Hello studygirl-ga:
I have found quite a few Web sites that will give you plenty of information
and perspective for your essay.
Some of these sites contain text of Mid-Victorian poetry, plays, and
literature, so you can peruse the material yourself for insight on the
portrayal of women during this era.
The Mid-Victorian period is generally defined as about 1845 or 1850 to
1900, so I searched for information that falls into that time frame.
DIRECTORIES:
The Victorian Research Web is a good starting point:
http://victorianresearch.org/
It lead me to the VoS "Voice of the Shuttle" academic research site:
http://vos.ucsb.edu/index.asp
which is hosted by the English Dept. at the University of California at
Santa Barbara.
The site's section on the Victorian Era:
http://vos.ucsb.edu/browse.asp?id=2751
will also direct you to Victorian literature online (scroll down to find
links listed by author), so that you can peruse some of these works
yourself.
VoS also lead me to another superb directory, "Victorian Web Sites," at:
http://lang.nagoya-u.ac.jp/~matsuoka/Victorian.html
From there I found this excellent overview of Victorian-Era British
literature:
http://members.aol.com/bjownsbey/literature.htm
PBS has an instructive site on 19th century women writers and how they
portrayed women:
http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/masterpiece/wives/writers_text.html
This roundup includes essays on the Bronte sisters -- "Wuthering
Heights" and "Jane Eyre" -- who were among the most important
novelists of the 19th century.
ESSAYS ON THE DEPICTIONS OF MID-VICTORIAN WOMEN:
See history scholar Jennifer Payne's essay "Two literary treatments of
prostitution in mid-19th century England: Rosetti's 'Jenny' and
Gaskell's 'Esther'", at:
http://www.geocities.com/Athens/Aegean/7023/prostitution.html
"England In the Nineteenth Century: Gender Issues," from a University
of Birmingham collection of essays. I can't find the author of this
one, which begins with this quote from the poet Tennyson "Man to
command and woman to obey":
http://www.rmjs.co.uk/bham/12eh04.pdf
For insight on the era's attitudes, see the Victorian Periodicals
Review, Volume 34, Number 3, "Epideictic Rhetoric in the
Englishwoman?s Review" by Kathryn Summers:
http://www.utpjournals.com/product/vpr/343/rhetoric13.html
"Published from 1866 to 1910, the Englishwoman?s Review of Social and
Industrial Questions provided information, inspiration, and direction
crucial to the formation of the Victorian women?s movement. It
documented progress, provided needed encouragement, and kept women
informed of new political, social, and economic opportunities" . . . .
The journal challenged the prevailing "Victorian ideal for women of
the domestic angel, or 'Angel in the House,' in order to provide more
empowering models for women?s behavior and self-construction. Although
most Victorian women?s lived experience bore little or no resemblance
to the Angel in the House stereotype (working class, upper class, even
most middle-class women faced challenges and experiences not
acknowledged by domestic ideology), the discursive reality of this
hortatory ideal exerted tremendous pressure on both women and men . .
. ."
Read Beverly Taylor's (The University of North Carolina) overview of
the Mid-Victorian era, at"
http://www.unc.edu/~btaylor/ENGL_373.htm
Scroll down to sections on various aspects of 19th century literature,
including "Position of Women in the mid-19th century."
DISSENTING VOICES:
Here are some notable works that challenged Mid-Victorian depictions
and perceptions of women, including female sexuality:
"Spectacular Women: The Mysteries of London and the Female Body," an essay
by Ellen Bayuk Rosenman, found at the Indiana University's Victorian
Studies site:
http://iupjournals.org/victorian/vic40-1.html
"George William MacArthur Reynold's "The Mysteries of London" (first series,
1844-46) was by far the best-selling novel in mid-Victorian England." Yet,
"Mysteries of London" stands very far from the formulas of Victorian fiction
. . . . While retaining some allegiance to this gender stereotype, Reynolds
also creates prominent female characters with extended and irregular
histories who nevertheless prosper as the novel unfolds."
Instructor Linda Montag, of the University of Haifa, Israel, examines
Victorian era short story writer George MacDonald at "Alice's
Academy":
http://www.the-looking-glass.net/rabbit/v7i1/academy.html
"MacDonald is perhaps at his most subversive when, in stark contrast
to the contemporary conduct books for women which stressed that a wife
must completely subordinate her needs to those of her husband and
children, he demonstrates that in a happy relationship the husband and
wife function not as polar opposites and according to hierarchy, but
operate on a system of mutuality, complementarity [sic], and
reciprocity."
