Galia Ofek. Representations of Hair in Victorian Literature and Culture. Farnham, Surrey: Ashgate, 2009. ISBN: 9780754661610. Price: US$99.95/£55.00

Writing in Blackwood’s Edinburgh Magazine in 1867, Margaret Oliphant lamented the importance women’s hair had come to play in popular novels: In Representations of Hair in Victorian Literature and Culture, Galia Ofek appraises the work of several nineteenth-century authors and artists to examine this “leading property” and to trace “the places where hair imagery both underlined and undermined neat and reassuring definitions of womanhood, where representations of hair both reflected and deflected the standardization of femininity and women’s quest for self-determination” (250). Ofek contends that while “many Victorian discourses sought to bury, fix, tame or categorize women’s hair as a means to contain the discussion of female sexuality,” representations of hair nonetheless “haunted the liminal spaces between classes, genders, genres, agendas and individuals” (250). Ofek details female hair’s role as both a sexual and commodity fetish during the nineteenth century. As the main consumers of the family, women were the primary target of advertisers, and commodity culture was increasingly regarded as “essential to the process of becoming feminine” (38). One of the few publicly exposed parts of a woman’s body, hair became “the main focus of conspicuous leisure and consumption” (2), and “was invested with an over-determination of sexual meaning” (3). The elaborate hairstyles of the second half of the nineteenth century required enormous quantities of false hair, creating an expansive and profitable hair industry for artificial hair additions, as well as soaps, oils, and brushes. The fetishization of hair was further abetted by the popularity of hair keepsakes exchanged between romantic partners and family members (27). Ofek regards hair mementos as a “distinct instance of female fetishism” (49) and notes that Queen Victoria, Elizabeth Barrett Browning, Dante Gabriel Rossetti, and Charles Dickens all carried locks of loved ones on their bodies (47, 80, 118). Applying fetish theories to literary and visual representations of women’s hair, Ofek sets out to uncover the “unread text in the margins of Victorian culture and literature” (31). Clearly inspired by the work of Sandra Gilbert and Susan Gubar, Ofek’s analysis of representations of hair reveals “important, if covert, sub-narratives” that tell “the story of a marginalized, fragmented or isolated female identity” (30-1). Central to her project is a careful examination of the age-old dichotomy of the blonde heroine and the brunette vixen. Ofek draws on Roland Barthes’s notion of objects as signs to examine a Victorian semiotic system “in which hair as a widely circulated sign has a social and systemic role, conjuring up ideas which are projected as external, seemingly concrete facts” (17). In Victorian times, the opposing models of the innocent girl with blonde and neat hair and the wicked woman with dark and wild hair served as a sign system that defined proper femininity and policed women’s sexuality. “To regulate hair was to regulate society and to restrain waywardness” (35), so respectable Victorian wives and mothers kept their hair neat and orderly as a sign of sexual purity and social propriety (68); in contrast, loose, unruly, or unkempt female hair “automatically signified loose sexuality,” impurity, and even criminality (148). “As an important sign in a developing system of classification,” Ofek writes, “women’s hair mediated and negotiated the ideological construction of female sexuality” (69). Victorian authors and artists regularly utilized this hair system, depicting domestic, gentle blonde heroines and dangerous, passionate, sexually threatening brunettes. Ofek focuses on the tale of Rapunzel and the myth of Medusa–which both “seemed to fascinate Victorian imagination” (76) and were replicated repeatedly in Victorian literature and art–as a framework for examining the dichotomy between the idealized pure and helpless heroine and the wicked wild-haired temptress. Ofek …