Book contents
- Frontmatter
- CONTENTS
- List of Contributors
- Introduction: Narrating Domestic Portability: Emigration, Domesticity and Genre Formation
- 1 Unsettled Status in Australian Settler Novels
- 2 Agents of Empire and Feminist Rebels: Settlement and Gender in Isabella Aylmer's Distant Homes and Ellen Ellis's Everything Is Possible To Will
- 3 Reconstructing British Domesticity on the North American Frontier
- 4 Divided House, Divided Self: Susanna Moodie's Flora Lyndsay; or, Passages from an Eventful Life
- 5 For Fortune and Adventure: Representations of Emigration in British Popular Fiction, 1870–1914
- 6 The Return and Rescue of the Émigré in A Tale of Two Cities
- 7 Settling Back in at Home: Impostors and Imperial Panic in Victorian Narratives of Return
- 8 Surviving Black Thursday: The Great Bushfire of 1851
- 9 ‘I am but a Stranger Everywhere’: Missionary Themes in Charlotte Yonge's New Ground and My Young Alcides
- 10 Sad Remains: Foreclosing Settlement in The Coral Island
- 11 Nineteenth-Century Female Crusoes: Rewriting the Robinsonade for Girls
- 12 ‘The Freedom Suits Me’: Encouraging Girls to Settle in the Colonies
- 13 Domestic Goddesses on the Frontier; or, Tempting the Mothers of Empire with Adventure
- 14 A ‘Curious Political and Social Experiment’: A Settler Utopia, Feminism and a Greater Britain in Catherine Helen Spence's Handfasted
- Notes
- Index
13 - Domestic Goddesses on the Frontier; or, Tempting the Mothers of Empire with Adventure
- Frontmatter
- CONTENTS
- List of Contributors
- Introduction: Narrating Domestic Portability: Emigration, Domesticity and Genre Formation
- 1 Unsettled Status in Australian Settler Novels
- 2 Agents of Empire and Feminist Rebels: Settlement and Gender in Isabella Aylmer's Distant Homes and Ellen Ellis's Everything Is Possible To Will
- 3 Reconstructing British Domesticity on the North American Frontier
- 4 Divided House, Divided Self: Susanna Moodie's Flora Lyndsay; or, Passages from an Eventful Life
- 5 For Fortune and Adventure: Representations of Emigration in British Popular Fiction, 1870–1914
- 6 The Return and Rescue of the Émigré in A Tale of Two Cities
- 7 Settling Back in at Home: Impostors and Imperial Panic in Victorian Narratives of Return
- 8 Surviving Black Thursday: The Great Bushfire of 1851
- 9 ‘I am but a Stranger Everywhere’: Missionary Themes in Charlotte Yonge's New Ground and My Young Alcides
- 10 Sad Remains: Foreclosing Settlement in The Coral Island
- 11 Nineteenth-Century Female Crusoes: Rewriting the Robinsonade for Girls
- 12 ‘The Freedom Suits Me’: Encouraging Girls to Settle in the Colonies
- 13 Domestic Goddesses on the Frontier; or, Tempting the Mothers of Empire with Adventure
- 14 A ‘Curious Political and Social Experiment’: A Settler Utopia, Feminism and a Greater Britain in Catherine Helen Spence's Handfasted
- Notes
- Index
Summary
Judith Rowbotham describes the late nineteenth-century shift in the British feminine ideal as a movement away from the ‘Household Fairy’ to the ‘Home Goddess’. Influenced by New Woman literature emphasizing female intelligence, independence and strength, this new goddess of the hearth was depicted in journalism and fiction as a professional in the domestic sphere. The idea of the capable, resourceful domestic goddess was particularly useful to emigration promoters who wished to market the emigration and settlement of middle-class British women. Those in the colonies and dominions who might believe middle-class women to be unsuited to the rigours of settlement life and those women who might be apprehensive about the life awaiting them in various new lands could be reassured by the image of the domestic goddess triumphant. A key selling point of the British domestic goddess was her utility to empire: with her ability not only to manage her home competently but to expand those domestic skills to manage her wider community, the domestic goddess exercised a civilizing effect. Moreover, single British domestic goddesses were potential mates for British settlers; once married, these women would produce children of British heritage to populate the new land. Organizations such as the British Women's Emigration Association (BWEA) publicized their work and promoted female emigration and settlement in the periodical press, not only in their own organ, the Imperial Colonist, but more broadly in general newspapers and magazines.
- Type
- Chapter
- Information
- Victorian Settler NarrativesEmigrants, Cosmopolitans and Returnees in Nineteenth-Century Literature, pp. 193 - 206Publisher: Pickering & ChattoFirst published in: 2014