Women, Portraiture and the Crisis of Identity in Victorian England: My Lady Scandalous Reconsidered

ISBN-13: 9781138253667 / Angielski / Miękka / 2017 / 274 str.

Colleen Denney

Opis

Women, Portraiture and the Crisis of Identity in Victorian England shows the effect of celebrity and scandal on four prominent Victorian women: Mary Elizabeth Braddon, Lady Dilke, Millicent Garrett Fawcett, and Sarah Grand. Colleen Denney explores how these women used their portraits as tools of persuasion, performing a domestic masquerade to secure privacy and acceptance, or sites of resistance, tearing down male constructions of female propriety and fighting Victorian stereotypes of intellectual women.

Spis treści

Contents: Preface; Introduction: portraying smart women: scandalous revelations; Part 1 Victorian Scandals and Visual Tools of Persuasion: 'Sex, money and dirt': Mary Elizabeth Braddon, William Powell Frith, and the business of respectability; Victorian scandals and desperate political wives: a case study of Lady Dilke. Part 2 Challenging the Status Quo: A Woman's Modern Identity Formation as a Site of Resistance: 'Voiceless London': Millicent Garrett Fawcett's embodiment of the common cause or, resisting the scandal of the platform; Sarah Grand and the scandal of the new woman novelist; The scandal of the feminist woman at the fin de siècle: cultural critique in Oscar Wilde's play An Ideal Husband (1895); Bibliography; Index.

O autorze

Colleen Denney is a Professor of Art History in the Women's Studies Program at the University of Wyoming, where she also holds an adjunct position in the Art Department. She counts many scandalous women among her closest friends. Like one of her subjects, Sarah Grand, she is an avid cyclist.