{"title":"Zachary Samalin, The Masses Are Revolting: Victorian Culture and the Political Aesthetics of Disgust","authors":"Meghna Sapui","doi":"10.3366/vic.2023.0494","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.3366/vic.2023.0494","url":null,"abstract":"","PeriodicalId":40670,"journal":{"name":"Victoriographies-A Journal of Nineteenth-Century Writing 1790-1914","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.3,"publicationDate":"2023-07-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"47889679","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Reflecting on Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein (1818) nearly two centuries after its original publication, Ernest Larsen observes that Shelley ‘opened the lid on a new way of thinking about pregnancy – the narrative in which a male gives birth to a monster’ (236). And while we might regard such a narrative as inherently queer, the queerness of Victor Frankenstein’s methods for cultivating life are rarely explored. This article aims to remedy this gap in the abundant scholarship surrounding the novel. In negotiating feminist readings (which have historically highlighted the role of reproduction in the novel while ignoring or indemnifying Victor Frankenstein’s queerness) and queer and trans readings (which better recognise the novel’s alternative affirmations), this work ultimately highlights the novel’s exploration of queer generativity – an effort that is muddied not by the protagonist’s methods but by his own irresponsibility and failures in character. Although the focus of this work remains on the critical response to Frankenstein, it concludes by suggesting ways in which future scholarship might adopt the analytical framework outlined here in further engagement with the text.
{"title":"On Frankenstein and How (Not) to Be a Queer Parent","authors":"Jon Heggestad","doi":"10.3366/vic.2023.0489","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.3366/vic.2023.0489","url":null,"abstract":"Reflecting on Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein (1818) nearly two centuries after its original publication, Ernest Larsen observes that Shelley ‘opened the lid on a new way of thinking about pregnancy – the narrative in which a male gives birth to a monster’ (236). And while we might regard such a narrative as inherently queer, the queerness of Victor Frankenstein’s methods for cultivating life are rarely explored. This article aims to remedy this gap in the abundant scholarship surrounding the novel. In negotiating feminist readings (which have historically highlighted the role of reproduction in the novel while ignoring or indemnifying Victor Frankenstein’s queerness) and queer and trans readings (which better recognise the novel’s alternative affirmations), this work ultimately highlights the novel’s exploration of queer generativity – an effort that is muddied not by the protagonist’s methods but by his own irresponsibility and failures in character. Although the focus of this work remains on the critical response to Frankenstein, it concludes by suggesting ways in which future scholarship might adopt the analytical framework outlined here in further engagement with the text.","PeriodicalId":40670,"journal":{"name":"Victoriographies-A Journal of Nineteenth-Century Writing 1790-1914","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.3,"publicationDate":"2023-07-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"41932925","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
This article will examine how Sarah Waters and Laura Purcell use the corset as a narrative tool in Fingersmith (2002) and The Corset (2018), and how placing these texts alongside Victorian writing on the corset influences our understanding of the narratives. In Fingersmith, there are many allusions to Maud Lilly practising tight-lacing, having been laced into tight dresses to ‘give her the figure of a lady’ from a young age. When these tight laces are loosened, there is a suggestion of another Maud almost breaking out from the sartorial restriction. There are two corsets in The Corset which are of interest: first, a corset made by the narrator, Ruth, for herself that acts as a physical and emotional support system; second, one that Ruth makes for the daughter of the woman for whom she works. This latter corset is made by Ruth to ‘squeeze the evil out’ of the daughter; when Ruth is later accused of murder, she considers the corset to be the murder weapon. This article, therefore, considers how Victorian corset narratives, when placed alongside modern scholarship on the Victorian corset influences the twenty-first century reconstruction of the past and its sartorial/somatic imagery.
