Professional Documents
Culture Documents
Full Chapter The Palgrave Handbook of Neo Victorianism 1St Edition Bernhard Esslinger PDF
Full Chapter The Palgrave Handbook of Neo Victorianism 1St Edition Bernhard Esslinger PDF
https://textbookfull.com/product/neo-victorianism-and-sensation-
fiction-jessica-cox/
https://textbookfull.com/product/neo-victorianism-on-screen-
postfeminism-and-contemporary-adaptations-of-victorian-women-1st-
edition-antonija-primorac-auth/
https://textbookfull.com/product/the-palgrave-handbook-of-
anarchism-1st-edition-carl-levy/
https://textbookfull.com/product/the-palgrave-handbook-of-
ethnicity-1st-edition-steven-ratuva/
The Palgrave Handbook of the Afterlife 1st Edition
Yujin Nagasawa
https://textbookfull.com/product/the-palgrave-handbook-of-the-
afterlife-1st-edition-yujin-nagasawa/
https://textbookfull.com/product/the-palgrave-handbook-of-
critical-theory-thompson/
https://textbookfull.com/product/the-palgrave-handbook-of-
international-development-1st-edition-jean-grugel/
https://textbookfull.com/product/the-palgrave-handbook-of-
european-banking-1st-edition-thorsten-beck/
https://textbookfull.com/product/the-palgrave-handbook-of-
sexuality-education-1st-edition-louisa-allen/
The Palgrave Handbook
of Neo-Victorianism
Edited by
Brenda Ayres · Sarah E. Maier
The Palgrave Handbook of Neo-Victorianism
Brenda Ayres • Sarah E. Maier
Editors
The Palgrave
Handbook of
Neo-Victorianism
Editors
Brenda Ayres Sarah E. Maier
Liberty University University of New Brunswick
Lynchburg, VA, USA Saint John, NB, Canada
This Palgrave Macmillan imprint is published by the registered company Springer Nature
Switzerland AG.
The registered company address is: Gewerbestrasse 11, 6330 Cham, Switzerland
Brenda Ayres wants to thank the generosity of Penn State’s library that loaned
her hundreds of books and articles about neo-Victorianism. She is also grateful
to Liberty University for access to electronic articles and especially Liberty’s
database British Periodicals. She also wants to express her gratitude to Sarah
E. Maier for her continued friendship and collegiality in their collaboration and
scholarship of Victorianism and Neo-Victorianism.
Sarah E. Maier is always amazed by the generosity of scholars like Ann
Heilmann, Marie-Louise Kohlke, Mark Llewellyn, Joanne Shattock, Naomi
Schor, Elaine Showalter, and others, who have shared their knowledge and
their passion for (neo-)Victorian books. The UNB library staff is always
patiently standing by to reach out for books or track down references; to them
Maier says thank you. Brenda—a force of nature as a scholar and a friend—my
gratitude for sharing our love of all things Victorian and neo-Victorian. As
always, this work is for Violet and my Dad, Patrick, and in memory of my
Mom, Valerie.
Both editors express their deepest appreciation to the following scholars
who contributed chapters to this volume: Anne-Marie Beller, Barbara Braid,
Miriam Elizabeth Burstein, Brooke Cameron, Martin Danahay, Connor
E. R. DeMerchant, Sophie Franklin, Rachel M. Friars, Felipe Espinoza Garrido,
Anna Jones, Catherine Layton, John Morton, Claire O’Callaghan, Benjamin
Poore, Antonija Primorac, Marija Reiff, Sutirtho Roy, Carol Senf, and
Eckart Voigts.
We both want to say how much we also appreciate Robert J. Moore who has
generously donated his talented artwork to yet another one of our covers.
Robert is a colleague of Sarah’s at the University of New Brunswick at Saint
John. Besides being an artist, he has authored over a dozen plays and published
several books of poetry. See his bio at https://www.unb.ca/faculty-staff/
directory/arts-sj-humlang/moore-robert.html.
vii
viii ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
And we so value our kinship with fellow lovers and critics of Victorian litera-
ture and those drawn, for a myriad of reasons, to reproduce and analyse it in
this recent genre we call neo-Victorian.
