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1
Barton, Anna Jane. "NURSERY POETICS: AN EXAMINATION OF LYRIC REPRESENTATIONS OF THE CHILD IN TENNYSON'S “THE PRINCESS”." Victorian Literature and Culture 35, no. 2 (June 29, 2007): 489–500. http://dx.doi.org/10.1017/s1060150307051595.
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“THE PRINCESS,”TENNYSON's narrative poem about a radically feminist princess and a cross-dressing prince, framed by an imagined argument between Victorian men and women concerning the role of women in modern society, has, understandably, formed the central text in a number of articles about nineteenth-century gender poetics. Critics have been eager to engage with the fictional authors of the narrative, casting Tennyson as, on the one hand, a bastion of Victorian patriarchy, and on the other a subversive feminist. Donald E. Hall, in an essay, published in his collectionFixing Patriarchy, is the most persuasive advocate for a masculinist Tennyson, presenting “The Princess” as undertaking a project of “subsumption,” in which the words and demands of the women are “ingested, modified and incorporated by the patriarch” (46). In an article entitled: “Marginalized Musical Interludes: Tennyson's Critiques of Conventionality in ‘The Princess,’“ Alisa Clapp-Itnyre provides a representative case for the defence, presenting the lyrics as “pivotal feminist commentaries” that work to interrupt and deconstruct the male narrative (229). Herbert Tucker locates a third way, identifying the poem as a “textbook Victorian compromise” (Tennyson352). He argues that it “avoids taking a position on a hotly debated issue by taking up any number of positions” and characterizes this compromise, not as a commitment to portraying a complex contemporary issue with integrity, but as the result of Tennyson's not caring particularly either way: “neither the rallying of Victorian feminism” he writes, “nor the patriarchal status quo was sufficient stimulus to commitment” (352). In order to open up a new line of enquiry into “The Princess” I would like to look beyond the gender questions that continue to be batted back and forth amongst Tennyson's critics and to offer the figure of the child as an alternative and more powerful cultural, aesthetic and professional stimulus to Tennyson's poem.
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Crosby, Christina, and Donald E. Hall. "Fixing Patriarchy: Feminism and Mid- Victorian Male Novelists." South Atlantic Review 62, no. 4 (1997): 87. http://dx.doi.org/10.2307/3200752.
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Moghari, Shaghayegh. "Portrait of Women in Victorian Novels." International Journal of Language and Literary Studies 2, no. 4 (December 26, 2020): 167–76. http://dx.doi.org/10.36892/ijlls.v2i4.414.
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This article examines the representation of three female characters in three Victorian novels. These three novels are Bleak house, Ruth, and Lady Audley’s Secret. This work is, in fact, a study of how women were viewed in Victorian novels which actually depicted the Victorian society. The society of that time was male-dominated that tried to rule over women unfairly and made them as submissive as possible in order to handle them easily according to their selfish tastes. If women in Victorian society followed the expectations of men thoroughly, they were called angel-in-the-house; if not, they were labeled with negative labels like fallen-woman or mad-woman. This article tries to go through the characters of Esther Summerson, Ruth, and Lady Audley who appeared in the three aforementioned novels respectively in order to prove that the Victorian Society, which was represented in the novels of that period, was a harshly male-dominated society that ruled over women with bitter patriarchy.
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David, Deirdre. "“Art's a Service”: Social Wound, Sexual Politics, and Aurora Leigh." Browning Institute Studies 13 (1985): 113–36. http://dx.doi.org/10.1017/s0092472500005393.
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Elizabeth Barrett Browning's Aurora Leigh has become a key text for feminist critics concerned with nineteenth-century women writers. For some, Aurora Leigh is a revolutionary poem, a passionate indictment of patriarchy that speaks the resentment of the Victorian woman poet through a language of eroticized female imagery. For others, the poem is less explosive, and Barrett Browning's liberal feminism is seen as compromised by Aurora Leigh's eventual dedication to a life governed by traditionally male directives. In my view, however, Aurora Leigh is neither revolutionary nor compromised: rather, it is a coherent expression of Barrett Browning's conservative sexual politics, and I shall argue that female imagery is employed to show that the “art” of the woman poet performs a “service” for a patriarchal vision of the apocalypse. In Aurora Leigh woman's art is made the servitor of male ideal.
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Boos, Florence S. "Sexual Polarities in The Defence of Guenevere." Browning Institute Studies 13 (1985): 181–200. http://dx.doi.org/10.1017/s0092472500005423.
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William Morris's early poetry is striking for its erotic intensity and powerful evocations of passionate and unhappy women. Indeed, his portrayals of confined, alienated, and dependent women are so sharp that they pose some obvious questions. Do they, in the end, simply stylize and project some of the most destructive conventions of Victorian patriarchy? Or do they actually provide some “defence” of female passion and sexuality, against the social hierarchies and emotional suffocation they depict?
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Hamlett, Jane. "“Rotten Effeminate Stuff”: Patriarchy, Domesticity, and Home in Victorian and Edwardian English Public Schools." Journal of British Studies 58, no. 1 (January 2019): 79–108. http://dx.doi.org/10.1017/jbr.2018.171.
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AbstractDuring the nineteenth century, British public schools became increasingly important, turning out thousands of elite young men. Historians have long recognized the centrality of these institutions to modern British history and to understandings of masculinity in this era. While studies of universities and clubs have revealed how fundamental the rituals and everyday life of institutions were to the creation of masculinity, public schools have not been subjected to the same scrutiny. Approaches to date have emphasized the schools’ roles in distancing boys from the world of the home, domesticity, femininity, and women. Focusing on three case-study schools, Winchester College, Charterhouse, and Lancing College, this article offers a reassessment of the relationship between home and school in the Victorian and Edwardian period and contributes to the growing literature on forms of masculine domesticity in the second half of the nineteenth century. In the reformed public schools, the ideal of the patriarchal household was often essential, and in producing it, the presence of significant women—the wives of headmasters and housemasters—could be vital. The schools also worked to create a specifically masculine form of domesticity through boys’ performance of mundane domestic tasks in the “fagging” system, which was often imagined in terms of the chivalric service ideal. Letters from the period show how the everyday worlds of school and home remained enmeshed, revealing the distinctive nature of family relationships forged by the routine of presence and absence that public schools created.
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Gelpi, Barbara Charlesworth. ": Intellectual Women and Victorian Patriarchy: Harriet Martineau, Elizabeth Barrett Browning, George Eliot. . Deirdre David." Nineteenth-Century Literature 43, no. 3 (December 1988): 396–99. http://dx.doi.org/10.1525/ncl.1988.43.3.99p0185g.
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Eddington, Ross Elliot. "Millett's Rationalist Error." Hypatia 18, no. 3 (2003): 193–211. http://dx.doi.org/10.1111/j.1527-2001.2003.tb00827.x.
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This article examines Millett's condemnation of Ruskin in Sexual Politics (1977) to demonstrate that Ruskin's views on women are the product of a specific mode of experience—one that precludes his views being representative of traditional Victorian patriarchy. The article uses Oakeshott's philosophical framework of different modes of experience to illustrate that Millett narrowly interprets Ruskin's statements on women from her own modal perspective without considering his broader belief in the imaginative over the rational faculty.
