Laurence Talairach-Vielmas

Moulding the Female Body in Victorian Fairy Tales and Sensation Novels

Laurence Talairach-Vielmas

Publié le : 19 juin 2008

Laurence Talairach-Vielmas brings together Victorian fairy tales and sensation novels - two anti-realistic genres - and shows how the representation of their heroines contributed to a deconstruction and a reconstruction of femininity. Read the author's introduction on this website.

femininity in narratives that depart from mainstream realism, from fairy tales by George MacDonald, Lewis Carroll, Christina Rossetti, Juliana Horatia Ewing, and Jean Ingelow, to sensation novels by Wilkie Collins, Mary Elizabeth Braddon, Rhoda Broughton, and Charles Dickens. Feminine representation, Talairach-Vielmas argues, is actually presented in a hyper-realistic way in such anti-realistic genres as children's literature and sensation fiction. In fact, it is precisely the clash between fantasy and reality that enables the narratives to interrogate the real and re-create a new type of realism that exposes the normative constraints imposed to contain the female body. In her exploration of the female body and its representations, Talairach-Vielmas examines how Victorian fantasies and sensation novels deconstructs and reconstruct femininity; she focuses in particular on the links between the female characters and consumerism, and shows how these serve to illuminate the tensions underlying the representation of the Victorian ideal.

Laurence Talairach-Vielmas is Senior Lecturer in English at the University of Toulouse-Le Mirail, France.


Ashgate Publishing
september 2007
198 pages

Read the introduction

"Femininity through the looking glass": Click here to download the author's introduction.

Read a review

Fabienne Moine reviews Moulding the Female Body for Cercles

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mise à jour le 20 juin 2008

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