Madness in the Female Character of Mrs Audley in Lady Audley's Secret by Elizabeth Braddon (original) (raw)
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Female Authors under the Mask of a Male Pseudonym - Some Approaches to Revealing Authors’ Gender
European Journal of Language and Literature
A patriarchal society has very clear and rigid norms. Its frame does not allow one to move out of it, and a mode of behaviour which attempts any change is severely punished. This kind of society has strict written and unwritten rules, and it seems that the second kind are more harmful and painful for the individual than the first. In 19th century, European society was strongly patriarchal, and a phenomenon which confirms this is the fact that many female writers published their works under a male pseudonym. A patriarchal system attempts to prevent women from any artistic and scientific form and expression, as they are labelled as less intellectually able or talented, but by choosing a male pseudonym they found a way to reach their goal. An author writes about what he knows, what surrounds him and/or what he notices, feels and thinks. Considering that a patriarchal society system is highly defined, female and male points of view, their angles of reflection and aims are obviously diff...
Portrait of Women in Victorian Novels
International Journal of Language and Literary Studies
This article examines the representation of three female characters in three Victorian novels. These three novels are Bleak house, Ruth, and Lady Audley’s Secret. This work is, in fact, a study of how women were viewed in Victorian novels which actually depicted the Victorian society. The society of that time was male-dominated that tried to rule over women unfairly and made them as submissive as possible in order to handle them easily according to their selfish tastes. If women in Victorian society followed the expectations of men thoroughly, they were called angel-in-the-house; if not, they were labeled with negative labels like fallen-woman or mad-woman. This article tries to go through the characters of Esther Summerson, Ruth, and Lady Audley who appeared in the three aforementioned novels respectively in order to prove that the Victorian Society, which was represented in the novels of that period, was a harshly male-dominated society that ruled over women with bitter patriarchy.
Identification Crises: Victorian Women and Wayward Reading
2013
In the Victorian period, no assumption about female reading generated more ambivalence and anxiety than the supposedly feminine facility for identifying with fictional characters and plots. Simultaneously, no assumption about women's reading seemed to be more axiomatic. Conservatives and radicals, feminists and anti-feminists, artists and scientists, and novelists and critics throughout the long nineteenth century believed implicitly in women's essential tendency to internalize textual perspectives to their detriment. My dissertation rethinks the discourse of "crisis" over women's literary identification in opposition to increasing representation of what I call "wayward reading," in which women approached identification as a flexible capacity instead of an emotional compulsion. I argue that the constant anxiety expressed by Victorian writers about women's absorption in literature helped to reify irrational and involuntary identification as the feminine norm, even while accounts of women's elective reading response defied this narrative. This study analyzes and contextualizes three major types of deliberately wayward reading in the Victorian era, which challenge the premises of gendered identification that often obtain in criticism and pedagogy today. The first chapter explores the imaginative license granted to women readers, as opposed to women writers, to identify with male subjects. While such literary identification with men was believed to bolster women's marital and relational sympathies, Elizabeth Barrett Browning's Aurora Leigh depicts an artistic form of masculine identification that, unlike marriage, preserves the integrity of female subjectivity. The second chapter examines the multiple crises prompted by the sensation genre about the representation of female characters, which mirror contemporary concerns about the representation of women sought by the burgeoning women's suffrage movement. I contend that the sensation novels of Mary Elizabeth Braddon do not exploit the reader's "feminine" nerves, but rather facilitate morally conscious, elective identification. By the fin de siècle, a new crisis emerged over the possibility of women's under-identification with literature as a result of their increased access to higher education and professionalization. George Gissing's New Grub Street and The Odd Women, as well as the New Woman novels of Charlotte Riddell, Mary Cholmondeley, and George Paston, all engage with the concept of female literary detachment as a kind of morbid pathology: a trope that demonstrates how necessary emotional identification was and is for defining femininity. The greatest share of my gratitude belongs to Ian Duncan, the chair of my dissertation committee, who shepherded this project at every stage with extraordinary encouragement and advice on all matters great and small. I was also extremely fortunate to benefit from the trenchant insights and suggestions of Catherine Gallagher and Carla Hesse, the other members of the committee. Kent Puckett planted the germ of the first chapter by assigning Aurora Leigh in his graduate seminar, and continued to give me crucial and generous guidance throughout this project. Randall Smith, Ruth Baldwin, Catherine Cronquist Browning, Slavica Naumovska, and Sangina Patnaik all graciously read early drafts of my chapters and offered brilliant feedback and just criticism. Matthew Knox and Samira Franklin tirelessly discussed the dissertation with me, helped clarify my ideas, and cheered me onward with their support. All of these mentors, friends, and family kept me from straying too far into the "Valley of the Shadow of Books" and helped me move forward with my writing. For that, I am ever thankful. A Very Brief History of Modern Identification Identification with literature famously became a pathology in the early seventeenth century with Miguel de Cervantes' Don Quixote, the first part of which spawned a counterfeit sequel as well as less brazen imitations like Charles Sorel's Le Berger extravagant. Joseph Harris notes that Don Quixote and Le Berger's Lysis, and, I would add, Arabella, the eponymous Female Quixote of the eighteenth century, are all eventually able to emerge from their insane or merely misguided literary identifications, whereas "the fate of Emma Bovary two centuries later reflects rather less optimism about the possibility of delineating an untrammelled 'true self' from the precedents set by fictional intertexts." 