Abstract
Focus in this chapter rests on how neo-Victorian young adult narratives of girlhoods, and girl cultures in boarding-school books, examine and critique the socialisation of young people alongside ideas of “proper” femininity. Libba Bray’s Gemma Doyle trilogy—A Great and Terrible Beauty (2003), Rebel Angels (2005), and The Sweet, Far Thing (2007)—features young female characters who are on a quest for agency and independence in a system that seeks to regulate their bodies and minds. It is only when they become aware of the social strictures that confine them that they begin to live more authentic lives. “Mis(s)education” suggests that these novels return to the nineteenth century to examine the role that extremely binarised gender roles play in both Victorian and contemporary conceptions of girlhood, and how young women must work to think beyond these ideologies.
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Notes
- 1.
The use of the plural for girl cultures and girlhoods is intentional; Lynne Vallone and Claudia Nelson are correct in that “Girls’ culture was not monolithic but multivocal” (1994, 2). Although this chapter focuses on one trilogy to make specific comments on the culture of the finishing school, but not on all the diversity of girls or schools.
- 2.
The “Angel in the House” has become a kind of shorthand for these characteristics as aspired to in life but also described in fiction, particularly as opposed to the other end of the dichotomy, the “Whore.” For a full consideration of the polarization of women as binary oppositions of character, see Nina Auerbach (1982).
- 3.
There are many excellent discussions of the New Woman, including the following seminal texts: Gail Cunningham’s The New Woman and the Victorian Novel (1978), Linda Dowling’s “The Decadent and the New Woman” (1979), Lyn Pykett’s The Improper Feminine (2003), Ann Heilmann’s and Margaret Beetham’s New Woman Hybridities (2004) and others.
- 4.
The profession of governess was an important one, particularly for young women with education but without means; according to the 1861 census, there were 24,770 governesses in England and Wales (Hughes 22).
- 5.
Absinthe, a high alcohol anise flavoured spirit made from wormwood is sometimes referred to as la fée verte and is most often associated with the belle monde of the fin de siècle in Paris or of Bohemian life. It was particularly used and/or described by artists and authors like Charles Baudelaire, Edgar Degas, Édouard Manet, and Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec. A scathing indictment of the drink was written by Marie Corelli in Wormwood: A Drama of Paris (1890). Usually depicted as a drink among degenerates during the late Victorian age, in Bray’s novel it is easily acquired by a young man and distributed to his friends with its use mirroring that of a date-rape drug. For a full discussion, see Doris Lanier (2004).
- 6.
Difficult subjects have increasingly appeared in young adult fiction with novels that address BIPOC issues including race, LGBTQ+ gender and sexuality conversations, teen suicide, self-harm, abuse, sexual assault, and others.
- 7.
Following Christine Wilkie-Stibbs observation that loss of language makes victims into non-subjects, in her chapter on “Queer Carnalities” Kokkola reverses the direction of language loss to consider the move from silence to voice “the dominant trope of trauma literature” (176).
- 8.
On the “knowing” child, Kokkola laments that the “abused child is not a blank slate” (203) as envisioned by the Romantics. Rosemarie Bodenheimer writes about how a Dickensian childhood is defined by its abnormality; rather than protected, it is inadequately taken care of and suffers physical and psychological abuse or exploitation, leaving the child feeling alienated (see 2015).
- 9.
Danielle Russell discusses the powerful figure of the witch in relation to the expectations of family in Bray’s trilogy (see 2016).
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Maier, S.E. (2024). The Mis(s) Education of Young Women. In: Neo-Victorian Young Adult Narratives . Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-47295-4_7
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