Anxious Domesticity in the Victorian Novel
Anxious Domesticity in the Victorian Novel

Author: Michael Mahar Klotz

Publisher:

Published: 2007

Total Pages: 396

ISBN-13: 9780549348382

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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
Professional Domesticity in the Victorian Novel

Author: Monica F. Cohen

Publisher: Cambridge University Press

Published: 1998-02-05

Total Pages: 234

ISBN-13: 0521591414

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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.

Death and the Mother from Dickens to Freud
Death and the Mother from Dickens to Freud

Author: Carolyn Dever

Publisher: Cambridge University Press

Published: 1998-05-14

Total Pages: 255

ISBN-13: 0521622808

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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.

Sensation Novels and Domestic Minds
Sensation Novels and Domestic Minds

Author: Mathilde Vialard

Publisher: Taylor & Francis

Published: 2024-02-26

Total Pages: 218

ISBN-13: 1003845347

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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.

The Victorian Novel and Masculinity
The Victorian Novel and Masculinity

Author: P. Mallett

Publisher: Springer

Published: 2015-01-22

Total Pages: 191

ISBN-13: 113749154X

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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.

Pets and Domesticity in Victorian Literature and Culture
Pets and Domesticity in Victorian Literature and Culture

Author: Monica Flegel

Publisher: Routledge

Published: 2015-02-11

Total Pages: 216

ISBN-13: 1317564863

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Addressing the significance of the pet in the Victorian period, this book examines the role played by the domestic pet in delineating relations for each member of the "natural" family home. Flegel explores the pet in relation to the couple at the head of the house, to the children who make up the family’s dependents, and to the common familial "outcasts" who populate Victorian literature and culture: the orphan, the spinster, the bachelor, and the same-sex couple. Drawing upon both animal studies and queer theory, this study stresses the importance of the domestic pet in elucidating normative sexuality and (re)productivity within the familial home, and reveals how the family pet operates as a means of identifying aberrant, failed, or perverse familial and gender performances. The family pet, that is, was an important signifier in Victorian familial ideology of the individual family unit’s ability to support or threaten the health and morality of the nation in the Victorian period. Texts by authors such as Clara Balfour, Juliana Horatia Ewing, E. Burrows, Bessie Rayner Parkes, Anne Brontë, George Eliot, Frederick Marryat, and Charles Dickens speak to the centrality of the domestic pet to negotiations of gender, power, and sexuality within the home that both reify and challenge the imaginary structure known as the natural family in the Victorian period. This book highlights the possibilities for a familial elsewhere outside of normative and restrictive models of heterosexuality, reproduction, and the natural family, and will be of interest to those studying Victorian literature and culture, animal studies, queer studies, and beyond.

A Concise Companion to the Victorian Novel
A Concise Companion to the Victorian Novel

Author: Francis O'Gorman

Publisher: John Wiley & Sons

Published: 2008-04-15

Total Pages: 304

ISBN-13: 0470757558

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This volume presents fresh approaches to classic Victorian fiction from 1830-1900. Opens up for the reader the cultural world in which the Victorian novel was written and read. Crosses traditional disciplinary boundaries. Provides fresh perspectives on how Victorian fiction relates to different contexts, such as class, sexuality, empire, psychology, law and biology.