Escaping the Women's Sphere in Neo-Victorian Fiction

The Comilla University Journal of Arts (ISSN: 2616-8278), 2020

Does the story of a patriarch society’s girl dressing like a boy to prove her worth or as a survival mechanism sound familiar? Stories of cross-dressing have been (r)/e-volving from the 15th century’s Joan of Arc legends to today’s pop-culture. Drawing on Foucault’s ‘power/knowledge’ and Butler’s ‘gender performativity’, this qualitative research offers a comparative reading of the 20th - 21st century’s pop-cultural elements with reference to Shakespeare’s Twelfth Night or What You Will to explore (a) how the subversive or transgressive practice of cross-dressing has been used across time and space as a means of accessing power in a male dominated society and (b) how it serves the end diversely.

Revista Canaria de Estudios Ingleses, 2016

Sarah Waters’s Neo-Victorian novel Tipping the Velvet (1998) is set in the last decades of the nineteenth century and its two lesbian protagonists are given voice as the marginalised and “the other.” Judith Butler’s notion of gender performance is taken to its extremes in a story where male prostitution is exerted by a lesbian woman who behaves and dresses like a man. Therefore, drawing from Butler’s theories on gender performance and Elisabeth Grosz’s idea about bodily inscriptions, this article will address Victorian and contemporary discourses connected with the notions of identity and agency as the result of sexual violence and gender abuse.

Women's Writing, 2004

This article both uncovers a forgotten genre of women's writing and intervenes into recent critical debates about the status of the actress in Victorian literature and culture. In the 1870s and early 1880s a number of women's novels were published that presented acting as a noble and ennobling profession. Such texts didactically engaged with traditional portrayals of theatrical life as dissolute and depraved and described it instead as a profession requiring all a woman's powers of endurance and self-sacrifice. The novels appear, therefore, to incorporate rather than challenge conservative mythologies of womanhood; the article argues, however, that the challenge to those mythologies comes precisely from the texts' refusal to accept that public life taints a woman. The novels compound their attack on ideals of domestic, compliant femininity through sympathetically evoked scenes of self-directed acting: authentic female performance emerges as the self-governed expression of the insurgent impulse to act. Such texts therefore represent an intriguingly nuanced contribution to Victorian debates about the "essential" nature and appropriate sphere of women.

2019

Author(s): Raphaeli, Karen | Advisor(s): Smarr, Janet | Abstract: “The Clothes Make the Man: Theatrical Crossdressing as Expression of Gender Fluidity in Seventeenth- through Nineteenth-Century Performance” explores theatrical crossdressing, specifically masculinity embodied by a female actor, in British and American performances starting in 1689 and ending in 1914. By examining specific performances, plays and historical individuals over the course of 225 years, this dissertation traces theorizations of gender during these different time periods, combining a close reading of texts with historical research and historiography to offer transgender readings of characters, performers and historical individuals. This project challenges the gender normative assumptions in the theatre scholarship, that previously read these masculine performances through a narrow lens, without fully considering gender identity. The wide temporal range examined in this dissertation allows for the developmen...

Clepsydra, 2022

The actress, like the prostitute, was one of the female figures who in the nineteenth century bore a certain social stigma for being professionally active in public and non-domestic roles that were considered vulgar and immoral. This prejudiced view is indebted to the ideology of separate spheres, which has proven to be both class-bound and unstable. While critics as Davis (1991) and Kift (1996) have questioned the overgeneralised association between actresses and prostitutes, feminist scholars have challenged the strict separation of gendered spheres, and argued for the instability and fluidity of this spatial divide. Taking this as a starting point, this essay addresses the Victorian popular actress from a feminist perspective to explore the transcendental role she had in music-hall culture. I will explore how this popular entertainment developed from a working-class culture and question the applicability of bourgeoise values and the ideology of separate spheres to the music hall. In doing so, I hope to shed new light over the music-hall actress as a working woman demonstrating that she was better esteemed than previously admitted, and argue that she turned the music hall into a space of self-fulfillment though subversion and transcendence of female roles.

