Lynne Vallone

A humble Spirit under Correction: Tracts, Hymns, and the Ideology of Evangelical Fiction for Children, 1780-1820

Other critics have discussed ideology in childrens literature, and gender and genre concerns in eighteenthand nineteenth-century didactic fiction; this essay, while informed by their scholarship, discusses a combination of the three, and examines didactic and religious fiction not particularly from the point of view of the author writing for a child audience, but from the interstices of the relationship between Author and Child.2 Part 1 considers some theoretical issues connected with the creation of a class-

Reading Girlhood in Victorian Photography

The purpose behind my interdisciplinary seminar, which combined the “Origins and Developments” with the “Radical Visual” strands of CLISS, was twofold: to practice reading photographs and to examine examples of Victorian photography’s construction of girlhood. In this essay I will provide a snapshot of the seminar’s texts and concerns and then a brief close reading of one of its central issues: the relationship between poetry and portraiture.

FERTILITY, CHILDHOOD, AND DEATH IN THE VICTORIAN FAMILY

GEORGE ELIOT’S MIDDLEMARCH concludes with the summing up of the lives of her most visionary characters, bringing them to either happy fulfillment or early demise according, not to the worth of their dreams but, in part, to their success or failure in choosing a domestic partner. For Dorothea Brooke, Middlemarch’s most luminous and large-souled citizen, Eliot can finally justify no other existence than that of a devoted wife and mother. Eliot defends this apparent demotion of her heroine from modern Saint Theresa to London matron by arguing that her “study of provincial life” was of necessity the story of domestic times, when, in fact, the “heroics” of raising a family and offering “wifely help” to a husband were more noble than sororal obligation or religious mysticism. Though the novel is set in the late Georgian period just before the first Reform Bill of 1832, it was published in 1871–72, at the height of the Victorian era and is thoroughly Victorian in character. For the Victorians, the “reformed rakes” of Richardson and Fielding are no longer desirable as heads of households. The Queen herself seemed to offer a model of perfect domesticity in her large family, middle-class values, and reliance on her husband. In fact, just as Eliot concedes the dominance of the “home epic” (890), the myth of the Victorian family continues to maintain a powerful presence within contemporary American culture. Questions that still consume us today — What makes a good mother?

Disciplines of Virtue: Girls' Culture in the Eighteenth and Nineteenth Centuries

In the 18th and 19th centuries girls were portrayed by the British and Americans as figures of adornment in need of rescue and reform. This book investigates such portrayals by analyzing literature, conduct manuals, religious tracts, institutions and social practices and phenomena of the period.