scholarly journals Mother of Three and Widow of the Nation: The Hungarian Mrs Vachott (1828–96) as Protégé-Editor

2021 ◽  
Vol 6 (1) ◽  
Author(s):  
Zsuzsa Török
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Real Life ◽  
Symbolic Capital ◽  
Personal Loss ◽  
Performed Identities

This article focuses on the editorial undertakings of the Hungarian Mária Csapó (1828–96), better known as Mrs Vachott. Using her personal correspondence, memoirs, and the magazines she edited, the article traces the particularities of Mrs Vachott’s career as an author and periodical editor. It does so by examining her performed identities in real life and as editor of various magazines. Furthermore, it intends to demonstrate that Mrs Vachott’s professional endeavours were defined and shaped by a personal loss that eventually became her strongest symbolic capital in building up a literary career. Finally, the article suggests that Mrs Vachott’s case offers valuable insights into the types of editorial roles that women inhabited during the nineteenth century.

A “Hired Girl” Testifies Against the “Son of a Prominent Family”: Bastardy and Rape on the Nineteenth-Century Nebraska Plains

2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
Donna Rae Devlin
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Great Plains ◽  
Life Experience ◽  
Real Life ◽  
Primary Component ◽  
Space And Place ◽  
Successful Outcome ◽  
Power Dynamics ◽  
Civil Suit ◽  
Sexual Power

Abstract In Red Cloud, Nebraska, in 1887, Anna “Annie” Sadilek (later Pavelka) pressed bastardy charges against the “son of a prominent family,” even though she could have, according to her pre-trial testimony, pressed charges for rape. To the literary world, Sadilek is better known as Ántonia Shimerda, the powerful protagonist in Willa Cather’s 1918 novel, My Ántonia. However, it is Sadilek’s real-life experience that allows us to better understand life on the Nebraska Plains, specifically through an examination of the state’s rape laws and the ways these laws were subsequently interpreted by the courts. The Nebraska Supreme Court, between 1877 and 1886, established the need for the state to prove force as a primary component of the definition for rape, drew boundaries around acceptable reporting times, and solidified their stance on the requirement of corroborating testimony. These factors led Sadilek to charge Charley Kaley not with rape but with bastardy, a civil suit, which almost guaranteed a successful outcome for Sadilek and her child because it would not burden the county or state with their financial welfare. In analyzing Sadilek’s choices before the law, this article demonstrates the complexities of the gendered legal systems facing women like Sadilek who sought justice for crimes of a sexual nature. Additionally significant, this article draws attention to a space and place that lacks significant study in regard to the sexual power dynamics of the nineteenth-century Great Plains West, a multicultural contact zone highly susceptible to the influences of hypermasculine control.

Courtesan

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Felicity Chaplin
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Visual Culture ◽  
Real Life ◽  
Second Empire ◽  
Narrow Sense ◽  
General Sense ◽  
High Class ◽  
Art And Literature ◽  
French Art ◽  
The Way

La Parisienne is frequently associated with prostitution, whether in the narrow sense of the streetwalker or courtesan or the general sense of the object and subject of consumption. Tracing her development in nineteenth-century art and literature, this chapter examines the way the Parisienne as courtesan is re-presented in cinema in Charles Chaplin’s A Woman of Paris (1923), Alain Cavalier’s La Chamade (1968), and Baz Luhrmann’s Moulin Rouge! (2001). Cinematic courtesans have their prefigurations in both real life courtesans of the Second Empire, as well as in representations in French art, literature, and visual culture (Manet, Degas, Toulouse-Lautrec, Balzac, Zola, Dumas fils). Motifs associated with the Parisienne courtesan include the familiar tropes associated with Paris as a demimonde: desire, pleasure, and consumption. Alongside these tropes are the visual and narrative motifs on which the iconography of the Parisienne courtesan is based: fashion or style (often conceived to denote luxury and leisure), transformation (usually from provincial to high class), ambiguity (insofar as her class origins, motivations, and emotional allegiances are generally obscure), and the ménage à trois (films featuring Parisienne courtesans often involve the choice between an earnest but poor lover and a rich benefactor).

School Ties

2018 ◽  
pp. 1-22
Author(s):  
George Shuffelton
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Real Life ◽  
Social Identities ◽  
Early Nineteenth Century ◽  
Alumni Associations ◽  
Medieval Universities

In the early nineteenth century, as alumni associations quickly became commonplace, Oxford and Cambridge colleges established their own alumni magazines and societies. This raises questions such as: what kinds of friendships were created at medieval universities? How commonly did university men retain lasting connections with those they had met years ago as scolares? The answers to these questions tell us something about the medieval universities as institutions capable of forging new social identities for their members. This chapter reviews the available evidence for friendships among old members of medieval Oxford and Cambridge. Nearly all of the evidence discussed comes from previously published sources, including institutional records and official correspondence, letters from formularies and at least one real-life example of how such formulas might be employed, the theories of friendship taught in the classroom and those theories as embodied in popular handbooks for students, and the evidence of wills.

