The Victorian
Idealization of Little Girls
This bust of a young
cherub-faced girl, complete with bonnet and bow, typifies the ideal Victorian girl. During the Victorian age, prints of photographs
were being purchased at a ferocious rate. Images of dolled-up, dainty little girls and mischievous young boys were
two of the ideal middle-class archetypes being photographed, reproduced, and disseminated throughout Victorian households.
The modern viewer may
find it odd that the ideal Victorian girl is supposed to be demure, full of "womanly virtue," and is seen as the "mother
surrogate" when interacting with her friends, while the ideal adult Victorian woman is supposed to be innocent and regress
back to a sort of girlishness.
Victorians (particularly
middle - and upper-class Victorians) considered children to be innocent and childhood to be a sort of golden period of their
lives before they had to face the hardships of adulthood. Because of this changing view on childhood, images of
children went from representations of miniaturized adults to those of realistically-portrayed children in the prime
of youth. |