Review: Feminine Singularity: The Politics of Subjectivity in Nineteenth-Century Literature, by Ronjaunee Chatterjee

Feminine Singularity has no less an ambition than to ask us to rethink personhood: to discard “individualism,” a term by now overly freighted with the weight of capitalist, imperialist, gendered, and racialized expectations of over two hundred years, in favor of “singularity.” In doing so, Chatterjee finds alternative modes of thinking about what it means to be one person, in relation to another or to many, in and beyond the nineteenth century. She takes subjectivity out of a framework of identity, gendered binaries, and an economy of reproducibility in order to establish it as at once unique and irreducible yet also in relation. The dynamic between uniqueness and relation is represented, in Chatterjee’s analysis of Christina Rossetti, for example, in the term “likeness,” which implies similarity with room enough for difference. The liberal individual subject has its roots in the nineteenth century and, as Chatterjee notes, “liberal progress and freedom...