Abstract
In this article, we investigate neo-Victorian YA fiction’s efforts to mirror twenty-first-century feminist ideals in nineteenth-century spaces through examining the role of heterotopia in Colleen Gleason’s Stoker and Holmes series (2013–2019). We first consider how the novels’ steampunk elements figure in Gleason’s feminist framing of neo-Victorian London, particularly in terms of common heterotopias—primarily the garden and the museum—that the protagonists briefly navigate over the course of the series. Second, we explore how the series’ three female protagonists each occupy spaces that function as pseudo—“heterotopias of crisis”—that is, while each of them claims space within which to subvert expectations of women, these spaces and the activities they support are themselves fundamentally insular and yield no socio-cultural critique. Finally, we consider how the spaces created and occupied by the books’ villain, known as the Ankh, serve as heterotopias. We find that the fact that the only truly heterotopic spaces in the novels belong to the villain, whose transgressive deviance the series frames as a bridge too far, illustrates how disappointingly limited neo-Victorian YA can be in its ability to offer subversive mirrors to twenty-first-century feminism.
Highlights
Foucault’s Heterotopias and Gleason’s Pseudo-HeterotopiasSet in a version of Victorian London that is inflected with both steampunk and supernatural elements, Colleen Gleason’s Stoker and Holmes series (2013–2019) features the alternating first-person narration of its intertextual, metafictional protagonists, Mina Holmes and Evaline Stoker, whose initially strained partnership evolves into true friendship as they navigate personal and professional conflicts alike
The private nature of the feminist spaces utilized by Mina, Evaline, and Irene Adler highlights the double lives of these neo-Victorian women and frames their gendered power as both transgressive in Victorian society and appropriate to twenty-first-century readers—both strange and familiar
As Gleason’s protagonists navigate the contradictory demands of their cultural place as young women and their professional goals, they play out the conventional Victorian tensions between public and private that represent pressures to perform respectability versus opportunities to be one’s authentic self; they demonstrate the ways in which “neo-Victorian fictions representing Victorian girl subjectivities for the consumption of twenty-first-century girls [ . . . ] have no choice but to present a fragmented, multifaceted self—one that can be placed in both periods” (Fritz 2021, pp. 56–57)
Summary
Set in a version of Victorian London that is inflected with both steampunk and supernatural elements, Colleen Gleason’s Stoker and Holmes series (2013–2019) features the alternating first-person narration of its intertextual, metafictional protagonists, Mina Holmes (daughter of Mycroft) and Evaline Stoker (sister of Bram), whose initially strained partnership evolves into true friendship as they navigate personal and professional conflicts alike. While Gleason clearly seeks to interrogate restrictive Victorian gender norms through the portrayal of Mina’s laboratory, Evaline’s sparring studio, and Ms Adler’s office, these spaces are not heterotopias because they do not function as counter-sites to particular locations that comment on the nineteenth-century cultural sites they mirror. As private spaces, they do not disrupt Victorian ideologies; instead, they provide the novel’s exceptional female protagonists private places in which to pursue exceptional. We consider how the spaces created and occupied by the Ankh serve as both heterotopias and reminders of the limits of historical revisionism
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