Where womanhood and childhood meet: Female adolescence in Victorian fiction and culture.
Item
-
Title
-
Where womanhood and childhood meet: Female adolescence in Victorian fiction and culture.
-
Identifier
-
AAI9510636
-
identifier
-
9510636
-
Creator
-
Boufis, Christina M.
-
Contributor
-
Adviser: Fred Kaplan
-
Date
-
1994
-
Language
-
English
-
Publisher
-
City University of New York.
-
Subject
-
Literature, English | Women's Studies
-
Abstract
-
Recognizing that the nineteenth century was an age of transition affecting every aspect of life, many Victorian writers noted that "girlhood" was very different from what it had been in previous centuries. This dissertation examines female adolescence--what the Victorians labeled girlhood--during the years 1830 through 1870 as a "site of cultural contestation," to borrow Mary Poovey's words, in which we may read literary and cultural changes. Exploring the figure of the young woman in novels by Elizabeth Gaskell, Charles Dickens, George Eliot, Anthony Trollope, and Rhoda Broughton, as well as in numerous nonfictional sources, I discuss the ways Victorian writers project their culture's anxieties about other social transformations onto girlhood, which, by its liminal nature, serves as an ideal focus for issues of definition and development. The young woman who forms the subject of so many nineteenth-century novels thus also serves as a symbol for larger social movements such as Chartism, evangelicalism, and imperialism. Furthermore, her equivocal status is metaphoric of perhaps the most formative change in nineteenth-century England--that of class development.;Chapter One explores the depiction of female adolescence in early nineteenth-century conduct books in order to assess how girlhood is constructed along middle-class lines. In Chapter Two, I discuss how Gaskell's Mary Barton reveals a conflation of individual and social developmental processes; Mary Barton's coming of age both mirrors and realizes certain aspects of the Chartist social platform for women. Chapter Three investigates another route to adulthood--religious conversion in Eliot's Adam Bede. Examining the fallen woman in the novels of Gaskell and Dickens in Chapter Four, I demonstrate that the transition from girlhood to womanhood is indeed marked by conflicting sexual and class ideologies. Chapter Five turns to Trollope's young women heroines and reads them back into the context of the 1860s. The dissertation concludes with an examination of the "Girl of the Period" in Eliza Lynn Linton's essay and her fast counterpart in the fiction of Rhoda Broughton, and asserts that the figure of the girl is often used to project larger nineteenth-century social, political, and cultural issues.
-
Type
-
dissertation
-
Source
-
PQT Legacy CUNY.xlsx
-
degree
-
Ph.D.
