The "Silver-Fork" Governess: Shifting Highlife in Catherine Gore's Novels

Tamara S. Wagner

《小說與戲劇》 18卷1期 (2007/12) Pp. 91-113

並列摘要

Although it reached its heyday in the 1830s and then went into a decline as notorious as its rise in the early decades of the century, the ”silver-fork” triple-decker significantly influenced the development of Women's writing beyond the mid-century. In its ambiguous representation of impoverished members of the upper ranks, it intriguingly capitalised on the flipside of social mobility at a time when such reputed values as progress and hard work started predominating in an increasingly bourgeois society. As the literary figure of the governess became the most suitable embodiment of ongoing shifts in the genre's class-alignments, reflecting its essentially ambiguous investment in inborn gentility as a conflicted, even transgressive, value, late exponents especially began to build up to the canonical governess-novels of the mid-century. In order to illustrate the symptomatic redefinition of status incongruity, I shall specifically draw on three representative novels by Catherine Gore, one of the most popular, most prolific, and most long-lasting silver-fork novelists: Mothers and Daughters (1831), Peers and Parvenus (1846), and Progress and Prejudice (1854). By concentrating on the development of one particular author over three decades, I shall be able to extend an analysis of silver-fork fiction's definitional features that goes beyond textbook descriptions of a genre that at once demands and helps to facilitate an alternative literary history of omen's writing in the first half of the nineteenth century.

並列關鍵字

silver-fork fiction ； literary influence ； governess fiction ； class relations in fiction ； domesticity in fiction ； status incongruence ； Catherine Gore

參考文獻

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