Victorian Feminist Research Articles

Response: Victorian History: Some Experiments with Syllabi

Victorian History:Some Experiments with Syllabi Antoinette Burton (bio) The week that I received copies of these three engaged and thoughtful responses to Empire in Question I was two-thirds of the way through the syllabus for my 400 level course, Victorian Britain, which I teach in the department of History at the University of Illinois. In fact, we were poised between General Gordon's vainglorious death in the Sudan—with its ramifications for both Gladstone's second ministry and the "scramble for Africa"—and the partisan political work of Irish nationalists at Westminster—that eventuated in the ill-fated Home Rule debate of 1885-86 and the rout of the Liberals from office for the better part of two decades. Inhabiting the world of that syllabus as one often does at the upper-division level of the curriculum, where you can dig deeply into primary sources and build narratives and counter-narratives and engage students in lively debate about the fate of, in this case, nation and empire in "Britain's imperial century," I was struck at once by the sheer generosity of my colleagues' comments, and by the limitations of my own syllabus as well. Had I ever mentioned, let alone thoroughly explored, the Anglo-Saxonism at the heart of much racial thinking in the nineteenth century that Elaine Freedgood references? One way to do so in the context of our syllabus readings would be to examine those Victorian suffragists who invoked Magna Carta and the relationship of "British cultures" to "Indo-Germanic races." Though the staging of Magna Carta pageantry was a prominent feature of Edwardian suffrage work, references to the superiority of Anglo-Saxon civilizations to Norman counterparts were all over early Victorian feminist periodicals as well, and were especially evident in the work of Helen Blackburn.1 Identifying what's at stake in conceiving Victorian Britain as a story about "islands of whiteness" and [End Page 305] its counter-narratives is a pedagogical preoccupation for me, and it's salutary to be reminded of the many ways that the colonial rule of racial difference—to echo both Partha Chatterjee and Catherine Hall—can be approached. Do I sufficiently address the inter-imperial rivalries and cross-imperial pressures that shape so many of the major imperial events—and with them, the rise and fall of governments—of the later nineteenth century, from the Crimean War to the South African War? I typically end my course with the 1905 Alien Act and the founding of Sinn Fein that same year. But following Joanna de Groot's observations it would be interesting, and provocative, to situate those confessional acts alongside the Russo-Japanese War, as a way of truly globalizing the end of Victoria's reign and anticipating the conflagrations of 1914-1918. The specter of an aggressively imperializing Japan laying claim not simply to a place at the table at Versailles but to a kind of racial equivalence with white Europeans on the basis of its imperial success over Russia fifteen years before would make for an instructive complement to similar Victorian-era claims and presumptions.2 If this seems a temporal stretch for a Victorian history course, it is in part because determining the beginning and ending dates of "Victorian Britain" is an ongoing challenge of the syllabus, which I used to take to the threshold of World War I but which I now end, effectively, with the afterlives of what was formerly known as the Boer War on a variety of imperial and domestic fronts. And last but certainly not least, do I pay enough attention to the political economy of the imperial nation-state in this period, moving beyond the metaphor of "flow" that some critics of the cultural emphasis of the imperial turn have suggested, both implicitly and explicitly, is insufficient for getting at the relationship of consumption and trade and "material processes" to citizenship and imperial political culture in a global frame? Though this may not be what Susan Pennybacker had in mind, recent scholarship makes these counter-arguments with various degrees of intensity, and they have yet to be taken up as widely as they should be in Victorian studies.3...

Feminist thinking on education in Victorian England

This article examines some of the conversations that took place between women’s rights advocates on the subject of female education. The relationship between Victorian feminism and educational reform was a complex one, and historians have long argued over whether campaigns for women’s schools and colleges can be termed ‘feminist’. This article maintains, however, that it is possible to identify a current of feminist analyses, ideas and debates which formed an important part of the broader movement for women’s education. ‘Theory’ in this context was driven less by individual thinkers than by networks in dialogue with each other, responding to a clear practical agenda. Clusters of educational reformers were distinguished by their varying religious outlooks, attitudes to sexual difference, the kind of education they advocated, and their relationship to the wider movement for women’s emancipation. This article focuses primarily on higher education, and particularly on the Oxbridge women’s colleges, as arenas in which some of these themes and disagreements were most prominently and clearly articulated.

