In reflection of the popularity of conduct books among nineteenth-century women writers, throughout the 1980s to 2000s, literary critics frequently examined conduct books to understand reading practices and materials. Studies of nineteenth-century domesticity show that popular nineteenth-century conduct books and a didactic reading culture reinforced in these books were essential to creating the image of the ideal mother and home. We should keep in mind, however, that nineteenth-century readers were exposed to a vast array of genres. This dissertation seeks to provide both an alternate and broader understanding of nineteenth-century reading culture and domestic education, tracing a persistent idea in nineteenth-century literature that stages reading, text, and violence as subverting and replacing parental authority.
This project also seeks to highlight texts that are comparatively understudied. Very little has been published on the texts analyzed in Chapters 2 and 3. They are certainly deserving of more scholarly attention for their depictions of complex anxieties about reading daughters and absent and/or violent parents in particular. In each chapter, examples of popular conduct books show what one might expect from nineteenth-century reading culture, while the literary examples I survey disrupt such expectations–conduct books attempt to contain reading, but literature shows it simply cannot be contained. Victorian concerns about reading are just as relevant and urgent issues in the present day. Questions concerning reading are intensely contested matters in literary studies and everyday life. Technological advancements have created a deluge of new genres, reading materials, ways of reading words and images, and narrative forms. We still question: What and how should children (not) read at schools and libraries, and why? Should parents have authority over what their children read?
While recent scholarship is helpful in answering these important questions, it is also crucial to return to earlier scholarship that provides historical context for women readers and conduct books. Conduct book writers strove to convince women that their natural role was that of wife and mother. The novels this dissertation examines work in opposition to the idea that a daughter should aim to become like her mother. Chapter 1 considers how public and private modes of reading operate in the establishment of families in The Mysteries of Udolpho (1794), Northanger Abbey (1817), and Pride and Prejudice (1818). In these texts, reading is never merely a form of entertainment. In Austen's world, reading matters a lot–reading functions as a mode of self-education and reflection of taste, playing a necessary role in courtship. Chapter 2 proposes reading as a mode of self-education that subverts parental authority and the fictional ideal of the middle-class household in Agnes Grey (1847). Learning was not, as was widely depicted in conservative mid-nineteenth century conduct books, a linear, one-way experience. Finally, I suggest that the mother-daughter partnership in Agnes Grey complicates what a successful domestic education looks like.
Chapter 3 investigates the depiction of families and parenting in fantastical tales about children that are narrated to young audiences by an adult figure. Many Victorian writers used fairy tales to comment on the issues of the day. Children's fantasy not only emerged from a new readership, but challenged nineteenth-century notions of parental guidance and the significance of the Victorian home. In The Light Princess (1864), Speaking Likenesses (1874), and The Old Nurse's Story (1852), not only are parents or parental figures depicted as comical, manipulative, lacking empathy, physically and emotionally absent, and foolish in turn, but parenting emerges as a source of substantial danger and violence to children. Examining what and how characters read in nineteenth-century literature both develops and challenges our understanding of parental guidance and authority (or its absence thereof). We must notice not only missing or neatly categorizable mothers and daughters in Victorian fiction, but those that challenge common images and perceptions of the Victorian family.