1 Introduction 1
Sarah E. Maier and Brenda Ayres
2 The
Hauntology/Narratology of the Neo-Victorian Ghost
Story 17
Brenda Ayres
3 Neo-Victorian
Victoria(s) on Screen 35
Rachel M. Friars and Connor E. R. DeMerchant
4 Neo-Victorian
Fiction on Screen 55
Antonija Primorac
5 Gaslight:
The Play, the Film, the Noun, the Verb 71
Benjamin Poore
6 Postcolonial
and Global Neo-Victorianisms 89
Felipe Espinoza Garrido
7 “Too
frivolous, too middlebrow, too populist, and too
commercial”: Examining the Neo-Victorian Musical117
Marija Reiff
8 Coming
of Age: Neo-Victorian, Dickensian Children135
Brenda Ayres
ix
x Contents
9 Fred
Saberhagen’s Dracula: The Vampire as Neo-Victorian
Hero159
Carol Senf
10 Neo-Victorianism
and the End(s) of Religion177
Miriam Elizabeth Burstein
11 Exotic
Prehistory or Relevant Science? Post-human
Subversion of Prehistoric Travel Narratives in Neo-Victorian
Literature195
Sutirtho Roy
12 Neo-Victorian Darwin217
Brenda Ayres
13 “The
Unclosed Coffin”: The Neo-Victorian Afterlives of
Elizabeth Siddal237
Anne-Marie Beller and Claire O’Callaghan
14 Fits
Like a Glove: Neo-Victorian Metonyms of Fingers,
Hands, and Gloves255
Brenda Ayres
15 Neo-Victorian Poetry273
John Morton
16 Neo-Victorian
Graphic Novels: Learning to Unmaster the
Archive295
Anna Maria Jones
17 Biofiction
and the Neo-Victorian Crime Novel: The Case of
the Brontës317
Barbara Braid
18 Neo-Victorian Violence337
Sophie Franklin
20 Dust
and Sewers, Filth and Waste: “Disgusting”
Retro-Speculation in Neo-Victorian Narratives375
Eckart Voigts
Contents xi
21 “This
Much I Know”: The Ghosting of the Past in Crimson
Peak393
Brenda Ayres
22 New
Wine in Old Bottles: Angela Carter’s Nights at the Circus409
Catherine Layton
23 Victorian
Women’s Hysteria and Neo-Victorian Women’s
Madness427
Brenda Ayres
24 “The
Testimony of Love”: The Lesbian Neo-Victorian Novel447
Rachel M. Friars
25 Misfits
and Queers: Alienism, Detective Agency, and
Neo-Victorian Investigation in The Alienist(s)465
Sarah E. Maier
27 Epilogue507
Brenda Ayres
Index513
Notes on Contributors
Editors
Brenda Ayres and Sarah E. Maier coedited and contributed chapters to the
following: Neo-Victorian Things (Palgrave Macmillan, 2022), Neo-Disneyism:
Inclusivity in the Twenty-First Century of Disney’s Magic Kingdom (Peter Lang,
2022), The Routledge Handbook of Victorian Scandals in Literature and Culture
(Routledge, 2022), The Theological Dickens (Routledge, 2022), Neo-Victorian
Madness: Rediagnosing Nineteenth-Century Mental Illness in Literature and
Other Media (Palgrave Macmillan, 2020); Neo-Gothic Narratives: Illusory
Allusions from the Past (Anthem, 2020); Animals and Their Children in
Victorian Culture (Routledge, 2019); and Reinventing Marie Corelli for the
Twenty-first Century (Anthem, 2019). The two cowrote A Vindication of the
Redhead: The Typology of Red Hair Throughout the Literary and Visual Arts
(Palgrave Macmillan, 2021).
Contributors
Brenda Ayres with a PhD in nineteenth-century English literature, is now
retired from full-time residential teaching and currently teaches nineteenth-
century English and professional writing courses for Liberty University Online
in Lynchburg, Virginia. Besides the listing above as coeditor, see https://
bayres3.wixsite.com/books.
