Never Seen a Violet

Dinah Birch

• Men in Wonderland: The Lost Girlhood of the Victorian Gentleman by Catherine Robson
  Princeton, 250 pp, £19.95, June 2001, ISBN 0 691 00422 6

Freud takes it for granted that masculinity is the defining human condition, that all children begin life by imagining themselves as little men. When girls get round to noticing their lack of a penis and have to abandon fantasies of maleness, they feel envy and a lasting sense of alienation. Catherine Robson acknowledges and dismisses Freud and Lacan as forming ‘part of the continuing mythology of the creation of interiorised selves, a mythology to which this book aims to contribute one particular narrative’. In the story Robson tells, it’s the boys who are estranged. They respond to their dislocation by creating a compensating vision of ideal girlhood.