Between Women
Friendship, Desire, and Marriage in Victorian England
Published on 22. January 2007
Book
Hardback
368 pages
978-0-691-12820-7 (ISBN)
Description
Women in Victorian England wore jewelry made from each other's hair and wrote poems celebrating decades of friendship. They pored over magazines that described the dangerous pleasures of corporal punishment. A few had sexual relationships with each other, exchanged rings and vows, willed each other property, and lived together in long-term partnerships described as marriages. But, as Sharon Marcus shows, these women were not seen as gender outlaws. Their desires were fanned by consumer culture and their friendships and unions were accepted and even encouraged by family, society, and church. Far from being sexless angels defined only by male desires, Victorian women openly enjoyed looking at and even dominating other women. Their friendships helped realize the ideal of companionate love between men and women celebrated by novels, and their unions influenced politicians and social thinkers to reform marriage law. Through a close examination of literature, memoirs, letters, domestic magazines, and political debates, Marcus reveals how relationships between women were a crucial component of femininity.
Deeply researched, powerfully argued, and filled with original readings of familiar and surprising sources, "Between Women" overturns everything we thought we knew about Victorian women and the history of marriage and family life. It offers a new paradigm for theorizing gender and sexuality - not just in the Victorian period, but in our own.
Deeply researched, powerfully argued, and filled with original readings of familiar and surprising sources, "Between Women" overturns everything we thought we knew about Victorian women and the history of marriage and family life. It offers a new paradigm for theorizing gender and sexuality - not just in the Victorian period, but in our own.
Reviews / Votes
Sharon Marcus adduces a variety of evidence to make a compelling case that such relationships were omnipresent and, far from being framed in terms of envy and rivalry between women, or as dangerously and transgressively competing with women's relationships with men, they were conceived of as benign and desirable and contributing helpfully to the network of connections supporting heterosexual unions... [T]his is an outstanding study of a neglected phenomenon. -- Lesley Hall Times Higher Education Supplement The study's packed scholarly discourse will doubtless create new dialogue about these gender descriptions and their implications for the modern day. Abundant chapter notes and primary and secondary bibliographic entries make this a good research source. -- S.A. Parker Choice Between Women is one of those books that instantly, radically, and convincingly alters your understanding of terrain you thought you couldn't know any better...Marcus powerfully revises more than a century's worth of theory, arguing persuasively that women are capable of objectifying women, that women possess the gaze, as well as the capacity for domination, and that women's homoerotic desire was fully compatible with heterosexuality and femininity... Between Women has important things to say, not just to Victorianists, literary critics, feminists, and queer theorists, but to all of us. -- Rebecca Steinitz Women's Review of Books Every once in a while a book comes along that, in offering readers an in-depth and provocative assessment of an archive, promises to change--irreversibly--a field or two. Between Women is such a study. -- Carla Freccero Gay and Lesbian QuarterlyMore details
Language
English
Place of publication
New Jersey
United States
Target group
Professional and scholarly
College/higher education
Product notice
Trade binding
Illustrations
18 Fotos bzw. Rasterbilder, 2 Abbildungen
18 halftones. 2 line illus.
Dimensions
Height: 229 mm
Width: 152 mm
Weight
652 gr
ISBN-13
978-0-691-12820-7 (9780691128207)
Copyright in bibliographic data and cover images is held by Nielsen Book Services Limited or by the publishers or by their respective licensors: all rights reserved.
Schweitzer Classification
Other editions
Additional editions
E-Book
06/2015
1st Edition
Princeton University Press
from
€103.95
Available for download
Person
Sharon Marcus is Associate Professor of English and Comparative Literature at Columbia University. She is the author of "Apartment Stories: City and Home in Nineteenth-Century Paris and London".
Content
Illustrations vii Acknowledgments ix INTRODUCTION: The Female Relations of Victorian England 1 Overview 2 Historical and Disciplinary Borders 5 How This Book Engages Scholarly Debates 9 How I Came to Write This Book 14 Conclusion 21 PART ONE: Elastic Ideals: Female Friendship 23 CHAPTER ONE: Friendship and the Play of the System 25 Female Friendship in Feminist Studies 29 Victorian Women's Lifewriting and Relationships between Women 32 Female Friendship as Gender Norm 38 Friends and "Friends" 43 The Repertory of Friendship 54 "Purified and Made One in Jesus" 62 Friendship, Kinship, Marriage 66 CHAPTER TWO: Just Reading: Female Friendship and the Marriage Plot 73 The Form of the Plot 82 Female Amity and the Companionate Marriage Plot 85 Female Amity and the Feminist Marriage Plot 91 The Double Marriage Plot: Friendship as Cause and Effect 96 Unamiable Villette: Lucy Snowe's Passion 102 PART TWO: Mobile Objects: Female Desire 109 CHAPTER THREE: Dressing Up and Dressing Down the Feminine Plaything 111 Fashion and Fantasies of Women 116 Discipline and Punishment in the Fashion Magazine 135 Live Dolls 149 CHAPTER FOUR: The Female Accessory in Great Expectations 167 The Female Dyad and the Origins of Desire 173 Gender Mobility I: Masculinity as Castoff 177 Gender Mobility II: Pip as Doll and Fashion Plate 180 The Sentimental Education of the Female Dyad 184 PART THREE: Plastic Institutions: Female Marriage 191 CHAPTER FIVE: The Genealogy of Marriage 193 Female Marriage in the Nineteenth Century 196 Female Marriage and Victorian Marriage Reform 204 The Debate over Contractual Marriage 212 Victorian Anthropology and the History of Marriage 217 Same-Sex Unions and the History of Civilization 222 CHAPTER SIX: Contracting Female Marriage in Can You Forgive Her? 227 Trollope, Feminism, and Female Marriage 228 Female Marriage and Contractual Marriage in Can You Forgive Her? 232 Marriage as Forgiveness: Primitive Contract and Modern Punishment 239 The Persistence of Female Relations 251 CONCLUSION: Woolf, Wilde, and Girl Dates 257 Notes 263 Bibliography 317 Illustration Credits 347 Index 349