Fantastic and Sensational: Representing the Female Body: Moulding the Female Body in Victorian Fairy Tales and Sensation Novels. Laurence Talairach-Vielmas. Aldershot: Ashgate, 2007. 188 pp. [Review]

Laurence Talairach-Vielmas’ Moulding the Female Body asserts that Victorian fairy tales and sensation fiction of the 1860s and 1870s revised traditional tales and old plot patterns, bringing them up-to-date with the modern Victorian world, and in doing so “foregrounded and often reworked cultural and social codes” (1). Although they may close with a happy, or at least conventional, ending, they also hold subversive possibilities, positing unconventional alternatives to the accepted social order. In the light of this assertion, Talairach-Vielmas focuses on how nineteenth-century conceptions and constructions of femininity, and of the female body, are explored, challenged, and (often) reasserted. In these stories different, sometimes conflicting, notions of the ideal woman – domestic, ethereal, natural, plump, consumptive – are tested and revaluated. The result of such scrutiny, however, is often the erasure of the female body as it is reduced to signs, metaphors and metonymies, as well as reflections, representations and works of art