City of Dreadful Delight : Narratives of Sexual Danger in Late-Victorian London (Women in Culture and Society Series)

Rating:
Summary: Unusual but excellent history of gender and violence
Review: Judith Walkowitz delivers a very engaging history of gender violence, prostitution, and good old Jack the Ripper. Her style is more reminiscent of a novel or short story collection than an academic history, and that works in the narrative's favor. One finds it very easy to go along with her argument, even though it does have some holes in it. The style she adopts makes it easy for her to squeeze events into her hypothesis, and it sometimes feels forced, especially in her repeated attempts to relate everything to "melodrama." The book is well researched, which is most obvious in her discussion of the men and women's club and Georgina Weldon's struggle against the male establishment. Overall, a feminist history that never becomes militant, and a piece of academic work that is accessible to a wider audience than merely women's studies faculty members across the U.S.

Rating:
Summary: Sexual Danger
Review: This is primarily a history of gender. And armed with the theme of sexual danger, Walkowitz is able to explore not just late-Victorian women, but late-Victorian relationships between men and women.

Walkowitz begins with the urban strollers of the 1880's, the flaneurs. Prior to this period, the primary urban female found in London is the prostitute. Following commercial development in late-Victorian London there is an influx of "shopping ladies" and the "working women" who serve them in "the new feminized world of department stores." (p.24)

Next, Walkowitz discusses the findings of Charles Booth's study of London poverty. Significant is the area of London known as Whitechapel where gender roles were somewhat reversed.

In chapter 2, Walkowitz further explores the characters inhabiting the urban terrain of London. There are "gents" or "swells", women in music halls(both performing and in the audience), shopping ladies, charity workers, and the Glorified Spinsters. These "actors" were constantly exploring new boundaries while re-inventing their roles.

In the chapter "Science and Seance", Walkowitz gives us the tale of Mrs. Weldon who makes the great leap from being nearly committed(falsely) to a lunatic asylum, to becoming a fixure on Pears Soap advertisements. Certainly, Mrs. Weldon's role reversal was socially significant, and due to her "succesful negotiation of urban spaces and cultural styles" and "her willingnes to make a spectacle of herself and to allow her image to be refashioned, circulated, and ultimately discarded by a fickle marketplace." (p.189)

The significance of Jack the Ripper is the effect the murders had on men as well as women, including boys and girls. The Ripper's legacy is the crystallization of "sexual fears and hostilities" and the creation of a "common vocabulary of male violence against women." (pp.227-228)

These gender roles all represent the theme of sexual danger because they are changing. Roles are being reversed or re-invented. Barriers, whether physical or social, are being probed.

Rating:
Summary: Fabulous blend of Foucauldian theory and empiricist history
Review: Walkowitz masterfully unravels the mysteries of Foucault's periodization of the proliferation of gender discources. Backed by solid empirical evidence, we see competing discourses on gender, class, and race evolve as different groups fight to stake out access to discursive power. Read Foucault, then read this, for an epiphanous moment that unlocks the mysteries of technologies of power!