Alice Bonzom (MCF Université Lumière Lyon 2)
“From lady to virago, from con to ex-con: the transitions and tribulations of British female criminals and prisoners (1860s-1910s)”
When Mary Ann Lipman and her husband Elias were put on trial for causing the death of their nephew by willful neglect in 1870, Mary Ann was sentenced to eighteen months in prison while Elias was acquitted. The judge believed that “her conduct had been most unwomanly and criminal”. The use of the word “unwomanly” suggests that prescriptive gendered categories drew lines between the “good” women, the “ladies”, and the “bad” women, the “viragoes”. Newspapers reporting on court proceedings often insisted on how masculine some female defendants looked, suggesting an unnatural transformation, a transition from womanhood to un-womanhood, to a gendered no-(wo)man’s land. For psychiatrist Henry Maudsley, the female criminal turned into “a sort of fiend with all the vices of woman in an exaggerated form, and with none of her virtues” (1863). This “loss”, so to speak, of femininity was meant to be fixed by a stay in a woman’s prison, where offenders were supposed to clean, cook, sew and do laundry; in other words, where a “femininity 1.0.1” class was meant to allow them to transition back into the realm of proper womanhood. But the stigma of prison made them, instead, transition into the realm of tainted characters whose pasts interfered with the presents and their futures. “When a woman falls she falls precipitately, usually never to rise again”, wrote Adam Hargrave in Women and Crime (1914). If prison walls clearly separated places of confinement from the free world, leaving those walls did not always entail transitioning back into the free world. This paper intends to explore the primary and secondary deviance – to borrow concepts from sociologists Edwin Lemert and Howard Becker – triggered by the labels assigned to female offenders and prisoners in the Victorian and Edwardians eras. Using primary sources such as court proceedings, newspaper articles and reports, this paper will argue that when women stepped outside of the realm of what was legal, they also risked being forced to transition into categories that denied their femininity and questioned their ability to reintegrate society after a prison sentence.
Alice Bonzom is an Associate Professor in History at the Université Lumière Lyon 2. Her PhD, entitled “Between criminality, insanity, deviance and defiance: Victorian and Edwardian women in the London carceral net (1877-1914)”, was awarded a thesis prize in the “Social and Political History Since 1870” category by the French Institute for Justice and Democracy in 2020. My research bears on the history of prisons in the Victorian and Edwardian periods. More specifically, I am keen to explore the part played by gender in carceral and peri-carceral environments as well as scientific issues connected to deviance and criminality (eugenics, alcoholism, feeble-mindedness). My latest publication, entitled “‘Prison Echoes’: Composing Poetry to Compose Oneself in British Prisons (1830s-1910s)” (2024), focuses on the subversive and self-defining nature of prison writing.
Isabelle Cases (MCF Université de Perpignan Via Domitia)
« Traditions et passages : Akroydon, ou bâtir la transition »
Le village modèle d’Akroydon, bâti à côté d’Halifax à partir de 1859 par l’industriel Edward Akroyd qui lui donne son nom, est moins connu que certains sites contemporains comme Saltaire. Pour autant, si l’on revient sur le projet tel que décrit par Akroyd dans une présentation de 1862 intitulée “On Improved Dwellings for the Working Classes with a Plan for Building Them in Connection with Benefit Building Societies”, on est frappé par une approche qui s’inscrit au-delà du paternalisme de l’époque et qui envisage l’initiative comme un passage voué à produire des développements dont la perspective s’inscrit sur le long terme. Tant au niveau du débat sur les choix architecturaux que des tentatives de collaboration avec des institutions et des associations préexistantes, la réflexion sur un changement en profondeur et dans la durée apparaît clairement. La description d’Akroyd insiste de même sur l’adaptation et l’application rapide du modèle dans de nombreuses autres villes. Soucieux de l’impact des environnements insalubres, conscient de l’urgence à mieux loger une grande partie de la population, bien informé sur les acteurs potentiels d’un changement et sur les enjeux financiers, il inscrit son action dans une prise en compte du contexte large, contemporain et historique, tout en adoptant des visées ambitieuses à court terme, notamment pour ce qui concerne l’accès à la propriété pour tous. Malgré l’impact relativement limité de son entreprise, un retour sur le contexte et la présentation de la construction d’Akroydon permet de replacer le projet dans une position intermédiaire qui annonce déjà par certains aspects les cités jardins du siècle suivant.
