Maladies, Madness, Miracles, Monsters, and Medicine: Representations of the Body in Victorian Culture
Session Organizer: Beth Torgerson
Flagler College
btorgerson@flagler.edu

Session D:

Subtopic: Issues of Empire and Bodies Abroad

Sending the Fallen Woman to the Frontier: Female Emigration in 19th Century British Fiction

This paper will conduct an analysis of the transformational effects of globa lization on the British woman – more specifically, it will examine the global disposal of women, especially the fallen and/or transgressive Victorian female. Indeed, the transportation and communication developments that make global travel possible also make it possible for England first to create and then to use alternate depositories for women who have acted in a subversive manner. Voluntary emigration (and in some cases forcible removal) emerges during fiction of the Victorian period as a means of ridding England of its “undesirable” and “excess” female elements, and this emigration trend coincides with the emergence of an expanding globe. Discussions of voluntary emigration in juxtaposition with forced bodily removal necessarily mandate a discussion of the role that female agency played in both scenarios, and there exists a definite link between a woman’s attempt at claiming agency and the dangers that such assertion entailed; texts from the Victorian period including assertions of female agency that result in some type of female emigration/removal are many, but representative samples include E lizabeth Gaskell’s Mary Barton and Mary E lizabeth Braddon’s Lady Audley’s Secret. Characters in each novel claim and exercise agency – sometimes criminal agency – and each is punished for her assertive actions; the means of punishment is bodily removal from her home country to a frontier that will bring about her redemption.

Cynthia M. VanSickle
Wayne State University
cmvansickle@wayne.edu 

Cutaneous Matters: Early Nineteenth-Century Physiologies of Race and the British Frontier

This paper explores how theories of race informed early/mid nineteenth-century British representations of colonisation and settlement, exposing a contemporary preoccupation with the operation of boundaries between internal and external geographies/bodies. The period from 1800 to 1850 was one of accelerating emigration from metropolitan Britain, along with a proliferation of emigration companies and a vast outpouring of works on where to emigrate, who should emigrate and how the emigrant was to succeed in their chosen destination. These works reveal a concern with ensuring the individual emigrant's conformity to a set of moral, social and civic behaviours considered appropriate to their new circumstances and, by digging out the ideological underpinnings of these accounts, we can clearly discern the conflicted nature of the encounter between emigrant and frontier. From a metropolitan viewpoint, the apparent absence of social controls meant this could be the focus of anxieties over the fraying of relations on which civilisation itself depended. It was a place where, many writers warned, Europeans could simply wander out of their sphere and sink ineluctably back into savagery.

These anxieties were premised on contemporary theories of race that argued for the influence of climate and environment on racial types. Samuel Stanhope Smith, for example, explained the bilious fevers encountered by European emigrants in hot climates (a subject much commented on in early nineteenth-century descriptions of colonisation) as physiological adjustments to a new environment and a first step in the progressive darkening of their skin. He argued that European colonists in Africa had, over three centuries, become physically and morally indistinguishable from the local inhabitants: ‘more like beasts than men’. James Cowles Prichard believed the blackness of human skin was caused by a secretion that could occur even in Europeans during pregnancy, fever or violent disruptions to normal life. To Prichard, the relationship between environment and human physiology was self-evident, demonstrated by the fact that the ugliest and most deformed races were found in swampy tracts or forested lowlands. The operation of these racialised typologies within the literature of emigration attests to the difficulty of containing the disruptive forces of cultural and racial hybridisation at the colonial frontier. It points to the powerful erotics of miscegenation and the bewildering freedoms of colonial life, and explains attempts to police these boundaries in contemporary representations of colonisation and settlement to prevent physical, moral and social degeneration at the colonial frontier.

Robert Grant
rgbooks1@hotmail.com

Enticement in the Parlor: Pleasure, Pain, and English Self-Fashioning in Literary Annuals of the 1830’s

To date, scholarship on English gift-books or literary annuals has focused either on the (somewhat embarrassing, to literary scholars) contributions of canonical authors to their middle-brow pages or on their subtle subversions of traditional domesticity; the richly suggestive representations of the burgeoning British Empire in the literary annuals have so far been ignored. Images of the colonies in mid-century gift-books are to a great extent focused on a variety of British bodies, tending to promise a mixture of potential pleasures and pains to Englishmen and –women, while imagining or describing in detail the sexua lized and/or suffering bodies of colonized people. This essay argues that the annuals ask their metropolitan, largely female readership to accept the Empire as a necessary evil: necessary for their physical maintenance and psychological sense of superiority, yet potentially lethal to all who dare leave England for the East or West Indies. Tales of romance in the mainstream annuals repeatedly frame the colonies as a vast, highly dangerous, employment agency for middle-class Englishmen, who place their bodies in great jeopardy to win sustenance for their heroines back home. Literary annuals set closer to the colonies—either written in India or focused more directly on colonial life—echo this theme of necessary evil, but also tend to gaze at the bodies of colonized peoples, offering them up as a source of entertainment, fascination and titillation for English readers. Through a variety of genres—short stories, poetry, and travel narratives— mid-century annuals invite Englishwomen to sit back and enjoy the fruits of the Empire, both material and mental, while keeping their own bodies safely at home in the Victorian parlor.

Kelly Hulander
University of Minnesota, Twin Cities
Hula001@umn.edu

Discussant:

John Parham
Thames Valley University, London
johnnieparham@hotmail.com

See Kathryn Ledbetter, “‘Begemmed and beAmuletted’: Tennyson and Those ‘Vapid’ Gift Books,” in Victorian Poetry, vol. 34, no. 2 (1996 Summer), 235 – 45; O’Dea, Gregory, “‘Perhaps a Tale You’ll Make It: Mary Shelley’s Tales for The Keepsake” in Iconoclastic Departures: Mary Shelley after Frankenstein: Essays in Honor of the Bicentenary of Mary Shelley’s Birth, edited by Syndy Conger, Frederick S. Frank, and Gregory O’Dea (Madison, NJ: Fairleigh Dickinson UP, 1997); and Kathryn Ledbetter, “Domesticity Betrayed: The Keepsake Literary Annual,” in Victorian Newsletter, vol. 99 (Spring 2001), 16 – 24.