A Vindication of the Redhead The Typology of Red Hair Throughout the Literary and Visual Arts

A Vindication of the Redhead  investigates red hair in literature, art, television, and film throughout Eastern and Western cultures. This study examines red hair as a signifier, perpetuated through stereotypes, myths, legends, and literary and visual representations. Brenda Ayres and Sarah E. Maier provide a history of attitudes held by hegemonic populations toward red-haired individuals, groups, and genders from antiquity to the present. Ayres and Maier explore such diverse topics as Judeo-Christian narratives of red hair, redheads in Pre-Raphaelite paintings, red hair and gender identity, famous literary redheads such as Anne of Green Gables and Pippi Longstocking, contemporary and Neo-Victorian representations of redheads from the Black Widow to The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo, and more. This book illuminates the symbolic significance and related ideologies of red hair constructed in mythic, religious, literary, and visual cultural discourse.  

1. Introduction: “Hair is the Woman’s Glory”—Unless It’s Red.- 2. The Devil Has Red Hair: And So Do Other Dissemblers in Judeo-Christian Narratives.- 3. “Real Are the Dreams”: Red Hairy Incubi and Unheavenly Succubi.- 4. Les Roux Fatales: The Plaits of Pre-Raphaelite Redheads.- 5. The Agency of Red Hair on the Mage Gender Equivocal in Mr. Rochester, The Little Stranger, The Danish Girl, and Elsewhere.- 6. “Here we are again!” Red-haired Golems Galore Including Those in Dan Leno and the Limehouse Golem.- 7. Tangled Webs of Red Hair from the Grimm Brothers to Kate Morton.- 8. The Other Redheads Throughout Asia and Africa.- 9. Tough Little Red-Headed Orphans: Anne (of Green Gables), Little Orphan Annie, Madeline, and Pippi.- 10. Rebellious Royals: From Disney’s Ariel to Pixar’s Merida.- 11. Neo-Victorian Freakery: Flaming-Haired Women, Art, Dolls, and Detection.- 12. STEAM(y) and Marvel(ous) Women: Agent Scully, Lisbeth Salander, Beth Harmon and the Black Widow.- 13. Epilogue: The Splitting of Red Hairs.

Brenda Ayres, now semiretired, teaches online English courses for Liberty University and Southern New Hampshire University, USA. 

Sarah E. Maier is Professor of English and Comparative Literature at the University of New Brunswick Saint John, Canada. 

Ayres and Maier have coedited several collections of essays. The most recent are The Theological Dickens (2021), Neo-Victorian Madness: Rediagnosing Nineteenth-Century Mental Illness in Literature and Other Media (Palgrave Macmillan, 2020), Neo-Gothic Narratives: Illusory Allusions from the Past (2020), Animals and Their Children in Victorian Culture (2019) and Reinventing Marie Corelli for the Twenty-first Century (2019).