Sex, Religion, and the New Woman in China: A Comparative Reading of Sarah Grand and Alicia Little

Sex, Religion, and the New Woman in China:A Comparative Reading of Sarah Grand and Alicia Little Ann Heilmann (bio) Victorian Feminists often invoked such tropes as the Chinese woman’s bound feet, the Arab woman’s veiled seclusion, or the American slave as metaphors of women’s social and legal confinement in Britain. In this essay, I explore how two British New Woman writers with personal experience of China, the doyenne of British New Womanhood in the 1890s, Sarah Grand (1854–1943), and the lesser-known Alicia (Mrs. Archibald) Little (1845–1926), drew on and transformed the first of these tropes to universalize feminist concerns and relativize the Western claim to moral, religious, and political supremacy. As Elizabeth Chang and Shanyn Fiske have illustrated, China, as a “field of imagined visual possibility” (Chang 1), had a considerable “spectral presence” in Victorian literature and frequently served as a “mirror for Western projection” (Fiske, “Orientalism” 222, 219). The complexities of this projection hold particular significance for the work of New Woman writers who were familiar with Chinese culture and indigenous reform movements and at the same time had an investment in representing the Western feminist project as a quasi-religious mission for moral and social advancement. Grand spent her apprenticeship years as the wife of a British army surgeon in China and southeast Asia in the 1870s (Kersley 37), utilizing this experience in her journalism (“The Great Typhoon,” 1881; “Ah Man,” 1893), her first novel-tract, Two Dear Little Feet (1873), and her feminist “coming-out” novel, Ideala (1888), in which the heroine takes up social purity activism after encountering Chinese women reformers. While Grand dramatized the New Woman’s rejection of marriage and Little depicted her effort to reform marriage from within, both writers explored the sexual double standard and became suffrage supporters. Born nine years before Grand, Little authored a spate of society novels, cautiously exploring women’s desire for an object in life and the legal plight of wives and mothers in the late 1870s to mid-1880s, including Margery Travers (1878) and Mother Darling (1885) (Fiske, “Asian” 16–17). Her move to China in 1886, where she joined her businessman husband, shifted her attention to Chinese culture and indigenous women’s condition, inspiring A Marriage in China (1896), two further novels, and nine travelogues and factual accounts of [End Page 61] Chinese society. Relatives thought her eccentric in her “ardent enthusiasms. The rights of married women to their own money, Women’s Suffrage and … the unbinding of Chinese girl children’s feet.… We never quite knew what to expect” (Bewicke 19–20). As the founder of the Natural Feet Society (Tien Tsu Hui), Little engaged in a form of feminist activism comparable to Grand’s social purism (Fiske, “Asian” 12, 19; Thurin 164, 182–87; Young ii–vi; Little, Blue Gown 253–304 and Intimate China 134–63). The reformist spirit of both writers had its conceptual roots in Christianity. If social purity feminism developed from the earlier nineteenth-century evangelical movements of temperance, moral reform, and abolitionism (see Banks 11–27), the notion of “natural” as “heavenly” feet (the Chinese word tianzu encompasses both) was, as Dorothy Ko notes, grounded in “Christian doctrines while appealing to native belief and terminology” (16). Ideala and A Marriage in China correlate the personal with the political and the sexual with the religious, embedding Victorian social reform concerns within an examination of Anglo-Chinese relations. Both tender quasi-utopian resolutions that posit female authority in the regulation of the family (Little) and society (Grand) as the linchpin of (inter)national renovation and exalt the heroines as figures of Christian salvation. While Grand’s Ideala finds spiritual purification in China and becomes a “saintly” woman who combines Eastern wisdom with a Western sociopolitical mission inspired by indigenous women, Little’s Lilian travels to China in search of companionship, missionary humanitarianism, and romantic love, only to discover the human sacrifice of religious, cultural, and sexual imperialism. Like Ideala, Lilian returns with a mission, here individualized rather than collectivized; her adoption of her husband’s mixed-race children born to his Chinese mistress gestures toward the creation of a multiracial society. Both writers...

The Bible and the Cause: Freethinking Feminists vs Christianity, England, 1870–1900

This article examines Victorian debates on scriptural interpretation and women's rights, when feminists and anti-feminists, Christians and secularists battled over whether the Bible assigned women a subordinate sphere. It argues that scriptural debates were of central importance to the nineteenth-century ‘woman question’, while women's rights provided the discursive terrain upon which Christians and secularists competed for power and legitimacy. The article focuses on the contributions made by women activists in the secularist or freethought movement. These ‘freethinking feminists’ have been largely ignored in the historiography, though they formed a longstanding and active current within the Victorian women's movement. They were often marginalised, however, because of their violently anti-Christian views and their insistence that the Bible needed to be rejected in full for women to acquire freedom and equality. They argued not only with conservative Christians but with other activists in the women's movement who sought to demonstrate that women's rights could be reconciled with scriptural teachings. Highlighting this alternative tradition reveals the ‘religious roots’ of Victorian feminism to have been diverse and highly contested, and expands our understanding of the multiple processes by which modern definitions of ‘secularism’ came into being.

