题目内容

题目材料：

The following passage is excerpted from an article about biographies of the wives of famous Victorian men.

The relative rarity of "wife stories" among Victorian biographies might be simply explained by reference to the relative scarcity of archival sources for such studies and the relative indifference of the reading public to biographies of obscure women. But I suspect the reluctance to deal with the biography of wives goes rather deeper. The case of Jane Franklin is instructive. Franklin (1791-1875), a traveler and diarist, was married to John Franklin, governor of what is now Tasmania and a famed polar explorer who disappeared on an expedition in the Arctic in 1847. During the 1850s her sentimental celebrity arguably rivaled that of Florence Nightingale [the founder of modern nursing]; her archive includes 158 diary volumes, supplemented by a mass of correspondence. Yet there has been no serious biographical study of Jane Franklin since 1951, compared with more than twenty-five of Nightingale. While she is a colorful, if peripheral, figure in the annals of Tasmanian history, and a more domineering presence in some polar historiography, Victorian biographers and British feminist historians have shown no interest in her. Though the theoretical preoccupations of the 1990s prompted reconsiderations of gender, sentiment, and power in many unpromising figures, including Queen Victoria herself, feminist revision has made no attempt to unsettle Franklin's halo of tedious virtue.

The reason for this lack of attention has much to do with the success of Franklin's strategic self-representation as a devoted and unassuming wife. Her skillful rhetoric, moreover, was augmented before and after her death by a succession of sentimental biographical portraits in which her identity was thoroughly subsumed by the narrative of her husband's tragic fate. Not surprisingly, when her diaries and correspondence left private hands in 1939, they were valued not for their illumination of a woman's life, but of a man's. "Take out whatever is of polar interest, and burn the rest," Louisa Lefroy instructed the archivist when she delivered the papers to the Scott Polar Research Institute. Although they escaped this fate, the papers remain immured at Cambridge in quintessentially masculine surroundings (in the Scott Polar Research Institute) where they rarely strike the attention of feminist scholars. Their physical location enforces the subordination of Franklin's identity to her husband's fame, and they have been plundered most often for their revelations concerning John Franklin, or the innumerable search expeditions dispatched, often at her urging, in his wake.