123043 PS PS Literary Studies (2022W)

As an era of contrasts and contradictions, the Victorian period was also a time of epochal changes in the understanding and performance of gender identities. The Victorian era did not only see unprecedented transformations in the legal, socio-cultural, and political standing of women. It also witnessed the diversification of publically acknowledged gender scripts. The novel offered a space where they could be addressed and negotiated. More often than not, it illustrated their instability, their fluid character, and their simultaneous social conditioning. By that, it drew attention to the incongruences between acknowledged gender scripts and actual quotidian possibilities. At the same time, it naturalised the institution of marriage and thus reinforced specific patterns of gendered behaviour, even as it eventually employed the failed-marriage plot to draw attention to the power inequality that such unions invited. Marriage, of course, was not attainable to all. And so, the Victorian novel also registered debates addressing new-fangled gender roles, such as that of the odd woman and the colonial male. It also took up the topic of sexuality, even if only indirectly. It drew attention to Victorian polymorphous desires while its changing form mirrored transformations that modernity brought to the conception of gender identities and male-female relations. The novel's utopian variety also provided a space for the envisioning of new gender futures. Last but not least, as part of the larger literary sphere, the novel and novel writing practically contributed to the widening of women's occupational possibilities and to the public visibility of their concerns (cf. Pietrzak-Franger 2020). In this proseminar, students will be introduced to these developments as they will also have a chance to actively pursue related research questions.