Binnie, Jon. The Globalization of Sexuality. London: Sage, 2004. Print. Cook, Matt. Queer Domesti... more Binnie, Jon. The Globalization of Sexuality. London: Sage, 2004. Print. Cook, Matt. Queer Domesticities: Homosexuality and Home Life in Twentieth-Century London. New York: Palgrave, 2014. Print. Denisoff, Dennis. “Oscar Wilde’s Convictions, Speciesism, and the Pain of Individualism.” A Companion to Irish Literature. Ed. Julia Wright. Oxford: Blackwell, 2010. 476-90. Print. Ehnenn, Jill R. Women’s Literary Collaboration, Queerness, and Late-Victorian Culture. Burlington: Ashgate, 2008. Print. Field, Michael. Works and Days. Ed. T. Sturge Moore and D.C. Sturge Moore. London: J. Murray, 1933. Print. Gandhi, Leela. Affective Communities: Anticolonial Thought, Fin-De-Siècle Radicalism, and the Politics of Friendship. Durham: Duke UP, 2005. Print. Laird, Holly. “The Death of the Author by Suicide: Fin-De-Siècle Poets and the Construction of Identity.” The Fin-De-Siècle Poem: English Literary Culture and the 1890s. Ed. Joseph Bristow. Athens: Ohio UP, 2005. 116-51. Print. Maltz, Diana. “Katharine Bradley and Ethical Socialism.” Michael Field and Their World. Ed. Margaret Diane Stetz and Cheryl Ann Wilson. High Wycombe: Rivendale, 2007. 191-201. Print. Singh, Brijraj Bhushan. The Development of a Critical Tradition from Pater to Yeats. Delhi: Macmillan, 1978. Print. Thain, Marion. “Michael Field”: Poetry, Aestheticism, and the Fin de Siècle. New York: Cambridge UP, 2007. Print. Tildesley, Michael. The Century Guild Hobby Horse and Oscar Wilde: A Study of British Little Magazines, 1884–97. Diss. Durham U. Durham: Durham eTheses Online, 2011. Web. 24 Oct. 2015. The Trial of Oscar Wilde from the Shorthand Reports. Paris: Charles Carrington, 1906. Print.
What is the connection between an Arts and Crafts object and the beliefs of the producer? Imogen ... more What is the connection between an Arts and Crafts object and the beliefs of the producer? Imogen Hart has argued that ‘an “Arts and Crafts” object may not have been made or designed by someone with...
... implicitly privileges an attention to "macropolitical' processes over the analysis ... more ... implicitly privileges an attention to "macropolitical' processes over the analysis of the micropolitics of the ... enclosed individual can be represented as the site of a purely imaginary autonomy. ... rational subject, as the reader is exhorted to abandon the fallen sectarian self, grounded ...
Recently, film historians (Gunning, Heath and Mayer) have warned against a teleological reading o... more Recently, film historians (Gunning, Heath and Mayer) have warned against a teleological reading of cinema that makes it the triumphal outcome of an evolutionary process that leads seamlessly from theatre and photography to motion pictures. This warning is especially appropriate in evaluating the ‘trickrsquo; or double exposure photograph of Richard Mansfield in his signature role as Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde from his highly successful adaptation of Robert Louis Stevenson's Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde (1886). While it is tempting to view this photograph as part of the history of early film special effects, such a reading occludes the importance of the body in Mansfield's acting. Mansfield in his performances had closer affiliations with contortionists such as Harry Houdini than with cinema technology in that his acting depended on his control of his body and face to effect the live transformation from Dr Jekyll into Mr Hyde. The only technological aid that Mansfield u...
Do performances of gender in steampunk texts and cosplay destabilise or reinforce contemporary id... more Do performances of gender in steampunk texts and cosplay destabilise or reinforce contemporary ideologies of masculinity and femininity? While claims have been made that neo-Victorian tropes in steampunk are mobilised to both critique Victorian gender norms and dramatise contemporary understanding of gender identity as fluid, this article argues that such performances are contradictory, not because of the motives of the performer but because of contradictions in the wider culture. The depiction of 'action babes' in steampunk texts and costumes in particular represents both an image of an active autonomous woman and the female body as an eroticised object. Unlike the 'hard' image of masculinity in steampunk, images of women combine 'hard' imagery, especially in the use of weapons, and 'soft' imagery in the sexualisation of the female body, resorting to both/and rather than either/or in representations of women. Ultimately the threat of female violence ...
