Margaret Homans - Royal Representations: Queen Victoria and British Culture, 1837-1876 (Women in Culture and Society)

Royal Representations: Queen Victoria and British Culture, 1837-1876 (Women in Culture and Society) — read online for free the complete book (whole text) full work

Below is the text of the book, divided by pages. System saving the place of the last page read, allows you to conveniently read the book "Royal Representations: Queen Victoria and British Culture, 1837-1876 (Women in Culture and Society)" online for free, without having to search again every time where you left off. Put a bookmark, and you can go to the page where you finished reading at any time.

Light

Font size:

↓

↑

Georgia Tahoma Arial Verdana

Reset

Interval:

↓

↑

Bookmark:

Make

1234567...81

MARGARET HOMANS is chair of the Womens Studies Program and professor of English at Yale University, where she has taught since 1978. Among her books are: Bearing the Word: Language and Female Experience in Nineteenth-Century Womens Writing (also published by the University of Chicago Press, 1986), and Women Writers and Poetic Identity: Dorothy Wordsworth, Emily Bront, and Emily Dickinson (1980). Her honors and prizes include fellowships from the Whiting Foundation, the Morse Foundation, and the ACLS. She is the recipient of the Theron Rockwell Field Prize and the Keats-Shelley Association Prize.

The University of Chicago Press, Chicago 60637

The University of Chicago Press, Ltd., London

1998 by The University of Chicago

All rights reserved. Published 1998

Printed in the United States of America

07 06 05 04 03 02 01 00 99 98 1 2 3 4 5

ISBN-10: 0-226-35113-0 (cloth)

ISBN-13: 978-0-226-35113-1 (cloth)

ISBN-10: 0-226-35114-9 (paper)

ISBN-13: 978-0-226-35114-8 (paper)

ISBN: 978-0-226-35115-5 (e-book)

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Homans, Margaret, 1952

Royal representations : Queen Victoria and British culture, 18371876 / Margaret Homans

p. cm.

Includes bibliographical references and index.

ISBN 0-226-35113-0 (cloth). ISBN 0-226-35114-9 (pbk.)

1. Great BritainCivilization19th century. 2. MonarchyGreat BritainHistory19th century. 3. Great BritainHistoryVictoria, 18371901. 4. QueensGreat BritainBiography. 5. Queens in literature. 6. Queens in art. [1. Victoria, Queen of Great Britain, 18191901.] I. Title.

DA533.H74 1998

941.081dc21

98-19836
CIP

The paper used in this publication meets the minimum requirements of the American National Standard for Information SciencesPermanence of Paper for Printed Library Materials, ANSI Z39.481992.

ROYAL REPRESENTATIONS

QUEEN VICTORIA AND BRITISH CULTURE, 18371876

MARGARET HOMANS

THE UNIVERSITY OF CHICAGO PRESS
CHICAGO AND LONDON

WOMEN IN CULTURE AND SOCIETY

A series edited by Catharine R. Stimpson

To Marian

FIGURES

.

.

.

.

.

.

.

.

.

.

.

.

.

.

.

.

.

.

.

.

.

.

.

.

.

.

.

.

.

.

.

.

.

.

.

.

.

.

.

.

.

.

.

.

.

.

FOREWORD

In 1837 a young woman, Victoria, became queen of Great Britain and Ireland. Because she was the daughter of the fourth son of an earlier king, her ascension had seemed unlikely at her birth in 1819. Once enthroned, she endured throughout the century, ruling until her death in 1901, a time that came to be called the Victorian period.

Margaret Homans, a brilliant and subtle critic, has published two previous books about women writers, Women Writers and Poetic Identity (1980) and Bearing the Word (1986). Royal Representations: Queen Victoria and British Culture is another major book. Homans audaciously, meticulously, and originally explores Victoria as a woman writer. Prolific and conscientious, Victoria wrote journals and diaries from the age of thirteen and continued to produce them as well as thousands of letters throughout her reign. Because she was a royal, she also authorized many textssuch as her parliamentary addressesthat others scripted, not always to her private acclaim. Homans treats these materials as part of her great subject, the ways in which Victoria, operating within the constraints of history and discourse, composed nothing less than the modern British monarchy.

