Hostname: page-component-cd9895bd7-8ctnn Total loading time: 0 Render date: 2024-12-26T02:21:50.461Z Has data issue: false hasContentIssue false
  • English
  • Français

NEXT WEEK!! — : DESIRE, DOMESTIC MELODRAMA, AND THE EXTRAVAGANT PROLIFERATIONS OF EAST LYNNE

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  05 August 2015

Mary A. Armstrong
Mary A. Armstrong*
Affiliation:
Lafayette College
Get access Rights & Permissions [Opens in a new window]

Extract

Ellen Wood's East Lynne (1861) exhibits the exhilarating characteristics of a Victorian sensation novel and then some: degenerate aristocracy, a sneering villain, flight, adultery, a child born out of wedlock, disfigurement, disguise, extended deathbed scenes, murder, and more (e.g., fake accents, false identities, an electrifying homicide trial, and a spectacular train wreck). But at the center of all the disaster, transgression, pathos, coincidence, and extremity, East Lynne is (mainly) the story of the aptly-named Isabel Vane, the beloved but patently bored wife who abandons her husband and children to run away with a handsome seducer. Overcome by remorse (and conveniently both disfigured and presumed dead), she returns to the home of her remarried husband to act as governess to her own children and to witness (at length and in painful detail) the life she might have had if she had denied her perpetually irrepressible but inappropriate feelings — feelings not so much of lust for another man, but of annoyance and tedium with the man she actually has. East Lynne urges (usually in the form of multiple diatribes from the third person narrator) that the wives and mothers of mid-Victorian England be content with their lot, employing a moral didacticism that insists on female domestic responsibility — and the attendant obligation of female suffering — with sadistic pleasure. And yet, when not lingering over the agonies of Isabel, the narrative gushes, seemingly despite itself, with sympathy for the heroine's life of monotony and misery. Indeed, East Lynne's compelling power comes in large part from the novel's skillful, lingering walk on a ledge of its own making and its protracted vacillation between condemnation and empathy for an unhappy heroine gone astray.

Type
Research Article
Information
Victorian Literature and Culture , Volume 43 , Issue 4 , December 2015 , pp. 745 - 764
Check for updates
Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press 2015 

Access options

Get access to the full version of this content by using one of the access options below. (Log in options will check for institutional or personal access. Content may require purchase if you do not have access.)