The title of this special issue obviously owes a great deal to Mary Poovey's Uneven Developme... more The title of this special issue obviously owes a great deal to Mary Poovey's Uneven Developments, which was subtitled The Ideological Work of Gender in Mid-Victorian England. Poovey emphasizes the "ideology" aspect of the title, examining representations of gender as one of "the sites at which ideological systems were simultaneously constructed and contested" (2). This issue also uses "work" in this sense, examining a variety of sites for the "cultural work" of representations of gender in either contesting or acquiescing to the consequences of nineteenth-century idealized images of masculinity and femininity. This also builds on Poovey's formulation by taking it in a different direction, using "work" in the sense of labor because gender and work roles intersect at many crucial sites in nineteenth-century British culture. The oft cited Victorian "separation of spheres" informed both work and domestic roles, and the two are interlinked in complex ways in both the formal division of labor in public and the informal gender-based allocation of tasks in the domestic sphere. The division of labor is also crucially a class issue implicated in politics and symbolic power. As Poovey argues in her chapter on "The Ideological Work of Gender," "the rhetorical separation of spheres and the image of a domesticated, feminized morality were crucial to the consolidation of bourgeois power" (10), meaning that class and gender were both strands in the growing middle-class hegemony in the period. This "feminizing of morality" could be read in part as a way of negating the growing power of working-class men who agitated for more political representation in the Chartist movement and later in the century in the trades unions. Since the publication of Poovey's Uneven Developments, more attention has been paid both to the effects of the "separation of spheres" on the representation of labor and to the social construction of gender roles. It has been widely recognized that masculinity and femininity in this period were subject to cross-cutting ideological forces that led to unstable and deeply contested representations of gender roles, but the intersection of these roles with the representation of work has only recently become a recognizable area of analysis within the wider question of the ideological impact of the "separation of spheres." While it would be an exaggeration to call it a "surge," there has at least been an increase of critical interest in the intersection of work and gender in the nineteenth century in the ten years since the publication of Uneven Developments. Recent book-length studies of work and gender include Carolyn Lesjak's Working Fictions; Patricia Zakreski's Representing Female Artistic Labour, 1848-1890, which examines female artistic labor as production; Tim Barringer's Men at Work, which examines the representation of labor generally in Victorian art; and my own more modest Gender at Work, which examines contradictions in representations of masculinity through manual labor. More narrow in scope, Chris Louttit has recently published Dickens's Secular Gospel: Work, Gender, and Personality, which traces the issue in a single author, while Rob Breton has examined the politics of labor in Gospels and Grit: Work and Labour in Carlyle, Conrad, and Orwell. Carolyn Lesjak, in her introduction to Working Fictions, has argued for the centrality of the "labour novel" for our understanding of the genealogy of the genre. She tackles head on the problem for any critical examination of the function of work in nineteenth-century culture, namely that labor is rendered invisible and must be detected "at the margins" of most novels. There are notable exceptions, of course, in some novels that tackle work directly, but even Dickens's Hard Times, which overtly addresses the relationship between masters and workers in an industrial town, does not enter the factory, but rather takes a detached view of factories as "fairy palaces" seen from a train. …
There has been much critical debate over the character of Esther Summerson in Dickens's Bleak... more There has been much critical debate over the character of Esther Summerson in Dickens's Bleak House. Controversy has focussed on whether Esther Summerson is an "ambiguous" and "repugnant" figure, a "female paragon to whom Dickens felt so committed that he lost critical control over her creation," or a "subtle psychological portrait clear in its outlines and convincing in its details."1 Sidestepping such psychologically-based discussions of individual character, I propose a reading of the character of Esther Summerson in this article in terms of her work in the novel. I will read Esther as a "sign of the feminine,"2 a character who reveals the Victorian cultural construction of work along gender lines. Esther seems to have many roles in the novel; she cares for children, she organizes households, and she provides companionship for various male figures. All these roles can, however, be grouped under one term: housekeeper. Since Bleak House ends with Esther's marriage, it does not represent Esther in the role of housewife, although "housekeeper" and "housewife" are obviously closely related terms; both participate in the nineteenth-century British cultural construction of the feminine in terms of domesticity. The ideology of women's natural domesticity, although present in previous centuries, was articulated most forcefully from the beginning of the nineteenth century on.3 Ann Oakley in her tripartite history of the housewife denotes the period 1840-1914, within which Bleak House ( 1851 -53) falls, as marking a "decline in the employment of women outside the home associated with the rising popularity of the belief in women's natural domesticity."4 Although large numbers of women, especially working class women, continued to work inside and outside the home, the expectation was that they be economically dependent and unproductive.5 Esther Summerson is a"keeper" of other people's houses and other people's children. She represents an intermediate stage in the development of the term housewife as we use it now. As Oakley points out, it was not until the "servant crisis" of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries when domestic help became less readily available that "the housewife and homeworker roles . . .
