Suffering mothers in mid-Victorian novels
By: by Natalie J. McKnight.
Edition: 1st ed.
Publisher: St. Martin's Press
Published: 1997
Place of publication: New York
Language: eng
Number of pages: 162
Subjects: English fiction -- 19th century -- History and criticism.; Women and literature -- Great Britain -- History -- 19th century.; Mother and child in literature.; Motherhood in literature.; Suffering in literature.; Mothers in literature.
Description: During the Victorian Era, women who became mothers faced unprecedented, unrealistic, and contradictory expectations from mainstream society. These expectations were expressed through a wide range of media including maternal guidebooks, popular periodicals, and Queen Victoria's maternal image. In Suffering Mothers in Mid-Victorian Novels, Natalie McKnight analyzes the influence of such cultural pressures on the fictional portrayals of mothers in mid-Victorian novels.

Using a new historical and psychoanalytic approach, McKnight examines the climate created by a society that idolized mothers in theory but in reality positioned them to fail. The novels of Dickens, Charlotte Bronte, Thackeray, and George Eliot are studied for their inclusion of mother characters who vary from the ambivalent to the monstrous, the angelic to the absent.

In her thorough exploration of these novels, McKnight reveals the influences and the natures of characters who function more centrally in mid-Victorian fiction than has often been supposed.
Notes: Includes bibliographical references (p. [145]-151) and index.