In-yer-Victorian-face: A Subcultural Hermeneutics of Neo-Victorianism

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Notes

For the interest in sensationalism, streetwalking, and crime, see Maunder and Moore, Joyce, Gibson, Sweet, Thomas, Cohen, Kucich, Pykett, and Bernstein.

Relevant studies include Joan Perkins's monograph on Victorian Women, Lucia Zedner's study of Women, Crime, and Custody in Victorian England, Judith R. Walkowitz's Prostitution and Victorian Society: Women, Class, and the State or Deborah Epstein Nord's investigations of prostitution and narratives of sexual danger in late-Victorian London (Walking the Victorian Streets: Women, Representation, and the City) and Ludmilla Jordanova's survey on women in medical discourse.

Sweet is possibly referring to the essentialist discourses of William Acton, Henry Maudsley, and Sarah Stickney Ellis or the infamous Coventry Patmore, views widely disseminated in journals and conduct books. Acton held that women did not have much sexual feeling; for Maudsley they were at the mercy of womb and ovaries and could not choose but to be women. It is also true, however, that the Victorians themselves provided a counter narrative of their own. In 1860, George Drysdale's The Elements of Social Science held that strong sexual appetites were a virtue in women and argued that marriage may be an instrument in the degradation of women, and even legalized prostitution.

In East Lynne, the fallen woman and mother, Lady Isabel, returns to her former household under cover, scarred by a rail accident, assuming the position of governess to her own children. Ellen Wood has Lady Isabel die from consumption as a wage of sin, the elopement of an immoral aristocratic lady replaced with a moral middle-class girl. Faber, on the contrary, grants Sugar a non-ending, suspending her in female mother–daughter bonding with Sophie.

It is in this sense that the sensation novel is a crucial source for both Waters and Faber: In Ellen Wood's East Lynne, the fallen woman, Lady Isabel, can only return as a strange, Frenchified governess to her home, just as Sugar must turn into a governess.

The Victorians were in a process of defining homosexuality as an essential state rather than as a temporary aberration of sodomy (see Losey and Brewer). The Labouchere Amendment to the Criminal Law Amendment Act 1885 ambiguously speaks about “gross indecency” to be punished by up to two years of hard labour (rather than the death penalty; it formed the basis of the Wilde trials in 1895). The word “homosexual” was first used in 1868 by Hans Benkert and reached England via the Psychopathia Sexualis by Richard von Krafft-Ebing in 1892 (see Sweet 196). Whether or not Queen Victoria really demanded all references to lesbianism erased, the Act does not provide for lesbian activities.

There are, however, occasional exceptions, such as a furtive metafictional reference to the author herself: when Nurse Spiller in the asylum calls Sue “Mrs. What-is-your-name? Mrs. Waters, or Rivers?” (Waters 398). Another metafictional ambiguity occurs when Maud fantasizes about cutting her uncle's eye with a razor and comments: “But this is not that kind of story. Not yet” (Waters 290)—this might be read as a wilfully anachronistic reference to Un Chien Andalou.

In her 2007 book, Between Women, Sharon Marcus radicalized Martha Vicinus's account of lesbian eroticism from 1778 to 1928 in Intimate Friends to argue that female bonding in the Victorian era assumed the quasi-status of a middle-class marriage. The case is further debated in vol. 50.1 of Victorian Studies (2007–08).

See the papers by Sasha Torres and Danae Clark in Abelove, et al.

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Eckart Voigts-Virchow

Eckart Voigts-Virchow is Professor of English Literature at the University of Siegen, Germany. He also taught at the Universities of Madison and Milwaukee (Wisconsin), Giessen, Frankfurt/Main, Vienna, and Chemnitz. His Introduction to Media Studies (Klett Uni-Wissen) was published in 2005. He is also editor of Dramatized Media/Mediated Drama (WVT, 2000), Janespotting and Beyond: British Heritage Retrovisions since the Mid-1990s (Narr, 2004) and co-edited a special edition of the journals ZAA (56.2) on The New Documentarism in 2008. He is on the Advisory Board of the journal Adaptation (Oxford University Press) and Adaptation in Performance and Film (Intellect) and is currently editing a volume on adaptation in the theatre.