Kirby-Jane Hallum | University of Otago (original) (raw)

Books by Kirby-Jane Hallum

A notorious characteristic of English society is the universal marketing of our unmarried women ;... more A notorious characteristic of English society is the universal marketing of our unmarried women ; a marketing peculiar to ourselves in Europe, and only rivalled by the slave merchants of the East. We are a match-making nation. 1 Th e 'universal marketing' of 'unmarried women' referred to by Edward Bulwer-Lytton in 1836 in his critical refl ection on English culture and society recognizes the economic implications of what would become known as the Victorian marriage market. Th e idea of women being for sale via transactional marriage arrangements is not new in feminist critical studies and has been frequently considered in the context of the marriage plot. 2 Th e valuing of a marriageable woman according to her beauty dates back for centuries, and was also tied to her social class, economic fortune, virginity and virtue , and accomplishments . Such qualities made her an object of desire in a marriage system that imitated the conditions of market sales. Th is book began as an attempt to understand the Victorian marriage market , a cultural cliché so widespread in Victorian fi ction that it appears to be taken for granted in literary and cultural history. My understanding of the Victorian marriage market is two-pronged. At the outset, it is a metaphor for the way in which families sought to arrange fi nancially and socially advantageous marital unions between their sons and daughters in order to preserve 'the two interrelated factors of social and economic interest, which traditionally determined marriage choice' . 3 Relatedly, the marriage market also refers to publicly organized events intended to bring eligible men and women together, or as Patricia Jalland notes: 'elaborate social conventions were created to restrict and regulate young love among the upper-middle and upper class. Th e London season , 'coming out' country house parties and balls -all operated to ensure that young people only met others of desirable social background' . 4 Th e London season in particular served as a more literal kind of marriage market because a young woman's presence at various social engagements during this season announced her candidature for marriage, with the result that many 784 Aestheticism.indd 1 784 Aestheticism.indd

Based on close readings of five Victorian novels, Hallum presents an original study of the intera... more Based on close readings of five Victorian novels, Hallum presents an original study of the interaction between popular fiction, the marriage market and the aesthetic movement. She uses the texts to trace the development of aestheticism, examining the differences between the authors, including their approach, style and gender.

Papers by Kirby-Jane Hallum

Victorian Environments: A Changing World in Nineteenth-Century British and Australian Literature and Culture.

A number of publications documenting the meanings attributed to various blooms and plants entered... more A number of publications documenting the meanings attributed to various blooms and plants entered the early-nineteenth-century book market. Charlotte de Latour’s The Language of Flowers, or, Floral Emblems of Thoughts, Feelings, and Sentiments is still relatively well known today. The Victorians, too, embraced the language of flowers as a means of codified and sentimental communication. While the
fascination with the natural world in nineteenth-century fiction is well established, within this lively field of enquiry, insufficient attention has been given to Victorian writers’ productive engagement with floriography, a system of reference that accompanied the nineteenth century’s burgeoning interest in botany and classification. Perhaps its status as a popular culture phenomenon is to blame for it being neglected in literary analysis, but in the context of women sensation writers who were trying to highlight social issues, while still conforming to moral standards, the language of flowers provides a strategic yet restrained way to write about female desire.

While New Woman scholarship has been a lively element of Victorian studies for the last thirty ye... more While New Woman scholarship has been a lively element of Victorian studies for the last thirty years, less attention has been given to the colonial space and the pressure it puts on the New Woman in the way in which her freedoms differed from that of her British counterpart. This essay for the Global Circulation Project begins to interrogate how the historical moment of the New Woman movement translates to a New Zealand context in the fiction of three turn-of-the-century New Zealand writers: Julius Vogel (1835-1899), Louisa Alice Baker (1856-1926), and Edith Searle Grossmann (1863-1931). The state of criticism on each of these writers has tended to focus on their productive engagement with New Zealand cultural history rather their being situated within a New Woman literary tradition. Ranging from the late 1880s through to 1910, their writing shows a progression from a utopian vision of harmony between Britain and the colonies, to a refutation of the intellectual and cultural limitations of the colonial setting, and finally, to a rejection of Britain in favour of a distinctly New Zealand home. The three novels under analysis here are judged to be examples of New Zealand New Woman fiction, and are recuperated within a wider framework of late nineteenth-century New Woman writing.