Aging and Gender: On the discourses of Older Women and the realities of experiences of the Victorian Feminists in the old ages

Aging and Gender: On the discourses of Older Women and the realities of experiences of the Victorian Feminists in the old ages

Mary Reilly as Jekyll or Hyde : Neo-Victorian (re)creations of Feminity and Feminism

In his article “What is Neo-Victorian Studies?” (2008), Mark Lewellyn argues that the term neo-Victorian fiction refers to works that are consciously set in the Victorian period, but introduce representations of marginalised voices, new histories of sexuality, post-colonial viewpoints and other generally ‘different’ versions of the Victorian era. Valerie Martin’s gothic-romance Mary Reilly drew on Stevenson’s novella to introduce a woman’s perspective on the puzzle of Jekyll and Hyde. Almost twenty-years after the publication of Martin’s novel, the newly established field of research in Neo-Victorian fiction has questioned the extent to which Neo-Victorian recreations of the Victorian past respond to postmodern contemporary reflections and ideas about the period. This article aims to examine the ways in which this Neo-Victorian gothic text addresses both the issues of Victorian femininity and feminist principles now in the light of later Neo-Victorian precepts, taking into consideration that Martin’s novel introduces a woman’s perspective as a feminist response to Stevenson’s text but also includes many allusions to the cult of domesticity as a legacy of the Victorian gothic romance.

Catholic Sensationalism and Victorian Literature (review)

Reviewed by: Catholic Sensationalism and Victorian Literature Patrick R. O'Malley (bio) Catholic Sensationalism and Victorian Literature by Maureen Moran; pp. 324. Liverpool: Liverpool UP, 2007. $99.76. Recent years have witnessed the emergence of a significant constellation of books devoted to the place of Catholicism in nineteenth-century British literature and culture. Among those with strong literary allegiances, there have been (to name only a few) Ruth Vanita's Sappho and the Virgin Mary (1996), Ellis Hanson's Decadence and Catholicism (1997), Kimberly VanEsveld Adams's Our Lady of Victorian Feminism (2001), Frederick S. Roden's Same-Sex Desire in Victorian Religious Culture (2002), Susan Griffin's Anti-Catholicism and Nineteenth-Century Fiction (2004), Michael Wheeler's The Old Enemies: Catholic and Protestant in Nineteenth-Century Culture (2006), and Maria LaMonaca's Masked Atheism (2008). To this, of course, could be added those accounts of nineteenth-century Catholicism that ground themselves more specifically in traditional historical methods, published with some regularity since the end of the nineteenth century itself. As Maureen Moran suggests at the end of her vigorously argued and wide-ranging Catholic Sensationalism and Victorian Literature, the surprise should not, perhaps, be the recent proliferation of such studies but rather the relative dearth that preceded them, a dearth encouraged by an academic culture for which religion—especially a [End Page 236] religion like Catholicism—seems fundamentally opposed to "liberalism, secularism, rational science ... and other progressive, non-religious outlooks" (284, quoting Turner 6). The cultural studies approaches that could most add to the complexity of our understanding of nineteenth-century religious belief and practice have been, in some ways, most suspicious of religion's reactionary politics: The mapping of texts and authors on a faith-doubt continuum replicated the twentieth-century cultural myth endorsed by historians: that Victorian society grounded our own modernity through the move to a more "enlightened," non-spiritual understanding of the world. The embedding of critical and cultural theoretical discourses in the academy has certainly put paid to such grand narratives. Nonetheless, these traditions of intellectual activity have tended to eclipse the importance of religion to the Victorian literary imagination. (285) That is particularly unfortunate, Moran correctly insists, since "the saturation of nineteenth-century culture by Christianity and its denominational variants makes religion always and everywhere a presence" (3). As the list that opens this review suggests, Moran's book is certainly not alone in striving to fill the void, but it is one of the most intelligent and most cogently constructed. Moran's chapters are generally thematically (rather than chronologically) organized, each appearing under the rubric of a topic of importance to the nineteenth-century representation of Catholicism and focusing on two or three more or less canonical texts or sets of texts. Thus, a chapter on representations of Jesuits provides significant readings of Charles Kingsley's Westward Ho! (1855) and Wilkie Collins's The Black Robe (1881), while one on martyrdom highlights Grace Aguilar's The Vale of Cedars (1850) and George Eliot's Romola (1862-63). Poetry is represented by Robert Browning's monologues (paired with Charlotte Brontë's Villette in a chapter on nuns and priests) and the poetry of Gerard Manley Hopkins and Francis Thompson (in a chapter devoted to Art Catholicism). An effective epilogue nicely frames the book, gesturing toward modernism and, ultimately, our own contemporary moment. Moran situates the anchoring texts of each chapter within a clear and engaging set of historical events, other literary texts, and various archival documents; the bibliography that she has assembled is alone a valuable resource. Collins aside, Moran does not in general focus on the sensation novel but rather on a broader and conceptually more complex notion of "sensationalism," bringing together "the many and interrelated understandings of 'sensation' that haunted the period" (3). Related to the Gothic, and largely opposing realism, this Victorian sensationalism stresses heightened emotional states—"extreme, eccentric scenarios and language" (12), and it "replaces the passive, escapist comforts of the older genres with a somatic involvement—a physical frisson that moves the reader from shock to curiosity and thence to the active decoding [End Page 237] of a hidden truth" (13). In Moran's account, a culture of...

