The lady or the tiger?, evolving Victorian perceptions of education and the private resident governess

grantor: University of TorontoFrom the first few decades of the nineteenth century to the 1860s, the governess-figure moved steadily in public estimation from embodiment of pathos to powerful subverter of order, only to revert in the last decades of the 1800s to earlier type. These changes were predicated, it was felt in the period, and often, afterwards, on the degree to which her skills were culturally relevant, especially to middle-class girls' needs. This study holds, however, that much of what was negative in Victorian views of the governess reflected a generalized dissatisfaction with education in the period, displaced onto a particularly vulnerable scapegoat. Meanwhile, in literature, the governess had long been a complex figure when she was an important character in a text. The nineteenth-century history of her literary representation thus describes a different parabola from that traced by other aspects of her image: she became a complicated and/or dangerous presence earlier, and stayed that way later in the century. This thesis explores some of the reasons for this with a view to showing how literary demands pressured the way her stereotype both weathered and accommodated itself in the translation to fictional construct.Ph.D