Fixing Patriarchy: Feminism and Mid-Victorian Male Novelists [Hardcover]

Fixing Patriarchy: Feminism and Mid-Victorian Male Novelists explores representations of monstrous women in mid-Victorian literature, tracing anxious male responses to the feminist movement of the era. It argues that Victorian patriarchy was a fluid theory and set of practices through which Victorian men attempted unsuccessfully to fix gender definitions and their own positions of power. In Victorian novels written by men, the thorough instability of contemporary conceptions of both masculinity and femininity is revealed, as an entire society struggled with new forms of self-awareness and new threats to traditional social structures and systems of belief.Acknowledgements - Introduction: Female Trouble: Nineteenth-Century Feminism and a Literature of Threat - PART 1: THE 1840s - 'Betsy Prig...try the cowcumbers, God Bless You!': Hierarchy, Transgression, and Trouble in Martin Chuzzlewit - Reading Tennyson Reading Fuller Reading Tennyson: The Anti-Feminism of The Princess - Kingsley as Negotiator: Class/Gender Discord/Discourse in Yeast and Alton Locke - PART 2: THE 1850s - Gender in the Marketplace: Contestation and Accommodation in Thackeray's The Newcomes - 'None of your eyes at me': The Patriarchal Gaze in Little Dorrit - Becoming One's Own Worst Enemy: Muscular Anxiety in Tom Brown's Schooldays - PART 3: THE 1860s - From Margin to Centre: Agency and Authority in the Novels of Wilkie Collins - Great Expectations and Harsh Realities - Conclusion: Trollope on Women/Women in Trollope - Works CitedDONALD E. HALL is Associate Professor and Associate Chair of the Department of English at California State University, Northridge, where he teaches Victorian literature, feminist theory, and queer studies. He is the author of Muscular Christianity: Embodying the Victorian Age, and co-editor of RePresenting Bisexualities.