Although the Victorians were categorically pioneering in the implication of many radical developments, industrially, socially, and even globally; one area in which variety was rarely seen was in the discourse of sexuality. Critics such as Steven Marcus have acknowledged the existence of sexual ‘others’ within Victorian England, but show how in traditional texts from the period, these ‘others’ have always been enclosed within deviant spaces. (Marcus) Terry Castle, in her insightful and challenging book, The Apparitional Lesbian; discusses the presence of lesbians in literature, and argues that ‘The literary history of lesbianism…is first of all a history of derealization’ (Castle 34). Although Castle shows that female homosexuality does occur in Victorian texts, she also provides evidence that any suggestion of lesbianism had to be ‘derealized’. Over the past twenty years or so, a new form of historical text has emerged, which has come to be known as the Neo-Victorian novel. In these novels, writers have been able to reimagine the nineteenth-century, with the inclusion of previously marginalised ‘otherness’. One of these authors is the critically acclaimed and highly successful novelist; Sarah Waters, and the ‘other Victorians’ that Waters includes in her stories are lesbians. This study will examine Sarah Waters three Neo-Victorian texts; Tipping the Velvet, Affinity, and Fingersmith, assessing the treatment of both sexuality and gender, and the relationship they have with space. In Tipping the Velvet, the study will look at how the protagonist journeys through a number of different spaces, and assess her sexual development within each space, discussing how theatricality is used to conceal identity. It will also analyse how Waters imagines the male gaze, and look at the treatment of Victorian ideals surrounding masculinity and femininity. In Affinity, the essay will examine the notion of the ‘apparitional lesbian’, and how Waters utilizes this concept to uncover the truths it hides. It will also assess Waters’ use of Bentnam’s panopticon, and the way in which the author portrays the entrapment of the Victorian woman. In Fingersmith, the study will discuss the dubiety of the novel’s spaces and how this is significant to the study of sexuality. It will also show how Waters uses intertextuality to convey her own transgressions. The main point of concern will be to judge just how progressive these novels are in their portrayal of lesbianism, and whether Waters succeeds in finding a conceivable space for lesbians within an authentic historical novel.

Kafkas Üniversitesi Sosyal Bilimler Enstitüsü Dergisi, 2024

Sex and gender are two concepts that are often unconsciously used interchangeably, but they have distinct meanings. They are crucial in understanding the gender hierarchy or the distinction between man and woman created by the patriarchal order. While sex refers to a biological difference or an innate existence based on signs such as chromosomes and genitals, gender is a socio-cultural identity subsequently acquired through social interaction. While the biology-oriented approach reduces femininity and masculinity to the body based on an essentialist approach, the socio-culturally oriented approach underlines that femininity and masculinity are culturally constructed, fluid, and changeable. The gender roles assigned to man and woman in patriarchal society bring along certain expectations based on their sexes and their society's values and beliefs about gender. The fact that both woman and man are expected to wear appropriate dress for their gender roles is the reflection of this expectation. When a man wears clothing traditionally associated with women or when a woman wears clothing traditionally associated with men, they might face ridicule or criticism because these clothing choices challenge established gender norms, and because the clothes are reminders of roles or symbols that favour social roles. Contrary to this, cross-dressing is described as an act of wearing clothes and accessories that belong to the opposite sex, and it is possible to see its examples as a deconstructive strategy in contemporary British feminist theatre. This article aims at discussing the functions of cross-dressing as a body memory in contemporary British feminist theatre over selected plays such as Caryl Churchill's plays

See www.neovictorianstudies for original; Neo-Victorian Studies 9.2 (2017) This article seeks to illustrate how cross-dressing functions to highlight not only a crisis of gender identity, as Marjorie Garber describes in Vested Interests (1992), but operates more broadly to indicate multiple and overlapping crises of sexual and racial identity. Using examples from three postcolonial neo-Victorian novels, Ahdaf Soueif's The Map of Love (1999), Elaine di Rollo's A Proper Education for Girls (2008) and Kate Pullinger's The Mistress of Nothing (2009), the article analyses the representation of characters who consciously fail to pass as 'other' when dressing across lines of race and gender. Using a postfeminist framework, the article challenges the assumption that seemingly independent female characters in neo-Victorian fiction automatically contest Victorian stereotypes of accepted female behaviour. Looking at the novels' representations of otherness, the article argues for the existence of a double Orientalism in postcolonial neo-Victorianism: a revived Victorian Orientalism within the texts as well as a renewed twenty-first-century Orientalism constructed between the present-day reader and the modern text itself.

