Victorian Heroine Research Articles

Reading the Victorian Novel’s Future in Never Let Me Go

ABSTRACT: Kazuo Ishiguro’s Never Let Me Go (2005) exemplifies the contemporary Anglophone novel’s inheritance of the Victorian novel. Specifically, it reworks this historical genre’s thematization of an unchanging present for marginalized subjects. In Ishiguro’s counterfactual Britain, cloned beings are raised for organ harvesting. The predetermined condition of their trajectories applies to countless Victorian heroines. By comparing Ishiguro’s protagonist to the heroine of George Eliot’s Daniel Deronda (1876), I demonstrate that Ishiguro’s novel recontextualizes a gendered lack of futurity in the Victorian novel. Additionally, I connect pro-clone advocacy in Never Let Me Go to mid-Victorian liberalism. Despite professing objectivity and disinterestedness, the advocates reproduce the British public’s subordination of clones to a class of non-persons. As one of the Victorian novel’s futures, Never Let Me Go illustrates how the Anglophone novel still grapples with unjust experiences of the present while challenging readers’ assumptions of personhood, individuality, and difference.

기혼여성 예술가의 초상: 모나 케어드와 다나이데스

This paper aims at reading Mona Caird’s The Daughters of Danaus, as a feminist attempt to establish a new form of Künstlerroman portraying the frustrated artist as a married woman with three children. As the most ‘notorious’ feminist whose controversial essays denounce marriage as a failed institution, Caird alludes to the Greek mythology of the Danaides, who kill their husbands on the wedding night to be punished in the underworld with an endless toil to fetch water. Caird portrays an aspiring and frustrated female artist, given no other choice than to flee from the family or to suffer from the exhausting labour of caring. Hadria, whose musical talent is so rare among the Victorian heroines, has to give up her ambition to be a composer, in order to meet her family obligations. Caird presents various types of independent women, a novelist and a social worker, more or less acceptable in their contemporary society, and goes further to raise a question of woman’s basic human right to develop her talent and to give expression to her rare genius as a musical composer. Caird, herself a married woman with a son, is a trailblazing “New Woman” writer who tries hard to make the woman’s paid work and family life compatible and peacefully coexistent. Describing Hadria’s passion and artistic ambition, with her breakthrough and frustration, Caird not only records the deadlocked conditions of female artists at the fin-de-siecle, but also makes various suggestions to help ameliorate the contemporary gender relations, throwing light on the ‘feminist dilemma’ of our age.

The Muslin Gown as “A White Unblemished Page”: Sensational Femininities and Fictions in Mary Elizabeth Braddon’s Aurora Floyd and The Doctor’s Wife

ABSTRACT This essay argues that in Mary Elizabeth Braddon’s Aurora Floyd (1863) and The Doctor’s Wife (1864) the heroines’ muslin gowns function as sites where conflicting notions of femininity and of literature are explored. The white gown represents the Victorian feminine ideal of innocence and virginity, yet Aurora and Isabel’s gowns are inscribed with models of subversive femininity drawn from literature and history, thereby contradicting the analogy of the muslin gown as “a white unblemished page”. 1 In the 1860s, white muslin came with a loaded set of cultural meanings, derived from its origins as a product of British imperialism, and as the fashionable garb of the gothic heroine. Aurora and Isabel use these references and intertextual clues to fashion new subjectivities as heroines who traverse and transgress conventional literary representations of Victorian femininity and the Victorian heroine.

Mary Seacole: nursing care in many lands

Mary Seacole, a Jamaican/Scottish nurse and businesswoman, was a celebrated Victorian heroine, due to her bravery in nursing soldiers in the Crimean War (1853-6). She was also admired for her use of Creole herbal remedies to relieve the symptoms of infectious illnesses such as cholera in Jamaica and Panama. .

HUNTING GWENDOLEN: ANIMETAPHOR INDANIEL DERONDA

In George Eliot'sDanielDeronda, animal vitality figures prominently in shaping the human shell, to use an opening animal metaphor. Approaching the significance of the animal leads to a reading of Gwendolen Grandcourt's character as a responsible creature. Gwendolen is Eliot's heroine, one half of the pair of protagonists around whom the novel revolves. Eliot's fantastic character takes shape in three movements, each punctuated by its own animal metaphor: Gwendolen morphs from Lamia to mastered-animal to white doe. Animal imagery appears at the edge of the human, the point at which humanity gains and loses subjectivity, and Gwendolen's novel is fundamentally one of finding her place in the world, her singularity, her responsibility. Images of animals stand in the linguistic gaps – in the places words fail – to figure the subject.1Animals appear at the end of the ability of language to mean. Nevertheless, this analysis is not intended to encompass the complex range of animal representations in George's Eliot's oeuvre, or even to catalog every example inDaniel Deronda. Instead, it suggests the possibility of using animal metaphor as a map for reading a Victorian heroine.

