Conferences--Melanie Ulrich

Conferences

Feminist Intimations: Three Poets Imagine Victoria (2003)
Big Queen Victoria Goes to South Africa : The Queen and Olive Schreiner’s From Man to Man (2003)
The Eye of the Beholder: Feminism & Visual Constructions of Queen Victoria (2003)
The Poems of Edith Nesbit, Reconsidered (2001)

Feminist Intimations:
Three Poets Imagine Victoria

Victorian Interdisciplinary Studies Association of the Western United States Confernece
Southwest Texas State University, October 9-11, 2003.

This paper posits that Queen Victoria was an important source of feminist inspiration for many of her female contemporaries, who saw in her a woman who managed great power responsibly and intelligently and who lived in the public sphere without losing her femininity or becoming soiled. The effect that Victoria had on the burgeoning feminist movement is something that has been little considered in either feminist histories or critiques of Victoria’s reign, obfuscated by the twentieth-century reaction against Victoria and Victorianism as well as by her own avowed anti-feminism. However, the exact nature of Victoria ’s stance on the Woman Question is more complex than is often realized, and misconceptions about the nature of feminisms in the nineteenth century exacerbate critics’ tendency to overestimate Victoria’s disdain for women’s issues. In fact, she gave support to several of the less radical manifestations of the early feminist movement, including lending her imprimatur to a women-owned and –run press whose purpose was to broaden the range of employments available for women by demonstrating their ability to run a printing press capably and intelligently. She similarly supported the opening up of the nursing field to women, favored the reform of marriage laws, and herself pioneered the use of anesthesia during childbirth, despite resistance from clerics who argued that to alleviate the pains of labor was to defy God’s will. Thus, one of Victoria’s least recognized legacies to us is the assistance she gave – both unwittingly and deliberately – at the birth of the feminist movement.

Big Queen Victoria Goes to South Africa:
The Queen and Olive Schreiner’s From Man to Man

11th Annual British Women Writers Conference
Texas Christian University, March 20-23, 2003

This paper will examine Olive Schreiner’s use of Queen Victoria as a persistent but mutable symbol in the novel From Man to Man (1927). From the first chapter, in which the child Rebekah manipulates images and fantasies of the Queen as part of her developing understanding of herself and the world, to Rebekah and Bertie’s later crises, in which Victoria, no longer under Rebekah’s control, appears as a seeming manifestation of the social mores so destructive to the sisters, the novel makes use of Victoria’s contradictory abilities to act as both a feminist touchstone and as an emblem of social repression. Rebekah’s ultimate substitution of other female figures for Victoria as symbols of her feminism indicates how her philosophy has evolved and matured. The Queen’s duality in the novel, in other words, mirrors her complicated function in real life, in which Victoria was both an empowered, public, political woman, and a vehement opponent of what she called “this mad, wicked folly of ‘Women’s Rights.’”

Schreiner’s changing use of the idea of the Queen is also congruent with her views on women in society. On the one hand, she envisioned radical changes in gender roles and the expression of great talents and abilities on the part of women in the future; on the other hand, she was so conflicted about the possibility for female happiness or fulfillment or even a tidy conclusion to women’s lives that she worked on her story for nearly 40 years without finishing it. She could not decide whether or not the present had any space in it for fragments of that scintillating future that she imagined for women; in consequence, her protagonists’ destinies are equivocal.

Tracking the novel’s use of Victoria, then, enables a deeper understanding of the Queen’s potentially liberating and repressive effects on her female subjects and of Schreiner’s own feminist ideals.

The Eye of the Beholder:
Feminism & Visual Constructions of Queen Victoria

10 Annual Graduate Student Gender Studies Conference
University of Texas, March 20-21, 2003.

This paper will explore visual representations of Queen Victoria by herself and by other women, including sketches, paintings, photographs, cartes-de-visite albums, photocollages, and statues. This study will help to clarify how Victoria was constructed, in particular by her middle-class female subjects, and how much agency the Queen herself enjoyed in influencing those constructions. These questions are important because the Queen’s position of political power and visibility made her a useful role model and exemplar for early feminists and women intellectuals; her significance in her capacity as feminist role model is complicated, but not diminished by Victoria’s articulated anti-feminism. Unfortunately, her denunciations of “this mad, wicked folly of ‘Women’s Rights’” have led to an underestimation of the Queen’s importance to the early feminist movement.

By looking at how women visually created Victoria, we can derive a better understanding of the nature and degree of her feminist effect; by including the works of ordinary (not famous or unusually well-educated) middle-class women, we can estimate how potentially radical and widespread Victoria’s influence as a feminist role model was. At the same time, the nature of the persona adopted by Victoria – domestic, unglamorous, hard-working, morally upright, and matronly – means that the way her subjects used her only occasionally resembled contemporary feminism; instead, women frequently, but not exclusively, focused on the validity of female subjectivity and the supposed inherent moral superiority of women.

This paper will elucidate the nuances of Victoria’s feminist effect as manifested through visual representations of the Queen in an attempt to clarify an obscured and important element of feminist history. The emphasis on the visual arts is important because the nineteenth century was a time when new technologies for the reproduction of images led to a sudden increased importance of the visual as an element of public discourse. Moreover, as the so-called decorative arts (such as photocollage) were available to and even forced upon most middle class women, the products of these arts are a rich field for studying the subjectivities of ordinary bourgeois women, whose voices are not readily accessible through published writings.

The Poems of Edith Nesbit, Reconsidered

Dickens Project Winter Conference
University of California, Davis, February 9-11, 2001

Edith Nesbit has not received much critical attention, and what she has received has almost exclusively focused on her famous children's works. Her poetry, on the other hand, tends to be dismissed as second-rate and insufficiently feminist. While it is undeniable that her work is uneven, the kind of critical perspective to which Nesbit has been subjected implies that she had an obligation to produce proto-feminist works. Rather than evaluating her on the basis of her radicalism, it would be worthwhile to examine to what ends Nesbit, a socialist, Fabian and sexual free-thinker, was able to use poetry. She was not only an intellectual and a Bohemian, she was also a widely respected poet in her own time. To what was her popularity due? To what social and national issues did she speak? How did she balance the demands of the public and her own intellectual needs? What did poetry allow her to do and what did it inhibit? In other words, how was this talented thinker successful? This paper will show that through Nesbit's sophisticated use of meter, unusual subject matter, and passion, many of works comment eloquently and originally on issues that continue to concern us, including motherhood, romantic love, and power within marriages. Nesbit's ability to capture pain, frustration, rebellion, obsession, and pastoral nostalgia with poignancy and with give her poems the ability to move and intrigue us today.