The poetic phrase "all that is solid melts in air" from the Communist Manifesto (Marx a... more The poetic phrase "all that is solid melts in air" from the Communist Manifesto (Marx and Engels 1847) conveyed the sense that stable bonds of obligation were being replaced by the 'cash nexus' in the commodification of human relationships during nineteenth-century industrialisation. Steampunk is a postindustrial aesthetic born of a reaction against the social and cultural upheaval caused by new digital technologies that has much in common with nineteenth-century critiques of industrialisation, particularly those by proponents of the Arts and Crafts movement. Steampunk uses the weight and substance of Victorian industry as a protest against the increasing minimalism and 'weightlessness' of new technologies. It is an aesthetic that works by accretion, adding layers of cogs and clothing to objects and bodies to counter this 'weightlessness'. Rather than subvert what Karl Marx termed "commodity fetishism" however, steampunk replaces it with &...
... Reviewed by. Sarah Winter University of Connecticut, Storrs. Victorian Animal Dreams: Represe... more ... Reviewed by. Sarah Winter University of Connecticut, Storrs. Victorian Animal Dreams: Representations of Animals in Victorian Literature and Culture, edited by ... If, as Harriet Ritvo argues in her afterword, quoting Claude Levi-Strauss, "animals are good to think with" (275), then ...
Analysis of Arts and Crafts practitioner C. R. Ashbee and his visits to fellow practitioners in t... more Analysis of Arts and Crafts practitioner C. R. Ashbee and his visits to fellow practitioners in the United States between 1896 and 1915 in the context of the aesthetic as a Transatlantic movement. U.S. practitioners include Frank Lloyd Wright, Elbert Hubbard and Gustav Stickley.
War Without Bodies contributes to an important and ongoing effort to understand-and to challenge-... more War Without Bodies contributes to an important and ongoing effort to understand-and to challenge-the myriad ways in which a culture of war has been historically normalized as a function of "new" technologies of representation. Martin Danahay illustrates how the illusion of a "war without bodies" complicates our capacity to engage the trauma of war by sanitizing its violence and undermining the very possibility of grieveable bodies, whether soldiers or civilians."-John Louis Lucaites, co-editor of In/visible War: The Culture of War in Twenty-first-Century America "Danahay offers a pacifist's lament, not only for the victims of war, but for their systematic erasure from its representation. War Without Bodies documents the history of this practice, explores its lethal consequences, and urges its readers toward an alternative visuality."-Rebecca Adelman, author of Figuring Violence: Affective Investments in Perpetual War
I argue in this article that Robert Louis Stevenson’s Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde (18... more I argue in this article that Robert Louis Stevenson’s Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde (1886) is a cautionary tale about the increasing emphasis on the appetites of the masculine body in late Victorian culture. The narrative represents Stevenson’s rearguard action against such indulgence of bodily appetites, which in Jekyll and Hyde leads to the complete loss of manly self-control. Dr. Jekyll loses his social standing as a result of his indulgence of his desires and inhabits a working-class body to seek gratification of unseemly appetites. Stevenson’s story in this plays out as tragedy the comic narrative of Wells’ Mr. Kipps or the Pockets in Dickens’ Great Expectations where subjects try to occupy a class position above their