Victorian Domesticity and the Perpetuation of Childhood: an Examination of Gender Roles and the Family Unit in J. M. Barrie's Peter Pan
Victorian Domesticity and the Perpetuation of Childhood: an Examination of Gender Roles and the Family Unit in J. M. Barrie's Peter Pan

Author: Abigail Nusbaum

Publisher:

Published: 2014

Total Pages: 97

ISBN-13:

DOWNLOAD EBOOK

This work examines JM Barrie's Peter Pan in light of its cultural context. It works to show how the Victorian ideology of the separate spheres narrowed the scope of roles for men and women within the home, which ultimately led to an obsession with childhood that manifested itself strongly in the works of the children of the Victorians, the Edwardians. A study of the Victorian society in which Barrie grew up and first imagined Peter Pan, accompanied by a close reading of the text, reveals Barrie using the various characters' interactions with the title character as cultural artifacts that illuminate and critique rigidly prescribed Victorian gender roles. This study also shows how the ideologies of the time resulted in the obsession with childhood which allowed men to remain boyish but mournful when girls became mothers. Barrie's work provides a journey through which the reader may follow the various characters, and Wendy especially, as they question and accept the prevailing roles of the time, moving through the process of mourning childhood in order to step into adulthood without the lingering vestiges of a lost childhood.

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

DOWNLOAD EBOOK

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.

Neo-Victorian Families
Neo-Victorian Families

Author: Christian Gutleben

Publisher: Rodopi

Published: 2011

Total Pages: 407

ISBN-13: 9401207240

DOWNLOAD EBOOK

Tracing representations of re-imagined Victorian families in literature, film and television, and social discourse, this collection, the second volume in Rodopi’s Neo-Victorian Series, analyses the historical trajectory of persistent but increasingly contested cultural myths that coalesce around the heterosexual couple and nuclear family as the supposed ‘normative’ foundation of communities and nations, past and present. It sheds new light on the significance of families as a source of fluctuating cultural capital, deployed in diverse arenas from political debates, social policy and identity politics to equal rights activism, and analyses how residual as well as emergent ideologies of family are mediated and critiqued by contemporary arts and popular culture. This volume will be of interest to researchers and students of neo-Victorian studies, as well as scholars in contemporary literature and film studies, cultural studies and the history of the family. Situating the nineteenth-century family both as a site of debilitating trauma and the means of ethical resistance against multivalent forms of oppression, neo-Victorian texts display a fascinating proliferation of alternative family models, albeit overshadowed by the apparent recalcitrance of familial ideologies to the same historical changes neo-Victorianism reflects and seeks to promote within the cultural imaginary.

The Victorian Girl and the Feminine Ideal
The Victorian Girl and the Feminine Ideal

Author: Deborah Gorham

Publisher: Routledge

Published: 2012-12-12

Total Pages: 242

ISBN-13: 1136248102

DOWNLOAD EBOOK

In Victorian England, the perception of girlhood arose not in isolation, but as one manifestation of the prevailing conception of femininity. Examining the assumptions that underlay the education and upbringing of middle-class girls, this book is also a study of the learning of gender roles in theory and reality. It was originally published in 1982. The first two sections examine the image of women in the Victorian family, and the advice offered in printed sources on the rearing of daughters during the Victorian period. To illustrate the effect and evolution of feminine ideals over the Victorian period, the book’s final section presents the actual experiences of several middle-class Victorian women who represent three generations and range, socioeconomically, from lower-middle class through upper-middle class.

