Abstract
The last chapter addresses Victorian conventions and restrictions on historical youth, particularly unconventional young women’s bodies, and minds. Libba Bray’s Gemma Doyle trilogy (2003, 3005, 2007), Jane Eagland’s Wildthorn (2009), Cat Winters’ The Cure for Dreaming (2014), and Mindy McGuiness’ A Madness So Discreet (2014) all feature the trials and tribulations of young adult women who live their lives outside of normative conceptions of gender, sexuality, or politics. This chapter suggests that, while young adult fiction’s inclusion of these women highlights many of the obstacles faced by queer people and othered subjects of the past, these texts also figure their female characters as liminal subjects who are in a period of transition—between spaces and places, as well as between rules and rebellion—as they pursue autonomy and selfhood independent of their social circumstances.
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Notes
- 1.
Cheryl A. Wilson identifies one feminist issue Bray’s neo-Victorian novels as the expression of sexuality, and discusses Gemma’s relationship with a Rokshana young man, Kartik, as outside the usual boundaries—literally in a different realm—away from Victorian sexual context (2012, 129–32).
- 2.
McGinnis refers here to the historical Athens Lunatic Asylum in southeast Ohio, known as The Ridges (373).
- 3.
The lobotomy was an intrusive, controversial neurosurgical procedure that severed most of the prefrontal cortex from the rest of the brain to cut off communication between these areas to alleviate mental distress. It was used on patients who had been deemed, by the doctors, to be violent or morally insane. It would make patients passive and confused as well as emotionally limited.
- 4.
“Nellie Bly,” née Elizabeth Jane Cochrane, was an investigative journalist for the Pittsburgh Dispatch where she wrote on issues like women’s right to work, to not marry, and to divorce and ongoing problems like the lives of female factory workers for poor wages. After leaving the paper, she went to the New York World; once there, she went undercover at the Women’s Lunatic Asylum (Blackwell’s Island) to expose the cruel mistreatment of women in asylums.
- 5.
See Brenda Ayres and Sarah E. Maier (2021) for a lengthy discussion of the stereotypes of redheads and the disruption of the same tropes in literature and film, including neo-Victorian narratives.
- 6.
For example, see Cara Dobbing and Alannah Tomkins (2020).
- 7.
Simon Joyce uses this idea of twenty-first-century society looking into the rear-view mirror of history to see what it reflects about us (2007).
- 8.
This trope of a photographer visiting a mental hospital is based in history and has precursors in adult neo-Victorian fiction. In the nineteenth century, Jean Paul Charcot famously had photographs taken of his hysterics at the Sâlpetrière Hospital in Paris to record hysterical movements (see Georges Didi-Huberman 2003); in addition, the hospital held the mad women’s ball to raise funds for the hospital and to give the inhabitants of the asylum a reminder of being in society. One British photographer, Hugh Diamond, used the newly invented technology of the camera to be objective and accurate regarding the visual indicators of mental illness; it was “based on the idea that one’s face reveals one’s mental state—with the goal of identifying visual signs of mental illness” (Wetzler 2021, n.p.).
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Maier, S.E. (2024). Deviant Young Womanhood: Liminal Queerness, Mad Femininity, and Spectral Subjectivity.
In: Neo-Victorian Young Adult Narratives . Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-47295-4_8
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