{"title":"The Neo-Victorian Corset: Two Narrative Approaches to the Constricting Garment in Sarah Waters’s Fingersmith (2002) and Laura Purcell’s The Corset (2018)","authors":"Emma Butler-Way","doi":"10.3366/vic.2023.0481","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.3366/vic.2023.0481","url":null,"abstract":"This article will examine how Sarah Waters and Laura Purcell use the corset as a narrative tool in Fingersmith (2002) and The Corset (2018), and how placing these texts alongside Victorian writing on the corset influences our understanding of the narratives. In Fingersmith, there are many allusions to Maud Lilly practising tight-lacing, having been laced into tight dresses to ‘give her the figure of a lady’ from a young age. When these tight laces are loosened, there is a suggestion of another Maud almost breaking out from the sartorial restriction. There are two corsets in The Corset which are of interest: first, a corset made by the narrator, Ruth, for herself that acts as a physical and emotional support system; second, one that Ruth makes for the daughter of the woman for whom she works. This latter corset is made by Ruth to ‘squeeze the evil out’ of the daughter; when Ruth is later accused of murder, she considers the corset to be the murder weapon. This article, therefore, considers how Victorian corset narratives, when placed alongside modern scholarship on the Victorian corset influences the twenty-first century reconstruction of the past and its sartorial/somatic imagery.","PeriodicalId":40670,"journal":{"name":"Victoriographies-A Journal of Nineteenth-Century Writing 1790-1914","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.3,"publicationDate":"2023-03-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"49006878","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Jerrold E. Hogle and Robert Miles, eds., The Gothic and Theory: An Edinburgh Companion","authors":"Nicola Bandler-Llewellyn","doi":"10.3366/vic.2023.0482","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.3366/vic.2023.0482","url":null,"abstract":"","PeriodicalId":40670,"journal":{"name":"Victoriographies-A Journal of Nineteenth-Century Writing 1790-1914","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.3,"publicationDate":"2023-03-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"44255036","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
E. March, D. Moran, Matt Houlbrook, Y. Jewkes, Michaela Mahlberg
Charles Dickens is often evoked to make connections to Victorian times – and to highlight the need for change in today’s society. The situation of prisons is a prime example, where references to the ‘Dickensian prison’ figure in contemporary discourse to draw critical attention to the state of prisons and to call for reform. But it would be too simple to assume that today’s references to the Dickensian prison relate directly to the way Dickens narrates the prison. Therefore, this paper presents a detailed digital humanities textual study of prisons in Dickens’s novels to shed light on the vocabulary that the author uses to talk about this institution. The prisons in Dickens’s novels tend to be historic and outdated prisons, rather than the new Victorian-built model prisons. Using the CLiC (Corpus Linguistics in Context) web app, which combines a set of corpora with tools to access and search sets of texts, we set out to accumulate a substantial amount of textual evidence for a description of the carceral characteristics of Dickens’s prisons. These characteristics describe features of the prison building, prison TimeSpace, prison life, and effects of the prison. Our findings present a valuable platform from which to consider the enduring popularity of the Dickensian prison in contemporary penal discourse.
{"title":"Defining the Carceral Characteristics of the ‘Dickensian prison’: A Corpus Stylistics Analysis of Dickens’s Novels","authors":"E. March, D. Moran, Matt Houlbrook, Y. Jewkes, Michaela Mahlberg","doi":"10.3366/vic.2023.0477","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.3366/vic.2023.0477","url":null,"abstract":"Charles Dickens is often evoked to make connections to Victorian times – and to highlight the need for change in today’s society. The situation of prisons is a prime example, where references to the ‘Dickensian prison’ figure in contemporary discourse to draw critical attention to the state of prisons and to call for reform. But it would be too simple to assume that today’s references to the Dickensian prison relate directly to the way Dickens narrates the prison. Therefore, this paper presents a detailed digital humanities textual study of prisons in Dickens’s novels to shed light on the vocabulary that the author uses to talk about this institution. The prisons in Dickens’s novels tend to be historic and outdated prisons, rather than the new Victorian-built model prisons. Using the CLiC (Corpus Linguistics in Context) web app, which combines a set of corpora with tools to access and search sets of texts, we set out to accumulate a substantial amount of textual evidence for a description of the carceral characteristics of Dickens’s prisons. These characteristics describe features of the prison building, prison TimeSpace, prison life, and effects of the prison. Our findings present a valuable platform from which to consider the enduring popularity of the Dickensian prison in contemporary penal discourse.","PeriodicalId":40670,"journal":{"name":"Victoriographies-A Journal of Nineteenth-Century Writing 1790-1914","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.3,"publicationDate":"2023-03-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"44716945","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Victorian literary resistance to explicit discussion of female sexual reproduction mirrors the material segregation and confinement of parturient women in this era. Just as literary depictions of the pregnancy/labour of the gentry do not represent an embodied, material, clinical experience, so, too, does reproduction more generally serve as a plot device rather than an attempt to realistically and faithfully depict its nuances. Through this lens, George Moore's Esther Waters (1894) represents a fruitful contrast to Emily Brontë's Wuthering Heights (1847). For privileged characters, there is the characteristically Victorian deployment of implicature surrounding reproduction; for the poor, the punitive spectacle of visible pregnancy, birth, and childrearing. Either through its reinforcement or violation, the ubiquitous notion of Victorian propriety in the confinement room – by way of restriction and concealment – shapes our reading of the characters in these novels, as well as the messages imparted by their respective story arcs. I argue that class is a critical mediating factor in terms of both the experiences that pregnant and birthing characters are allowed, as well as the literary terms in which they are conveyed.
