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Rodriguez, Mia U. "Medea in Victorian Women's Poetry." University of Toledo Honors Theses / OhioLINK, 2012. http://rave.ohiolink.edu/etdc/view?acc_num=uthonors1355934808.
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Stewart, Clare. "Fighting spirit : Victorian women's ghost stories." Thesis, University of Glasgow, 2000. http://theses.gla.ac.uk/1610/.
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Brand, Prudence. "Emily Pfeiffer and Victorian women's religious poetry." Thesis, Royal Holloway, University of London, 2012. http://repository.royalholloway.ac.uk/items/6766393a-e1ab-a987-0223-0460c5622c28/8/.
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As a Christian, Emily Pfeiffer (1827-1890) saw women's fight for emancipation as a crusade that transcends the earthly state. Yet, although her poetry was well-received during her life-time, Pfeiffer remains obscure. In order to challenge values that may have helped to perpetuate Pfeiffer's non-canonical status, I examine Pfeiffer's poetry against a broader definition of religious practice and worship than was traditionally applied to Victorian women's poetry. Responding to a recent re-evaluation of the criteria for what constitutes nineteenth-century religious literature, I demonstrate that Pfeiffer's poetry occupies a unique position in the canon of Victorian women's religious poetry. To determine what made Pfeiffer such an original thinker, my research considers childhood experiences from which the psychological imprint nev~r faded. In order to compensate for losses and disappointments, Pfeiffer learned to channel her frustrations into her poetry early in life. A Central Anglican, Pfeiffer belonged to a declining strand of the Established Church during a period when other branches of Christianity were expanding.
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McGowran, Katharine Margaret. "House and home in late Victorian women's poetry." Thesis, University of Hull, 1999. http://hydra.hull.ac.uk/resources/hull:3954.
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Any consideration of the theme of ‘house and home’ leads into discussion on three different levels of discourse. First of all, houses have biographical and historical significance; they are, after all, real places in which real lives are lived. Secondly, home is an ideologically loaded noun, a bastion of value which is inextricably entwined with the notion of the pure woman. Thirdly, in literature, houses are metaphorical places. This thesis is primarily a study of those metaphorical places. It explores representations of ‘house’ and ‘home’ in late Victorian women's poetry. However, it also takes account of the biographical, historical and ideological significance of the house, looking at factors which may have helped to shape each poet's representations of ‘house and home’. The house occupies an ambiguous position in the poetry of the later Victorian period. It is variously imagined as a haunted house, a ruin, an empty house of echoes, and a prison of isolation and despair. At times, the house is a recognisable domestic place (the private house), at others, it is turned into a place of art or poetry, a new aesthetic ‘home’ for the female imagination. In some poems the house is a focus for nostalgia and homesickness. Yet it is also often a place which must be left behind. What unites the poets I have studied is the fact that the houses they inhabit in their work are never entirely their own and they are rarely entirely at home in them. Home is less roomy as a concept. It tends to carry religious or ideological connotations and is usually represented as a place of duty and responsibility. It also comes to mean the final resting place: the grave. Thus house and home, which are not identical terms, are freighted with different meanings. It is the mismatch of these two terms, the tension between them, which I explore in this thesis.
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Bianchi, Petra. "'Hidden strength' : the poetry and plays of Augusta Webster." Thesis, University of Oxford, 1999. http://ethos.bl.uk/OrderDetails.do?uin=uk.bl.ethos.313138.
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Dredge, Sarah. "Accommodating feminism : Victorian fiction and the nineteenth-century women's movement." Thesis, McGill University, 2000. http://digitool.Library.McGill.CA:80/R/?func=dbin-jump-full&object_id=36917.
