Woman and the Demon: The Life of a Victorian Myth Contributor(s): Auerbach, Nina (Author) |
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ISBN: 0674954076 ISBN-13: 9780674954076 Publisher: Harvard University Press OUR PRICE: $36.63 Product Type: Paperback - Other Formats Published: January 1984 |
Additional Information |
BISAC Categories: - Social Science | Gender Studies |
Dewey: 823 |
LCCN: 00000000 |
Physical Information: 0.82" H x 6.04" W x 9.32" (0.95 lbs) 272 pages |
Themes: - Sex & Gender - Feminine |
Descriptions, Reviews, Etc. |
Publisher Description: Here is a bold new vision of Victorian culture: a study of myths of womanhood that shatters the usual generalizations about the squeezed, crushed, and ego-less Victorian woman. Through copious examples drawn from literature, art, and biography, Nina Auerbach reconstructs three central paradigms: the angel/demon, the old maid, and the fallen woman. She shows how these animate a pervasive Victorian vision of a mobile female outcast with divine and demonic powers. Fear of such disruptive, self-creating figures, Auerbach argues, produces the approved ideal of the dutiful, family-bound woman. The awe they inspire associates them with characters in literature, the only vehicles of immortality in whom most Victorians could unreservedly believe. Auerbach looks at a wonderful variety of sources: Svengali, Dracula, and Freud; poets and major and minor novelists Carlyle, John Stuart Mill, and Ruskin; lives of women, great and unknown; Anglican sisterhoods and Magdalen homes; bardolatry and the theater; Pre-Raphaelite paintings and contemporary cartoons and book illustrations. Reinterpreting a medley of fantasies, she demonstrates that female powers inspired a vivid myth central to the spirit of the age. |
Contributor Bio(s): Auerbach, Nina: - Nina Auerbach was the John Welsh Centennial Professor of English Emerita at the University of Pennsylvania. |