This course will examine the “woman question” in the nineteenth century focusing on women’s covert and overt appropriation of the public sphere. We shall investigate the interplay of domesticity and publicity in Victorian literature looking at the conflicting representations of women’s role and aspirations in fiction and poetry by Charlotte Bronte, Christina Rossetti, George Gissing, Thomas Hardy, Henry James, and Mona Caird but also in other prose writings by Mill, Ruskin, Stickney Ellis, Eliot, and others. In particular we’ll examine the function of various spaces of residence or transit such as the home, the workplace, the entertainment hall (e.g. theatre), the city, the station, and the countryside, whose boundaries keep shifting in the Victorian period making the line between private and public sphere very thin. Through the study of literary, philosophical, sociological, and journalistic texts, and using a contemporary theoretical framework, we’ll examine the effect of the Victorian public and private spheres on the subjectivity of women.

The students will be evaluated on the basis of their oral presentations, the written examinations, as well as their participation in class discussions.

Instructor: Anna Despotopoulou