<em>Women and Personal Property in the Victorian Novel</em>, by Deborah Wynne

Reviewed by: Women and Personal Property in the Victorian Novel Sara L. Maurer (bio) Women and Personal Property in the Victorian Novel, by Deborah Wynne; pp. viii + 179. Aldershot and Burlington: Ashgate, 2010, £55.00, $99.95. Ownership, rather than personal property, comprises the heart of Deborah Wynne’s most recent book. She suggests that in discussions of property in literature, Marxists treat all things as commodities, while more recently thing theorists have explored the peculiar qualities that make objects autonomous, expressive of realities beyond the marketplace. But neither approach, Wynne contends, has much to say about the relationship that constitutes the ownership of objects: the ties between owner and thing owned. In making ownership and not property the basis of her approach to the novels of Charles Dickens, George Eliot, and Henry James, Wynne produces a textured analysis of a truth all readers of Victorian novels know, but too often ignore: the laws that through most of the nineteenth century prevented married women from owning the property in and with which they lived did not prevent them from exerting control over it. Mrs. Weller in The Pickwick Papers (1836–37) makes a will despite her married status. In The Mill on the Floss (1860) Aunt Glegg similarly anticipates controlling the posthumous disposition of what she considers her property. For Wynne, what these women teach us about all ownership is its performative, almost self-constituting nature: “Victorian novels . . . abound with representations of women who, believing themselves to be property owners, act as property owners by writing wills and appropriating the things they desire regardless of the fact that they had no legal rights to property. These characters forcefully demonstrate that property exists most powerfully in the imagination” (25). Holding their property first and foremost in their own minds, such women expand our understanding of what sorts of relationships people might have with property. The wills of real women in the nineteenth century, Wynne argues, show them disposing of personal property which they did not legally own in a way that marked out networks of friendship and kinship. They willed specific objects to people based on those objects’ personal and emotional associations, not their intended uses. Victorian novels, too, she points out, portray women as imbuing their property with intimate meanings rather than capitulating to the meanings assigned to objects by market value or mass production. For Wynne, Victorian heroines commonly experience the personal objects of their daily life as one of two types of property: biographical property, the [End Page 551] meaning of which bears witness to the life of the owner (for instance, monogrammed linens or miniature portraits), and reciprocal property that acts as an audience before which an owner performs her identity. Dolls and pets might be the most common of women’s reciprocal property, but such reciprocity is not precisely determined by the form of the object, as is proven by the reciprocal property Isabel Archer claims in “an old haircloth sofa” in her grandmother’s spare room, “to which she had confided a hundred childish sorrows” (qtd. in Wynne 134). Victorian society trivialized women’s relationships with personal property as the love of trinkets characteristic of childish minds. Wynne responds to this charge by arguing that women’s highly intimate communing with personal objects actually offered a more clear-eyed understanding of the social relationships behind property than did the market-driven commodity fetishism Karl Marx diagnosed in early capitalism. Such a personalized relationship to property has utopian potential, one that Wynne illustrates in her reading of the community of women that forms around the non-market circulation of Esther Summerson’s monogrammed handkerchief in Bleak House (1852–53). And while Wynne’s literary readings tend to celebrate the productive potential contained in women’s ways of owning, she also acknowledges that they have darker possibilities. She points out that Great Expectations’s (1860–61) Miss Havisham and Little Dorrit’s (1855–57) Mrs. Clennam both manipulate their household objects to make a dystopian theater of personal meaning that both estranges objects from their socially determined uses and values and disrupts any possibility for community. Wynne’s book is invigorating in the way it breaks with...

