{"title":"Mary Watson’s Vanishing Acts: From The Sign of Four to Sherlock","authors":"Roshnara Kissoon","doi":"10.5325/victinstj.48.2021.0001","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.5325/victinstj.48.2021.0001","url":null,"abstract":"\u0000 The character of Mary Watson first appears in Arthur Conan Doyle’s The Sign of Four (1890). Scholars have read Mary as a personification of late nineteenth-century British imperial and societal anxieties. Mary is identified both with the dangerous colonial Other and New Woman and, conversely, with the “pure” and safe British domestic order that uneasily triumphs over these threatening forces. Though the critical discourse on Conan Doyle’s work acknowledges the ambivalence surrounding Mary, many critics ignore her eventual childless death in the original Holmes canon. Considering Karen Beckman’s study of the Victorian “vanishing woman” magic act, Mary’s death can be interpreted as this sort of “vanishing”—one that further resists the uneasy containment of the threats so often read in Conan Doyle’s novel. In the television series Sherlock (2010–17) created by Steven Moffat and Mark Gatiss, Mary Watson performs Beckman’s vanishing act in full, reappearing after her onscreen death. Though Sherlock’s Mary is seemingly divorced from her original Victorian context, a closer reading of her trajectory in the series suggests that the model of the “vanishing woman” is very much the same—with the historical points of context merely substituted. Sherlock’s treatment of Mary’s character in the twenty-first century, then, seems surprisingly even more inhibitive and violent than that of Mary’s character in its nineteenth century source material.","PeriodicalId":397139,"journal":{"name":"Victorians Institute Journal","volume":"17 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2021-12-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"126655196","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Annette R. Federico. My Victorian Novel: Critical Essays in the Personal Voice.","authors":"Lydia Craig","doi":"10.5325/victinstj.48.2021.0185","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.5325/victinstj.48.2021.0185","url":null,"abstract":"","PeriodicalId":397139,"journal":{"name":"Victorians Institute Journal","volume":"6 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2021-12-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"132949794","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Adam Grener. Improbability, Chance, and the Nineteenth-Century Realist Novel.","authors":"Eric G. Lorentzen","doi":"10.5325/victinstj.48.2021.0190","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.5325/victinstj.48.2021.0190","url":null,"abstract":"","PeriodicalId":397139,"journal":{"name":"Victorians Institute Journal","volume":"24 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2021-12-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"133153613","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Adapting Jane Eyre for the Celebrity Book Club","authors":"Lauren A Cameron","doi":"10.5325/victinstj.48.2021.0065","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.5325/victinstj.48.2021.0065","url":null,"abstract":"\u0000 Eleanor Oliphant Is Completely Fine (2017), the debut novel by Scottish writer Gail Honeyman, represents an ingenious adaptation of Jane Eyre that appeals strongly to modern book clubs. Eleanor Oliphant’s intertextual approach is not a straightforward translation of the events of Charlotte Brontë’s novel but rather a thoughtful transformation of its themes and characters. Moreover, the allusions to Jane Eyre are interwoven so thoroughly throughout Eleanor Oliphant that a reader with any degree of familiarity with Brontë’s novel will notice them and be able to comment on them. Eleanor Oliphant was the flagship selection for Reese Witherspoon’s enormously popular book club, “Reese’s Book Club,” which depends on social media to promote her selections, including Goodreads, an Amazon-owned book review platform. These social media platforms’ rating scales and digestible blurbs, as well as the imprimatur of a well-liked celebrity, provide the opportunity to choose middlebrow books quickly that the reading community will enjoy discussing with their friends. Eleanor Oliphant’s success provides a compelling model for authors looking to reimagine classic literature for modern audiences in addition to scholars looking to understand the appeal of popular fiction in our technologically oriented society.","PeriodicalId":397139,"journal":{"name":"Victorians Institute Journal","volume":"17 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2021-12-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"114515107","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Carlyle’s “Phallus-worship”: An Annotated Transcription","authors":"Mark Allison","doi":"10.5325/victinstj.48.2021.0161","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.5325/victinstj.48.2021.0161","url":null,"abstract":"\u0000 In this hitherto unpublished manuscript essay (c. 1848), Thomas Carlyle uses ancient Dionysian ritual as a symbol for a complex of contemporaneous social tendencies that he deplores. Foremost among these tendencies is the displacement of piety and duty by the exaltation of sensualism and romantic love, which Carlyle associates with revolutionary France, George