Language:
English
Year of publication:
1999
Titel der Quelle:
Victorian Literature and Culture
Angaben zur Quelle:
27,1 (1999) 171-183
Keywords:
Frankau, Julia,
;
Self-hate (Psychology)
;
Jews Identity
;
Antisemitism in literature
Abstract:
Contends that the Anglo-Jewish writer Julia Frankau (1864-1916) expressed Jewish self-hatred in her novels "Dr. Phillips: A Maida Vale Idyll" (1887) and "Pigs in Clover" (1903), which she legitimated by recourse to an idiosyncratic form of "scientific" racism. Early and mid-Victorian novelists regarded the Jews as a religious group rather than a racial one, but in the 1880s-90s, with the influx of Eastern European Jews and the rise of nativist racism, the Jews were classified as "non-whites." Frankau shared this racist view, and felt that biologically inherited traits explained the moral degeneracy of Jews. Although she projected negative Jewish traits on Eastern European Jews, and thus divided the Jewish community into "good" and "bad" factions, it does not mean that she approved of "West End" Jews. The only way to improve Jewry in Frankau's view was the kind of mixed marriage in which a Jewish woman married a Christian man, because only the latter was able to "whiten" Jewry. Contends that Frankau's racism was a leitmotif in Anglo-Jewish thinking.
DOI:
10.1017/S1060150399271094
URL:
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