SUFFERING ANGELS: DEATH AND FEMININITY IN ELLEN WOOD'S FICTION

摘要

This essay discusses Wood's treatment of the relationship between femininity and death, highlighting the tension in her depiction of the dying heroine between a Christian eschatology and the representational codes of contemporary visual art and literature. It argues that Wood's negotiation of death is inextricably connected to her ideas about femininity, and that a close analysis of the deaths of female characters in Wood's wider oeuvre facilitates new ways of reading the famous fate of Isabel Vane in East Lynne (1861).