station, with the added twist that Dr. Jekyll occupies, albeit temporarily, a class position below his own. Also, whereas such characters wear clothes above their station, Dr. Jekyll wears a working-class body as if it were a suit of clothing. In a telling phrase Dr. Jekyll talks of being “accustomed to sleep in the body of Edward Hyde” while in Soho (Jekyll 84), as if Mr. Hyde were a pair of pajamas that he would wear while sleeping in one location, but not in the other. The different bodies encode at the corporeal level the geographical, class-based division of London into East and West. Dr. Jekyll therefore has two bodies in Robert Louis Stevenson’s Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde (1886); when he becomes Mr. Hyde he switches from a “decent” and respectable body into the “indecent” body of a working-class man. In keeping with the class-based stereotypes of the period, the respectable, self-denying body is that of a gentleman, while the hedonistic body is marked both as “degenerate” and of a lower social class. This corporeal duality registers the conflict between competing versions of manliness. Dr. Jekyll tries to adhere to a self-regulated and pious discipline, like that of his friend Utterson, but fails when he discovers a way to switch into another body, that of Mr. Hyde. Dr. Jekyll suffers a double loss of status, losing both selfdiscipline, which was essential to the status of a gentleman, and the title “Dr.” as he becomes a mere “Mr.” However, Mr. Hyde is still dressed as a gentleman, which Nineteenth-Century Contexts, 2013 Vol. 35, No. 1, 23–40, http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/08905495.2013.770616
Binnie, Jon. The Globalization of Sexuality. London: Sage, 2004. Print. Cook, Matt. Queer Domesti... more Binnie, Jon. The Globalization of Sexuality. London: Sage, 2004. Print. Cook, Matt. Queer Domesticities: Homosexuality and Home Life in Twentieth-Century London. New York: Palgrave, 2014. Print. Denisoff, Dennis. “Oscar Wilde’s Convictions, Speciesism, and the Pain of Individualism.” A Companion to Irish Literature. Ed. Julia Wright. Oxford: Blackwell, 2010. 476-90. Print. Ehnenn, Jill R. Women’s Literary Collaboration, Queerness, and Late-Victorian Culture. Burlington: Ashgate, 2008. Print. Field, Michael. Works and Days. Ed. T. Sturge Moore and D.C. Sturge Moore. London: J. Murray, 1933. Print. Gandhi, Leela. Affective Communities: Anticolonial Thought, Fin-De-Siècle Radicalism, and the Politics of Friendship. Durham: Duke UP, 2005. Print. Laird, Holly. “The Death of the Author by Suicide: Fin-De-Siècle Poets and the Construction of Identity.” The Fin-De-Siècle Poem: English Literary Culture and the 1890s. Ed. Joseph Bristow. Athens: Ohio UP, 2005. 116-51. Print. Maltz, Diana. “Katharine Bradley and Ethical Socialism.” Michael Field and Their World. Ed. Margaret Diane Stetz and Cheryl Ann Wilson. High Wycombe: Rivendale, 2007. 191-201. Print. Singh, Brijraj Bhushan. The Development of a Critical Tradition from Pater to Yeats. Delhi: Macmillan, 1978. Print. Thain, Marion. “Michael Field”: Poetry, Aestheticism, and the Fin de Siècle. New York: Cambridge UP, 2007. Print. Tildesley, Michael. The Century Guild Hobby Horse and Oscar Wilde: A Study of British Little Magazines, 1884–97. Diss. Durham U. Durham: Durham eTheses Online, 2011. Web. 24 Oct. 2015. The Trial of Oscar Wilde from the Shorthand Reports. Paris: Charles Carrington, 1906. Print.
What is the connection between an Arts and Crafts object and the beliefs of the producer? Imogen ... more What is the connection between an Arts and Crafts object and the beliefs of the producer? Imogen Hart has argued that ‘an “Arts and Crafts” object may not have been made or designed by someone with...