The novelty of newspapers: Victorian fiction after the invention of the news

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS ILLUSTRATIONS INTRODUCTION: THE AGE OF NEWSPAPERS Newspapers in Different Voices A Nation of News Readers A Newspaperized World PART I: THE FRONT PAGE 1. THE SHIPPING INTELLIGENCE Shipwrecks and Secret Tears from Dickens to Stoker The Latest Shipping Intelligence Why Victorian Heroines Read the Shipping News Shipwreck Spine Secret Tears for Ships Lost at Sea 2. THE PERSONAL ADVERTISEMENTS Advertisements, the Agony Column, and Sensation Novels of the 1860s The Short History of a Miserable Life A Double State of Existence The Sensation Novel in Embryo PART II: THE INNER PAGES 3. THE LEADING ARTICLE The Whispering Conscience in Trollope's Palliser Novels A Horror of Newspaper Men Thunderbolts from Mount Olympus Trollope's Whispering Conscience The Promise of Big Type in the Morning 4. THE PERSONAL INTERVIEW Wishing to Be Interviewed in Henry James Interviewed! The Rise of the Interview Society James's Overhearing Audience The Age of Interviewing 5. THE FOREIGN CORRESPONDENCE Conrad's Wild Story of a Journalist Brains Pulsating to the Rhythm of Journalistic Phrases Stanley's Journalism by Warfare Kurtz's Letters from Africa CONCLUSION: THE BACK PAGE NOTES BIBLIOGRAPHY INDEX

I Shall Make No Excuse: The Narrative Odyssey of Mary Seacole

I shall make no excuse to my readers for giving them a pretty full history of my struggles to become a Crimean heroine! (76) says Mary Seacole in her travel book, Wonderful Adventures of Mrs. Seacole in Many Lands. This statement encapsulates project of her entire work. While Wonderful Adventures was marketed as a travel book, a genre enjoying high popularity at time, it was in fact, a kind of autobiography in which Seacole, conscious of audience expectations, employed sophisticated rhetorical strategies to establish herself as a perfect Victorian heroine. Since Seacole presents herself in her text as unmarried, childless, not overtly Protestant (except in her disdain for Catholicism), not English, and not white, this is an impressive literary feat. Seacole succeeded brilliantly. Not only did Wonderful Adventures become an overnight success in Great Britain, going into its second printing within a year of its first publication in 1857, but Seacole made enough money from profits to live well after returning from Crimea virtually bankrupt. Since Seacole needed to earn money from her book she adopted pose of travel writer, and in this case, 'lady' travel writer, in order to achieve these goals. In Transatlantic Manners Christopher Mulvey explains obstacles travel writers needed to negotiate to publish. He compares travel literature to fiction, claiming the most pervasive fiction constructed by nineteenth-century travel writer was that of gentility of writer and

Till Death Do Us Part: The Consumptive Victorian Heroine in Popular Romantic Fiction

The Journal of Popular CultureVolume 37, Issue 2 p. 287-308 Till Death Do Us Part: The Consumptive Victorian Heroine in Popular Romantic Fiction Basil Meyer, Basil Meyer Open University, LondonSearch for more papers by this author Basil Meyer, Basil Meyer Open University, LondonSearch for more papers by this author First published: 30 September 2003 https://doi.org/10.1111/1540-5931.00069AboutPDF ToolsRequest permissionExport citationAdd to favoritesTrack citation ShareShare Give accessShare full text accessShare full-text accessPlease review our Terms and Conditions of Use and check box below to share full-text version of article.I have read and accept the Wiley Online Library Terms and Conditions of UseShareable LinkUse the link below to share a full-text version of this article with your friends and colleagues. Learn more.Copy URL Share a linkShare onFacebookTwitterLinkedInRedditWechat Volume37, Issue2November 2003Pages 287-308 RelatedInformation

Plotting the Mother: Caroline Norton, Helen Huntingdon, and Isabel Vane

The proper Victorian heroine neither acts nor plots. Heroines as disparate as Fanny Price of Mansfield Park and Gwendolen Harleth of Daniel Deronda prove their virtue by failing as actresses.' When Fanny protests, Indeed, I cannot act, we know that it is because she cannot be other than what she is: virtuous.2 Gwendolen Harleth's aborted attempt to make a career as an actress seems, in Daniel Deronda, to signal her essential difference from Princess Halm-Eberstein, mother who has abandoned Daniel in order to pursue her acting career. Gwendolen is flawed, but at least she is not an actress. In dominant literary form for women writers, courtship novel, heroine is a modest woman, usually passive, unconscious of her sexuality, in transition from father's house-or a substitute therefor-to husband's house. We follow her gradual awakening as others plot and act around her-for her marriage, for its frustration, for money or power or influenceuntil their plots finally converge with her (heretofore unarticulated) desires, and she is married. Or, perhaps, their plots prevail, she transgresses, and she dies.3 In either case, her story usually ends when she must cast off one roleusually that of daughter or eligible young thing-for another-usually that of wife, although sometimes (in case of transgressive heroine) mother or mistress. Heroines of Victorian novel must, it seems, be one thing only; they must not act roles, but embody them. Motherhood is particularly problematic, then, for as Marianne Hirsch notes, the multiplicity of 'women' is nowhere more obvious than for figure of mother, who is always both mother and daughter-and often wife and/or lover as well.4 This difficulty about motherhood provides one possible explanation for why heroines of Victorian novels are so rarely mothers.5 As Hirsch continues, the nineteenth-century heroine ... tends not only to be separated from figure and story of her mother, but herself tries to avoid maternity at all costs.6 Victorian heroines, especially heroines of novels by women, such as Jane Eyre, Dorothea Brooke, or Maggie Tulliver, tend to be motherless or

