The Girl's own

About This Book

In The Girl's Own Claudia Nelson and Lynne Vallone bring together eleven essays that explore British and American Victorian representations of the adolescent girl. The variety of contemporary sources on which the essays draw includes conduct books, housekeeping manuals, periodicals, biographies, photographs, paintings, and educational treatises. The institutions, practices, and literatures discussed in this volume reveal the ways in which the Girl expressed her independence, as well as the ways in which she was presented and controlled. As many of the contributors note, nineteenth-century visions of girlhood in both Britain and the United States were extremely ambiguous. The adolescent girl was a figure both fascinating and troubling to Victorian commentators, who often debated her place in society. In the controversy over female sexuality and behavior she played an especially significant role, because she embodied the potential for either virtuous attention to duty - as wife/mother or spinster/sister - or depraved independence and sexual freedom. Unlike other examinations of Victorian girlhood, this collection is particularly distinguished by its combination of literary and cultural history in its discussion of both British and American texts and practices. Among the topics addressed are the nineteenth-century attempt to link morality and diet; the making of heroines in biographies for girls; Lewis Carroll's and John Millais's iconographies of girlhood in, respectively, their photographs and paintings; genre fiction for and by girls; and the effort to reincorporate teenage unwed mothers into the domestic life of Victorian America. Together these essays follow the adolescent girl from her domestic life as housekeeper and as consumer of didactic literature, through her canonization or condemnation by nineteenth-century society, to her forays into the public sphere of school or employment, and finally back "home" again, as turn-of-the-century social activists tried to come to terms with girls who refused to act according to Victorian values. Ultimately, neither actual nor fictional girls appear content to be categorized as the reassuringly meek and ornamental beings their society desired.