Those Very ‘Other’ Victorians:

Interrogating Neo-Victorian Feminism in The Journal of Dora Damage

Abstract

This paper focuses on Belinda Starling’s The Journal of Dora Damage (2006), one of the most detailed and outspoken depictions of Victorian sexuality in recent years, drawing an exaggerated picture of sexual deviance smouldering under a thin veneer of repressed respectability. Focusing on issues such as pornography, rape, child abuse, and the sexual liberation of women in a patriarchal society, it is, on one level, little more than a feminist attack on Victorian hypocrisy and on a social system which fostered an ideal of femininity that denied women access to meaningful economic occupations and sexual agency. On a second level, however, the novel can be read both as a commentary on contemporary debates, and as a critical revaluation of the validity of offloading such concerns onto the Victorians. Implicating its readers in voyeuristic enjoyment of Victorian perversion, The Journal of Dora Damage constitutes a self-consciously parodical interrogation of the feminist politics of neo-Victorian women’s fiction more generally.