The Hidden Hand: Subversion of Cultural Ideology in Three Mid-Nineteenth-Century American Women's Novels

1986 ◽  
Vol 38 (2) ◽  
pp. 223 ◽  
Author(s):  
Joanne Dobson
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Cultural Ideology ◽  
Women's Novels

‘The Consenting Silence’: Chaperoning the Orphan Sisterhood of Amy Levy's The Romance of a Shop

2019 ◽  
Vol 9 (2) ◽  
pp. 147-164
Author(s):  
Ann-Marie Richardson
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Social Responsibility ◽  
Moral Education ◽  
Female Agency ◽  
Nineteenth Century Literature ◽  
Family Unit ◽  
Cultural Ideology ◽  
Amy Levy ◽  
Century Literature ◽  
The Ideal

The parentless child of nineteenth-century literature was designed to elicit an inherent sense of social responsibility in Victorian readers. The orphan inadvertently rejects the cultural ideology of the ideal home and therefore embodies society's worst fear. No longer belonging to a family unit, the child is left with an incomplete moral education. Chaperones and guardians are required to “rescue” the orphan from ignorance, and society from their disquieting presence. Amy Levy empathised with the orphan model due to her own sense of otherness, as a result of her race, religion, sexuality, and New Woman ideologies. Levy observed parallels between societal fear of the orphan and that of female agency. Subsequently, the recently orphaned Lorimer sisters of Levy's Romance of a Shop are of marriageable age, yet emancipate themselves from their matchmaking families, becoming each other's chaperones as they open a photography studio. Thus begins a narrative which attempts to reconcile the sisters' wish to quietly persevere in their vocation and voice their innate feminism. This article will explore how speech and silence are used to embody these sisters' torn loyalties to their gender and each other, examining how their shift in social status alters their dialogue and where their silence speaks volumes.

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.

In Memory of Cassie: Child Death and Religious Vision in American Women's Novels

1996 ◽  
Vol 6 (1) ◽  
pp. 87-104 ◽  
Author(s):  
Ann-Janine Morey
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Women Writers ◽  
Toni Morrison ◽  
Child Death ◽  
American Women ◽  
Social Perspectives ◽  
Religious Vision ◽  
Women's Novels ◽  
Religious Problems

This article investigates the contribution of several twentieth-century women writers to the legacy of women's writing about child death and scriptural consolation. The suffering and death of children constitutes the most intractable of religious problems, and recent studies of parental grieving support women's literary treatment of child death. Thus, just as child death creates a unique religious space, it may also demand its own literary category and aesthetic. By considering the unique dimensions of parental grieving, and by looking at how Perri Klass, Toni Morrison, and Harriette Arnow handle this subject, it is possible to gain fresh literary perspective on the fiction of nineteenth-century American women, many of whom also addressed the problem of child death and scriptural consolation. Women writers create children who are more than literary or symbolic commodities, and, in so doing, these writers challenge us to reevaluate scriptural and social perspectives on child death.

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