12 Harris charts the "prehistory" of identification in the early Modern period, particularly as theorized in the writings of Pierre Corneille about audience "intérêt." 13 Corneille begins to consider pity instead of fear (Aristotle's Poetics described the latter, not the former, as the feeling for "someone like us") as a source of identification. This represents a shift from the "classical" model of identification described by Alain Ménil as a process of rational, self-interested analogy (e.g., "the character is afraid in this situation; how would I avoid this outcome if I were in the same situation?") toward emotional involvement on the character's behalf through the vehicle of pity. Jean-Jacques Rousseau originated the psychological, self-reflexive usage of the word "identification" in his "Discourse on the Origin of Inequality" in 1754. 14 Rousseau uses "s'identifier" to denote a spontaneous mental activity that produces pity: "En effet, le commiseration sera d'autant plus energique que l'animal spectateur s'identifiera plus intimement avec l'animal souffrant. Or il est évident que cette identification a dû être infiniment plus étroite dans l'état de Nature que dans l'état de raisonnement." 15 Identification as conceptualized by Rousseau is a natural capacity that is mitigated, not cultivated, by the reason, which engenders "l'amour-propre" that he opposes to identificatory sympathy. Rousseau thus defines identification as a primal impulse suppressed by philosophers and their ilk but still alive among Donna Quixote and Gendered Overidentification From Plato onward, emotionalism, overabsorption, passivity, and narcissism had been feared as the effects of literary identification. But beginning in the eighteenth century and established in the nineteenth century, these disparate effects were consolidated under the label of "feminine" reading. Robert Uphaus traces concerns about women's vulnerability to identification with literature back to the seventeenth century, when Anglican minister Richard Allestree's 1675 The Ladies Calling observed that "reading Romances, which seems now to be thought the peculiar and only becoming study of young Ladies," exposes them to "amorous Passions" that are "apt to insinuate themselves into their unwary Readers, and by an unhappy inversion, a coppy shall produce an Original." 30 In the eighteenth century, the naïve woman seduced by literature-first romances, then novels-becomes, as Ina Ferris notes, a "trope" and a cliché. Ferris argues that the young female reader "came to function metonymically" for all new readers trying to access a new "culture of literacy." 31 The heroine of The Female Quixote follows her namesake of La Mancha in mistaking romances for reality, although Clara Reeve's account of the book in The Progress of Romance as well as Henry Fielding's contemporary review observe that romances were already passé reading material. 32 But in spite of the generic anachronism, Fielding finds The Female Quixote to possess greater verisimilitude than Don Quixote in its female subject: …as we are to grant in both Performances, that the Head of a very sensible Person is entirely subverted by reading Romances, this Concession seems to me more easy to be granted in the Case of a young Lady than of an old Gentleman .... To say Truth, I make no Doubt but that most young Women. .. in the same Situation, and with the same Studies, would be able to make a large Progress in the same Follies. Fielding interprets the book as specifically directed at women by Lennox, "to expose all those Vices and Follies in her Sex which are chiefly predominant in Our Days." Although seemingly "there was hardly any crime, sin, or personalized catastrophe that injudicious reading was not held to cause directly or indirectly," the focus of cultural anxiety had begun to shift from the more general perils of reading to its most likely victims: women. 33 In the constant association of women with misreading, delusive identification with fiction became less an amusing aberration than a vice or folly endemic to femininity. The ubiquity of this assumption is reflected in the ominous claim of Maria and Richard Edgeworth in Practical Education: "We know, from common experience, the effects which are produced upon the female mind by immoderate novel reading." 34 The indictment of women's identification rested on essentialist ideas of feminine emotionalism. Hume expressed great faith in women's perspicuity in reading, except for "books of gallantry and devotion," because, "as the fair sex have a great share of the tender and amorous disposition, it perverts their judgment on this occasion, and makes them be easily affected, even by what has no propriety in the expression or nature in the sentiment." 35 Female emotions were characterized as especially liable to aestheticization, or enjoyment of feeling for feeling's sake. The Edgeworths condemned "sentimental stories and books of mere entertainment" that cultivated this feminine preference for fictional over real objects: …the species of reading to which we object, has an effect directly opposite to what it is intended to produce. It diminishes, instead of increasing, the sensibility of the heart; a combination of romantic imagery, is requisite to act upon the associations of sentimental people, and they are virtuous only when virtue is in
CEPOS, 2017
