Skip to main content Accessibility help
×
Hostname: page-component-848d4c4894-v5vhk Total loading time: 0 Render date: 2024-07-02T04:38:12.200Z Has data issue: false hasContentIssue false

4 - Narrative annexes, social mobility, and class anxiety

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  13 November 2009

Suzanne Keen
Affiliation:
Washington and Lee University, Virginia
Get access

Summary

SOCIAL FICTION AND THE BOUNDARIES OF REPRESENTATION

Any account of the social restrictions on representation in the Victorian novel would be incomplete without acknowledging the importance of the mythical figure Mrs. Grundy. Her person represents most plainly the gendered limits on representation, for it is she, on behalf of novel-reading young ladies, who forbids frank depiction of adult sexuality. If, as we have seen, some prominent Victorian critics held women writers and female readers to blame for a constricted realm of representation (even as they enforced those limits when responding to novels by women), to these same critics Mrs. Grundy embodied the worst of a “maternal” impulse to protect the vulnerable young person from the effects of fiction-reading. Her genesis can be traced to the early nineteenth- century evangelical reaction to the dangers of novels, promulgated in warnings such as this one from an 1824 issue of the Lady's Magazine:

One great foremost evil of novel-reading is generated and established in its tendency to banish simplicity and nature from the mind, and to form artificial, imitative character; to fashion and confirm a practised mind; to seduce the frank and honest disposition from its native ingenuousness, and to teach the art of acting perpetually upon plan; to be frivolously busy in analysing what never can be analysed, except by that power which formed it – the human heart.

Novel-reading leads to a fondness of making experiments on the affections of others toward ourselves.

In fighting a losing battle against the reading of fiction, particularly by girls and young unmarried ladies, the evangelical proscribers in subsequent decades target, instead of all novels, particular areas of representation of human life.

Type
Chapter
Information
Victorian Renovations of the Novel
Narrative Annexes and the Boundaries of Representation
, pp. 111 - 144
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Print publication year: 1997

Access options

Get access to the full version of this content by using one of the access options below. (Log in options will check for institutional or personal access. Content may require purchase if you do not have access.)

Save book to Kindle

To save this book to your Kindle, first ensure coreplatform@cambridge.org is added to your Approved Personal Document E-mail List under your Personal Document Settings on the Manage Your Content and Devices page of your Amazon account. Then enter the ‘name’ part of your Kindle email address below. Find out more about saving to your Kindle.

Note you can select to save to either the @free.kindle.com or @kindle.com variations. ‘@free.kindle.com’ emails are free but can only be saved to your device when it is connected to wi-fi. ‘@kindle.com’ emails can be delivered even when you are not connected to wi-fi, but note that service fees apply.

Find out more about the Kindle Personal Document Service.

Available formats
×

Save book to Dropbox

To save content items to your account, please confirm that you agree to abide by our usage policies. If this is the first time you use this feature, you will be asked to authorise Cambridge Core to connect with your account. Find out more about saving content to Dropbox.

Available formats
×

Save book to Google Drive

To save content items to your account, please confirm that you agree to abide by our usage policies. If this is the first time you use this feature, you will be asked to authorise Cambridge Core to connect with your account. Find out more about saving content to Google Drive.

Available formats
×