Walking the Victorian Streets: Women, Representation, and the City

by Deborah Epstein Nord

Overview

Literary traditions of urban description in the nineteenth century revolve around the figure of the stroller, a man who navigates and observes the city streets with impunity. Whether the stroller appears as fictional character, literary persona, or the nameless, omnipresent narrator of panoramic fiction, he casts the woman of the streets in a distinctive role. She functions at times as a double for the walker's marginal and alienated self and at others as connector and contaminant, carrier of the literal and symbolic diseases of modern urban life. In Walking the Victorian Streets, Deborah Epstein Nord explores the way in which the female figure is used as a marker for social suffering, poverty, and contagion in texts by De Quincey, Lamb, Pierce Egan, and Dickens.

What, then, of the female walker and urban chronicler? While the male spectator enjoyed the ability to see without being seen, the female stroller struggled to transcend her role as urban spectacle and her association with sexual transgression. In novels, nonfiction, and poetry by Elizabeth Gaskell1 Flora Tristan, Margaret Harkness, Amy Levy, Maud Pember Reeves, Beatrice Webb, Helen Bosanquet, and others, Nord locates the tensions felt by the female spectator conscious of herself as both observer and observed. Finally, Walking the Victorian Streets considers the legacy of urban rambling and the uses of incognito in twentieth-century texts by George Orwell and Virginia Woolf.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780801482915
Publisher:	Cornell University Press
Publication date:	10/12/1995
Series:	10/23/2006
Edition description:	New Edition
Pages:	284
Product dimensions:	6.00(w) x 9.00(h) x 0.81(d)
Age Range:	18 Years

About the Author

Deborah Epstein Nord is Professor of English at Princeton University where she also teaches in the Program in Women's Studies. She is also the author of The Apprenticeship of Beatrice Webb (Cornell Paperbacks).

Table of Contents

Introduction: Rambling in the Nineteenth CenturyPART ONE. STROLLER INTO NOVELIST1. The City as Theater: London in the 1820s2. Sketches by Boz: The Middle-Class City and the Quarantine of Urban Suffering3. "Vitiated Air": The Polluted City and Female Sexuality in Dombey and Son and Bleak HousePART TWO. FALLEN WOMEN4. The Female Pariah: Flora Tristan's London Promenades5. Elbowed in the Streets: Exposure and Authority in Elizabeth Gaskell's Urban FictionsPART THREE: NEW WOMEN6. "Neither Pairs Nor Odd": Women, Urban Community, and Writing in the 1880s

7. The Female Social Investigator: Maternalism, Feminism, and Women's WorkConclusion: Esther Summerson's Veil

Bibliography
Index

What People are Saying About This

Linda Dowling

A historically informed account of the sexual politics of urban spectatorship in nineteenth-century England. Nord's shrewd analysis and sensitive readings, coupled with the similarity between late-Victorian middle-class women's anxieties about family and vocation and those of contemporary Western women, will earn the book an especially enthusiastic response. The subject is intriguing and attractively handled; Walking the Victorian Streets is pleasurable and informative reading.

Editorial Reviews

"A historically informed account of the sexual politics of urban spectatorship in nineteenth-century England. Nord's shrewd analysis and sensitive readings, coupled with the similarity between late-Victorian middle-class women's anxieties about family and vocation and those of contemporary Western women, will earn the book an especially enthusiastic response. The subject is intriguing and attractively handled; Walking the Victorian Streets is pleasurable and informative reading."

--Linda Dowling, author of Hellenism and Homosexuality in Victorian Oxford

From the Publisher

"A historically informed account of the sexual politics of urban spectatorship in nineteenth-century England. Nord's shrewd analysis and sensitive readings, coupled with the similarity between late-Victorian middle-class women's anxieties about family and vocation and those of contemporary Western women, will earn the book an especially enthusiastic response. The subject is intriguing and attractively handled; Walking the Victorian Streets is pleasurable and informative reading."

Linda Dowling