Victorian Heroines: Representations of Femininity in Nineteenth-Century Literature and Art

by Kimberley Reynolds

Kimberley Reynolds and Nicola Humble here provide a radical revision of Victorian constructions of femininity. Using a wide range of textual examples (including children's literature, sensations fiction, diaries, and autobiography) as well as visual illustrations, Victorian Heroines 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 Victorian 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 Victorian 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.

Genres: Literary Criticism

288 pages, Hardcover

First published September 1, 1993

Reviews

[Amanda May · Rating 3 out of 5]

The Victorian era gave birth to a multitude of manners in which to present identity. Victorian Heroines explores the ways in which women attain an identity through writing and how writing made the identity of both female characters and female authors multifarious in nature. It explores the dyadic idea that women can either be angels in the house or madwomen in the attic while listing the determining factor as sexual experience. The book contains five chapters, the first of which explores Victorian orphanhood and adolescence as periods where morality, particularly sexual morality, are endangered. Orphanhood is equatable with femininity due to its isolated nature, and like adolescence, it is usually resolved through death (following a sexual fall) or marriage (which signifies a safety net). The second chapter examines how the New Woman is simply another version of the mid-Victorian woman and focuses on viewpoints and clothing in particular. The third chapter discusses Decadence, particularly in the paintings of the era that portrayed women erotically. Chapter four discusses the phenomenon of sensational fiction, particularly how it complicated the identification of heroine and how its motifs were eventually absorbed into realism. Finally, chapter five examines feminine autobiography, whose two chief factors (the fact that any portrayal of self is "fictional" and the communal nature of that self which is portrayed in relation to others). Ultimately, the feminine autobiography became popular in the fin de sicle and was used by men such as Charles Dickens and (later) James Joyce.

I found the arguments presented in this book compelling. It seems to confirm what my other recent reads have been telling me about the Victorian era, that its ideologies were complex and a little slippery to get a hold of. The focus on the heroine is an interesting spin on the topic. The chapter on sensational fiction is particularly engaging, though I may simply find it so due to my own recent (re)perusal of Lady Audley's Secret. For Dickens scholars, this book would probably be useful, particularly in discussing him as a feminist writer. However, I would not recommend this for someone who is not invested in research. The general reader would likely have the same reaction my friends did when I started literarily analyzing Tim Burton's 9: "Huh?"