QUAKER DRESS, SEXUALITY, AND THE DOMESTICATION OF REFORM IN THE VICTORIAN NOVEL

2002 ◽  
Vol 30 (1) ◽  
pp. 211-236 ◽  
Author(s):  
Suzanne Keen
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
George Eliot ◽  
Charlotte Bronte ◽  
Female Sexuality ◽  
Victorian Novel ◽  
Jane Eyre ◽  
Religious Groups ◽  
Victorian Fiction ◽  
Core Function ◽  
Nineteenth Century Novels

WHY ARE JANE EYRE AND DOROTHEA BROOKE clad by their creators in “Quakerish” garb? The oppositional plainness and simplicity of Quakerish heroines have often been read as signs of classlessness and sexlessness.1 Plain and simple clothing seems, to both Victorian and contemporary eyes, part of the package of reticence, reserve, and repression associated with the evangelical wing of nineteenth-century dissenting sects.2 The typical sociological view of the function of dress within conservative religious groups holds that “strict dress codes are enforced because dress is considered symbolic of religiosity. Hence dress becomes a symbol of social control as it controls the external body” (Arthur 1). The control of female sexuality and the restraint of desire would seem to be the core function of modest clothing. Then the plain dress of some of the liveliest heroines of Victorian fiction presents a puzzle that can be solved only by recuperating the meaning of that clothing for Victorians. As fashion historian Anne Hollander points out, nineteenth-century novels testify to the way that clothes “always correctly express character” (Feeding the Eye 12), but the meaning of particular articles of clothing or styles can slip away. Accurately reading the characters of Charlotte Brontë and George Eliot thus requires careful interpretation of their dress, in this case reversing the conventional reading of their plain, modest, and simple style. This essay argues that Quakerish clothing expresses both a promise of spirited sexuality and an admonition about the class-crossing potential of the respectable female contained within it.

Becoming Foreign in the Victorian Novel: International Migration in Little Dorrit and Villette

2020 ◽  
Author(s):  
Tamara S Wagner
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Migrant Workers ◽  
Victorian Novel ◽  
The Novel ◽  
Global Studies ◽  
Victorian Fiction ◽  
Time Migration ◽  
Globalizing World ◽  
Social Invisibility ◽  
Nineteenth Century Novels

Abstract This article analyses the representation of migrant workers in Victorian fiction. While exploring the seldom-discussed experience of such migrants, I argue that in the fiction of the time, migration for work outside of the empire expresses the experience of individual isolation as the result of increasing urban anonymity as well as of global exchanges. The figure of the migrant thereby literalizes modern isolation in an emergent society of strangers. In depicting migratory characters as embodiments of loneliness, while establishing it as a shared experience through parallel plots, nineteenth-century novels map out possible connections in a globalizing world. In parsing the interplay of isolation and imaginary sympathy in two texts of the 1850s, Charles Dickens’s Little Dorrit and Charlotte Brontë’s Villette, I argue that the experience of feeling foreign while working abroad enables characters to seek connections that transcend boundaries of class and national identity, even as the sympathy they imagine might be flawed, warped by projection and identification. In Little Dorrit, Cavalletto’s accident in the streets of London enacts a pivotal moment of imagined sympathy for the recently returned Arthur Clennam that ultimately helps to solve the renegotiation of home and host country in the novel, while in Villette, a female migrant articulates an increasingly widespread experience not only of modern isolation, social invisibility, and cultural disorientation, but also of the power of anonymity. A critical analysis of migratory work in Victorian fiction adds an important new dimension to nineteenth-century global studies.

‘Reader, I [shagged/beat/whipped/f****d/rewrote] him’: the sexual and financial afterlives of Jane Eyre

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Louisa Yates
Keyword(s):  
Charlotte Bronte ◽  
Copyright Law ◽  
Victorian Novel ◽  
Jane Eyre ◽  
Fan Fiction ◽  
Financial Success ◽  
Additional Material ◽  
Commercial Success ◽  
Victorian Fiction ◽  
The Erotic

