Royal Representations: Queen Victoria and British Culture, 1837-1876 (Women in Culture and Society Series)

Queen Victoria was one of the most complex cultural productions of her age. In Royal Representations , Margaret Homans investigates the meanings Victoria held for her times, Victoria's own contributions to Victorian writing and art, and the cultural mechanisms through which her influence was felt. Arguing that being, seeming, and appearing were crucial to Victoria's "rule," Homans explores the variability of Victoria's agency and of its representations using a wide array of literary, historical, and visual sources. Along the way she shows how Victoria provided a deeply equivocal model for women's powers in and out of marriage, how Victoria's dramatic public withdrawal after Albert's death helped to ease the monarchy's transition to an entirely symbolic role, and how Victoria's literary self-representations influenced debates over political self-representation. Homans considers versions of Victoria in the work of Elizabeth Barrett Browning, George Eliot, John Ruskin, Margaret Oliphant, Lewis Carroll, Alfred Lord Tennyson, and Julia Margaret Cameron.

Queen Victoria was one of the most complex cultural productions of her age. In Royal Representations, Margaret Homans investigates the meanings Victoria held for her times, Victoria's own contributions to Victorian writing and art, and the cultural mechanisms through which her influence was felt.

Arguing that being, seeming, and appearing were crucial to Victoria's rule, Homans explores the variability of Victoria's agency and of its representations using a wide array of literary, historical, and visual sources. Along the way she shows how Victoria provided a deeply equivocal model for women's powers in and out of marriage, how Victoria's dramatic public withdrawal after Albert's death helped to ease the monarchy's transition to an entirely symbolic role, and how Victoria's literary self-representations influenced debates over political self-representation.

Homans considers versions of Victoria in the work of Elizabeth Barrett Browning, George Eliot, John Ruskin, Margaret Oliphant, Lewis Carroll, Alfred Lord Tennyson, and Julia Margaret Cameron.

Frontmatter Figures (page ix) Foreword (Catherine R. Stimpson, page xiii) Acknowledgments (page xvii) Introduction: The Queen's Agency (page xix) 1 QUEEN VICTORIA'S SOVEREIGN OBEDIENCE (page 1) 2 QUEEN VICTORIA'S WIDOWHOOD AND THE MAKING OF VICTORIAN QUEENS (page 58) 3 THE WIDOW AS AUTHOR AND THE ARTS AND POWERS OF CONCEALMENT (page 100) 4 QUEEN VICTORIA'S MEMORIAL ARTS (page 157) Epilogue: Empire of Grief (page 229) Notes (page 245) Index (page 277) Examining Queen Victoria's own contributions to Victorian writing and art, this text looks at the cultural mechanisms through which her influence was felt. It explores the variability of Victoria's agency and of its representations using a wide array of literary, historical and visual sources. What made it possible, at a time when women were meant to "obey," for a woman to occupy the throne of England for sixty-three years and to leave the monarchy's domestic and international prestige, if not its political authority, enhanced?