Neo-Victoria:

On Queen Victoria’s Celebrity in the Twenty-First Century

Abstract

Queen Victoria was the namesake, the very face, of the latter half of the nineteenth century. ‘Neo-Victoria’, on the other hand, is a memory of the Queen by means of which we sustain her relevance even into the new millennium – via such biopics as Jean-Marc Vallée’s The Young Victoria (2009) and, more recently, Tom Vaughan’s ITV series Victoria (2016). This paper compares Victorian and neo-Victorian accounts of the Queen on the basis of underlying tropes and discourses of domestic femininity. In the nineteenth century, Victoria was portrayed as the consummate bourgeois wife and imperial mother to coloniser and colonised alike (Voskuil 2004: 170); at present, a Neo-Victoria is introduced as a reaction against her progenitor’s projected wifely submissiveness, but, curiously, not against the imperial meaning inscribed in her maternal role. Neo-Victoria’s vestigial imperialism, I argue, is at least an impediment to Vallée’s project of retrospectively empowering Victorian femininity or re-envisioning the nineteenth century in a postcolonial global context. The Young Victoria, in particular, seeks to redress Victorian patriarchy but in the end invigorates a residual nostalgia for imperial Britain.