"Women's Writing" Special Issue on Colonial Girlhood 21.2 (2014): pp. 245-258

This paper examines some of the public debates about girls’ education that took place in Dunedin,... more This paper examines some of the public debates about girls’ education that took place in Dunedin, a provincial city in southern New Zealand, to establish Otago Girls’ High School, reputedly the oldest public secondary school for girls in Australasia. In assessing Victorian colonial girlhood in the nexus of national and imperial attitudes towards the education of young women in the New Zealand colony, it explores how Learmonth White Dalrymple (1827–1906), together with a Committee of Ladies, waged a seven-year campaign for girls’ secondary education in the province. In the resulting school system, the growing awareness of physical education that came about on one hand mirrored similar trends in British schools, but on the other hand, what consequently emerged was a distinct New Zealand girl – an inimitable version of colonia girlhood – that was a product of her celebrated physical health and robustness. Although the implications of teaching physical education receive extended treatment here, this paper also resumes the theme of intellectual development as it relates to the fictional representation of New Zealand girlhood in Louisa Alice Baker’s 1898 novel, "Wheat in the Ear".

This essay seeks to extend the study of male consumption in the Victorian period, focusing specif... more This essay seeks to extend the study of male consumption in the Victorian period, focusing specifically on the practice of aesthetic collecting in Wilkie Collins’s "The Woman in White" (1860). I compare male characters in this text, in terms of class and gender identity, in order to offer a pre-Wildean understanding of the Victorian male consumer. The novel’s treatment of the aristocracy and the middle classes offers substantial textual evidence of a relationship between consumption and masculinity, especially in relation to the collection of art as the acquisition of cultural capital. Drawing on the work of Pierre Bourdieu, I clarify the connection between class position and the possession of cultural capital in nineteenth-century Britain, and explore other cultural assumptions concerning aesthetic proficiency, social status and consumer behaviour. I consider the theory of cultural capital in its relation to practices of collecting by taking into account the aesthetic tastes and cultural goods ascribed to the nineteenth-century collector figure whereby a collector’s embodied cultural capital translates into a capacity to identify the aesthetic properties of artistic objects. The recognised ownership of such culturally-valued works of art represents the collector’s objectified cultural capital. How a collector comes to be in the position to distinguish, or indeed, to own art objects reflects his own social situation in terms of his class status and access to economic capital and education. My argument, in brief, is that the very notion of the collection differs between the classes; it is therefore my aim to look at how the practices of aesthetic collection carried out in "The Woman in White" validate the idea of cultural capital.

Latchkey: Journal of New Woman Studies, Sep 2013

Renowned just as much for her eccentric lifestyle as for her highly popular fiction, Ouida's sens... more Renowned just as much for her eccentric lifestyle as for her highly popular fiction, Ouida's sensational existence has invited a considerable amount of critical attention over the last century, and a number of biographical books and essays position her as a woman who was vivacious, outspoken and socially rebellious. As Malcolm Elwin notes: -Ouida is a good subject for a biographer, because she was a colourful personality, essentially, though curiously, feminine, impressed other people strongly, and talked a lot about herself‖ (311). Only in the last decade or so have scholars such as Talia Schaffer and Natalie Schroeder really begun to interrogate Ouida's novels.

Latchkey: Journal of New Woman Studies, Sep 2013

Born at Denbighshire in Wales in 1840, Rhoda Broughton began writing novels from a young age. Not... more Born at Denbighshire in Wales in 1840, Rhoda Broughton began writing novels from a young age. Not Wisely but Too Well (1867), published after Cometh up as a Flower, was her first work and was composed over a six-week period. In 1893, Helen C. Black recounts Broughton"s motivation to write the novel:

Conference Papers by Kirby-Jane Hallum

Caroline Daley acknowledges the rise of the body beautiful in New Zealand culture and argues that... more Caroline Daley acknowledges the rise of the body beautiful in New Zealand culture and argues that “as muscles and strength were to men, so, increasingly was beauty of face and form to women” (85). Recent years have witnessed the examination of the New Zealand body within the context of physical health and sport in a number of critical studies including Charlotte Macdonald’s Strong, Beautiful and Modern: National Fitness in Britain, New Zealand, Australia and Canada, 1935-1960 (2011). Such histories of twentieth-century New Zealand demonstrate the potential for making use of nineteenth-century beauty culture as an equally significant site for investigation.

This paper will consider New Zealand women’s visibility within the nexus of changing standards for female beauty over the second half of the 19th century, focusing in particular on the tension between the pervasive influence of British and American beauty products and the emergent national identity of the healthy, robust and naturally beautiful New Zealand woman who began to inhabit the pages of local newspapers.

“Nature has not made all women beautiful, but if it has endowed her with good taste and habits of cleanliness the chances are she will be a greater success in social and domestic circles than if she depended upon mere physical beauty alone” observed Louisa Alice Baker in the Ladies Pages of the Otago Witness in 1889. Baker’s weekly column was dedicated to topics of the day such as personal beautification and home decoration and contributed to public debates as to what constituted female beauty in the colony.

