Cover not available
Article published In:
English Text Construction
Vol. 14:2 (2021) ► pp.119–149

The representation of mothers and the gendered social structure of nineteenth-century children’s literature

 | University of Cambridge
 | University of Birmingham
Language has the capacity to create fictional worlds and to describe real-life social structures. In this paper, we explore gendered social structures in a corpus of nineteenth-century children’s fiction. We describe these structures in terms of the frequent nouns that are used to label people in the texts of the corpus. Through a bottom-up categorisation of these nouns into four groups, we find, in line with previous studies, textual evidence of a society that is unequal and that is divided into a private and a public sphere. Our study focuses in particular on mothers, the most frequent character type in children’s fiction. The representation of mothers includes abstract qualities, such as a mother’s love, as well as concrete behaviours, such as mothers taking their children into their arms. Both types of qualities contribute to the depiction of mothers as an anchor point for the private sphere.
Keywords: corpus stylistics, gender, norms, general nouns, Victorian literature
Article outline
  • 1.Introduction
  • 2.Norms and ideologies
  • 3.A corpus approach
    • 3.1The 19th Century Children’s Literature (ChiLit) corpus
    • 3.2Method
  • 4.The representation of mothers
    • 4.1The social worlds mothers inhabit
    • 4.2Linguistic and social ties
    • 4.3Abstract and concrete qualities of motherhood
  • 5.Conclusions
  • Notes
  • References
Available under the Creative Commons Attribution (CC BY) 4.0 license.

For any use beyond this license, please contact the publisher at [email protected].

