Abstract
The topic of the ‘woman at the window’ has never been thoroughly studied in nineteenth-century English literature despite the attention that related issues of the separation between the public and private spheres and the gendered usages of space during this period have received. In order to present how the window may constitute a space of its ‘own’, i.e. neither belonging to public nor private spaces, this article will approach the signification of windows in literary texts produced by women throughout this century. Addressing the recurrent presence of windows in woman-authored writings, on the one hand, and the way that middle- and upper-class female characters are depicted in relation to windows, on the other, might shed new light on how English modern women writers conceived space as well as their place in society. This implies to question what is unique and distinctive about the ‘woman at the window’ in the English modern literature and whether it presents any differences from the other ‘window women’ from the past. Following the approach to the window motif by art historians Eitner (1955), Shefer (1983) and Bastida de la Calle (1996), it will be seen how the ‘woman at the window’ to be found in these novels differs from the deep-rooted ideas associated with this figure. Indeed, a comparative analysis of the selected novels will attest that the space produced by windows is not physical. Rather, windows are employed as a mental, reflective retreat where female characters go to when they feel desolation, disappointment, restlessness, but also when they daydream about a different life to the one they have, a life beyond the confines of their home.
Similar content being viewed by others
Notes
In The Little Republic: Masculinity & Domestic Authority in Eighteenth-Century England (2012), Karen Harvey extensively describes the domestic experiences of eighteenth-century English men.
Conversely, Dorothy van Ghent (1961) views the windows in Wuthering Heights as liberating or, at least, offering new opportunities to the characters.
References
Primary sources:
Brontë, C. (2009). Shirley, a tale. Hertfordshire, UK: Wordsworth Editions.
Brontë, E. (2012). Wuthering Heights. London, UK: Penguin Books.
Eliot, G. (1994). Middlemarch, A Study of Provincial Life. London, UK: Penguin Books.
Gaskell, E. C. (1987). Wives and daughters, an every-day story. Oxford, UK: Oxford University Press.
Secondary sources:
Bastida de la Calle, M. D. (1996). La mujer en la ventana, una iconografía del XIX en pintura e ilustración. Espacio, Tiempo y Forma, Serie VII, Historia Del Arte, 9, 297–316.
Beck, C. (2021). Mobility, spatiality, and resistance in literary and political discourse. Cham, CH: Palgrave Macmillan. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-83477-7
Cirnigliaro, N. S. (2009). Through the cellar and from the window: Urban domesticity and literary creation in early modern Spain (1583–1663) (Doctoral Dissertation). University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, MI.
Cohen, E. S. (2009). To pray, to work, to hear, to speak: Women in Roman streets c. 1600. In R. Laitinen & T. V. Cohen (Eds.), Cultural history of early modern European streets (pp. 95–117). Boston, MA: Brill.
Cowen Orlin, L. (2002). Women on the threshold. Shakespeare Studies, 25, 50–58.
Eitner, L. (1955). The open window and the storm-tossed boat: An essay in the iconography of Romanticism. The Art Bulletin, 37(4), 281–290. https://doi.org/10.1080/00043079.1955.11408316
Friedman, A. T. (1992). Architecture, authority, and the female gaze: Planning and representation in the early modern country house. Assemblage, 18, 40–61. https://doi.org/10.2307/3171205
Gilbert, S. M., & Gubar, S. (1979). The madwoman in the attic: The woman writer and the nineteenth-century literary imagination. London, UK: Yale University Press.
Gowing, L. (2000). “The freedom of the streets”: Women and social space, 1560–1640. In P. Griffiths & M. R. S. Jenner (Eds.), Londinopolis: Essays in the cultural and social history of early modern London (pp. 130–152). London, UK: Manchester University Press.
Harvey, K. (2012). The little republic: masculinity & domestic authority in eighteenth-century England. Oxford, UK: Oxford University Press. https://doi.org/10.1093/acprof:oso/9780199533848.001.0001
Henitiuk, V. (2007). Embodied boundaries: Images of liminality in a selection of women-authored courtship narratives. Madrid, ES: Gateway Press. https://doi.org/10.1177/0091450915569499
Hoeveler, D. L. (1998). Gothic feminism: The professionalization of gender from Charlotte Smith to the Brontës. The Pennsylvania State University Press. https://doi.org/10.5325/j.ctv14gnztb
Kaartinen, M. (2002). Public and private: Challenges in the study of early modern women’s Lives. In K. Tuohela (Ed.), Time frames. Negotiating cultural history (pp. 89–104). Turku, FIN: Turku yliopisto.
