Nobody's Angels : Middle-Class Women and Domestic Ideology in Victorian Culture Paperback / softback
by Elizabeth Langland
Part of the Reading Women Writing series
Paperback / softback
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Description
Victoria's accession to the throne in 1837 coincided with the birth of a now notorious gender stereotype—the "Angel in the House." Comparing the position of real women—from the Queen of England to middle-class housewives—with their status as household angels, Elizabeth Langland explores a complex image of femininity in Victorian culture. Langland offers provocative readings of nineteenth-century fiction as well as a rare glimpse into etiquette guides, home management manuals, and cookbooks.
She traces the implications of a profound contradiction: although the home was popularly depicted as a private moral haven, running the middle-class household—which included at least one servant—was in fact an exercise in class management.
Drawing on the work of Foucault, Benjamin, and Bourdieu, and of recent feminist theorists, Langland considers novels by Dickens, Gaskell, Oliphant. and Eliot, as well as the memoirs of Hannah Cullwick, a former domestic servant who married a middle-class man. Langland discovers that the middle-class wife assumed a more complex and important function than has previously been recognized.
With her substantial power veiled in myth, the Victorian angel mastered skills that enabled her to support a rigid class system; at the same time, however, her achievements unobtrusively set the stage for a feminist revolution.
Nobody's Angels reconstructs a disturbing picture of social change that depended as much on protecting class inequity as on promoting gender equality.
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Available to Order - This title is available to order, with delivery expected within 2 weeks
- Format:Paperback / softback
- Pages:288 pages
- Publisher:Cornell University Press
- Publication Date:05/04/1995
- Category:
- ISBN:9780801482205
Other Formats
- Hardback from £87.01
Information
-
Available to Order - This title is available to order, with delivery expected within 2 weeks
- Format:Paperback / softback
- Pages:288 pages
- Publisher:Cornell University Press
- Publication Date:05/04/1995
- Category:
- ISBN:9780801482205