Category: Other

Sexualizing Narratives: Layered Scopophilia in Tess of the d’Urbervilles and the Female Reader

Other

Header image: 1891 illustration from Thomas Hardy’s Tess of the d’Urbervilles, by Joseph Syddall. “Why so often the coarse appropriates the finer thus,” comments the narrator of Tess of the d’Urbervilles following Tess Durbeyfield’s fateful encounter with Alec d’Urbervilles at the Chase.[1] The exploration of sexuality within Victorian culture and literature, especially female sexuality, is extensive; Michel Foucault’s first volume of The History of Sexuality (1976), Nancy Armstrong’s Desire and Domestic Fiction: A Political History of the Novel (1987), Christopher

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‘Dear Boss, I am staying in Manchester at present’: Regional Jack the Ripper Letters and Northern Representation

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‘Dear Boss, I keep on hearing the police have caught me but they wont fix me just yet. I have laughed when they look so clever and talk about being on the right track. That joke about Leather Apron gave me real fits. I am down on whores and I shant quit ripping them till I do get buckled.’ [1] [2] Scribbled in red ink, these sentences marked the first of several letters attributed to the serial killer known as

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‘Morphinomania’: Morphine use in three Edwardian novels

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To be young, socially privileged, and in love; such is the happy situation of Felix Wilding, the euphonious hero of Robert Hichens’s 1902 novel. The object of Felix’s adoration is socially prominent Valeria Ismey, who is the more attractive for being older and married; this after all is the 1900s, and Victorianism, represented by Felix’s loving, ineffectual mother, is in retreat. No: Mrs. Ismey’s problem – one evident to the reader before it is to Felix – is her hopeless

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Lady Clementina Hawarden: the silhouette motif in photographic art

Other, Victorians on Display

1st June 2022 marked the bicentenary of the birth of pioneering photographer Clementina Hawarden (1822-1865), one of the most significant women to contribute to early photography. In this blog I highlight a specific genre within the extensive Hawarden photographic collection at the Victoria and Albert Museum, London, concentrating on use of the silhouette as a stylistic motif in her photographic portraiture. Viscountess Clementina Hawarden, née Fleeming, left an extensive oeuvre of collodion photographic images marking her brief embrace of the

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“That tree gives me the creeps!”: Tales of Vampiric Plants

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Readers of Gothic literature will quickly recognize that Irene is suffering from a vampire bite. She is not the victim of Dracula, Carmilla, or Lord Ruthven, though. Rather, it is a vampiric sumach tree that has attacked her during her sleep. Ulric Daubeny’s “The Sumach,” published in his collection The Elemental: Tales of the Supernormal and the Inexplicable (1919), is a fascinating killer-plant story. It tells of a tree that has grown from a stake plunged into the heart of a buried vampire. The tree possesses hypnotic powers that seduce young women to its branches to feed upon them.

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“Is it a snake with legs, or a lizard without them?”: The Strange and Wondrous Case of the Biscobra

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Alice Perrin’s anthology of gothic short stories, East of Suez (1901), concludes with a rather unsettling story called “The Biscobra.” Perrin’s “The Biscobra” is a rare instance in Anglo-Indian fiction where the biscobra is the central concern. Here, the eponymous Indian animal—strange, wondrous, and deadly—devastates the domestic life of a young Anglo-Indian couple, the Kreys. The biscobra, in this story, does some narrative heavy lifting: it falls on a pregnant Nell Krey’s shoulders, frightening her to death; becomes the reincarnation

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Bankimchandra Chatterjee’s Fiction and Nineteenth-Century Cross-Cultural Dialogue

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The cross-cultural dialogue generated as a part of the discursive assimilation between the East and the West during the nineteenth century was not only textured and nuanced, but further reflected larger epistemological debates emerging from this socio-historic conflation of ideas. The question of ‘colonial modernity’, which gained currency in later critical writing, focusing on the multiplicity of ideological categories formed as a part of this discursive shift, certainly testifies to the transformative cultural landscape of the time period. Significant among

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“Preferring Death to the Embrace of a Strange Dancing Woman”: Jewish Dancers in Victorian Ballrooms

Other

Dancing was perhaps the most universal and popular mixed-sex leisure pursuit in the nineteenth century. Yet dance was not purely a recreational activity. Ballroom etiquette demanded adherence to the rules of fashionable society, including precise rules for comportment, conversation, and choosing a dance partner. For upwardly mobile Jewish dancers, balls presented additional challenges. First of all, mixed-sex dancing was forbidden according to traditional Jewish law, which regarded men and women dancing together as a gateway to sexual impropriety. And while

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‘Bill’s-O’-Jacks’ and the Northern ‘Dark Tourist’

Other, Victorians Beyond the Academy, Victorians on Display

The floor was covered with blood, as if it was a butcher’s slaughter-house. The wall of the room, on three sides, was sprinkled with human blood, […] and even the glass of the windows, on the fourth side, were splashed with blood. [1] Thomas Smith saw this when visiting The Moorcock Inn – more commonly known as ‘Bill’s-O’-Jacks’ – in 1832. The gore from father and son William and Thomas Bradbury was so thick that Smith repeated it three times

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The Virtuosa is the Villain: How Hulu’s ‘Only Murders in the Building’ Rehearses Victorian Ideas About Female Musicians

Other, Victorians in Film

Alert: this piece contains spoilers for Hulu’s 2021 show Only Murders in the Building. Scroll down to read!                         I should have known it was the bassoonist.  As a scholar of classical music and gender and a clarinetist myself, I can’t believe it took me until the second-to-last episode of Hulu’s 2021 murder mystery/comedy series Only Murders in the Building (OMITB) to realize that the serial killer at the core

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