Jovial Bigotry: Max Orell and the Transnational Debate Over Manners and Morals in 19th Century France, Britain and the United States

Product Description This book revisits the debate over manners and morals that raged in France, Britain and the United States in the late nineteenth century. It was in essence a debate about gender and sexuality, and one of the foremost figures in the transnational discussions was the French writer and lecturer Paul Blouet, alias Max O Rell (1847 1903). Although largely forgotten today, O Rell deserves remembrance as a major phenomenon of the fin-de-siècle publishing and entertainment world. A Frenchman living in England but catering primarily to the American market, he disseminated national and gender stereotypes in an unprecedented way. Admired for the wit deployed in his lectures and his many best-selling books, he is a colorful exemplar of the many bourgeois commentators, male and female; most of them with mainstream political, social and cultural views, who engaged in these discussions, producing dense webs of assertion and opinion across countries and even continents. The elegant French salonnière, the independent but trustworthy English girl, the bitter American spinster activist meddling in public affairs: these are just a few examples of the many caricatural representations of women thrust into the debate. Max O Rell and his fellow observers commented on women s position in family and society, their partnership in the couple, their education, their sexual fulfilment, their right to paid work, aspects of social etiquette, feminism, domestic abuse, adultery and prostitution. There were frequent disagreements and sometimes hostile exchanges, but this analysis of the debate reveals a fundamentally common outlook among its participants: an agreement on patriarchy as the foundation of bourgeois society, and on the necessity to confine women in carefully stereotyped roles. About the Author Jana Verhoeven completed her PhD at the University of Melbourne and holds an MA in American History from Humboldt Universitat Berlin. She is currently teaching at the French Department of the University Melbourne, specializing in 19th century French cultural history as well as European cultural history, and has published on aspects of 19th French gender and cultural history.