The Fantasy of Family: Nineteenth-Century Children’s Literature and the Myth of the Domestic Ideal (review)
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The myth of the Victorian family continues to pervade the consciousness of contemporary Britain. In The Fantasy of Family, Elizabeth Thiel explores the cultural and historical implications of the traditional family and its influence on nineteenth-century literature.
The traditional, middle class family was vital to maintaining the status quo of Victorian adults, and this ideal was often replicated in children’s literature. However, modern day research suggests a wide variety of family groups in mid-century Britain, and there is a “dearth of mid-Victorian children’s literature that focuses on what has been perceived as the ideal family of mother, father, and siblings” (9), partly due to the presence of women writers in the world of children’s books. Many women subverted this norm by focusing on nontraditional, trans-normative families in their writing.
As a researcher, Elizabeth Thiel fuses new historicism with family theory and gender studies to offer a socio-historical and literary perspective in which nineteenth-century British female writers dominate (12). While Thiel looks at canonical writers like Carroll, Kingsley, and MacDonald, her primary purpose is to embrace eclectic and forgotten female writers. Yet she acknowledges the limitations of her own work and believes it will be a building block for “scholars who will continue to unearth new information” (15). [End Page 302]
In the introduction, Thiel poses critical questions to readers. How many writers still languish in obscurity as contemporary scholars focus on the selected and approved elite? Can we ever get beyond the “canon” and examine the bulk of literature? Will our perceptions continue to be shaped by the classic texts that dominate anthologies?
The Fantasy of Family is not the first work to focus on nineteenth century families. But Thiel is well-versed with previous books and positions her work effectively in this area of scholarship. Previous writers have looked at aspects of the Victorian family, but Thiel looks at the trans-normative family across a broad perspective. Historically, many children grew up in trans-normative families for a variety of reasons, including the early death of a parent. The purpose of this book is to examine nontraditional families within nineteenth-century literature and to study how well literature mirrors life at that time.
In Chapter 1, Thiel reviews and appraises the existing sociological methodology and contemporary discoveries relating to the Victorian family. Michael Anderson discusses family in Approaches to the History of the Western Family 1500–1980 (1980), but the trans-normative family is absent from this book. Writing nearly three decades later, Thiel attempts to fill in the gaps that are missing from this seminal text.
In Chapter 2, Thiel examines Victorian texts for children that feature “street arabs” and explores how authors underwrote middle-class ideology within tales about the destitute underclass. The destitute poor posed a continual threat to the social order, but their children could be saved by placing them in a middle-class environment. Thiel includes a discussion of Hesba Stretton’s Jessica’s First Prayer, in which the girl is forced to beg for food and scavenge on the streets before being saved by a minister’s family and raised in a middle class family. Thiel interrogates the prevailing theme that the poor are unable to care for their children. While this theme cannot be dealt with exhaustively, Thiel presents several examples that establish her argument.
Chapter 3 is dedicated to a discussion about stepmothers and the impossibility of re-establishing the family ideal in the wake of maternal death. The stepmother has a unique role in fairy tales, sometimes imposing cruel and unusual treatment upon children. Thiel discusses Harriet Childe-Pemberton’s Birdie: A Tale of Child-Life (1888), a story about a girl who resists the arrival of the new stepmother just a year after her mother’s death. While children are allowed to resist the stepmother initially, the middle-class family eventually prevails; the new woman...
