Hong-Jin Lu
ABSTRACT
This study examines how Victorian female writers employed nostalgia in their fiction to represent social movements, status differences, and feminine development. Taking Elizabeth Gaskell’s Cranford and Charlotte Brontë’s Villette as case studies, the paper explores the role of nostalgia in diverse contexts and its implications for women. This study presents nostalgia not only in terms of emotional longing for the past but also as a social and psychological coping mechanism that helped Victorian women adjust to a changing world. Cranford illustrates how collective nostalgia allowed the community to maintain social order and cultural identity. The individual nostalgia of unmarried female elders also played a significant role in achieving self-healing. Villette, by contrast, is about the ways that individual nostalgia creates self and identity. Lucy’s longing for the Bretton family is a combination of her sweet childhood memories and her innate desire for a sense of belonging. Through the act of nostalgia, Lucy as a young single woman is not just searching for moments of her past but also for the possibility of personal growth and identity through these moments. Both novels go beyond nostalgia to incisively examine social changes, class conflict and self-help among women in the Victorian era with similar and different attitudes. They also demonstrate that nostalgia is not just an emotion, but a social and psychological survival tool that helps people locate a sense of belonging in themselves when confronting change.
KEYWORDS: nostalgia, class, single women, Cranford, Villette
Hong-Jin Lu, Assistant Professor, Department of Applied English, Chihlee University of Technology, Taiwan (bekahlu.tw@gmail.com)
DOI: 10.30395/WSR.202606_19(2).0003
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