Isabelle Cases est agrégée d’anglais et maître de conférences à l’université de Perpignan Via Domitia. Ses travaux portent sur le patrimoine architectural et l’archéologie industrielle au Royaume-Uni, ainsi que sur l’interprétation de la période et des valeurs victoriennes. Elle s’intéresse également à la représentation cinématographique de cette période. Elle est membre de l’axe Patrimoines du CRESEM (ER 7397) et a dirigé en 2023 l’ouvrage Bibliothèques. Héritages matériels, culturels et imaginaires publié aux Presses Universitaires de Perpignan.
Justine Cousin (PRAG Université de Caen)
“Titanic Stewardesses across Edwardian Era Gender Roles”
20 Titanic stewardesses were a minority compared to the 908 total crew members, yet their stories remain mostly untold. Most of them were not professional maritime workers. Their daily work in the catering department mixed both physical and psychological duties. It was very different depending on the department in which they were hired, from a female companion in the first class to a single woman who had to learn to all third-class women how to behave properly – including eating and washing. They had multifaced positions as opposed to the usual male specialized ones in the catering department. As members of the crew, they had to follow a rigid discipline both ashore and, on the ship, from the White Star Line company and the official authorities at the time. They belonged to the least-loved ship department aboard steamships and were unskilled low-waged workers. Housekeeping and personal service were deemed feminine and the stewardesses had a specific uniform in order to be noticed by the other passengers and members of the crew. Work was based on gender hierarchies which divided the colonial and metropolitan society between man and woman. Stewardesses’ duties challenged the traditional masculine assumptions of the seafaring community and patriarchal society of the Edwardian era. All the other people than white middle-class and ruling men were considered as dirty, emotional, and weak. As such stewardesses suffered from a horizontal and vertical segregation; they had very few possibilities of internal promotion as women workers. Such characteristics were like the society of the time and may explain why some many of them survived through the Titanic sinking – since they were first considered as women and second as maritime workers. There were few accounts from the Titanic stewardesses apart from the memoirs of Violet Jessop who survived several sinkings.
Justine Cousin (PRAG) teaches Contemporary History and Culture at the University of Caen. She is also a secondary school teacher. She holds a PhD in contemporary History and British civilisation from Sorbonne University and defended her thesis in 2018 on colonial sailors working for British imperial shipping companies (1860-1960). Her research themes are social and maritime history, as well as imperial and urban history from 1860 onwards. She is a member of two working groups of the ELHN (European Labour History Network), the AFHMT (Association française pour l’histoire des mondes du travail), H2C (Historiennes et historiens du contemporain) and the SAES (Société des Anglicistes de l’Enseignement Supérieur).
Marton Farkas (Maître de langues Université Sorbonne-Nouvelle)
“Transitional parallels – Catching Hopkins’ prosody”
‘Parallelism is of two kinds necessarily – where the opposition is clearly marked, and where it is transitional rather or chromatic’, writes Gerard Manley Hopkins of art, in general, and of poetry, in particular. My paper will offer an account of transitional parallelism in his theoretical work. If Hopkins’ prosodic theory was subject to dismissal by his early critics, his concept of sprung rhythm became a source of enduring obsession by the second half of the past century among linguists, structuralist and new critical readers and other academic devotees of the poet. Largely relegated to an underdog position in Hopkins criticism, it is all the more necessary to recover the critical and historical discourse that he conjured up around parallelism and Hebrew poetry. For, as Hopkins’ own critical discussion as well as his poetic word testify, the poetological consequences of parallelism go far beyond being a historical precedent for sprung rhythm. I argue that for Hopkins, in a departure from Robert Lowth’s concept of parallelismus membrorum, the parallelism of Hebrew poetry appears as a way of being for poetic language. As my reading of a Hopkins sonnetwill eventually suggest, parallelism is hard to catch but without it there is no poetic language.
