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This book examines the changing roles of fathers in the nineteenth century as seen in the lives and fiction of Victorian authors. Fatherhood underwent unprecedented change during this period. The Industrial Revolution moved work out of the home for many men, diminishing contact between fathers and their children. Yet fatherhood continued to be seen as the ultimate expression of masculinity, and being involved with the lives of one’s children was essential to being a good father. Conflicting and frustrating expectations of fathers and the growing disillusionment with other paternal authorities such as church and state yielded memorable portrayals of fathers from the best novelists of the age. The essays in this volume explore how Victorian authors (the Brontës, Dickens, Gaskell, Trollope, Eliot, Hardy, and Elizabeth Sewall and Mary Augusta Ward) responded to these tensions in their lives and in their fiction. The stern Victorian father cliché persisted, but it was countered by imaginative, involved, albeit faulty fathers and surrogate fathers. This volume poses fathering questions that are still relevant today: What does it mean to be a good father? And, with distrust in patriarchal authorities continuing to increase, are there any sources of authority left that one can trust?
Examining Victorian middle-class fatherhood from the fathers' own perspective, Valerie Sanders dismantles the persistent stereotype of the nineteenth-century paterfamilias by focusing on the intimate family lives of influential public men. Beginning with Prince Albert as a high-profile patriarchal role-model, and comparing the parallel case histories of prominent Victorians such as Dickens, Darwin, Huxley and Gladstone, the book explores the strains on men in public life as they managed their private relationship with their children and found a language for the expression of their pleasure, grief and anxiety as fathers. In a context of cultural uncertainty about the legal rights and moral responsibilities of fatherhood, the study draws on a wealth of unpublished journals and letters to show how conscientious Victorian fathers in effect invented a meaningful domestic role for themselves which has been little understood.
Outlaw Fathers in Victorian and Modern British Literature: Queering Patriarchy traces the representations of outlaw fathers, or queer patriarchs, and their relationships with their queer sons, in a particular literary tradition: mid-to-late-Victorian and twentieth-century British fiction and memoir. Specifically, I look at such representations in Anthony Trollope’s Doctor Thorne (1858) and The Prime Minister (1875-76) (while also drawing on An Autobiography (1883) and The Duke’s Children (1880)); Samuel Butler’s The Way of All Flesh (published in 1901), Henry James’s “The Lesson of the Master” (1888), J. R. Ackerley’s My Father and Myself (written in the 1930s and published in 1968), E. M. Forster’s “Little Imber” (1961) (with an occasional detour into The Longest Journey (1907), Howards End (1909), and Maurice (published in 1971)), and Alan Hollinghurst’s The Spell (1998). In the coda, I consider the implications of including transgender, transnational female-to-male fathers of color in the ranks of queer patriarchy and discuss two contemporary novels, Jackie Kay’s Trumpet (1998, Scotland) and Patricia Powell’s The Pagoda (1998, Jamaica and the United States), as well as—briefly—an episode an episode of the television show The L-Word (2008) and the documentary U-People (2007). The term “queer patriarchy” has two components. The first one is a non-traditional, primarily—but not exclusively—non-heterosexual, pervasively present, and culturally important, paternal subjectivity. The second one is the bond between such queer paternal figures and their sons, biological and non-biological. This study pays attention primarily to the relationship between psyche, language, and ideology, but it will join a larger conversation about the changing roles of men in general and fathers in particular, which is taking place outside of the field of literary studies.