Kuffner, E. (2019). Fictions of containment in the Spanish female picaresque: Architectural space and prostitution in the early modern Mediterranean. Amsterdam, NL: Amsterdam University Press. https://doi.org/10.1515/9789048538171
Massey, D. (1994). Spaces, place, and gender. Minneapolis, MN: UP Minnesota.
Morris, R. J. (2005). Men, women and property in England, 1780–1870. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press. https://doi.org/10.1017/CBO9780511495953
Orendorf, J. M. (2009). Architectural chastity belts: The window motif as instrument of discipline in Italian fifteenth-century conduct manuals and art. Quidditas, 30, 140–150.
Rothstein, M. (2021). What lies between the public and the secret? In M. Green, L. C. Nørgaard, & M. B. Bruun (Eds.), Early modern privacy: Sources and approaches (pp. 423–437). Brill, NL: Leiden. https://doi.org/10.1163/9789004153073_020
Saggini, F., & Soccio, A. E. (2012). The house of life: Representations of the house from Richardson to Woolf. Newcastle, UK: Cambridge Scholar Publishing.
Shefer, E. (1983). The woman at the window in Victorian art and Christina Rossetti as the subject of Millais's Mariana. The Journal of Pre-Raphaelite Studies, 4(1), 14–25.
Shepherd, H. (2018). Women’s visibility and the ‘vocal gaze’ at windows, doors and gates in vitae from the thirteenth-century low countries. In V. Blud, D. Heath, & E. Klafter (Eds.), Gender in medieval places, spaces and thresholds (pp. 205–217). London, UK: University of London Press.
Singh, J. (2022). Feminist literary and cultural criticism: An analytical approach to space. Singapore, SG: Springer. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-19-1426-3
Staeheli, L. A. (2008). Publicity, privacy, and women’s political action. In V. Mamadouh, & J. Agnew (Eds.) Politics: critical essays in human geography (pp. 407–425). London, UK: Routledge. https://doi.org/10.4324/9781315246512-21
Tally, R. T. (2021). Series editor’s preface. In C. Beck (Ed.), Mobility, spatiality, and resistance in literary and political discourse (pp.v-vi). Cham, CH: Palgrave Macmillan.
Tomas, N. R. (2006). Did women have a space? In R. J. Crum & J. T. Paoletti (Eds.), Renaissance Florence: A social history (pp. 311–328). New York, NY: Cambridge University Press.
Tosh, J. (1999). The old Adam and the new man: Emerging themes in the history of English masculinities, 1750–1850. In T. Hitchcock & M. Cohen (Eds.), English masculinities, 1660–1800 (pp. 217–238). London, UK: Longman.
Van den Heuvel, D. (2019). Gender in the streets of the premodern city. Journal of Urban History, 45(4), 1–18. https://doi.org/10.1177/0096144218768493
Van Ghent, D. (1961). The English novel: Form and function. New York, NY: Harper & Row. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-349-10885-5_5
Vickery, A. (1998). The gentleman’s daughter: Women’s lives in Georgian England. New Haven and London, UK: Yale University Press.
Von Meiss, P. (1970). Elements of architecture: From form to place. Abingdon, UK: Routledge.
Funding
No funding was received for conducting this study.
Author information
Authors and Affiliations
Corresponding author
Ethics declarations
Conflict of interest
The author has no conflicts of interest to declare that are relevant to the content of this article.
Additional information
Publisher's Note
Springer Nature remains neutral with regard to jurisdictional claims in published maps and institutional affiliations.
Rights and permissions
Springer Nature or its licensor (e.g. a society or other partner) holds exclusive rights to this article under a publishing agreement with the author(s) or other rightsholder(s); author self-archiving of the accepted manuscript version of this article is solely governed by the terms of such publishing agreement and applicable law.
About this article
Cite this article
Ferràndez López, A. Window Women: A Way into Nineteenth-Century English Literature. Neophilologus 107, 311–327 (2023). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11061-022-09749-2
Accepted:
Published:
Issue Date:
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11061-022-09749-2