Idolatrous Reading

2015 ◽  
Vol 70 (2) ◽  
pp. 238-266 ◽  
Author(s):  
Timothy L. Carens
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Middle Class ◽  
Significant Role ◽  
Young Women ◽  
Young Female ◽  
Mary Elizabeth Braddon ◽  
Unhealthy Food ◽  
Female Subjectivity ◽  
Domestic Ideology ◽  
Patriarchal Culture

Timothy L. Carens, “Idolatrous Reading: Subversive Fantasy and Domestic Ideology” (pp. 238–266) In nineteenth-century Britain, patriarchal culture revealed its anxieties about female subjectivity and anxiety through an extensive debate about what young women should read. As critics have already shown, many writers in the period disparaged romantic novels by comparing them to unhealthy food, addictive drugs, or even illicit sexual encounters. The figure of idolatry played a significant role in this debate as well, suggesting that young female readers might betray the true god of the middle-class patriarchal order by worshiping more gratifying alternatives. If the language of idolatry generally connoted heretical transgression, emergent feminist writers such as Mary Elizabeth Braddon found that they could also use it to articulate a woman’s longing for the power to shape her own dreams. In Braddon’s The Doctor’s Wife (1864), a figure used to disparage women who neglect their role within the domestic order thus acquires a new and intensely ironic life as a way to imagine an escape from it.

Charles Dickens and the Properties of Fiction

2020 ◽  
Author(s):  
Ushashi Dasgupta
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Middle Class ◽  
Real Estate ◽  
Charles Dickens ◽  
Dense Network ◽  
Social Psychological ◽  
Domestic Ideology ◽  
The Social ◽  
Literary Collaboration ◽  
Economic Relationship

This book explores the significance of rental culture in Charles Dickens’s fiction and journalism. It reveals tenancy, or the leasing of real estate in exchange for money, to be a governing force in everyday life in the nineteenth century. It casts a light into back attics and landladies’ parlours, and follows a host of characters—from slum landlords exploiting their tenants, to pairs of friends deciding to live together and share the rent. In this period, tenancy shaped individuals, structured communities, and fascinated writers. The vast majority of London’s population had an immediate economic relationship with the houses and rooms they inhabited, and Dickens was highly attuned to the social, psychological, and imaginative corollaries of this phenomenon. He may have been read as an overwhelming proponent of middle-class domestic ideology, but if we look closely, we see that his fictional universe is a dense network of rented spaces. He is comfortable in what he calls the ‘lodger world’, and he locates versions of home in a multitude of unlikely places. These are not mere settings, waiting to be recreated faithfully; rented space does not simply provide a backdrop for incident in the nineteenth-century novel. Instead, it plays an important part in influencing what takes place. For Dickens, to write about tenancy can often mean to write about writing—character, authorship, and literary collaboration. More than anything, he celebrates the fact that unassuming houses brim with narrative potential: comedies, romances, mysteries, and comings-of-age take place behind their doors.

Animal Bodies: Corporeality, Class, and Subject Formation in The Wide, Wide World

2000 ◽  
Vol 54 (4) ◽  
pp. 503-533 ◽  
Author(s):  
Jennifer Mason
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Middle Class ◽  
Self Regulation ◽  
Recent Criticism ◽  
Horseback Riding ◽  
Subject Formation ◽  
Domestic Ideology ◽  
New Methods ◽  
Middle Class Woman ◽  
Historical Contextualization

In recent criticism, arguments about whether domesticity in The Wide, Wide World (1850) empowered or disempowered women, and whether it was embraced or critiqued by Warner and her contemporaries, have been founded upon, or at least buttressed by, readings of horses and horsemanship. The interpretation of Ellen Montgomery's riding lessons as a metaphor for her disempowerment, and the ubiquitous denunciation of John Humphreys as "brutal horse-beater," however, have little grounding in the nineteenth-century horsemanship on which Warner drew. While for centuries horses in Western culture had been associated with human passions and horsemanship with their forcible domination, a combination of new methods for disciplining equines and new forms of recreational riding rendered the equine body, in the nineteenth century, discursively situated to communicate the internalized discipline and self-regulation that was necessary to make a human body middle class. Through horseback riding and other lessons, Ellen attains the particular mental and bodily development necessary for her to become a proper, sentimental, middle-class woman who is inserted into a network of power relations-a network in which Ellen attains power over other kinds of women who fail to meet the standards that she does. Historical contextualization also reveals that John's horsemanship accords quite well with nineteenth-century standards and would not have been seen as abusive by his contemporaries. As nearly all arguments about The Wide, Wide World's resistance to domestic ideology have been predicated upon John's propensity for horse-beating, this essay calls for a reexamination of what has become a principal claim of Warner criticism.

