Explores the imaginative role of women in the novels that grew out of the social turmoil of England's industrialization.
The last decade has seen a resurgence of critical interest in the English industrial novel of the 1840s and 1850s that described the social problems caused by the nation's rapid industrialization. During this period working-class political agitation made many in England fear that revolution was imminent. The conclusions of these novels often offered imaginative responses to a pressing situation by providing suggestions for the resolution of class tensions. One striking feature of these conclusions is the leading role women play: their inventions contain a utopian dream of a woman-led society without classes and competition.
By carefully examining narrative in seven novels: Charles Dickens's Hard Times, Elizabeth Gaskell's North and South and Mary Barton, Benjamin Disraeli's Sybil, Charles Kingsley's Alton Locke, Frances Trollope's Michael Armstrong, and Charlotte Elizabeth Tonna's Helen Fleetwood, this study explores the means by which female characters gain public power and the millenarian implications of their activities.
This study departs from recent work in two important ways: it maintains its focus on the novels rather than on the nonfictional condition-of-England debate, and it emphasizes the consistency of the genre's approach to the contemporary crisis of class relations. By delineating continuities within the analytic community that these novels constitute, this book reveals a propensity for utopian feminist mythmaking in mid-Victorian culture.
Subversive Heroines will be of interest to scholars and students of Victorian literature, and to anyone concerned with nineteenth-century British culture or feminist criticism.
Constance D. Harsh is Assistant Professor of English, Colgate University.
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6 x 9, ca 192 pagesISBN 0-472-10566-3
cloth 34.50E (tentative)
December