Seriality and domesticity: the Victorian serial and domestic ideology in the family literary magazine

Abstract

Seriality and Domesticity examines how domestic serials and family literary magazines both reinforced and reshaped domesticity. As a commodity that circulated within the home, family literary magazines had to engage and to appease whole families of readers, men and women, husbands and wives, brothers and sisters, parents and children. Domestic serials were a key component of these magazines' appeal to the family. As a space for intellectual debate and education, however, family literary magazines were able to subtly re-view and revise domesticity. I argue that these magazines complicate domestic ideology by espousing a professional, urban sensibility in their shaping of women's and men's roles.^Consequently, these magazines and the serials within them grapple with the social changes of the latter half of the nineteenth century, advocating for a domesticity radically different from the myth of separate spheres ideology that informed analysis of the Victorian period so long.^Crucially, these texts define masculine and feminine roles within the home, a shaping of domesticity often overlooked in periodical scholarship.^Specifically, my project looks at how four domestic serials--Elizabeth Gaskell's Wives and Daughters, serialized in the Cornhill from August 1864 to January 1866 with illustrations by George Du Maurier; Margaret Oliphant's The Story of Valentine and His Brother, serialized in Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine from January 1874 to February 1875; Thomas Hardy's The Woodlanders, serialized in Macmillan's Monthly Magazine from May 1886 to April 1887; and Oscar Wilde's The Picture of Dorian Gray, published in one installment in the July 1890 issue of Lippincott's Monthly Magazine--engage in or disrupt domestic discourse in the family literary magazine. I situate each of these domestic serials as part of a larger, on-going conversation about class and gender identity that occurs within and between periodicals.^I also focus on these four texts and these four magazines as a means of charting the evolution of the family literary magazine and the domestic serial from the 1860s through the 1890s.