The gendered danger of illusion in The Blithedale Romance (1852) and The Mayor of Casterbridge (1886)

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No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1 Other representations, such as Signor Brunoni in Elizabeth Gaskell’s Cranford (1853), tend to adopt a more comedic approach.

2 Lucetta’s change to a more anglicised surname is in itself notable in regard to what Julian Wolfreys has highlighted as the ability of names to “fix the limits of an identity” (2002, xi).

3 Pictorial divinatory cards named for Marie Anne Lenormand (1772–1843), a notable French fortune-teller.

4 David Greven reads this conflict as homoerotic but also autobiographical, arguing that “Hawthorne imbues Westervelt with the calumniated qualities lobbed against the writer himself – foppishness, artificiality, effeminacy” (2006, 139).

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Beatrice Ashton-Lelliott

Beatrice Ashton-Lelliott recently completed her PhD at the University of Portsmouth studying the autobiographies of nineteenth-century magicians and representations of fictional conjuring in Victorian literature. She has most recently published on the lesser-known novel Conjurer Dick (1885) by Angelo Lewis. Her other research interests include occulture, Romanticism and contemporary Japanese literature, which she currently teaches at CityLit.