Domesticity Imperialism And Emigration In The Victorian Novel

This edited collection from a distinguished group of contributors explores a range of topics including literature as imperialist propaganda, the representation of the colonies in British literature, the emergence of literary culture in the colonies and the creation of new gender roles such as 'girl Crusoes' in works of fiction.

In her study of the unsuccessful nineteenth-century emigrant, Tamara S. Wagner argues that failed emigration and return drive nineteenth-century writing in English in unexpected, culturally revealing ways. Wagner highlights the hitherto unexplored subgenre of anti-emigration writing that emerged as an important counter-current to a pervasive emigration propaganda machine that was pressing popular fiction into its service. The exportation of characters at the end of a novel indisputably formed a convenient narrative solution that at once mirrored and exaggerated public policies about so-called 'superfluous' or 'redundant' parts of society. Yet the very convenience of such pat endings was increasingly called into question. New starts overseas might not be so easily realizable; emigration destinations failed to live up to the inflated promises of pro-emigration rhetoric; the 'unwanted' might make a surprising reappearance. Wagner juxtaposes representations of emigration in the works of Charles Dickens, Wilkie Collins, Frances Trollope, and Charlotte Yonge with Australian, New Zealand, and Canadian settler fiction by Elizabeth Murray, Clara Cheeseman, and Susanna Moodie, offering a new literary history not just of nineteenth-century migration, but also of transoceanic exchanges and genre formation.

The implicit link between white women and "the dark races" recurs persistently in nineteenth-century English fiction. Imperialism at Home examines the metaphorical use of race by three nineteenth-century women novelists: Charlotte Brontë, Emily Brontë, and George Eliot. Susan Meyer argues that each of these domestic novelists uses race relations as a metaphor through which to explore the relationships between men and women at home in England. In the fiction of, for example, Anthony Trollope and Charles Dickens, as in nineteenth-century culture more generally, the subtle and not-so-subtle comparison of white women and people of color is used to suggest their mutual inferiority. The Bronte sisters and George Eliot responded to this comparison, Meyer contends, transforming it for their own purposes. Through this central metaphor, these women novelists work out a sometimes contentious relationship to established hierarchies of race and gender. Their feminist impulses, in combination with their use of race as a metaphor, Meyer argues, produce at times a surprising, if partial, critique of empire. Through readings of Jane Eyre, Wuthering Heights, The Mill on the Floss, Daniel Deronda, and Charlotte Brontë's African juvenilia, Meyer traces the aesthetically and ideologically complex workings of the racial metaphor. Her analysis is supported by careful attention to textual details and thorough grounding in recent scholarship on the idea of race, and on literature and imperialism.

Much attention has recently been given by scholars to the widening of the gender gap in the nineteenth century and the concept of separate spheres. Testing such constructions, and questioning the stereotypes associated with Victorian domesticity, Monica F. Cohen offers new readings of narratives by Austen, Charlotte Brontë, Dickens, Eliot, Eden, Gaskell, Oliphant and Reade to show how domestic work, the most feminine of all activities, gained much of its social credibility by positioning itself in relation to the emergent professions. By exploring how novels cast the Victorian conception of female morality into the vocabulary of nineteenth-century professionalism, Cohen traces the ways in which women sought identity and privilege within a professionalised culture, and revises our understanding of Victorian domestic ideology.