‘An Impudent Intrusion?’ Assessing the Life of Elizabeth Wolstenholme Elmy, First‐Wave Feminist and Social Reformer (1833–1918)

This article seeks to re‐evaluate the life of first‐wave feminist Elizabeth Wolstenholme Elmy through the lens of her own autobiographical fragments and newly‐discovered material concerning her genealogy and childhood familial circumstances. One of the most significant but under‐researched feminists of her generation, the ‘self’ constructed by Wolstenholme Elmy is one that appears to negate the influences of youthful familial circumstances on her later life and career—a career she deemed worthy of auto/biographical narration. This supports her forcefully expressed opinion that analysis of the private ‘self’ was an unsuitable subject for biographical study: an ‘impudent intrusion’ of little value when assessing a subject’s historical merit, a view this article seeks to contend. By acknowledging the complex reflexive nature of the auto/biographical process and thus the biographer’s inability to provide an ‘essence’ of the subject’s ‘self’, the article offers a construction of how the events of Wolstenholme Elmy’s childhood might have impacted on her intellectual and emotional pre‐disposition to adopt the cause of feminism. The portrait of Wolstenholme Elmy as expressed by this article contrasts with the largely negative impression of her character gained from analysis of the headline accounts of the nineteenth‐century women’s emancipation struggle and the ‘classic’ feminist memoirs upon which those accounts were, in part, based. As such the article builds upon recent revisionist accounts that have highlighted the importance of Wolstenholme Elmy’s life to the study of the Victorian feminist movement.

<em>Frances Power Cobbe: Victorian Feminist, Journalist, Reformer</em>, by Sally Mitchell<br/><em>Frances Power Cobbe and Victorian Feminism</em>, by Susan Hamilton

<em>Frances Power Cobbe: Victorian Feminist, Journalist, Reformer</em>, by Sally Mitchell<br/><em>Frances Power Cobbe and Victorian Feminism</em>, by Susan Hamilton

Feminism, Governmentality and the Politics of Legal Reform

This paper offers a critical evaluation of the relationship between feminism and the politics of legal change. Using Foucault’s concept of episteme, it explores the presence of the phenomenon itself — namely the conditions which made its rise possible and configured its nature and mode of being. The analysis reveals these politics to be the outcome of the epistemological context of nineteenth century thought, in particular the canon of reason utilised and the apprehension of subjectivity as a self in possession of consciousness and the ability to reflect upon this consciousness. It argues that these epistemic conditions, in granting the Victorian feminist discourse its specific configuration, not only made feminist calls for legal reform possible, but fashioned their form both at the time and into the future. In reaching this conclusion, I suggest that the feminist practice of legal reform is not as neutral as hitherto believed, and argue that we should recognise its dependency on questions of knowledge, truth and subjectivity. Acknowledging this dependency as an inevitable corollary of the politics of legal reform enables these politics to be explored as ‘the conduct of conduct’ — as a social practice with the power to identify and individualise appropriate norms for the conduct of women.

The Pleasures (and Dangers) Of Biography

The Pleasures (and Dangers) Of Biography Lori D. Ginzberg (bio) Alison Booth . How to Make It as a Woman: Collective Biographical History from Victoria to the Present. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2004. xvi + 423 pp.; ill.; tables. ISBN 0-226-06546-4 (pb). Sally Mitchell . Frances Power Cobbe: Victorian Feminist, Journalist, Reformer. Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 2004. xiii + 463 pp.; ill. ISBN 0-8139-2271-2 (cl). John G. Reid . Viola Florence Barnes, 1885–1979: A Historian's Biography. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2005. xxiv + 228 pp.; ill. ISBN 0-8020-8017-0 (cl). First, if I may, a confession. I do not like, and until recently rarely read, biographies. It is not that I doubt that there are good ones, or that I think biography is a lesser genre than narrative history writing, or that I dismiss the importance of individual women in making history. Mostly I find books that focus on the individual life too exclusive, too self-absorbed, and too packed with dinner parties; surely more tiresome than attending most parties is reading about them. And then, too many biographers fall in love with their subject and so, it seems to me, lose their balance. (Here I recommend Jill Lepore's article "Historians Who Love Too Much: Reflections on Microhistory and Biography," whose self-deprecatory description of stroking "a lock of [Noah Webster's] hair in a tender embrace" in the archives made me laugh out loud.1 ) I learn too little actual history from most biographies—and too little about what the individual life really means in its time and place. I have heard the basic story (birth, the struggles of girlhood, the passions and limits of adulthood, death) before. I would certainly be far more bored reading about my own life than I am living it. I know many historians who share my puzzlement that people actually read biographies; more, that they love them. Indeed, as a child, I enjoyed the little blue biographies about explorers and thinkers and people who performed a creative act that changed the world (though I admit I skipped the warriors and never found sea-stories much fun). Something about the biographical narrative—about living in another's skin, about identifying with a person from another time, another world, about imagining oneself in a heroic moment—draws people as few nonfiction genres do. I do not really get it. [End Page 205] But I am researching and writing a biography, and so have embarked on reading dozens of them with an entirely new attitude. Certain preferences have inevitably emerged: I vastly prefer those whose authors do not love, or forgive, their subjects (Dan Carter's biography of George Wallace comes to mind2 ); I impatiently skim the ones with too many "important" guest appearances. Reminded of what historian Barbara Caine once called the "deep gulf between the biographical study of prominent feminists on the one hand, and the writing of the history of feminism and of women's movements on the other," I have been aware of navigating waters that are, at best, unfamiliar and, at worst, uncrossable.3 Feminist biography, Caine continues, while it tries to understand women in their place and time, necessarily focuses on people who transcended those constraints, who were exceptions or rebels or heroines. She points to collective biographies as a means of transforming the uses we can make of life histories. Alison Booth's How to Make It as a Woman contributes to this endeavor in important ways, both by exploring and explaining the pleasures people gain from reading women's lives and by illuminating the very act of compiling and honoring particular women's stories. Not itself a biography, it is a study of collective biographies (prosopographies) of women—those compendia of women's lives that sprung up regularly among the reading classes in part to celebrate, but as much to educate about, what women had, and therefore could, become. Booth's work teaches us not so much why people love biography, but what they are expected to learn, and teach, from the numerous individual stories gathered between a set of covers—or, in Booth's wonderful phrase, how "a...