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The research field of this thesis is framed by the major political and legal women's movement campaigns from the 1840s to the 1870s: the debates over the Married Women's Property Act; over philanthropy and methods of addressing social ills; the campaign for professional opportunities for women, and the arguments surrounding women's suffrage. I address how these issues are considered and contextualised in major works of Victorian fiction: Anne Bronte's The Tenant of Wildfell Hall (1848), Elizabeth Gaskell's North and South (1855), Charlotte Bronte's Villette (1853), and George Eliot's Middlemarch (1871--2).In works of fiction by women, concepts of social justice were not constrained by layers of legal abstraction and the obligatory political vocabulary of "disinterest." Contemporary fiction by women could thus offer some of the most developed articulations of women's changing expectations. This thesis demonstrates that the Victorian novel provides a distinct synthesis of, and contribution to, arguments grouped under the rubric of the "woman question." The novel offers a perspective on feminist politics in which conflicting social interests and demands can be played out, where ethical questions meet everyday life, and human relations have philosophical weight. Given women's traditional exclusion from the domain of legitimate (authoritative) speech, the novels of Gaskell, the Bronte's, and Eliot, traditionally admired for their portrayal of moral character, play a special role in giving voice to the key political issues of women's rights, entitlements, and interests. Evidence for the political content and efficacy of these novels is drawn from archival sources which have been little used in literary studies (including unpublished materials), as well as contemporary periodicals. Central among these is the English Woman's Journal. Conceived as the mouthpiece of the early women's movement, the journal offers a valuable record of the feminist activity of the period. Though it has not been widely exploited, particularly in literary studies, detailed study of the journal reveals close parallels between the ideological commitments and concerns of the women's movement and novels by mid-Victorian women.
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Parish, Christina M. "Gender dissonance and the bourgeois woman in the Victorian novel." Related electronic resource: Current Research at SU : database of SU dissertations, recent titles available full text, 2006. http://proquest.umi.com/login?COPT=REJTPTU0NWQmSU5UPTAmVkVSPTI=&clientId=3739.
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Dyer, Anton. "John Stuart Mill and male support for the Victorian women's movement." Thesis, University of Sussex, 1995. http://ethos.bl.uk/OrderDetails.do?uin=uk.bl.ethos.294416.
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In examining male support for the Victorian women's movement, I decided to focus upon a number of men who gave active support across the wide range of causes championed by feminists. John Stuart Mill, Henry Fawcett, James Stansfeld, Jacob Bright, Richard Pankhurst and Francis Newman were selected as my main protagonists and their support for the Married Women's Property campaign, the higher education of women, the opening up of the professions to women, women's suffrage and the campaign to repeal the Contagious Diseases Acts was explored. I also examine the views of John Russell, Viscount Amberley, whose early death robbed the women's suffrage movement of his enthusiastic support, and also those of William Johnson Fox, a proponent of women's emancipation who gave his support to the Married Women's Property campaign, but who died when the women's movement had existed for only a decade. The ideas of an important male feminist of an earlier generation, William Thompson, are also explored. I discuss the views of my protagonists on sexual equality and sexual difference, marriage, sexuality, female education, the employment of women and women's suffrage. In seeking to account for the feminism of my protagonists I note the personal characteristics which they broadly shared: moral courage, a tendency to self-sacrifice, sensitivity and a strong sense of justice. Male feminists, especially Mill, were sometimes branded as effeminate, but it seems fairer to suggest that they generally combined the best of both 'masculine' and 'feminine' qualities; they possessed a sufficient degree of 'womanly' sensitivity to empathise with the wrongs of woman and a great deal of 'manly' courage which enabled them to endure the ridicule and abuse which standing up for women's rights frequently entailed. Most of my protagonists were advanced Liberals, and a belief in the need to cultivate altruism was a significant component of their creed; support for women's emancipation was an important aspect of their concern for the welfare of others. The fact that men and women worked closely together in the fight for women's emancipation is explored and especially their intellectual collaboration, notable in the cases of William Thompson and Anna Wheeler, John Mill and Harriet Taylor, and Henry and Millicent Fawcett.