Sand and her epigones, and circulating-library fiction more generally. “Phallus-worship” represents a jointure between Carlyle’s humane youthful writings and the authoritarian jeremiads of his old age, combining the literary virtuosity of the former with the caustic perspective of the latter. More broadly, “Phallus-worship” is a textual locus of the shift between early and mid-Victorian sensibilities, as Carlyle’s own residual puritanism marked the limits of his capacity to engage with the literary and cultural developments that interested a rising generation of Victorian men and women of letters.","PeriodicalId":397139,"journal":{"name":"Victorians Institute Journal","volume":"29 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2021-12-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"127982591","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"In Conversation with Enola Holmes: Neo-Victorian Girlhood, Adaptation, and Direct Address","authors":"Erin Temple","doi":"10.5325/victinstj.48.2021.0024","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.5325/victinstj.48.2021.0024","url":null,"abstract":"\u0000 Netflix’s Enola Holmes (2020) adapts Nancy Springer’s young adult novels by the same name for a new generation of viewers, using the affordances of film to engage varied source material and generic conventions. The film replicates often-used tropes and themes of both Neo-Victorian narratives and young adult literature and media—most notably, girl empowerment in a restrictive society. At the same time, Enola Holmes also challenges the notion of a bad or absent mother figure in children’s literature, complicating the character of Eudoria Holmes from Springer’s novels. While issues of adaptation are most obvious with regard to the Sherlock Holmes canon and Springer novels, Enola Holmes also employs Jane Eyre as an intertext, between shared characteristics in the plot and characterization as well as the use of direct address to speak to the viewer. With a familiar message promoting girl power and social activism, the rhetorical move made by Enola’s direct address invites the viewer to participate in the narrative.","PeriodicalId":397139,"journal":{"name":"Victorians Institute Journal","volume":"29 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2021-12-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"125973704","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Lissette Lopez Szwydky. Transmedia Adaptation in the Nineteenth Century.","authors":"A. Jones","doi":"10.5325/victinstj.48.2021.0198","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.5325/victinstj.48.2021.0198","url":null,"abstract":"","PeriodicalId":397139,"journal":{"name":"Victorians Institute Journal","volume":"44 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2021-12-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"123247649","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"“One of her delusions”: Maternity, Selfhood, and Voice in Mr. Rochester","authors":"E. Sferra","doi":"10.5325/victinstj.48.2021.0043","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.5325/victinstj.48.2021.0043","url":null,"abstract":"\u0000 Sarah Shoemaker’s Mr. Rochester, a recent adaptation of Charlotte Brontë’s Jane Eyre, disputes understandings of women’s selfhood as promoted by Jane Eyre and Jean Rhys’s Wide Sargasso Sea. By attributing the cause of Bertha Mason’s mental illness to disrupted maternity and not allowing her to articulate her loss fully to a compassionate listener, Shoemaker’s adaptation upholds the Victorian gender ideals which Brontë’s novel challenges and ignores the efforts of Wide Sargasso Sea to allow Bertha a voice. The positive reception of Mr. Rochester among readers signals that the politics of a source text may matter less than characters and plot to readers and writers of neo-Victorian adaptations. To understand how and why the reading public values Victorian novels today, scholars must critically examine adaptations and their fidelity to their source texts.","PeriodicalId":397139,"journal":{"name":"Victorians Institute Journal","volume":"180 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2021-12-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"123183844","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"L. E. L. : The Lost Life and Scandalous Death of Letitia Elizabeth Landon, the Celebrated “Female Byron.”","authors":"D. Latanē","doi":"10.5325/victinstj.47.2019-20.0259","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.5325/victinstj.47.2019-20.0259","url":null,"abstract":"","PeriodicalId":397139,"journal":{"name":"Victorians Institute Journal","volume":"28 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2020-12-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"134059322","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Victorian Science and Aesthetics: Coastal Erosion and Illegitimacy in Wilkie Collins's No Name","authors":"Michael R. Mitchell","doi":"10.5325/victinstj.47.2019-20.0178","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.5325/victinstj.47.2019-20.0178","url":null,"abstract":"","PeriodicalId":397139,"journal":{"name":"Victorians Institute Journal","volume":"122 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2020-12-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"127418819","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}