Anne-Marie Beller is Senior Lecturer in Victorian Literature at Loughborough
University, UK. Her research interests are in Victorian literature and culture,
particularly sensation fiction, New Woman Writing of the fin de siècle, and Neo-
Victorian Studies. Within these areas, Anne-Marie is interested in gender, sexu-
ality, and identity, representations of mental health and the history of psychiatry.
Recent neo-Victorian publications include a coauthored chapter (with Dr
xiii
xiv Notes on Contributors
Fig. 16.1 Enslaved people being sold beside a statue of the Queen, London.
Heart of Empire, written and drawn by Bryan Talbot. Milwaukie,
OR: Dark Horse, 2001, 40. © Bryan Talbot, 2022 298
Fig. 16.2 Chapter 2 title page, “In the Afternoon: The Butler, Very Skilled.”
Kuroshitsuji, vol. 1, written and drawn by Yana Toboso. Tokyo:
Square Enix, 2007, 43. ©Yana Toboso/SQUARE ENIX CO., LTD 300
Fig. 16.3 Collage of Alice adaptations over original illustrations by John
Tenniel. Alice in Sunderland, written and drawn by Bryan Talbot.
Milwaukie, OR: Dark Horse Comics, 2007, 28. © Bryan Talbot,
2022303
Fig. 16.4 Hatter M searches for the missing Alyss. Hatter M, vol. 1, written
by Frank Beddor and Liz Cavalier and drawn by Ben Templesmith.
Los Angeles: Automatic Pictures, 2008, 145 309
Fig. 16.5 Archival materials discovered in a “Victorian-era trunk.”
Hatter M, vol. 2. Written by Frank Beddor and Liz Cavalier
and drawn by Sami Makkonen. Los Angeles: Automatic
Pictures, 2009, 188 311
xix
CHAPTER 1
Introduction
S. E. Maier
University of New Brunswick, Saint John, NB, Canada
e-mail: smaier@unb.ca
B. Ayres (*)
Liberty University, Lynchburg, VA, USA
e-mail: bayres@liberty.edu
Maggs by Peter Carey (1997), or the proliferate film adaptations by the BBC,
A and E, and other studies made it clear something was in the zeitgeist that was
sending us running back for more. The majestic trio of neo-Victorian novels—
Wide Sargasso Sea (1966) by Jean Rhys, The French Lieutenant’s Woman (1969)
by John Fowles, and Possession (1990) by A. S. Byatt—are often the reference
for beginning of this particular “ism” although any narrative of the Victorians
after the age could, in the right context, be neo-Victorian.
Terms abound for this cultural interest in the reconstruction or revision of
the long-nineteenth century from Victoriana to victoriographies, to prefixes
like neo, retro, post, or pseudo, or seek to engulf this genre within historical
fiction. Dana Schiller first proposes the term “neo-Victorian” to indicate texts
which contain the “characteristic of postmodernism” but are “imbued with a
historicity reminiscent of the nineteenth-century novel” (1997, 538). Sally
Shuttleworth uses the term “retro-Victorian novels” to indicate a Victorian-
centred novel that are “explicitly nostalgic texts that engage with the discourse
of natural history”; in addition, they demonstrate a “self-reflexive conscious-
ness about the problems of writing history in our postmodern age” with the
“commitment to recreating the detailed texture of an age, to tracing the eco-
nomic and social determinants which might structure these imaginary lives”
(1998, 255). Later, Cora Kaplan posits that “Victoriana” is “a British postwar
vogue that shows no signs of exhaustion” (2007, 2) as a “self-conscious rewrit-
ing of historical narratives to highlight the suppressed histories of gender and
sexuality, race and empire, as well as challenges to the conventional under-
standings of the historical itself” (3). According to her reading, these narratives
have “has become so capacious and lucrative that it contains many mini-genres,
including pastiche, Victorian crime fiction and mass-market romance” (88) in
a kind of “compulsive recycling of Victorian material” (15).
