Constructing Victorian girlhood: tensions, precedents, and subversion in images of little girls

Abstract

The mid- to late- nineteenth century is characterized by immense industrial, cultural, technological, medical, and political changes, as well as an overwhelming obsession with girlhood. This interest in the little girl was an escape mechanism resulting from the disconcerting changes affecting nineteenth-century Britons. Victorian painters, photographers, and children's authors such as Sir John Everett Millais, Thomas Cooper Gotch, Julia Margaret Cameron, and Lewis Carroll used societal tensions, such as innocence and sexuality, old art and new art, and weakness and powerfulness in their representations of girls as a means to both participate in and subversively criticize the period's adult-constructed girlhood craze. Though often working from eighteenth-century precedents--particularly the images of Sir Joshua Reynolds--these four creators uniquely succeeded in commenting on and affecting Victorian views of girlhood that would last to the end of the century.