The Liquefaction of Desire: Music,Water and Femininity in Victorian Aestheticism

This article reconsiders Victorian images of mermaids and sirens through a detailed examination of two images: Frederic Leighton's Lieder ohne Worte (1861, oil on canvas, Tate Britain) and Edward Burne-Jones's The Depths of the Sea (1886, oil on canvas, private collection). It demonstrates that the themes of water, music and femininity were entwined in the Victorian imagination, by setting these two paintings within the context of Victorian artistic, literary and cultural production. It shows that musical images were prevalent in the emerging Aesthetic movement. Musical subjects freed artists and audiences from the conventions of narrative interpretation, and allowed them instead to concentrate on exploring mood and colour.

Pictures of mermaids add a further twist to the Aesthetic preoccupation with music. This article reveals that mermaids made explicit the underlying connection between musical performance and sensuality. It also suggests that the idiosyncratic depiction of the mermaid by Burne-Jones and the ambiguous sexuality of Leighton's figures could be read as symptomatic of changing conceptions of desire. It argues that these images embodied the shift from ardour to libido. In other words, love was no longer described as burning and fixed, but as fluid and shifting. This transformation in the way desire was theorised was most urgently presented in Freud's Three Essays on Sexuality (1905). However, this article suggests that the same ideas were being made visible in Aesthetic art and writing from the mid-nineteenth century.     

Turning like a Femme: Figuring Critical Femininity Studies

Psychotropics and alcohol are psychoactive substances with different cultural meanings and opposing gender associations. This paper examines the Swedish press debate on gender and psychotropics and compares it with the press debate on gender and alcohol, aiming to identify the conditions under which gendered moral boundaries of acceptable/unacceptable consumption are defended. The study shows that boundaries acquire a heightened moral status in news stories (1) that deal with a topic related to cultural ideas about essential gender difference, (2) where the cultural status of the psychoactive substance is linked to selfish and/or hedonistic motives, and (3) where innocent victims of consumption can be identified. Moreover, it shows that the “bad” characters constructed through this moral boundary are portrayed as exhibiting “excessive masculinity” and “insufficient femininity”. On the basis of these findings, it is argued that newspaper discourse on psychotropics and alcohol still relies quite heavily on gendered and heteronormative ideas.     

Working Girls: Femininity and Entrapment in Peyton Place and Valley of the Dolls

Jacqueline Susann's Valley of the Dolls (1966) and Grace Metalious's Peyton Place (1956) are novels that have long exerted a powerful hold on the popular imagination. The bestselling Peyton Place was adapted into a successful film in 1957 before becoming an iconic television series, running from 1964 to 1969. Valley of the Dolls was similarly re-imagined in two films, Valley of the Dolls (1967) and Beyond the Valley of the Dolls (1970), which, even today, retain a cult following. These books are typically remembered for their scandalous bringing to light of such ‘taboo’ issues as adultery, abortion, female sexuality and sexual abuse. But this article suggests that Peyton Place and Valley of the Dolls are equally preoccupied with a sympathetic examination of the role of women in the post-war workplace. In both of these novels, the process of female self-fashioning is integrally related to a woman's entry into the workforce, and to the making and controlling of her own money. But this entry into the male-dominated workforce is inherently fraught with danger, and Metalious and Susann expose some of the myriad ways in which the so-called ‘American Dream’ is contingent on the entrapment, suppression and regulation of various forms of female desire and agency.     

The new technology,class formation and class action in the Indian countryside

The central aim of this article is to try and assess, on the basis of the existing evidence, what influence, if any, the technological innovations that have been introduced into Indian agriculture since the mid‐1960s have hadupon class formation and class action in the Indian countryside. An attempt is made, further, to suggest, if only briefly, the significance of this for urban class formation and class action. The nature of the new technology and some of its implications for the labour process in agriculture are identified and it is held that the distinction between biochemical innovations and mechanical innovations, to the extent that those who make it argue that technological innovation can be limited to the former, is a false one. It is stressed that partly because of the intensified time constraint brought about by the application of biochemical innovations the pressure to mechanise is likely to be strong, as mechanisation becomes increasingly profitable. The evidence reveals that the new technology has meant certain class‐in‐ itself changes. It has hastened the social differentiation that was already in motion, although in complex ways that have yet to work themselves out fully. Some of the characteristics of a process of partial proletarianisation are noted and the’ nature of the emerging rural proletariat and of new relations between rural labourers and dominant classes analysed. What these changing structural features have meant with respect to the class consciousness and class‐for‐itself action of the rural proletariat is given attention, and the indeterminate nature of the outcome indicated by the contrast between north‐west India (where class action has been relatively weak) and the Tanjore district of Tamil Nadu (where the organised power and militancy of agricultural labourers have achieved substantial success). The growing emergence of a rich peasantry as a class‐in‐itself and a powerful class‐for‐itself is treated and some of the political implications of this drawn, especially in relation to Indian state power and its class basis.     

Battle of Femininity: romantic heroines and modern sexuality in the interwar middlebrow women's novel

Focusing on Rosamond Lehmann's The Weather in the Streets, Rose Macaulay's Dangerous Ages and E. H. Young's William, this article examines the representation of young romantic heroines in the context of emergent discourses on women's sexuality, marriage and motherhood. It is argued that these heroines, ambivalent and tentative in their quest for sexual modernity, represent the middlebrow's moral stance that reflects the paradoxical attitude of the interwar era towards modern women. A juxtaposition of these texts reveals a battle of varying versions of femininity, while a fine balance is mediated between the progressive and conservative ends of the middlebrow spectrum of values.