Historical Area Questions
EVIL WOMEN
In her reflections on Shakespeare’s Heroines (1832), Anna Jameson applauds the infamous Lady Macbeth for her supreme intellect and her ability to “soar above all womanish feelings in her murder.” Victorian authors, fascinated by “evil” women like Lady Macbeth, feature (and, at times, valorize) villainesses, some of their own creations and some recuperated from antiquity. Current concerns about the gendered antagonism of women in power prompt us to consider with renewed urgency the gendered (and often sexualized) demonization of powerful women characters in nineteenth-century literature.Select three texts from throughout the nineteenth century that depict (sympathetically or unsympathetically) women villains, women who are or have historically been portrayed as “evil.” How do these depictions of the “villainess” reflect and inform Victorian debates concerning gender and its intersections with sexuality, class, race, and ethnicity?
DEATH AND REANIMATION
It is rumored that Percy Bysshe Shelley’s heart refused to burn during his cremation. The heart, according to this famous tale, was removed from his body to be kept as a keepsake by his wife Mary Shelley, who of course (speaking of reanimated dead bodies) wrote Frankenstein (1818). Victorians, like Shelley’s flame-resistant heart, confronted and challenged the finality of death, attempting to preserve—in a variety of ways—the selves, the bodies, and the souls of the dead. The nineteenth-century witnessed the rise of elaborate funerals, embalming practices, and, of course, the Spiritualist movement. Perhaps because of the twenty-first century’s own fascination with zombies and the undead, recent work in Victorian studies has unearthed with vigor nineteenth-century literature’s dealings with the reanimated dead. In the past several years, scholars have coined terms like “necropoetics” to describe Browning’s portrayal of the “almost-alive-again body” in The Ring and the Book and “necroecology” to describe human and nonhuman relations in colonial and post-colonial India.Select two cultural moments in the nineteenth-century during which you think authors conversed about death and reanimation in distinct ways. Using two literary texts from each year, discuss: how do these literary texts’ depictions of post-mortem reanimation comment upon the conversations surrounding death—literal, political, spiritual, or ideological—in that historical moment?
THE MUSICAL INSTRUMENT
In 1842, Claude-Félix Seytre patented the perforated cardboard roll used in the first player-piano: a piano that plays by itself. Now merely an antiquated trifle, this invention was, in the nineteenth century, heralded as more revolutionary than the phonograph. As sound and media scholar David Suisman reminds us, the player piano was a truly monumental development in the history of sound recording and mechanization. The piano could now be played without human agents—by what seemed to be invisible fingers! Nineteenth-century authors as well as inventors experimented with the musical instrument and its relation to creative agency. Who/what causes inspiration? Does the author control the literary “music,” or does a force outside of her?Select three texts that differently employ the musical instrument metaphor to theorize authorial agency and/or the origins of inspiration. In each case, what does the instrument imply about the role of creative agent in acts of artistic representation?
CLASS STRADDLERS
Charles Booth’s late-century classification (1886-1903) of “London poverty” describes the nation’s working class as divisible into eight sub-classes. This taxonomy stratified the urban poor by occupation, income, food intake, and character, ranging from the “lowest class” of “savages” to the upper-middle “servant-keeping class.” Yet class, as the literature of the period demonstrates, can hardly be boiled down into neat categories. Victorian authors depict characters that seem to straddle class identities and, in doing so, challenge and at times perpetuate class stereotypes. These depictions can also, as the current influx of scholarship on nineteenth-century socialism would remind us, work to expose the failures of capitalism and industrialization.Select three pieces of nineteenth-century literature portraying characters or groups of people who queer class boundaries. Why do each of these authors trouble taxonomies of class and what do these characters tell us about contemporaneous class-informed norms and prejudices?
WONDER
The Victorian period is commonly characterized as an “age of doubt,” a century experiencing a “crisis of faith.” Indeed, as Thomas Carlyle argues in his Sartor Resartus (1833), the Christianity of England’s past seemed, in the nineteenth century, an ill-fitting garment. And yet Carlyle’s philosopher of clothes, Professor Teufelsdrock, “insists on the necessity and high work of universal Wonder” (53). With recent calls to turn scholarly attention toward religion and secularism, historians and literary critics have looked to the nineteenth century’s complex re-workings of what it means to wonder and believe.Identify a three-year period during which you think writers, as well as Victorian society more generally, found urgent the task of reconciling scientific discovery with a desire for and value of wonder. Select one text from each of the three years. How do these texts converse with each other, as well as with their sociocultural context, on issues of wonder and belief in relation to (not necessarily opposed to) discourses of Victorian “discovery”—in the realms of science, technology, and empire?
