At læse imod det victorianske ægteskabsplot

Barnfrie kvinder og queer slægtskaber hos Austen, Eliot, Alcott og Brontë

Resumé

The majority of canonized female Victorian writers never formed a nuclear family. They remained unmarried and had no children. Yet, paradoxically, these writers are still the women we turn to when we want to read about romantic love. By rereading selected novels by e.g. Jane Austen, the Brontës, and George Eliot as capacious carrier bags (in Ursula K. Le Guin’s sense) rather than predictable heteronormative love stories, this article traces a marked critique in these works of the traditional marriage plots they were supposedly constructed around. In so doing, it identifies a strong queer potential in a series of key Victorian novels.