Victorian Sentimentality Research Articles

"Oriental Leaven": Anna and Rose Strunsky in the Unpublished Writings of Jack London and Sinclair Lewis

"Oriental Leaven":Anna and Rose Strunsky in the Unpublished Writings of Jack London and Sinclair Lewis Ashley Walters (bio) In 1960, the remnants of San Francisco's turn-of-the-century literary scene gathered in Sonoma Valley to dedicate the Jack London State Historic Park.1 Reporting on the event, the Forverts (Jewish Daily Forward) took the opportunity to resurrect a long-since-forgotten part of London's story.2 At a San Francisco commemoration of the Paris Commune hosted by the Socialist Labor Party in December 1899, the young author met a twenty-two-year-old East European Jewish immigrant—an aspiring writer and rising figure on the radical left by the name of Anna Strunsky.3 A tumultuous love affair ensued, spanning more than two years and spawning a semi-successful joint literary venture, a string of broken hearts, and a scandalized public. The Forverts explained that Anna was one of a large Jewish family of budding intellectuals and writers from Babinots, a small village in what is today Belarus. The celebrated New York Times editor and author of No Mean City, Simeon Strunsky, was a first cousin. Ira Gershwin and playwright George S. Kaufman married into the family. It was the "San Francisco Strunskys," the Forverts noted, who boasted two main "attractions": the young and charismatic sisters Anna and Rose. In recounting the love affair between London and Anna and its unhappy ending, the Forverts underscored London's foray into eugenics and explained that while "he was madly in love and had wanted to marry [Anna], he [End Page 323] wouldn't because she was not of Anglo-Saxon descent."4 While a bit of an oversimplification, the author is correct that modern ideas about race, gender, and love figured prominently in their story. Eight years after London and Strunsky's affair came to an end, Rose Strunsky found herself being courted by a young and volatile writer, new to Greenwich Village. A recent arrival to New York, Harry Sinclair Lewis attempted to integrate himself into a number of literary and political circles, and it was around this time that he began to pursue a number of romantic interests that proved rather disappointing.5 It is unclear how Rose and Lewis first became acquainted. She had only recently arrived in New York after an extended stay in Europe.6 Both were active in the same political and literary circles, suggesting they met through mutual acquaintances. That winter, Lewis asked Rose to accompany him to the Anarchists' Christmastime Ball, an invitation she declined.7 He continued to pursue her until she returned to Europe in January 1911, after which he quickly directed his interests elsewhere. A more complex portrait of their relationship emerges, however, from the more than thirty unpublished poems he wrote for her during this time. They suggest he was a periodic presence in her life—although ironically, her absence is a pronounced theme in the poetry—juxtaposing the futile pursuit of a young American man with the larger-than-life persona of an East European Jewish revolutionary. Although almost a decade separated London's and Lewis's romantic interests in the Strunsky sisters, both men at the time were unsettled in life, love, and their careers, and they were contemplating many of the same social, political, and cultural questions preoccupying other young thinkers at the turn of the century. The story of intimacies and desires between London, Lewis, and the Strunsky sisters, in addition to the unpublished literary depictions of Jewish femininities that these women inspired, speak to larger questions about the image of the East European Jew in early-twentieth-century American thought, particularly within progressive circles and on the radical left. Scholars have long noted how Anglo-American intellectuals and writers were drawn to East European Jewish immigrants because of their ties to the revolutionary centers of Europe and the vibrant cultural world they [End Page 324] established on the Lower East Side. Rejecting the Victorian sentimentality of a previous generation, American thinkers were eager to explore new meaningful forms of expression, representation, and association, a quest they characterized as a search for "authenticity." As cosmopolitan and urbane denizens of the working class...