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Saeed, Nadia, Muhammad Ali Shaikh, Stephen John, and Kamal Haider. "Thomas Hardy: A Torchbearer of Feminism Representing Sufferings of Victorian Era Women." International Journal of Applied Linguistics and English Literature 9, no. 3 (May 31, 2020): 55. http://dx.doi.org/10.7575/aiac.ijalel.v.9n.3p.55.
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The purpose of this paper was to highlight the miserable plight of women during the Victorian era, the age of social reforms, political improvements, collective welfare, and material prosperity. During this age, Queen Victoria worked on various issues that had remained the cause of unrest among the people. Her efforts, in this regard, were indeed commendable, but she took no interest to resolve issues of women who had been suffering terribly under patriarchy. The subject of women remained ignored for many years, then some writers started to highlight the miserable state of these passive creatures who were the constant victims of social, political and economic injustices, inequalities, deprivations, and domestic violence. Of all the feminists, Thomas Hardy stood unique as he brought to light almost all areas of life where women were suffering awfully and their voices were suppressed under the male-dominated system. Hardy took serious note of the long-ignored subject of society and provided a vivid and realistic picture of Victorian society through his extraordinarily brilliant novels. Thomas Hardy’s famous masterpiece ‘Tess of the d’Urbervilles: A Pure Woman” is one of the best novels depicting women-related issues that shook the minds of the people to proceed towards this delicate matter. The contents or events described in the novel confirmed that women were the disadvantaged section of society who were deprived of their due rights and respect in society. They were objectified and preferred to a man in each sphere of life.
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Savage, Gail L. "The Divorce Court and the Queen’s/King’s Proctor: Legal Patriarchy and the Sanctity of Marriage in England, 1861‑1937." Historical Papers 24, no. 1 (April 26, 2006): 210–27. http://dx.doi.org/10.7202/031003ar.
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Abstract The office of H M Proctor, a curious aspect of English divorce procedure, investigated divorce cases based on collusion between the spouses and divorce cases brought by spouses whose own misconduct disqualified them from the right to divorce. On the basis of evidence provided by the proctor's intervention into divorce suits, the divorce court had the power to rescind divorce decrees improperly obtained. This essay describes the origins of this legal institution and delineates its impact on divorce during the Victorian period. The analysis considers the growing criticism of the proctor's powers during the first four decades of the twentieth century. English divorce law was originally intended to buttress both the power of the husband within the marital relationship and the power of the state over the family. The changing view of the proctor over seventy-five years reveals the tensions inherent in Victorian gender ideology and reflects changing attitudes towards the nature of marriage.
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Zaidi, Najia Asrar, and Fouzia Rehman Khan. "WOMEN AND MARRIAGE IN MIDDLEMARCH AND THE RETURN OF THE NATIVE." Journal of Social Sciences and Humanities 56, no. 2 (December 31, 2017): 129–44. http://dx.doi.org/10.46568/jssh.v56i2.51.
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Women in the nineteenth century were the worst victims of patriarchy, socio-cultural norms and class difference. It was not a good time for women. In the Victorian era, women did not have the right to vote, own property or come out of the violent marriage. This picture has been painted by many writers of the time. Of all the Victorian novelists, Eliot and Hardy have the gifted ability to chart the women situation from all angles. Both writers show that women had few rights and privileges. The socio-cultural and economic factors further contributed to women’s oppression. Women were expected to remain attached to the domestic sphere. Marriage is one such institution, which during the Victorian period became a tool for women’s exploitation and subjugation. The heroines and protagonists suffer due to social and moral taboos. Mismatch in marriage leads to several problems for the couple and their respective families. George Eliot in her novel Middlemarch and Thomas Hardy in his work The Return of the Native, portray the heroines who decide to step into life that is just contrary to their expectations and later regret their decisions. This paper would attempt to analyze the repercussions of their choices and compare their nature and the line of action these heroines take to deal with the situation they are placed into.
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Breckenridge, Jhilmil. "Are Family Systems and Medical Systems Broken? An Auto-Ethnographic Reflection on Psychiatric Incarceration in India." Genealogy 4, no. 2 (May 18, 2020): 60. http://dx.doi.org/10.3390/genealogy4020060.
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I examine whether undue power and privilege allow families in India to use force to incarcerate their wives, daughters or other family members who may deviate from the “norm”. Using my own personal experience, I examine the intersectionality of gender, violence and privilege to see how several systems are broken. I also argue psychiatry and the patriarchy are tools of oppression and how India and most other societies continue to perpetuate trauma in those they are trying to help. In addition, families become “allies” to psychiatry and medical systems unwittingly and become “keepers” of their broken people. By citing other writing and memoirs, I will show how stories like these have been happening since before Victorian times to the present.
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Reid, Donald. "Industrial Paternalism: Discourse and Practice in Nineteenth-Century French Mining and Metallurgy." Comparative Studies in Society and History 27, no. 4 (October 1985): 579–607. http://dx.doi.org/10.1017/s0010417500011671.
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In recent years paternalism has become one of the most discussed concepts in social history. While historians of women invoke paternalism and patriarchy to help explain relations of male domination, Marxist historians have found paternalism useful in expanding their analyses of class consciousness. Eugene Genovese organized his interpretation of slavery in the American south around paternalism. For E. P. Thompson, the breakdown of the ideology and practice of rural paternalism underlay the development of “class struggle without class” in eighteenth-century England. Despite Genovese's warning that paternalism is an inappropriate concept for understanding industrial society, several recent studies have identified paternalism as an important factor in the history of industrial labor during the nineteenth century. Daniel Walkowitz and Tamara Haraven have analyzed paternalism in the textile industries of upstate New York and southern New Hampshire. Lawrence Schofer and David Crew have studied paternalism in nineteenth-century German heavy industry, and Patrick Joyce has recently argued for its centrality in the restructuring of class relations in the late Victorian textile industry.
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Nanda, Chinmayee. "The Concept of New Women in the Short Stories of Odia Writer Binapani Mohanty." SMART MOVES JOURNAL IJELLH 8, no. 2 (February 11, 2020): 16. http://dx.doi.org/10.24113/ijellh.v8i2.10381.
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I deliberate on examining few of the liberated women or the New Women presented in an Odia short story writer Binapani Mohanty’s stories. In her stories, the persona and disposition is finding a place for constructive thrive, but again those are not really allowed to flourish in a full fledged manner. With the change of time and different dynamics of the modern scenario, women have started to become aware of the happening surrounded by them. A liberated woman thinks on her own, can take decision, has the ability to accept or reject any idea. They hold their own opinion. But when patriarchy operates, to what extent they have been allowed for expression is the next thing to be examined. Talking about the New Women is more appropriate than New Woman. Every individual woman has a different circumstance to respond to. Her portrayal of new women is different from the idea of the Victorian New Woman. In the modern context, they have to endure lots of struggle and suffering. Mohanty’s characters are mostly the middle class women, who are affected by every small little change in the society. She has also drawn a parallel with the doubly disadvantageous lot of the society, the poor class women. In every situation the characters so dynamically adopt to every situation.
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Pérez Porras, Ana. "Emily Brontë y Wuthering Heights: la verdadera historia detrás del mito." Revista Internacional de Culturas y Literaturas, no. 20 (2017): 80–92. http://dx.doi.org/10.12795/ricl.2017.i20.06.
