Woman and the Demon: The Life of a Victorian Myth - Softcover

Auerbach, Nina

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0674954076 ISBN 13: 9780674954076

Publisher: Harvard University Press, 1984

Synopsis

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.

About this title

About the Author

Nina Auerbach was the John Welsh Centennial Professor of English Emerita at the University of Pennsylvania.

Edition details

• Publisher: Harvard University Press
• Publication date: 1984
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 0674954076
• ISBN 13: 9780674954076
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 272