Precocious Children and Childish Adults
Precocious Children and Childish Adults

Author: Claudia Nelson

Publisher: JHU Press

Published: 2012-07-02

Total Pages: 224

ISBN-13: 1421405342

DOWNLOAD EBOOK

Especially evident in Victorian-era writings is a rhetorical tendency to liken adults to children and children to adults. Claudia Nelson examines this literary phenomenon and explores the ways in which writers discussed the child-adult relationship during this period. Though far from ubiquitous, the terms “child-woman,” “child-man,” and “old-fashioned child” appear often enough in Victorian writings to prompt critical questions about the motivations and meanings of such generational border crossings. Nelson carefully considers the use of these terms and connects invocations of age inversion to developments in post-Darwinian scientific thinking and attitudes about gender roles, social class, sexuality, power, and economic mobility. She brilliantly analyzes canonical works of Charles Dickens, Charlotte Brontë, William Makepeace Thackeray, Bram Stoker, and Robert Louis Stevenson alongside lesser-known writings to demonstrate the diversity of literary age inversion and its profound influence on Victorian culture. By considering the full context of Victorian age inversion, Precocious Children and Childish Adults illuminates the complicated pattern of anxiety and desire that creates such ambiguity in the writings of the time. Scholars of Victorian literature and culture, as well as readers interested in children’s literature, childhood studies, and gender studies, will welcome this excellent work from a major figure in the field.

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

DOWNLOAD EBOOK

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.

Domesticated Bachelors and Femininity in Victorian Novels
Domesticated Bachelors and Femininity in Victorian Novels

Author: Jennifer Beauvais

Publisher: McFarland

Published: 2020-10-09

Total Pages: 199

ISBN-13: 0786460369

DOWNLOAD EBOOK

Domestic issues, chastity, morality, marriage and love are concerns we typically associate with Victorian female characters. But what happens when men in Victorian novels begin to engage in this type of feminine discourse? While we are familiar with certain Victorian women seeking freedom by moving beyond the domestic sphere, there is an equally interesting movement by the domestic man into the private space through his performance of femininity. This book defines the domesticated bachelor, examines the effects of the blurring of boundaries between the public and private spheres, and traces the evolution of the public discourse on masculinity in novels such as Bronte's Shirley, Braddon's Lady Audley's Secret, Eliot's Daniel Deronda, and Stevenson's The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde. This bachelor, along with his female counterpart, the New Woman, opens up for discussion new definitions of Victorian masculinity and gender boundaries and blurs the rigid distinction between the gendered spaces thought to be in place during the Victorian period.

Disorderly Conduct
Disorderly Conduct

Author: Carroll Smith-Rosenberg

Publisher: Knopf

Published: 1985

Total Pages: 384

ISBN-13:

DOWNLOAD EBOOK

Essays look at feminist history, female friendships, Davy Crockett, sex roles, the feminine cycle, hysteria, abortion, and androgyny in nineteenth-century America.

Victorian Gender Roles and Dickens's Image of Women As Represented in the Female Characters in Great Expectations
Victorian Gender Roles and Dickens's Image of Women As Represented in the Female Characters in Great Expectations

Author: Anja Dinter

Publisher: GRIN Verlag

Published: 2012-06

Total Pages: 29

ISBN-13: 3656208794

DOWNLOAD EBOOK

Seminar paper from the year 2004 in the subject English Language and Literature Studies - Literature, grade: 1,3, University of Potsdam (Institut für Anglistik und Amerikanistik), course: Great Expectations and Hard Times by Charles Dickens, 15 entries in the bibliography, language: English, abstract: Introduction The following work is an analysis of the female characters in Charles Dickens's Great Expectations especially with regard to Victorian gender constructions and Dickens's image of women. Dickens's biography and the depiction of very diverse female characters in his novels stimulated the idea of a closer analysis. First of all, a short summary of Great Expectations is provided. Then, the Victorian construction of gender will be discussed. As will be shown, a very strict ideology regarding gender roles existed during the Victorian age. Obviously, Dickens must have been influenced by the ideas of his contemporaries which should then be presented in the novel. Another focus will be on how his relationships to women influenced his image of women and also, consequently, the depiction of his female characters in Great Expectations. Finally the female characters, with reference to Victorian gender roles and Dickens's image of women, will be analyzed in greater detail. The focus is on four women who I believe to be the most important female characters in the novel and powerful representatives of the author's image of women and Victorian gender construction.