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Emily Brontë fue una de las pioneras de la época victoriana en la defensa de la lucha de los derechos de la mujer y rompió con las normas del decoro victoriano. A través de sus personajes femeninos Brontë reivindica la independencia de la mujer, en una sociedad patriarcal en la que el marido tenía la custodia de los hijos y la esposa no tenía protección social, legal ni económica.
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Bernard Mlambo, Obert. "The role of the female body in contesting and negotiating space in sports for women in rural and urban Zimbabwe." African Journal of Religion, Philosophy and Culture 1, no. 2 (December 1, 2020): 93–113. http://dx.doi.org/10.31920/2634-7644/2020/1n2a6.
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This article examined attitudes, knowledge, behavior and practices of men and society on Gender bias in sports. The paper examined how the African female body was made into an object of contest between African patriarchy and the colonial system and also shows how the battle for the female body eventually extended into the sporting field. It also explored the postcolonial period and the effects on Zimbabwean society of the colonial ideals of the Victorian culture of morality. The study focused on school sports and the participation of the girl child in sports such as netball, volleyball and football. Reference was made to other sports but emphasis was given to where women were affected. It is in this case where reference to the senior women soccer team was made to provide a case study for purposes of illustration. Selected rural community and urban schools were served as case references for ethnographic accounts which provided the qualitative data used in the analysis. In terms of methodology and theoretical framework, the paper adopted the political economy of the female body as an analytical viewing point in order to examine the body of the girl child and of women in action on the sporting field in Zimbabwe. In this context, the female body is viewed as deeply contested and as a medium that functions as a site for the redirection, profusion and transvaluation of gender ideals. Using the concept of embodiment, involving demeanor, body shape and perceptions of the female body in its social context, the paper attempted to establish a connection between gender ideologies and embodied practice. The results of the study showed the prevalence of condescending attitudes towards girls and women participation in sports.
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Gordon, Eleanor, and Gweneth Nair. "The myth of the Victorian patriarchal family." History of the Family 7, no. 1 (January 2002): 125–38. http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/s1081-602x(01)00100-2.
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Rogers, Katharine M. "Intellectual Women and Victorian Patriarchy: Harriet Martineau, Elizabeth Barrett Browning, George Eliot. Deirdre DavidDesire and Domestic Fiction: A Political History of the Novel. Nancy ArmstrongRomance and the Erotics of Property: Mass-Market Fiction for Women. Jan Cohn." Signs: Journal of Women in Culture and Society 15, no. 4 (July 1990): 878–82. http://dx.doi.org/10.1086/494640.
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Pérez González, Lourdes. "Las guerras de las mujeres en la guerra :[homenaje a la teórica deminista Victoria Sau]." Cuestiones de género: de la igualdad y la diferencia, no. 6 (December 15, 2011): 309. http://dx.doi.org/10.18002/cg.v0i6.3776.
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Este artículo, reconocimiento y homenaje a la teórica feminista Victoria Sau, utiliza las tres figuras mitológicas o literarias —Casandra, Antígona y Lisístrata— con las que la autora ejemplifica las distintas etapas del feminismo para hacer un recorrido en distintos momentos y lugares por los papeles que las mujeres asumen o tienen que asumir en la guerra, entendida como un mecanismo de defensa y mantenimiento del sistema patriarcal, sin cuyo desmantelamiento, no será posible que desaparezcan.<br /><br />This paper pays tribute to the work of the feminist theorist Victoria Sau. The article relies on the three mythological or literary figures used by the author to exemplify the different stages of feminism -Cassandra, Antigone and Lysistrata- in order to review the roles played in different moments and places by women in war, understood as a defence mechanism intended to preserve the patriarchal system. As long as this mechanism is not dismantled, these roles will not disappear.<br /><br />
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Cleveland, Emma Kathryn. "Patriarchy, Spirituality, and Power." African and Asian Studies 14, no. 3 (August 5, 2015): 210–25. http://dx.doi.org/10.1163/15692108-12341341.
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The reorganization of Akan society in the early 1300’s-1400, the subsequent formation of Asante in 1701, and the introduction of the trans-Atlantic slave trade in the former Gold Coast created new social, economic, and political conditions which initiated a change in the status, mobility, and role of women. Societal restrictions were placed upon female title-holders through language and spiritual taboos which prohibited them from sacred spaces and shrines. Akan cosmology and spirituality were monopolized as a tool for the acquisition of authority. A desire for the accumulation of wealth and power reconceptualised masculine identities as military victories began to be associated with manliness and honor. Patriarchal systems of governance were later established, specifically the institutions of chieftaincy and kingship, which were key contributors to the deterioration of political positions for females, for example, the Queen Mother. As the dominant political organizations, these institutions have seemingly functioned to shape the experiences of Ghanaian women throughout the history of Asante. This paper argues that the significance of women in the realm of politics and cultural affairs in Akan society were effectively lessened as a result of patriarchy, the manipulation of spirituality, and the influence of militaristic ideals.
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Winarti, Winarti. "EKSISTENSI PEREMPUAN DALAM PUISI 'BRIDE SONG' KARYA CHRISTINA ROSSETTI." LEKSEMA: Jurnal Bahasa dan Sastra 3, no. 2 (December 6, 2018): 149. http://dx.doi.org/10.22515/ljbs.v3i2.1144.
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This article aims at describing women existence as reflected on Bride Song poem written by Christina Rossseti. Rossetti’s view on women’s lives was inspired much by her awareness toward the their conditions in Victorian’s era. In the meantime, women were shaped to be an individuals who fulfill the ideal standard as preferred by men. By Bride Song, Rosetti tried to break patriarchal domination toward women. She wanted to turn back the existence equivalence between men and women based on human rights. She also attemped to open the world’s perspective to accept women’s existence as important as men’s and not just a binary opposition of it. Women’s existence in Bride Song is not only a struggle against men’s domination in Victorian era, but it also has relevance with contemporary issues on women’s struggle to show their existence in this modern era.
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Ishida, Yoriko. "Was Ida Lewis a Womanly, or a Manly, Woman? The Ambivalence of a Woman Lighthouse Keeper’s Gender Identity Between Masculinity and Femininity." International Journal of Social Science Studies 7, no. 5 (August 13, 2019): 12. http://dx.doi.org/10.11114/ijsss.v7i5.4447.
