Woman and the Demon: The Life of a Victorian Myth

About this book

Here is a bold new vision of Victorian culture: a study of myths of womanhood that shatters the usual generalizations about the squeezed crushed and ego-less Victorian woman. Through copious examples drawn from literature art and biography Auerbach reconstructs three central paradigms: the angel/demon the old maid and the fallen woman. She shows how these animate a pervasive Victorian vision of a mobile female outcast with divine and demonic powers. Fear of such disruptive self-creating figures Auerbach argues produces the approved ideal of the dutiful family-bound woman. The awe they inspire associates them with characters in literature the only vehicles of immortality in whom most Victorians could unreservedly believe. Auerbach looks at a wonderful variety of sources: Svengali Dracula and Freud; poets and major and minor novelists Carlyle John Stuart Mill and Ruskin; lives of women great and unknown; Anglican sisterhoods and Magdalen homes; bardolatry and the theater; Pre- Raphaelite paintings and contemporary cartoons and book illustrations. Reinterpreting a medley of fantasies she demonstrates that female powers inspired a vivid myth central to the spirit of the age.