Homans focuses on Victorias reign between 1837 and 1876 when she became Empress of India as well as queen, a blazing global sign of Great Britains imperial reach and strength. During these decades, the monarchy as an institution and Victoria as a monarch confronted forces and situations that had to be properly managed if they were not to prove damaging, even fatal. Some of them, social and political in nature, would have daunted a monarch of either gender. Because established hierarchies were dissolving and reform movements growing, royal power was being diluted. Victorias gender provoked another difficult issue that dragged behind her. She was a queen, a unique role that unites the contradictory realities of public power and womanhood, which historically denotes a lack of public power.

With the clarity, care, and depth that characterize her work, Homans lays bare the strategies Victoria developed to survive and prevail as queen. So doing, Homans shows how profound the connections were among Victoria, her era, and other influential cultural figures such as the poet laureate Alfred Lord Tennyson, the poet Elizabeth Barrett Browning, and the photographer Julia Margaret Cameron. Victoria seemed to grasp that the monarchs role was increasingly symbolic. Her people wanted to exert more control over the affairs of state. Thus, she had to act symbolically, which often meant appearing to be passive and inactive. Constructing effective patterns of royal representation and self-representation, she helped to design and then embodied a paradoxshe would hold sway by playing out her willingness to give power away. She assured and reassured her subjects that she would defer to their protocols of what royal behavior ought to be. The royal court would respect the court of public opinion. In her later years, Homans concludes, Victoria was both captive and despot of her own regime.

Victoria, the royal family, and her supporters deployed a variety of means to make a public spectacle of the mingling of rule and renunciation of rule: official and artlessly unofficial appearances, art itself (paintings and sculpture), the new medium of photography (she and her family pioneered the photo opportunity), and the publication of her judiciously edited writing. Her people were an audience, viewers, and readers.

Among Victorias greatest triumphs was her treatment of domestic power. For she aligned, with limpid sincerity and passion, the institutions of the monarchy and the middle-class family. Her family role was that of perfect wife to her beloved husband, Prince Albert, a figure of substance in his own right. As queen she might be a sovereign, but as wife she was happily subjugated. As queen she might be a singular figure, but as wife she was an exemplary everywoman to and for her subjects. Homans cites a Christina Rossetti quatrain that illustrates Victorias balance of throne room and marital bed:

If I were Queen

What would I do?

Id make you King

And Id wait on you.

In 1861 Albert died. Pitched into deep mourning and melancholia, Victoria retreated from public view. Homans is fascinating on the responses of the government, shapers of public opinion, writers, and public to the problem of the queens disappearance. Appearances were one of her most important techniques of maintaining royal position and authority, and yet she had become visibly invisible. One reaction was to create multiple queens in literature and art. The writers John Ruskin and Lewis Carroll famously participated in this wave of invention. The presence of different queens offered up fantasy substitutes for Victoria. Moreover, by diffusing the power of the monarchy, it abetted in the slaking of democratic thirsts.

Next page

1234567...81

Light

Font size:

↓

↑

Georgia Tahoma Arial Verdana

Reset

Interval:

↓

↑

Bookmark:

Make

Similar books «Royal Representations: Queen Victoria and British Culture, 1837-1876 (Women in Culture and Society)»

Look at similar books to Royal Representations: Queen Victoria and British Culture, 1837-1876 (Women in Culture and Society). We have selected literature similar in name and meaning in the hope of providing readers with more options to find new, interesting, not yet read works.

Viktoriya Holt

Victoria Victorious: The Story of Queen Victoria

Karen Dolby

My Dearest, Dearest Albert: Queen Victorias Life Through Her Letters and Journals

Daniel A. Willis

The Children of Victoria II

Elizabeth Longford

Queen Victoria

Ronald Clark

Balmoral: Queen Victorias Highland Home

Van der Kiste

Queen Victorias Children

Helen Rappaport

Victoria: The Heart and Mind of a Young Queen: Official Companion to the Masterpiece Presentation on PBS

Taylor Miles

Empress: Queen Victoria and India

Elphinstone John

The Queen, Her Lover and the Most Notorious Spy in History

Browne Edgar Gordon

Queen Victoria

Lucy Worsley

Queen Victoria: Twenty-Four Days That Changed Her Life

Miles Taylor

Empress: Queen Victoria and India

Discussion, reviews of the book Royal Representations: Queen Victoria and British Culture, 1837-1876 (Women in Culture and Society) and just readers' own opinions. Leave your comments, write what you think about the work, its meaning or the main characters. Specify what exactly you liked and what you didn't like, and why you think so.