Refining work : representations of female artistic labour in Victorian literature, 1848-1888.

This thesis explores representations of women working in artistic professions in
Britain in the second half of the nineteenth century. Applying an interdisciplinary
method that draws on fiction, prose, painting and the periodical press from the years
1848-1888, this thesis aims to expand our understanding of women's relationships to
paid work in the Victorian period. Paid work, I argue, was not always represented as a
degrading activity for women. Throughout the thesis, I trace the process through which
the concept of work for middle-class women was made increasingly acceptable through
an association with artistry. One of my central purposes is to show how the supposedly
degrading activity of paid work could be transformed into refining experience for
women. Looking specifically at sewing, art, writing and acting, I demonstrate how these
professions came to be represented as suitable remunerative work for middle-class
women. In chapters one and two, I examine the way in which the reputations of the
typically working-class occupations of needlework and industrial design were 'rescued'
from their associations with commercial degradation and vulnerability in order to
expand the middle-class woman's employment opportunities. Chapters three and four
demonstrate that even the very public and self-promoting professions of authorship and
acting could be represented as domestic in character. Each of these chapters considers
the relationship between domesticity, creativity, remuneration and refinement in
fictional representations of working women and shows how they produced images of
work defined by female forms of experience. Such representations, I argue, helped to
raise the profile of women's work so that, by the end of the century, the working
women who had been pitied and patronised as victims of degrading circumstances came
to be seen as a legitimate, respected and self-respecting group.