Eleanor Marx’s Political Legacy—self sacrifice or self‐realisation?

Eleanor Marx’s life invites thought about the politics of Victorian feminism, what endures in the minds of later generations and what is forgotten. Eleanor moves in and out of the feminist pantheon—prophet of Marxism, Ibsenite new woman, trade union organiser—her elusiveness repeating her own self‐doubt and ambivalence towards feminism. This article sketches the sequence of identifications in Eleanor’s political subjectivity and some tensions between them. Virginia Woolf’s appeal to ‘find the law’ (like Antigone) encompasses Eleanor’s ambivalence, identifying it both as a perpetual theme of twentieth‐century feminist thought and of human subjectivity itself.

NURSERY POETICS: AN EXAMINATION OF LYRIC REPRESENTATIONS OF THE CHILD IN TENNYSON'S “THE PRINCESS”

“THE PRINCESS,”TENNYSON's narrative poem about a radically feminist princess and a cross-dressing prince, framed by an imagined argument between Victorian men and women concerning the role of women in modern society, has, understandably, formed the central text in a number of articles about nineteenth-century gender poetics. Critics have been eager to engage with the fictional authors of the narrative, casting Tennyson as, on the one hand, a bastion of Victorian patriarchy, and on the other a subversive feminist. Donald E. Hall, in an essay, published in his collectionFixing Patriarchy, is the most persuasive advocate for a masculinist Tennyson, presenting “The Princess” as undertaking a project of “subsumption,” in which the words and demands of the women are “ingested, modified and incorporated by the patriarch” (46). In an article entitled: “Marginalized Musical Interludes: Tennyson's Critiques of Conventionality in ‘The Princess,’“ Alisa Clapp-Itnyre provides a representative case for the defence, presenting the lyrics as “pivotal feminist commentaries” that work to interrupt and deconstruct the male narrative (229). Herbert Tucker locates a third way, identifying the poem as a “textbook Victorian compromise” (Tennyson352). He argues that it “avoids taking a position on a hotly debated issue by taking up any number of positions” and characterizes this compromise, not as a commitment to portraying a complex contemporary issue with integrity, but as the result of Tennyson's not caring particularly either way: “neither the rallying of Victorian feminism” he writes, “nor the patriarchal status quo was sufficient stimulus to commitment” (352). In order to open up a new line of enquiry into “The Princess” I would like to look beyond the gender questions that continue to be batted back and forth amongst Tennyson's critics and to offer the figure of the child as an alternative and more powerful cultural, aesthetic and professional stimulus to Tennyson's poem.

