Required
"Victorian Domesticity": course packet of literary and critical materials available at the Arts and Sciences Copy Center
Nina Auerbach and U.C. Knoepflmacher, Forbidden Journeys: Fairy Tales and Fantasies by Victorian Women (U Chicago P)
Jane Austen, Pride and Prejudice (Oxford UP)
Mary E. Braddon, Lady Audley's Secret (Oxford UP)
Charlotte Brontë, Jane Eyre (Penguin)
Andrea Broomfield and Sally Mitchell, Prose by Victorian Women (Garland)
Elizabeth Gaskell, A Dark Night's Work, and Other Stories (Oxford UP)
Elaine Showalter, Daughters of Decadence: Women Writers of the Fin De Siécle (Rutgers UP)
Mrs. Henry (Ellen) Wood, East Lynne (Everyman)
Recommended
MLA Handbook (4th edition)
Links to Victorian resources on the WWW can be accessed through our class web site.

Course Purposes
This class will examine a variety of domestic writings by Victorian women, including domestic fiction, gothic and sensation fiction, fantasy and fairy tales, and non-fiction essays and political writings, as well as critical and background materials, to explore how conflictual inscriptions of the female subject became a mechanism for change. To consider the rise of domesticity, almost exclusively in the hands of women, as a major event in political history is not to present a contradiction in terms, but to identify a paradox that shapes modern culture. Popular nineteenth-century domestic ideology constructs the domestic sphere as a political and economic alternative to the world, one which calls into question the structures of Victorian society.

Course Requirements
Since this is a seminar, your attendance and participation are essential. Be sure to see me immediately if you have a serious attendance problem. Students will present two short (15 minute) reports, regularly formulate questions for class discussion, and write a substantial (20-30 page) research paper.

Please arrange to meet with me as soon as possible about your seminar paper, as it will consume more of your effort in this class than anything else, apart from doing the assigned readings. Your research paper is yours: find something to research that you are interested in and want to know more about.

August
T-26 Introduction to Class
U-28 Introduction; Elaine Showalter, "The Female Tradition," from A Literature of Their Own

September
T-2 Jane Austen, Pride and Prejudice (1814)
U-4 Austen

 T-9 Austen
U-11 Austen; Judith Lowder Newton, "Power and the Ideology of 'Woman's Sphere'" and "Pride and Prejudice," from Women, Power, and Subversion: Social Strategies in British Fiction

 T-16 Charlotte Brontë, Jane Eyre (1847)
U-18 Brontë; Charlotte Brontë and the Critical Reception of Jane Eyre (Mary)

 T-23 Brontë; Nancy Armstrong, "The Rise of Female Authority in the Novel," from Desire and Domestic Fiction: A Political History of the Novel
U-25 Brontë; Lady Elizabeth Eastlake, "Review of Jane Eyre" (1848)

 T-30 Elizabeth Gaskell, "Libbie Marsh's Three Eras" (1847)
October

October
U-2 Gaskell, "The Old Nurse's Story" (1852) and "The Grey Woman" (1861)

 T-7 Gaskell
U-9 Mary Elizabeth Braddon, Lady Audley's Secret (1862); Mary Braddon (Kristin)        

 T-14 Braddon; Elaine Showalter, "Subverting the Feminine Novel: Sensationalism and Feminine Protest," from A Literature of Their Own
U-16 Braddon; The Critical Reception of Lady Audley's Secret and Sensation Fiction (Matt)

 T-21 Mrs. Henry (Ellen) Wood, East Lynne (1862); Ellen Wood and the critical reception of East Lynne (Mary)
U-23 Wood; excerpt from John Ruskin, "Of Queen's Gardens" (1865)

 T-28 Wood; Nina Auerbach, "Old Maids and the Wish for Wings," from Woman and the Demon: The Life of a Victorian Myth*; "Odd Women": Unmarried Women in Victorian Britain (Ramona)
U-30 Anne Thackeray Ritchie, "Heroines and Their Grandmothers" (1865) and "Beauty and The Beast" (1874); Anne Ritchie (Kim)

November
T-4 Juliana Horatia Ewing, "Amelia and the Dwarfs" (1870; Frances Hodgson Burnett, "Behind the White Brick" (1879)
U-6 Conferences: Essay Proposals due Friday 11/7 in my mailbox.

 T-11 Ewing and Burnett; Carroll Smith-Rosenberg, "The Female World of Love and Ritual" from Disorderly Conduct; Victorian Childhood
U-13 Christina Rossetti, Speaking Likenesses (1874); Christina Rossetti (Ramona)

 T-18 Christina Rossetti
U-20 E. Nesbit, "Melisande, or, Long and Short Division" (1901); Elaine Showalter, "Borderlines" and "New Women," from Sexual Anarchy: Gender and Culture at the Fin De Siécle; Victorian Feminism

T-25 Conferences
U-27 Thanksgiving Holiday

December
T-2 Mona Caird, "The Morality of Marriage" (1890); Sarah Grand, "The New Woman and the Old" (1898); The "New Woman" (Mary)
U-4 Charlotte Perkins-Gilman, "The Yellow Wallpaper" (1892); Mary E. Wilkins-Freeman, "Luella Miller" (1902)

 T-9 George Fleming, "By Accident" (1898); Olive Schreiner, "The Buddhist Priest's Wife," "Life's Gifts" (1890); Edith Wharton, "The Valley of Childish Things" (1896)
U-11 Conclusions; Seminar Papers Due