Victorian Fiction and the Cult of the Horse

Gina M. Dorré

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2016
• eBook ISBN: 9781351875899
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: Literary Criticism
• Index: Literature

The horse was essential to the workings of Victorian society, and its representations, which are vast, ranging, and often contradictory, comprise a vibrant cult of the horse. Examining the representational, emblematic, and rhetorical uses of horses in a diversity of nineteenth-century texts, Gina M. Dorré shows how discourses about horses reveal and negotiate anxieties related to industrialism and technology, constructions of gender and sexuality, ruptures in the social fabric caused by class conflict and mobility, and changes occasioned by national "progress" and imperial expansion. She argues that as a cultural object, the horse functions as a repository of desire and despair in a society rocked by astonishing social, economic, and technological shifts. While representations of horses abound in Victorian fiction, Gina M. Dorré's study focuses on those novels by Charles Dickens, Elizabeth Braddon, Anna Sewell, and George Moore that engage with the most impassioned controversies concerning horses and horse-care, such as the introduction of the steam engine, popular new methods of horse-taming, debates over the tight-reining of horses, and the moral furor surrounding gambling at the race track. Her book establishes the centrality of the horse as a Victorian cultural icon and explores how through it, dominant ideologies of gender and class are created, promoted, and disrupted.

Index

Adams, James Eli 59n7

Adams, W.B. 26–7

Adamson, James 41

aestheticism 127, 132, 138, 140–43

versus realism 132, 138, 141–3

Altick, Richard D. 153n27

animals, human beings’ attitudes toward 5–6, 7–10

anthropomorphism 10, 17, 26, 158

anti-gambling rhetoric 123–6, 128, 132, 133–4, 138, 142, 144–6, 149–52

Apperley, Charles J. (Nimrod) 14, 31, 39, 40, 60n29, 61n46

Arata, Stephen 123

Armstrong, Nancy 89n10

Auerbach, Nina 53, 61n59, 62n68, 66

Austen, Jane

Northanger Abbey 59n3

Austin, Alfred 154n37

Baker, Steve 5

Bakhtin, Mikhail 141, 143

Baudrillard, Jean 98, 112

Baumgarten, Murray 62n59

Beaconsfield, Lord 125

bearing-rein 100–4, 105

beauty 98–9

Beckson, Karl 130, 137

Beer, Gillian 19n19

Beetham, Margaret 104, 105, 107

Benjamin, Walter 68, 112, 114

Berger, John 19n20

Betting Houses Act (1853) 124

Blunt, William Scawen 3–4

bodies, working class 14, 49–50, 63–4, 83–4, 136–7, 144–5, 146–8, 150–51

body, and pain 100–102, 107–8, 109–10

Boem, Joseph Edgar 4

Boose, Lynda E. 20n40

Bourdieu, Pierre 113

Bowlby, Rachel 126

Braddon, Mary Elizabeth 16, 64, 65–6, 80–81

Aurora Floyd 16, 63–5, 66, 81–4

Lady Audley’s Secret 16, 81

Vixen 16, 84–8

Brantlinger, Patrick 128, 129, 153n30

Breward, Christopher 119n62

Brontë, Charlotte

Jane Eyre...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Dedication
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• List of Illustrations
• Acknowledgements
• Introduction All the Queen's Horses: Victorian Culture and the "Definition of a Horse"
• One Handling the "Iron Horse": Dickens, Travel, and the Derailing of Victorian Masculinity
• Two Horsebreaking and Homemaking: Horsey Heroines and Destabilized Domesticity in the Sensation Fiction of Mary Elizabeth Braddon
• Three Horses and Corsets: Black Beauty, Dress Reform, and the Fashioning of the Victorian Woman
• Four Reading and Riding: Late-Century Aesthetics and the Cultural Economy of the Turf in George Moore's Esther Waters
• Epilogue Urban Ironies and the Modern Mind: Horses After Victoria
• Bibliography
• Index