Title: Suffering mothers in mid-Victorian novels
First published: 1997
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.
Subjects: Mothers in literature, History and criticism, Motherhood in literature, Mother and child in literature, Women and literature, English fiction, Suffering in literature, History, Souffrance dans la littérature, Histoire, Moeders, Roman, Literature, Femmes et littérature, Leid, Literatuur, Mères dans la littérature, Mutter, Histoire et critique, Roman anglais, Romans, Moeder-kind-relaties, Mère et enfant dans la littérature, Maternité dans la littérature, Victoriaanse tijd, English fiction, history and criticism, 19th century, Great britain, history, 19th century
Places: Great Britain
Time periods: 19th century
LC classification: PR878.M69 M35 1996