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Girl

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  18 September 2023

Lauren Byler Open the ORCID record for Lauren Byler [Opens in a new window]
Lauren Byler*
Affiliation:
California State University, Northridge, United States
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Abstract

This essay surveys the variant meanings and uses of the term “girl” caused by gender, age, class, race, and etymological differences. It argues that the extremes of idealization and contempt expressed toward girls and through the figure of the girl accentuate the girl's use as a fulcrum for assigning value in Victorian literature and culture.

Type
Keywords Redux
Information
Victorian Literature and Culture , Volume 51 , Issue 3 , Fall 2023 , pp. 415 - 418
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Copyright
Copyright © The Author(s), 2023. Published by Cambridge University Press

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References

Notes

1. Dickens, Charles, Great Expectations (New York: Penguin Press, 2003), 304Google Scholar.

2. Dickens, Charles, Little Dorrit (New York: Penguin Press, 2003), 236Google Scholar.

3. Eliot, George, Daniel Deronda (New York: Penguin Press, 1995), 74Google Scholar.

4. As late as 1891, Sherlock Holmes refers to the maid Watson and his wife employ as “a particularly malignant boot-splitting specimen of the London slavey.” Doyle, Arthur Conan, The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes (New York: Oxford University Press, 2008), 7CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

5. Trollope, Anthony, Framley Parsonage (New York: Penguin Press, 2004), 138Google Scholar.

6. Bilston, Sarah, The Awkward Age in Women's Popular Fiction, 1850–1900: Girls and the Transition to Womanhood (New York: Oxford University Press, 2004), 6CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

7. Farningham, Marianne, Girlhood (London: James Clarke, 1869), 19–20Google Scholar. See also Anonymous, Girls and Their Ways; By One Who Knows Them (London: John Hogg, 1881).

8. Sharpe, Christina, In the Wake: On Blackness and Being (Durham: Duke University Press, 2016), 52–53Google Scholar.

9. James, Henry, What Maisie Knew (New York: Penguin, 1985), 26Google Scholar; Eliot, Daniel Deronda, 124.

10. Eliot, Daniel Deronda, 124.

11. Sharpe, In the Wake, 41; Eliot, Daniel Deronda, 39.

12. Susan Meyer traces Eliot's many metaphorical references to Gwendolen Harleth as an enslaved person in Imperialism at Home: Race and Victorian Women's Fiction (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1996), 158–71.

13. Eliot, Daniel Deronda, 672.