Abstract Many authors began to write about the sufferings and endurances of women in the Victorian Age. More and more novels focused heavily on traditional, typical Victorian female characters and their interactions. As to the movement for the emancipation of woman from the unjust burdens and disabilities to which the five authors made it a subject to reveal the benign qualities of woman, Hardy, Thackeray, Gaskell, Trollope and George Eliot also focused the condition of woman, besides Charles Dickens and the Brontë sisters – with a remarkable account of the social institutions of Victorian London. This does not mean that those novelists held feminist ideas, they simply he wanted to give woman her feminine privileges and rights. This study aims to explore most important Victorian writers who wrote about woman to seek the accuracy of Victorian views towards women. Charles Dickens was a pioneer in dealing with the kind of woman that was identified in that era. We also include Thomas Hardy and Charlotte Brontë who had different ideas in this point
Patterns of Gendered Constructions of the Self - the Narrative of Victorian Lady Novelists
International Journal of Social Science and Humanity, 2011
In stories of initiation, any hero has to go through a series of trials that will constantly reshape and broaden his horizons by pouring the light of knowledge and experience accomplishing him as a human being, who ultimately reaches the epiphantic moment of self-discovery. By the end of the journey, the protagonist would have descended deep into the very core of his being, and would have also travelled the world of shadows and lights, of noesis and eikasia. Such is the journey of women during the Victorian time, in their search for self assertion, in their quest for the true light of the sun that would no longer distort the shape and perception of things.
Pseudonomity Victorian Women Authors Recognition Strategy
British and American Studies, , ISSN print 1224-3086, ISSN-L 1224-3086 ISSN online 2457-7715, ISSN-L 1224-3086, vol. XXVII, 2021
Abstract: This essay presents the female authors of the Victorian era and the male pen names they adopted, arguing that they favoured acceptance by attaining positive distinctiveness to relate and be a member of the out-group (males) but as a strategic move to favour the in-group (women). This taking of pseudo-identity played a significant role in defining the changing reality, and contributing to the success of feminism as a social change in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. Keywords: feminist writing, male pseudonyms, positive distinctiveness, social identity theory, Victorian literature, Victorian women
The New Woman in embryo: Masculine women in Victorian Novels
2019
In 1792, Mary Wollstonecraft defined the term "Masculine woman" as "the imitation of manly virtues, or (more accurately) the achieving of the talents and virtues that ennoble the human character and raise females in the scale of animal being when they are brought under the comprehensive label 'mankind'" (33). 102 years later, in 1894, Sarah Grand coined the term "New Woman" as the term for a woman liberated from oppressive Victorian standards, who "does not in the least intend to sacrifice the privileges she enjoys…especially of the kind which man seems to think she must aspire to as so much more desirable" (273). In that century between those two terms, there is a history of women fighting for the necessary reforms that would allow them equal freedoms to their male counterparts. In this paper, I will examine three novels-Wuthering Heights, Daniel Deronda, and Jude the Obscure-in the context of Victorian society and women's issues at the time, highlighting how the struggles faced by the heroines in each novel are congruent with the silent struggles of women at the time. Each of these novels features
Gender in Victorian Popular Fiction, Art, and Culture
<1>Issues of gender are at the heart of popular culture studies. To offer just one of many examples, the extent to which heroines such as Joss Whedon's Buffy Summers and Stephanie Meyer's Bella Swan can be seen as role models for young women, and the type of message they may be conveying to their viewers and readers, continues to generate much critical interest (see Jarvis, Levine and Parks). More recently, shows like Transparent (which, at the time of writing, has won numerous awards) have led to much discussion in the popular press about the representation of trans people in the media and what they might teach viewers (both trans and cis). This suggests that discussions about the depiction of gender in popular culture, and how it may influence the public conception of gender, will only continue to become more complex and pressing. <2>These issues were equally pertinent in the nineteenth century. As Walter Besant argues, popular fiction "may be considered as a great educational power. As dealing with different aspects of life, it teaches the nature of the world we live in" (49). This statement is a defense of sensation novels, which, as it was published in M. E. Braddon's own periodical, Belgravia, is hardly free from bias, but it does illustrate a key point: popular fiction educates. Through its choice of subject matter, characterization, narrative voice and plots-particularly endings that seem to reward or punish certain types of behavior-popular fiction can teach its readers about what is and is not acceptable, admirable, and to be aspired to. Popular fiction can also affect readers' opinions on matters of genre, class, race, age, and of course gender. This is true of many genres, not only popular ones, but Victorian reviewers were often most critical of the moral (as well as the literary) quality of popular fiction (as demonstrated in Brooke Fortune's article on Newgate fiction), and so its ability to influence its readers became a cause for concern, especially because popular fiction was popular-read by large numbers of people from different levels and corners of society, numbers so large, and groups so disparate, that their reading, and responses to that reading, could not be effectively controlled or monitored. While