The Maternal Icon in Eleanor Sleath's The Orphan of the Rhine
Bibliographic Data
| ID | 22005773 |
|---|---|
| Authors | Esmeralda Orndorff (Gettysburg College), Joanne E Myers (Gettysburg College), JoAnne Myers (Gettysburg College) |
| Year | 2024 |
| Volume | 15 |
| Issue | 1 |
| Publication date | 2024-06-01 |
| Open Access | Yes |
| Type | ARTICLE |
| Venue | ABO Interactive Journal for Women in the Arts 1640-1830 (JOURNAL) |
| Journal identifiers | ISSN: 2157-7129 • E-ISSN: 2157-7129 |
| Publisher | University of South Florida Libraries (PUBLISHER) |
| DOI | 10.5038/2157-7129.15.1.1356 |
| OpenAlex | W4411094516 |
| Language | EN |
| Citations received | 1 |
| References cited | 4 |
In recent years, Eleanor Sleath’s long-neglected The Orphan of the Rhine has received attention as a valuable addition to the Gothic canon. In particular, critics have hailed the unconventionality of her worldly heroine Julie de Rubine. In this article, we resituate Julie’s exceptionalism in a specifically post-Reformation context, arguing that, in Julie, Sleath has created a powerful maternal icon whose mediating authority contests iconoclastic attacks on Marian devotion in seventeenth- and eighteenth-century England. Julie is, as critics have observed, the moral center of the text, and we show how that role is warranted specifically by her religiosity. Although partway through Orphan Julie suffers to some extent the common Gothic mother’s fate, being abducted and held captive in a convent for a portion of the novel, she remains the focus of the other characters’ attention and ultimately is restored to preside over the deathbed confession of her errant husband. By showing how Julie’s immaculate motherhood reforms the patriarchal family, we suggest that Catholicism, however counter-intuitively, can be understood as a potentially “queer” element in modern British consciousness. By inspiring an alternative domesticity, Sleath’s maternal icon shows one way that the Gothic can provide a constructive alternative to modernity’s strictures
Bioinformatics · Biology · Icon · Orphan drug · Computer Science · Irish and British Studies · Medicine
| Citations per year | 0.5 |
|---|---|
| Citation span | 2024 - 2024 (1) |
| Highly cited | No |