Royal Representations: Queen Victoria and British Culture, 18371876 (Women in Culture and Society),Used

Product Description Queen Victoria was one of the most complex cultural productions of her age. In Royal Representations, Margaret Homans investigates the meanings Victoria held for her times, Victoria's own contributions to Victorian writing and art, and the cultural mechanisms through which her influence was felt.Arguing that being, seeming, and appearing were crucial to Victoria's 'rule,' Homans explores the variability of Victoria's agency and of its representations using a wide array of literary, historical, and visual sources. Along the way she shows how Victoria provided a deeply equivocal model for women's powers in and out of marriage, how Victoria's dramatic public withdrawal after Albert's death helped to ease the monarchy's transition to an entirely symbolic role, and how Victoria's literary selfrepresentations influenced debates over political selfrepresentation.Homans considers versions of Victoria in the work of Elizabeth Barrett Browning, George Eliot, John Ruskin, Margaret Oliphant, Lewis Carroll, Alfred Lord Tennyson, and Julia Margaret Cameron. Excerpt. Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved. Royal RepresentationsQueen Victoria and British Culture, 18371876By Margaret HomansThe University of Chicago PressCopyright 1998 The University of ChicagoAll rights reserved.ISBN: 9780226351131ContentsFigures, Foreword, by Catharine R. Stimpson, Acknowledgments, Introduction: The Queen's Agency, 1. QUEEN VICTORIA'S SOVEREIGN OBEDIENCE, 2. QUEEN VICTORIA'S WIDOWHOOD AND THE MAKING OF VICTORIAN QUEENS, 3. THE WIDOW AS AUTHOR AND THE ARTS AND POWERS OF CONCEALMENT, 4. QUEEN VICTORIA'S MEMORIAL ARTS, Epilogue: Empire of Grief, Notes, Index, CHAPTER 1QUEEN VICTORIA'S SOVEREIGN OBEDIENCE[Acknowledging] one important truth [will make a successful marriage]it is the superiority of your husband as a man. It is quite possible that you may have more talent, with higher attainments ... but this has nothing whatever to do with your position as a woman, which is, and must be, inferior to his as a man. Sarah Ellis, The Wives of England, 1843Since the Queen did herself for a husband 'propose,' The ladies will all do the same, I suppose; Their days of subserviency now will be past, For all will 'speak first' as they always did last! Since the Queen has no equal, 'obey' none she need, So of course at the altar from such vow she's freed; And the women will all follow suit, so they say'Love, honour,' they'll promise, but never'obey.' London street ballad, 1841'The Queen Has No Equal': The Problem of a Female MonarchyWhat made it possible, at a time when women were meant to 'obey,' for a woman to occupy the throne of England for sixtythree years and to leave the monarchy's domestic and international prestige, if not its political authority, enhanced? Despite notable exceptions, women were never meant to be Britain's monarchs. The throne was patrilineal. Dorothy Thompson indicates how peculiar it is 'that in a century in which male dominion and the separation of spheres into sharply defined male and female areas became entrenched in the ideology of all classes, a female in the highest office in the nation seems to have been almost universally accepted.' Adrienne Munich points out, moreover, that the idea of 'maternal monarchy seems absurd,' an outrageous mingling of separate spheres that created a 'gap in representability' to be filled only by one paradox after another. And yet it is also arguable, on the model of Nancy Armstrong's contention 'that the modern individual was first and foremost a woman' (Desire and Domestic Fiction, 8), that, quite apart from the historical accident of Queen Victoria's reigning from 1837 to 1901, the modern British monarch was first and foremost a womanto be specific, a wife, and a middleclass one. Paradoxical representations of Victoria, as monarch on the one hand and as wife on the other, became an effective strategy both for handling the public relations problem of fema