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- Title
'The Consenting Silence': Chaperoning the Orphan Sisterhood of Amy Levy's The Romance of a Shop.
- Authors
Richardson, Ann-Marie
- Abstract
The parentless child of nineteenth-century literature was designed to elicit an inherent sense of social responsibility in Victorian readers. The orphan inadvertently rejects the cultural ideology of the ideal home and therefore embodies society's worst fear. No longer belonging to a family unit, the child is left with an incomplete moral education. Chaperones and guardians are required to "rescue" the orphan from ignorance, and society from their disquieting presence. Amy Levy empathised with the orphan model due to her own sense of otherness, as a result of her race, religion, sexuality, and New Woman ideologies. Levy observed parallels between societal fear of the orphan and that of female agency. Subsequently, the recently orphaned Lorimer sisters of Levy's Romance of a Shop are of marriageable age, yet emancipate themselves from their matchmaking families, becoming each other's chaperones as they open a photography studio. Thus begins a narrative which attempts to reconcile the sisters' wish to quietly persevere in their vocation and voice their innate feminism. This article will explore how speech and silence are used to embody these sisters' torn loyalties to their gender and each other, examining how their shift in social status alters their dialogue and where their silence speaks volumes.
- Subjects
19TH century feminism; MORAL education; SOCIAL responsibility
- Publication
Victoriographies, 2019, Vol 9, Issue 2, p147
- ISSN
2044-2416
- Publication type
Article
- DOI
10.3366/vic.2019.0339