The Drowned Woman

Via Panorâmica, 2018

The theme of the fallen woman finding salvation in death was a popular topic in Victorian art and literature, especially during the mid-Victorian era. From the fiction of Thomas Hardy and Charles Dickens to realistic paintings, the myth of the fallen woman had a strong presence. In this article, I will focus on artistic representations of the fallen woman, such as John Everett Millais's Ophelia and Augustus Egg's Past and Present triptych and discuss the importance of Williams Shakespeare's Ophelia and Thomas Hood's poem "The Bridge of Sighs" for the conception of this mythical figure. I will also argue that, despite these artists' efforts to mercifully portray the fallen women, in the end, they reinforced a Victorian patriarchal discourse, which regarded women as physically and intellectually weaker than men, while mythologizing this transgressing figure, created in order to remind all women of the fate they could expect if they defied the idealized conception of femininity imposed by society.

The work of Virginia Woolf is replete with water imagery. In her texts, this imagery is both figurative and literal, but omnipresent nonetheless. Just as it flows, water is a flexible image that represents an array of emotions and concepts. Yet, one enduring metaphor is water tied together with mental illness. Many of Woolf’s characters, particularly in Mrs. Dalloway, To The Lighthouse, and Between The Acts, display mentally ill tendencies in worlds where the imagery is centered on water. The tendency towards this metaphor is only further complicated by Woolf’s own morbid fascination with drowning and her own watery death after a lifelong struggle with mental illness.

Cahiers victoriens et édouardiens, 2017

This text was automatically generated on 5 July 2019. Cahiers victoriens et édouardiens est mis à disposition selon les termes de la licence Creative Commons Attribution-Pas d'Utilisation Commerciale-Pas de Modification 4.0 International.

Shima: The International Journal of Research into Island Cultures, 2021

The Sea Lady (1901) is one of the more neglected early novels of H. G. Wells, particularly compared to his more famous scientific romances. Both a social satire and a mediation on the limits of human imagination, Wells’s only mermaid story has drawn surprisingly little attention as a mermaid story. The novel is highly intertextual with legends, written tales, and artwork about mermaids in the 19th Century, which, I argue, Wells deploys in pursuit of the narrative’s interests in gender politics, the critique of social conventions, and philosophical reflection on the possibility of reaching for greater knowledge. Traditional associations of mermaid figures with sexual and ontological transgression and with liminal zones of the sea and the seashore are used to invite reflection on late Victorian social practices around sea-bathing and clothing, as the mythological mermaid’s incursion into the real everyday world exposes its profound vulnerability to radical alternative ways of thinking...

Bachelor of Arts (BA) Dissertation, 2022

This research examines Virginia Woolf's use of the water imagery through two successive novels: Orlando: A Biography and The Waves. Water imagery has a vital place in Woolf's personal life and her works. By closely reading the water imageries, repetitive motifs, symbols, and puns, I examine how they support the idea that the self is an unstable, ever-changing phenomenon. Water is the descriptor for Orlando's fluid gendered identity and the central imagery of The Waves' mystification of the self. Including the metafictional references, which are abundant in both novels, within the scope of the research, I produce answers to the main question mark, Woolf's theory of the self. The social order exerts a power that expects a single self, but the (in)dividual is in a constant fluidity between multiple gendered, sexualized, purposeful, and emotional selves. In the moments when the social order disrupts the fluidity, the characters continue to search for new methods but develop a perspective toward life that creates the melancholic tone of the novels. Although neither the water imagery nor the multiplicity of the self in Virginia Woolf's novels is an unexplored topic, this research aims to contribute to the discussion with the notions of gender and sexuality fluidity.

Open Cultural Studies

The Victorian artistic community that grew up on the Isle of Wight around Tennyson and Julia Margaret Cameron has been reimagined in Virginia Woolf's play, Freshwater (1923, 1935), and more recently in Lynn Truss's novel, Tennyson's Gift (1996). Whereas Freshwater should be read as modernist or post- Victorian, Tennyson's Gift is neo-Victorian and postmodern in its form and attitude. Integral to both are the discontent of women and the disruption of gender norms. Therefore, this essay looks particularly at the question of female agency in a Victorian world envisioned in 1923-35 and one of 1996. In Freshwater, one sees a serious exploration of generational change and the desire for artistic freedom, especially through the character of Ellen Terry. Freshwater is a dress rehearsal for To the Lighthouse. Truss reimagines Freshwater by adding to Woolf's cast the unstable Charles Dodgson, whose Alice in Wonderland becomes the familiarizing scaffolding for readers in a ...

2014

In this paper I examine the use of three different literary models associated with female water spirits in Jeffrey Eugenides’s novel Middlesex. More specifically, I will read the protagonist’s struggle to understand his gender identity in the light of the following models: the Naiad, the Fiji Mermaid, and the Siren. I will show how the Naiad is used as a metaphor for an immature state in the development of a human being, allusions to the Fiji Mermaid are used to indicate the fulfillment of a human desire, and the Siren is used metonymically to refer to the gnoseological imperative of her song.

Woman's Art Journal, 1984

The Mermaid and the Medium: A Neo-Victorian Reclamation of Victorian Archetypes in Sarah Waters’ Affinity, 2016

Sarah Waters’ Affinity (1999), set during the height of Victorian Spiritualism, consciously plays with Victorian truisms to subvert our expectations of class and gender roles, and retrospectively explore Victorian taboos of female power and sexuality. Lower class Selina Dawes and Ruth Vigers take advantage of the relatively liberal space of the seance to make 'unnatural' border crossings, using the archetype of the Victorian 'Angel' to hide their 'Monstrosity.' This paper argues that the Mermaid is a useful image for re-examining placed on women by men in that era. As a contemporary female writer, Waters subverts these normative models, and in doing so reveals the complexity and hidden talents of women who, in their own time, were unable to outwardly voice their desires, or actively seek power.

A hallmark of neo-Victorian fiction is its preoccupation with recovering and reimagining lost voices from the past. The increased critical attention toward feminist neo-Victorian fiction in the late 1990s and early 2000s fuelled an ongoing debate about the genre’s capacity to redress historical silences toward marginalised groups. The representation of women in neo-Victorian fiction has divided critics: on the one hand, these novels are viewed as key interventions in contemporary gender inequality and, on the other, as opportunistic works designed to capitalise on the fetishisation of the Other. Despite the recurring presence of transgressive female bodies in Graham Swift’s neo-Victorian novel Waterland (1983), criticism of the novel has thus far neglected to engage with its relationship to the feminist movement in the genre. The majority of scholarship on the novel focuses on Tom Crick’s narrative as a prime example of postmodern historiography or historiographic metafiction. As a result, little attention has been paid to the female characters in Waterland, while the scholarship that does exist in this area perpetuates the perception of these women as powerless pawns in the grand narrative of male-authored history. This paper addresses the critical silence toward Waterland’s female characters by employing an interdisciplinary methodology drawn from memory studies, corporeal feminism, and neo-Victorian criticism. I argue that repositioning our attention from memory-as-story to memory-as-body reveals the agency inherent in the actions of Waterland’s women, particularly with regard to Crick’s wife Mary and her Victorian-era counterpart, Sarah Atkinson. Reading the novel through the embodied memories of its female characters demonstrates their capacity to successfully intervene in the patriarchal discourse that seeks to overpower them.