To browse Academia. This dissertation investigates the cultural meaning ascribed to feminine fashionable objects such as gloves, fans, parasols and vanity sets. I pay particular attention to issues of middle-class formation, the performance of gender, and the materiality of race, empire and colonialism. While these issues lie at the heart of British historiography, this project is written from a unique perspective which privileges cultural artifacts through material culture analysis.
Adding to these ideas, I argue that Victorian women performed a distinct type of femininity represented as passivity, asexuality, innocence, and leisure. By studying the repetitive gestures, poses and consumption practices of middle-class women, I show that certain corporeal acts helped to create Victorian femininity. This work also suggests that women participated in the British colonial project by consuming objects that were represented in the Victorian imagination as imperial spoils. As such, I argue that imperialism penetrated the everyday lives of Britons through several everyday objects.
Empire building also created anxieties surrounding questions of race. Women's accessories, such as gloves and parasols, helped British women to maintain their whiteness, an important way of distinguishing the 'civilized' Britons from the 'uncivilized' tanned colonial peoples.
Still, his words could almost describe our current state of academic affairs; 'thing theory' have established almost as secure a niche among humanists and social scientists as 'object biographies' of chairs, paperclips, sofas have carved out in popular writing.
Victorian studies has been one place that surge crested vigorously. Digital thesis embargoed until Aug. Print thesis available in the University of Auckland Library or may be available through Interlibrary Loan. Burlington VT: Ashgate, , As Dianne F. The continuous reiterations of the Victorian in popular neo-Victorian cultural artefacts have contributed to the establishment of the area of neo-Victorian studies, with the publication, in recent decades, of several books focused on millennial and post-millennial literary engagements with the Victorians.