The Westerns and War Films of John Ford by Sue Matheson (review)

Reviewed by: The Westerns and War Films of John Ford by Sue Matheson Robert Weldon Whalen Sue Matheson. The Westerns and War Films of John Ford. New York: Rowman and Littlefield, 2016. Acknowledgments, introduction, aftermath, illustrations, notes, index. Pp. xxi; 339. $45.00, cloth. Think of the famous filmmaker John Ford and you'll probably think of the famous actor, John Wayne. Think of John Ford and John Wayne and you might imagine a triumphalist, violent, strutting Americana, and you wouldn't be entirely wrong. Sue Matheson's The Westerns and War Films of John Ford would show you, though, that your opinion was awfully incomplete. This exhaustively researched and elegantly written study convincingly argues that when it comes to John Ford and his westerns and war films, what meets the eye is much more than you might think. A professor at the University College of the North in Manitoba and an accomplished film scholar, Matheson is the author of, among other works, Love in Western Film and Television: Lonely Hearts and Happy Trails (2013) and A Fistful of Icons: Essays on Frontier Fixtures of the American Western (2017). The Westerns and War Films of John Ford is part of Rowman and Littlefield's "Film and History" series. Matheson organizes The Westerns and War Films of John Ford chronologically. She begins, in Chapter 1, with a brief overview of Ford's long career. Each of the remaining thirteen chapters considers selected Ford films including, for example, early works like Straight Shooting (1917) and The Iron Horse (1924); Ford's World War II films; the "Cavalry Trilogy" –Fort Apache, She Wore a Yellow Ribbon, and Rio Grande (1947-1950); The Searchers (1956) and The Horse Soldiers (1959); and finally, The Man Who Shot Liberty Valence (1962) and Cheyenne Autumn (1964). Matheson knows Ford and Fordiana well. Ford is, of course, enormously influential; as Matheson notes, "[Steven] Spielberg still regards Ford as his mentor and watches Ford's films before making his own" (xvii). Matheson's thesis is that there is nothing simple about Ford's work. Matheson approvingly cites Scott Eyman's judgment that Ford was a "mass of contradiction" (xiii), but as Matheson skillfully demonstrates, these many contradictions do not cancel each other out, but rather enrich Ford's immense body of work. Ford was a photographer at heart; film for him was a photographic art and each image in his films is not only carefully composed but also evokes a wide range of visual associations. The Battle of Midway (1942), his documentary about the epic naval battle, includes sweeping images of cloud and sky, echoing the nature mysticism of the nineteenth century Hudson River School of landscape painters (101). Images from his "Cavalry Trilogy" are shaped by Civil War photographs. His earliest films reference Renaissance art. As Matheson notes, Ford had a "painterly eye" (30). At the same time, Ford was a storyteller, a narrative artist who turned as often to books as to paintings when composing a film (xvii). The child of Irish immigrants, Ford became, Matheson writes, "a seanchaí, a traditional Irish storyteller" (xv). He thought that there was such a thing as an "American character" (227) and his great goal was to show, and tell, its story. That story was complicated. Ford was a Victorian and Matheson agrees with Gaylyn Studlar that "Victorian sentiment informs what have come to be regarded as Fordian values" (xvii). Victorian sometimes means "hierarchical" and "oppressive" but such characteristics aren't typical of Ford. He did not make simple-minded "he-man" pictures (11); as prosperous as he became, he never forgot that he was the child of immigrants. Matheson writes: "Always sympathetic to the underdog, Ford adopted the stance of the outsider" (xiv) both in his films and in his personal life. Racism was, of course, pervasive in Ford's America, which makes Sergeant Rutledge (1960) all the [End Page 104] more surprising. A murder mystery set in Ford's beloved west, the film tells the story of an African American sergeant (Woody Strode) who is wrongly accused of rape and murder–a remarkable film for such a Victorian and patriotic filmmaker. John Ford was a "greatest generation" patriot. In...

Shelley's Grave, Botanical Souvenirs, and Handling Literary Afterlives in the Nineteenth Century

