Royal Representations

by Homans, Margaret

• ISBN13: 9780226351131
• ISBN10: 0226351130
• Format: Hardcover
• Copyright: 1999-02-02
• Publisher: Univ of Chicago Pr

Summary

Queen Victoria was one of the most complex cultural productions of her age. InRoyal Representations, Margaret Homans investigates the meanings Victoria held for her times, Victoria's own contributions to Victorian writing and art, and the cultural mechanisms through which her influence was felt. Arguing that being, seeming, and appearing were crucial to Victoria's "rule," Homans explores the variability of Victoria's agency and of its representations using a wide array of literary, historical, and visual sources. Along the way she shows how Victoria provided a deeply equivocal model for women's powers in and out of marriage, how Victoria's dramatic public withdrawal after Albert's death helped to ease the monarchy's transition to an entirely symbolic role, and how Victoria's literary self-representations influenced debates over political self-representation. Homans considers versions of Victoria in the work of Elizabeth Barrett Browning, George Eliot, John Ruskin, Margaret Oliphant, Lewis Carroll, Alfred Lord Tennyson, and Julia Margaret Cameron.

Table of Contents

Figures	ix	(4)
Foreword	xiii	(4)
Catharine R. Stimpson
Acknowledgments	xvii	(2)
Introduction: The Queen's Agency	xix
1 QUEEN VICTORIA'S SOVEREIGN OBEDIENCE	1	(57)
"The Queen Has No Equal": The Problem of a Female Monarchy	1	(16)
Privacy on Display: The Queen as Wife and Mother	17	(16)
The Queenly Courtship of Elizabeth Barrett	33	(10)
Photographic Realism's Abject Queens	43	(15)
2 QUEEN VICTORIA'S WIDOWHOOD AND THE MAKING OF VICTORIAN QUEENS	58	(42)
The Invisible Queen	58	(9)
Domestic Queens: Miss Marjoribanks	67	(18)
Making Queens: "Of Queens' Gardens" and the Alice Books	85	(15)
3 THE WIDOW AS AUTHOR AND THE ARTS AND POWERS OF CONCEALMENT	100	(57)
Bagehot's The English Constitution	101	(14)
The Queen's Books: The Early Years of His Royal Highness the Prince Consort	115	(16)
The Queen's Books: Leaves from the Journal of Our Life in the Highlands	131	(15)
The Reform Bill and the Queen's Footnotes	146	(11)
4 QUEEN VICTORIA'S MEMORIAL ARTS	157	(72)
Albert Memorials	157	(22)
Tennyson's Idylls of the King as an Albert Memorial	179	(23)
Cameron's Photographic Idylls: Allegorical Realism and Memorial Art	202	(27)
Epilogue: Empire of Grief	229	(16)
Notes	245	(32)
Index	277