The Empire Inside: Indian Commodities in Victorian Domestic Novels (review)

2012 ◽  
Vol 44 (1) ◽  
pp. 112-114
Author(s):  
Ann-Marie Dunbar
Keyword(s):  
Domestic Novels

WORDS FROM SOME DOMESTIC NOVELS OF C. M. YONGE

1960 ◽  
Vol 7 (12) ◽  
pp. 459-b-465
Author(s):  
MARGHANITA LASKI
Keyword(s):  
Domestic Novels

Sex, Violence, and Religion in the Irish-American Domestic Novel

2020 ◽  
pp. 496-515
Author(s):  
Sally Barr Ebest
Keyword(s):  
American Women Writers ◽  
Domestic Novel ◽  
Male And Female ◽  
Female Authors ◽  
Gender Hierarchy ◽  
Domestic Novels ◽  
Sexuality And Religion ◽  
Post War ◽  
Irish Americans

This chapter compares post-war Irish-American domestic novels by male and female authors, examining the influence of politics, assimilation, and ethnic identity on their plots and characters. Focusing on representative novels per decade from the 1940s to the present, the analysis finds that while both male and female writers agree that married life rarely equals domestic bliss, the authors’ gender identity determines their representation of the roles played by marriage, sexuality, and religion. The first part of the chapter examines the preponderance of adultery and gendered abuse; the second discusses attitudes towards women, sex, and sexual preference; and the third traces the movement from immigrant piety to an intellectual, independent view of the Church that acknowledges its ongoing gender hierarchy. The discussion not only reveals the progression of Irish Americans’ fictional lives since the 1940s but also examines the role of Irish-American women writers in expanding that view.

BREAKING THE IDOL OF THE MARRIAGE PLOT INYEASTANDVILLETTE

2010 ◽  
Vol 38 (2) ◽  
pp. 337-353
Author(s):  
Timothy L. Carens
Keyword(s):  
Religious Faith ◽  
Domestic Fiction ◽  
Jane Eyre ◽  
Marriage Plot ◽  
Passionate Love ◽  
Human Love ◽  
Domestic Novels ◽  
High Esteem ◽  
Conventional Device ◽  
Made In

Nineteenth-century Protestant culturegenerally held marriage in high esteem, and the notion that marriage was “made in heaven” often explicitly undergirds the conventional resolution of domestic fiction. Despite many indications of a harmonious relationship between human love and religious faith, a countervailing cultural trend reveals a deep conflict between the two. Victorian Protestants worried that passionate love for another mortal creature might lead to heretical extremes, that human love might slip into idolatry, the worship of false and material gods. Jane Eyre memorably confesses that she has “made an idol” of Rochester, although she, of course, looks back upon this transgression from the vantage of marital happiness (274). In this essay, I focus on works in which misgivings about idolatrous love arise with more disruptive force. The marriage plots of Charles Kingsley'sYeast: A Problem(1851) and Charlotte Brontë'sVillette(1853) both abruptly collapse, bringing into sharp focus a Protestant religious anxiety that subverts the conventional device with which Victorian domestic novels achieve closure.

BETWEEN TWO WORLDS: RACIAL IDENTITY IN ALICE PERRIN'S THE STRONGER CLAIM

2014 ◽  
Vol 42 (3) ◽  
pp. 491-508
Author(s):  
Melissa Edmundson Makala
Keyword(s):  
Racial Identity ◽  
Mixed Race ◽  
Negative Effects ◽  
Racial Inequalities ◽  
One Dimensional ◽  
British Raj ◽  
Domestic Novels ◽  
Social Messages ◽  
Romance Plot ◽  
Anglo Indian

Like many Anglo-Indian novelists of her generation, Alice Perrin (1867–1934) gained fame through the publication and popular reception of several domestic novels based in India and England. However, within the traditional Anglo-Indian romance plot, Perrin often incorporated subversive social messages highlighting racial and cultural problems prevalent in India during the British Raj. Instead of relying solely on one-dimensional, sentimental British heroes and heroines, Perrin frequently chose non-British protagonists who reminded her contemporary readers of very real Anglo-Indian racial inequalities they might wish to forget. In The Stronger Claim (1903), Perrin creates a main character who has a mixed-race background, but who, contrary to prevailing public opinion of the time, is a multi-dimensional, complex, and perhaps most importantly, sympathetic character positioned between two worlds. Even as Victorian India was coming to an end, many of the problems that had plagued the British Raj intensified in the early decades of the twentieth century. Perrin's novel is one of the earliest attempts to present a sympathetic and heroic mixed-race protagonist, one whose presence asked readers to question the lasting negative effects of race relations and racial identity in both India and England.

Hagar in Nineteenth-Century Southern Women’s Novels

2020 ◽  
pp. 387-405
Author(s):  
Vanessa L. Lovelace
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Black Women ◽  
Middle Class ◽  
White Women ◽  
African Ancestry ◽  
Domestic Sphere ◽  
Wild Female ◽  
Domestic Novels ◽  
Women's Novels ◽  
Racially Ambiguous

The appropriation by U.S.-American blacks of the Egyptian enslaved woman, Hagar, as she appears in the book of Genesis, is epitomized in black art, literature, and cinema. Yet less familiar is the appropriation of Hagar by nineteenth-century, middle-class, white women novelists, who mostly lived during the antebellum Southern era. Their novels feature a dark, wild, female protagonist named Hagar who appears as a racially ambiguous woman. She is usually orphaned or abandoned, and she overcomes many obstacles and adversaries to fulfill her life’s purpose in the domestic sphere. Sometimes she is openly compared with the biblical Hagar, depicted as having African ancestry, and characterized as an untamed woman who is free of society’s gender constraints. Nineteenth-century domestic novels thus present stories about Hagar as a temporary escape for middle-class white women’s perceived enslavement to traditional gender expectations, as they experienced them in their individual lives. At the same time, the domestic novels disregard the experiences of nineteenth-century enslaved black women.

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