"Mary Elizabeth Braddon and the literary marketplace: a study in
commercial authorship," by Chris Willis:
http://www.chriswillis.freeserve.co.uk/meb2.html
In the novel "Lady Audley's Secret," "Braddon subverted the stereotype
of the angelic, fragile, blonde heroine by showing a woman who appears
to fit the type and embody the domestic ideal but who is in fact a
homicidal bigamist. Contemporary male critics found such a heroine
difficult to understand, as she contravened many Victorian beliefs
about passive, submissive womanhood."
MID-VICTORIAN THEATRE:
The University of Washington has a "19th Century British Theatre
History Research" site:
http://artsci.washington.edu/drama-phd/melodram.html
Click on the link for there "Women," which will bring you to "19th
Century Women On-Stage and Off":
http://artsci.washington.edu/drama-phd/dhhome.html
Also, learn about the portrayal of women in 19th century theatre at:
http://artsci.washington.edu/drama-phd/kjdomest.html
The links will take you to abstracts of popular Victorian era plays
that concerned domesticity and widowhood, among other topics.
MID-VICTORIAN POETRY:
The Blackheath Poetry Society examines the poet Elizabeth Barrett Browning:
http://oufcnt2.open.ac.uk/~gill_stoker/jc1.htm
See "Elizabeth Barrett Browning?s Redundant Women," Pauline Simonsen,
from "Victorian Poetry," Volume 35, no. 4, Winter 1997:
http://vp.engl.wvu.edu/winter97/simon.htm
"In Elizabeth Barrett browning?s poem 'My heart and I,' a woman mourns
her dead lover, and reveals her consequent sense of redundancy. The
speaker perceives . . . that her world views, her emotions (?my
heart?), appearance and desires ('fancies'), and her voice and
subjectivity are insignificant. She feels a strong sense of
dislocation, and the subtext of the poem is a resigned desire for
death. The speaker has assumed the position of a Victorian 'redundant
woman.'?
http://www.erinoconnor.org/reviews/psomiades.shtml:
has this review of "Kathy Alexis Psomiades, Beauty's Body: Femininity
and Representation in British Aestheticism. Victorian Studies 42:1
(Autumn 1998)":
" . . . argues that the feminine icons in these works allow them both
to know art as a public, commercial venture and to defer the
consequences of that knowledge indefinitely. By embodying the
aesthetic in the image of a beautiful woman, mid-Victorian poetry
casts ideological contradictions as artistic paradoxes, and so paves
the way for the commodification of art that took place during the
latter half of the century."
The essay "Lowly Bards and Incomplete Lyres: Fanny Forrester and the
Construction of a Working-Class Woman?s Poetic Identity," by Susan
Zlotnick, which appeared in "Victorian Poetry" Volume 36, no. 1,
Spring 1998:
http://vp.engl.wvu.edu/spring98/zlotnick.htm:
Starts with a nod to the ubiquitous Elizabeth Barrett Browning, but
then moves into a discourse on 1870s British, working-class poet Fanny
Forrester who "ultimately does not question female subjectivity so
much as struggle to include working-class women in it. To gain respect
and respectability by securing herself in her 'proper sphere,'
Forrester embraces the discourse of expressivity and the conventions
of femininity and domesticity implicit in it."
OFFLINE RESOURCES
Temple University professor Sally Mitchell has written extensively about how
women were portrayed in Victorian literature. Read about her and her books
at:
http://www.temple.edu/temple_times/5-18-00/mitchell.html
(You should be able to obtain some of her works through your library or
inter-library loan, or via online booksellers).
The University of Birmingham has a lengthy list of books that examine
Victorian culture, including the depiction of women, at:
http://www.english.bham.ac.uk/student/0304/core/victorian/readinglist.htm
Search Strings Used:
"Englishwomen mid-Victorian culture"
"women Victorian poetry"
"women depicted Mid-Victorian"
"Englishwomen Mid-Victorian theatre"
"Mid-Victorian poetry portrayed women"
"women Mid-Victorian literature"
If you need any help navigating any of the above sites, or if you require
clarification, please post a "Request For Clarification" and I'll be glad to
assist you.
Regards,
nancylynn-ga |
