scholarly journals Portrait of Women in Victorian Novels

2020 ◽  
Vol 2 (4) ◽  
pp. 167-176
Author(s):  
Shaghayegh Moghari
Keyword(s):  
Female Characters ◽  
Victorian Novels ◽  
Fallen Woman ◽  
Bleak House ◽  
Male Dominated ◽  
Lady Audley's Secret

This article examines the representation of three female characters in three Victorian novels. These three novels are Bleak house, Ruth, and Lady Audley’s Secret. This work is, in fact, a study of how women were viewed in Victorian novels which actually depicted the Victorian society. The society of that time was male-dominated that tried to rule over women unfairly and made them as submissive as possible in order to handle them easily according to their selfish tastes. If women in Victorian society followed the expectations of men thoroughly, they were called angel-in-the-house; if not, they were labeled with negative labels like fallen-woman or mad-woman. This article tries to go through the characters of Esther Summerson, Ruth, and Lady Audley who appeared in the three aforementioned novels respectively in order to prove that the Victorian Society, which was represented in the novels of that period, was a harshly male-dominated society that ruled over women with bitter patriarchy.

scholarly journals Adaptive Transformations: Nineteenth-Century Stage Adaptations of Nineteenth-Century Novels

2020 ◽  
Author(s):  
◽  
Amy E Holley-Cribbin
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Jane Eyre ◽  
Female Agency ◽  
Victorian Novels ◽  
Original Source ◽  
Fallen Woman ◽  
Academic Level ◽  
Stage Adaptations ◽  
Lady Audley's Secret ◽  
Criminal Culpability

This study analyses nineteenth-century stage adaptations of Victorian novels. It argues that doing so, provides an important insight into the way that nineteenth-century society engaged with and responded to proto-feminism. A selection of nineteenth-century stage adaptations of three novels, which were both popular at the time and have subsequently become canonical, are analysed. The thesis focuses on how dramatists responded to the germinal proto-feminist elements in the novel when they transferred the plot of the original source to the stage. In Chapter One, the issue of female agency is looked at in the nineteenth century stage adaptations of Jane Eyre. Chapter Two focuses on the figure of the ‘fallen woman’ in the shape of Isabel Vane, Mrs Henry Wood’s central figure in East Lynne. Finally, in Chapter Three the complex issue of madness, criminal culpability and femininity is examined in the stage adaptations of Mary Braddon’s Lady Audley’s Secret. Despite the attention devoted to the novels by feminist critics, the study of these popular adaptations has received comparatively little attention. One of the plays examined in this thesis has never been examined at an academic level before (The Mystery of Audley Court by John Brougham 1866). Building on the pioneering work of Patsy Stoneman, this thesis contributes to the growing interest in popular plays. The argument of this thesis is that by studying popular adaptations it is possible from both a New Historicist and a proto-feminist perspective to identify how nineteenth-century society engaged with and responded to proto-feminism. The key findings of this thesis are to do with the amount of license that the dramatists gave themselves as they went about adapting the original source to the stage, for example, the characteristics of the main characters are altered, characters are omitted and new characters are created and inserted into the plot, themes are removed or highlighted and it is the argument of this thesis that those changes were made due to contemporaneous events.

Virtual Minds, Victorian Novels, and the Question of Modeling

2020 ◽  
Vol 48 (2) ◽  
pp. 471-483
Author(s):  
Elisha Cohn
Keyword(s):  
Object Oriented ◽  
Mental Images ◽  
Legal Process ◽  
Victorian Novels ◽  
Bleak House ◽  
Red Tape

Snagsby's paper shop in Bleak House (1853) deals in “all sorts of blank forms of legal process; in skins and rolls of parchment; in paper—foolscap, brief, draft, brown, white, whitey-brown, and blotting; in stamps; in office-quills, pens, India-rubber, pounce, pins, pencils, sealing-wax, and wafers; in red tape, and green ferret; in pocket-books, almanacks, diaries, and law lists; in string boxes, rulers, inkstands—glass and leaden, penknives, scissors, bodkins, and other small office cutlery; in short, in articles too numerous to mention.” While one might imagine this stifling bookish environment as especially inviting for an object-oriented reading, this passage has recently attracted what I might call a newly inflected kind of subject-oriented reading. This description from Bleak House makes an appearance in two recent critical monographs concerned with how the reader's cognitive capabilities meet words on the page to transform them into a felt reality. How does a passage like this act on our minds, creating mental images or offering a sense of embeddedness in an unreal “reality”? How does fiction become phenomenological?

