13 research outputs found
Introduction: Reflections Faint and Confused—Experiments in/of Realism
No abstract (available)
NOWHERE OR SOMEWHERE? (DIS)LOCATING GENDER AND CLASS BOUNDARIES IN CHRISTINA ROSSETTI'S SPEAKING LIKENESSES
This article attempts a novel reading of Christina Rossetti’s little
known children’s narrative, Speaking Likenesses (1874), through an
examination of the socio-historical background, and specifically the
Victorian debates on prostitution and child prostitution, which had
reached their peak in the years surrounding the conception of the story.
Rossetti employs fantasy in order, firstly, to allegorise contemporary
social issues faced by women of that period and, secondly, to satirise
the mixed and often contradictory Victorian attitudes concerning
childhood. With her juxtaposition of two different social contexts,
middle and working class, in which little girls grow up, Rossetti is
testing out the degrees of independence granted to young girls of
different classes, questioning the middle-class fear and suspicion of a
girl’s/woman’s autonomy. Both social settings described disrupt
Victorian expectations concerning impulses, behaviour, and degrees of
safety that each one fosters. Through a conflation of the dangers
(competitiveness, aggression, abuse) encountered in both settings,
Rossetti is able to cast doubt on the supposed virtues of middle-class
seclusion and overprotection. In this sense, ‘Nowhere,’ the name she
gives to her frightening imaginary site, is more likely to be
‘Somewhere,’ the real, middle-class locus of familiar threat