The touristic practice of gathering flowers from famous graves has been allowed to contribute, relatively unexamined by critical scholarship, to narratives of Victorian sentimentality. This essay rethinks the role of such botanical ephemera in constructing and responding to representations of literary afterlives in the nineteenth century. Specifically, it considers botanical souvenirs taken from the grave of Romantic poet Percy Bysshe Shelley by Anglophone tourists over the course of the nineteenth century. Shelley's grave at the Protestant Cemetery in Rome, where his ashes were ultimately interred following his death by drowning in 1822, was a popular destination for literary tourists by mid-century. The numerous botanical souvenirs collected from Shelley's gravesite in the nineteenth century complicate simple narratives of textual reiteration, revealing reciprocal material gestures necessary to posthumous existence. These souvenirs constitute a branch of the Shelley mythology that thrives on the appearance of natural regeneration but that is, in fact, profoundly dependent on the material and emotional investment of readers and admirers. Examining the overlapping cultural discourses of botany, tourism, and the textual reception and reproduction of Shelley's Adonais in which these souvenirs emerged, this essay argues that these souvenirs provide an alternative archive for an embodied, affective posthumous Shelley. However, these souvenirs do not speak only to Shelley's poetical afterlife. Attention to particular souvenirs, such as a rose sent to American author and critic Margaret Fuller, reveals ways in which interest in a dead poet could also be a palpable expression of personal identity and desire.

His Two Mates Around Him Were Crying: Masculine Sentimentality in Late-Victorian Culture

Commentators on late-Victorian culture often tell us that two interrelated developments took place. First, there was a shift away from Victorian sentimentality; second, there was a growing insistence on toughness and emotional reserve as desirable for white men. Commentators on late-Victorian Australia often suggest that these developments were unusually conspicuous there. This is what the historian of mourning Patricia Jalland tells us in a discussion of the paradigmatic representation of death in Victorian Australian culture. In the Australian colonies, she writes, the paradigmatic death was the tough white man’s in the solitary bush. Representations of such deaths were legion, most often infused with ‘ironic realism’ rather than sentiment. In this article I challenge this view. Focusing on the work of popular Australian writer, Henry Lawson, I show that depictions of white men dying in the bush were profoundly sentimental in that they promoted pathos for white men’s suffering and grief in conventional ways. Representations of dying bushmen were indeed part of a specifically white, masculine sentimentality emerging throughout Anglophone culture in the late-Victorian years, part of a process through which white men insisted on the primacy of their emotional experiences and needs. In Australia and other settler colonies, this new masculine sentimentality also supported settler colonialism because promoting tenderness for hardy white frontiersmen diverted sympathy from the Aboriginal peoples they dispossessed. This article accordingly rethinks the dynamic between masculinity and sentiment in late-Victorian culture, paying particular attention to its relationship to power.

Situating Hong Kong Pet-Dog-Child Figures within Colonialist Flows and Disjunctures

In this article the author works with posthuman research practices to think with and through the natureculture figure of the pet–dog–child to explore specific dog practices she keeps encountering within the postcolonial nexus of Hong Kong, Britain, and China. By tracing, gathering, and reassembling six knotty aspects of the pet–dog–child figure (i.e. population governance, gender-expressive dogs, the Peke, Victorian sentimentality, becoming ‘common’, and designer dog-bags) the author shows how connections, movements, and disjunctures about pet, dog, and child emerge. By situating Hong Kong dog practices within colonialist flows and disjunctures, the author opens up space for thinking differently about childhoods as situated and gestures towards new ways of reconfiguring Hong Kong childhoods.

Tender Beauty: Victorian Painting and the Problem of Sentimentality

One of the most enduring critical legacies of modernism has been the condemnation of the sentimentality of Victorian art. This essay argues that recent art historical attempts to discuss Victorian sentimentality are condemned to repeat modernist critical judgements about sentimental art because of their espousal of historicist methodologies which produce historical distance between artwork and the critical viewer in the present. Instead, I argue, our own emotional involvement with Victorian paintings should form part of our scholarly accounts of their meanings, because their affective power is central to their aesthetic qualities. To look properly, I argue, is also to feel. To exemplify this I discuss Augustus Mulready's Remembering the Joys that Have Passed Away (1873), in order to show how a sentimental look at this painting undermines approaches that absorb sentimentality into historicist, social-constructionist and ideological accounts of such a picture.