These multiplicities of (re)workings of nineteenth-century fiction often
approximate the length and structure of Victorian novels with books, chapters,
and epigraphs. To Andrea Kirchknopf, these texts
Indeed, it is not the loss of a specific belief system, but rather the loss of that sense
of immediacy and urgency which comes with true existential crisis. We look back
nostalgically not to an age of safe belief, for that holds few attractions for us now,
but rather to a point of crisis. It is the intensity of emotion and authenticity of
experience at that moment which we long to recapture. (Shuttleworth 260)
fictional text which creates meaning from the background of awareness of time as
flowing and as poised uneasily between the Victorian past and the present; which
secondly deals dominantly with topics which belong to the field of history, histo-
riography and/or the philosophy of history in dialogue with a Victorian past; and
which thirdly can do so at all narrative levels and in any possible discursive form,
be it through the narration of action, through static description, argumentative
exposition or stream- of-consciousness techniques. (2002, 62; emphasis
in original)
Readers and scholars alike realise that such “re-visionary fiction” is “central to
the construction of ‘our’ consciousness” (Widdowson 2006, 491) a double-
speak or double consciousness that allows for a dialogue between eras and ideas.
Two major definitions of neo-Victorianism appear to be de rigueur in con-
temporary criticism. Mark Llewellyn considers neo-Victorianism to include
“those works which are consciously set in the Victorian period (or the nine-
teenth century—there is a difference … ),” or as those which desire to re-write
the historical narrative of that period by representing “marginalised voices, new
histories of sexuality, post-colonial viewpoints and other generally ‘different’
versions of the Victorian;” however, they “do not claim to be all-encompassing
reconfigurations” but can “illustrate conflict and difference through their very
act of undermining the stability of a presumed hegemonic historical narrative”
(2008, 165). In this way, the neo-Victorian project creates a critical paradigm
because “it blurs the distinctions between criticism and creativity, with each
1 INTRODUCTION 5
becoming a reflection on self and other” causing what Llewellyn terms “critical
f(r)iction” or the bringing together of “knowing and historicised, critical, and
scholarly perspective contained within the fictional text” (170). There is an
interaction on the page between then and now, the past and the postmodern
present, to “re-fresh and re-vitalise the importance of the earlier text to the
here and now” (170–71).
The concern Llewellyn then expresses is how to capture the different shades of
neo-Victorianism—and can they be theorised differently to the variations in other
kinds of historical fiction?… the approaches required to reading the neo-Victorian
and do it critical justice are exactly the same mix of contextual and textual aware-
ness required to address the multiplicity of the Victorians themselves. (175)
of study while being mindful of those integral works that have come before;
there is, despite the enormity of what is now neo-Victorianism, a great deal of
work still to do, as this volume’s epilogue suggests.
The first chapter of criticism in this collection, “The Hauntology/
Narratology of the Neo-Victorian Ghost Story” by coeditor Brenda Ayres,
refers to Jacques Derrida’s term, “hauntology,” which is a portmanteau of
haunting and ontology. Applying his theory, Ayres investigates the iconic
haunted house in neo-Victorian literature as a metaphorical conceit to describe
the processes of writing and reading in the pursuit of knowledge. Storytelling,
for the neo-Victorian, is layered and rarely linear, in contrast to the traditional
Victorian novel. Reality and assertions or presumptions about right and wrong,
good and evil, acceptable and unacceptable were endemic depictions in the
nineteenth century when novels were entrusted to be social purveyors of
morality and preceptors of decorum. Neo-Victorian ghost stories suggest that,
at best, writers and their readers might discover clues to reality and truth from
a myriad of physical and preternatural means embedded in the text, but knowl-
edge is a spectre that assumes a variety of forms that can be deceptive and
allusive. The “haunting” of narratology in neo-Victorian ghost stories set in
Victorian times analysed in this chapter are Home Before Dark (2020) by Riley
Sager and The Whispering House (2021) by Elizabeth Brooks.
The writing of history as well as the reading of history to the postmodern is
an exertion of relativity, as Ayres implied in her “haunting” chapter. Central to
the construction of the history of the nineteenth century, of course, is the
period’s namesake, Queen Victoria. In Chap. 3, Rachel M. Friars and Connor
E. R. DeMerchant, scrutinise neo-Victorian representations of Queen Victoria
on film from 1913 to 2019, with a focused analysis of two films that attempt to
cover major periods of Victoria’s life, The Young Victoria (2009) and Victoria
& Abdul (2017). In “recovering” Queen Victoria’s story and representing the
elements of her life that endear her to contemporary audiences, creators craft
their own versions of the monarch that deploy her iconic image for their own
ends. In neo-Victorian representations of the monarch on film, writers and
directors attempt to centralise Victoria’s personhood, purporting to give her a
voice through representations of her thoughts, feelings, and independent
actions; however, By choosing how and when to adapt Victoria’s life, writers
and directors cement Victoria’s status as an unknowable figurehead representa-
tive of an age and a nationalist ideology.
