Beyond the Bower

2020 ◽  
pp. 41-60
Author(s):  
Heather Braun
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Women Writers ◽  
Natural World ◽  
Female Characters ◽  
Artistic Production ◽  
Interior Spaces ◽  
Romantic Era ◽  
Definition Of ◽  
Poetic Creation ◽  
Female Poets

Romantic male poets typically describe bowers as lush, ecological spaces for quiet introspection and poetic creation within a distinctly masculinize landscape. In contrast to these idyllic spaces in Nature, the word bower meant something quite different for many nineteenth-century British women writers. For Romantic female poets, these garden bowers were isolated and fragmented spaces where artistic production was inhibited rather than nurtured. Their poems imagine a very different kind of bower, one that is aligned most directly with a second definition of the term: namely, a lady’s apartment in which “embowered” characters are trapped in interior spaces. These barren, claustrophobic bowers offered the antithesis of the freedom and inspiration male poets of the Romantic-era associated with outdoor garden bowers. Poet, essayist, and activist Caroline Norton demonstrates how these artificial domestic prisons produced paralysis and self-division rather than comfort and poetic inspiration. Cut off from the ecological spaces available to their male contemporaries, Norton’s female characters are silenced, distracted, and confined unable to leave their stifling bowers to create space for themselves in the natural world. Many nineteenth-century women writers reconfigured the Romantic garden bower as an unnatural lady’s bower from which female artists must flee in order to create.

scholarly journals DEPICTION OF WOMEN IN NINETEENTH CENTURY AMERICAN AND BRITISH FICTION

2021 ◽  
pp. 686-691
Author(s):  
Naresh M. Solanki
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Women Writers ◽  
Detective Fiction ◽  
Louisa May Alcott ◽  
British Society ◽  
Women Readers ◽  
Female Characters ◽  
Nineteenth Century America ◽  
British Fiction ◽  
Changing Times

It was time of nineteenth century when women writers used to have male pennames for publication. Theme of marriage and society were prevalent in both American and British society. It was a microcosm of its own as women readers used to write about their life through the eyes of women writers. This phenomenon is historical as it stands between Mary Wollstonecraft, arguably the first feminist thinker and Virginia Woolf, arguably the most famous one. Changing times in the second half of nineteenth century was affecting the sensibility and religious clutches on society. It was also affecting notions of patriarchy. Writings of the time ought to reflect that. However, author also presumes a gender of her or his own before writing. That makes her or his gendering of character political and biased. But honest portrayals are important for examining depictions of women in a particular time. This paper aims to analyse two popular writers of the age, a female and a male, to understand the changing notions regarding patriarchy. American novelist Louisa May Alcott (1832-1888) have been written important social novels like novel Little Women (1868) and its sequels Little Men (1871) and Jo's Boys (1886). Her novels features cast of female characters from the contemporary times. Arthur Conan Doyle, creator of Sherlock Holmes, was a British writer writing detective fiction who used to portray his contemporary society. He also uses female characters in her stories. This paper aims to study works of both novelist employing methodologies of close reading and comparative literature to see how depiction of women in nineteenth century America and British fiction changes and what are the reasons for it.

The Late-Victorian ‘New Man’ and the Neo-Victorian ‘Neo-Man’

2015 ◽  
Vol 5 (2) ◽  
pp. 105-121
Author(s):  
Margaret D. Stetz
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Literary History ◽  
Historical Fiction ◽  
Gender Relations ◽  
Victorian Fiction ◽  
New Man ◽  
Victorian Period ◽  
The New Woman ◽  
Definition Of ◽  
Victorian Age

The New Man was a crucial topic of discussion and a continual preoccupation in late-Victorian feminist writing, precisely because he was more often a wished-for presence than an actual one. Nevertheless, creators of neo-Victorian fiction and film repeatedly project him backwards onto the screen of literary history, representing him as having in fact existed in the Victorian age as a complement to the New Woman. What is at stake in retrospectively situating the New Man – or, as I will call him, the ‘Neo-Man’ – in the nineteenth century, through historical fiction? If one impulse behind fictional returns to the Victorian period is nostalgia, then what explains this nostalgia for The Man Who Never Was? This essay will suggest that neo-Victorian works have a didactic interest in transforming present-day readers, especially men, through depictions of the Neo-Man, which broaden the audience's feminist sympathies, queer its notions of gender relations, and alter its definition of masculinity.