Marton Farkas is a PhD candidate at Harvard University and a member of PRISMES at the Université Sorbonne-Nouvelle. He is currently “maître de langue” at the Université Paris-Dauphine. His dissertation, titled Parallel Members: Parallelism, Translation and Sacred Poetry, 1741-1929, considers English and German translations and poetics of the Bible with chapters on Robert Lowth, Johann Gottfried Herder, Gerard Manley Hopkins as well as on Franz Rosenzweig and Martin Buber.
Rim Kanso (Doctorante Université Bordeaux Montaigne)
“Andromeda in Victorian Britain: from Damsel in Distress to Hero”
A damsel in distress since time immemorial, Andromeda – of the Myth of Perseus and Andromeda – deserves to be seen under a new light. According to the myth, Perseus reached his hero status when he rescued Andromeda. My research, however, shows that Andromeda – through and despite her perceived inaction – is also a hero and that, by extension, heroism is genderless. First, by accepting to be chained to the rock as sacrifice, she allowed Perseus to achieve his heroic destiny. Second, she rescued an entire kingdom and people from annihilation. And third, she elevated herself to the hero status, precisely through the process of victimisation. Andromeda was revived in the Victorian era for her coveted ‘feminine’ attributes of submission, vulnerability, and dependence on the male. But on the other side of that coin is a reflection on real-life feminine figures who have left their mark on the Victorian era, most notably, Queen Victoria herself and Caroline Norton. The study relies on the nascent research on heroism and a new reading of the symbolism nestled in the paintings of 19th-century British artists. The dissertation compares two sets of corpora; the first being three poems by William Morris, Charles Kingsley, and Gerard Manley Hopkins and five paintings by William Etty, Frederic Leighton, Edward Poynter, Edward Burne-Jones, and John Roddam Spencer Stanhope. The research concludes that it was through her social status, her famous (in)action, and the violence she had endured on the rock that Andromeda was elevated to the status of the sacred and, ultimately, of hero. Modern research on heroism shows that the definition of a hero is not etched in stone and that it is indeed a process. Heroes are not those who simply complete their quest or demonstrate unparalleled physical strength but those who fulfil certain criteria. Among these criteria – or heroic attributes – Andromeda fulfils three main ones: (self-)sacrifice, fortitude, and resilience –attributes that allow her transition from victim to hero.
Rim Kanso (r[i]m; she/her) is a translator and researcher with Master’s degrees in translation from Saint Joseph University in Beirut and in English Studies from the University of Bordeaux Montaigne. Currently pursuing a PhD, her research focuses on mythological feminine figures and their representations in British art during the Victorian era. Rim’s work explores the intersection of mythology, gender, and art history, shedding light on how these figures were depicted and their cultural significance in Victorian society, and offers a new reading of these representations through the lens of gender and heroism studies.
Céline Lochot (PRAG IUT de Lille)
“Elusive meaning : De Quincey between fear and hope”
As “a late Romantic publishing with Victorian means and concerns” (Gerald Maa), Thomas De Quincey appears as a transitional author par excellence; and yet, he has also been described as an author who never fully adjusted to Victorian times and, “having lived well on into an age which was not his […] died almost an anachronism in 1859” (H.A. Eaton). De Quincey worries that Progress displaces outmoded lifestyles and values instead of outgrowing them. Like individuals, civilisations, landscapes, or ideas become superannuated and die. If we could read the palimpsest of successive layers of our History, whether individual or collective, we would chance upon “grotesque collisions” for lack of “natural connection” between them. And yet, De Quincey complains that school education does not present the “growth and development” at work in History, looks for permanent laws in economy, and begrudges “loose and rambling” biographies. He also wrote an extensive history of the Cesars, and a biography of Wordsworth and Coleridge. Moreover, he puts nostalgia aside in favour of a lyrical tone to announce the benefits (yet to come) of the French Revolution, and celebrate Progress (improvement of the national spirit and education with the improvement of communications and conversation). Throughout his autobiographical work, he keeps looking for the elusive “nexus” that would reconcile the child he was with the man he became, and make him whole. However, he seems bound to fail, as the insensible change connected to long-term evolution both warps our critical judgement, and distorts our memory, making us forget large parts of our past opinions and feelings, leaving us with a series of disjointed portraits, to be interpreted in the light of a few life-changing events, sudden crises and unexpected parentheses of happiness. Despite his expertise in style and rhetoric, De Quincey also enjoys casual, humorous transitions between ideas and articles, though they are often more meaningful than they appear, and actually connected to serious concerns.