Queen Victoria has been presented in countless ways through literature and
film and so has the literature that bears her name. The first Victorian work to
be adapted to film was one of the most emotive and shocking scenes in the
Dickens’ canon, the death of Nancy Sykes in Oliver Twist (1838). The Death of
Nancy was produced by American Mutoscope in the United States in April
1897 (Pointer 1996, 117). Nevertheless, Antonija Primorac in Chap. 4 believes
that there has been a reluctance to deal with neo-Victorianism on the screen,
echoing a persistent view that only literature can offer a multifaceted re-
visioning of the Victorian era. Primorac shows that screen adaptations can offer
1 INTRODUCTION 7
Chap. 7, “Too frivolous, too middlebrow, too populist, and too commercial:
Examining the Neo-Victorian Musical,” Marija Reiff focuses on the variety and
types of musicals produced, identifying what they reveal both about Victorian
and contemporary culture. Reiff treats musicals that have become part of the
musical theatre canon, such as The King and I (1951) and Oliver! (1960);
commercially unsuccessful shows, such as The Woman in White (2004); and a
proliferation of adaptations on smaller, more local stages, such as regional the-
atre productions of Charles Dickens’ A Christmas Carol. The present day thus
enjoys fecund ground for musical exploration, left by the Victorians, that not
only reflects Victorian culture but also perpetuates aspects of Victoriana found
necessary and/or desirable for contemporary viewers.
Certainly, Dickens’ A Christmas Carol has been a global sensation since its
first appearance in 1843. With Tiny Tim’s lionised benediction, “God Bless
Us, Every One!” the story is not just about the spirit of Christmas, about giv-
ing and receiving blessings; it emphasises the innocence of childhood that
should be valued, nurtured, cherished, and emulated by adults. Ayres’ Chap. 8,
“Coming of Age: Neo-Victorian, Dickensian Children,” develops this theme in
Dickens’ famous Christmas tale and in his David Copperfield—with all their
neo-Victorian adaptations and reinventions. In particular, she examines
Disney’s 2009 version, the first computer-animated film made of the former,
and the “colourrblind” version of the latter by Armando Lannucci in 2019.
Both neo-Victorian films convey changing methods and perspectives by today’s
parents in inculcating and revising Victorian morals and desired behaviour in
malleable children so that they will evolve into adults who are healthy and can
live in harmony with others.
Another Victorian text that has been adapted numerous times in forms that
would be defined as Neo-Victorian is Bram Stoker’s 1897 Dracula. Of these,
Fred Saberhagen wrote nine novels between 1975 and 1996. In the first vol-
ume, The Dracula Tape, Saberhagen works with Stoker’s master vampire is
always silent, his story told by characters who have sworn to destroy him. By
having the neo-Victorian Dracula tell his own story in his own words,
Saberhagen creates a surprisingly humane and sympathetic character with ethi-
cal standards that are equivalent or superior to those of his opponents. Two
volumes, The Holmes-Dracula File, (1978) and Séance for a Vampire (1994)
also combine Dracula with Sherlock Holmes, alternating chapters by Dracula
and those by Dr Watson. Carol Senf’s Chap. 9 views Saberhagen’s redemption
of Dracula as making his series worthy of inclusion in this handbook because it
reveals that the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries often respond to
their Victorian ancestors by criticising that past. The Holmes-Dracula File is set
in 1897, the year of Queen Victoria’s Jubilee and looks pointedly at both
Victorian science and colonialism, while Séance for a Vampire (1994) features
spiritualism and takes Dracula, Holmes, and Watson to St. Petersburg, where
they encounter Rasputin on the eve of the Russian Revolution.