Book Notes

Book Notes Patrick Dandrey. Anthologie de l'humeur noire: Écrits sur la mélancolie d'Hippocrate à l'Encyclopédie. Paris: Gallimard–Promeneur, 2005. 791 pp. E39.99 (paperbound, 2-07-077547-X). This collection of translated and annotated primary sources is divided chronologically, with an introduction preceding each section. "L'antiquité classique" encompasses works by Hippocrates, Aristotle, Cicero, Seneca, Celsus, Rufus of Ephesus, and Galen, among others. "L'antiquité tardive" includes essays by Jean Chrysostome, Évagre le Pontique, Oribasius, and Alexander of Tralles. "De la médicine arabe à la clergie médiévale" comprises works by Constantine the African, Rhazes, Avicenna, Averroes, Hugues de Fouilloi, Hildegard of Bingen, William of Auvergne, and Bernard of Gordon. "Les renaissances" takes the reader from Petrarch to Ficin, Ofhuys, Melanchthon, Wier, and Huarte. Finally, "Du zénith baroque au crépuscule des Lumières" includes writings by Garzoni, Du Laurens, Guibelet, Robert Burton, Van Helmont, Sydenham, and Boissier de Sauvages. The book's concluding chapter is followed by a lexicon and an index. The Editors [End Page 496] Susan Hamilton, ed. Animal Welfare and Anti-vivisection 1870–1910: Nineteenth-Century Woman's Mission. 3 vols. London: Routledge, 2004. Vol. 1: Frances Power Cobbe, lxv + 390 pp. (facsimile), ill. (0-415-32142-5). Vol. 2: Anti-Vivisection Writings, ix + 353 pp. (facsimile) (0-415-32143-3). Vol. 3: Pro-Vivisection Writings, viii + 311 pp. (0-415-32144-1). Set $765.00 (0-415-32141-7). These three volumes in the series History of Feminism provide an incredibly important set of materials on the nineteenth-century controversy in England over the use of live animals in scientific research. The editor is Susan Hamilton, assistant professor in the Department of English and Film Studies at the University of Alberta, Canada. She is the editor of another important collection of Victorian writings called Criminals, Idiots, Women, and Minors: Victorian Writings by Women on Women (2004), and the author of Frances Power Cobbe and Victorian Feminism (2006). The first volume is completely dedicated to Frances Power Cobbe's writings. Born in 1822, she was not only one of the best-known feminist thinkers of her day, but also the leader of the antivivisection movement. In 1875 she founded the Society for the Protection of Animals Liable to Vivisection, one of the most important antivivisection organizations in England. The second volume presents other important antivivisection papers. The third volume is a collection of provivisection writings; particularly interesting are the pamphlets published by the Association for the Advancement of Medicine by Research founded in 1882. The sources collected in these volumes include articles in the established press (periodicals as well as newspapers), daily news clippings, medical editorials, propagandist pamphlets, government documents, and educational material. As Hamilton suggests, this collection not only "encourages an awareness of the cultural work of gender in the vivisection controversy" (1: xiv), but also "shows the ways in which questions asked from the perspective of women's history can complement those posed by the history of medicine in its approach to the vivisection controversy" (1: xiv–xv). In fact, the discussion about the scientific use of live animals was a complicated mix of different voices: there were those who advocated the new attitudes toward "pets" and new ideas about pain; those who defended the scientific status of physiology; those who tried to introduce and explain the effect of a new medical technology, anesthesia; and those who redefined the concept of "scientific expertise." The bringing of all these papers together will help historians writing their own stories to appreciate the complexity of this rich controversy. Massimo Petrozzi Johns Hopkins University [End Page 497] Eric von der Luft. SUNY Upstate Medical University: A Pictorial History. North Syracuse, N.Y.: Gegensatz Press, 2005. viii + 184 pp. Ill. $18.95 (paperbound, 1-933237-34-1). Histories of medical schools (usually celebratory) continue to appear in a regular fashion. While most are of interest primarily to those...

"The least 'Angelical' poem in the language": Political Economy, Gender, and the Heritage of Aurora Leigh

"The least 'Angelical' poem in the language": Political Economy, Gender, and the Heritage of Aurora Leigh Lana L. Dalley Since its canonical recovery in the 1970s, Elizabeth Barrett Browning's "novel-poem" Aurora Leigh has been a highly contested text in feminist literary criticism.1 Critics have focused on EBB's tenuous position as a female poet in mid-Victorian England, her fruitless search for literary "grandmothers," and her work in the creation of a "new poetry."2 More recently, critics like Tricia Lootens and Marjorie Stone have demonstrated how the mythologizing of EBB's life has eclipsed critical understanding of and engagement with the "novel-poem" since the late-nineteenth century.3 In the midst of this renewed critical interest, EBB's treatment of political economy in Aurora Leigh is largely unexplored critical terrain. EBB's breadth of scholarly reading is well acknowledged; Deirdre David writes, "Her library was her father's, replete with Classical literature and works of philosophy and political economy."4 The lack of critical attention to liberal economic theory in Aurora Leigh is particularly interesting given the poem's emphasis on women's waged labor, its direct reference to Adam Smith, and its iconic status in nineteenth-century feminist economic writing.5 Writers like Barbara Leigh Smith Bodichon, Bessie Raynor Parkes, Frances Power Cobbe, Millicent Garrett Fawcett, and Clara Collet directly cite Aurora Leigh as a key literary expression of their economic vision—a vision that is predicated on the tenets of classical economic theory. Their appropriation of Aurora Leigh provides a telling counter-tradition to the popular mythologies about EBB that began to be formed shortly after her death in 1861 and suggests a new way of reading her "novel-poem" along economic lines. This essay traces the ways in which liberal economic theory comes to bear on the poetic vision of Aurora Leigh and the manner in which Victorian feminist essayists draw upon the figure of Aurora Leigh to formulate their arguments for women's increased (economic) autonomy; such analysis situates EBB, as a writer, within her cultural milieu and identifies new ways of [End Page 525] understanding the heritage of Aurora Leigh. The fact that Aurora Leigh is so self-consciously a "woman's poem"—written by and about a woman and consciously upholding ideologies of sexual difference—makes it a fruitful site for studying the tensions that arise when writing women into the liberal economic model. Aurora Leigh resists being characterized as purely an economic figure—she aspires to a "higher" purpose through her poetry—although, tellingly, it is her vocation as poet (a vocation that she describes as "Most serious work, most necessary work / As any of the economists'") that uncovers the material dimensions and determinations of her character (2:459-260).6 EBB draws attention to the limitations of the liberal economic paradigm for conceptualizing women's waged labor and sexual difference through the seemingly incongruous union of economics and Christianity at the poem's conclusion. Like the "economists" Aurora alludes to, EBB critiques paternalistic dependence, pauperism, and over-legislation; unlike the economists, she situates women and morality at the center of her critiques. Women, Property, and Wages Before exploring Aurora Leigh's engagement with political economy I wish to briefly delineate the relationships between the nineteenth-century women's rights movement and political economy and, more specifically, between EBB and the women's rights agenda. Like many of her contemporaries, she rejected aspects of the formalized women's rights movement, while simultaneously writing literary texts that expose the injustices suffered by women.7 In a letter written in 1856, she writes, "Bessie Parkes is writing very vigorous articles on the woman question, in opposition to Mr. Patmore, poet & husband, who expounds infamous doctrines on the same subject . . .—Oh, if you heard Bessie Parkes!—she & the rest of us militant, foam with rage."8 In this letter EBB aligns herself with Parkes and other "militants" and opposes herself to...

