ABSTRACT
The previous chapter suggested that male authors participated in the cultural production of gendered identities through their representations of women’s hair, which contributed to a complex system of signification and differentiation in Victorian society. Women’s representations of hair bring to the fore a new set of issues: could they take part in a discourse which fetishized their own bodies? Did they recognize the cultural legibility of their hair? If so, did their deployment of hair as a sign correspond with the signifying system which their male counterparts elaborated? Or did their representations of the heroines’ hair highlight the constructedness and arbitrariness of hair codes? Did they alter or destabilize the sign, or at least suggest that it could acquire a plurality of references, or did they comply with the cultural assumption that femininity resided in, and could be controlled through, a system of signs?