NARRATING INSANITY IN THE LETTERS OF THOMAS MULOCK AND DINAH MULOCK CRAIK

Scholars have had a difficult time assessing the significance of Dinah Mulock Craik (1824–1887), best remembered as the author of John Halifax, Gentleman (1856). The critical verdict on her life and letters has swung toward extremes. Some critics have seen her, to quote Henry James, as “kindly, somewhat dull, pious, and very sentimental” (172); her novels embody the Victorian values of self-help, moral earnestness, and hard work, and it is assumed that her life did too. Elaine Showalter's and Sally Mitchell's feminist recoveries of Craik's work in the 1970s and early 1980s found that just the opposite was true, and that Victorian sentimentality allowed Craik to voice the subversive desires of her female readers covertly, in a form that was acceptable to the general public (Showalter 5–7, Mitchell 31). This critical tradition tended to overemphasize the melodramatic aspects of Craik's life and career as a means of dramatizing the struggles of women in a patriarchal society. The most recent scholarship eschews Craik's life altogether for the most part, focusing on her novelistic representations of disability, of Irish and Scottish nationality, and of class and enfranchisement. This criticism engages Craik's writing as an interesting cultural artifact rather than as an aesthetic object: her work is once again seen as embodying normative Victorian values, but to what extent the author was the cognizant promoter of these values, and to what extent she was their unwitting filter, and whether it matters, is unclear. But new archival work shows the importance of her life in understanding her career. The Mulock Family Papers, held at the University of California at Los Angeles, underscore Craik's challenges in managing an abusive father, who suffered from periods of dejection followed by periods of great happiness, and who was frequently absent and incarcerated. Craik was intensely private when it came to her personal life, and scholars like Showalter have read her reserve as a bow to womanly decorum in a life otherwise dominated by literary celebrity. But the archive suggests that Craik's taciturnity was instead a strategy for managing the threat of violence and scandal.

Thomas Bracken, 1843–1898

Thomas Bracken was New Zealand’s most famous and well-loved poet of the nineteenth century. He was considered by many to be New Zealand’s national poet, and he has an enduring place in New Zealand’s literary history because he wrote the words to the national hymn ‘God Defend New Zealand’. He was considered to be New Zealand’s Tennyson, and he encouraged the comparison himself. Although his poetry is sentimental and possesses too strong a focus on England for modern readers, it exhibits Bracken’s love for his country, and provides a fine example of popular Victorian sentiment.

From Sentiment to Sentimentality: A Nineteenth-Century Lexicographical Search

The brief account of the lexicographical history of the word ‘sentiment' in the nineteenth century, and the table of definitions which follows it, grew from my increasing sense of the shifting and ambivalent nature of the term in the literature of the period, despite the resonance and the proverbial solidity of phrases such as ‘Victorian sentiment' and ‘Victorian sentimentality'. The table is self explanatory, representing the findings of a search, among a wide range of nineteenth-century dictionaries over the period, for the changing meanings accrued by the word ‘sentiment' over time, its extensions and its modifications. The nineteenth-century lexicographical history of the word ‘sentiment' has its chief roots in the Eighteenth-century enlightenment, with definitions from Samuel Johnson and quotations from John Locke, chiefly based on intellect and reason. The nineteenth century generated a number of derivatives of the word over a period of time to express altered modes of feeling, thought and moral concern. The history of the word ‘sentiment' offers a psychological as well as a linguistic narrative.

Sentiment and Vision in Charles Dickens's A Christmas Carol and The Cricket on the Hearth

This essay explores the ways in which sentimentality is manifested through the visible, and through associative functions of the eye, in two of Dickens's Christmas books of the 1840s. I situate the relationship between vision and sentiment within discourses from eighteenth-century moral philosophy, as Adam Smith's figure of the “Impartial Spectator” (of central importance to the development of ideas around sympathy) is constructed mainly through the visual. I focus on two of the Christmas Books as they offer an interesting local study to test these ideas, coming at a critical juncture within the development of Dickens's own writing style, and also at an important historical moment within an investigation into Victorian sentimentality. Within Dickens's writing, sentimentality is typically associated with the exaggerated emotional portrayal of pathetic scenes (particularly the deaths of children), designed to elicit emotional responses from the reader. However, behind the hyperbole rests a concern with the self's need to take social, ethical and moral care of others, and the role of literature and art in tutoring the reader's emotional response, with the eye playing a crucial role in this act. I further explore the way in which Dickens's interest in blindness both reinforces, and points to certain disturbances, in his sentimental vision.