... implicitly privileges an attention to "macropolitical' processes over the analysis ... more ... implicitly privileges an attention to "macropolitical' processes over the analysis of the micropolitics of the ... enclosed individual can be represented as the site of a purely imaginary autonomy. ... rational subject, as the reader is exhorted to abandon the fallen sectarian self, grounded ...
Recently, film historians (Gunning, Heath and Mayer) have warned against a teleological reading o... more Recently, film historians (Gunning, Heath and Mayer) have warned against a teleological reading of cinema that makes it the triumphal outcome of an evolutionary process that leads seamlessly from theatre and photography to motion pictures. This warning is especially appropriate in evaluating the ‘trickrsquo; or double exposure photograph of Richard Mansfield in his signature role as Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde from his highly successful adaptation of Robert Louis Stevenson's Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde (1886). While it is tempting to view this photograph as part of the history of early film special effects, such a reading occludes the importance of the body in Mansfield's acting. Mansfield in his performances had closer affiliations with contortionists such as Harry Houdini than with cinema technology in that his acting depended on his control of his body and face to effect the live transformation from Dr Jekyll into Mr Hyde. The only technological aid that Mansfield u...
Do performances of gender in steampunk texts and cosplay destabilise or reinforce contemporary id... more Do performances of gender in steampunk texts and cosplay destabilise or reinforce contemporary ideologies of masculinity and femininity? While claims have been made that neo-Victorian tropes in steampunk are mobilised to both critique Victorian gender norms and dramatise contemporary understanding of gender identity as fluid, this article argues that such performances are contradictory, not because of the motives of the performer but because of contradictions in the wider culture. The depiction of 'action babes' in steampunk texts and costumes in particular represents both an image of an active autonomous woman and the female body as an eroticised object. Unlike the 'hard' image of masculinity in steampunk, images of women combine 'hard' imagery, especially in the use of weapons, and 'soft' imagery in the sexualisation of the female body, resorting to both/and rather than either/or in representations of women. Ultimately the threat of female violence ...
The title of this special issue obviously owes a great deal to Mary Poovey's Uneven Developme... more The title of this special issue obviously owes a great deal to Mary Poovey's Uneven Developments, which was subtitled The Ideological Work of Gender in Mid-Victorian England. Poovey emphasizes the "ideology" aspect of the title, examining representations of gender as one of "the sites at which ideological systems were simultaneously constructed and contested" (2). This issue also uses "work" in this sense, examining a variety of sites for the "cultural work" of representations of gender in either contesting or acquiescing to the consequences of nineteenth-century idealized images of masculinity and femininity. This also builds on Poovey's formulation by taking it in a different direction, using "work" in the sense of labor because gender and work roles intersect at many crucial sites in nineteenth-century British culture. The oft cited Victorian "separation of spheres" informed both work and domestic roles, and the two are interlinked in complex ways in both the formal division of labor in public and the informal gender-based allocation of tasks in the domestic sphere. The division of labor is also crucially a class issue implicated in politics and symbolic power. As Poovey argues in her chapter on "The Ideological Work of Gender," "the rhetorical separation of spheres and the image of a domesticated, feminized morality were crucial to the consolidation of bourgeois power" (10), meaning that class and gender were both strands in the growing middle-class hegemony in the period. This "feminizing of morality" could be read in part as a way of negating the growing power of working-class men who agitated for more political representation in the Chartist movement and later in the century in the trades unions. Since the publication of Poovey's Uneven Developments, more attention has been paid both to the effects of the "separation of spheres" on the representation of labor and to the social construction of gender roles. It has been widely recognized that masculinity and femininity in this period were subject to cross-cutting ideological forces that led to unstable and deeply contested representations of gender roles, but the intersection of these roles with the representation of work has only recently become a recognizable area of analysis within the wider question of the ideological impact of the "separation of spheres." While it would be an exaggeration to call it a "surge," there has at least been an increase of critical interest in the intersection of work and gender in the nineteenth century in the ten