Blame : marriage, folklore, and the Victorian novel

Blame: Marriage, Folklore, and the Victorian Novel contends that the intersection of folk and legal discourses of responsibility and culpability shapes the way the Victorian novel imagines blame. Recent studies have drawn attention to the importance of official legal discourses such as trial testimony and standards of evidence to the development of narrative form during the nineteenth century. However, by attending to folk modes for establishing blameworthiness in Victorian novels, I show that folk and legal standards of culpability are mutually constitutive. The legal system is designed to identify the culpable in a fixed process – codified in slow-changing statutes – that begins with crime and ends with punishment. The counter-discourse of folklore – by definition constantly changing – distributes blame more widely than the legal system allows. The resulting circulation of blame blurs the distinction between public and private by showing that the stakes of domestic conflicts extend beyond husband and wife, underscoring the communal investment in failing marriages and their symptoms, which include marital violence, bigamy, and adultery. Examining marital conflicts in works by Charlotte Brontë, Anthony Trollope, Rosina Bulwer Lytton, Wilkie Collins, Charles Dickens, Thomas Hardy, and William Makepeace Thackeray, I argue that the novels conceive of blame not as a single event but as a process of continuous negotiation and redefinition of standards of responsibility, moral agency, and culpability

Responses of African-American girls to two types of folktales

This study examined the responses of two 11-year-old African-American girls to two folktales: one with a passive female protagonist and one with an active female protagonist. The goal of the study was to add to the small body of previous research on children’s responses to folktales by exploring the opinions of African-American girls, who had been thus far overlooked, and to illuminate areas for future research. Data were collected through a series of four interviews with each girl and analyzed using qualitative research methodologies. Some of the data reflected previous findings from studies of Caucasian girls’ responses to folktales. The data echoed the finding that children are “active makers of meaning” (Trousdale, 1987) in responding to folktales. Both girls in this study related the stories to their own lives by inserting modifications into the original tales. The data also suggested that the girls were drawn to active, helping female characters but held mixed feelings about emulating such active characters, reflecting a 1995 study (Trousdale). The study challenges the assumption that children necessarily identify with the protagonists in fairy tales. In both types of tales the girls seemed to make qualified identifications with the main characters. The study also suggests that girls’ readiness to identify with active female characters may depend on their prior experience with such characters. Moreover, the study found that both girls were reluctant to describe the characters in terms of specific physical traits. Further research was called for to determine whether such responses are typical of children from ethnic groups who do not often see themselves represented in literature