ABSTRACT
As has been seen throughout this journey into mid-Victorian constructions of femininity, Victorian fairy tales, fantasies, and sensation novels, whether rewriting traditional folk tales or rehearsing versions of Cinderella, Snow White, Little Red Ridinghood, or Bluebeard, investigate the way women were led to conform to and to mould themselves in accordance with the dominant representations, ultimately questioning the possibility for woman to be anything but reflection, as Collins’s The Law and the Lady underlines. In all these narratives, the female body is projected onto reflecting surfaces or haunted by doubles. As Mopsa discovers a world of doubles women cannot escape in Ingelow’s Mopsa the Fairy, as Alice learns to draw ‘muchnesses’ in Carroll’s Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland, or as Flora visualizes the slippage of the female self when her image is reflected everywhere in Rossetti’s Speaking Likenesses, the female characters experience their own powerlessness in fantastic realms where male figures handle their bodies and seek to construct them as ethereal beings, as light women forbidden food and confined within glass structures. In the sensation novels, copies of the feminine ideal also mark the narratives. From Dickens’s Lady Dedlock and Braddon’s Lady Audley to Collins’s female protagonists, the novels constantly construct the female body as a surface or as an image which the female characters try to manipulate. Typifying the extent to which Victorian reality was increasingly becoming elusive, chimerical, and, inevitably, malleable, Victorian fairy tales and sensation novels alike provide us with a significant insight into the construction of femininity. Resonating with artificiality, bound to representation and moulded, as by a corset, to fit into a male-preferred pattern—while they threaten to refuse to be made rigid—their heroines highlight the tensions inhering in the definition of mid-century femininity.