{"title":"Confined: Pregnancy, Birth, and Class in Esther Waters (1894) and Wuthering Heights (1847)","authors":"Haleigh R Yaspan","doi":"10.3366/vic.2023.0480","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.3366/vic.2023.0480","url":null,"abstract":"Victorian literary resistance to explicit discussion of female sexual reproduction mirrors the material segregation and confinement of parturient women in this era. Just as literary depictions of the pregnancy/labour of the gentry do not represent an embodied, material, clinical experience, so, too, does reproduction more generally serve as a plot device rather than an attempt to realistically and faithfully depict its nuances. Through this lens, George Moore's Esther Waters (1894) represents a fruitful contrast to Emily Brontë's Wuthering Heights (1847). For privileged characters, there is the characteristically Victorian deployment of implicature surrounding reproduction; for the poor, the punitive spectacle of visible pregnancy, birth, and childrearing. Either through its reinforcement or violation, the ubiquitous notion of Victorian propriety in the confinement room – by way of restriction and concealment – shapes our reading of the characters in these novels, as well as the messages imparted by their respective story arcs. I argue that class is a critical mediating factor in terms of both the experiences that pregnant and birthing characters are allowed, as well as the literary terms in which they are conveyed.","PeriodicalId":40670,"journal":{"name":"Victoriographies-A Journal of Nineteenth-Century Writing 1790-1914","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.3,"publicationDate":"2023-03-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"43548717","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Notes on Contributors","authors":"","doi":"10.3366/vic.2023.0475","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.3366/vic.2023.0475","url":null,"abstract":"","PeriodicalId":40670,"journal":{"name":"Victoriographies-A Journal of Nineteenth-Century Writing 1790-1914","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2023-03-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"136179689","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
In our present moment of ecological crises, stories about nature fighting back take on new significance. This article looks back at fin-de-siècle stories about predatory plants that entrap people, examining texts such as Edmond Nolcini's ‘The Guardian of Mystery Island’ (1896), H.G. Wells’ ‘The Flowering of the Strange Orchid’ (1894), and Lucy H. Hooper's ‘Carnivorine’ (1889). These stories focus on killer plants that grab and confine characters with their tentacle-like branches and vines, ultimately suffocating them in their foliage. Like other gothic monsters, these plants reveal societal anxieties (colonialism, women, degeneration, and so on) at moments of transition. Given our twenty-first-century anxieties about environmental destruction, we need to look back at ecophobic moments in earlier literature to understand, as Simon C. Estok argues in ‘Theorizing the EcoGothic’, ‘how monstrosity is central to an environmental imagination that locates the human as the center of all things good and safe’ (34). Ideally, this historical interrogation can help us transition to new and healthier relationships with our environments in the present.
{"title":"‘Embowered in a mass of vegetation’: Confinement and Predatory Plants in Fin-de-Siècle Fiction","authors":"Purdue Melissa","doi":"10.3366/vic.2023.0478","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.3366/vic.2023.0478","url":null,"abstract":"In our present moment of ecological crises, stories about nature fighting back take on new significance. This article looks back at fin-de-siècle stories about predatory plants that entrap people, examining texts such as Edmond Nolcini's ‘The Guardian of Mystery Island’ (1896), H.G. Wells’ ‘The Flowering of the Strange Orchid’ (1894), and Lucy H. Hooper's ‘Carnivorine’ (1889). These stories focus on killer plants that grab and confine characters with their tentacle-like branches and vines, ultimately suffocating them in their foliage. Like other gothic monsters, these plants reveal societal anxieties (colonialism, women, degeneration, and so on) at moments of transition. Given our twenty-first-century anxieties about environmental destruction, we need to look back at ecophobic moments in earlier literature to understand, as Simon C. Estok argues in ‘Theorizing the EcoGothic’, ‘how monstrosity is central to an environmental imagination that locates the human as the center of all things good and safe’ (34). Ideally, this historical interrogation can help us transition to new and healthier relationships with our environments in the present.","PeriodicalId":40670,"journal":{"name":"Victoriographies-A Journal of Nineteenth-Century Writing 1790-1914","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.3,"publicationDate":"2023-03-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"47158140","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Beatrice Ashton-Lelliott, Debbie Parker Kinch, Sara Zadrozny
{"title":"Introduction Confinement: The Entrapped Individual in Victorian Writing","authors":"Beatrice Ashton-Lelliott, Debbie Parker Kinch, Sara Zadrozny","doi":"10.3366/vic.2023.0476","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.3366/vic.2023.0476","url":null,"abstract":"","PeriodicalId":40670,"journal":{"name":"Victoriographies-A Journal of Nineteenth-Century Writing 1790-1914","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.3,"publicationDate":"2023-03-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"43336288","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
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