Samson and the Making of American Martyrs

Black Samson ◽  
2020 ◽  
pp. 35-48
Author(s):  
Nyasha Junior ◽  
Jeremy Schipper
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Civil War ◽  
African Americans ◽  
Real Life ◽  
Racial Oppression ◽  
Political Compromise ◽  
Social Advancement ◽  
John Brown

By the 1850s, some abolitionists had begun to use the term “Samson” to refer to those involved in insurrections by enslaved persons. By the dawn of the Civil War, they extended that term to describe real-life persons who fought to end slavery. In the last half of the nineteenth century, poets, clergy, scholars, and other intellectuals began to identify biblical Samson with historical individuals who challenged racial oppression in America. The biblical hero had already become a potent symbol of African Americans’ collective strength in the fight against slavery and other barriers to social advancement. Eventually, he became associated with those who took up this struggle through passionate rhetoric, violence, and, at times, political compromise. In the process, persons like John Brown, Fredrick Douglass, Gabriel Prosser, Nat Turner, and Booker T. Washington became memorialized as larger-than-life Samson figures.

Schubert’s “Ständchen” in the Voice of the Cinematic Amateur

2019 ◽  
Vol 42 (3) ◽  
pp. 157-183
Author(s):  
Jennifer Ronyak
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Cultural History ◽  
Real Life ◽  
Documentary Evidence ◽  
Continuity And Change ◽  
Literary Sources ◽  
Musical Practices ◽  
The Relationship ◽  
The Voice

Scholars who have analyzed performances of Schubert’s Lieder have generally focused on the voices of masterful professionals, whether looking at performances before or during the age of sound recordings. This tendency overlooks one historically important group of performers: the amateurs who made up the broad marketplace for the genre during Schubert’s lifetime and throughout the nineteenth century. Studying this group of performers with any level of aesthetic particularity is, however, difficult: documentary evidence of particular singers in this group in the nineteenth century and even the early twentieth is scarce. Yet as the real-life practice of the amateur singing of Schubert’s Lieder in the home gradually dwindled after the nineteenth century, fictional representations of this nineteenth-century practice began to appear in period sound films across the twentieth. While not a substitute for documentary evidence of real practices, this film phenomenon meaningfully engages with nineteenth-century cultural history, literary sources, and musical practices through presentist conventions and concerns. Such films thus offer a vehicle through which to think about continuity and change in the relationship between Schubert’s song and the figure of the amateur in the nineteenth century, the twentieth century, and today. This article analyzes three period film scenes involving nineteenth-century “amateur” performances of Schubert’s “Ständchen” (Schwanengesang, D. 957, no. 4). It does so in order to think about the combined aesthetic and social ramifications of the figure of the amateur in relationship to Schubert’s Lieder. I look at scenes in the following three films: the operetta-influenced Schubert picture Leise flehen meine Lieder (1933), in which operetta star Mártha Eggerth sings as the Countess Esterházy, the classic novel adaptation Jane Eyre (1934), in which Virginia Bruce sings as the titular character, and a newly written piece of “governess fiction,” The Governess (1998), in which Minnie Driver performs the song as said governess. None of these scenes offers unmed­iated or simple access to amateurism. Instead, in each scene, a professional, twentieth-­century celebrity woman movie star both sings and otherwise portrays the nineteenth-century amateur musician and character onscreen. Keeping this tension in mind, I explore how this contradiction and other elements in each scene would have and can still provide audiences opportunities to think about the relationship between amateurism and Schubert’s most popular songs. In so doing, I explore the term “amateur” in a number of overlapping senses that embrace positive and, to a lesser extent, pejorative meanings. My analysis ultimately shows how these three diverse film stagings valorize the figure and, indeed, the voice of the amateur in relationship to Schubert’s music. These conclusions have implications regarding Schubert’s songs and successful modes of performance that might attend them.

