The aim of this volume is to explore the intersections of gender with class and race in the construction of national and imperial ideologies and the fluid transformation of some related cultural tropes from the Romantic to the Victorian period and beyond. For example, by examining the re-signification of the “angel in the house” and the deviant woman in the context of unstable or contingent masculinities and across discourses of class and nation, the volume contributes to a more nuanced understanding of British cultural constructions in the long nineteenth century. In addition, it explores both male and female gender stereotypes, thereby enabling a more perceptive comparison, enriched with a nuanced reflection on the construction and social function of class.
The central idea of the collection is that in the long nineteenth century, perceptions of womanhood and motherhood were the core around which all gender expectations were defined. This is not surprising, considering that the white, heterosexual family was the fundamental unit of the British nation, and that middle-class women were the ones in control of its moral health as well as the preservers of its continuation through motherhood. In view of this, the volume explores the impact of Edmund Burke’s family metaphor and his ideal of female domesticity on the formation of British national discourse; how such discourse was legitimised, naturalised, challenged, resisted, and re-imagined through key tropes including violence, the knowing woman, and constructions of normality; how in the nineteenth century cases of infanticide challenged ideologies of motherhood and mother country; and the effects of transgressive sexualities and queer identities on the conceptualisation of the heterosexual family as guarantee for the continuation of the nation. The central idea of the book is to unearth the historical roots of the family metaphor in the construction of national and imperial ideologies and to uncover the interests served by its specific discursive formation.
Though the collection is divided into five discrete parts, several essays are also thematically linked across sections through key tropes, thereby suggesting less obvious connections, such as the mirroring of the “grateful slave” and the “angel in the house,” and the relationship between masculinities, culture, and the public visibility of the working class. Specifically, a section of the book explores how the more progressive roles of women at the beginning of the twentieth century challenged the symbolic violence inherent in one of the most influential cultural figures of womanhood, “the angel in the house,” which achieved its acme in mid-Victorian educational conduct manuals that celebrated submissive and unassuming women for their unselfish attitude. The practice of victim-blaming that contemporary feminists resist has its roots in these female behavioural expectations, one of the contributors contends (Claire O’Callaghan), as the hypocrisy and contradictions associated with angelic womanhood are often used to validate emotional, cultural, physical, and sexual abuse against women, even today (see Chap. 13).
In relation to cultural constructions of masculinities, Stephen Etheridge’s chapter discusses how British brass bands between 1840 and 1940 offered working-class men a space to mimic the higher classes through a military ethos asking whether, when performing in the public sphere, this ethos actually served to promote the values of the higher classes or to reinforce the working-class identity of the performers. Another contributor, Rainer Emig, explores discourses of degeneration and perversion in the decadent writing of Oscar Wilde and the reiteration of the same discourses in the descriptions of male homosexual literature in the twentieth century as opposed to male heteronormativity.
This is an interdisciplinary project which intends to build a constructive dialogue between queer, feminist, post-colonial theory, history, literatures in English, and cultural studies, thereby leading to a mixed and fertile combination of methodologies. The multiple ranges of disciplinary approaches explore the family metaphor from different perspectives and illuminate how it has been legitimised, naturalised, challenged, resisted, and re-imagined throughout the long nineteenth century and beyond.
The volume is in conversation with current research on nineteenth-century cultural constructions of gender, class, and race. In addition, it provides a more intersectional discussion of such categories which are usually addressed separately or only very marginally from an intersectional point of view. Moreover, the chapters highlight that the family metaphor is an ideological tool that has been informing ideas of gender, class, and race since the end of the eighteenth century, when Edmund Burke first used it in his Reflections on the Revolution in France (1790) to articulate his ideal of the white, middle-class, harmonious family on which Britain had to base its national and imperial relationships.
This volume explores a wide range of topics that have mostly been discussed in isolation by different disciplines. For example, Anne Mellor in Mothers of the Nation explores the metaphor of motherhood and mother country, complicating Habermas’s division of society into the female domestic and the male public spheres. Mellor argues that nineteenth-century female authors actively participated in the public sphere through their writing, promoting the image of an educated, rational, and virtuous New Woman who, for this reason, was better skilled at governing the nation than some contemporary not-so-honourable men in power.1 Nonetheless, it must be argued that though these female authors’ writing might have influenced the public opinion, they did not hold any decisional power in the governing of the nation. The only power they had beyond their communicative skills was that of giving birth to the nation’s future citizens.
Historians Leah Leneman and Rosalind Mitchison have explored female sexuality and social control both in rural and urban Scotland between 1660 and 1780 in Girls in Trouble and in Sin in the City.2 The issue of infanticide and women killing their child has been addressed both by historians and literary critics. Josephine McDonagh in Child Murder and British Culture, 1720–1900 contends that the inclusion of the child murder narrative in literary texts complicates the authority inherent in progressive accounts, while Deborah Symonds in Weep Not for Me highlights that the Scottish ballads of infanticide bluntly mirror the solutions women had at their disposal to tackle an unwished-for pregnancy out of wedlock.3 Part I of this volume focuses on the female murderer arguing that this figure disrupts the ideology inherent in the family metaphor by questioning the idealised role expected of women both in the past and in the present.
Concerning the ideology of the family metaphor, Jennifer Golightly has recently explored the representation of marriage in five female Romantic radical novelists, who in their writings expose this institution as fundamentally patriarchal and primarily concerned with the distribution of male property.4 In his seminal book The History of Sexuality, Michel Foucault has thoroughly described the mechanism of the discourse of sex around the middle-class family contending that, with the advent of the Victorian bourgeoisie, sexuality became restricted to the familial boundaries within the domestic space and reduced to the reproductive function. The primary concern of the discourse on sex was the preservation of the ruling class. The bourgeoisie thus put the accent on the safety of the body, because a sound organism and a healthy sexuality could guarantee the transmission of a strong progeny and, as a consequence, the strength of their class.5 The present volume argues that the bourgeois discourse of sex restricted to the family has increased the negative perception of more unconventional forms of human bonding that do not necessarily entail procreation or, if they do, is among same-sex partners.
The notion of gender performativity has played an important role in anti-essentialist feminist and queer studies as developed by Judith Butler and Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick. Both scholars share the assumption that gender identity is culturally constructed and that it does not exist outside the acts that one performs through language.6 Post-feminist scholars such as bell hooks, however, have accused feminist scholars of voicing only a white, middle-class, Anglo-centred perspective, thus missing the intersectionality of class and race which certainly contributes to a diverse construction of female, male, and queer identities.7 This volume embraces intersectionality because both the performance and the embodiment of the wide range of masculinities and femininities visible t...