Reveling in Restraint: Limiting the Neo-Victorian Girl

There is an inherent tension in neo-Victorian fiction¹ between deviance and comfort. Ann Heilmann and Mark Llewellyn refer to this as the appeal, on the one hand, of the "dangerous edginess of nineteenthcentury fiction," "the possibilities nineteenth-century fiction always contained within itself for subversion" (4), and, on the other hand, what many neo-Victorian critics observe as comforts inherent in the nostalgia the genre has the potential to provide.² This tension is both defused and elevated in contemporary children's fiction depicting or alluding to the long nineteenth century. Except for a special edition of Neo-Victorian Studies, The Child in Neo-Victorian Arts and Discourse (2012), put together by Anne Morey and Claudia Nelson, and a recent collection, The Victorian Era in Twenty-First Century Children's and Adolescent Literature and Culture (2018), edited by Sonya Sawyer Fritz and Sara K. Day, the vast majority of criticism focusing on neo-Victorian texts over the last few decades has centered on texts designed primarily for adults. Yet growing numbers of neo-Victorian texts take children as their primary audience.³ It is to these understudied texts this article will turn, tracing some of the contradictions and critical commonplaces of neo-Victorianism to examine portrayals of gender and especially girlhood in a range of neo-Victorian children's texts: adaptations, realist texts, and a notably long-lasting, slowly evolving, children's neo-Victorian fantasy series.

In their consideration of contemporary children's neo-Victorian texts, Morey and Nelson reference the nineteenth century's seemingly unfettered imperialist practices to acknowledge that "part of the past's appeal may be the lack of restraint that it promises to those pursuing artistic and financial success" ("Secret Sharer" 6). As ideas of "dangerous edginess" and "subversion" highlighted by Heilmann and Llewellyn suggest, adult neo-Victorian texts and even Young Adult (YA) neo-Victorian texts often take as their focus this seeming "lack of restraint": liberating explorations of what is typically repressed, oppressed, dark, and/or hidden in nineteenth-century texts—such as explicit sexuality and deviations from heteronormative expectations. The very nature of their audience ensures that adult publishers and purchasers would likely frown on children's texts that, say, offer overt explorations of sexuality. As a result, children's neo-Victorian texts, unlike their adult counterparts, are frequently left both grappling with and reveling in restraint rather than enjoying a lack of it, a fact that is perhaps most forcefully clear with the case of children's literature featuring girl protagonists.

Girlhood, and the space between childhood and adulthood (including but not limited to today's notions of adolescence), were challenging concepts for the Victorians, especially in the latter part of the century and at the turn of the century when, increasingly, ideas of what girls and women could be and do were under vigorous debate. This fact has been observed by a variety of children's literature scholars, including Sally Mitchell in her groundbreaking The New Girl and Beth Rodgers in her recent revisiting of the idea of the "New Girl" (or really, the "modern girl") and ambiguous notions of adolescent girlhood. Indeed, in their consideration of Katie Kapurch's analysis of Jane Eyre adaptations today, Morey and Nelson echo such ideas and state the situation bluntly: "girlhood was a troubling, ambiguous concept for the Victorians" ("Secret Sharer" 8). They note, though, that the Victorians' difficulty in pinpointing "girlhood" may help "to explain the popularity of the neo-Victorian for modern girls, who must confront similar ambiguities in social status," if not in "negotiating agency" (8).

It is with this notion of ambiguous girlhood that I return to Morey and Nelson's comment about nineteenth-century settings as a place of "lack of restraint" today. For realist neo-Victorian texts, or texts adapting original nineteenth-century literature (whether realist or fantastic in origin), negotiating nineteenth-century limitations is seemingly inevitable if one wishes to remain faithful to the period or to the origin text. Indeed, realist or adapted neo-Victorian texts' focus on historical accuracy aligns with Kate Mitchell's argument for "[p]ositioning...