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It is obvious that Darling could be mentioned as a most brave woman in doing the heavy labor involved in a lighthouse keeping and even saving shipwrecked people, but it is more particularly worth noting that Ida Lewis’s efforts saved the lives of at least eighteen people over a period of twenty-five years. This paper focuses on Ida Lewis, the most famous woman lighthouse keeper in the United States, and analyzes the gender identity of women lighthouse keepers. most studies that discuss women lighthouse keepers point out that, behind women’s being appointed as official lighthouse keepers in the nineteenth-century United States, the labor of lighthouse keepers could essentially share common features with the form of femininity that was emphasized in the Victorian era. However, when analyzing from the viewpoint of gender ideology, I cannot help raising questions regarding women lighthouse keepers as examples of mere femininity simply because the labor forms were analogous with household labor. When the labors of lighthouse keeping would be actually recognized as a manly role, can we make a judgement that women lighthouse keepers all endowed feminine traits even when performing the heavy tasks of lighthouse keeping? Moreover, lifesaving, being separable from lighthouse keeping, has been traditionally considered to be “masculine behavior.” The aim of this paper is to point out that “femininity” and “masculinity” have been artificially generated, and, as such, are entirely unrelated to an individual’s characteristics and abilities. In that light, to deconstruct ideologies of “femininity” and “masculinity,” I have chosen to focus on women who have committed to continuing to perform their duties by analyzing the life of Ida Lewis as the most famous woman lighthouse keeper. This has been accomplished by referring to the United States Department of the Interior National Park Service: National Register of Historic Places Inventory for 1897 and some articles about Ida Lewis from 1869 to 1911 as primary sources. Ida Lewis applies simultaneously as among those women who, under the patriarchy, should be confined to the “women’s sphere.” Furthermore, according to social gender ideology, the life of Ms. Lewis does not necessarily correspond to an individual’s abilities and character, as she was able to display the same ability as a man and perform “men’s work” in the women’s sphere.
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Koç, Ertuğrul, and Yağmur Demir. "VAMPIRE VERSUS THE EMPIRE: BRAM STOKER'S REPROACH OF FIN-DE-SIÈCLE BRITAIN IN DRACULA." Victorian Literature and Culture 46, no. 2 (May 16, 2018): 425–42. http://dx.doi.org/10.1017/s1060150317000481.
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Much has been said about Bram Stoker's Dracula (1897), the out-of-tradition exemplar of the Gothic which, perhaps, has had a more pervasive effect on our understanding of life and death, gender roles and identity, and sex and perversity than any other work of the genre. The vampire from the so-called dark ages has become a symbol standing for the uncontrollable powers acting on us and also for all the discarded, uncanny phenomena in human nature and history. The work, however, has usually been taken by the critics of Gothic literature as “a paradigmatic Gothic text” (Brewster 488) representing the social, psychological, and sexual traumas of the late-nineteenth century. Hence, it has been analysed as a work “breaking [the] taboos, [and in need of being] read as an expression of specifically late Victorian concerns” (Punter and Byron 231). The text has also been seen as “reinforc[ing] readers’ suspicions that the authorities (including people, institutions and disciplines) they trust are ineffectual” (Senf 76). Yet, it has hardly ever been taken as offering an alternative Weltanschauung in place of the decaying Victorian ethos. True, Dracula is a fin-de-siècle novel and deals with the turbulent paradigmatic shift from the Victorian to the modern, and Stoker, by creating the lecherous vampire and his band as the doppelgängers of the sexually sterile and morally pretentious bourgeois types (who are, in fact, inclined to lascivious joys), reveals the moral hypocrisy and sexual duplicity of his time. But, it is also true that by juxtaposing the “abnormal” against the “normal” he targets the utilitarian bourgeois ethics of the empire: aware of the Victorian pragmatism on which the concept of the “normal” has been erected, he, with an “abnormal” historical figure (Vlad Drăculea of the House of Drăculești, 1431–76) who appears as Count Dracula in the work, attacks the ethical superstructure of Britain which has already imposed on the Victorians the “pathology of normalcy” (Fromm 356). Hence, Stoker's choice of title character, the sadistic Vlad the Impaler, who fought against the Ottoman Empire in the closing years of the Middle Ages, and his anachronistic rendering of Dracula as a Gothic invader of the Early Middle Ages are not coincidental (Figure 8). In the world of the novel, this embodiment of the early and late paradigms is the antagonistic power arrayed against the supposedly stable, but in reality fluctuating, fin-de-siècle ethos. However, by turning this personification of the “evil” past into a sexual enigma for the band of men who are trying to preserve the Victorian patriarchal hegemony, Stoker suggests that if Victorian sterile faith in the “normal” is defeated through a historically extrinsic (in fact, currently intrinsic) anomaly, a more comprehensive social and ethical epoch that has made peace with the past can be started.
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Pedersen, Joyce Senders. "Book Review: The Maternal Voice in Victorian Fiction: Rewriting the Patriarchal Family." Journal of Family History 24, no. 1 (January 1999): 115–17. http://dx.doi.org/10.1177/036319909902400109.
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Abdullah, Md Abu Shahid. "Fluids, cages, and boisterous femininity: The grotesque transgression of patriarchal norms in Angela Carter’s Nights at the Circus." Journal of Language and Cultural Education 5, no. 2 (May 24, 2017): 114–22. http://dx.doi.org/10.1515/jolace-2017-0022.
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AbstractThe article will show that in Nights at the Circus, Carter’s use of the themes of food consumption and excrement operate as both a grotesque means of emancipation from a feminine point-of-view, and a carnivalesque challenge to subversive patriarchal norms and deconstruction of arbitrary patriarchal hierarchies. By turning the simple act of eating into boisterous spectacle, and by handling a bottle of champagne and water hose in a disturbingly masculine manner, Fevvers transgresses the boundary between masculinity and femininity, sheds the patriarchal constraints imposed upon femininity, and thus achieves agency and emancipation. Since she is not able to acquire biological signifier of masculinity, she achieves the transgression of the binary entirely through the performative carnivalesque. The article will also discuss that the overflowing nature of grotesque femininity (both physical and behavioral) enables the female characters to speak and act at their own will, and thus performs as a means of critiquing Victorian patriarchal cultural norms.
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Mohammed, Saman Ali. "Mid-Victorian England and Female Emancipation: Elizabeth Gaskell’s North and South." Journal of University of Human Development 5, no. 1 (March 12, 2019): 109. http://dx.doi.org/10.21928/juhd.v5n1y2019.pp109-118.
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One of the heated discussions of the Victorian era is female emancipation. In the heart of an industrial period when materialism, economic competition and public domain were dominated by men, women had the domestic sphere. The apparent difference between these two spheres was not tolerable for Elizabeth Gaskell and she critiqued it. Her novel North and South discusses the perceptions on women, the idea of industrialization, and class distinction in Victorian Era. Developing her main character Margaret Hale, Gaskell critiques her society and the mentality behind a perception of patriarchal and materialistic society. Gaskell develops her character on many different levels by giving her various roles especially in the industrial north. Valuing certain qualities women possess in the domestic level, Gaskell brings Margaret to the debates, businesses, factories, riots and public sphere of Milton. Gaskell presents the contemporary and Victorian readers with a different perception of women, their roles, and significance in the private and public spheres.
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Kain, Kevin M. "Conceptualizing New Jerusalem." Canadian-American Slavic Studies 54, no. 1-3 (August 13, 2020): 134–69. http://dx.doi.org/10.30965/22102396-05401008.