scholarly journals THE REPRESENTATION OF SISTERHOOD IN SUSAN GLASPELL'S TRIFLE: PROXEMIC AND KINESIC ANALYSES

2021 ◽  
Vol 10 (2) ◽  
pp. 103
Author(s):  
Ni Komang Arie Suwastini ◽  
Alexei Wahyudiputra
Keyword(s):  
Female Characters ◽  
Patriarchal Society ◽  
Feminist Ideology ◽  
Male Dominated

Abstract: Susan Glaspell’s plays have been recognized for its feminist ideologies. The present study traces the representations of the notion of sisterhood in Glaspell’s scrip entitled Trifles by employing Barthes’ semiotics and Fischer-Lichte’s concept of kinesics. Focusing on the gestural and the proxemic signs of the kinesics included in the script, the present study reveals that the notion of sisterhood grows among the female characters in the play through the increasing realization of their similar positions as women in patriarchal society. This development of solidarity among the female characters implies a strong feminist ideology about how women should stand together in facing oppression in male-dominated structures.

scholarly journals Evaluative Adjectives in the Portrayal of Victorian Women

Linguaculture ◽  
2018 ◽  
Vol 9 (1) ◽  
pp. 85-97
Author(s):  
Lyudmyla Gryzhak
Keyword(s):  
Negative Attitude ◽  
Female Characters ◽  
Wuthering Heights ◽  
Vanity Fair ◽  
Bleak House ◽  
Victorian Women ◽  
Time Period ◽  
Personal Qualities ◽  
The 19Th Century

The focus of this paper is the analysis of evaluative adjectives used in the description of physical appearance, clothing, personal qualities, intelligence and manners of female characters in the English prose fiction of the 19th century. Four novels written by the Victorian writers, approximately in the same time period, served as the source material for the research, namely E. Bronte’s “Wuthering Heights” (1847), W. M. Thackeray’s “Vanity Fair” (1847), E. Gaskell’s “Cranford” (1851), and C. Dicken’s “Bleak House” (1852). Evaluative adjectives are regarded in this paper as the ones that carry in their use an implication of a positive or negative attitude or evaluation on the part of the writer (beautiful, awful, etc.). They give an emotive or subjective characterization of the qualities of the referent, revealing the writer’s or speaker’s peculiar attitude towards the object described. The present paper has two aims. The first is to study what evaluative adjectives were mostly employed by the authors in the portrayals of women in each of the mentioned novels and whether the authors prefer positive or negative characterisation of female characters. The second one is to examine if there are any gender specific peculiarities in the use of evaluative adjectives in the portrayal of women in the novels.

scholarly journals Ecofeminism in Doris Lessing’s Mara and Dann: An Adventure

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
AWEJ-tls for Translation & Literary Studies ◽  
Najla R. Aldeeb
Keyword(s):  
Global Warming ◽  
The Novel ◽  
Female Characters ◽  
The Core ◽  
The Future ◽  
Male Dominated ◽  
Liberal Culture

Doris Lessing's Mara and Dann: An Adventure (1999) is a fantasy novel with focus on nature. Lessing portrays a world in which oppression by a male-dominated society is at the root of countless problems. It depicts the effects of global warming in the future emphasizing that the domination of women is the core of all crises in the environment. The novel implies that women are able to lead as most of the female characters in the novel play the role of the leader starting from Daima, the woman who protects Mara and Dann as children, to Orphne the woman who heals Dann from addiction. Applying Greta Claire Gaard’s (1993) principles of ecofeminism to literature classifies and justifies the cause of the movement (p. 20). This paper sheds light on Gaard’s four types of ecofeminism in Lessing’s Rama and Dann: An Adventure: liberal, culture, social and socialist by discussing the apocalypses, patriarchal legacy, pathetic fallacy and radical orthodoxies as features of ecofeminism.

