Proper Lady Research Articles

Poisonous Plots: Women Sensation Novelists and Murderesses of the Victorian Period

POISONOUS PLOTS: WOMEN SENSATION NOVELISTS AND MURDERESSES OF THE VICTORIAN PERIOD RANDA HELFlELD University ofMontreal The plot of the nineteenth-century sensation novel almost always revolves around a murder, often a case of poisoning. Stories of this kind were tremendously popular, whether they appeared in novels or in the newspapers; the heavily publicized poison trials were read as eagerly as any sensation novel. Indeed, the prevalence of poison plots in sensation fiction led many critics to complain that the genre was poisonous itself, for it had the potential to corrupt the minds and morals of its readers. Henry Mansel, for example, disparagingly describes the sensational "poison" to be found in the circulating library (486), and Alfred Austin refers to sensation novels as the "worst form of mental food, if we except that which is absolutely poisonous" (424). Even Wilkie Collins, who is generally regarded as the founder of the genre, called sensation fiction a "deadly social poison," which "contaminate[s] the popular literature of a clever and polished people" (393). In his 1868 spoof on sensation fiction entitled, Lucretia, or the Heroine ofthe Nineteenth Century, Francis Edward Paget portrays the dangers of sensational "poison" (301), particularly for young women. Lucretia's cousin John condemns the "unwholesome character of such books, and their corrupting influence" (17), and warns her of their tendency to "poison everybody that looked into them" (22) by teaching "young ladies to flirt, and make run-away matches, and commit theft, and false witness, and bigamy, and murder, and all the rest of it" (17). And sure enough, Lucretia's reading gets her into trouble. Not only does she inadvertently make a "run-away match" with a bigamist and become guilty of theft as her cousin predicts, but she lives up to her name by accidentally poisoning herself and her female Victorian Review 21.2 (Winter 1995) 162Victorian Review companion. Despite its light-hearted and humorous tone, the novel concludes with a serious attack on women writers of sensation fiction who, by "making profligacy attractive," and "detailing with licentious minuteness the workings of unbridled passions," "pollute" not only "their pages," but their readers as well (305). In Paget's view, the female sensation novelist was especially dangerous to members of her own sex; she had become one of the "bitterest enemies of all that remains innocent and maidenly among us" (298). Much has been written in the last fifteen years about the ways in which women writers in the Victorian period were often condemned as immoral, unfeminine, mad, monstrous, or even criminal. Critics like Mary Poovey, Elaine Showalter, and Gilbert and Gubar have thoroughly documented these attacks, explaining that writing thrust more and more women into the public arena in ways that threatened their sociallydesignated roles as quite, passive, and selfless "angels in the house." Female sensation novelists were especially condemned, for it was a widely-held opinion that sensation fiction contained events and expressed emotions which no proper lady could or should know anything about Thus while it is true that male writers in the genre were also accused of disseminating literary "poison," female sensation novelists were particularly vulnerable to charges of this kind: the indelicate content of their writings and the fact that they wrote at all made them doubly 'criminal'. It is perhaps for this reason that critics often singled out the most famous female sensation novelist in their attacks on the genre — Mary Elizabeth Braddon.1 As a woman writer of sensational poison plots, Braddon found herself figuratively on trial. Not surprisingly, her novels often examine the figure of the female poisoner, and explore the relationship between women's criminality and their art While female sensation novelists like Braddon were forced to defend themselves against charges of poisoning, accused murderesses such as Madeleine Smith and Adelaide Bartlett were judged guilty of telling stories that thrilled and shocked the public. They were attacked by the lawyers, thejudges, and the press as much for their narrative abilities as for their alleged crimes. For example, Madeleine Smith's trial and the newspapers focused on her scandalous letters to her victim, Emile, and the sensational love story they told seriously damaged her defense. The more a woman appeared...