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Kumojima, Tomoe. "Of friendship and hospitality : Victorian women's travel writing on Meiji Japan." Thesis, University of Oxford, 2012. http://ora.ox.ac.uk/objects/uuid:545e605a-9361-485a-878c-dabb76da9822.
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This thesis explores the possibility and challenges of international/interracial female friendship and anti-communitarian hospitality through writings of Victorian female travellers to Meiji Japan between 1854 and 1918. It features three travellers, viz. Isabella Bird, Mary Crawford Fraser, and Marie Stopes. The introduction delineates the context of key events in the Anglo-Japanese relationship and explores the representation of Japan in Victorian travelogues and literary works. Chapter I considers the philosophical dialogue between Jean-Luc Nancy, Maurice Blanchot, and Jacques Derrida on community, friendship, and hospitality. It demonstrates the potential of applying their thinking, notwithstanding its occasional complicity, to an analysis of the place of hitherto marginalised groups, women and foreigners, in Western philosophical models. Chapter II examines relationships between Bird and Japanese natives, especially her interpreter, Ito in Unbeaten Tracks in Japan (1880) in terms of questions of stable identity and translation. It further undertakes a comparative study between the travelogue and Itō no koi (2005) by Nakajima Kyōko. I explore the afterlife of Bird in Japanese literature. Chapter III investigates friendships in Fraser’s A Diplomatist’s Wife in Japan (1898). It uncovers her connection with Japanese female writers in oblivion, Yei Theodra Ozaki and Wakamatsu Shizuko. I discuss the influence her friendships had on Fraser’s fictional works such as The Stolen Emperor (1903), especially on the fair portrayals of Japanese women. Chapter IV explores friendships between the sexes in Stopes’ A Journal from Japan (1910) and articulates its relationship with Love-Letters of a Japanese (1911) and Plays of Old Japan (1913). I examine Stopes’ romantic relationship with Fujī Kenjirō and its influence on her career in sexology. It also investigates Stopes’ collaboration with Sakurai Jōji on Nō translation and exposes complex gender, racial, and linguistic politics. The conclusion explores three Japanese female travellers to Victorian Britain, focusing on their contact with local women. It considers Tsuda Umeko’s Journal in London, Yasui Tetsu’s Wakakihi no ato, and Yosano Akiko’s Pari yori (1914).
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Bissell, Sarah Jane. "Haunted matters : objects, bodies, and epistemology in Victorian women's ghost stories." Thesis, University of Glasgow, 2014. http://theses.gla.ac.uk/6402/.
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Haunted Matters interrogates objects, bodies, and epistemology in a selection of Victorian women’s ghost stories, arguing that these things provided a means through which the chosen writers could critique women’s troubled cultural position in mid- to late-nineteenth-century Britain. The four authors considered – Charlotte Riddell, Margaret Oliphant, Vernon Lee, and Edith Nesbit – were all fundamental figures in the development of the ghost story genre, using this popular fiction form to investigate social arenas in which women were subjugated, professional venues from which they were excluded, and the cultural construction of femininity. Each chapter is thus keyed into a specific aspect of women’s material lives: money and the financial market (Riddell); visual science and the male gaze (Oliphant); object culture and ‘feminine’ mysteriousness (Lee); and fin de siècle marriage and the female corpse (Nesbit). This study argues that these writers – in making things, bodies, and forms of perception central to their ghost stories – implicitly condemned the patriarchal society which perpetuated a range of contradictory assumptions about women, as being both bodily and spiritual, overly invested in the material world or too prone to flights of fancy. Their diverse literary endeavours in this popular fiction form enabled the selected writers to earn money, engage in public discourse, and critique the dominant culture which sanctioned women’s subjugation. Haunted Matters thus questions the ghost story’s designation as an anti-materialist genre through a focus on gender, instead foregrounding the form’s explicit connections to the material world.