References

WORKS CITED

Auerbach, Nina. “Before The Curtain.” The Cambridge Companion to Victorian and Edwardian Theatre. Ed. Powell, Kerry. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 2004. 3–14.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Balfe, Michael. “Then You'll Remember Me.” The Bohemian Girl. Libretto by Bunn, Alfred. Aria Database. Web. 3 Nov. 2014.Google Scholar
Barthes, Roland. “The Reality Effect.” 1975. The Rustle of Language. Trans. Howard, Richard. Berkeley: U of California P, 1989. 141–48.Google Scholar
Bolton, H. Philip. Women Writers Dramatized: A Calendar of Performances from Narrative Works Published in English to 1900. London: Mansell, 2000.Google Scholar
Booth, Michael. Theatre in the Victorian Age. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1991.Google Scholar
Brooks, Peter. The Melodramatic Imagination: Balzac, Henry James, Melodrama, and the Mode of Excess. New Haven: Yale UP, 1976.Google Scholar
Colby, Vineta.Yesterday's Woman: Domestic Realism in the English Novel. Princeton: Princeton UP, 1974.Google Scholar
Cvetkovich, Ann. Mixed Feelings: Feminism, Mass Culture, and Victorian Sensationalism. New Brunswick: Rutgers UP, 1992.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
East Lynne: A Drama in 5 Acts. 1870. Boston: Walter H. Baker, 1884.Google Scholar
East Lynne. Dir. Bert, Bracken. 20th Century Fox, 1916. Film.Google Scholar
East Lynne. Dir. Emmett, Flynn. 20th Century Fox, 1925. Film.Google Scholar
East Lynne. Dir. Frank, Lloyd. 20th Century Fox, 1931. Film.Google Scholar
East Lynne on the Western Front. Dir. George, Pearson. Gaumont, 1931. Film.Google Scholar
Edelman, Lee. Homographesis: Essays in Gay Literary and Cultural Theory. New York: Routledge, 1994.Google Scholar
Ex-Flame. Dir. Victor Halperin. Liberty, 1930. Film.Google Scholar
Fishbein, Leslie. “The Demise of the Cult of True Womanhood in Early American Film 1900- 1930: Two Modes of Subversion.” Journal of Popular Film and Television 12.2 (1984): 66–72.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Flint, Kate. The Woman Reader, 1837–1914. Oxford: Clarendon, 1993.Google Scholar
Freedgood, Elaine. The Ideas in Things: Fugitive Meaning in the Victorian Novel. Chicago: U of Chicago P, 2006.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Hadley, Elaine. Melodramatic Tactics: Theatricalized Dissent in England's Marketplace, 1800- 1885. Palo Alto: Stanford UP, 1995.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Hann, T. R.“[Y]East Lynn; or, the Humors of Lady Isabel.” 1877. Tony Pastor Presents: Afterpieces from the Vaudeville Stage. Ed. Kaatwinkle, Susan. Westport: Praeger, 1998. 135–54.Google Scholar
Hughes, Winifred. The Maniac in the Cellar: Sensation Fiction of the 1860s. Princeton, Princeton UP, 1980.Google Scholar
Jacobs, Lea. “Unsophisticated Lady: The Vicissitudes of the Maternal Melodrama in Hollywood.” Modernism/modernity 16.1 (2009): 123–40.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Jay, Elisabeth. “Introduction.” East Lynne by Ellen Wood. 1862. Ed. Jay, Elisabeth. Oxford: Oxford UP, 2005. vii–xxxix.Google Scholar
Kattwinkle, Susan. “Introduction.” Tony Pastor Presents: Afterpieces from the Vaudeville Stage. Ed. Kattwinkle, Susan. Westport: Praeger, 1998. 1–8.Google Scholar
Kaplan, E. AnnMotherhood and Representation: The Mother in Popular Culture and Melodrama. New York: Routledge, 1992.Google Scholar
Liggins, Emma. “Good Housekeeping? Domestic Economy and Suffering Wives in Mrs. Henry Woods' Early Fiction.” Feminist Readings of Victorian Popular Texts: Divergent Femininities. Ed. Liggins, Emma and Duffy, Daniel. Aldershot: Ashgate, 2002. 53–68.Google Scholar
Liggins, Emma, and Daniel, Duffy. “Introduction.” Feminist Readings of Victorian Popular Texts: Divergent Femininities. Ed. Liggins, Emma and Duffy, Daniel. Aldershot: Ashgate, 2002. xiii–xxiv.Google Scholar
Litvak, Joseph. Caught in the Act: Theatricality in the Nineteenth-Century English Novel. Berkeley: U of California P, 1992.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
“Lost for Love.” Spectator 17 Oct. 1874: 1303.Google Scholar
Marx, Karl. Capital. Vol I, Part I, Chpt 1, Section 4: “The Fetishism of Commodities and the Secret thereof.” Web. 13 March 2014.Google Scholar
Matthews, Brander. Books and Play-Books: Essays on Literature and the Drama. London: Osgood, McIlvaine, 1895.Google Scholar
Maunder, Andrew. “‘I will not live in poverty and neglect’: East Lynne on the East End Stage.” Victorian Sensations: Essays on a Scandalous Genre. Ed. Harrison, Kimberley and Fantina, Richard. Columbus: Ohio State UP, 2006. 173–87.Google Scholar
Maunder, Andrew. “Introduction.” East Lynne by Ellen Wood. Ed. Maunder, Andrew. Ontario: Broadview, 2000. 9–36.Google Scholar
Meer, Sarah. Uncle Tom Mania: Slavery, Minstrelsy and Transatlantic Culture in the 1850s. Athens: U of Georgia P, 2005.Google Scholar
Miller, Andrew K. Novels Behind Glass: Commodity Culture and Victorian Narrative. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1995.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Mitchell, Sally. The Fallen Angel: Chastity, Class, and Women's Reading, 1835–1880. Madison: U of Wisconsin P, 1981Google Scholar
Mitchell, Sally. “Introduction.” East Lynne by Ellen Wood. Ed. Mitchell, Sally. New Brunswick: Rutgers UP, 1984. vii–xviii.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Newton, Harry L. East of Lynn, Mass. Chicago: Denison, 1913.Google Scholar
“Notes of Current Plays.” New York Times. 29 April 1903: 6.Google Scholar
Nunokawa, Jeff. The Afterlife of Property: Domestic Security and the Victorian Novel. Princeton: Princeton UP, 1994.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Nus, Eugène. and Belot, Adolphe. Miss Multon: Comédie en 3 actes. Paris: Michel Levy Frères, 1869.Google Scholar
Ofek, Galia. Representations of Hair in Victorian Literature and Culture. Burlington: Ashgate, 2009.Google Scholar
Oxenford, John. East Lynne. 1866. The Golden Age of Melodrama: Twelve Nineteenth Century Melodramas. Ed. Kilgarrif, Michael. London: Wolfe, 1974. 278–306.Google Scholar
Palmer, T. A.East Lynne. 1874. Nineteenth Century British Drama. Ed. Ashley, Leonard R. N.. Chicago: Scott, Foresman, 1967. 353–96.Google Scholar
Perry, Jack, and Porter, Robert Neil. East Lynne: a Musical in Two Acts. Denver: Pioneer, 1977.Google Scholar
“Plays Never Too Old for Stock Theatres.” New York Times. 27 March 1910: 4.Google Scholar
Pykett, Lyn. The ‘Improper’ Feminine: The Women's Sensation Novel and the New Woman Writing. London, Routledge, 1992.Google Scholar
Rosenman, Ellen. “Mimic Sorrows”: Masochism and the Gendering of Pain in Victorian Melodrama. Studies in the Novel 35.1 (2003): 22–43.Google Scholar
Schor, Naomi. Reading in Detail: Aesthetics and the Feminine. New York: Methuen, 1987.Google Scholar
Showalter, Elaine. A Literature of Their Own: From Charlotte Brontë to Doris Lessing. London, Penguin, 1978.Google Scholar
Vicinus, Martha. “‘Helpless and Unfriended’: Nineteenth-Century Domestic Melodrama.” New Literary History 13.1 (1981): 127–43.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Voskuil, Lynn M. “Feeling Public: Sensation Theater, Commodity Culture, and the Victorian Public Sphere.” Victorian Studies 44.2 (2002): 245–74.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Walker, Gail “The ‘Sin’ of Isabel Vane: East Lynne and Victorian Sexuality.” Heroines of Popular Culture. Ed. Browne, Pat. Bowling Green: Bowling Green State UP, 1987. 23–31.Google Scholar
Wood, Ellen. East Lynne. 1861. Ed. Jay, Elizabeth. Oxford: Oxford UP, 2005.Google Scholar
Wynne, Deborah. “See What a Big Wide Bed it is!: Mrs. Henry Wood and the Philistine Imagination.” Feminist Readings of Victorian Popular Texts: Divergent Femininities. Ed. Liggins, Emma and Duffy, Daniel. Aldershot: Ashgate, 2002. 89–107.Google Scholar
Wynne, Deborah. Women and Personal Property in the Victorian Novel. Burlington: Ashgate, 2010.Google Scholar