Neo-Victorian fiction may be grounded in postmodernism, but its treat-
ment of religion is rooted in modernism’s rejection of Victorian evangelical
1 INTRODUCTION 9
Atwood, Richard Howard, Daljit Nagra, Ruth Padel, Susana Gardner, Andrew
Motion, Mick Imlah, Rosie Miles, John Seed, and Oliver Reynolds. The chap-
ter offers a case study of the varied ways in which poets have returned to
address, challenge, and (less often) celebrate Alfred Tennyson and his works, in
order to demonstrate a sustained trend in neo-Victorian poetry of hostility to
“eminent Victorians”’ while acknowledging, in a much less iconoclastic fash-
ion, the enduring force of his work.
Anna Maria Jones, in Chap. 16, “Neo-Victorian Graphic Novels: Learning
to Unmaster the Archive,” provides an overview of neo-Victorian graphic texts
and of the body of scholarship on that genre, in particular Alan Moore and
Kevin O’Neill’s The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen (2000–2021), Frank
Beddor and Liz Cavalier’s Hatter M (2008–2014), and Ikumi Katagiri and Ai
Ninomiya’s Are You Alice? (2010–2015). Reading these examples as represen-
tative of larger phenomena, Jones posits that, whereas some modes of neo-
Victorianism produce a masterful pleasure modelled on imperial
conquest—enabling the reader to plunder the literary, visual, and material arte-
facts of the Victorian past—others invite a much less self-assured engagement
with that archive.
Chapter 18 addresses a similar self-reflexivity in neo-Victorian writing and
reading but in biofiction, as observed by Barbara Braid in “Biofiction and the
Neo-Victorian Crime Novel: The Case of the Brontës.” Despite its essentially
fictitious nature, biofiction makes claims to authenticity, drawing in its audi-
ences with suggestions that the sensationalised versions of the famous lives are
the “true” ones, and often resists the existing narratives of Victorian person-
ages that had been disseminated throughout most of the twentieth century.
Braid analyses the negotiations of authenticity, sensationalism, and presentism
in a corpus of contemporary literary biofictions that adapt the life and writing
of Charlotte Brontë into a sensational and detective convention. They position
Charlotte Brontë as a stock character in crime fiction, either as a criminal
(James Tully’s The Crimes of Charlotte Brontë, 1999) or a detective (e.g. Laura
Joh Rowland’s The Secret Adventures of Charlotte Brontë, 2008 and Bedlam,
2010, or Bella Ellis’ The Brontë Mystery series, 2019–2021). These adaptive
novels attempt to do away with the Brontë myth, which is then subverted to
offer a new, more scandalous neo-Victorian version of the author and her life.
Sophie Franklin’s Chap. 19 deals with violence in Neo-Victorian texts.
Although violence has been critically examined in relation to neo-Victorian
subgenres—such as trauma, crime, and Gothicism—the nature, form, and pur-
pose of violence in neo-Victorian fiction and film has yet to be fully accounted
for and theorised. Franklin studies the ethics of representing graphic violence
in a displaced neo-Victorian setting, specifically in the light of expanding
definition(s) of “neo-Victorian” and the subsequent problematizing of neo-
Victorian texts and studies in their engagement with global, colonial and
Anglophone contexts. Considering “canonical” English writers, such as the
Brontës, Wilkie Collins and Elizabeth Gaskell, Franklin explores their modes of
representation, including graphic violence, flashbacks, and omission. This
12 S. E. MAIER AND B. AYRES
haunting. Once the present is considered the past, envisioning and understand-
ing becomes even more difficult; but there are characteristics of it that were not
available in the present that can illuminate. This chapter analyses how ghosts in
the neo-Victorianism like Crimson Peak are metaphors for the aftermath of the
past that never dies and how it haunts the living, a major theme in neo-
Victorian texts.
Instead of a haunting, Catherine Layton’s “New Wine in Old Bottles” views
Angela Carter’s Nights at the Circus, as an example of neo-Victorianism that
revisits Victoriana in the present like a hallucinogenic drug that triggers the
reader’s non-ordinary state of consciousness. Set in 1899, Carter’s novel
attempts to uncover the scam behind the wings of music hall artiste Sophie
Fevvers whirls the tale from London (Part 1) through St. Petersburg and
Siberia. Combining the sights, smells, sounds, and sayings of Cockney life with
feminist, socialist, and postmodern theories, Carter has created vivid characters
and allegorical figures that invite readers to explore a strange, hallucinatory
world and make their own meanings. The writers’ experiences, along with
Great Expectations (Carter’s favourite Dickens’ work in her childhood), form
the background for considering this neo-Victorian psychedelia in Chap. 22.
