L378 27015 STUDIES IN WOMEN AND LITERATURE
Joss Marsh

2:30p-3:20p MWF (30 students) 3 cr. A&H.

TOPIC: "Imagining Victorian Women"

An intensive survey of the representation of women, both by women and by men, and from within and outside Victorian patriarchal culture, in poetry, novels, conduct books, memoirs, polemical tracts, painting, photography, plays, and early film. Works will include the Diaries of Hannah Cullwick, Victorian maid-of-all- work; Charlotte Bronte's tempestuous autobiographical fiction, Jane Eyre (perhaps the founding text of modern feminist literary criticism), and extracts from biographies of Bronte by her friend Mrs. Gaskell and others; Elizabeth Barrett Browning's ambitious long poem Aurora Leigh; lyrics by Christina Rossetti and others; D.W. Griffith's "Victorian" film melodramas Way Down East and Broken Blossoms, which we will view side-by-side with a stage version of the Victorian weepie East Lynne; the photographic ouevre of Julia Margaret Cameron, especially her illustrations to Tennyson and her portraits of Julia Duckworth Stephen (the mother of Virginia Woolf), which we will study in light of writings by Tennyson, Leslie Stephen, and Woolf; Olive Schreiner's heretical colonial novel The Story of an African Farm; and polemical material by John Stuart Mill, Harriet Taylor Mill, Barbara Bodichon, Caroline Norton, Florence Nightingale, Eliza Lynn Linton, Mary Wollstonecraft, Annie Besant, and others. Midterm; short paper; collaborative report, oral and written, on supplementary self-chosen texts (e.g. Mrs. Gaskell, North and South, Mrs. Ward, Helbeck of Bannisdale, George Eliot [Mary Ann Evans] The Mill on the Floss); final examination.