In Mona Caird\u2019s \u201cThe Yellow Drawing-Room,\u201d Vanora is initially described by the narrator, Mr. St. Vincent, as \u201ca headstrong and probably affected young person\u201d (Caird 103). She is everything that St. Vincent hates in a woman; she is too loud and independent, and he detests her before he even meets her. However, his opinion of Vanora is immediately confused when he meets her for the first time. It seems that the last thing he expected to see in Vanora\u2019s appearance was femininity, yet, \u201cShe was supremely, overpoweringly woman\u201d (Caird 105). St. Vincent is bewildered at the fact that Vanora\u2019s feminine beauty could exist at the same time as her headstrong personality. Surely a woman with a lovely figure and beautiful golden hair could never be anything but quiet and amenable.<\/p>\n
A very similar instance occurs in Wilkie Collins\u2019 \u201cThe Woman in White.\u201d When Walter Hartright sees Marian for the first time, she is turned around, and Hartright marvels at the beauty and femininity of her body. However, the second that he sees Marian\u2019s face, he is at once struck with the same confusion as Mr. St. Vincent. To Hartright, Marian\u2019s masculine face completely contradicts the femininity of her body. Additionally, he makes judgements about her personality in a way that mimics St. Vincent\u2019s judgements about Vanora: \u201cHer expression \u2013 bright, frank, and intelligent \u2013 appeared, while she was silent, to be altogether wanting in those feminine attractions of gentleness and pliability, without which the beauty of the handsomest woman alive is beauty incomplete\u201d (Collins 35).<\/p>\n
In these two instances, St. Vincent and Hatright both have a hard time grappling with the contradiction of the women\u2019s \u2018masculine\u2019 and \u2018feminine\u2019 attributes. Hatright states it plainly, saying \u201cto see such a face as this set on shoulders that a sculptor would have longed to model [\u2026] was to feel a sensation oddly akin to the helpless discomfort familiar to us all in sleep, when we recognize yet cannot reconcile the anomalies and contradictions of dreams\u201d (Collins 35). The reactions of both men likely represent the general public\u2019s views on gender roles. There is a very narrow definition of what a woman or a man can be, and anything that deviates from this is difficult to understand and accept.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
In Mona Caird\u2019s \u201cThe Yellow Drawing-Room,\u201d Vanora is initially described by the narrator, Mr. St. Vincent, as \u201ca headstrong and probably affected young person\u201d (Caird 103). She is everything that St. Vincent hates in a woman; she is too loud and independent, and he detests her before he even meets her. However, his opinion of … Continue reading Vanora, Marian, and Gender Subversion<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":5590,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"ngg_post_thumbnail":0,"footnotes":""},"categories":[135984],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-2231","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-2025-posts"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.dickinson.edu\/victorianlit\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2231","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.dickinson.edu\/victorianlit\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.dickinson.edu\/victorianlit\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.dickinson.edu\/victorianlit\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/5590"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.dickinson.edu\/victorianlit\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=2231"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.dickinson.edu\/victorianlit\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2231\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.dickinson.edu\/victorianlit\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=2231"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.dickinson.edu\/victorianlit\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=2231"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.dickinson.edu\/victorianlit\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=2231"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}