"Victorian" in the U.S.: uses beyond architecture?

[eplovejoy]

The Fasting Girl by Michelle Stacey, who also wrote Consumed: Why Americans Love, Hate, and Fear Food, is an interesting account of a woman in Brooklyn who claimed that for a dozen years in the 1860s and '70s she ate absolutely nothing. Newspaper accounts made her a celebrity. Some people hailed her as a saint; others decried her as a fraud.

My biggest trouble with the book so far (I'm about halfway through) is reflected in the subtitle: A True Victorian Medical Mystery. Strictly speaking, "Victorian" could be used to describe events that took place anywhere in the world during the time Victoria was Queen of England, from 1837 to 1901. But should it?

Saying that the United States had a Victorian Era seems to me misleading. Sure, some features of life in some parts of the country were influenced by Victoria, but her influence wasn't as pervasive on this side of the Atlantic as it was in England.

I suspect that Stacey's repeated use of "Victorian" is simply sloppy shorthand, especially because she uses the term to describe the entire 19th century, including the first third when Victoria was not queen.

[mjfrombuffalo[$]]

Furniture and antiques produced in America during that time is referred to Victorian.

[kurt_messick]

Victorian can be a state of mind. There are many in public life today whose morality could be called 'Victorian'. Not always a bad thing, either.

[brian_igo]

I've heard this question raised before by historians. The defense is that Britain's Queen Victoria had an umatched influence on culture and societies around the world, both directly through the Empire and indirectly through the works of art, music and literature that became a standardbearers around the world.

What I wonder is, can any one person ever have that much influence on such disparate nations and cultures again?


Brian

[realtraveller]

I have a "Chippendale" dining room set but it came from North Carolina. Chippendale has been dead for years. Was I bamboozled?

[magenta321]

Ummm. I never doubted we had a Victorian era here. But I had a great-great aunt who lived to be 98, and she referred to her parent's (or was it her grandparents... I don't remember) time as the "Victorian era" too. And the homes, the artwork, the clothing, the furniture... they all had the name too.

I don't know. I've always been fond of the Victorian time period, and I've never thought about those Brit twits. I just thought about the people who owned the homes I fall in love with, and the furniture I like, who lived in the paintings I like (ok, so those people were probably brits, but in my mind, they are American ).

[erazo]

Not only did the Victorian period in the UK influence U.S. culture in a dramatic way, so did the period that followed it: Arts and Crafts.

Today, the U.S. is in the midst of an Arts and Crafts revival which seems to have a lot more energy than the Victorian revival of the 1970's-1980's.

[sylvanb]

I remember reading, as a child, probably at my grandmother's house, a number of books that in retrospect I think could be called Victorian. Some were textbooks -- collections of readings for 4th - 6th graders. Louisa May Alcott could be called Victorian -- there were several of her deservedly obscure little moral tales, weepers about Good Girls Gone Bad and such. I remember (by other authors) "Beautiful Joe," a polemic about Kindness to Animals, and "The Five Little Peppers and How They Grew," with it's Little-Women-like romanticization of poverty. Now that I think of it, it's amazing that "Little Women" trancends its time and genre as it does.

What these books -- all juveniles, of course -- had in common was a pious, moralizing tone, with a distinctly American accent however. I didn't care, they were rattling good stories and I loved them.

Edith Wharton comes to mind as an adult author who mined the Victorian mentality to good effect. I can't think of any others at this moment.

I'm no expert on either juvenile or Victorian literature; I hope someone else will chime in.