Research Catalog

Title

Suffering mothers in mid-Victorian novels / by Natalie J. McKnight.

Author

McKnight, Natalie.

Publication

New York : St. Martin's Press, [1997], ©1997.

Items in the Library & Off-site

Holdings

Details

Description

xi, 162 pages; 21 cm

Summary

• During the Victorian Era, women who became mothers faced unprecedented, unrealistic, and contradictory expectations from mainstream society. These expectations were expressed through a wide range of media including maternal guidebooks, popular periodicals, and Queen Victoria's maternal image. In Suffering Mothers in Mid-Victorian Novels, Natalie McKnight analyzes the influence of such cultural pressures on the fictional portrayals of mothers in mid-Victorian novels.
• Using a new historical and psychoanalytic approach, McKnight examines the climate created by a society that idolized mothers in theory but in reality positioned them to fail. The novels of Dickens, Charlotte Bronte, Thackeray, and George Eliot are studied for their inclusion of mother characters who vary from the ambivalent to the monstrous, the angelic to the absent.
• In her thorough exploration of these novels, McKnight reveals the influences and the natures of characters who function more centrally in mid-Victorian fiction than has often been supposed.

Subjects

• Mothers in literature
• Mother and child in literature
• Motherhood in literature
• Women and literature > Great Britain > History > 19th century
• English fiction > 19th century > History and criticism
• Suffering in literature

Bibliography (note)

• Includes bibliographical references and index.

Contents

Ch. 1. Introduction to Suffering Mothers -- Ch. 2. Mothering Theory and Miserable or Missing Mothers in Victorian Novels -- Ch. 3. Making Mother Suffer, and Other Fun in Dickens -- Ch. 4. Charlotte Bronte: Moving from Mother to Mother -- Ch. 5. Thackeray's Oxymoronic Mothers -- Ch. 6. Escaping Mother/Motherhood in George Eliot -- Ch. 7. Conclusion.

ISBN

0312122950

LCCN

96034454

OCLC

• 35249488
• ocm35249488

Owning Institutions

Columbia University Libraries