years since the publication of Uneven Developments. Recent book-length studies of work and gender include Carolyn Lesjak's Working Fictions; Patricia Zakreski's Representing Female Artistic Labour, 1848-1890, which examines female artistic labor as production; Tim Barringer's Men at Work, which examines the representation of labor generally in Victorian art; and my own more modest Gender at Work, which examines contradictions in representations of masculinity through manual labor. More narrow in scope, Chris Louttit has recently published Dickens's Secular Gospel: Work, Gender, and Personality, which traces the issue in a single author, while Rob Breton has examined the politics of labor in Gospels and Grit: Work and Labour in Carlyle, Conrad, and Orwell. Carolyn Lesjak, in her introduction to Working Fictions, has argued for the centrality of the "labour novel" for our understanding of the genealogy of the genre. She tackles head on the problem for any critical examination of the function of work in nineteenth-century culture, namely that labor is rendered invisible and must be detected "at the margins" of most novels. There are notable exceptions, of course, in some novels that tackle work directly, but even Dickens's Hard Times, which overtly addresses the relationship between masters and workers in an industrial town, does not enter the factory, but rather takes a detached view of factories as "fairy palaces" seen from a train. …
There has been much critical debate over the character of Esther Summerson in Dickens's Bleak... more There has been much critical debate over the character of Esther Summerson in Dickens's Bleak House. Controversy has focussed on whether Esther Summerson is an "ambiguous" and "repugnant" figure, a "female paragon to whom Dickens felt so committed that he lost critical control over her creation," or a "subtle psychological portrait clear in its outlines and convincing in its details."1 Sidestepping such psychologically-based discussions of individual character, I propose a reading of the character of Esther Summerson in this article in terms of her work in the novel. I will read Esther as a "sign of the feminine,"2 a character who reveals the Victorian cultural construction of work along gender lines. Esther seems to have many roles in the novel; she cares for children, she organizes households, and she provides companionship for various male figures. All these roles can, however, be grouped under one term: housekeeper. Since Bleak House ends with Esther's marriage, it does not represent Esther in the role of housewife, although "housekeeper" and "housewife" are obviously closely related terms; both participate in the nineteenth-century British cultural construction of the feminine in terms of domesticity. The ideology of women's natural domesticity, although present in previous centuries, was articulated most forcefully from the beginning of the nineteenth century on.3 Ann Oakley in her tripartite history of the housewife denotes the period 1840-1914, within which Bleak House ( 1851 -53) falls, as marking a "decline in the employment of women outside the home associated with the rising popularity of the belief in women's natural domesticity."4 Although large numbers of women, especially working class women, continued to work inside and outside the home, the expectation was that they be economically dependent and unproductive.5 Esther Summerson is a"keeper" of other people's houses and other people's children. She represents an intermediate stage in the development of the term housewife as we use it now. As Oakley points out, it was not until the "servant crisis" of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries when domestic help became less readily available that "the housewife and homeworker roles . . .
The poetic phrase "all that is solid melts in air" from the Communist Manifesto (Marx a... more The poetic phrase "all that is solid melts in air" from the Communist Manifesto (Marx and Engels 1847) conveyed the sense that stable bonds of obligation were being replaced by the 'cash nexus' in the commodification of human relationships during nineteenth-century industrialisation. Steampunk is a postindustrial aesthetic born of a reaction against the social and cultural upheaval caused by new digital technologies that has much in common with nineteenth-century critiques of industrialisation, particularly those by proponents of the Arts and Crafts movement. Steampunk uses the weight and substance of Victorian industry as a protest against the increasing minimalism and 'weightlessness' of new technologies. It is an aesthetic that works by accretion, adding layers of cogs and clothing to objects and bodies to counter this 'weightlessness'. Rather than subvert what Karl Marx termed "commodity fetishism" however, steampunk replaces it with &...
... Reviewed by. Sarah Winter University of Connecticut, Storrs. Victorian Animal Dreams: Represe... more ... Reviewed by. Sarah Winter University of Connecticut, Storrs. Victorian Animal Dreams: Representations of Animals in Victorian Literature and Culture, edited by ... If, as Harriet Ritvo argues in her afterword, quoting Claude Levi-Strauss, "animals are good to think with" (275), then ...