Céline Lochot is an agrégée in English and holds a PhD in Anglophone Studies from the University of Burgundy (subject: Irony in the works of Thomas De Quincey). Since her recruitment as “PRAG” at the IUT in Lille in 2009, she has been teaching literary methodology at the Department of Anglophone Studies (University of Lille) since 2016. She has published several articles on Thomas de Quincey and a monograph entitled, Complexe de l’ironiste, De Quincey à l’œuvre (2021).
Mariana Teixeira Marques-Pujol (MCF Université Toulouse Capitole)
“Domestic Horror and Female Knowledge in Victorian Gothic Fiction: A Transatlantic Approach”
In Northanger Abbey (1817), Jane Austen’s Caroline Morland acknowledges that while Ann Radcliffe’s works (and their imitations) were “charming,” they did not necessarily reflect “human nature, at least in the Midland counties of England.” She observes: “In the central part of England there was surely some security for the existence even of a wife not beloved, in the laws of the land, and the manners of the age. Murder was not tolerated […] and neither poison nor sleeping potions to be procured, like rhubarb, from every druggist” (apud McCord Chavez, 2015, Gaskell’s Other Wives and Daughters, p. 60). Julia McCord Chavez argues that Austen hinted at the need to update late 18th-century Gothic tropes to address the concerns and experiences of 19th-century readers. Elizabeth Gaskell contributed significantly to this evolution by redefining the female Gothic in her short fiction published between 1850 and 1861, paving the way for what critics later termed “sensation fiction” in England. This paper aims to examine the development of the theme of “domestic horror” (Bernardi, 1999) in Elizabeth Gaskell’s novella The Grey Woman (1861) and Louisa May Alcott’s short story A Whisper in the Dark (1863). It focuses on how both texts portray the transitions undergone by the female body, where female knowledge emerges through physical rites of passage and transformation. These experiences are conveyed using subverted Gothic and sensation fiction conventions. Finally, I propose a transatlantic approach to Victorian Gothic fiction, illuminating the dynamics that shaped 19th-century literary life in both England and the United States. By examining these works in dialogue, we might better understand how Anglo-American authors redefined Gothic themes to explore female agency, domesticity, and identity.
Mariana Teixeira Marques-Pujol is an Assistant Professor of English at Université Toulouse Capitole. Her research spans a wide array of topics, including 18th-century English and French Enlightenment texts, English-language novels of the 18th and 19th centuries, women authors, and feminist criticism. She earned her PhD in Comparative Literature from the Department of English at the University of São Paulo (USP) in Brazil. Her scholarly work includes a study of the novels Fanny Hill by John Cleland and Margot la Ravaudeuse, attributed to Fougeret de Monbron (2015). She also contributed to the collection Women and Philosophy of the Enlightenment (2020) with an article examining the writings of Lady Mary Wortley Montagu and Mary Wollstonecraft. Recently, she published an article on Laurence Sterne in Revue Europe. She is an active member of the European Study Group of Nineteenth-Century American Literature. Her forthcoming articles explore the works of 19th-century American and British women novelists, including Catharine Sedgwick, Elizabeth Stuart Phelps, and George Eliot.