City of Dreadful Delight: Book Review
Judith R. Walkowitz's sociological study of gender and violence in Victorian London is entitled City of Dreadful Delight. This reflects the dual potential of late Victorian London to offer both visual and physical horror to all of the city's inhabitants and visitors. London gave visual and sensual pleasure and delight to those persons seeking to enjoy its sights and human commodities, but London was also rife with the danger and dread of violence. To many middle class men, the public space London was a place where they could escape the strictures of everyday life and morality that they suffered at home. To many women as well, the city of London was increasingly welcoming to their foot traffic and gave them the potential for unprecedented access to public spaces, including spaces of trade and a presence in the headlines of the mass media of the time. The sensationalist and muckraking journalists of the late Victorian era reinforced such trends towards publicity through their exposes and coverage of new trends amongst Victorian womanhood, with a seller's eye upon both spectacles of delight and dread. But the city of London also was rife with danger for ordinary pedestrians, especially women, and provided a daily and less glamo
rized spectacle of hunger, privation, poverty, and violence to all who passed through its streets and byways. Thus, the still-infamous crimes of Jack the Ripper were merely one embodiment of the era's creation of a "common vocabulary of male violence against women" now that women were growing more prominent as visual images in public life, both as consumers, as subjects of newspapers, and in advertising that was now specifically targeted towards the female consumer. (Walkowitz, 1992, pp.227-228) This female prominence occurred at the same time as more and more middle-class men were taking advantage of the city's opportunities at night to stroll and act as visual consumers of London's wide-ranging urban cultures, combining both scientific observation with the ability to engage in discursive fantasy and masquerade, given by the anonymous nature of the city's blackness. (Walkowitz, 1992, pp.15-16) This increased emphasis on wandering amongst men, ironically, caused the perceived culture of the city to increasingly feminized, as more men engaged in interactions with working class women, as prostitutes and also simply as passers-by. This feminization was not simply true of the evening but also because late Victorian London's increasing industrialization and commercialization brought women out into the streets, who sought to buy merchandise in the newly feminine shopping arena of department stores. Before, servants were the primary physical purchasers of goods. (Walkowitz, 1992, p.24) Now shopping had become an experience for women rather than a chore for lower-class women. Thus women ventured out to experience the new delights of touching commodities in department stores, but also themselves became commodities in the eyes of more men, or objects of desire and purchase for the male gaze and touch in a way that morally shook some women and men to the core. Women themselves, however, did not always use such exposure to demand greater freedom-although some did. Rather man
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Approximate Word count = 1338
Approximate Pages = 5 (250 words per page double spaced)
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