This chapter provides the first comparative reading of neo-Victorian fiction with the erotic makeover novel, a genre that realised commercial success in the immediate aftermath of the wild financial success of E.L. James’s Fifty Shades of Grey. Individual makeovers exactly reproduce the text of canonical novels such as Jane Eyre; the only additional material are passages of explicit, often BDSM-inflected, sexual encounters. This chapter examines the brief flare of global interest in the erotic makeover in order to demonstrate the genre’s appropriation of academic neo-Victorian vocabulary. As this chapter argues, such appropriation is deployed in order to obfuscate opportunistic financial imperatives. A comparative reading of Sienna Cartwright’s erotic makeover of Jane Eyre with D.M. Thomas’s neo-Victorian novel Charlotte initiates a dialogue between the two genres across the topics of authorship, fan fiction, copyright law, literary originality and neo-Victoriana. Both genres provide Charlotte Brontë and Jane Eyre with a curiously commercial afterlife.

A Space of “unwonted liberty and pleasure”

2020 ◽  
pp. 61-80
Author(s):  
Louise Willis
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Young Women ◽  
Natural Environment ◽  
Charlotte Bronte ◽  
Power Relations ◽  
Jane Eyre ◽  
Domestic Sphere ◽  
Female Bildungsroman ◽  
Self Discovery ◽  
The Relationship

Gardening and botany emerged as independent and stimulating pursuits permitted, and even encouraged, for women, in the nineteenth century. Drawing on the cultural history of these pursuits, this paper examines how Charlotte Brontë uses gardens as critical sites in the Bildungsromans of Jane Eyre and Lucy Snowe. I argue that corresponding to this culture, and given the restricted locations in which the traditional female Bildungsroman may play out, Brontë’s gardens function as sites of liberation and self-discovery and are a fundamental part of the heroines’ journey into adulthood. They become crucial places for communication, courtship, and power relations, and of escape, sanctuary and introspection; public yet private spaces in which young women might negotiate and discover an empowered self. Critics have tended to treat gardens in the Brontë novels as Edenic, or as having pedagogical or moral associations. But taking an ecofeminist approach, particularly drawing on Stacy Alaimo’s work on trans-corporeality, I argue that Charlotte Brontë actively interrogates the relationship between Victorian ideologies of nature and the construction of female selfhood. Brontë valorizes the natural environment that was being eroded and exploited, appropriating gardens as a feminine territory that sustains and enriches the individual, albeit within the safe bounds of the domestic sphere.

Adaptive/appropriative reuse in neo-Victorian fiction: having one’s cake and eating it too

Interventions ◽  
2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Marie-Luise Kohlke
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Historical Fiction ◽  
Adaptive Reuse ◽  
Victorian Novel ◽  
Victorian Culture ◽  
Victorian Novels ◽  
Victorian Fiction ◽  
Fiction Writers ◽  
Historic Conservation ◽  
Adaptive Practice

Marie-Luise Kohlke’s chapter on ‘Adaptive/Appropriate Reuse in Neo-Victorian Fiction: Having One’s Cake and Eating it Too’ argues that historical fiction writers’ persistent fascination with the long nineteenth century enacts a simultaneous drawing near to and distancing from the period, the lives of its inhabitants, and its cultural icons, aesthetic discourses, and canonical works. Always constituting at least in part as a fantasy construction of ‘the Victorian’ for present-day purposes, the process of re-imagining involves not just a quasi resurrection (of nineteenth-century historical persons, fictional characters, traumas, aesthetics, values, and ideologies) but also a relational transformation – a change in nature, a conversion into something other, namely what we want ‘the Victorian’ to signify rather than what it was. Hence adaptive practice in the neo-Victorian novel, applied both to Victorian literary precursors and the period more generally, may be better described as adaptive reuse (to borrow a term from urban planning’s approach to historic conservation) or, perhaps, appropriative reuse. Drawing on a range of neo-Victorian novels Kohlke explores the prevalent perspectival frames and generic forms employed in neo-Victorian appropriative reuse and their divergent effects on present-day conceptions of Victorian culture.

