Suffering Mothers in Mid-Victorian Novels

Download or read book Suffering Mothers in Mid-Victorian Novels written by Natalie McKnight and published by Palgrave Macmillan. This book was released on 1997 with total page 162 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: During the Victorian Era, women who became mothers faced unprecedented, unrealistic, and contradictory expectations from mainstream society. These expectations were expressed through a wide range of media including maternal guidebooks, popular periodicals, and Queen Victoria's maternal image. In Suffering Mothers in Mid-Victorian Novels, Natalie McKnight analyzes the influence of such cultural pressures on the fictional portrayals of mothers in mid-Victorian novels. Using a new historical and psychoanalytic approach, McKnight examines the climate created by a society that idolized mothers in theory but in reality positioned them to fail. The novels of Dickens, Charlotte Bronte, Thackeray, and George Eliot are studied for their inclusion of mother characters who vary from the ambivalent to the monstrous, the angelic to the absent. In her thorough exploration of these novels, McKnight reveals the influences and the natures of characters who function more centrally in mid-Victorian fiction than has often been supposed.