Analysis of Arts and Crafts practitioner C. R. Ashbee and his visits to fellow practitioners in t... more Analysis of Arts and Crafts practitioner C. R. Ashbee and his visits to fellow practitioners in the United States between 1896 and 1915 in the context of the aesthetic as a Transatlantic movement. U.S. practitioners include Frank Lloyd Wright, Elbert Hubbard and Gustav Stickley.
War Without Bodies contributes to an important and ongoing effort to understand-and to challenge-... more War Without Bodies contributes to an important and ongoing effort to understand-and to challenge-the myriad ways in which a culture of war has been historically normalized as a function of "new" technologies of representation. Martin Danahay illustrates how the illusion of a "war without bodies" complicates our capacity to engage the trauma of war by sanitizing its violence and undermining the very possibility of grieveable bodies, whether soldiers or civilians."-John Louis Lucaites, co-editor of In/visible War: The Culture of War in Twenty-first-Century America "Danahay offers a pacifist's lament, not only for the victims of war, but for their systematic erasure from its representation. War Without Bodies documents the history of this practice, explores its lethal consequences, and urges its readers toward an alternative visuality."-Rebecca Adelman, author of Figuring Violence: Affective Investments in Perpetual War
I argue in this article that Robert Louis Stevenson’s Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde (18... more I argue in this article that Robert Louis Stevenson’s Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde (1886) is a cautionary tale about the increasing emphasis on the appetites of the masculine body in late Victorian culture. The narrative represents Stevenson’s rearguard action against such indulgence of bodily appetites, which in Jekyll and Hyde leads to the complete loss of manly self-control. Dr. Jekyll loses his social standing as a result of his indulgence of his desires and inhabits a working-class body to seek gratification of unseemly appetites. Stevenson’s story in this plays out as tragedy the comic narrative of Wells’ Mr. Kipps or the Pockets in Dickens’ Great Expectations where subjects try to occupy a class position above their station, with the added twist that Dr. Jekyll occupies, albeit temporarily, a class position below his own. Also, whereas such characters wear clothes above their station, Dr. Jekyll wears a working-class body as if it were a suit of clothing. In a telling phrase Dr. Jekyll talks of being “accustomed to sleep in the body of Edward Hyde” while in Soho (Jekyll 84), as if Mr. Hyde were a pair of pajamas that he would wear while sleeping in one location, but not in the other. The different bodies encode at the corporeal level the geographical, class-based division of London into East and West. Dr. Jekyll therefore has two bodies in Robert Louis Stevenson’s Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde (1886); when he becomes Mr. Hyde he switches from a “decent” and respectable body into the “indecent” body of a working-class man. In keeping with the class-based stereotypes of the period, the respectable, self-denying body is that of a gentleman, while the hedonistic body is marked both as “degenerate” and of a lower social class. This corporeal duality registers the conflict between competing versions of manliness. Dr. Jekyll tries to adhere to a self-regulated and pious discipline, like that of his friend Utterson, but fails when he discovers a way to switch into another body, that of Mr. Hyde. Dr. Jekyll suffers a double loss of status, losing both selfdiscipline, which was essential to the status of a gentleman, and the title “Dr.” as he becomes a mere “Mr.” However, Mr. Hyde is still dressed as a gentleman, which Nineteenth-Century Contexts, 2013 Vol. 35, No. 1, 23–40, http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/08905495.2013.770616
War Without Bodies contributes to an important and ongoing effort to understand-and to challenge-... more War Without Bodies contributes to an important and ongoing effort to understand-and to challenge-the myriad ways in which a culture of war has been historically normalized as a function of "new" technologies of representation. Martin Danahay illustrates how the illusion of a "war without bodies" complicates our capacity to engage the trauma of war by sanitizing its violence and undermining the very possibility of grieveable bodies, whether soldiers or civilians."-John Louis Lucaites, co-editor of In/visible War: The Culture of War in Twenty-first-Century America "Danahay offers a pacifist's lament, not only for the victims of war, but for their systematic erasure from its representation. War Without Bodies documents the history of this practice, explores its lethal consequences, and urges its readers toward an alternative visuality."-Rebecca Adelman, author of Figuring Violence: Affective Investments in Perpetual War
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