Introduction

2020 ◽  
pp. 1-40
Author(s):  
Ushashi Dasgupta
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Middle Class ◽  
Everyday Life ◽  
Charles Dickens ◽  
Property Market ◽  
Spatial Turn ◽  
Domestic Ideology ◽  
Preliminary Discussion ◽  
History Of ◽  
Economic Transaction

The Introduction offers a preliminary discussion of what Charles Dickens calls the ‘lodger world’, and it establishes the book’s main lines of argument. It explains that tenancy, an economic transaction realized in space, was a central aspect of everyday life in the nineteenth century. An overwhelming majority of Victorians did not own their homes outright. Instead, they were tenants: while single families could take entire houses on lease, lodgers lived in rooms overseen by landladies, and these many kinds of rented space captured Dickens’s imagination. The pervasive need to rent in the period encourages a reassessment of middle-class domestic ideology. The Introduction surveys the history of the property market, reviews Dickens’s active participation in rental culture throughout his life, and describes a number of his creative relationships. It considers the ‘spatial turn’ in cultural studies, and ultimately sets up a link between rented space, narrative, and genre in Dickens’s thinking.

scholarly journals Magazine Culture, Girlhood Communities, and Educational Reform in Late Victorian Britain*

2019 ◽  
Vol 134 (570) ◽  
pp. 1169-1195
Author(s):  
Kathryn Gleadle
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Educational Reform ◽  
Significant Role ◽  
Young Women ◽  
Young Females ◽  
Victorian Britain ◽  
Process Understanding ◽  
Educational Career ◽  
New Generation ◽  
The Impact

Abstract This article argues for the importance of restoring girls’ aspirations and self-education to narratives of Victorian educational reform. Studies typically focus upon the efforts of professionals, politicians and campaigners in plotting the pioneering changes to girls’ education in the second half of the nineteenth century. Here it is contended that the success of these developments depended upon a new generation of girls with the confidence and ambition to take advantage of the new opportunities to sit examinations and attend university. To do this, the article excavates the neglected phenomenon of the manuscript magazine. It examines how young females used well-established periodicals to advertise their own amateur magazines. Inviting readers to contribute to their ventures, they constructed independent networks of collaborative cultural endeavour. Manuscript magazines, it will be suggested, need to be understood as part of a ‘magazine culture’ widely embraced by Victorian girls. To tease out the small but subtle ways in which magazine culture could enhance the aspirations of young women, the article focuses upon the extraordinary diary archives of Eva Knatchbull-Hugessen (1861–95). The educational career of Knatchbull-Hugessen, who was an early student at Newnham College in the 1880s, exemplifies the impact which engagement in girlhood culture could engender and the significant role played by magazines, both professional and amateur, in this process. Understanding teenage responses to educational reforms requires a recalibration of our analytical lens to focus not upon grand narratives of feminist awakening but rather upon the small subjective shifts which typically underlay young females’ decisions.

‘Here in India’: Nineteenth-Century British Women Navigating their Position in the Empire through Children's Literature

2018 ◽  
Vol 11 (2) ◽  
pp. 173-185
Author(s):  
Jesse Aberbach
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Middle Class ◽  
Children’S Literature ◽  
Infants And Children ◽  
Children's Books ◽  
Children’S Books ◽  
Maternal Roles ◽  
Female Writers ◽  
And Control ◽  
Botanical Study

This article considers how the children's books written by two nineteenth-century female writers, Eliza Tabor and Mary Martha Sherwood, when they accompanied their husbands to India, enabled them to navigate this new environment and their position as respectable middle-class women while revealing how India was deemed a place where British childhood was impossible. Just as many women took up botanical study to legitimise their ‘otherwise transgressive presence in imperial spaces’ (McEwan 219), writing for children enabled others to engage with the masculine world of travelling and earning money without compromising their femininity. Addressing their work to children also seems to have helped both writers to deal with the absence of their own children: the Indian climate made it impossibly challenging for most British infants and children. In this way their writing gives expression to what might be termed a crisis of imperial motherhood. Underlying the texts is an anxiety relating to British settlement and an attempt to comprehend and control a place that threatened their maternal roles.

Textbook Popery

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Cassandra L. Yacovazzi
Keyword(s):  
Higher Education ◽  
Public School ◽  
Middle Class ◽  
Print Culture ◽  
Young Women ◽  
Female Teachers ◽  
The Common ◽  
The Right ◽  
School Movement

By the 1840s, convent narratives gained more middle-class, respectable readers, moving away from descriptions of sex and sadism and focusing instead on convent schools and the education of young women. Popular works such as Protestant Girl in a French Nunnery described "tricks" used by nuns to convert female pupils and lure them into convents. Such literature warned that as neither wives nor mothers, nuns could not train the right kind of women for America. The focus on convent schools converged with the common or public school movement. At the same time, teaching became an acceptable occupation for women, prompting more women to seek opportunities for higher education. This chapter compares the approach to education among nuns and other female teachers alongside the caricatures of convent schools in anti-Catholic print culture. I seek to answer why convent schools faced such heightened animosity even as teaching became feminized.

scholarly journals Lives Interrupted: Navigating Hardship During COVID-19 Provides Lessons in Solidarity and Visibility for Mobile Young People in South Africa and Uganda

2021 ◽  
pp. 146499342199820
Author(s):  
Thembelihle Zuma ◽  
Rachel King ◽  
Nothando Ngwenya ◽  
Francis Xavier Kasujja ◽  
Natsayi Chimbindi ◽  
...  
Keyword(s):  
South Africa ◽  
Young People ◽  
Social Environment ◽  
Young Women ◽  
Sex Workers ◽  
Virtual World ◽  
Female Sex Workers ◽  
Young Female ◽  
Social Forces ◽  
Need Support

We examine data from young women and men in South Africa and young female sex workers in Uganda to explore the inequalities and hardships experienced during the COVID-19 pandemic and investigate the opportunities and ability presented to navigate in a virtual world to build an inclusive supportive future for young people on the move. We argue that against the backdrop of a fragile past, young people who see their today disturbed, tomorrow reshaped and their futures interrupted, need support to interact with their social environment and adjust their lives and expectations amidst the changing influences of social forces.

Sign in / Sign up

Export Citation Format

Share Document