Moulding the Female Body in Victorian Fairy Tales and Sensation Novels (review)

For anyone interested in comprehending the significant social and cultural aspects of Victorian fairy tales and sensation novels, Laurence Talairach Vielmas' compelling and sophisticated study is required reading. Not only does Talairach-Vielmas draw unusual parallels between the fairy tales and the sensation novels that have rarely been drawn before, but she also depicts with great perspicacity how these unique narratives emanated and exposed the pressures and expectations that obliged young Victorian women, in particular from the middle and upper classes, to transform themselves along aesthetic and cultural models constructed according to male interests and to the rapidly growing commodity market in England. Her research is thorough and impeccable, and each chapter illuminates different problems confronted by female protagonists in the fairy tales and sensation novels that deal essentially with molding their bodies and manners in compliance with a class-biased civilizing process.

Talairach-Vielmas' book is divided into nine chapters and an introduction and conclusion. In her introduction, she puts forth her major thesis:

Constantly reified, extolled as an art curio connoting the wealth of its owner, the fashionably corseted Victorian woman was also girdled by discourses to define her. In the streets or in women's magazines, advertisements aimed at women and constructed women as desiring and consuming subjects. In so doing, they simultaneously led them to become merchandise themselves—thereby confining them within a role as reflectors of male power, exhibiting their fathers' or husbands' economic success. Victorian fairy tales and sensation novels explore this insolubly paradoxical terrain, where women oscillate between subject and object.

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The first four chapters focus on key fairy tales: Jean Ingelow's Mopsa the Fairy (1869), George MacDonald's "The Light Princess" (1864), Lewis Carroll's Alice in Wonderland (1865), Juliana Horatia Ewing's "Amelia and the Dwarfs" (1870), and Christina Rossetti's Speaking Likenesses (1874), which, she contends, seek to question feminine stereotypes traditionally associated with passivity and victimization. She maintains that the Victorian female body registered the tensions of the nineteenth century, and thus it is through linguistic representations (narratives with clichés, metaphors, similes, puns) that fairy tale writers, female and male, transformed traditional characters and plots to reveal the oppressive manner in which young women were treated in Victorian society. Indeed, the female protagonists tend to be diverse, adventurous and inventive girls, who are sent on difficult journeys of self-discovery, and many of the fairy tales do not end happily ever after: Mopsa discovers that freedom is illusory; Alice must struggle against her own curiosity and appetites to the point of self-effacement; MacDonald's light princess becomes medicated by puns and discourses that "cure" her of her rebellious nature; Ewing's Amelia learns that she should never reveal her true nature; and Rossetti's "heroines" are generally reified as precious little things for exhibition.

In the second part of her book Talairach-Vielmas concentrates on six notable sensation novels: Rhoda Broughton's Not Wisely but Too Well (1867), Charles Dickens' Bleak House (1853), M. E. Braddon's Lady Audley's Secret (1862), and Wilkie Collins' No Name (1862), Armadale (1864), and The Law and the Lady (1875). Often alluding either explicitly or implicitly to traditional fairy tales, these novels portray how young women endeavor to use the new products of the English consumer society to enhance their aesthetic charms and their ambitions, but they generally have to submit to the rules of the market dominated by male interests. While the novels by Broughton, Dickens, Braddon, and Collins differ in plot and characterization, they all emphasize that adventurous women seeking to revamp their personalities and identities will more than often end up like Snow White or Sleeping Beauty, become crystallized by the market, and end up commodified. They may marry and become what they think that they want to become, but there is no bliss in their lives.

Each chapter in Talraich-Vielmas' book is replete with historical and theoretical analyses that place the works in their socio-historical...