{"id":526,"date":"2015-03-23T01:10:36","date_gmt":"2015-03-23T01:10:36","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/blogs.dickinson.edu\/victorianlit\/?p=526"},"modified":"2016-08-24T15:50:37","modified_gmt":"2016-08-24T15:50:37","slug":"maternity-society-and-the-legitimization-of-the-female-storyteller","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/blogs.dickinson.edu\/victorianlit\/2015\/03\/23\/maternity-society-and-the-legitimization-of-the-female-storyteller\/","title":{"rendered":"Maternity, Society, and the Legitimization of the Female Storyteller"},"content":{"rendered":"

At the end of Alice\u2019s Adventures in Wonderland, <\/em>Alice\u2019s older sister imagines \u201chow this same little sister of hers would, in the after-time, be herself a grown woman [\u2026] and how she would gather about her other little children, and make their <\/em>eyes bright and eager with many a strange tale, perhaps even with the dream of Wonderland of long ago; and how she would feel with all their simple sorrows, and find a pleasure in all their simple joys\u201d (Carroll 99, Norton 1992 Ed. Gray). Alice\u2019s sister immediately thrusts her forward from childhood into womanhood, from an imaginative, experiential role to an informative, supporting one. Although initially problematic because it seems to sketch Alice\u2019s future solely within the confines of motherhood, this image of Alice as a maternal figure subtly legitimizes her role as a female storyteller.<\/p>\n

Alice\u2019s experience in Wonderland is validated by its transmission to the next generation, whose gaze lies \u201cbright and eager\u201d on her tale. Through the socially accepted role of \u201cmother,\u201d Alice is able to use her imagination (which, despite her dream state, I would deem her female experience) to form new physical and emotional bonds within her society\u2014to \u201cgather about her\u201d a group of children, and to \u201cfeel\u201d their sorrows and joys, perhaps even giving them advice. Her role as mother empowers her to retain her dream-world in a way that other adults cannot, and to spread the lessons that she learned and the experiences that she had there to the next generation.<\/p>\n

In \u201cGoblin Market,\u201d Christina Rossetti similarly paints the two sisters transitioning from an experiential otherworldly danger to the safe, idealized realm of domesticity. Although their story is more explicitly didactic than Alice\u2019s tale, it still retains the thrilling, imaginatively provocative elements of \u201cthe haunted glen,\u201d \u201cthe wicked [\u2026] men,\u201d \u201cpoison in the blood,\u201d \u201cdeadly peril,\u201d and \u201cthe fiery antidote\u201d (Rossetti 488). That they have access to the experience with which to tell such a tale positions Lizzie and Laura as authoritative storytellers. Furthermore, the moral of their tale, like the end of Alice\u2019s sister\u2019s imaginings, includes connective imagery\u2014with their story, they \u201c[join] hands to little hands [\u2026and] bid them cling together,\u201d thus aligning the emotional bond and mutual reliance of sisterhood with the physical bond of clasped hands (Rossetti 488). Like Alice, the sisters bring about structural social change in the next generation by telling their story. This depiction empowers them in their role as female storytellers, underlining their experiential authority\u2014but it does so by first legitimizing them as mothers.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

At the end of Alice\u2019s Adventures in Wonderland, Alice\u2019s older sister imagines \u201chow this same little sister of hers would, in the after-time, be herself a grown woman [\u2026] and how she would gather about her other little children, and make their eyes bright and eager with many a strange tale, perhaps even with the … Continue reading Maternity, Society, and the Legitimization of the Female Storyteller<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1106,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"ngg_post_thumbnail":0,"footnotes":""},"categories":[111380,108029],"tags":[111412,111414,111400,111415,111396,1991,111413,92708,111416,111417,85284,11480,1476],"class_list":["post-526","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-360-victorian-sexualities","category-spring-2015","tag-alice-in-wonderland","tag-charles-dodgson","tag-christina-rossetti","tag-female-storyteller","tag-goblin-market","tag-laura","tag-lewis-carroll","tag-lizzie","tag-maternity","tag-motherhood","tag-sisters","tag-social-change","tag-society"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.dickinson.edu\/victorianlit\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/526","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\/1106"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.dickinson.edu\/victorianlit\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=526"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.dickinson.edu\/victorianlit\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/526\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.dickinson.edu\/victorianlit\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=526"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.dickinson.edu\/victorianlit\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=526"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.dickinson.edu\/victorianlit\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=526"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}