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Williams, Lucy. "'At large' : women's lives and offending in Victorian Liverpool and London." Thesis, University of Liverpool, 2014. http://livrepository.liverpool.ac.uk/17193/.
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This thesis focuses on serious female offenders living in Liverpool and London during the Victorian period. In contrast to much existing historical research on women and crime, the interest here is not solely on the offences women committed, nor their offending patterns; but instead on their lives, experiences, and identities. One of the key objectives of this research is to add new information on women and offending to a historiography which continues to be dominated by the male offender and the male experience or crime. Similarly, this research moves away from histories of female offenders as shoplifters, prostitutes, and child-killers, and considers the wider involvement of women in crimes of theft and violence in Victorian cities. The findings demonstrate that female offences were diverse, and patterns of offending were heavily influenced by local, environmental, and personal factors. Analysis of women’s experiences shows that limited opportunities for employment, difficult living conditions, and poor prospects for social mobility and stability all impacted upon the probability of offending. The research also shows that women who were part of the lowest sections of the working class, members of an ethnic minority, the oldest female child in their families, and unmarried, were most likely to become serious female offenders. Local differences in employment opportunities, housing patterns, and policing practices could impact upon the kind of crimes undertaken by women, the period of the life-cycle in which offending was most likely to begin, the length of offending careers, and the number of convictions women gained. Yet the biggest contribution to serious female offending was made by experiences which transcended both location and environment, namely the issues of poverty, and social and economic exclusion.
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MacDonald, Anna. "Expressions of White Ink: Victorian Women's Poetry and the Lactating Breast." Thesis, Université d'Ottawa / University of Ottawa, 2015. http://hdl.handle.net/10393/32951.
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The period spanning from the late 1850s to the mid-1860s frames a historical moment in Victorian England when lactation and breastfeeding came under intense public scrutiny in both medical and creative writing. While popular domestic author Isabella Beeton wrote on the dangers that an unwary mother’s milk represented for her child and herself in her serial publication, Mrs. Beeton’s Book of Household Management (1859-1861), prominent physicians C.H.F. Routh and William Acton launched a public dispute in medical journals contesting the physiological and moral dangers that the fallen wet nurse posed for the middle-class household (1859). Meanwhile, the medical community catalogued the bizarre long-term physical and dispositional side-effects of an infant’s consumption of “bad milk” – among them, syphilis, swearing, sexual immorality, and death (Matus 161-162). But it is not only medical writers who were latching on to the breastfeeding debate as a means of voicing social and political concerns of the day; recent literary critics have gestured towards the troubling manifestations of lactation in popular mid-century novels like Charles Dickens’s Dombey and Son (1848) and George Eliot’s Adam Bede (1859) as entry points into Victorian anxieties about classed and gendered embodiment. This project stipulates that the mid-century preoccupation with managing women’s milk represents an intersection of two overlapping cultural paradigms pertaining to female expression: a cultural devaluation of female physiological expression as unconscious if not dangerous leakage, and a deprecation of female linguistic and poetic expression as an analogously unmeditated and potentially disruptive kind of communication. Mid-century manuals, articles, and novels offered public voice to a number of existing anxieties surrounding breastfeeding which accompanied the mid-nineteenth century, a historical moment at the cusp of a waning popularity in wet nursing and at the advent and rise of patented infant formula. This project stipulates that at least three female poets of the mid-nineteenth century employ lactation imagery in their works as a means of recasting a cultural devaluation of female expression – inventing a new critical terminology of feminine poetic signifiers that uses the symbolic medium of breastmilk as its ink. Informed by the medical and cultural context of the High Victorian age, I explore how poets Elizabeth Barrett Browning (1806-1861), Christina Rossetti (1830-1894), and Augusta Webster (1837-1894) not only participate in the preoccupation with unstable bodies and fluids, but capitalize on female leakage in an elaborate rhetorical strategy that embarks on a new embodied female poetics. Barrett Browning’s Aurora Leigh, Rossetti’s “Goblin Market,” and Webster’s Mother and Daughter all enlist the lactating and feeding breast in a series of elaborate metaphors of female identity construction, literary expression, and poetic voice.
