Tag: Sexuality

‘I wear men’s lives’: The Maternal Femme Fatale in R. Murray Gilchrist’s ‘The Crimson Weaver’

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Robert Murray Gilchrist (1868-1917) was a prolific writer who, over the course of his career, produced 22 novels and nearly 100 short stories. His fiction is notable for the way in which he blends together Gothic and Decadent influences to create uniquely strange stories that, according to critic and Gilchrist editor Dan Pieterson, anteceded the Cosmic Weird of Lovecraft.[1] He was certainly recognised and praised to a certain degree by his literary contemporaries. H.G. Wells ranked him among such successful

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

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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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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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The Global and the Local: NAVSA/BAVS/AVSA Conference Report

Victorians Beyond the Academy

By Barbara Franchi,  University of Kent The city of Venice is a labyrinth where the most different cultures and civilizations have met for centuries. So, no location could be better for the first NAVSA/BAVS/AVSA supernumerary conference. During June 3-6, 2013, Victorianists from every corner of the globe gathered on the Island of San Servolo for this unique opportunity to exchange and discuss ideas around the Global and the Local in the 19th century and beyond. With over one hundred participants

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Poor Women and Elite Men

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Victorian Women, Unwed Mothers and the London Foundling Hospital, by Jessica A. Sheetz-Nguyen, London: Continuum, 2012, xii + 258 pp. (softcover), ISBN 978 1 441 1 4112 5 Elizabeth M., a waitress in a vegetarian restaurant, sought help from the London Foundling Hospital in 1891.  She had met a respectably employed man, Daniel B., a foreman in the office of a dairy company, and the two began courting.  They decided to marry and engaged in sexual intercourse.  She became pregnant

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Men, Sex, and a Selfish Giant – Review of Wilde (1997)

Victorians Beyond the Academy

by Fern Riddell, (King’s College, London) [youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_Y7NGglgjCU[/youtube] “You shocked them. But the more frivolous you seem, the more serious you are, aren’t you?” -Bosie to Oscar Wilde Now, Oscar Wilde has been a love of mine since I read ‘A Picture of Dorian Grey’ during my A Levels. His style of writing, and his observations on the frailty of human interaction, is so delicate in its understanding that it will always be timeless. Wilde has often divided critics; there are those

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Vibrators, the New Women and One Naughty Queen: Film Review of ‘Hysteria’

Victorians Beyond the Academy

by Fern Riddell (King’s College, London) Since 2011, I have waited with bated breath for the release of Tanya Wexler’s new film Hysteria, which stars Rupert Everret as a sexually deviant, technologically gifted billionaire playboy – the Victorian Bruce Wayne of the sex aid industry – Maggie Gyllenhaal as a feisty, do-gooding, chest-beating early suffragette, and Hugh Dancy as a young, forward-thinking, if not always forward-looking, doctor with a great idea. With brilliant support from Jonathan Pryce, Felicity Jones, and

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Book Review: Victorian poetry when?

Book Reviews, Digital Forum

Victorian Poetry Now: Poets, Poems, Poetics, by Valentine Cunningham, Chichester: Wiley Blackwell, 2011, xiii + 537 pp., £95 (hardback), ISBN 978-0-631-20826-6 Reviewed byEmma Mason, University of Warwick emma.mason@warwick.ac.uk   From his work on dissenting religious traditions to the significance of intertextual writing and reading practices and the status of critical theory in literary studies, Valentine Cunningham has shaped for himself a scholarly guise at once robustly intellectual and critically jocose.  His critical voice – homiletic and idiosyncratic – resonates with a

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