The Victorian Spinster and Colonial Emigration; Contested Subjects

by Kranidis, Rita S.

• ISBN13: 9780312216054
• ISBN10: 031221605X
• Format: Trade Book
• Copyright: 1999-02-15
• Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan

Summary

During the Victorian period thousands of women left England to seek work and new lives in the British colonies. This book examines the highly problematic issues surrounding the colonial emigration of unmarried Victorian women, revealing the many ways in which these women were regarded as cultural "excess." Rita S. Kranidis explains how England had little use for spinsters, a category spanning the working class through the middle class, including domestic laborers, genteel women, and middle class widows. Kranidis brings together a variety of discourses, including historical, critical, literary, and theoretical, to form a critical evaluation of the events she investigates. This study questions the very premises and cultural foundations of evaluative systems that render some women/subjects more essential than others, and considers how the expulsion of problematic British subjects is a practice that permeates many facets of Victorian culture. The construction of gender, the meaning of emigration, and the idea of nation are all explored in the literature of the period alongside primary sources such as census figures and the popular press.

Author Biography

Rita S. Kranidis is Assistant Professor of English at Radford University.

Table of Contents

Acknowledgments	ix
Introduction: The Imperial Import of the Emigrant Spinster	1	(18)
1. The Politics of "Superfluity": Empire, Class, Emigration, and the Single Woman	19	(40)
2. Preparations for Travel: Colonial Exports for Ideal Destinations	59	(40)
3. Domestic Maps: Internal Migration, Gender, and the Sociography of "Elsewhere"	99	(34)
4. Unsafe Journeys: Memory, Displacement, and Authority	133	(36)
5. Questions of Value: Female Identity as Excess	169	(32)
Notes	201	(17)
Works Cited	218	(9)
Index	227	(2)
About the Author	229