Fiction and Femininity from Wollstonecraft to Woolf

Overview

• Credit value: 30 credits at Level 7
• Convenor and tutor: Dr Victoria Mills
• Assessment: a 5000-word essay (100%)

Module description

In this module we will study a range of sources including novels, poetry, essays and paintings to explore debates about the Woman Question as they developed during the second half of the nineteenth century.

Indicative syllabus

Introduction

• Introduction to the module and Mary Wollstonecraft’s Vindication of the Rights of Women
• The Victorian novel and the woman question - Charlotte Brontë’s Jane Eyre 

The Fallen Woman

• The fallen woman in Victorian art
• The fallen woman in Victorian literature - Elizabeth Gaskell’s Ruth

Women and Work

• Gender and the Victorian periodical
• Mary Seacole’s care work 

Marriage and Sexuality

• The new woman and marriage (short stories)
• Female sexuality, tragedy - Thomas Hardy’s Tess of the D’Urbervilles 

Decadent and Queer

• Decadent women - Vernon Lee’s ghost stories
• Queer identities - Virginia Woolf’s Orlando

Learning objectives

By the end of this module, you will be able to:

• understand how femininity and the role of women were debated and contested across the long nineteenth century and into the twentieth century
• examine a range of literature from across the nineteenth and early twentieth-century literature and discuss how it represents femininity
• understand femininity in the context of important debates about evolution, new technologies, politics, art, design and literature
• recognise and understand key critical and interdisciplinary approaches to studying representations of femininity, including queer theory and recent work on gender and performativity
• undertake independent research into nineteenth-century periodicals using online databases and the collections at Senate House Library.