Published online: 24 May 2022
DOI logo
https://doi.org/10.1075/etc.00044.cer
References (62)
References
Adams, James Eli. 1995. Dandies and Desert Saints: Styles of Victorian Masculinity. Cornell University Press. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Altick, Richard. 1957. The English Common Reader. A Social History of the Mass Reading Public, 1800–1900. Columbus: Ohio State University Press.Google Scholar
Anthony, Laurence. 2019. AntConc (Version 3.5.8) [Computer Software]. Tokyo, Japan: Waseda University. [URL]
Archer, Dawn, Andrew Wilson & Paul Rayson. 2002. Introduction to the USAS category system. Benedict project report, October 2002. Accessed January 2022. [URL]
Armstrong, Nancy. 1987. Desire and Domestic Fiction: A Political History of the Novel. Oxford: Oxford University Press.Google Scholar
Arnold, Guy. 1980. Held Fast for England: G. A. Henty, Imperialist Boys’ Writer. London: Hamish Hamilton.Google Scholar
Baker, Paul, Gavin Brookes, Dimitrinka Atanasova & Stuart W. Flint. 2020. Changing frames of obesity in the UK Press 2008–2017. Social Science & Medicine 2641 (1 November 2020): 113403. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Bristow, Joseph. 1991. Empire Boys: Adventures in a Man’s World. London: Harper Collins.Google Scholar
Carpenter, Humprey. 1984. Secret Gardens: A Study of the Golden Age of Children’s Literature. London: George Allen.Google Scholar
Čermáková, Anna & Mahlberg, Michaela. 2022. Gendered body language in children’s literature over time. Language & Literature 31(1): 11–40. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Čermáková, Anna. 2021. Diachronic change in the ordering of kinship binomials: A contrastive perspective. In Time in Languages, Languages in Time, Anna Čermáková, Thomas Egan, Hilde Hasselgård & Sylvi Rørvik (eds). Amsterdam: John Benjamins, 39–66. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Chiranorawanit, Kunrada & Passapong Sripicharn. 2020. A corpus-based study of characterization of mother in children’s and young adult literature: A transitivity analysis of Mrs. Weasley in the Harry Potter novels. The New English Teacher 14 (1): 14–32.Google Scholar
D’Ignazio, Catherine & Lauren F. Klein. 2020. Data Feminism. Cambridge, Massachusetts: The MIT Press. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Davidoff, Leonore & Catherine Hall. 1987. Family Fortunes. Men and Women of the English Middle Class, 1780–1850. Chicago: The University of Chicago Press.Google Scholar
Dever, Carolyn. 1998. Death and the mother from Dickens to Freud: Victorian fiction and the anxiety of origins. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Eberhardt, Maeve. 2017. Gendered representations through speech: The case of the Harry Potter series. Language and Literature 26 (3): 227–246. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Fraustino, Lisa Rowe & Karen Coats. 2016. Mothers in Children’s and Young Adult Literature. From the Eighteenth Century to Postfeminism. Jackson: University Press of Mississippi.Google Scholar
Fruchterman, Thomas M. J. & Edward M. Reingold. 1991. Graph drawing by force-directed placement. Software: Practice and Experience 21 (11): 1129–64.Google Scholar
Goldberg, Adele & Lee Crystal. (2021). Accessibility and historical change: An emergent cluster led uncles and aunts to become aunts and uncles. In Frontiers in Psychology. Special issue on Emergentist Approaches to Language, ed. by P. Brooks. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Halliday, Michael A. K. 1978. Language as Social Semiotic: The Social Interpretation of Language and Meaning. London: Edward Arnold.Google Scholar
1985. An Introduction to Functional Grammar. London: Edward Arnold.Google Scholar
Hammond, Mary. 2002. “The great fiction bore”: Free libraries and the construction of a reading public in England, 1880–1914. Libraries & Culture 37 (2): 83–108. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Hanks, Patrick. 2013. Lexical Analysis: Norms and Exploitations. Cambridge, Massachusetts: The MIT Press. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Hateley, Erica. 2011. Gender. In Keywords for Children’s Literature, Philip Nel & Lisa Paul (eds). New York: New York University Press, 86–92.Google Scholar
Hollindale, Peter. 1988. Ideology and the children’s book. Signal 551: 3–22.Google Scholar
Hunt, Peter (ed.) 1995. Children’s Literature: An Illustrated History. Oxford: Oxford University Press.Google Scholar
. 2001. Children’s Literature: An Anthology, 1801–1902. Malden: Blackwell Publishers.Google Scholar
Hunt, Sally. 2015. Representations of gender and agency in the Harry Potter Series. In Corpora and Discourse Studies, Paul Baker & Tony McEnery (eds). London: Palgrave Macmillan. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Kim, Koeun. 2016. Juliana Ewing’s Six to Sixteen: Realizing and rewriting maternal legacy. In Mothers in Children’s and Young Adult Literature. From the Eighteenth Century to Postfeminism, Lisa Rowe Fraustino & Karen Coats (eds). Jackson: University Press of Mississippi.Google Scholar
Klaver, Claudia C. & Ellen Bayuk Rosenman. 2008. Introduction. In Other Mothers: Beyond the Maternal Ideal, Ellen Bayuk Rosenman & Claudia C. Klaver (eds). Columbus: The Ohio University Press, 1–22.Google Scholar
Kraicer, Eve & Andrew Piper. 2018. Social Characters: The hierarchy of gender in contemporary English-language fiction. Journal of Cultural Analytics 1 (1), 30 January 2019.Google Scholar