From Blackface to ‘Genuine Negroes’: Nineteenth-Century Minstrelsy and the Icon of the ‘Negro’

1996 ◽  
Vol 21 (1) ◽  
pp. 17-23 ◽  
Author(s):  
Lisa M. Anderson
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Real Life ◽  
The United States ◽  
Different Types ◽  
The Face ◽  
And Performance ◽  
Minstrel Shows ◽  
Over Time ◽  
The Way

In 1855, the first ‘coloured’ minstrel troupe, the Mocking Bird Minstrels, appeared on a Philadelphia stage. While this company did not stay together long, it heralded a change in the ‘face’ of minstrelsy in the United States. Many other black minstrel troupes would quickly follow, drawing attention away from the white minstrels who had until then dominated the scene. However, the white minstrel show had already iconized a particular representation of the ‘Negro’, which ultimately paved the way for black anti-minstrel attitudes at the end of the nineteenth century. The minstrel show existed in two guises: the white-in-blackface, and the black-in-blackface. The form and content of the minstrel shows changed over time, as well as audience perception of the two different types of performance. The black minstrel show has come to be regarded as a ‘reclaiming’ of slave dance and performance. It differs from white minstrelsy in that it gave theatrical form to ‘signifyin” on white minstrelsy in the manner in which slaves practised ‘signifyin” on whites in real life.

British Bravery, or Tars Triumphant: Images of the British Navy in Nautical Melodrama

1988 ◽  
Vol 4 (14) ◽  
pp. 122-143 ◽  
Author(s):  
Jim Davis
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
New South ◽  
Real Life ◽  
Theatre History ◽  
Popular Theatre ◽  
South Wales ◽  
Theatre Studies ◽  
The University ◽  
Relationship Of ◽  
The Relationship

In recent years, melodrama has increasingly been recognized not only as an important element in popular theatre studies, but for the intrinsic importance of the form itself. Less considered has been the relationship of the material of melodrama to the ‘real life’ it reflected in a highly conventionalized yet ultimately (for its audiences), recognizable fashion. Here, Jim Davis looks at one major category, nautical melodrama, setting the images of the navy and of sailors that it created alongside factual and critical accounts of life at sea in the first half of the nineteenth century. He conveys both the pressures that existed for redress of abuses, and the consequent balance between coercion and subversion in the melodramas themselves – drawing in particular on the memoirs of Douglas Jerrold to explore aspects of the ambiguity to be found in contemporary attitudes. Jim Davis, who is the author of several books and articles in the area of nineteenth century theatre history, is presently teaching in the School of Theatre Studies at the University of New South Wales.

Poe

2018 ◽  
pp. 49-69
Author(s):  
Lesley Ginsberg
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Lyric Poetry ◽  
Letter Writing ◽  
Antebellum America ◽  
Nineteenth Century United States ◽  
Public Cultures ◽  
And Shifts ◽  
Performed Identities ◽  
The Relationship

This chapter approaches Poe’s life through his letters with reference to historical contexts that shaped letter writing in antebellum America, Poe’s interests in handwriting and “Autography,” the relationship between letter writing and antebellum authorship and celebrity, and shifts in Poe’s voice across multiple letters and recipients. In his letters, Poe performed identities ranging from the wronged son, the victim, the lover, and the literary genius. Poe’s epistolary “rhetoric of dread” may be linked to his lyric poetry. As scholars of letter writing in the nineteenth-century United States attest, letters were not “private documents.” Rather, they were “self-conscious” artifacts “circulating between friends and strangers.” Poe’s letters were written when the distinctions between privately circulated manuscripts and public cultures of print were destabilized. His letters to women are studied in this chapter as is the issue of poverty haunting his letters. Finally, Poe’s letters also document his desire for editorship of a magazine and his participation in the business of publishing in antebellum America.

‘Pictures of Domestic Life in Country Villages’

2014 ◽  
Author(s):  
Jan Fergus
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Literary History ◽  
Jane Austen ◽  
Real Life ◽  
Domestic Life ◽  
Realist Novel ◽  
The Real ◽  
Indirect Speech ◽  
Third Person ◽  
Narrative Techniques

Though less popular and esteemed in her own time than better known novelists like Maria Edgeworth and Walter Scott, Jane Austen now occupies an exalted place in literary history, in part for inventing nineteenth-century British ‘realist’ fiction. Such fictions seem to represent ‘real life’; she found narrative techniques to give the effect of the real. One of the most important of these techniques has been called ‘free indirect speech’: loosely, a narrator’s third-person, supposedly detached voice ventriloquizes the language and thus the perspective of one of the characters. Austen’s experiments with this device, particularly in Emma, have a history; she had foremothers. Analysis of examples from Austen’s and Edgeworth’s works demonstrate that the use of free indirect speech came to Austen in part through Edgeworth’s experiments in Tales of Fashionable Life. Elaborated and extended by Austen in her novels, the device constitutes Austen’s lasting formal contribution to the realist novel.

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