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In the 1980s, feminist cultural history of the Victorian period mani-fested a decisive shift toward asserting the centrality of gender to the ideological advent of modernity. In her influential essay," Gender: A Useful Category of Historical Analysis"(1986), Joan Scott gave promi-nence to the notion that feminist history ideally aspires not only to uncover women in history, but to argue for the primacy of gender in the symbolic formations of culture and the political arrangements shaping social life. Such an agenda has been dramatically evident in theoretically minded feminist scholarship on the modern period, which has posi-tioned women and cultural forms of femininity as vital structuring agents within history. A prime example of this approach would be Nancy Armstrong's Desire and Domestic Fiction: A Political History of the Novel (1987), which provocatively asserts that" the modern individual is first and foremost a female" …