Victorian Heroines: Representations of Femininity in Nineteenth-Century Literature and Art. Kimberly Reynolds , Nicola HumbleThe Afterlife of Property: Domestic Security and the Victorian Novel. Jeff NunokawaOutside the Pale: Cultural Exclusion, Gender Difference, and the Victorian Woman Writer. Elsie B. Michie

<i>Victorian Heroines: Representations of Femininity in Nineteenth-Century Literature and Art</i>. Kimberly Reynolds , Nicola Humble<i>The Afterlife of Property: Domestic Security and the Victorian Novel</i>. Jeff Nunokawa<i>Outside the Pale: Cultural Exclusion, Gender Difference, and the Victorian Woman Writer</i>. Elsie B. Michie

Victorian heroines: representations of femininity in nineteenth-century literature and art

Kimberley Reynolds and Nicola Humble here provide a radical revision of constructions of femininity. Using a wide range of textual examples (including children's literature, sensations fiction, diaries, and autobiography) as well as visual illustrations, offers a new look at the representation of women and sexuality in nineteenth-century literature and painting. Arguing against the conventional dyadic model that interprets fiction in terms of a rigid distinction between the good and bad, the sexual and asexual woman, the authors suggest a more complex paradigm, simultaneously concealing and revealing contradictory attitudes to womanhood. The book explores the highly erotic fantasy elements frequently found in widely disseminated orthodox female images, and effectively demonstrates how both male and female writers used similar techniques to subvert this orthodoxy. Drawing on contemporary critical and cultural theories, Victorian Heroines is a lucid and accessible analysis of the depiction of women during this period, challenging the prevalent views of recent decades.

Revising Old Scripts: The Fusion of Independence and Intimacy in Aurora Leigh

Elizabeth Barrett Browning's Aurora Leigh is an unusual Victorian heroine because she ultimately combines career and marriage. Although Aurora's story has been recognized as an important revision of a traditional woman's story by such famous readers as Virginia Woolf (182–92) and Ellen Moers (60–62), some feminist critics have been disturbed by the ending, even as they describe its compelling feminist vision. Rachel Blau DuPlessis, while acknowledging that the story is a “rescripting,” argues that “being an artist is, at the end, reinterpreted as self-sacrifice for the woman, and thus is aligned with feminine ideology” (87). Sandra Gilbert and Susan Gubar argue that Aurora has to learn “not to be herself,” that is, she must learn sympathy and service (576–77). Deirdre David goes even further in asserting Barrett Browning's conservatism when she argues that Aurora's art does not subvert Romney's authority; instead, feminine art serves “male socialist politics” and “a woman's voice [speaks] patriarchal discourse – boldly, passionately, and without rancor” (134).

Florence Nightingale and the Salisbury Incident

Florence Nightingale's astute handling of mismanagement in Free Gifts Stores during the Crimean War underscored her administrative ability. Miss Nightingale went to Scutari ostensibly to nurse the British soldiers, and while there encountered innumerable instances of administrative and managerial ineffectiveness and difficulties. Among these were the problems in the accountability and deployment of supplies as well as the assignment and supervision of female personnel-an untried situation. The article identifies the misdirected organizational management which occasioned the introduction of women into British war nursing and the voluntary participation of the British citizenry in providing supplies and comfort for the Army. Through analysis of Miss Nightingale's and others' private correspondence, the problems of personnel management and supply distribution are brought into sharp focus. The interplay of policies and principles to which Miss Nightingale subscribed, the human frailty of one of her women, Miss Nightingale's illness, and the confusion and stress which characterized the Crimean War are discussed. The compassion, understanding, and rectitude as well as the human values to which Miss Nightingale subscribed in protecting a woman guilty of a breach of trust and felony and the troublesome slanderous attack to which Miss Nightingale was subjected at the instigation of her foes on the home front provide a background for the presentation of the Salisbury affair as an interesting aspect of historical research into the life of the Victorian heroine.

