Intersections of Gender, Class, and Race in the Long Nineteenth Century and Beyond ed. by Barbara Leonardi (review)

In Intersections of Gender, Class, and Race in the Long Nineteenth Century, Barbara Leonardi has collected essays that “explore the intersections of gender with class and race in the construction of national and imperial ideologies and the fluid transformation of some related cultural tropes from the Romantic to the Victorian period and beyond” (1). This volume uses an interdisciplinary approach to engage current conversations on Victorian constructions of gender, class, and race from a variety of scholarly perspectives and exposes the multifaceted ways “the family metaphor is [used as] an ideological tool that has been informing ideas of gender, class, and race since the end of the eighteenth century” (3). Each chapter explores how Victorian gender roles were simultaneously reinforced and destabilized, revealing that the heteronormative middle-class Victorian family was much less stable than it initially appeared. Leonardi structures the volume in five separate but related sections: “Unconventional Mothers of the Nation,” “Gender, Class, and the Nation,” “Gender, Race, and the Empire,” “Undoing Hegemonic and Military Masculinities,” and “Undoing the Heteronormative Family.”

Leonardi’s introduction lays the groundwork for the essays by exploring Edmund Burke’s family metaphor (which forms the connective tissue that runs through every essay in this volume) and situating the volume within scholarship by Anne Mellor, Josephine McDonagh, Phillipa Levine, Reina Lewis, and others. The three essays in the volume’s first section, “Unconventional Mothers of the Nation,” analyze the variety of ways nineteenth-century women destabilized the stereotype that middle-class women were naturally maternal. In “Motherhood, Mother Country, and Migrant Maternity,” Leonardi examines works by Mary Wollstonecraft, Sir Walter Scott, and James Hogg that feature disruptions to the traditional marriage plot, infanticide, and lesbian attraction so as to “provide literary examples that interrogate and destabilise the maternal role of women as educators of the British nation” (34). Daniel J. R. Grey takes up the subject of infanticide in his chapter, “‘No Crime to Kill a Bastard-Child’: Stereotypes of Infanticide in Nineteenth-Century England and Wales.” Grey’s historical survey demonstrates that women accused of infanticide often received leniency from “both the press and the criminal justice system” because they were believed to be temporarily insane, thereby protecting the image of naturally maternal women (42). The last chapter in this section, Kirsty Bunting’s “The New Woman in Her Confinement: Fin-de-siècle Constructions of Maternity and Motherhood,” explores the shifting discourse on marriage and maternity at the end of the nineteenth century. Bunting pays particular attention to instances of asexual female-female friendships that replace the heteronormative Victorian family due to the “Odd Woman” phenomenon of the mid- to late-nineteenth century.

The second section, “Gender, Class, and the Nation,” explores how class complicates prescribed gender roles and how both class and gender figure into imperial narratives. Anna Fenge’s “‘Another Class’: The Lady’s Maid in Short Stories 1920–1950” analyzes the relationship between lady’s maids and their mistresses in three twentieth-century short stories, exploring the complexity of class relationships from the inter-war to post-WWII years. According to Fenge, “These representations of lady’s maids show a working class that seeks the continuation of certain domestic structures rather than the development of a new working environment” (109). In other words, Fenge’s textual examples reinforce social structures established during the nineteenth century and position lady’s maids as childlike dependents of their mistresses/mothers. In the section’s second chapter, “The Destabilisation of Gender and National Boundaries in Lewis Grassic Gibbon’s A Scots Quair: A Long Nineteenth-Century Perspective,” Carla Sassi argues that the two central characters in A Scots Quair (a Scottish mother and her son) exhibit androgynous characteristics that subvert Victorian-era constructions of gender as well as imperial discourse that positions conquered nations as feminine and conquerors as masculine. Together, these two chapters provide...