Afterword

2020 ◽  
pp. 207-212
Author(s):  
Jane Bennett
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Women Writers ◽  
George Eliot ◽  
Charlotte Bronte ◽  
Mary Wollstonecraft ◽  
Lydia Maria Child ◽  
Mary Elizabeth Braddon ◽  
Margaret Fuller ◽  
Roll Call ◽  
Susan Fenimore Cooper

It is worth repeating the roll call: Mary Wollstonecraft, Mary Shelley, Caroline Norton, Charlotte Brontë, George Eliot, Mary Elizabeth Braddon, Jane Johnston Schoolcraft, Margaret Fuller, Susan Fenimore Cooper, Celia Thaxter, Laura Ingalls Wilder, Francis Wright, and Lydia Maria Child. The essays in Gendered Ecologies: New Materialist Interpretations of Women Writers in the Long Nineteenth Century...

scholarly journals Class conflict in Victorian fiction with especial Reference to Hardy’s novels

Al-Burz ◽  
2019 ◽  
Vol 11 (1) ◽  
pp. 32-45
Author(s):  
Dr Saima Manzoor ◽  
Ghulam Rasool ◽  
Shumaila Barozai
Keyword(s):  
Charles Dickens ◽  
George Eliot ◽  
Thomas Hardy ◽  
Relevant Information ◽  
Victorian Novel ◽  
Class Conflict ◽  
Charles Kingsley ◽  
George Meredith ◽  
Victorian Fiction ◽  
Class Distinction

The Victorian novel is dominated by class conflict. This research paper is an attempt to define the different classes of the society and the attitude of the Victorian novelists, especially, that of Hardy’s, towards class distinction. The present study includes the nineteenth century novelists, namely, Charles Dickens, George Eliot, Charles Kingsley, George Meredith and Thomas Hardy who in their works focus upon class conflict. The paper, while highlighting the attitude of the Victorian writers towards class conflict, mainly explores the major novels of Hardy who, being highly conscious about his humble origin, presents such characters who are inclined to social improvement. In Victorian fiction the elite class is marked with meanness and moral degradation. The research study would provide relevant information about the conflict between haves and have not especially with reference to Hardy’s fiction.

scholarly journals Diagnosis or Detour? The Uses of Medical Realism in the Victorian Novel

2008 ◽  
pp. 0
Author(s):  
Meegan Kennedy
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Clinical Medicine ◽  
Victorian Novel ◽  
The Novel ◽  
Narrative Methods ◽  
Professional Ideology ◽  
Narrative Techniques ◽  
Realist Methodology ◽  
Nineteenth Century Novels ◽  
Literary Techniques

AbstractThis essay attempts to open up our perspective on novels’ use of medical narrative realism. Previous analyses of “medicine and the novel” have focused on a common realist ideal and on novels with medical content. But even a realist methodology shared by the novel and by medicine did not find common expression in both genres. Accordingly, this paper draws on some examples that are representative of nineteenth-century novels and range from literal discussions of disease to scenes much farther removed from literal depictions of medicine or disease, but which still, I am arguing, draw on narrative techniques associated with medical clinical realism for their effect. In fact, novels revised and redirected such techniques, often using them against the grain of the professional ideology from which they arise. Accordingly, this essay will sketch out not only how medical case histories can use supposedly literary techniques, but also how nineteenth-century novels apply the narrative methods of clinical medicine even where medicine is not strictly at issue, and how they adapt those methods to their own literary aims.

The Place of Objects

2020 ◽  
pp. 81-96
Author(s):  
Dewey W. Hall
Keyword(s):  
Human Nature ◽  
George Eliot ◽  
Charlotte Bronte ◽  
Female Body ◽  
Open Space ◽  
The Body ◽  
Narrative Discourse ◽  
Jane Eyre ◽  
Natural Phenomena ◽  
Mill On The Floss

As British female writers, Charlotte Brontë and George Eliot perceived their environs with keen awareness of the intra-action of the female body with matter. The environs, often linked to the materiality of natural phenomena, is open space, which is inhabited by animate and inanimate entities as objects intra-relating with each other. Through an interpretive reading of Bronte’s Jane Eyre (1847) and Eliot’s The Mill on the Floss (1860), my objective is to reconsider the female body in the novels as part of an assemblage of distinct objects (i.e., subject treated as object) in the context of a neo-materialist approach to ecofeminism. My attempt is to read the female body in relation to entities, yielding a perception of the body, which examines the body-as-matter within narrative discourse. The female body, however, is not meant to be constituted as a subject-less object without agency that, in effect, results in disempowerment. Instead, my discussion examines selected instances by which the female body has been entangled with more-than-human nature, revealing the vibrancy of the female body and its agential link to matter.

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