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Abstract This essay re-conceptualizes Muscovite notions of New Jerusalem, by considering the practice of historical replication, including hierotopy, as a religious-political ideology. It explains why and how Tsar Fedor Alekseevich adopted and advanced the replication of the Church of the Holy Sepulcher at the Resurrection “New Jerusalem” Monastery, founded by Patriarch Nikon and his father Tsar Aleksei Mikhailovich, despite the ecumenical patriarchs’ condemnation of Nikon and his monastery in 1666 and eschatological fears promoted by Old Believers. Fedor resurrected the New Jerusalem idea in order to solidify his inheritance of the Muscovite throne and the Constantinian legacy in connection with the First Russo-Turkish War of 1676–1681. The tsar embraced the “Byzantine-New Jerusalem scenario,” according to which Muscovite rulers who scored military victories through the power of the True Cross in St. Constantine’s image were obliged to preform churchwardenship (ktitorstvo) in imitation of the Byzantine emperor, including the embellishment of the prototypical Jerusalem church and its replications in Russia. The investigation of Tsar Fedor Alekseevich’s Byzantine-New Jerusalem scenario reveals the non-linear, non-logical type of thinking that advanced political goals, including the establishment of the legitimacy of the tsar and his dynasty. This article highlights and qualifies the strategy of historical repetition, in which the icon reproduces the prototype in real, not metaphoric, terms.
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Rajan, Supritha. "ANIMATING HOUSEHOLD GODS: VALUE, TOTEMS, AND KINSHIP IN VICTORIAN ANTHROPOLOGY AND DICKENS'SDOMBEY AND SON." Victorian Literature and Culture 42, no. 1 (February 19, 2014): 33–58. http://dx.doi.org/10.1017/s1060150313000284.
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At the heart of Dickens'sDombey and Son(1846–48) is a woman who is both the central problem that the narrative seeks to manage and its solution to that problem. Florence's position as heiress to Dombey and Son enables her entry into the marketplace as an independently wealthy woman who disrupts the patriarchal transmission of property and money.Dombey and Sondiverts attention from Florence's position as heiress by providing a sentimental lesson on the economic importance of the domestic woman, who grounds intrinsic value and is essential to the reproduction of the patriarchal family and economy. Dombey's domestic and financial failures, the novel would have us believe, stem from his initial devaluation of Florence and overvaluation of Paul. Hence, at the novel's close, Dombey learns that the foundation of the family and firm is not a son but “a Daughter after all.” Dickens thus presents Florence's intrinsic value and inalienability as the resolution to the very problem of alienability and unstable values that her position as heiress encodes. Yet this lesson regarding Florence's value conceals the novel's central anxiety, what Robert Clark refers to as “the arbitrary taboo on women's participation in the economic order” (73). If the novel accords insubstitutable value to the domestic woman as the keystone of the family and economy, it does so to dramatize the threat posed to patriarchal structures of kinship, property, and capitalist expansion if all women were to enter the marketplace and become, in a sense, heiresses.
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Akcesme, Banu. "Fighting Back Against the Encroachment of Patriarchal Power on Female Domains in Wuthering Heights." International Journal of Applied Linguistics and English Literature 6, no. 5 (July 6, 2017): 27. http://dx.doi.org/10.7575/aiac.ijalel.v.6n.5p.27.
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Wuthering Heights can be read as a novel of warfare against women and women-associated spaces to be conquered to prove male superiority, authority and power. This paper aims to discuss how Emily Bronte challenged not only the established Victorian literary traditions but also the prevailing ideals of the Victorian society by subverting the hierarchically constructed power and gender relations with an emphasis on various strategies employed by Heathcliff and Edgar in the war they launch against nature, property and women to conquer, possess and control domestic households, external nature and female body. Their strategies include reductionism which includes the commodification and objectification of female body, separation of women from their female bond, family and female spaces, physical and emotional uprooting which causes the loss of independence, self-confidence and positive self-image, masculinization of nature and home, brutalization through which the female characters are exposed to male violence and oppression and destruction of a sense of security, commitment and resistance. The female characters are disconnected not only from their domestic households and nature but also from female bonds. The sense of placelessness and homelessness along with the lack of female solidarity is aggravated by transforming home and the natural world into an imprisoning, dominating and tyrannical web for women. Bronte ends the novel with a hope that subjugation and subordination does not have to be the inevitable destiny for women who can fight back to restructure the existing power relations and reclaim their bodies and home along with nature turned against them.
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Cox, Jessica. "The ‘most Sacred of Duties’1: Maternal Ideals and Discourses of Authority in Victorian Breastfeeding Advice." Journal of Victorian Culture 25, no. 2 (January 8, 2020): 223–39. http://dx.doi.org/10.1093/jvcult/vcz065.
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Abstract The maternal role and its associated practices were subject to much scrutiny throughout the Victorian period. Whilst motherhood was seen as the natural destiny of the (respectable) woman, mothers were nonetheless deemed in need of strict guidance on how best to raise their offspring. This was offered in an extensive range of advice and conduct books, via newspapers, journals, and fiction, and from medical practitioners, and covered pregnancy, childbirth, and all aspects of care for babies and young children. This article considers Victorian advice on infant feeding, focusing in particular on the various strategies deployed to encourage mothers to breastfeed. Advice literature for mothers frequently invoked patriarchal – religious, medical, and (pseudo-) scientific – authority, in line with broader Victorian discourses on femininity. Much of this advice was produced by, or drew on, the authority of (male) medical practitioners, whilst comparatively little emphasis was placed on maternal experience as a source of expertise. Set within the wider historical context of shifting trends in infant feeding, this article analyses the various persuasive techniques employed by the authors of advice literature, which ultimately served as an attempt to control women’s maternal behaviours and to suppress their own maternal authority.
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Patterson, Anthony. "Making Mrs Grundy's Flesh Creep: George Egerton's Assault on Late-Victorian Censorship." Victoriographies 3, no. 1 (May 2013): 64–77. http://dx.doi.org/10.3366/vic.2013.0106.
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In recent evaluations of mutually shaping interactions between Modernism and literary censorship, Modernism is ultimately viewed as successfully challenging the censorship of texts deemed to be of literary value. As later modernists do, Egerton produces provocative constructions of female sexuality and reflexively inscribes within her fiction the theme of censorship. As part of such an inscription, and distinct from her male contemporaries, Egerton does not gender censorship as a womanly librarian or a matronly figure such as Mrs Grundy, but figures it as very much part of a patriarchal culture which seeks to tame instinctual nature, and especially the wilder nature of women.
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Kollar, Rene. "Power and Control over Women in Victorian England: Male Opposition to Sacramental Confession in the Anglican Church." Journal of Anglican Studies 3, no. 1 (June 2005): 11–31. http://dx.doi.org/10.1177/1740355305052820.
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ABSTRACTThe patriarchal environment of nineteenth century England viewed women as weak and naïve creatures who should submit to the dictates of men. Religion, however, could give women a sense of freedom and independence from male authority. When auricular confession began to gain acceptance in some sections of the Anglican Church, women saw this as a way of asserting their independence because they could confide their personal thoughts and problems to a clergymen. This could, in the opinion of some, threaten the powerful role of the husband or father by substituting an alternative patriarchal system, and many critics warned of the dangers associated with the confessional, especially the weakening of the male dominated family structure. The Priest in Absolution gave advice to Anglican confessors, but the sexual nature of the questions, made public in 1877, shocked the public and confirmed the fears of the opponents of auricular confession.
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Chrysostomides, Julian, Richard Clogg, and Charalambos Dendrinos. "The tombstone of an Ecumenical Patriarch in Muswell Hill, London: Meletios II (1700-80, r. 1768–9)." Byzantine and Modern Greek Studies 41, no. 2 (September 18, 2017): 229–38. http://dx.doi.org/10.1017/byz.2017.1.
