Foreword
Freud famously observed, “I am not a Freudian.” The remark is so pregnant it can stand without comment. This awareness that the perspective of great founders and their followers differs has been noted to the point of tedium with respect to Jesus and his followers, but also with respect to Marx, whose followers’ mutations have led to unspeakable horrors. Leszek Kolakowski, in a brilliant “revisionist” essay, “Permanent vs. Transitory Aspects of Marxism,” suggests that these mutations are the inevitable consequence of seeking to hold on to the “transitory” content of Marx’s ideology instead of embracing what is truly permanent in Marx, a “methodology” that has proven so influential it has been permanently assimilated into the social sciences as practiced by groups totally independent of official Marxism.
Nowhere is this duality more evident than in contemporary feminist literary study, where ideology and methodology intersect and conflict, and where, sadly, ideology triumphs methodology as often as not. Not so with The Femme Fatale in Victorian Literature: The Danger and the Sexual Threat.