The Monstrous Body of Knowledge in Mary Shelley's "Frankenstein"

i. The editor of this preface is not specified; the text is a translation of Giovanni (John) Aldini's An Account of the Late Improvements of Galvanism with a series of Curious and Interesting Experiments Performed Before the Commissioners of the French National Institute and Repeated Lately in the Anatomical Theatres of London (London: Cuthell and Martin, J. Murray, 1803). 2. The literature on Frankenstein is extensive. Several studies are worth noting here to give a sense of the breadth of the work that has been done. Ann Mellor has contributed significandy to feminist readings of the novel; her study is strongly grounded in textual analysis as well as close attention to contemporary events in science. Ellen Moers's early essay is a cornerstone of feminist thinking with respect to the novel. See also Mary Poovey's The Proper Lady and the Woman Writer (Chicago: U of Chicago P, 1984) and Margaret Homans' Bearing the Word (Chicago: U of Chicago P, 1986) for analyses of Shelley and of the novel. For psychoanalytic readings of the text see William Veeder's Mary Shelley & Frankenstein:

'Conversations on the Arts': Writing a Space for the Female Viewer in the Repository of Arts 1809 15

But if art was 'accessible' to all, Hazlitt was equally insistent that only the 'few' could feel the power of art and respond with true understanding.3 Excluded from the few was the female sex, whose interest could at best be only personal and particular, or, as was more likely, restricted to the level of superficial and fashionable commodity consumption. I will return to Hazlitt at the end of my article but for the moment want to suggest that the cultural formation of 'Hazlitt' as a critic and writer on art (i.e. as a liberal male intellectual) can be partly understood in terms of oppositions and differences encompassing the economic, political and private spheres, and defined in terms of class and gender. I want to argue that Ackermann's Repository ofArts4 provides a useful means of exploring the other side of these differences the construction of the bourgeois female viewing 'subject' as a 'proper lady'5 in the context of a magazine which celebrated individual capitalist enterprise, commerce, manufacturing and fashion. It was also politically and ideologically conservative, being dedicated to promoting the benefits of the Prince Regent's rule. Unlike Hazlitt, Ackermann did believe that it was possible to improve public taste by the promotion of the arts in the spirit of trade, and he also regarded the 'fair sex' as his most important consumers. I want to ask what happened to the 'female' viewer when privatised values, a new emphasis upon the particular and concrete in nature, and the rise of 'domestic' genre painting might appear to have privileged the woman's viewpoint, or at least to have offered the potential for so doing. If, as argued by John Barrell, women had been excluded from eighteenthcentury formulations of the 'republic of taste' on the grounds that they lacked any public or political voice or space, and because they were held to be intellectually incapable of generalising or abstracting from the particular;6 and if they were being increasingly excluded from institutional and professional artistic structures and practices as producers of art,7 they were nonetheless very much an important part of the expanding 'public' for art in the early nineteenth century where the public is understood in terms of an aggregate of private individuals as spectators, viewers, patrons, potential patrons, amateurs, readers and consumers. Moreover, it was a fragmented 'public' which was being defined, framed and controlled in terms of identity and difference according to class fraction, politics, gender and interest, in the many newspapers and periodicals of the day.8 This shift towards privatised values and viewpoints required the rewriting and/or reproduction of earlier formulations of gender difference in order to reinstate the dominance of the male viewpoint and to assert the authenticity of individual male experiences of art. At the same time, women, designated as the principal readers or consumers of fashionable novels and periodicals like Ackermann's Repository of Arts, were increasingly being defined as trivialising and superficial consumers of fashionable 'art commodities'. I want to offer an analysis of two 'representations' of the female viewer in the early nineteenth century to exemplify the way in which the periodical press functioned to construct or interpellate the reader as a 'viewing subject' in terms of class and gender. In doing so, I do not want to suggest that my examples exhaust the range of subject positions available to women at the time. I also recognise the danger of slipping from ideological formations and constructions within the text to making assumptions about the way real women looked at, responded to, and understood art. No art form was so widely regarded as being

The Spy and the Poet: Young Girls as Writers in Harriet the Spy and Anastasia Krupnik