A Victorian Feminist Christian: Josephine Butler, the Prostitutes and God ? Lisa Severine Nolland

A Victorian Feminist Christian: Josephine Butler, the Prostitutes and God ? Lisa Severine Nolland

Frances Power Cobbe: Victorian Feminist, Journalist, Reformer (review)

Frances Power Cobbe: Victorian Feminist, Journalist, Reformer (review)

The New Woman in Fiction and in Fact (review)

Reviewed by: The New Woman in Fiction and in Fact Bettina Tate Pedersen (bio) Angelique Richardson and Chris Willis, The New Woman in Fiction and in Fact (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2002), pp. vii+258, $65.00 cloth, $19.95 paper. Angelique Richardson, Lecturer in Victorian Literature and Culture at the University of Exeter, and Chris Willis, former scholar and member of the editorial staff of Gender and History, have together edited a fascinating collection of articles that explore the range and complexity of the New Woman icon emerging in the 1890s. The fourteen essays begin with Talia Schaffer's "'Nothing but Foolscap and Ink': Inventing the New Woman," which delineates the broad tension between the media caricature of the New Woman as "the unsexed, terrifying, violent Amazon ready to overturn the world" (39) and real New Women figures. In addressing questions of why such a caricature appeared, who found it useful, and what sort of negotiations progressive feminist women made around the label, Schaffer provides an effective foundation for the more particular investigations that follow. Willis's essay distinguishes between commercial and polemical New Woman fiction, noting that the less didactic commercial species reached a wider audience than the polemical (written by recognized New Women authors), but also depicted heroines capitulating to marriage in the end. Ann Heilmann and Laura Marcus study the relationship between real and fictive New Women and hysteria, emerging psychoanalysis, and daydreaming. Heilmann examines an English, American, and German New Woman response (from Sarah Grand, Charlotte Perkins Gilman, and Bertha Pappenheim respectively) to the medical establishment's categorization of hysteria, while Marcus argues that New Women fiction represented both feminism as external and hysteria/daydreaming as internal manifestations of female rebellion. Sarah Wintle explores the technological influences of the bicycle and automobile, and Sally Ledger the aesthetic influences of Ibsen's theatre (via George Bernard Shaw) on the New Woman and the shape of British Victorian feminism. Essays by Angelique Richardson, Matthew Beaumont, Gail Cunningham, Regina Gagnier, Ann Ardis, Lesley Hall, Rebecca Stott, and Carolyn Burdett elucidate important tensions informing constructions of the New Woman. Richardson traces the opposition between essentialism in biological determinism and social construction in utopian possibilities, with particular focus on Mona Caird, who offered a radical feminist resistance to eugenic feminism. Beaumont highlights the fin de siècle's "concern with post-capitalist or post-patriarchal social intercourse" (213) and probes the relationship between feminism and utopianism in a representative utopian novel by Elizabeth Corbett. Cunningham's "'He-Notes': Reconstructing Masculinity" examines New Womanhood and masculinity [End Page 429] in texts by George Egerton and Ménie Murial Dowie to find texts that did not offer the usual erasure or surrender of New Woman characters but instead treated males/masculinity as something to be accepted or rejected by the New Woman herself. Gagnier revisits the New Womanhood versus Male Decadence binary using an "optic of difference and tension rather than regret" (239) to elucidate the tension between "productive bodies" / "productivist aesthetics" and "pleasured bodies" / "hedonics" (241); whereas Ardis scrutinizes whether or not the New Hellenism – which did so much to legitimize and elevate male love – actually "enable[d] or discredit[ted] female intellectuality" (108). Hall recuperates a history of Stella Brown, less important in regard to suffrage than to radical feminism focused on female sexuality and sexual desire and a woman's right to control her own sexuality by refusing maternity. Stott and Burdett explore the complementary and contradictory relationships between the discourses of colonization and feminism with special attention to works of Olive Schreiner. Most essays in the collection give some attention to the periodical press, either as source of primary texts, or for contemporary commentary upon those primary texts or as a medium for shaping the popular cultural responses to the New Woman. However, Stott, Beaumont, Hall, Richardson, and Cunningham appear to draw on periodicals most deeply. The overall literary and historical success of Richardson and Willis's volume renders it a "must have" for any academic library; the introduction alone is invaluable for anyone studying New Woman fiction or fin de siècle feminism. By and large the essays combine complex reading and insight with accessible prose. As...