Neo-Victorian Studies, 2020

The body is constituted through perspectives it cannot inhabit; someone else sees our face in a way that we cannot and hears our voice in a way that we cannot. We are in this sensebodilyalways over there, yet here, and this dispossession marks the sociality to which we belong. Even as located beings, we are always elsewhere, constituted in a sociality that exceeds us. This establishes our exposure and our precarity, the ways in which we depend on political and social institutions to persist. (Butler 2015: 97) When Sarah Waters's first neo-Victorian novel, Tipping the Velvet, was published in 1998, it quickly became a sensational successquite to the surprise of the author herself, who at the time worried about how "lurid" its premise might have initially appeared, "how improbable, above all how niche" (Waters 2018: n.p.). One of the first best-selling lesbian novels, 1 and staging a blatant queering of the very hallmark of British literature, the Victorian novel, Tipping the Velvet was hailed as ground-breaking by readers and critics alike. It not only shifted the lesbian novel away from the margins and into the mainstream of popular fiction, but also popularised a literary approach of queer writing-back to heteronormative historiography, illuminating the struggles, vibrancy, and desires of a diverse community operating in the interstices. Followed by Waters's similarly successful neo-Victorian Affinity (1999) and Fingersmith , Tipping the Velvet was the first novel to truly attract readers and scholars alike to the idea of imaginatively (re-)inscribing into accounts of 'the Victorians' queer subjectivities, affects, attachments, crises, and ambitions. Retrospectively, the exhilaration triggered by Waters's neo-Victorian trio bespeaks not only the originality and daring of her writing, but also the extent to which LGBTQIA+ readers previously had been denied historical visibility and life-affirming, affective-sensual self-recognition in a 1990s culture still

2018

1994

No matter how moral, or well-behaved they might have been, many actresses - even the star actresses were associated with a life of immorality and degeneracy. The public nature of their art; the dubious social value of the institution in which they worked; the type of costumes they wore (which often revealed far more of the female anatomy than was permissable outside the theatre); the morally questionable parts they often had to play; all these factors conspired to make any Victorians believe that acting was a morally dubious profession. Actresses were no better than prostitutes; indeed, it was likely that some of them were prostitutes. Such paradoxes lie at the heart of the actress’ status during the late Victorian period, and it is these that this paper seeks to explore. In keeping with the theme of this seminar – “Text and context in Victorian Literature” - this paper will subsequently look at the social position of the Victorian actress, as revealed through various sources - published plays, songs, autobiographies. Such evidence should demonstrate that the various manifestations of the actresses' identity were constructed in keeping with the interests of particular groups, to the disadvantage of female performers themselves.

Theatre Research International, 2000

Theatre Survey, 1997

This masters thesis analyses the work of British writer Sarah Waters, focussing on the inseparability of spatiality and the expression of sexuality in her novels. Since 1998, Waters has published three books set in the mid-to-late Victorian era, featuring lesbian protagonists: Tipping the Velvet, Affinity and Fingersmith. All three novels are examples of lesbian fiction, but they are also arguably works of historiographic metafiction and “post-Victorian” novels. They have been critically and popularly acclaimed, added to university reading lists and adapted for television. There has thus far been a small amount of scholarship in response to Waters’s novels, primarily concerned with generic classification and lesbian identity. The entwined discourses of space and sexuality form the theoretical basis of this discussion. There is a large body of academic work on this subject, by cultural theorists such as Michel Foucault, Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick and Mark Wigley as well as geographers such as Tim Creswell. Previous studies of Waters’s work have made little use of theories of space and sexuality, despite their relevance to her novels. I draw upon these theories in my analyses of Tipping the Velvet, Affinity and Fingersmith, exploring the way in which the historically transgressive sexualities of Waters’s heroines are constructed spatially, via the characters’ movement (or lack thereof) through confining interiors. Chapter One looks at the ways in which theatrical and performative transgressions affect sexual expression in Waters’s first novel, Tipping the Velvet. Sites of performance, or stages, are not only located in theatres in this text, but are present everywhere: on the streets and in the homes of both the rich and poor. Upon these numerous and diverse stages Nancy Astley, the protagonist of the novel, reveals the inherent performativity of gender and sexuality through cross-dressing and impersonation. The second chapter shows the way sexual identities are confined within both the private sphere and the prison in Affinity. The desires of the protagonists can be articulated only through spiritual or ghostly transgressions, which are simultaneously arousing and frightening. The third chapter focuses on domestic spaces and madness in Fingersmith. Waters draws on Victorian notions of hysteria and female sexuality in this novel, re-appropriating them for her own purposes. This thesis concludes that Waters re-presents Victorian sexuality through the spaces in which it was enclosed.