Abstract
The chapter examines the image of the emasculated male, whose condition is not always due to some domineering, seductive red-haired woman as discussed in Chapter 3, but due to their own red hair. This would include the most famous controversial redhead of the Victorian period, Algernon Swinburne. The chapter studies the effect of Grace Poole on Rochester in Sarah Shoemaker’s Mr. Rochester (2017). Also considered are Dickens’ redheads followed by Lucinda Coxon’s film adaptation (2018) of Sarah Water’s The Little Stranger (2009) in which the very red-haired Domhnall Gleeson plays Dr. Faraday. The final treatment is of Lucinda Coxon’s film adaptation (2015) of David Ebershoff’s book, The Danish Girl (2000).
This is a preview of subscription content, log in via an institution to check access.
Access this chapter
Tax calculation will be finalised at checkout
Purchases are for personal use only
Notes
- 1.
Beguiling of Merlin (1874) by Edward Burne Jones can be seen at https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Beguiling_of_Merlin.jpg
- 2.
See the screen shot of 13:41:52 on February 21, 2017, from The Danish Woman film, directed by Tom Hooper, at https://www.artefactmagazine.com/2017/03/07/gerda-wegener-the-truth-behind-the-canvas/
- 3.
The title of Carol Grant’s article “Regressive, Reductive and Harmful: A Trans Woman’s Take on Tom Hooper’s Embarrassing ‘Danish Girl’” indicates her disdain for Redmayne’s performance as a transgendered woman. She complains that Lili’s “femininity is reduced to caricature” and that the representation is “a faux-transsexuality for cis people” (n.p.). By “hyperbolizing of femininity,” which Grant observes is not ascribed to Gerda, the film “further otherizes Lili.”
- 4.
He reads Sexual Fluidity by Johann Hoffman (128), The Sexes; The Normal and Abnormal Man; A Scientific Study of Sexual Immorality; and Die Sexuelle Krise (138).
- 5.
Bibliography
Asma, Stephen T. On Monsters: An Unnatural History of Our Worst Fears. Oxford, UK: Oxford University Press, 2009.
Braude, Benjamin. “The Sons of Noah and the Construction of Ethnic and Geographical Identities in the Medieval and Early Modern Periods.” William and Mary Quarterly 54, no. 1 (January 1997): 103–42. https://www.jstor.org/stable/2953314
Brontë, Charlotte. Jane Eyre. 1847. Edited by Richard Nemesvari. Peterborough, ON: Broadview Press, 1999.
Chase, Richard. “The Brontës: A Centennial Observance (Reconsiderations VIII).” The Kenyon Review 9, no. 4 (Autumn 1947): 487–506. https://www.jstor.org/stable/4332879
Chatterton, Claire. “Women in Mental Health Nursing: Angels or Custodians?” International History of Nursing Journal 5, no. 2 (2000): 11–19.
Coxon, Lucinda. The Danish Girl, screenplay. Directed by Tom Hooper. Working Title Films, 2015. DVD.
———. The Little Stranger, screenplay. Starring Domhnall Gleeson. Pathé, 2018.
Daly, Kathleen N., and revised by Marian Rengel. “Valkyries.” In Norse Mythology A to Z, 3rd. ed., 113. Facts on File. New York: Chelsea House Publishers, 2010..
Dickens, Charles. Barnaby Rudge; A Tale of the Riots of ’Eighty. London: Chapman and Hall, 1841.
———. Barnaby Rudge. 1841. Illustrated by Joseph Clayton Clark. Philadelphia: Pawson and Nicholson, 1890.
———. A Tale of Two Cities. 1859. London: Chapman and Hall, 1868. https://books.google.com/books?id=YqfPAAAAMAAJ
Dowerah, Swikrita, and Debarshi Prasad Nath. “Exploring Selfhood Through Performance in The Danish Girl.” Journal of Creative Communications 13, no. 3 (August 31, 2018): 185–96. https://doi.org/10.1177/0973258618790792
Ebbershoff, David. The Danish Girl. 2000. New York: Penguin, 2015.
Elbe, Lili. Man into Woman. Edited by Niels Hoyer. London: Jarrolds, 1933. Lili Elbe Digital Archive. 2020. http://www.lilielbe.org/narrative/editions/B1.html
Fedorenko, Sasha. “Gerda Wegener: The Truth Behind the Canvas.” Artefact. https://www.artefactmagazine.com/2017/03/07/gerda-wegener-the-truth-behind-the-canvas/
Fishberg, Maurice. Jews, Race, and Environment. London, Routledge, 2017.
