Better Left Unsaid: Victorian Novels, Hays Code Films, and the Benefits of Censorship by Nora Gilbert. (original) (raw)
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Underground History of Early Victorian Fiction: Introduction: Can a Social Problem Speak
Cambridge University Press, 2018
The book’s introduction provides a capsule history of working-class social movements from the 1830s to the 1850s, a period Thomas Carlyle referred to as “our French Revolution.” These years saw the mass mobilization of working-class people in Britain around an array of issues, including factory reform, a free press, a broadened franchise, and the maintenance of the poor laws. These agitations coalesced in Chartism, which sought the expansion of democratic rights as a way to redress social and economic wrongs. But Chartism was never exclusively focused on political reform; it was also a cultural force which nourished an array of artistic, educational, and literary activity. In the introduction, I analyze the treatment of middle-class social problem fiction in the literature column of the Northern Star, the preeminent radical publication of the late 1830s and 1840s. Even as Carlyle and others characterized the working classes as essentially mute, this radical publication actively engaged with the work of Jerrold, Gaskell, Disraeli, Dickens, Frances Trollope and Carlyle himself. At times, the Star sought to conscript middle-class novelists’ prestige into the Chartist program for reform, enlisting them, if unwillingly, as fellow travelers on the march towards democracy. The introduction concludes with an examination of the way Frances Trollope’s encounters with working-class radicals in the Manchester region informed her early industrial novels, which helped establish the genre of “Condition of England” fiction.
Ian Ward, Sex, Crime and Literature in Victorian England
Feminists Law, 2015
Can we learn more about Victorian jurisprudence through novels than we can through the works of Austin, Stephen or other Victorian jurists? Ian Ward's short book sets out to prove we can, by taking the reader on a romp through Victorian life; blending fiction, jurisprudence and the lives of his selected authors in an entertaining account of nineteenth century England. Drawing on this array of sources, the book provides a compelling feminist account of the regulation of Victorian sex, noting that while Austin wrote for a narrow and circumscribed circle of jurists, Dickens wrote for a public of hundreds of thousands. He is therefore critically important and "we need to read his novels, as we do those of Thackeray, Eliot and Gaskell, and Wood and Braddon and so on, because thousands and thousands of Victorians did…. [These] are the texts which shaped the Victorian mind, what it thought about women and their sexuality, about marriage, and about the law which was somehow supposed to regulate it" (28).
In this day and age, we live by our feelings:’ how do I feel?’, ‘what do I want to do?’ ‘How does this effect my emotions?’ To suppress our emotions is seen as damaging, therefore there is a school of thought where these feelings must be ‘let out’ or pandered to at every opportunity. The ‘Victorians’ had a different, perhaps more practical attitude: ‘this marriage will be good for the family estate’ and altruistic perhaps: ‘I must hide what I feel about this’, and led by etiquette, ‘violent emotions are so vulgar’. Summing up two eras in two sentences is a challenge, and the above may seem trite. This essay seeks to show the differences as well as the similarities, depending on the values of each individual, along with whether our present day conduct might benefit from readers identifying with some of our classical Victorian fiction.
Behind Closed Doors: Pornographic Uses of the Victorian
Sexualities, 2014
This essay argues that the frequency and consistency of Victorian-set or Victorianinfluenced pornographic films highlight hardcore's reliance on class-and gender-related spatial transgression for erotic appeal: boundaries of public and private that the films specifically associate with Victorian social structures. This essay illuminates a self-reflexive pornographic heritage and demonstrates the peculiar tension between sexual repression and sexual perversity evidenced in cultural understandings of both the 19th-century and modern day pornography. I argue that in such films as A Scent of Heather (1980), Memoirs of a Chambermaid (1987), and Victorian Love Letters (2010), 19th-century material culture and technology, including written text, clothing, furniture, and domestic space, are eroticized in pornographic film specifically in connection with gender and class. In so doing, Victorian sexuality is represented in pornography as simultaneously regressive and perverse, as well as intimately tied to the transgression of strict class boundaries; boundaries that, the films seem to suggest, are no longer present in enlightened modern culture.
"Out of the Pasts: Reading Victorian Sensation Fiction through the Lens of Hollywood Film Noir"
<1> As a scholar who specializes in the seemingly disconnected fields of Victorian literature and classical Hollywood film, I am always looking for new and different ways to solder together my two research interests in the classroom. While I do teach more traditional, adaptation-based literature and film courses on occasion, my preference is to move outside the arena of adaptation studies—to teach novels and films that speak to each other without speaking over each other, as I like to put it to my students. One course that has been particularly successful in this regard is a Literature and Gender course that I call " Women Behaving Badly: Victorian Sensation Fiction and Hollywood Film Noir. " For although they are linked by neither time nor place nor medium, sensation fiction and film noir do have a striking number of formal, thematic, and production-history attributes in common: both erupted on the popular culture scene and were produced, for the most part, over a contained period of one or two decades; both are " genre fictions " that play into audience expectations even as they work to subvert and rewrite them; both feature plots that revolve around scandalous and/or criminal acts, which must be discovered by some form of detective work; both of their narrative structures emphasize the importance of—or, rather, the inescapability of—the dark and shadowy past. <2> But what interests me most, from a pedagogical standpoint, about the cousinly genres of sensation fiction and film noir is the way they persistently, obsessively, and viscerally dramatize the (perceived) social threat of defiant and deviant female behaviors and desires. They do this, most obviously, by providing us with some of the most infamous examples of the " femme fatale " figure in all of British literature and Hollywood film: Lucy Audley from Lady Audley's Secret(1862), Lydia Gwilt from Armadale (1866), Phyllis Dietrichson from Double Indemnity (1944), Kathie Moffat from Out of the Past (1947), and so on. Yet the role of female transgression in both sensation fiction and film noir is, as literary and film scholars have respectively observed, a complex one; film noir's famed cinematographic stylings notwithstanding, these are not stories that are told in black and white. Indeed, the critical ©Nineteenth-Century Gender Studies, Edited by Stacey Floyd and Melissa Purdue