Victorians dealt with another alteration of the mind—what they called
“women’s hysteria.” From a modern perspective, most Victorians seemed to
have been obsessed about controlling women, subjugating the animal within
men, and adjudicating immorality, convinced that conformity was the very pil-
lar of civilisation. The by-product of such strict regulation must surely have
precipitated mental illness on a pandemic scale. According to Ayres in Chap. 23,
neo-Victorian works are fascinated with why and how so many Victorians suf-
fered mental illness (regardless of what it was called), how it was manifested,
and how it was treated or dealt with. Bodies of Water (2016) by V. H. Leslie and
Fingersmith (2002) by Sarah Waters narrate manifestations of mental illness in
unique ways that reveal useful insights into human nature regardless of histori-
cal era. The major difference between Victorian v. neo-Victorian narratives is
that in the latter, the narrative emphasises that the people who committed
women to the madhouse seem to be just as mentally ill if not more so than were
the inmates. Further, modern writers often depict men as the villains who drive
women to insanity inside or outside lunatic asylums.
The next two chapters shift gender focus from oppression of women to
oppression of the community now designated as LGBTQIA+. Chap. 24, “‘The
Testimony of Love’: The Lesbian Neo-Victorian Novel” joins a proliferation of
cultural and critical focus on queer re-visioning. Rachel M. Friars contends that
representations of queer women in neo-Victorian media from the last decade
(books, television, and film) have developed, in part, a post-Sarah Waters per-
spective. Such texts interrogate the labels ascribed to queer bodies and sexuali-
ties at the level of gender, sex, and performance challenging traditional
categories and divisions of gay/straight, male/female, or self/Other. Friars
presents an overview of queer women in neo-Victorian literature post-Waters
and examines three major contributions to the canon that address these
Another random document with
no related content on Scribd:
On kuin voimakas sähkövirta karkaisi koko Iljan olemuksen läpi.
Laskeeko "sisar" sydämetöntä leikkiä, vai tuleeko vapahdus juuri kun
hän kaikkein kiihkeimmästi sitä toivoo?
— Milloin?
Käsi nousee. Näyttää siltä kuin hän aikoisi tukkia korvansa. Mutta
sitte käsi taas hervahtaa takaisin paareille, joilla hän makaa.
Rakkaus äitiin auttaa häntä. Hän tahtoo unohtaa ja elää. Hänellä on
suuri tehtävä.
Siunaa ja varjele,
Siunaa ja varjele
Sodan tantereilla kärsineitä,
Haavat Sä lääkitse
Ijällä pitkällä
Palkitse, kruunaa heitä!
veisaa kuoro.
Iljan katse kostuu, ja autuas ilo virtaa koko hänen olemuksensa
läpi.
Ilja painuu takaisin vuoteelle. Totta, totta siis kuitenkin se, mitä hän
ei ole tohtinut eikä tahtonut uskoa.
*****
— Oli —?
— Haim Jankel?
*****
— Mitä ihmeessä?
Tällainen oli heidän ystävyytensä alku ollut. Ja sitä jatkui siitä sekä
läpi koulun että yliopistossa.
Tällä kannalla olivat asiat, kun sota puhkesi. Se repi kohta kuin
pohjan heidän jalkojensa alta. Pitkään aikaan he eivät puhuneet siitä
mikä tässä asiassa oli kipeintä heille. Mutta kerran se purkautui kuin
vahingossa.
*****
Hän koetti välttää näitä ajatuksia. Mutta Dimitri näki hänen kerran
ryntäävän ulos tallista paeten kuin henkensä edestä. Ja Dimitri
ymmärsi.
*****
— "Sisar", huudahti Dimitri äkkiä ohikulkevalle
sairaanhoitajattarelle.
— Tulkaa tänne, minulla olisi asiaa.