The Spy and the Poet: Young Girls as Writers in Harriet the Spy and Anastasia Krupnik Writers of children's fiction during the 1960s and 1970s such as Louise Fitzhugh and Lois Lowry created female characters who would have been destined for reform in earlier works of fiction. John Rowe Townsend sees these contemporary females as "highlyidiosyncratic " characters "whose personalities have been allowed by their authors to develop without too much regard for what constitutes a proper example" (277). Harriet Welsch (Harriet the Spy 1964) and Anastasia Krupnik (Anastasia Krupnik 1979) exhibit their sometimes "eccentric" characteristics in their writings: Harriet's "spy" notebooks and Anastasia's "important things" notebook. Writing, an occupation which had to be "tamed" out of earlier characters, such as Jo March (Little Women), helps these contemporary females order their worlds. Jo March is a prime example of a young woman who must be "reformed" before she can become a proper lady. Jo's first love is her writing, but this artistic ability is ultimately "tamed to laud domestic and moral virtues" (Clark 81). Cadogan and Craig explain the taming process which was "accepted by writers and readers of nineteenth-century girls' fiction" (54): "Wild" girls were tamed by 1) friends and family, 2) religion, or 3) falling in love. And for these girls writing was not "considered a suitably modest profession" (55). However, for Harriet and Anastasia, writing is a way of ordering their lives~a way that is ultimately encouraged by their parents and by society. Beverly Lyon Clark states that "seemly feminine behavior" (83) for nineteenth-century females required self-control, with aspirations towards "domesticity and moral goodness" (82) and away from the self-expression of art and fiction. Jo March must give up her "castle in the air" of being a famous writer and "outgrow it, like her strong language and her tomboy exuberance" (84). Unlike the "devaluation of writing" (90) that occurs in Alcott's book, writing skills are beneficial in Fitzhugh's and Lowry's works. Harriet's "spy" notebooks and Anastasia's "love-hate" lists are forms of self-expression, preliminary writing exercises which will continue to help them discover other interests and talents. Harriet M. Welsch (the middle initial is one she gave herself) is at the start of Fitzhugh's book a "neat compulsive, upper middle class, urban child" (Bosmajian 72) who is often "inelastic" in her habits. Her daily routine-tomato sandwiches for lunch, special "spy" clothes, cake at precisely 3:40 every afternoon, and reading under the covers with a flashlight until Ole Golly tells her to stop-gives her a "tenuous connectiveness" (76) to the world around her. Spying on other people is the real way Harriet connects with her world. It is an activity she does alone; Sport and Janie, her best friends, are not allowed to go along, and her parents are not even aware that she is spying and recording everything she sees and hears. Harriet fills fifteen green spy notebooks with her insights to the fragments of people's lives she glimpses. When asked why she writes about strangers she observes, Harriet responds, "Because I've seen them and I want to remember them" (11). Ole Golly encourages Harriet's writing and tells her that description "is good for the soul" (32). 200 Harriet takes her seriously. She writes about her teachers, mostly unflattering remarks: "I think Miss Elson is one of those people you don't bother to think about twice" (33); "Miss Whitehead has buck teeth, thin hair, feet like skis, and a very long hanging stomach" (34). And even about her best friends: "Sometimes I can't stand Sport. ... He's like a little old woman" (182). However, Harriet does not use her notebook merely for reports about people on her spy route or to record brutally honest descriptions of teachers and friends. She also tries to figure out people closer to home: her parents and Ole Golly. For instance, when she finds out that Ole Golly has a boyfriend, Harriet writes: "Is everybody a different person when they are with somebody else? Ole Golly has never been this way" (97). At one point, Harriet's mother says...

Uneven Developments: The Ideological Work of Gender in Mid-Victorian England.

Mary Poovey's Proper Lady and the Woman Writer has become a standard text in feminist literary discourse. In Uneven Developments Poovey turns to broader historical concerns in an analysis of how notions of gender shape ideology. Asserting that the organization of sexual difference is a social, not natural, phenomenon, Poovey shows how representations of gender took the form of a binary opposition in mid-Victorian culture. She then reveals the role of this opposition in various discourses and institutions-medical, legal, moral, and literary. The resulting oppositions, partly because they depended on the subordination of one term to another, were always unstable. Poovey contends that this instability helps explain why various institutional versions of binary logic developed unevenly. This unevenness, in turn, helped to account for the emergence in the 1850s of a genuine oppositional voice: the voice of an organized, politicized feminist movement. Drawing on a wide range of sources-parliamentary debates, novels, medical lectures, feminist analyses of work, middle-class periodicals on demesticity-Poovey examines various controversies that provide glimpses of the ways in which representations of gender were simultaneously constructed, deployed, and contested. These include debates about the use of chloroform in childbirth, the first divorce law, the professional status of writers, the plight of governesses, and the nature of the nursing corps. Uneven Developments is a contribution to the feminist analysis of culture and ideology that challenges the isolation of literary texts from other kinds of writing and the isolation of women's issues from economic and political histories.