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Ziegler, Amber M. "Unconventional Women in a Conventional Age: Strong Female Characters in Three Victorian Novels." Connect to resource online, 2009. http://rave.ohiolink.edu/etdc/view?acc_num=ysu1242224834.
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Boardman, Kay. "Representations of femininity, domesticity, sexuality, work and independence in mid-Victorian women's magazines." Thesis, University of Strathclyde, 1994. http://oleg.lib.strath.ac.uk:80/R/?func=dbin-jump-full&object_id=21301.
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This study explores representations of femininity, domesticity, sexuality, work and independence in mid-Victorian women's periodicals. Through close readings of a whole range of publications produced for and by women between 1845 and 1880 the study aims to explore the relationship between text and culture, and to consider the relevance of class as an important determinant of social knowledge and value. Starting from a discussion of methodological and theoretical concerns the study moves on to look at representations of the sign woman in popular, fashion, drawingroom and evangelical magazines. A final chapter explores the way in which a woman-centred discourse is developed in feminist journals and considers the significance of class as a marker of respectability. The wider concern of the study is with debates about the relationship between gender and class, the women's magazine as a popular signifying practice, and the highly mediated relationship between text and culture.
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Di, Bello Patrizia. "Ladies, mothers and flirts : women's photographic albums in Victorian England, c.1850-1880." Thesis, Birkbeck (University of London), 2004. http://ethos.bl.uk/OrderDetails.do?uin=uk.bl.ethos.407495.
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Forbes, Shannon. "Women's transition from Victorian to contemporary identity as portrayed in the modern novel /." Lewiston : the E. Mellen press, 2006. http://catalogue.bnf.fr/ark:/12148/cb40213429k.
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Fitch, Samantha. "The Gendered Pocket| Fashion and Patriarchal Anxieties about the Female Consumer in Select Victorian Literature." Thesis, Indiana University of Pennsylvania, 2017. http://pqdtopen.proquest.com/#viewpdf?dispub=10606781.
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The popularity of the iPhone generated a barrage of digital comments, complaints, and articles about how the trendy phone didn’t fit in women’s pockets, from articles like the one in the Atlantic titled “The Gender Politics of Pockets” to a vlog called “Girl Pockets” by popular vlogger Hank Green. Why are women protesting about the inadequacy of their pockets, and how is this indicative of sexism and inequality? An examination of the gendered history of pockets answers this question, and is rooted in the literature of the Victorian era. I use thing theory to reveal how the pocket was both an agent and a symbol of economic change in this period. This dissertation considers the importance of the pocket, not only as an item of fashion, but also as an object that carried symbolic and representative meanings in Victorian society.
Much like women’s fashion in general, pockets in the Victorian period were used as disciplinary forces. The increase in technology and the rise in consumerism meant that women were leaving the house, and a female buying force became immensely important to the British economy. Part of the effort to counter this threat was to make women’s fashion debilitating and limiting. As the receptacle of money and object of convenience to a mobile shopper, the pocket was an important part of the effort to curtail feminine power, and this can be seen in Victorian literature. A fashionable woman was forced to use separate tie-pockets, which were exposed to theft or ransacking, and were also inconvenient. This meant that women’s pockets were more vulnerable, and in economic and psychological terms, women suffered for this. The comparison with men’s easily accessible and secure pockets worked to reassert the traditional hierarchy in the Victorian patriarchal system. Consequently a tension was created: the female shopper represented a much-needed potential economic force, but because of the threat to patriarchy that she represented, this force was constantly being constrained and controlled.
Through an examination of Victorian literature, art, and advertisements, we can see that women’s pockets, then as now, were unsatisfactory.
