A01=Catherine Robson
Adult
Alice Liddell
Antithesis
Author_Catherine Robson
Autobiography
Brother and Sister
Caroline Norton
Category=DSBF
Category=DSK
Category=JBSF
Cathy
Central conceit
Centuries of Childhood
Charles Dickens
Confessions of an English Opium-Eater
Crime
Effie Gray
eq_bestseller
eq_biography-true-stories
eq_isMigrated=1
eq_isMigrated=2
eq_nobargain
eq_non-fiction
eq_society-politics
Ernest Dowson
Evocation
Femininity
G. (novel)
Grandparent
Grief
Hamlet's Father
His Favorite
I Wish (manhwa)
John Ruskin
Josephine Butler
Karoline Leach
Letter to His Father
Lewis Carroll
Lyrical Ballads
Margaret McMillan
Mary Carpenter
May Queen (TV series)
Melodrama
Misery (novel)
Mrs.
Narcissism
Narrative
Neil Postman
Nostalgia
Novelist
Parody
Pedophilia
Personal History
Photography
Poetry
Prostitution
Quilp
Romanticism
Rose La Touche
Royal Commission
Sarah Stickney Ellis
Secrecy (book)
Self-love
Sensationalism
Sentimentality
Sheila Jeffreys
Social purity movement
Sonnet sequence
Superiority (short story)
Sylvie and Bruno
The Angel in the House
The Beast in the Jungle
The Blind Girl
The Cry of the Children (poem)
The Erotic
The Maiden Tribute of Modern Babylon
The Old Curiosity Shop
V.
Victorian era
William Cobbett
Writing
Product details
- ISBN 9780691115269
- Weight: 369g
- Dimensions: 152 x 235mm
- Publication Date: 26 May 2003
- Publisher: Princeton University Press
- Publication City/Country: US
- Product Form: Paperback
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Fascination with little girls pervaded Victorian culture. For many, girls represented the true essence of childhood or bygone times of innocence; but for middle-class men, especially writers, the interest ran much deeper. In Men in Wonderland, Catherine Robson explores the ways in which various nineteenth-century British male authors constructed girlhood, and analyzes the nature of their investment in the figure of the girl. In so doing, she reveals the link between the idealization of little girls and a widespread fantasy of male development--a myth suggesting that men become masculine only after an initial feminine stage, lived out in the protective environment of the nursery. Little girls, argues Robson, thus offer an adult male the best opportunity to reconnect with his own lost self. Tracing the beginnings of this myth in the writings of Romantics Wordsworth and De Quincey, Robson identifies the consolidation of this paradigm in numerous Victorian artifacts, ranging from literary works by Dickens and Barrett Browning, to paintings by Frith and Millais, to reports of the Royal Commission on Children's Employment.
She analyzes Ruskin and Carroll's "high noon" of girl worship and investigates the destruction of the fantasy in the closing decades of the century, when social concerns about the working girl sexualized the image of young females. Men in Wonderland contributes to a growing interest in the nineteenth century's construction of childhood, sexuality, and masculinity, and illuminates their complex interconnections with a startlingly different light. Not only does it complicate the narratives of pedophilic desire that are generally used to explain figures like Ruskin and Carroll, but it offers a new understanding of the Victorian era's obsession with loss, its rampant sentimentality, and its intense valorization of the little girl at the expense of mature femininity.
Catherine Robson is Assistant Professor of English at the University of California, Davis, where she specializes in nineteenth-century British literature and culture. She is also a faculty member of the University of California Dickens Project.
