Given their pedagogical nature, many Victorian novels are highly politicized; their narratives are filtered through the value schemes, social views, and conscious purposes of their authors. Victorian women were largely expected to dedicate themselves to the social and moral betterment of their families. Women were expected to be soft, meek, quiet, modest, submissive, gentle, patient, and spiritual; men were supposed to be aggressive, assertive, resilient, disciplined, and competitive. These expectations were repeatedly endorsed through the conduct books of the period, which encouraged people to adhere to proper behavior. The Victorian era also viewed fiction as a didactic tool and as a means to propagate morality. Thus novels of the period typically present women as subordinate to men and as angels of the home. Women who conform to the social norms are usually rewarded in these fictitious worlds, whereas women who violate society's standards are often penalized. Certainly the novels of Charles Dickens fall into the larger didactic trend of Victorian fiction, and like other works of the period, his novels overtly support the conventional values of Victorian society. Dickens typically uses descriptive detail to register approval or disapproval of certain women, and these women are rewarded or chastized through his plots. But on a less obvious level, Dickens also challenges the prevailing Victorian attitude toward women. A close look at his works shows that patriarchs do not automatically deserve the respect they command from their privileged social positions. Women—however virtuous—are unable to produce moral or social change, and many women succeed outside the constraints of domesticity. This book provides a penetrating analysis of how Dickens' novels ultimately fail to promote the conventional Victorian behavioral ideal for women and discusses how his works subvert the domestic ideology of the nineteenth century.

"In The End of Domesticity, Charles Hatten offers a provocative theory for this seminal shift which even now shapes literary depictions of the family. Discussing works by Charles Dickens, George Eliot, and Henry James, Hatten shows how these major writers anticipate the modernist preoccupation with domestic alienation while responding to their own historical context of changes in, and controversies about, gender roles and the family. Most originally, Hatten argues that these writers' representations of gender and domesticity are strongly influenced by anxieties about capitalism and the marketplace." "Beginning with Dickens, Hatten traces how such early fictions as Barnaby Rudge and Dombey and Son diagnose familial dysfunction as evidence not only of individual moral failure but of the negative effects of the marketplace on family life, effects that Dickens believed could be counterbalanced by an idealized model of domesticity that relies on maternal nurturance and feminine self-sacrifice. Yet even in such apparently triumphant celebrations of the family as David Copperfield. Dickens becomes disillusioned with his own model, showing the high cost of domesticity for women, while increasingly blaming failed families on women's unwillingness to fulfill their proper duties." "In a radical revision of traditional domestic narrative, Eliot, in The Mill on the Floss and Daniel Deronda, revises Dickens's conservative gender politics to emphasize the inevitability, and the desirability, of women modifying their social roles in response to historical change, even while she too is anxious about women's ability wholly to transcend the materialist values of the age. Finally, Hatten shows how in James's late work, most notably The Wings of the Dove, darkly ironic narratives of courtship and marriage symbolize the destructive effects of economic coercionon human values and the obsolescence of traditional gender roles, themes that anticipate the pessimistic and alienated reading of family life in many modernist texts." "Demonstrating a sophisticated awareness of the interconnectedness of economic pressures and changing gender roles on late Victorian literary culture, The End of Domesticity contributes significantly to Victorian studies by offering a persuasive reading of how, within a few decades, Victorian writers paved the way for the sharply unsentimental and ironic view of marriage and the family in modernist fiction. Situating major texts of Victorian domestic fiction in the context both of writers' lives and their complex historical moment, The End of Domesticity shows how the corrosive effects of economic forces on courtship, marriage, and family life become the foundation for a literary critique of the negative effects of the market on the individual, a critique that also increasingly underscores tensions within traditional forms of gender and domesticity." --Book Jacket.

Details scholarly writings on Dickens and gender published between 1992 and 2008. This book analyzes nearly 200 books and essays to give students and advanced researchers a sense of the range, richness, and complexity of the work being done in this field.

From the author of the international bestseller Debt: The First 5,000 Years comes a revelatory account of the way bureaucracy rules our lives Where does the desire for endless rules, regulations, and bureaucracy come from? How did we come to spend so much of our time filling out forms? And is it really a cipher for state violence? To answer these questions, the anthropologist David Graeber—one of our most important and provocative thinkers—traces the peculiar and unexpected ways we relate to bureaucracy today, and reveals how it shapes our lives in ways we may not even notice…though he also suggests that there may be something perversely appealing—even romantic—about bureaucracy. Leaping from the ascendance of right-wing economics to the hidden meanings behind Sherlock Holmes and Batman, The Utopia of Rules is at once a powerful work of social theory in the tradition of Foucault and Marx, and an entertaining reckoning with popular culture that calls to mind Slavoj Zizek at his most accessible. An essential book for our times, The Utopia of Rules is sure to start a million conversations about the institutions that rule over us—and the better, freer world we should, perhaps, begin to imagine for ourselves.

»Houses, Secrets, and the Closet« investigates the literary production of masculinities and their relation to secrets and sexualities in 18th and 19th century fiction. It focusses on close readings of Gothic fiction, Sensation Novels, and tales by Horace Walpole, Ann Radcliffe, William Godwin, Mary Elizabeth Braddon, Wilkie Collins, and Henry James. The study approaches these texts through the lens of domestic space, gender, knowledge, and power. This approach serves to investigate the cultural roots of the ›closet‹ - the male homosexual secret - which reveals a more general notion of male secrecy in modern society. The study thus contributes to a better understanding of the cultural history of masculinities and sexualities.