For the Victorians the 1890s shared an important relationship to their past and future, as Sall... more For the Victorians the 1890s shared an important relationship to their past and future, as Sally Ledger indicates: ‘British cultural politics were caught between two ages, the Victorian and the modern; a time fraught both with anxiety and with an exhilarating sense of possibility’. It is possible to read Trilby (1894) as both looking towards modernism while also being nostalgic for high Victorian culture. George du Maurier, Anglo-French by birth, evokes bohemian Paris for the novel’s setting and with its recording of Pre-Raphaelitism through to aestheticism and decadence over the thirty-year time period it encompasses, Trilby overflows with detail on the Latin Quarter art world it represents.

In this paper I consider nostalgia via the artistic reproduction of Trilby’s feet. In the opening chapter Little Billee takes out a compass and scratches out an outline of ‘Trilby’s left foot.’ He draws her foot from memory, but – ‘slight as it was, this little piece of impromptu etching, in its sense of beauty, in its quick seizing of a peculiar individuality, its subtle rendering of a strongly received impression, was already the work of a master . . .’ The little masterpiece, a metonymic reminder of Trilby herself, carries even more currency when the three artists return to Paris some years later and visit this relic from their past. By now the chalk sketch, effectively a memoralisation in situ, is framed and covered by glass but still looks ‘as if it had been done only yesterday!’ Examining nostalgia in this context as a desire to preserve material remains from earlier in the century also highlights wider fin-de-siècle anxieties about being between the two cultural eras of the Victorian and the modern.

This paper will consider why female writers associated with aestheticism like Ouida and Marie Cor... more This paper will consider why female writers associated with aestheticism like Ouida and Marie Corelli did not sustain their popularity beyond the Victorian period in contrast with Oscar Wilde and George du Maurier who have tended to have a place both inside and outside of English department curricula.

According to Talia Schaffer and Kathy Alexis Psomiades, “the reputations of many of the female aesthetes deteriorated during the modernist era” (Women and British Aestheticism p. 13). Renowned just as much for their eccentric lifestyles as for their highly popular fiction, Ouida and Corelli’s aesthetic lives have invited a reasonable amount of critical attention over the last century that positions both women as vivacious, outspoken and socially rebellious. Yet only in the last few decades have scholars really begun to interrogate their fiction.

My main area of inquiry will be to compare male and female writers and how they use aestheticism to underpin their representation of the Victorian marriage market. As far the relationship between gender and genre goes, however, the contrast between these authors is even richer when it comes to the way their bestselling novels have been received beyond the nineteenth century. The lasting popularity (or not) of texts by Ouida, Corelli, Wilde and du Maurier will be surveyed in order to gauge why some literature that was in high circulation during the last third of the nineteenth century was condescendingly dismissed in the century that followed.

Whilst the amusements of WWI soldiers on the Western Front have been the subject of enquiry, less... more Whilst the amusements of WWI soldiers on the Western Front have been the subject of enquiry, less attention has been given to how the people back home in New Zealand entertained themselves during the four years of the Great War. The circus was a highly popular entertainment throughout Australasia during the nineteenth and the greater part of the twentieth century. In this paper, I will explore the idea of travelling entertainment, in particular the Baker Brothers’ Circus, an Australian company that toured New Zealand during the 1910s, and was billed by local newspapers as “a capital show, which is bound to prove popular with the public."

""A number of floriography publications entered the early nineteenth-century botanical book marke... more ""A number of floriography publications entered the early nineteenth-century botanical book market, with Charlotte de Latour’s The Language of Flowers, or, Floral Emblems of Thoughts, Feelings, and Sentiments (1834), still remaining relatively well known today. The Victorians embraced the language of flowers as a means of codified and sentimental communication, for they “loved nature not only for its beauty but also for its inherent moral message”.

In Cometh Up as a Flower (1867) Rhoda Broughton’s heroine is a Pre-Raphaelite beauty whose striking self-representation embodies a natural aesthetic. George Meredith’s The Egoist (1879) extends Broughton’s imbrication of nature with natural beauty, re-energising it as a concept that is in conversation with Darwinian theories of natural selection. In this paper I draw on post-romantic network of natural imagery to reveal how female beauty is validated in each novel. Relying on a contemporary reader’s knowledge of floriography, or the language of flowers, allows Broughton and Meredith to communicate meaning and sentiment that revivifies the entrenched historical association between women and nature.
""

Book Reviews by Kirby-Jane Hallum

Australasian Journal of Victorian Studies, Jan 1, 2010

Victorian Environments: A Changing World in Nineteenth-Century British and Australian Literature and Culture.

"Women's Writing" Special Issue on Colonial Girlhood 21.2 (2014): pp. 245-258

Latchkey: Journal of New Woman Studies, Sep 2013

llustrated talk on the trends 19th century women would have followed to meet new standards for fe... more llustrated talk on the trends 19th century women would have followed to meet new standards for female fashion and beauty.