Kreation und Zeit

2006 ◽  
Vol 51 (1) ◽  
pp. 118-133
Author(s):  
Renate Schlesier
Keyword(s):  
Central Position ◽  
Intellectual Work ◽  
Eine Analyse ◽  
Artistic Production ◽  
Poetic Creation

Das Inspirationskonzept ist für Prousts selbstreflexive Bestimmung künstlerischer Produktion von zentraler Bedeutung (dies läßt sich durch eine Analyse von Textstellen sowohl aus dem letzten Teil von Prousts Recherche als auch aus dem Kontext von Jean Santeuil und Contre Sainte-Beuve zeigen). Prousts spezifische Bestimmung der Inspiration als etwas, das auf intellektuelle Arbeit nicht verzichten kann, unterminiert jedoch antiintellektualistische platonische Dichtungslehren. Dies impliziert zudem, daß Proust die Kluft zwischen Künstlern und Nicht-Künstlern für unüberbrückbar erklärt. Inspiration ist für Proust etwas Verzauberndes, weil sie wiedergefundene Zeit ist, die jedoch erst im poetischen Kreationsprozeß Gestalt gewinnt. The concept of inspiration occupies a central position in the realm of Proust’s self-reflexive evaluation of artistic production (as can be demonstrated by an analysis of passages bothfrom the last part of Proust’s ›Recherche‹ and from the context of ›Jean Santeuil‹ and ›Contre SainteBeuve‹). Yet by evaluating inspiration as something that could not do without intellectual work, Proust undermines anti-intellectualistic platonizing poetics. In addition, this implies that Proust declares the gap between artists and non-artists as unbridgeable. For Proust, inspiration is enchanting because it is time regained, but takes shape only in the process of poetic creation.

DELIGHTFUL COXCOMBS TO INDUSTRIOUS MEN: FASHIONABLE POLITICS IN CECIL AND PENDENNIS

2002 ◽  
Vol 30 (1) ◽  
pp. 289-304 ◽  
Author(s):  
Claire Nicolay
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
Middle Class ◽  
Upward Mobility ◽  
Late Nineteenth Century ◽  
Class A ◽  
Late Nineteenth ◽  
Definition Of ◽  
A Site ◽  
Trade Office

THOMAS CARLYLE’S CONTEMPTUOUS DESCRIPTION of the dandy as “a Clothes-wearing Man, a Man whose trade, office, and existence consists in the wearing of Clothes” (313) has survived as the best-known definition of dandyism, which is generally equated with the foppery of eighteenth-century beaux and late nineteenth-century aesthetes. Actually, however, George Brummell (1778–1840), the primary architect of dandyism, developed not only a style of dress, but also a mode of behavior and style of wit that opposed ostentation. Brummell insisted that he was completely self-made, and his audacious self-transformation served as an example for both parvenus and dissatisfied nobles: the bourgeois might achieve upward mobility by distinguishing himself from his peers, and the noble could bolster his faltering status while retaining illusions of exclusivity. Aristocrats like Byron, Bulwer, and Wellington might effortlessly cultivate themselves and indulge their taste for luxury, while at the same time ambitious social climbers like Brummell, Disraeli, and Dickens might employ the codes of dandyism in order to establish places for themselves in the urban world. Thus, dandyism served as a nexus for the declining aristocratic elite and the rising middle class, a site where each was transformed by the dialectic interplay of aristocratic and individualistic ideals.

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