Writing
Erick DuPree’s blog explores the intersections of anthropology, literature, and material culture, illuminating how identity, ritual, and meaning take shape across time and tradition. Blending scholarship with storytelling, these essays invite readers to think critically and imaginatively about the cultural forces that shape both personal lives and collective experience.
Queen Victoria’s Mourning Gown: Ritual, Memory, and the Culture of Grief in Victorian Britain
Discover Queen Victoria’s mourning gown at Kensington Palace. Explore how her lifelong grief shaped Victorian mourning rituals—black crepe, jet jewelry, and public displays of loss—turning private sorrow into a powerful cultural and political tradition.
Tasseography: insights at the bottom of a cup of tea
Tea-leaf reading, or tasseography, blends ritual, history, and material culture. From 19th-century fortune cups to modern mindfulness, this practice transforms an ordinary cup of tea into a mirror of possibility
Social Satire to Sentimental Myth: How the Romance Genre Distorted Jane Austen
Modern romance has rewritten Jane Austen, trading social critique for fantasy. Learn how Austen’s sharp insights on power, gender, and survival were lost in the myth of “happily ever after.”
Caged Beasts and Broken Gods: The Byronic Hero and the Erotics of Gothic Masculinity
Explore the Byronic hero of Gothic fiction—tortured, magnetic, and dangerously masculine. This essay unpacks how stoicism, pain, and emotional repression became eroticized traits, revealing the dark roots of masculine fantasy, dominance, and the myth of redemptive love.
Victorian Monsters: Shadows of Progress and Fear
Victorian monsters—vampires, werewolves, and mummies—mirrored anxieties about sex, science, empire, and identity, showing how fear and fascination shaped both culture and imagination.
Heathcliff: On Sadism, Consent, and the Gothic Male in Wuthering Heights
Explore the dark psychology of Heathcliff in Wuthering Heights through the lens of masculinity, sadism, and BDSM. This essay unpacks why cruelty is mistaken for love—and how the Gothic bad boy became an enduring, dangerous erotic fantasy.
Victorian Culture, “Other Sciences,” the Occult, and Mourning
Victorian culture embraced “other sciences” like phrenology, alienism, and spiritualism alongside mourning rituals. These practices mirrored anxieties about race, empire, gender, and death—revealing how science, the occult, and grief shaped the shadows of progress.
The Empire in Victorian Literature
Victorian empire thrived on science and classification, yet its literature—Kipling, Haggard, and beyond—reveals the shadows of knowledge. Anthropology, ethnography, and adventure tales exposed anxieties about race, empire, and the unknowable.
Little Ladies, Big Lessons: Victorian Fashion Dolls as Instruments of Gender Socialization
Little Ladies: Victorian Fashion Dolls and the Feminine Ideal explores how 19th-century dolls served as tools of gender training and socialization. Beneath the silks and lace lies a powerful story of class, empire, and the making of the “proper” woman—stitched in miniature.