Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- List of illustrations
- Notes on contributors
- 1 Responding to the woman questions: rereading noncanonical Victorian women novelists
- 2 Marriage and the antifeminist woman novelist
- 3 Breaking apart: the early Victorian divorce novel
- 4 Phantasies of matriarchy in Victorian children's literature
- 5 Gendered observations: Harriet Martineau and the woman question
- 6 Maximizing Oliphant: begging the question and the politics of satire
- 7 Literary women of the 1850s and Charlotte Mary Yonge's
- 8 Portraits of the artist as a young woman: representations of the female artist in the New Woman fiction of the 1890s
- 9 Lady in green with novel: the gendered economics of the visual arts and mid-Victorian women's writing
- 10 Ouida and the other New Woman
- 11 Organizing women: New Woman writers, New Woman readers, and suffrage feminism
- 12 Shot out of the canon: Mary Ward and the claims of conflicting feminism
- 13 E. Nesbit and the woman question
- 14 “An ‘old-fashioned’ young woman”: Marie Corelli and the New Woman
- CAMBRIDGE STUDIES IN NINETEENTH-CENTURY LITERATURE AND CULTURE
9 - Lady in green with novel: the gendered economics of the visual arts and mid-Victorian women's writing
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 01 March 2010
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- List of illustrations
- Notes on contributors
- 1 Responding to the woman questions: rereading noncanonical Victorian women novelists
- 2 Marriage and the antifeminist woman novelist
- 3 Breaking apart: the early Victorian divorce novel
- 4 Phantasies of matriarchy in Victorian children's literature
- 5 Gendered observations: Harriet Martineau and the woman question
- 6 Maximizing Oliphant: begging the question and the politics of satire
- 7 Literary women of the 1850s and Charlotte Mary Yonge's
- 8 Portraits of the artist as a young woman: representations of the female artist in the New Woman fiction of the 1890s
- 9 Lady in green with novel: the gendered economics of the visual arts and mid-Victorian women's writing
- 10 Ouida and the other New Woman
- 11 Organizing women: New Woman writers, New Woman readers, and suffrage feminism
- 12 Shot out of the canon: Mary Ward and the claims of conflicting feminism
- 13 E. Nesbit and the woman question
- 14 “An ‘old-fashioned’ young woman”: Marie Corelli and the New Woman
- CAMBRIDGE STUDIES IN NINETEENTH-CENTURY LITERATURE AND CULTURE
Summary
“‘A woman make an artist! Ridiculous! … Ha! don't come near my picture – the paint's wet. Get away!’ … [H]e stood, flourishing his mahl-stick and palette – looking very like a gigantic warrior guarding the shrine of Art with shield and spear.” As Michael Vanbrugh's outburst in this passage from Dinah Mulock's novel Olive demonstrates, professional women artists in nineteenth-century Britain were perceived by many to be a challenge to male hegemony. Michael's very suggestion that a defense of his authority is necessary, however, exposes the falsity of his own claim for the inherent superiority of men. A provoking counter-image to that of Michael's defense is Anne Brontë's heroine Helen Graham, in The Tenant of Wildfell Hall, using her palette knife not only to finance her liberation from an abusive marriage but also, in one scene, to protect herself from a seducer. Mulock and Brontë's two images capture the economic and sexual conflicts which permeated Victorian conceptions of women's relation to the visual arts. The predominant conviction that men were both naturally and culturally better suited than women to artistic professions led society to configure women who attempted to infiltrate the hegemony as a sexually deviant, masculine threat. Conversely, the circumvention of the hegemony through forms of affectionate female–female interaction such as the gift-exchange of artworks was deemed trivial, and therefore sanctioned. As Terry Castle has argued, however, same-sex female attraction also contests men's economic and sexual authority over women.
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- Victorian Women Writers and the Woman Question , pp. 151 - 169Publisher: Cambridge University PressPrint publication year: 1999
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