The Proper Lady and the Woman Writer: Ideology as Style in the Works of Mary Wollstonecraft, Mary Shelley, and Jane Austen. Mary PooveySex and Enlightenment: Women in Richardson and Diderot. Rita GoldbergFirst Feminists: British Women Writers, 1578-1799. Moira Ferguson

Previous articleNext article No AccessBook ReviewsThe Proper Lady and the Woman Writer: Ideology as Style in the Works of Mary Wollstonecraft, Mary Shelley, and Jane Austen. Mary Poovey Sex and Enlightenment: Women in Richardson and Diderot. Rita Goldberg First Feminists: British Women Writers, 1578-1799. Moira Ferguson Katharine M. RogersKatharine M. Rogers Search for more articles by this author PDFPDF PLUS Add to favoritesDownload CitationTrack CitationsPermissionsReprints Share onFacebookTwitterLinkedInRedditEmail SectionsMoreDetailsFiguresReferencesCited by Signs Volume 12, Number 3Spring, 1987 Article DOIhttps://doi.org/10.1086/494350 Views: 1Total views on this site Copyright 1987 The University of ChicagoPDF download Crossref reports no articles citing this article.

The Proper Lady and the Woman Writer: Ideology as Style in the Works of Mary Wollstonecraft, Mary Shelley, and Jane Austen.

A brilliant, original, and powerful book. . . . This is the most skillful integration of feminism and Marxist literary criticism that I know of. So writes critic Stephen Greenblatt about Proper Lady and the Woman Writer, Mary Poovey's study of the struggle of three prominent writers to accommodate the artist's genius to the late eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century ideal of the modest, self-effacing lady. Interpreting novels, letters, journals, and political tracts in the context of cultural strictures, Poovey makes an important contribution to English social and literary history and to feminist theory. proper lady was a handy concept for a developing bourgeois patriarchy, since it deprived women of worldly power, relegating them to a sanctified domestic sphere that, in complex ways, nourished and sustained the harsh 'real' world of men. With care and subtle intelligence, Poovey examines this 'guardian and nemesis of the female self' through the ways it is implicated in the style and strategies of three very different writers.-Rachel M. Brownstein, Nation The Proper Lady and the Woman Writer is a model of . . . creative discovery, providing a well-researched, illuminating history of women writers at the turn of the nineteenth century. [Poovey] creates sociologically and psychologically persuasive accounts of the writers: Wollstonecraft, who could never fully transcend the ideology of propriety she attacked; Shelley, who gradually assumed a mask of feminine propriety in her social and literary styles; and Austen, who was neither as critical of propriety as Wollstonecraft nor as accepting as Shelley ultimately became.-Deborah Kaplan, Novel

The Proper Lady and the Woman Writer: Ideology as Style in the Works of Mary Wollstonecraft, Mary Shelley, and Jane Austen. Mary Poovey , Mary Wollstonecraft , Mary Shelley , Jane Austen

<i>The Proper Lady and the Woman Writer: Ideology as Style in the Works of Mary Wollstonecraft, Mary Shelley, and Jane Austen</i>. Mary Poovey , Mary Wollstonecraft , Mary Shelley , Jane Austen

The Proper Lady and the Woman Writer: Ideology as Style in the Works of Mary Wollstonecraft, Mary Shelley and Jane Austen

The Proper Lady and the Woman Writer: Ideology as Style in the Works of Mary Wollstonecraft, Mary Shelley and Jane Austen

Short notices

Abstract John Clare's Autobiographical Writings. Edited by Eric Robinson. With wood engravings by John Lawrence. Oxford: Oxford University Press. 1983. xxii + 185 pp. £7.95. The Natural History Prose Writings of John Clare. Edited by Margaret Grainger. Oxford: Clarendon Press. 1983. lxiv + 397 pp. £35.00 The Proper Lady and the Woman Writer. Ideology as Style in the Works of Mary Wollstonecrafl, Mary Shelley, and Jane Austen. By Mary Poovey. (Women in Culture and Society Series) Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press. 1984. xxii + 287 pp. £17.00 Browning and Italy By Jacob Korg. Athens, Ohio: Ohio University Press. 1983. x + 246 pp. £19.50.