Selling Sentiment: The Commodification of Emotion in Victorian Visual Culture

This essay argues that the Victorian sentimental impulse was motivated by the sharing of emotion and the dynamics of communal and interactive feeling. Integral to the popularity of sentiment was its recognition factor by means of established tropes and conventions. Arguably, the same familiarity that made narrative art accessible also made advertising successful and many of the same motifs ran from exhibition watercolours to book illustration to posters. Works of sentiment operated as emotional souvenirs so that material proof of feeling could be easily digested, displayed and revisited. The essay looks closer at the investment of emotion in ephemeral images, such as music-sheet covers, and the ways in which forms of feeling were standardised and reproduced in keeping with a new art-buying public and the possibilities of wider image dissemination. Focusing upon issues raised during the curation of a current exhibition at the Victoria and Albert Museum ( <em>A Show of Emotion: Victorian Sentiment in Prints and Drawings</em>, 7 Dec 2006 – 10 Sep 2007) this essay explores the ways in which the sentimental pervaded nineteenth-century visual culture and how, in the cut-throat commercial world of image production, sentiment became manifest and identifiable if only as a notional phenomenon.

‘Thousands of throbbing hearts' - Sentimentality and community in popular Victorian poetry: Longfellow's Evangeline and Tennyson's Enoch Arden

This essay explores the function of sentimentality in popular nineteenth-century narrative poetry by focusing on Tennyson's <em>Enoch Arden</em> and Longfellow's <em>Evangeline</em>, two poems that have suffered relative critical neglect due to their status as sentimental verse. It argues that both texts, in their stories of exile, alienation and eventual recuperation, set up their hero and heroine as role-models for ways of feeling and use them to examine the possibility of using personal feeling as a conduit for communal sentiment. While both poems deploy the standard tropes of Victorian sentimentality, the ambiguous conclusions of <em>Enoch Arden </em>and <em>Evangeline</em> , I argue, call into question the clichés of sentimental discourse. The fates of Enoch and of Evangeline offer, to some extent, a darker vision of the potential for sentimental responses to an individual's suffering to create feeling communities either within or without the poem.

A Show of Emotion: Victorian Sentiment in Prints and Drawings (review)

A Show of Emotion: Victorian Sentiment in Prints and Drawings (review)

