Tag Archives: victorian literature

A Dichotomous Era

Posted on by
Reply

Ahh, the Victorians, such a dichotomous group of people. They wanted to raise money for the poor but only if they didn’t have to see them; they would have spouses and children while walking down the block to have a dalliance or two (sometimes with someone of the same gender *gasp*). Many Victorians even had double lives – The Picture of Dorian Gray exemplifies this quite well. They wanted to have their cake and eat it too, but only if it was behind closed doors.

Yet, many double standards for women still exist because of this group of people. A weeping woman is a monster. So too is a fat woman, a horny woman, a woman shrieking with laughter. Women who are one or more of these things have heard, or perhaps simply intuited, that we are repugnantly excessive, that we have taken illicit liberties to live with abandon. It is the age-old problem women face, they can either be the angel or the monster, Mary or Eve, the madwoman in the attic or Jane Eyre.

Too Much: How Victorian Constraints Still Bind Women Today is a critical cry against white, heteronormative propriety and a culture that prizes only masculine profusion. It encourages women to reconsider the beauty of their excess—emotional, physical, and spiritual—in order to wrest power from these man-made boundaries. An erstwhile Victorian scholar, Rachel Vorona Cote makes parallels between the era’s fixation on women’s “hysterical” behavior and our modern policing of the same; in the space of her writing, you’re as likely to encounter Jane Eyre and Lizzy Bennett as you are Britney Spears and Lana Del Rey. She braids cultural criticism, theory, and storytelling together in her exploration of how culture grinds away our bodies, souls, and sexualities, forcing us into smaller lives than we desire (inside flap summary).

“A fascinating exploration of how literature and pop culture have constructed (and exploded) our expectations of modern womanhood, this book is as gloriously defiant as the women it profiles.” Review by Robin Wasserman

No “Goblin Market” but Still Some Wholesome Fun!

Posted on by
Reply

Drawing from letters, contracts, and other archival material, Linda Peterson details the careers of various women authors from the Victorian period. Some adopted the practices of their male counterparts and wrote for periodicals before producing a best-seller; others began in literary partnerships with their husbands and pursued independent careers later in life; and yet others wrote from obscure parsonages or isolated villages, hoping an acclaimed novel might spark a meteoric rise to fame. Peterson considers these women authors’ successes and failures–the critical esteem that led to financial rewards and lasting reputations, as well as the initial successes undermined by publishing trends and pressures.

“For the case studies, I have chosen six women of letters whose careers reveal new possibilities for the professional woman author and whose commentaries on their literary lives reveal the obstacles they faced and the strategies by which they succeeded (partially, if not wholly). All professionally innovative, these women took different approaches to authorship — approaches determined in part by their historical moment, in part thrust upon them by the demands of the marketplace, in part adopted as expressions of highly personal values and contingencies. The case studies do not, as one of my readers noted, ’round up the usual suspects’ (though canonical figures appear frequently in this book); rather, I have focused on women whose literary innovations and public self-constructions are pivotal in the history of authorship. I alternate women whose lives were marked by professional success and literary esteem with lesser-known writers, famous in their day, uncanonical now, but nonetheless representative of important models of nineteenth-century authorship” (Peterson, 6).

Call Number: 820.9 P485B