Mary Poovey, The Proper Lady and the Woman Writer, Ideology as Style in the Works of Mary Wollstonecraft, Mary Shelley, and Jane Austen, The University of Chicago Press, 1984., xxii+287pp.

Mary Poovey, The Proper Lady and the Woman Writer, Ideology as Style in the Works of Mary Wollstonecraft, Mary Shelley, and Jane Austen, The University of Chicago Press, 1984., xxii+287pp.

The Proper Lady and the Woman Writer. Mary Poovey.

Previous articleNext article No AccessREVIEW ISSUEThe Proper Lady and the Woman Writer. Mary Poovey.Kathleen FowlerKathleen Fowler Search for more articles by this author PDFPDF PLUS Add to favoritesDownload CitationTrack CitationsPermissionsReprints Share onFacebookTwitterLinkedInRedditEmail SectionsMoreDetailsFiguresReferencesCited by The Wordsworth Circle Volume 16, Number 4Fall 1985Review Issue Article DOIhttps://doi.org/10.1086/TWC24041258 Views: 7Total views on this site © 1985 by The University of Chicago. All rights reserved.PDF download Crossref reports no articles citing this article.

The Proper Lady and the Woman Writer, Ideology as Style in the Works of Mary Wollstonecraft, Mary Shelley, and Jane Austen.

The Proper Lady and the Woman Writer, Ideology as Style in the Works of Mary Wollstonecraft, Mary Shelley, and Jane Austen.

Review: Becoming a Heroine: Reading About Women in Novels., by Rachel M. Brownstein; The Proper Lady and the Woman Writer: Ideology as Style in the Works of Mary Wollstonecraft, Mary Shelley, and Jane Austen., by Mary Poovey; and Jane Austen and the Drama of Women., by LeRoy W. Smith

Review: <i>Becoming a Heroine: Reading About Women in Novels.</i>, by Rachel M. Brownstein; <i>The Proper Lady and the Woman Writer: Ideology as Style in the Works of Mary Wollstonecraft, Mary Shelley, and Jane Austen.</i>, by Mary Poovey; and <i>Jane Austen and the Drama of Women.</i>, by LeRoy W. Smith

: Becoming a Heroine: Reading About Women in Novels. . Rachel M. Brownstein. ; The Proper Lady and the Woman Writer: Ideology as Style in the Works of Mary Wollstonecraft, Mary Shelley, and Jane Austen. . Mary Poovey. ; Jane Austen and the Drama of Women. . LeRoy W. Smith.

: Becoming a Heroine: Reading About Women in Novels. . Rachel M. Brownstein. ; The Proper Lady and the Woman Writer: Ideology as Style in the Works of Mary Wollstonecraft, Mary Shelley, and Jane Austen. . Mary Poovey. ; Jane Austen and the Drama of Women. . LeRoy W. Smith.

Proper Ladies and Heroines

Proper Ladies and Heroines

When I Learned to Cook

In our China — especially several decades ago — any young woman who was well loved by her parents and enjoyed the comforts of a well-to-do home knew practically nothing about cooking, because that was done by servants. Naturally, I was no exception. My parents regarded me as a precious treasure, so since our family circumstances were good, in our household I never had anything to do with the kitchen. And when I married Mr. Liao [Chung-k'ai], the preparation of all food and meals was done entirely by the servants. However, when I went to study in Japan, in response to a unique responsibility demanded of me, I voluntarily gave up my status as a proper young lady and learned how to cook from a hired Japanese maid. As I think back on these events, I realize that my reflections and memories are well worth commemorating.