"Dismal Pleasure": Victorian Sentimentality and the Pathos of the Parvenu

"Dismal Pleasure": Victorian Sentimentality and the Pathos of the Parvenu

Abduction and Other Severe Pleasures: Rita Dove's Mother Love

Abduction and Other Severe PleasuresRita Dove’s Mother Love Alison Booth (bio) Editor’s Note: The essays of this special section consider Rita Dove’s remarkable recent volume, Mother Love. They were presented on December 1, 1995, in the English department at the University of Virginia, by Alison Booth, Stephen Cushman, and Lotta Lofgren. Each essay approaches the volume from a different perspective, but all share a high regard for Dove’s work, a commitment to close scrutiny of its verbal textures and movements, and the energizing conviction that to write well about a poet of Dove’s achievement, one’s own words must be artfully mediated. —Mark Edmundson Rita Dove’s new book abducts me. Mother Love makes me long for abandonment. This volume lures me to loosen the critical essay. But then “one is constantly bumping up against Order” (“Foreword,” Mother Love, xii). Dove’s book makes me want to turn back and begin the two-decades’ apprenticeship to become a poet. This time, not an “acetylene Virgin,” not a self-incinerating Medea or veiled Helen, not Plath or H.D., but a cosmopolite of multicolored nails and knowledge; a poet of aplomb under the “klieg lights” of fame (The Poet’s World 99); of grace in the fearsome solitude of nights of writing. Rita Dove, like a wise but fearless daughter who has heeded many mothers’ warnings, walks straight past the obscure cellarways and neglected lots in the historical neighborhood of black women poets. In 1975, Gloria T. Hull was not wrong to suggest that black women poets were considered “Shakespeare’s half-sisters,” who had “had to ‘go it alone’ as only children or support and nurture each other in an underground sisterhood” (Shakespeare’s Sisters 165–66). But in 1995, Dove can claim a large family without fanfare: a birthright eclectic, postmodern as it plunders and mocks pedigrees, vast as the distance between Ohio and Sicily, but not precisely universal. While eluding set location or identity, she makes the claim of a feminist woman (demolishing truckers’ crude jokes or seducers’ ploys in “Blue Days” or “Hades’ Pitch”), and of an “American Black” (“Her Island”). Most markedly, Mother Love claims tradition: it is a cycle of extraordinarily-crafted sonnets (à la both Rossettis) adapting a classical myth (à la H.D., Joyce, Woolf, or other high modernists). It’s at the same time part of a tradition of worthy blasphemy; here we can talk of “poodle shit” on sidewalks (“Persephone in Hell I”) or “Tampax tubes” in dumps (“Her Island”) as aptly-colored symbols in certain sacrificial rites. It is a subversive tribute, to choose the myth of Demeter and Persephone, not Eros and Psyche or Echo and Narcissus. She reiterates one of the few classical European myths that retains more than a trace of widespread worship of a mother-goddess. Without the Victorian sentiment or Amazonian zeal that tinges some feminist revivals of the Eleusinian mysteries, Dove plunges into some of the older if not the oldest caves of this fertility myth. Her mothers and daughters (there are no single characters here), [End Page 125] more or less middle-class Americans—at times explicitly African-American—follow the actions of an ancient and diverse ancestry, such as that of the Sumerian Inanna, “Queen of Heaven and Earth,” who in some versions descends into the Underworld to find her sister Erishkigal (Baring and Cashford 192, 223–24). 1 The whole sequence of sonnets, but also chains of sonnets in the interior, follow the plot of abduction, mourner’s search and sojourn in hell, and eventual seasonal recurrence. Just to follow a row of sonnets in Books I and II, for example, we see first the pastoral moment—plucking or becoming the plucked narcissus or poppy in a field or garden party in “Heroes” or “Party Dress for a First Born”: “Tonight men stride like elegant scissors across the lawn / to the women arrayed there, petals waiting to loosen.” Then in the next poem, abduction: “It is finished. No one heard her / . . . This is how one foot sinks into the ground” (“Persephone, Falling”). Next Demeter’s abandonment to grief: “Blown apart by loss, she let herself go” (“The...

Female Adolescence: Psychoanalytic Reflections on Literature by Katherine Dalsimer (review)

