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.

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.

Modern Dating and Respectability on Trial

2019 ◽  
pp. 146-170
Author(s):  
Tyler Carrington
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Middle Class ◽  
Large Scale ◽  
German Society ◽  
Middle Class Woman ◽  
The Face ◽  
Class Woman ◽  
Legal Strategy ◽  
The Way

Chapter 5 follows the sensational trial of Frieda Kliem’s murderer and the strategy of the defense, which was not so much a legal strategy as a way of turning the trial into a question of Frieda’s respectability as a middle-class woman. It interprets this trial—and the life of Frieda Kliem, more generally—as a microcosm of the large-scale confrontation between nineteenth-century society and the emerging twentieth-century world. It contends that identity, presented either authentically or as an illusion, became supremely relevant in the metropolis, where the ubiquity of strangers, new faces, and mysterious crimes shaped the way city people narrated the search for love and intimacy. And because enterprising outsiders like Frieda Kliem so flouted the established patterns of middle-class respectability, they remained on the outside looking in as German society clung to the nineteenth-century world that was crumbling in the face of a bewilderingly new twentieth-century one.

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.

Gender, Medicine, and Consumer Culture in Victorian England: Creating the Kleptomaniac

1999 ◽  
Vol 31 (3) ◽  
pp. 413-437 ◽  
Author(s):  
Tammy Whitlock
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Middle Class ◽  
Gender Ideology ◽  
Medical Science ◽  
Victorian England ◽  
Ample Evidence ◽  
Retail Crime ◽  
Middle Class Woman ◽  
The Subject ◽  
Class Woman

In his Crime and Society in England 1750-1900 Clive Emsley notes that “for England the subject of the middle-class woman ‘kleptomaniac,’ as opposed to the working-class woman ‘thief,’ awaits an historian,” and casts doubt on the significance of the respectable shoplifter in England. However, not only is there ample evidence that middle-class shoplifting was a rising concern in Victorian England, it is a key example of the way in which gender ideology and medical science were constructed to solve a commercial and legal problem. Early in the nineteenth century, a respectable woman accused of shoplifting only had the option of denying her crime and blaming the shopkeeper; however, as the number of middle-class women committing retail crimes such as shoplifting and fraud increased, the issue of representation in the nineteenth century became more complicated. Woman’s role as aggressive consumer and her role in retail crime clashed with her home-centered image. In trials, canting ballads, and scathing articles, critics presented an image of the retail female criminal as greedy, fraudulent, and middle-class. Women fought against this image by denying their crimes or by participating in the creation of the developing representation of criminal women as ill rather than greedy.

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.

‘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.

North and South

2008 ◽  
Author(s):  
Elizabeth Gaskell ◽  
Sally Shuttleworth
Keyword(s):  
Middle Class ◽  
Difficult Problem ◽  
The Novel ◽  
Social Authority ◽  
Industrial Town ◽  
Middle Class Woman ◽  
Class Woman ◽  
And Gender ◽  
North And South ◽  
Obedience To Authority

`She tried to settle that most difficult problem for women, how much was to be utterly merged in obedience to authority, and how much might be set apart for freedom in working.’ North and South is a novel about rebellion. Moving from the industrial riots of discontented millworkers through to the unsought passions of a middle-class woman, and from religious crises of conscience to the ethics of naval mutiny, it poses fundamental questions about the nature of social authority and obedience. Through the story of Margaret Hale, the middle-class southerner who moves to the northern industrial town of Milton, Gaskell skilfully explores issues of class and gender in the conflict between Margaret’s ready sympathy with the workers and her growing attraction to the charismatic mill ownder, John Thornton. This new revised and expanded edition sets the novel in the context of Victorian social and medical debate.

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