“A whole series of frightful cases”: Domestic Violence, the Periodical Press and Victorian Feminist Writing

This essay raises key questions about Victorian feminism’s aims, strategies and sites of articulation through an analysis of Frances Power Cobbe’s “Wife Torture in England.” Exploring the ways in which Cobbe’s essay makes violated women’s bodies meaningful so as to intervene in political narratives about domestic violence, the essay also focuses on Cobbe’s feminist appropriation of the humanitarian narrative in an attempt to represent the beaten woman in and to 19th-century society. Analyzing the political risks and benefits of representing the physical pain of marriage by exploring the processes through which Cobbe’s article constructs intervention as “necessary,” the paper illuminates how Cobbe produces a new cultural narrative about feminism by using a popular culture narrative mode—the narrative of sensation—to specific political ends in a particular textual space, the periodical press.

Justifying Their Modern Sisters: History Writing and the British Suffrage Movement

Justifying Their Modern Sisters: History Writing and the British Suffrage Movement Maria DiCenzo On the 25* there was a leading article in "The Nation" which makes one well-nigh despair of the intelligence of its author. Anyone so ignorant of the true history of the Suffrage movement might, one would mink, have had the modesty to refrain from commenting on it. The writer alludes to this "fiveyear -old agitation for securing the Padiamentary vote to some women." Has he, then, never heard of the great agitation started byJohn Stuart Mill, worked for by devoted men and women like Mrs. Wolstenholme Elmy, Lydia Becker,Jacob Bright, and others; of the petitions, one of them signed by over a quarter of a million; of the innumerable Bills and resolutions! ("How History is Written" 309) The remainder of this article, which expresses "grievous resentfmentj" on the part of members of the National Union of Women's Suffrage Societies at such a "monstrous misrepresentation" which can only do "insidious, poisonous work," helps to clarify that it is the Women's Social and Political Union to which this uninformed commentator has referred and mistaken for the "general body of women Suffragists." Out of context, this brief front-page tirade on "history" might escape notice, but its importance lies in the fact that it signals the increasingly fraught relationship between suffrage organizations in the Edwardian period and the extent to which the history of "the movement" came to represent competitive ground as they worked to legitimate their demands and tactics, in the interests of solidifying and expanding support for the cause. In a roughly ten-year period between 1902 and 1912 there was a proliferation 40volume 31 number 1 Medea at the Fin de Siècle of full-length histories by women claiming to trace the feminist movement, women's suffrage, and more specifically, the militant suffrage movement1 Given the hostility to women's activism in these years, it is clear that these narratives of "women's history" constituted an oppositional discourse — challenging the status quo — but they were not informed by a singular approach. An analysis of the discourse in the context of other types of publications, such as the official organs produced by various leagues, reveals that these narratives were instrumental in constructing different feminist/activist identities which reflected, in turn, the organizational cultures in this period. At issue, particularly between the NUWSS and the WSPU, was the impact and efficacy of the "old suffrage movement" (the activities of nineteenth-century "pioneers") versus the forms of activism initiated by the "new suffrage movement" of the early twentieth-century. It is by now a given in the scholarship that the wave of histories, biographies and autobiographies published in the interwar years must be read as historically situated and politically/personally interested (Corbett, Dodd, Holton, Kean, Mayhall, Swindells). Kathryn Dodd builds a persuasive case forwhy Ray Strachey's highly respected and frequendy referenced The Cause:A ShortHistory of the Women's Movementin Britain (1928) must be read, not as "a transparent medium through which we can locate facts aboutwomen's history, the truth or even the past," but as an account deeply implicated in middle-class progressive liberal politics of the 1920s, the consequences of which are the marginalization of some groups and the vilification of others ("Cultural Politics and Women's Historical Writing" 127). Similarly, Antoinette Burton examines earlier Victorian feminist historiography as a strand or dimension of the traditional narrative of Whig history and demonstrates the ways in which feminists in the period accepted and employed national-imperial ideology in justifying their own emancipationist claims. Sandra Stanley Holton has undertaken the most extensive examination of the historiography of the British suffrage movement. She identifies major tendencies in the founding schools of suffrage history established by women historians and links them to subsequent Victorian Review (2005)41 M. DiCenzo approaches to and interpretations of the campaign right up to the present She oudines the chief characteristics of what she terms "constitutionalist" and "militant" histories.2 The first constitutionalist histories, an important example of which is Helen Blackburn's Women's Suffrage (1902), Holton argues were Whiggish and Anglocentric, taking a long view back (sometimes to...