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This article examines the tombstone of Meletios II, a native of Tenedos, who was briefly Ecumenical Patriarch in 1768–9. It also offers an account of his troubled patriarchate and sketches events in the rest of his ecclesiastical career. This hitherto unknown tombstone has rested for an indeterminate number of years in the garden of North Bank, a large Victorian mansion in Pages Lane in the North London suburb of Muswell Hill. It appears to have been in the grounds of North Bank before the house became an annexe of Muswell Hill Methodist Church. It is not known where in the Ottoman Empire Meletios' grave was originally situated, nor has it been possible to establish the circumstances in which the tombstone came to North Bank. On the basis of the inscription on the tombstone it is possible to establish Meletios' previously unknown date of death, 5 January 1780. It appears to be one of the earliest known tombstones of an Ecumenical Patriarch during the period of the Tourkokratia.
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Downey, Dara. "The “Irish” Female Servant in Valerie Martin’s Mary Reilly and Elaine Bergstrom’s Blood to Blood." Humanities 9, no. 4 (October 27, 2020): 128. http://dx.doi.org/10.3390/h9040128.
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This article examines two neo-Victorian novels by American writers—Valerie Martin’s Mary Reilly (1990) and Elaine Bergstrom’s Blood to Blood (2000)—which “write back” to Robert Louis Stevenson’s Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde (1886) and Bram Stoker’s Dracula (1897), respectively. Both novels ostensibly critique the socio-cultural inequalities of Victorian London, particularly for women, immigrants, and the working class, and the gender and class politics and structures of the original texts. However, as this article demonstrates, the presence of invented Irish female servants as key figures in these “re-visionary” narratives also undermines some aspects of this critique. Despite acting as gothic heroines, figures who traditionally uncover patriarchal abuses, these servant characters also facilitate their employers’ lives and negotiations of the supernatural (with varying degrees of success), while also themselves becoming associated with gothic monstrosity, via their extended associations with Irish-Catholic violence and barbarity on both sides of the Atlantic. This article therefore argues that Irish servant figures in neo-Victorian texts by American writers function as complex signifiers of pastness and barbarity, but also of assimilation and progressive modernization. Indeed, the more “Irish” the servant, the better equipped she will be to help her employer navigate the world of the supernatural.
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Ansari, Usamah. "Producing the Conjugal Patriarchal Family in Maulana Thanvi’s Heavenly Ornaments: Biopolotics, ‘Shariatic Modernity’ and Managing Women." Comparative Islamic Studies 5, no. 1 (July 10, 2011): 93–110. http://dx.doi.org/10.1558/cis.v5i1.93.
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Written in the 1930s for Muslim women in north India by Maulana Ashraf Thanvi (1864-1943), Bahishti Zewar or Heavenly Ornaments, has been influential in defining proper feminine etiquette and household management. The household type that is produced is nuclear and with a clearly defined male patriarch. The most mundane of tasks are outlined and related to religious duty. What is central to my analysis is how the meticulous details of household management, bodily comportment and etiquette articulate a regime not of repressive power but rather a (modern) productive modality of power that produce trained docile bodies (Foucault, 1975) and complementary gendered Muslim subjectivities. Thus the tropes Thanvi uses to produce a manual for the self-management of women cannot be divorced from certain logics of modernity and modernist reform; but instead of medico-scientific discourses producing women’s subjectivity, Thanvi uses shariatic principles as the vector through which a modern vision of a managed patriarchal conjugal family infiltrates the household. I am thus depending on Foucault’s notion of biopower that characterizes a modern modality of power. In order to justify my use of this concept, I will outline how Thanvi’s reformist ideas are not inherently oppositional to the logics of Bourgeois modernist production of the conjugal family and the scientific management of the private sphere (Abu-Lughod, 1998). Though I am not claiming that a European Victorian mode of modernity was synonymous with Thanvi’s reformist sentiments, I will reveal that the Bahishti Zewar can be thought of as a modern text, though one articulating an alternative modernity (Göle, 2002; Zaidi, 2006; Gaonkar, 2001) organized around Thanvi’s selective interpretation of shariatic principles. This will reveal the ability to rethink modernity’s relationship with reformist Islamic sentiment and challenge the denial of coavelesence (Fabian, 1983) between modernity’s temporality and Islam, as well as challenging the idea that Thanvi refuted modernity (Naeem, 2003: 2).
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Queixas Zas, Mercedes. "Daquelas que contan..." Boletín da Real Academia Galega, no. 379 (May 29, 2019): 47. http://dx.doi.org/10.32766/brag.379.721.
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A prosa de María Victoria Moreno ofrece, como común denominador, as claves para unha interpretación literaria de marcado carácter pioneiro canto ao tratamento dalgunhas temáticas tan novidosas como a (des)igualdade de xénero.Voces e accións de protagonistas femininas que sofren o resultado dunha educación patriarcal á par doutras mozas e mulleres que son quen de a cuestionar en conciencia e de promover solucións liberadoras.Unha escrita que conta desde a radiografía dos silencios.
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Tosh, John. "Methodist Domesticity and Middle-Class Masculinity in Nineteenth-Century England." Studies in Church History 34 (1998): 323–45. http://dx.doi.org/10.1017/s0424208400013735.
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The history of the family, at least for the nineteenth century, has reached a certain maturity. Though not yet incorporated into mainstream history – that would be too much to expect – it now boasts a considerable specialist literature and some useful general surveys. Undoubtedly the driving force has been the aspiration of women’s history to reconstruct the lives of women in the past. Now that the personal records of women are being studied with such attention, there is a wealth of insights into their experience as daughters, wives, and widows. Jeanne Peterson’s account of the Paget family and their circle in Victorian England is a typical example. For the nineteenth-century women’s historian, there is the added bonus that this was the period when the claims of women to have the dominant influence in the family were taken most seriously – as witness the persistent appeal of the Angel Mother. Hence to research the history of the Victorian family promises results which will feature women as agents, and not merely as victims of patriarchal oppression.
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Ranea Triviño, Beatriz. "La prostitución: entre viejos privilegios masculinos y nuevos imaginarios neoliberales Presentación del monográfico." Atlánticas. Revista Internacional de Estudios Feministas 3, no. 1 (November 3, 2018): 1–12. http://dx.doi.org/10.17979/arief.2018.3.1.3540.
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El estudio de la prostitución ha de inscribirse dentro del contexto social en el que se produce y que posibilita su existencia de tal forma que podemos definirla como una institución masculina patriarcal -como establecía Victoria Sau (2000) en su Diccionario ideológico feminista- en la que el capitalismo neoliberal ha encontrado un negocio muy lucrativo. A día de hoy, el significado sociopolítico de la prostitución mantiene su origen patriarcal atravesado por nuevas lógicas propias de la era del capitalismo neoliberal. Por ello, en este monográfico el análisis de la prostitución aparece imbricado en la encrucijada entre capitalismo y patriarcado. En los artículos se analiza y reflexiona sobre diferentes elementos que configuran la prostitución en la sociedad contemporánea: la conversión en una macroindustria transnacional que obtiene grandes beneficios a costa de la explotación sexual de mujeres y niñas; las nuevas definiciones neoliberales que transforman los imaginarios legitimadores de la misma; o como la prostitución gana importancia como un escenario de representación de un modelo determinado de masculinidad.