Intelligence and Self-Awareness in North and South: A Matter of Sex and Class

Intelligence and Self-Awareness in North and South: A Matter ofSex and Class NANCY D. MANN North and South seems to me to be die most tiieoretically interesting of Elizabeth Gaskell's novels, because it concentrates on a crucial problem for the development of die novel in die nineteentii century, the relationship between abstract intelligence and self-awareness, and the ways in which diis relationship may be affected by factors of sex and class. Margaret Hale differs from other Victorian heroines in having what I may call "abstract" or "objective," as distinct from "personal" or "feminized" intelligence, and bodi writer and heroine violate traditional expectations by dealing widi matters of public interest as well as with what Ian Watt has called die sphere of "private experience." Other Victorian conventions, however, to which Mrs. Gaskell consciously adhered, make this externally-directed intelligence positively incompatible with an equally intelligent self-knowledge. By "objective" or "abstract" intelligence, I mean here die capacity for thinking abstracdy and distinterestedly about political, social, intellectual and religious matters. Margaret Hale is one of the few nineteendi -century heroines who are not only described, but shown as being vitally interested in public questions, and as having and expressing, in equal conversation with men, definite and respect-worthy opinions on these questions. Take, for instance, the first political argument between Margaret and Mr. Thornton. Margaret enters the conversation initially from motives which may be described as emotional and largely personal ; she is "roused by die aspersion on her beloved Soudi," and homeNancy D. Mann received her Ph.D. (1973) from Stanford. She now lives in Boulder, Colorado, where she is writing a book on Victorian fantasy. 24A MATTER OF SEX AND CLASS sickness makes her voice so unsteady as to prevent her from speaking more than a few sentences. But die speech itself shows a blending of social concern which is largely emotional in its orientation— I see men here going about in the streets who look ground down by some pinching sorrow or care—who are not only sufferers but haters. Now, in the South we have our poor, but there is not that terrible expression in their countenances of a sullen sense of injustíce which I see here.1 —with the beginnings of a dieoretical criticism of laissez-faire capitalism : "the gambling spirit of trade." Moreover, the conversation going on around her very shordy lifts her out of her homesick yearning, and involves her in a more general argument: "somehow she was compelled to listen; she could no longer abstract herself in her own thoughts" (p. 124). Her second contribution again has reference to human relationships , but it is now phrased with no reference to specific emotions nor even with any reference to personal observation of specific social groups: Margaret has begun to argue abstracdy about the relations between capital and labor, and her voice is "clear" and "cold." In die next political discussion Margaret takes a somewhat more active part. The argument centers on the question whedier die masters have a right to treat their workmen as children, by refusing to give reasons for their policies and generally exercising the "despotism" which Thornton claims "is the best kind of government for them." Margaret, of course, argues in favor of the "equality of friendship" and "mutual dependence." Masters and workmen, she claims, are obligated, because dieir welfares are interdependent, to a frank exchange of views and advice. The consistendy religious but entirely nonsectarian language which Gaskell makes Margaret use in this scene is one clue to die author's partial identification widi her character: there is no human law to prevent the employers from utterly wastíng or throwing away all their money, if they choose; but that there are 'Elizabeth Gaskell, North and South (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1970), pp. 122-3. All subsequent page references are to this edition. ROCKY MOUNTAIN REVIEW25 passages in the Bible which would rather imply—to me, at least—that they neglected their duty as stewards if they did so . . . every man has had to stand in an unchrisdan and isolated positíon . . . God has made us so diat we must be mutually dependent, (pp. 165, 169) The other clue, of...

Intelligence and Self-Awareness in "North and South": A Matter of Sex and Class

North and South seems to me to be the most theoretically interesting of Elizabeth Gaskell's novels, because it concentrates on a crucial problem for the development of the novel in the nineteenth century, the relationship between intelligence and self-awareness, and the ways in which this relationship may be affected by factors of sex and class. Margaret Hale differs from other Victorian heroines in having what I may call abstract or objective, as distinct from personal or feminized intelligence, and both writer and heroine violate traditional expectations by dealing with matters of public interest as well as with what Ian Watt has called the sphere of private experience. Other Victorian conventions, however, to which Mrs. Gaskell consciously adhered, make this externally-directed intelligence positively incompatible with an equally intelligent self-knowledge. By objective or abstract intelligence, I mean here the capacity for thinking abstractly and distinterestedly about political, social, intellectual and religious matters. Margaret Hale is one of the few nineteenth-century heroines who are not only described, but shown as being vitally interested in public questions, and as having and expressing, in equal conversation with men, definite and respect-worthy opinions on these questions. Take, for instance, the first political argument between Margaret and Mr. Thornton. Margaret enters the conversation initially from motives which may be described as emotional and largely personal; she is roused by the aspersion on her beloved South, and home-

Jane Eyre's Imagination

Jane Eyre's Imagination