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Full-Text Articles in Arts and Humanities
Female Performances: Melodramatic Music Conventions And 'The Woman In White', Laura Vorachek
Female Performances: Melodramatic Music Conventions And 'The Woman In White', Laura Vorachek
Laura Vorachek
While the similarities between melodrama and sensation fiction are often noted, the similar use of music in each has been overlooked. Melodrama is characterized by excessive emotion, flat character types, a focus on plot at the expense of characterization and exaggerated expressions of right and wrong. As its name implies, it also relied heavily on musical accompaniment. For much of the first half of rhe nineteenth century, only the patent theatres were allowed to present drama with spoken dialogue due to grants from Charles II in 1660 giving to two royal favourites, Killigrew and Davenant, exclusive rights, which came to …
Whitewashing Blackface Minstrelsy In Nineteenth-Century England: Female Banjo Players In 'Punch', Laura Vorachek
Whitewashing Blackface Minstrelsy In Nineteenth-Century England: Female Banjo Players In 'Punch', Laura Vorachek
Laura Vorachek
Blackface minstrelsy, popular in England since its introduction in 1836, reached its apogee in 1882 when the Prince of Wales took banjo lessons from James Bohee, an African-American performer. The result, according to musicologist Derek Scott, was a craze for the banjo among men of the middle classes. However, a close look at the periodical press, and the highly influential Punch in particular, indicates that the fad extended to women as well. While blackface minstrelsy was considered a wholesome entertainment in Victorian England, Punch's depiction of female banjo players highlights English unease with this practice in a way that male …
Dangerous Women: Vera Caspary’S Rewriting Of 'Lady Audley’S Secret' In 'Bedelia', Laura Vorachek
Dangerous Women: Vera Caspary’S Rewriting Of 'Lady Audley’S Secret' In 'Bedelia', Laura Vorachek
Laura Vorachek
Considering Vera Caspary's Bedelia as a reimagining of Mary Elizabeth Braddon's Lady Audley's Secret allows for a new critical interpretation that refutes the typical view of Bedelia as reinforcing traditional gender roles. Instead, Caspary critiques World War II America by bringing Victorian concerns with female roles into the twentieth century.
Intertextuality And Ideology: Jane Austen's 'Pride And Prejudice' And James Fordyce's 'Sermons To Young Women', Laura Vorachek
Intertextuality And Ideology: Jane Austen's 'Pride And Prejudice' And James Fordyce's 'Sermons To Young Women', Laura Vorachek
Laura Vorachek
In Jane Austen’s Art of Memory and other works, Jocelyn Harris has demonstrated the importance of Austen’s literary contexts for understanding and appreciating Austen’s art. One context for understanding Pride and Prejudice is the conduct book it mentions by name, James Fordyce’s Sermons to Young Women. Mr. Collins chooses it to read aloud to the Bennet girls, and when Lydia interrupts him, he responds: “I have often observed how little young ladies are interested by books of a serious stamp, though written solely for their benefit.” I would argue that reading Pride and Prejudice next to Fordyce’s Sermons reveals that …
Crossing Boundaries: Land And Sea In Jane Austen's 'Persuasion', Laura Vorachek
Crossing Boundaries: Land And Sea In Jane Austen's 'Persuasion', Laura Vorachek
Laura Vorachek
Jane Austen suggests in Persuasion the pressures that the increased mobility of the middle class placed on the established aristocratic society in her time. Anne Elliot especially brings to light the inherited assumptions of her society. She can marry within her social rank (Mr. Elliot or Charles Musgrove) or marry below her (Wentworth at age 23), but either is a choice within the limits established by her society. One owns land or one does not. But when Wentworth returns a man of name and wealth, he is not a member of the landed gentry nor is he below Anne in …
Speculation And The Emotional Economy Of 'Mansfield Park', Laura Vorachek
Speculation And The Emotional Economy Of 'Mansfield Park', Laura Vorachek
Laura Vorachek
At the midpoint of Mansfield Park (1814), the Bertram family dines at the Parsonage, and card games make up the after dinner entertainment. The characters form two groups, with Sir Thomas, Mrs. Norris, and Mr. and Mrs. Grant playing Whist, while Lady Bertram, Fanny, William, Edmund, and Henry and Mary Crawford play Speculation, This scene is central not only because Speculation reveals certain characters' personalities, but also because another type of “speculation” occurs during the game as the players contemplate or conjecture about one another. Moreover, “speculation” in the sense of gambling functions as a metaphor for the vicissitudes of …
Playing Italian: Cross-Cultural Dress And Investigative Journalism At The Fin De Siècle, Laura Vorachek
Playing Italian: Cross-Cultural Dress And Investigative Journalism At The Fin De Siècle, Laura Vorachek
Laura Vorachek
This examination of late Victorian journalism reveals that one type of clothing offered middle-class women protection from street harassment: cross-cultural dress. In appropriate ethnic attire, reporters and social investigators ventured into the immigrant communities that made up a part of England’s urban poor, exploring such trades as Jewish fur-puller or Italian organ-grinder. This incognito ethnic attire afforded women both the means and the authority to carry out their investigations into the Italian constituency of the Victorian working poor. This study also examines how costumes enabled female investigators to manipulate class- and gender-based assumptions about who had broad access to the …