Lundin, Anne H. 1994. The reception of children’s books in England and America, 1880–1900. The Library Quarterly: Information, Community, Policy 64 (1): 30–59. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Mahlberg, M. 2014. Corpus linguistics and discourse analysis. In Pragmatics of Discourse, Klaus P. Schneider & Anne Barron (eds), Berlin: De Gruyter, 215–238. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Mahlberg, Michaela & Dan McIntyre. 2011. A case for corpus stylistics: Ian Fleming’s Casino Royale . English Text Construction 4 (2), 204–227. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Mahlberg, Michaela, Peter Stockwell, Viola Wiegand, Jamie Lentin. 2020. CLiC 2.1. Corpus Linguistics in Context. [URL] [Accessed Jan 2022]
Mahlberg, Michaela, Viola Wiegand, Jamie Lentin, Anthony Hennessey. 2021. CLiC User Guide. [URL] [Accessed Jan 2022]
Mahlberg, Michaela. 2005. English General Nouns: A Corpus Theoretical Approach. Amsterdam: John Benjamins. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
. 2013. Corpus Stylistics and Dickens’s Fiction. London: Routledge. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Malmkjær, Kirsten & Murray Knowles. 1996. Language and control in children’s literature. London: Routledge.Google Scholar
Mandell, Laura. 2019. Gender and Cultural Analytics: Finding or Making Stereotypes? In Debates in the Digital Humanities 2019, Matthew K. Gold & Lauren F. Klein (eds). Minneapolis: University of Minesota Press, 3–26. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
McCallum, Robyn & John Stephens. 2010. Ideology and children’s books. In Handbook of Research on Children’s and Young Adult Literature, Shelby A. Wolf, Karen Coats, Patricia Enciso & Christine Jenkins (eds). New York: Routledge, 359–371.Google Scholar
McEnery, Tony, Helen Baker & Carmen Dayrell. 2019. Working at the interface of hydrology and corpus linguistics: Using corpora to identify droughts in nineteenth-century Britain. In Using Corpus Methods to Triangulate Linguistic Analysis, Jesse Egbert & Paul Baker (eds). New York: Routledge, 52–84. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
McIntyre, Dan & Brian Walker. 2019. Corpus Stylistics. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
McKnight, Natalie. 1997. Suffering Mothers in Mid-Victorian Novels. Basingstoke: Macmillan Press.Google Scholar
Molin, Sandra. 2014. The (Ir)reversibility of English Binomials. Amsterdam: John Benjamins. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Morse Denenholz, Deborah. 2008. Unforgiven: Drunken mothers in Hesba Stretton’s religious tract society and Scottish Temperance League fiction. In Other Mothers. Beyond the Maternal Ideal, Ellen Bayuk Rosenman & Claudia C. Klaver (eds). Columbus: The Ohio State University Press, 101–124.Google Scholar
Pfeiffer, Julie. 2016. The Romance of othermothering in nineteenth-century Backfish books. In Mothers in Children’s and Young Adult Literature: From the Eighteenth Century to Postfeminism, Lisa Rowe Fraustino & Karen Coats (eds). Jackson: University Press of Mississippi.Google Scholar
Regaignon Rossman, Dara. 2008. Infant doping and middle-class motherhood. Opium warnings and Charlotte Yonge’s The Daisy Chain. In Other Mothers: Beyond the Maternal Ideal, Ellen Bayuk Rosenman & Claudia C. Klaver (eds). Columbus: The Ohio State University Press, 125–144.Google Scholar
Reynolds, Kimberley. 1990. Girls Only? Gender and Popular Children’s Fiction in Britain, 1880–1910. Philadelphia: Temple University Press.Google Scholar
. 2002. Come lads and ladettes. Gendering bodies and gendering behaviors. In Ways of Being Male: Representing Masculinities in Children’s Literature, John Stephens & John A. Stephens (eds). London: Taylor & Francis, 96–115.Google Scholar
Rose, Jonathan. 2001. The Intellectual Life of the British Working Classes. New Haven: Yale University Press.Google Scholar
Salmon, Edward. 1888. Juvenile Literature as it is. London: Henry J. Drane.Google Scholar
Shuttleworth, Sally. 1992. Demonic mothers. Ideologies of bourgeois motherhood in the mid-Victorian era. In Rewriting the Victorians Theory, History and the Politics of Gender, Linda M. Shires (ed.). New York & London: Routledge, 31–51.Google Scholar
Simons, Judy. 2009 (2013 ed.). Gender roles in children’s fiction. In The Cambridge Companion to Children’s Literature, M. O. Grenby & Andrea Immel (eds). Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 143–158. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Sinclair, John. 1991. Corpus, Concordance, Collocation. Oxford: Oxford University Press.Google Scholar
Stephens, John & John A. Stephens (eds) 2002. Ways of Being Male: Representing Masculinities in Children’s Literature. London: Taylor & Francis.Google Scholar
Stubbs, Michael. 2002. Words and Phrases. Corpus Studies of Lexical Semantics. Oxford: Blackwell.Google Scholar
Sunderland, Jane & Mark McGlashan. 2012. The linguistic, visual and multimodal representation of two-Mum and two-Dad families in children’s picturebooks. Language and Literature 21(2), 189–210. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Sunderland, Jane. 2011. Language, Gender and Children’s Fiction. London: Continuum.Google Scholar
Thaden, Barbara Z. 2013. The Maternal Voice in Victorian Fiction: Rewriting the Patriarchal Family. London: Routledge. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Underwood, William E., Bamman, David & Sabrina Lee. 2018. The transformation of gender in English language fiction. Cultural Analytics 3(2). DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Walvin, James. 1982. A Child’s World: A Social History of English Childhood, 1800–1914. New York: Penguin Books.Google Scholar
Cited by (1)

Cited by one other publication

Wang, Xiaoyi & Sagheer Abbas
2022. Optimization of Child Literature Curriculum Settings for Preschool Education Based on Numerical Analysis. Mathematical Problems in Engineering 2022 ► pp. 1 ff. DOI logo

This list is based on CrossRef data as of 4 july 2024. Please note that it may not be complete. Sources presented here have been supplied by the respective publishers. Any errors therein should be reported to them.