Anxious Domesticity in the Victorian Novel
Title | Anxious Domesticity in the Victorian Novel PDF eBook |
Author | Michael Mahar Klotz |
Publisher | |
Pages | 396 |
Release | 2007 |
Genre | |
ISBN | 9780549348382 |
My analysis is informed by historical events that influenced the industry of interior decoration, including the expansion of the railway during the 1840s, the Great Exhibition of 1851, debates about female suffrage in the 1860s, and the response to Wilde's trial in 1895; letters and essays by Dickens, Oliphant, Eliot, and Wilde regarding the decoration of their own homes and the cultural role of adornment; and aesthetic manuals that document the prominence of possessions in an understanding of home. Through readings of Dombey and Son, Jane Eyre, Miss Marjoribanks, Middlemarch, and The Picture of Dorian Gray, I contend that the representation of the domestic interior in the Victorian novel provides a visible exhibit of the difficulty of subsuming a sense of self within the house, and is integral to understanding the fate of the individual within the Victorian home.
Professional Domesticity in the Victorian Novel
Title | Professional Domesticity in the Victorian Novel PDF eBook |
Author | Monica F. Cohen |
Publisher | Cambridge University Press |
Pages | 234 |
Release | 1998-02-05 |
Genre | Literary Criticism |
ISBN | 0521591414 |
Much attention has recently been given by scholars to the widening of the gender gap in the nineteenth century and the concept of separate spheres. Testing such constructions, and questioning the stereotypes associated with Victorian domesticity, Monica F. Cohen offers new readings of narratives by Austen, Charlotte Brontë, Dickens, Eliot, Eden, Gaskell, Oliphant and Reade to show how domestic work, the most feminine of all activities, gained much of its social credibility by positioning itself in relation to the emergent professions. By exploring how novels cast the Victorian conception of female morality into the vocabulary of nineteenth-century professionalism, Cohen traces the ways in which women sought identity and privilege within a professionalised culture, and revises our understanding of Victorian domestic ideology.
Domestic Crime In The Victorian Novel
Title | Domestic Crime In The Victorian Novel PDF eBook |
Author | Anthea Trodd |
Publisher | Springer |
Pages | 191 |
Release | 1988-12-05 |
Genre | Fiction |
ISBN | 134919638X |
Sensation Novels and Domestic Minds
Title | Sensation Novels and Domestic Minds PDF eBook |
Author | Mathilde Vialard |
Publisher | Taylor & Francis |
Pages | 218 |
Release | 2024-02-26 |
Genre | Literary Criticism |
ISBN | 1003845347 |
Drawing on the recent academic interest in approaching health and wellbeing from a humanities perspective, Sensation Novels and Domestic Minds investigates how the Victorians dealt with questions of mental health by examining literary works in the genre of sensation fiction. The novels of Mary Elizabeth Braddon and Wilkie Collins, two prominent writers of the genre, often portray characters suffering from mental illnesses commonly diagnosed at the time, among which are monomania, moral insanity, melancholia and hypochondria. By studying the fictional works of Braddon and Collins alongside medical texts from the nineteenth century, it sets out to investigate how these novels fictionally represented real mental sufferings. This book considers the different mental illnesses the characters of sensation novels develop inside and outside the home as they struggle to define their own identity against Victorian social expectations. It demonstrates how these novels fictionalised the crisis of the leisured upper classes, who spent most of their time at home, and found themselves at odds with a society that increasingly separated the domestic and working environments, while also considering the impact that a lack of a sense of domestic belonging could have on their mental health. Sensation Novels and Domestic Minds further analyses the extent to which domesticity—in its excess or lack—could afflict the mental health of Victorian men and women through the fictional representation of suicidal thoughts and acts in the novels of Braddon and Collins.
Death and the Mother from Dickens to Freud
Title | Death and the Mother from Dickens to Freud PDF eBook |
Author | Carolyn Dever |
Publisher | Cambridge University Press |
Pages | 255 |
Release | 1998-05-14 |
Genre | Literary Criticism |
ISBN | 0521622808 |
The cultural ideal of motherhood in Victorian Britain seems to be undermined by Victorian novels, which almost always represent mothers as incapacitated, abandoning or dead. Carolyn Dever argues that the phenomenon of the dead or missing mother in Victorian narrative is central to the construction of the good mother as a cultural ideal. Maternal loss is the prerequisite for Victorian representations of domestic life, a fact which has especially complex implications for women. When Freud constructs psychoanalytical models of family, gender and desire, he too assumes that domesticity begins with the death of the mother. Analysing texts by Dickens, Collins, Eliot, Darwin and Woolf, as well as Freud, Klein and Winnicott, Dever argues that fictional and theoretical narratives alike use maternal absence to articulate concerns about gender and representation. Psychoanalysis has long been used to analyse Victorian fiction; Dever contends that Victorian fiction has much to teach us about psychoanalysis.
Disease, Desire, and the Body in Victorian Women's Popular Novels
Title | Disease, Desire, and the Body in Victorian Women's Popular Novels PDF eBook |
Author | Pamela K. Gilbert |
Publisher | Cambridge University Press |
Pages | 221 |
Release | 1997-11-27 |
Genre | Literary Criticism |
ISBN | 0521593239 |
The work of popular women novelists in mid-Victorian Britain and beliefs about femininity and disease.
The Victorian Novel and Masculinity
Title | The Victorian Novel and Masculinity PDF eBook |
Author | P. Mallett |
Publisher | Springer |
Pages | 191 |
Release | 2015-01-22 |
Genre | Social Science |
ISBN | 113749154X |
What did it mean, in the rapidly changing world of Victorian England, to 'be a man'? In essays written specially for this volume, nine distinguished scholars from Britain and the USA show how Victorian novelists from the Brontës to Conrad sought to discover what made men, what broke them, and what restored them.