Professional Domesticity in the Victorian Novel
Women, Work and Home

Revisionary study of how domestic work gained social credibility through the language of professionalism.

Monica Feinberg Cohen (Author)

9780521591416, Cambridge University Press

Hardback, published 5 February 1998

232 pages
23.6 x 16 x 1.9 cm, 0.44 kg

"marvelous" Victorian Studies

Much attention has recently been given by scholars to the widening of the gender gap in the nineteenth century and the concept of separate spheres. Testing such constructions, and questioning the stereotypes associated with Victorian domesticity, Monica F. Cohen offers new readings of narratives by Austen, Charlotte Brontë, Dickens, Eliot, Eden, Gaskell, Oliphant and Reade to show how domestic work, the most feminine of all activities, gained much of its social credibility by positioning itself in relation to the emergent professions. By exploring how novels cast the Victorian conception of female morality into the vocabulary of nineteenth-century professionalism, Cohen traces the ways in which women sought identity and privilege within a professionalised culture, and revises our understanding of Victorian domestic ideology.

Preface
1. Persuading the navy home: Austen and professional domesticism
2. Homesick: the domestic interiors of Villette
3. Dickens I: Great Expectations and vocational domesticity
4. Dickens II: Little Dorrit in a home and the institutionalisation of form
5. Professing renunciation: domesticity in Felix Holt
6. A prejudice for milk: professionalism, nationalism and domesticism in Daniel Deronda
Afterword.

Subject Areas: Literary studies: fiction, novelists & prose writers [DSK]