94Rocky Mountain Review and a determination to believe in false stereotypes of impossible purity as the standard for normal healthy people" (149). By contrast, Carter lauds Swinburne for his courage in exploring passion, even "deviancy," with psychological depth and compassion. The final six essays are more diverse. His discursiveness undermines Mark Spilka's contention that Dickens is the first to guide us into the complexities of early childhood sexual conflict. The title itself indicates the verbal pomposity of the essay: "On the Enrichment of Poor Monkeys by Myth and Dream: or How Dickens Rousseauisticized and Pre-Freudianized Victorian Views of Childhood." However, the next essay by Sara M. Putzell-Korab on "Passion between Women in the Victorian Novel" gives an intelligent overview of the few explicit novels dealing with lesbianism before the nineteenth century. She then examines Charlotte Bronte's Villette as a work that explores the bisexual options of a mature female heroine. The reading is provocative and insightful. Wendell Stacy Johnson turns our attention to Wilde. In "Fallen Women, Lost Children: Wilde and the Theatre of the Nineties" he contrasts Pinero, Shaw, and Wilde to illustrate Wilde's superior comedy in revealing false pride and false judgment to his audience. The next essay, Thomas F. Boyle's " 'Morbid Depression Alternating with Excitement': Sex in Victorian Newspapers" will surprise many readers for Boyle has very effectively used excerpts from police and trial accounts in daily newspapers to illustrate how explicit they were about violent crimes, "seduction, rape, adultery, transvestitism, illegal abortion, prostitution, bigamy, sadism, and indecent exposure" (213). Such material, drawn on by potboiler novelists themselves, was problematic. It at once acknowledged sexuality as a force in one's daily life and made certain manifestations talkable subject matter, yet still reduced sexual activity "to some quantifiable malfunction of the human organism" (228). Lest we smile too broadly at this Victorian quandary, Howard W. Fulweiler in his essay, " 'Here a Captive Heart Busted': From Victorian Sentimentality to Modern Sexuality," does an historical and literary review of sentimentality in the novel from mid-eighteenth century forward, and effectively argues that we have not integrated mind, heart, and body any more successfully than the Victorians we tend to ridicule. The final essay, John Maynard's "The Worlds of Victorian Sexuality: Work in Progress" is an exceptionally good bibliographic overview of Victorian sexuality. This is an excellent collection with interesting articles for the general reader and major research articles for the historian and literary critic. ALANNA KATHLEEN BROWN Montana State University KATHERINE DALSIMER. Female Adolescence: Psychoanalytic Reflections on Literature. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1986. 149 p. Dalsimer is a clinical psychologist and teacher in the Department of Human Development at Columbia University. She is wise enough to read literature for insights into human character and to hope that her writing about literary texts "may deepen the reader's experience and pleasure in returning to the works themselves" (141). Her introduction states her promising subject: inquiry into distinctly female adolescence, Book Reviews95 using five well known literary works featuring adolescent girls. She starts with twelveyear -old Frankie Addams in Carson McCullers' The Member of the Wedding and proceeds chronologically according to the ages of the protagonists: the early adolescent girls in Muriel Spark's The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie, Anne Frank in The Diary ofAnne Frank, Juliet in Shakespeare's Romeo and Juliet, and finally the late adolescence recalled by Anne Elliot in Jane Austen's Persuasion. Dalsimer cites numerous passages in these texts that indeed illustrate familiar aspects of female experience. She sees these aspects as developmental processes, psychological processes, stages. This is where the problem of her interpretation begins. As she herself notes in a different context, "description inevitably shades into prescription" (10). While she notes that the five works are from different periods and cultures, she basically ignores class, race, culture, historical circumstances, and individual reactions and pro-actions in her schema of the stages and passages of girlhood. Common patterns of development are not so easily applied to individuals. Even more disturbing is the psychoanalytic premise Dalsimer uses as her framework. She states as one purpose of the book "to make more accessible to those outside the profession...

A Doll's Heart: The Girl in the Poetry of Edna St. Vincent Millay and Louise Bogan

There are good reasons to compare the early work of Louise Bogan with that of Edna St. Vincent Millay, for it was in the work produced in their twenties that both poets used the fact of being female not merely as subject matter, but as a formal principle for invigorating and intensifying lyric speech. Through the medium of female personae, each poet developed a specific approach to the lyric past. Millay, assuming the existence of fixed conventions in lyric tradition, became virtually a crusader in the reclamation of the short lyric poem from its temporary submersion in the twin sloughs of Victorian sentiment and modernist gloom, while Louise Bogan sought in the variety, complexity, and rigor of traditional lyric versification and diction a means of forging an elemental lyric. She was from the outset of her career decidedly modernist in her commitment to reducing the lyric to its essentials, and to redefining its sources in emotion, whereas Millay intended only that her poems measure up to the lyric past by approximating traditional lyric uses of voice, diction, and theme. Both poets, however, were precocious adepts in the craft of lyric versifica

Marjory Fleming—Myths and Mists

ON THE 15TH OF JANUARY 1803 Marjory Fleming was born in a house in the High Street of Kirkcaldy; and in her short life of almost nine years she wrote the diaries and poems which have made her something of a legend. But was she really a child genius, protegée and dear friend of Walter Scott, and the toast of literary Edinburgh—as some of her biographers would have us believe? The mists of Victorian sentimentality are hard to pierce, and facts have become confused by romantic embroidery.

Ideological Factors in Specie Resumption and Treasury Policy

The general sentiment of Congress toward resumption of specie payments had become more and more desultory, not to say negative, during the early part of the 1870's. Nevertheless, the Resumption Act was passed in 1875, and resumption of specie payments at the pre-Civil War parity occurred on schedule in 1879. Observers have slighted this incongruity. Passage of the Resumption Act has come to be regarded as a true reflection of Victorian sentiment; ultimate resumption in 1879 was the proof of the pudding.2 What seems to have been lost in this rationalization of cause and effect is the generally unfavorable light in which resumption was being viewed in the middle 1870's, the alternatives that were available in lieu of resumption, and some of the forces of “immorality” that made these alternatives attractive.