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Bland Botham, Peter. "‘I am a Victorian!’: W. B. Yeats, Modern Manliness and the Problems of Work." Review of English Studies 71, no. 301 (November 14, 2019): 745–67. http://dx.doi.org/10.1093/res/hgz130.
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Abstract Examining his writings up to 1909, this article argues that W. B. Yeats was drawn to a specifically modern notion of masculinity based on a material, athletic ideal of the male body, at odds with the more transcendent principles he otherwise professed and associated with the Renaissance. Moreover, he understood this corporeal archetype of manliness to be fashioned through everyday activities, such as work and sport, which are shown to shape his sense of gender in addition to more-oft examined aspects of his life, such as his occultism or relations with women. As a sedentary writer, however, Yeats struggled to embody the model of active Victorian manliness he idealized. Identifying such anxieties in his early poems and stories, this article traces Yeats’s efforts to reconceptualize his wearisome poetic toil as healthy, productive labour: namely, by assuming Thomas Carlyle’s notion of the writer as ascetic prophet, who cuts himself free from the propagandist verbiage of the mob to deliver a message that is physically potent in its radical sincerity. Rather than representing Yeats as a disembodied, heroic voice, speaking out of a patriarchal, Romantic tradition, this article depicts him as an anxiously masculine, late-Victorian man of letters, struggling with the expectations his own era placed upon the male body.
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Norcia, Megan A. "PERFORMING VICTORIAN WOMANHOOD: ELSIE FOGERTY STAGES TENNYSON'S PRINCESS IN GIRLS' SCHOOLS." Victorian Literature and Culture 41, no. 1 (March 2013): 1–20. http://dx.doi.org/10.1017/s1060150312000198.
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Tennyson's poem The Princess (1847) has long intrigued readers with its polarizing gender politics and playful, lilting verses recounting the grim bloodshed that results when an ambitious Princess establishes a women's college. The frame narrative focuses on a group of friends at a summer party who are inspired by a tale of an ancient warrior queen, who “sallying thro’ the gate, / Had beat her foes with slaughter from her walls” (Prologue 30–34). At some moments jocular and at others acerbic, the men spin the Princess's story, with the women of the gathering providing interludes of music between the tales. In the narrative that unfolds, the Princess establishes a separatist women's college deep in the country, but counter to her plans, a neighboring prince has determined to make her his wife. Along with two friends, the Prince sneaks into the school disguised as a woman. Comedy and romance ensue, leading to the Prince's eventual unmasking and a deadly serious battle between his father and the Princess's father over how her body will be disposed in marriage. The Prince is wounded in the battle and the Princess is smitten with remorse. While nursing him back to health she is “ultimately transformed from a fierce feminist into a broken nurse” (Buchanan 573) as she anticipates the possibilities of agency through marriage and motherhood. The poem ends with the disbanding of the Princess's school and the reinstallation of its female leaders under patriarchal control.
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Tyrrell, Alex. "Samuel Smiles and the Woman Question in Early Victorian Britain." Journal of British Studies 39, no. 2 (April 2000): 185–216. http://dx.doi.org/10.1086/386216.
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When Samuel Smiles (1812–1904) looked back over his career from the vantage point of old age he saw himself as one who had labored for “the emancipation and intellectual improvement of women.” His self-description will surprise those who know him, either through his famous book, Self-Help (1859), where women make fleeting appearances as maternal influences on the achievements of great men, or through the attempts that have been made during the Thatcher years to offer him as an exemplar of a highly selective code of “Victorian Values.” Nonetheless, there is much to be said for Smiles's interpretation: not only was he a prolific author on the condition of women, but his writings on this subject from the late 1830s to the early 1850s were radical in tone and content.By directing attention to these writings, this article makes three points about early Victorian gender relations, radicalism, and Smiles's own career. First, it challenges the lingering notion that this was a time when patriarchal values stifled debate on gender issues. For some historians who write about the women's movement, the early Victorian era has the status of something like a dark age in the history of the agitation for women's rights; this period is overshadowed on the one side by the great debates initiated by Mary Wollstonecraft's Vindication of the Rights of Woman (1792) and on the other by the new feminist movements that developed after the 1850s. Barbara Caine, for example, has written recently that the exclusion of women from the public sphere was “absolute” in the mid-century years; few women had the financial resources necessary to set up a major journal even if they had been bold enough to do so, and the sort of man who wrote sympathetically about women was concerned primarily with his own needs.
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Fromonot, Jacqueline. "Portraits de Résistantes (1847-1875) : la femme face au système patriarcal dans quelques romans victoriens." Cahiers victoriens et édouardiens, no. 75 Printemps (June 13, 2012): 69–80. http://dx.doi.org/10.4000/cve.1634.
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Cortés Vieco, Francisco José. "Unravelling the Body/Mind Reverberations of Secrets Woven into Charlotte Brontë’s Villette." Prague Journal of English Studies 4, no. 1 (July 1, 2015): 25–45. http://dx.doi.org/10.1515/pjes-2015-0002.
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Abstract The pervasive psychological realism of Charlotte Brontë’s Villette (1853) challenges scholarly assumptions based on her biography or her indoctrination to Victorian medical discourses, as it explores dysfunctional body/mind interrelations, particularly those evidencing patriarchal pressures and prejudices against women. Under the guise of her heroine Lucy, the author becomes both the physician and the patient suffering from a female malady of unnamed origin. This article intends to prove that, instead of narratively unravelling her creature’s past trauma with healing purposes, the author conceals its nature to protect her intimacy and she focuses on the periphery of her crisis aftermath to demonstrate its severity by means of the psychosomatic disorders that persistently haunt her life: depression, anorexia nervosa and suicidal behavior. Brontë’s literary guerrilla of secrecy aims, simultaneously, to veil and unveil the core of Lucy’s clinical case with an unequivocal diagnosis: a harmful, mysterious event from her childhood/adolescence, whose reverberations repeatedly erupt during her adulthood and endanger her survival. Unreliable but “lucid”, this heroine becomes the daguerreotype of her creator to portray life as a sad, exhausting journey, where professional self-realisation - not love or marriage - turns into the ultimate recovery therapy from past ordeals, never successfully confirmed in the case of Lucy, who epitomises a paradigm of femininity in Victorian England: the impoverished, solitary, middle-class woman
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Nardo, Anna K. "Romola and Milton: A Cultural History of Rewriting." Nineteenth-Century Literature 53, no. 3 (December 1, 1998): 328–63. http://dx.doi.org/10.2307/2903043.
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George Eliot's novel of fifteenth-century Florence, Romola, represents her struggles with both the history of Western culture and her real and literary fathers by reimagining Milton's life and thought. As heir to both Renaissance humanism and Reformation zeal, as a central historical link between fifteenth-century Florence and Victorian England, as the patriarch of English letters, and as the father of rebellious daughters, Milton is the unacknowledged father in Romola, and the stories of his family are woven into the fabric of the novel. Recovering the cultural history of these stories-retold by biographers for two centuries and fictionalized throughout the nineteenth century-allows us to historicize and expand Sandra M. Gilbert and Susan Gubar's insight that Milton is present in Romola, but also to confute their widely accepted conclusion (quoting Harold Bloom) that Milton was for Eliot, as for other women writers, "the great Inhibitor, the Sphinx who strangles even strong imaginations in their cradles."
