ABSTRACT
This chapter deals with a discussion of the woman whose public character best exemplified a willingness to use the new power accorded to womanhood, Queen Victoria. It argues that Victoria’s reign is the culmination of a feminization of the monarchy related to an increasing divisibility of traditional monarchical power. The king’s body had to give up its claims to unify the social body by encompassing it if it were to undergo a change to a type of power Margaret Homans identifies with Queen Victoria’s reign, a change that both feminized the monarchy and made it a monarchy for the bourgeoisie. If Victoria was meant to be a model for women and a representation of virtuous womanhood, it was more often those women who served as visual symbols of middle-class appropriation of monarchic power. Thus the highly visible Queen was less likely to become publicly unruly if she was less often public.