Gilbert, Sandra, and Susan Gubar. The Madwoman in the Attic: The Woman Writer and the Nineteenth-Century Literary Imagination. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1979.
Goldenberg, David M. The Curse of Ham: Race and Slavery in Early Judaism, Christianity, and Islam. Princeton University Press, 2003.
Grant, Carol. “Regressive, Reductive and Harmful: A Trans Woman’s Take on Tom Hooper’s Embarrassing Danish Girl.” December 3, 2015. IndieWire. https://www.indiewire.com/2015/12/regressive-reductive-and-harmful-a-trans-womans-take-on-tom-hoopers-embarrassing-danish-girl-2134
Groves, Robert, and Raphael Patai. Hebrew Myths: The Book of Genesis. New York: Greenwich House, 1982.
Haynes, Stephen R. Noah’s Cure: The Biblical Justification of American Slavery. Oxford, UK: Oxford University Press, 2002.
Judd, Catherine. Bedside Seductions: Nursing and the Victorian Imagination, 1830–1880. New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1998.
Lacey, Harry. God and the Nations. New York: Loizeaux Brothers, 1947.
The Little Stranger. Dir. Lenny Abrahamson. Film adaptation by Lucinda Coxes. Potboiler Productions, 2018.
Mellinkoff, Ruth. “Titian’s Pastoral Scene: A Unique Rendition of Lot and His Daughters. Renaissance Quarterly 51, no. 3 (Autumn 1998): 828–63. https://www.jstor.org/stable/2901747
O’Callaghan, Claire. Sara Waters: Gender and Sexual Politics. London: Bloomsbury Publishing, 2017.
Pearson, Hesketh. Oscar Wilde, His Life and Wit. New York: Harper and Brothers, 1946.
Peterson, Thomas Virgil. Ham and Japheth: The Mythic World of Whites in the Antebellum South. Metchen, NJ: Scarecrow Press, 1978.
Punter, David. Symbol. London: Routledge, 2007.
“queer, adj.1.” OED Online. March 2020. Oxford University Press. https://www-oedcom.ezproxy.liberty.edu/view/Entry/156236?rskey=OrQUMQ&result=2.
Ribeiro, Fernando Armando. Pólemos. Vol. 12, no. 2 (2018): 449–56. https://doi.org/10.1515/pol-2018-0025
Robins, Ashley H. Oscar Wilde—The Great Drama of His Life: How His Tragedy Reflected His Personality. Brighton: Sussex Academic Press, 2012.
Sans, Andrés Armengol. “‘This is truly me’: A Lacanian Approach to The Danish Girl (2015).” Journal of Comparative Literature and Aesthetics 40, no. 1 (2017): 83–94. Gale Academic OneFile. https://link-galecom.ezproxy.liberty.edu/apps/doc/A512868774/AONE?u=vic_liberty&sid=AONE&xid=725ba70a
Sayce, A. H. The Races of the Old Testament. London: Religious Tract Society, 1925.
Scott, Sir Walter. Woodstock; or, The Cavalier. 1826. Boston: Dana Estes and Company, 1894. https://www.google.com/books/edition/Woodstock_Or_The_Cavalier/KJU3AAAAYAAJ
Shoemaker, Sarah. Mr. Rochester: A Novel. New York: Grand Central Publishing, 2017.
Steinbeck, Eliza. “A Pretty Knot of Lilies: Disentangling Lili Elbe’s longue duree in Pop Culture.” In Man Into Woman: A Comparative Scholarly Edition, edited by Pamela L. Caughie & Sabine Meyer, 268–78. London: Bloomsbury Publishing, 2020.
Waters, Sarah. The Little Stranger. Toronto: McClelland and Stewart, 2009.
Wilde, Oscar. “Oh Who Is that Young Sinner?” In Victorian Literature: An Anthology, edited by Victor Shea and William Whitla, 879. West Sussex: John Wiley and Sons, 2014.
Author information
Authors and Affiliations
Corresponding author
Rights and permissions
Copyright information
© 2021 The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG
About this chapter
Cite this chapter
Ayres, B. (2021). The Agency of Red Hair on the Male Gender Equivocal in Mr. Rochester, The Little Stranger, The Danish Girl, and Elsewhere. In: A Vindication of the Redhead. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-83515-6_5
Download citation
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-83515-6_5
Published:
Publisher Name: Palgrave Macmillan, Cham
Print ISBN: 978-3-030-83514-9
Online ISBN: 978-3-030-83515-6
eBook Packages: Literature, Cultural and Media StudiesLiterature, Cultural and Media Studies (R0)