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Dever, Carolyn. "BOOK REVIEW: Barbara Z. Thaden.THE MATERNAL VOICE IN VICTORIAN FICTION: REWRITING THE PATRIARCHAL FAMILY.New York and London: Garland Publishing, 1997." Victorian Studies 42, no. 1 (October 1998): 176–78. http://dx.doi.org/10.2979/vic.1998.42.1.176.
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Kavitha, D., Prof M. Neeraja, and Prof M. Neeraja. "The Image of New Woman as Portrayed in Jhumpa Lahiri’s Novel The Lowland." SMART MOVES JOURNAL IJELLH 9, no. 3 (March 27, 2021): 92–98. http://dx.doi.org/10.24113/ijellh.v9i3.10951.
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The last decade of the Victorian era witnessed a major shift in the social attitude of the woman. It was a break away from the patriarchal system, and women emerging as independent being and moving towards achieving gender equality. The ‘New Woman’ is considered as a precursor to the feminist movement and thus the legacy of New Woman lives on to this day. Jhumpa Lahiri, the significant writer of the Indian diaspora has emerged on the global literary scene with her remarkable writings. The novel has a compelling plot of family relations. It delineates the tender fraternal bond between Subhash and Udayan and how it gets affected by the various paths they chose in their lives. This intensely emotional tale unfolds diverse dimensions of the woman caught in the predicament of conservative cultural practices at home, political unrest in society and the life of an exile in the immigrant land. It also explores Gauri’s expression of identity, her struggle with love, Bela’s choice for individuality and pragmatism in life has turned the novel into a unique narrative. In her second novel, ‘The Lowland’ Jhumpa portrays her women characters devaluing the patriarchal setup. They break the myths of womanhood and motherhood. Prominence is given to assert their position in society by restoring self-identity than nurturing deeper family relations. They fight with courage and confront various challenges in their marital relationship.
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Gates, Sarah. "Intertextual Estella: Great Expectations, Gender, and Literary Tradition." PMLA/Publications of the Modern Language Association of America 124, no. 2 (March 2009): 390–405. http://dx.doi.org/10.1632/pmla.2009.124.2.390.
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The treatment of Estella in Dickens criticism has tended to replicate the ways she is explained by Pip and the other characters in the novel. This article reveals a more complex psychology in her by unpacking the significance of three of the novel's intertexts—The London Merchant, Hamlet, and Frankenstein—as those texts seem to have been received by mid-Victorian audiences. Reading the differences between the Estella revealed in this authorial intertextual commentary and the Estella produced by Pip's experiential narration reveals in Dickens a more complicated negotiation with gender ideology and a greater intuition of its destructive forces than he is generally credited with. The article thus suggests a way to understand more fully the complex relations to ideology found even in works traditionally considered “patriarchal” and to recuperate such figures as Estella, who exceed—while seeming to promulgate—the worst stereotypes of their eras.
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Valeriia, Dmytriieva. "Gender Alterations in English and French Modernist “Bluebeard” Fairytale." English Language and Literature Studies 6, no. 3 (August 29, 2016): 16. http://dx.doi.org/10.5539/ells.v6n3p16.
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<p>The article is aimed at scrutinizing a variety of modernistic writings in a Bluebeard fairytale tradition. It is intended to show what is to be gained by studying texts in relation to the contexts in which they were produced. The period considered here is that of the late XIX and early XX centuries. This takes us into discussing patriarchal authority in the political thought of the early modern time in France and that of the Victorian England.The “Bluebeard” fairytale changes in the domain of gender as a response to certain historical and psychological changes are analyzed. A wide range of writings is investigated to reveal the contribution made by the French and English authors in the field of literature. The analysis implies that certain feministic ideas which grew out of social changes in the society of France and England have provoked some archetypal alterations in the texts of French and English modernists.</p>
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Sutphin, Christine. "Revising Old Scripts: The Fusion of Independence and Intimacy in Aurora Leigh." Browning Institute Studies 15 (1987): 43–54. http://dx.doi.org/10.1017/s0092472500001814.
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Elizabeth Barrett Browning's Aurora Leigh is an unusual Victorian heroine because she ultimately combines career and marriage. Although Aurora's story has been recognized as an important revision of a traditional woman's story by such famous readers as Virginia Woolf (182–92) and Ellen Moers (60–62), some feminist critics have been disturbed by the ending, even as they describe its compelling feminist vision. Rachel Blau DuPlessis, while acknowledging that the story is a “rescripting,” argues that “being an artist is, at the end, reinterpreted as self-sacrifice for the woman, and thus is aligned with feminine ideology” (87). Sandra Gilbert and Susan Gubar argue that Aurora has to learn “not to be herself,” that is, she must learn sympathy and service (576–77). Deirdre David goes even further in asserting Barrett Browning's conservatism when she argues that Aurora's art does not subvert Romney's authority; instead, feminine art serves “male socialist politics” and “a woman's voice [speaks] patriarchal discourse – boldly, passionately, and without rancor” (134).
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Bourrier, Karen. "NARRATING INSANITY IN THE LETTERS OF THOMAS MULOCK AND DINAH MULOCK CRAIK." Victorian Literature and Culture 39, no. 1 (December 7, 2010): 203–22. http://dx.doi.org/10.1017/s1060150310000355.
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Scholars have had a difficult time assessing the significance of Dinah Mulock Craik (1824–1887), best remembered as the author of John Halifax, Gentleman (1856). The critical verdict on her life and letters has swung toward extremes. Some critics have seen her, to quote Henry James, as “kindly, somewhat dull, pious, and very sentimental” (172); her novels embody the Victorian values of self-help, moral earnestness, and hard work, and it is assumed that her life did too. Elaine Showalter's and Sally Mitchell's feminist recoveries of Craik's work in the 1970s and early 1980s found that just the opposite was true, and that Victorian sentimentality allowed Craik to voice the subversive desires of her female readers covertly, in a form that was acceptable to the general public (Showalter 5–7, Mitchell 31). This critical tradition tended to overemphasize the melodramatic aspects of Craik's life and career as a means of dramatizing the struggles of women in a patriarchal society. The most recent scholarship eschews Craik's life altogether for the most part, focusing on her novelistic representations of disability, of Irish and Scottish nationality, and of class and enfranchisement. This criticism engages Craik's writing as an interesting cultural artifact rather than as an aesthetic object: her work is once again seen as embodying normative Victorian values, but to what extent the author was the cognizant promoter of these values, and to what extent she was their unwitting filter, and whether it matters, is unclear. But new archival work shows the importance of her life in understanding her career. The Mulock Family Papers, held at the University of California at Los Angeles, underscore Craik's challenges in managing an abusive father, who suffered from periods of dejection followed by periods of great happiness, and who was frequently absent and incarcerated. Craik was intensely private when it came to her personal life, and scholars like Showalter have read her reserve as a bow to womanly decorum in a life otherwise dominated by literary celebrity. But the archive suggests that Craik's taciturnity was instead a strategy for managing the threat of violence and scandal.