Dissertation Abstract
Victoria's Feminist Legacy: How 19th-Century Women Imagined the Queen
My
dissertation examines Victoria’s impact on the development of early feminism.
Although her vehemently expressed anti-feminist sentiments have come to
dominate the Queen’s reputation, during her life her persona as a public and
politically active woman fostered an environment that encouraged the advancement
of many strands of early feminism, as did many of her charitable activities and
personal convictions. Although some
of the feminist influence that she exerted was inadvertent, she also
deliberately championed a number of proto-feminist and early feminist causes,
particularly in her later reign. This
dissertation explores how the works of many Victorian woman writers, artists,
and thinkers testify to the Queen’s feminist influence.
The
prevailing rather negative image of
Victoria, originating from a backlash during the Edwardian period, is being challenged
by contemporary scholars: this study
is part of this recent critical reevaluation of the life and influence of
Victoria
. Adrienne Munich, Gail Turley
Houston, Margaret Homans, John Plunkett, and others have sought to uncover the
complexities in the public responses to
Victoria
and the complexities in the monarch herself.
Homans, in particular, argues that Victoria’s identity as an agent of
action was constantly in flux among the identities thrust on her by her role as
a constitutional monarch, her gender, her long seclusion, her subjects’
constructions of her, and her private identity.
Similarly,
Munich
is interested in the multiplicity of roles that
Victoria
created for herself or was subjected to, while Houston and Plunkett are most
interested in the uses to which the public put their constructions of
Victoria
. In spite of this spate of critical
activity, the feminist dimensions of the Queen’s life and public persona
remain largely underacknowledged.
The
study begins its assessment of
Victoria
and feminism at the inception of the Queen’s reign.
Chapter 1:
The Commercial Queen examines how Elizabeth Barrett Browning, Letitia
E. Landon, and Caroline Norton balanced public anxieties and expectations
regarding the monarch at the outset of her reign with the radical and disruptive
potential she possessed. The fact
that the poems were loyalist paeans, written for publication in the popular
press, shaped and limited them to a certain extent.
Nonetheless, all three women vigorously sought to naturalize the
controversial reign of the teenaged female monarch.
The ways that they carried out this project demonstrate that the
Queen’s own gender conservatism freed her less radical subjects to be
unusually revolutionary in their constructions of her, while inhibiting more
ardent early feminists from using her as an icon of emancipation.
By
mid-century, the Queen was a familiar icon, long accustomed to constructing her
public image. Instead of the
romantic, sexualized “Rose of England” of her early years,
Victoria
had become deliberately domestic and matronly.
Chapter 2:
The Personal Queen considers the relationship between ordinary
middle-class women and the Queen, as represented in Emily Eden’s Semi-Detached
House (1859) and Sarah Orne Jewett’s “The Queen’s Twin” (1910).
The works suggest that this more matronly
Victoria
fostered what I call an “emotional feminism” that women who were not
politically active to appropriate some of her power. The photomontage of Queen
Victoria and her family by Lady Charlotte Milles, however, reminds us that the
Queen’s feminist effect could be limited for ordinary women precisely because
some found her privileged position alienating.
While
examining general public reception of the Queen gives us one view of her
feminist effect, considering how she impacted the women in her life provides
insight into her more immediate effect. Some
of the strongest evidence for
Victoria
’s effect on the growth of proto-feminism is the lives of her daughters.
Chapter 3:
The Royal Mother documents their participation in early- and
proto-feminist movements: in particular, in the expansion of nursing and the
reform of female education, among other causes.
Those who grew up accustomed to strong female power became active and
influential women in their own rights and promoted the empowerment of other
women.
The
final two chapters explore the battle over the Queen’s legacy between
conservative and feminist forces. Chapter
4: The Feminists’ Queen
expands on the tendency originally noted in Chapter 1, for
Victoria
to have a stronger feminist effect on more moderate or conservative women than
on radical feminists. The works of
Millicent Garrett Fawcett, Emily Crawford, and Olive Schreiner, feminists of
varying radicalism, illustrate this propensity. While
these texts suggest the tendency of later feminists to reject the Queen, they
also show that even for a later and more harshly critical generation, the figure
of the female monarch had a persistent resonance.
Chapter 5:
The Conservative Queen? looks
at the conflicting conservative tradition in memoirs and biographies of
Victoria
, examining several works by Margaret Oliphant and Marie Corelli.
While these two authors usually adopted a fairly passionate anti-feminist
stance in their writings, and their biographies and memoirs of
Victoria
dwell on traditional female virtues, they both use
Victoria
to claim a broad and public scope and application of those traditional
qualities. In spite of their
resistance to any but the most traditional constructions of femininity, they
actually make arguments that sound surprisingly like modern feminism.
