The Short Story Series of Annie S. Swan for The Woman at Home

This chapter investigates the ten short story series about working women which the Scottish popular novelist, Annie S. Swan published in the women’s magazine, The Woman at Home, between 1893 and 1918. The format of the short story series, pioneered by Conan Doyle in The Strand, lent itself particularly well to periodical publication given its patterning of periodicity and repetition with variation. The chapter shows how Swan drew on these features to depict the experiences of professional and working women while deferring the closure of the marriage plot. Although the individual stories are often moralizing, predictable and conservative in their foregrounding of women as wives and mothers, the series in their entirety emphasise the expertise and professionalism of their female protagonists. In seeking to marry an advocacy for women’s work with a more traditional domestic ideology, Swan’s story series participate in The Woman at Home’s middlebrow negotiation of the new gender roles and feminine ideals that were being debated at the time.

Charles Dickens and the Properties of Fiction

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.

Introduction

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.

Grace Aguilar’s double-vision to a feminized religiosity through the Torah’s laws on inheritance and vows

Grace Aguilar’s interpretation of the Torah’s laws on female inheritance and a daughter’s vows in her 19th-century biography of biblical women The Women of Israel sits between a proselytizing Anglo-Protestant rhetoric and an androcentric Judaism. This article traces the contours of her feminized, contemplative brand of Judaism through her reading of these laws. The article finds her arguments against the main currents of Judaism of the period to be of a social-religious strain familiar to, yet contending with, the ‘tolerant’ Christianity of Victoria’s England. In staking her space between traditions, Aguilar adopts (and adapts) the terminology of Christian parlance and the Christianized domestic ideology the terms facilitate. The result is a subversive, if ambivalent, work of biblical interpretation that seconds a hegemonic cultural vision for domestic accord in substituting Judaism for its religious heart. Aguilar’s recovered ‘authentic’ Judaism, then, emerges as Christianity’s worthy twin that stands its ground against misogyny.

Towards a cultural biography of Roman painting

Using a term drawn from economic anthropology1 and pushing the boundaries of this type of analysis, I would like to describe an attempt to trace in time and space the roots of the technical, stylistic and iconographic know-how that gave form to Roman painting. Considering the fragmentary nature of the evidence at our disposal, the argumentation set forth here cannot follow a linear path containing various steps that can all be neatly demonstrated. I believe that the time is right, however, to tackle Roman painting — and particularly painting in the domestic setting — with more conviction. Although understanding the rôle and nature of the patrons and painters remains an objective that is still far off, it is probably worth investigating the traditions that enjoyed some level of continuity in Roman painting and the concrete ways and contexts in which the process unfolded. The aim is to achieve a deeper understanding of the rôle that this artistic technique played in a society that made ample use of it during a fundamental phase of its history. In the 1st c. B.C. and 1st c. A.D., in the brief period that saw the transition from Republic to Empire, the domestic ideology of Roman society found expression in a decorative system marked by a continuous stream of innovations with respect to themes, schemes and ornament that were adopted consistently by a broad spectrum of patrons. Indeed, beyond simply protecting and covering the walls of dwellings, figurative painting — especially of such a complex nature as we are dealing with here — added a wide range of elements which I believe it is useful to investigate.

“A Girdle of Thought Thrown around the World”

This article outlines impulses toward internationalism in women's programming during the twentieth century at two public service broadcasters: the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation (CBC) in Canada and the Australian Broadcasting Commission (ABC) in Australia. These case studies show common patterns as well as key differences in the establishment of an international frame for the modern domestic sphere. Research conducted in paper and audio recording archives relating to nonfiction programming for women demonstrates pervasive tensions between women's international versus national solidarities. The article argues that these contradictions must be highlighted—rather than papered over in a simplistic understanding of such programming as reflecting a binary domestic ideology of private versus public, home versus world—to fully understand media history and cultural memory from a gendered perspective.

The Trouble with Angels

Dickens’s celebration of other-worldly or childlike femininity, with its corollary anathema of ‘fallen’ women, has often seemed the quintessence of a fabled Victorian repression, which obscures or radically simplifies the unsettling energies of erotic life. Yet Dickens’s fiction acknowledges the power of those energies in its incessant preoccupation with the management of sexual desire. Gender norms in Dickens’s world are largely articulated through the management of desire, which also underwrites moral hierarchies that are frequently aligned with hierarchies of social class. But there is a powerful, gendered asymmetry in Dickens’s representation of sexual discipline. Inverting long-standing gender norms, the idealized woman of Victorian domestic ideology is a figure of selfless, nurturing sympathy, whose instinctive modesty and restraint are a foil to more aggressive, self-interested masculine desire, which must be controlled by strength of will. Thus while representations of femininity in Dickens tend to be shaped by stark sexual dichotomies—the virtuous and the ‘fallen’—masculinity depends on self-discipline that is articulated through a variety of psychic regimens, which are inflected by, and in turn articulate, more intricate social hierarchies. This chapter focuses on three novels from different stages of Dickens’s career—The Pickwick Papers, David Copperfield, and Our Mutual Friend—to bring home something of the range in his characterization of sexuality and sexual discipline, but also the consistency with which masculine self-discipline serves as a marker of class standing. That standing is ratified in the relative assurance with which a character masters his unruly desires—desires thrown into relief by contrasting models of femininity.