"History and Real Life": Anna Jameson, Shakspeare's Heroines and Victorian Women

Abstract

Anna Jameson's Characteristics of Women, Moral, Poetical, and Historical (1832), known in its many later editions as Shakspeare's Heroines, was an important and influential text in the Victorian enthusiasm for Shakespeare's women characters as ideal models of womanliness. So widely was Shakspeare's Heroines read that almost every subsequent nineteenth-century writer on Shakespeare's women characters mentions the book. Nina Auerbach notes the centrality of Jameson's work in developing the Victorian perception that Shakespeare's women characters represented the apotheosis of selfhood, and a glorification of womanhood in particular (207). The popularity of Jameson's book suggests that she struck a chord in Victorian society, sounding strong, and often contradictory, feelings about Shakespeare's characters, about women, and about the roles fictional characters can play in imaginative and moral life. As many critics of nineteenth-century culture note, the dominant ideological positions regarding women and womanliness are fraught with contradictions and tensions. Certainly, like the ideal of womanliness itself, Shakspeare's Heroines is full of internal stresses in its underlying assumptions, in its ostensible social aims, and in its rhetorical strategies. Influenced by realist literary practices, Jameson assumes that fictional characters can be understood in terms of contemporary moral and social ideologies. But in order to make the characters contemporary, Jameson offers psychological analyses of motives which are not always explicit, or even implicit, in the play text. Assuming that character is a function of inherent gender identity, Jameson defines Shakespeare's women characters primarily in terms of their womanliness. The open and flexible definition of womanliness proposed in the text fonctions to appropriate Shakespeare's fictional, dramatic characters as understandable, even familiar, in terms of nineteenth-century social and gender ideologies.