ABSTRACT: Elizabeth Gaskell’s historical novella “Lois the Witch” (1859) employs Gothicism to depict foreign religion as abhorrent, upholding English superiority by portraying American Puritans as religious fanatics. But the story’s condemnation of the Salem witch trials shifts to readers who may also struggle to practice a rational, caring religion. Lois’ recollections of witchcraft in England enable the tale to function as a juridical parable by asking readers to evaluate and internalize tolerance toward the Puritan characters and to themselves. This study complicates the functions of both religion and the Gothic in “Lois the Witch,” which has been read through the lenses of Gaskell’s Unitarianism but not in terms of its function as a juridical parable or its use of the ambiguous supernatural. Gothicism underlines the call for tolerance, with supernaturalism neither “explained” nor “real.” Instead, the question of supernatural activities (prophecies, spells) remains ambiguous, suggesting the Puritans’ cruelty in the name of religion supersedes the issue of witchcraft.
ABSTRACT: Elizabeth Gaskell’s protagonists are often categorized as redundant, particularly spinsters and widows. Such characters potentially complicate Gaskell’s feminist status, seemingly embodying the repressive stereotypes of Victorian femininity. But rather than portraying them as unproductive, ridiculous, and marginal, Gaskell creates characters who directly counter the idea of redundancy. Her spinsters and widows are reformers who catalyze significant social change and redefine the power of elderly, unmarried women against patriarchal paradigms. The shift from redundancy to reform is especially evident in Cranford (1853) and My Lady Ludlow (1858), which cast Miss Matty and Lady Ludlow as influential social figures who not only challenge tradition but reject its intolerance by working to rebuild their communities around a more inclusive model based on morality and relationality.
ABSTRACT: When Mina first meets Van Helsing in Bram Stoker’s Dracula , she plays a trick on him by giving him the shorthand version of her Whitby diary, which she anticipates he will not be able to read. This essay looks at the central positioning of Mina’s practical joke as an opportunity to consider how Stoker represents women’s capacity to be funny through Lucy, Mina, and Mrs. Bilder, the zookeeper’s wife. The three major theories of humor—superiority, relief, and incongruity, along with nineteenth-century discussions of women and comedy—help clarify how sexualizing women’s laughter through vampirism threatens conventional Victorian sensibilities and masculinity.
ABSTRACT: In Vanity Fair: A Novel without a Hero , William Makepeace Thackeray uses hats to illustrate his mock-heroic characters and to reinforce the novel’s theme of “ Vanitas Vanitatum! ” Of these hats—including cocked hats, top hats, shovel-hats, shakos, and bonnets—the narrator’s fool’s cap is the most symbolically important. Adopting a dual perspective of “Satire and Sentiment,” the narrator shows that “All is vanity.” If the vanity of life is inescapable, he implies, then the only consolation is laughter.
ABSTRACT: Krupabai Satthianadhan’s Saguna (1889–1890) is an autobiographical novel by one of the first Indian women to attend medical school in Madras. Saguna is a New Woman narrative of spiritual and social development for both its protagonist and the emerging Indian Christian community. Written in English, it was serialized in the Madras Christian College Magazine , a periodical reaching British, Anglo-Indian, and Western-educated Indian readerships regionally, nationally, and in Christian missionary networks throughout the Empire. Satthianadhan investigates the origins of Indian Christian womanhood in Indian Christian conversion narratives and professional work, especially the mission-sponsored Bible Woman. Critiquing the ways in which female converts and Bible Women retain limited personal agency or occupy lowly positions in the community, Satthianadhan presents her protagonist as a New Woman who draws on the Bible Woman’s example of bold preaching and her own liberal education to ground her beliefs about society and religion in independent, rational thought. Satthianadhan promotes Indian women’s education reform as a movement to be embraced by the Indian Christian community and as a means through which its women can join theological conversations and champion social reform efforts in the larger, male-dominated, Indian public sphere.