“I just want to feel something different”

2018 ◽  
Vol 4 (3) ◽  
pp. 157-178 ◽  
Author(s):  
Anna F. Peppard
Keyword(s):  
Gender Stereotypes ◽  
White Male ◽  
Female Characters ◽  
Progressive Politics ◽  
Male Characters ◽  
Private Investigator ◽  
Male Dominated ◽  
Narrative Conventions ◽  
At Home

The last several decades have witnessed the publication of many revisionist and self-critical superhero comics, yet the most critically discussed of these focus on the straight white male characters who have always dominated the genre. In contrast, the ongoing series Alias (2001–4) stars Jessica Jones, a superhero turned private investigator who is empowered by a radioactive accident yet disempowered by her gender within a male-dominated superhero community that both excludes women and actively abuses them. This article argues that Alias redresses the superhero genre's marginalization and victimization of female characters by emphasizing Jessica's complex subjectivity and implicating male superheroes in her multifaceted abuse. It also considers Jessica's translation into more traditional comics series, wherein she becomes sidelined as a wife and stay-at-home mother; these series prove the difficulty of maintaining progressive politics within genres where the visual and narrative conventions are so steeped in gender stereotypes.

scholarly journals Aquatic Matter: Water in Victorian Fiction

2019 ◽  
Vol 3 (1) ◽  
pp. 245-255
Author(s):  
Ursula Kluwick
Keyword(s):  
Literary Criticism ◽  
Jane Eyre ◽  
Victorian Novels ◽  
Bearing Witness ◽  
Wuthering Heights ◽  
Victorian Fiction ◽  
Representations Of Nature ◽  
Lady Audley's Secret

Abstract This essay looks at water in Victorian fiction and argues that it is important not just as motif or symbol—which is how literary criticism has traditionally approached it—but as a metamorphic substance. I propose a material ecocritical framework in order to conceptualise water as literary matter, and I analyse selected passages from four canonical Victorian novels through a focus on aquatic materialisation and transformation. I argue that through the emphasis on these processes in a variety of water scenes from Jane Eyre, Wuthering Heights, Lady Audley’s Secret, and Dracula, water emerges as not inert but agential. Through a material ecocritical approach which rejects intentionality as a precondition of agency, representations of nature as animate can be reconceived as not necessarily anthropomorphic or as instances of the pathetic fallacy, but as bearing witness to how agency is shared by humans and their environment.

scholarly journals A Reading of Shakespeare’s Three Female Characters – Hermione, Portia and Calpurnia

2020 ◽  
Vol 8 (3) ◽  
pp. 7
Author(s):  
Silvia P Deenadhayalan
Keyword(s):  
Women Characters ◽  
Human Beings ◽  
Female Characters ◽  
Patriarchal Society ◽  
Male Dominated

(A statement) is sexist if it contributes to, encourages or causes or results in the oppression of women. (Mills 83). For many years, humanity has been ruled by a patriarchal society. In the male dominated society, women have been viewed as objects, marginals, subalterns or inferior human beings. Shakespeare’s tragedies are monolithic and the heroes occupy the centre and the women characters get a subordinated treatment. The heroes are given a free ‘voice’ but the women are simply their ‘echo’.

scholarly journals Victim-Warriors and Restorers—Heroines in the Post-Apocalyptic World of Mad Max: Fury Road

Text Matters ◽  
2021 ◽  
pp. 106-118
Author(s):  
Anna Reglińska-Jemioł
Keyword(s):  
Cultural Context ◽  
Female Characters ◽  
Gender Discourse ◽  
Action Films ◽  
Feminist Film ◽  
Male Dominated ◽  
Previous Series ◽  
Female Solidarity

The article discusses the evolving image of female characters in the Mad Max saga directed by George Miller, focusing on Furiosa’s rebellion in the last film—Mad Max: Fury Road. Interestingly, studying Miller’s post-apocalyptic action films, we can observe the evolution of this post-apocalyptic vision from the male-dominated world with civilization collapsing into chaotic violence visualized in the previous series to a more hopeful future created by women in the last part of the saga: Mad Max: Fury Road (2015). We observe female heroes: the vengeful Furiosa, the protector of oppressed girls and sex slaves, the women of the separatist clan, and the wives of the warlord, who bring down the tyranny and create a new “green place.” It is worth emphasizing that the plot casts female solidarity in the central heroic role. In fact, the Mad Max saga emerges as a piece of socially engaged cinema preoccupied with the cultural context of gender discourse. Noticeably, media commentators, scholars and activists have suggested that Fury Road is a feminist film.

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