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Crouse, Jamie S. "To enlarge the sphere of religious poetry : the rise of Victorian women's religious verse." Thesis, University of Kent, 2010. http://ethos.bl.uk/OrderDetails.do?uin=uk.bl.ethos.544026.
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Lawrence, Lindsy M. "Seriality and domesticity the Victorian serial and domestic ideology in the family literary magazine /." Fort Worth, Tex. : Texas Christian University, 2008. http://etd.tcu.edu/etdfiles/available/etd-05052008-151851/unrestricted/Lawrence.pdf.
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Ritchie, Jessica Frances. "Revisiting the murderess representations of Victorian women's violence in mid-nineteenth- and late-twentieth-century fiction." Thesis, University of Canterbury. School of Culture, Literature and Society, 2006. http://hdl.handle.net/10092/897.
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The murderess in the twenty-first century is a figure of particular cultural fascination; she is the subject of innumerable books, websites, documentaries and award-winning movies. With female violence reportedly on the increase, a rethinking of beliefs about women's natural propensity towards violent and aggressive behaviours is inevitable. Using the Victorian period as a central focus, this thesis explores the contradictory ideologies regarding women's violence and also suggests an alternative approach to the relationship between gender and violence in the future. A study of violent women in representation reveals how Victorian attitudes towards violence and femininity persist today. On the one hand, women have traditionally been cast as the naturally non-aggressive victims of violence rather than its perpetrators; on the other hand, the destructive potential of womanhood has been a cause of anxiety since the earliest Western mythology. I suggest that it is a desire to resolve this contradiction that has resulted in the proliferation of violent women in representation over the last one and a half centuries. In particular, an analysis of mid-nineteenth-century popular fiction indicates that the stronger the ideal of the angelic woman was, the greater the anxiety produced by her demonic antithesis. Wilkie Collins's Armadale and Mary Elizabeth Braddon's Lady Audley's Secret illustrate both the contradictory Victorian attitudes towards violent women and a need to reconcile the combination of good and bad femininity that the murderess represents. Revisiting the Victorian murderess in the late twentieth century provides a potential means for resolving this contradiction; specifically, it enables the violent woman to engage in a process of self-representation that was not available to her in the nineteenth century. Margaret Atwood's Alias Grace suggests that any insight into the murderess begins with listening to the previously silenced voice of the violent woman herself.
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Day, Paula. "Nature and gender in Victorian women's writing : Emily Bronte, Charlotte Bronte, Elizabeth Barrett Browning, Christina Rossetti." Thesis, Lancaster University, 1990. http://ethos.bl.uk/OrderDetails.do?uin=uk.bl.ethos.293143.
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This thesis explores the ways in which four Victorian women writers - Emily Bronte, Charlotte Bronte, Elizabeth Barrett Browning, and Christina Rossetti - work with the gender associations implicit in the nature imagery of the male literary tradition. In the Introduction I explore the possible approaches available to the feminist literary critic. I then review the gender associations of nature symbolism in the male literary tradition, and the ways in which some Victorian critics used these to define the characteristics of women's writing. In Part One, I find that these writers re-affirm the idea of the fertile earth as 'mother na ture'. I argue, however, that in each case this projection functions to create a female space outside of patriarchal culture, in a symbolic relationship with a strong mother figure. Looking at Emily Bronte's construction of a 'male nature', I question how far this constitutes a reversal of the traditional pattern. I then examine some ways in which 'womanliness' is located in valley or mountain landscapes. In Part Two, I consider the moon as a symbol of femininity. Although, as in some of Christina Rossetti's poetry, it may become a metaphor for woman's dependence on the solar male God, it can also suggest female autonomy. In Emily Bronte's poetry, the moon of female vision is adhered to in preference to the 'sun' of male power. Charlotte Bronte exploits the moon's ambivalent associations to represent virginal autonomy and vengeful rage as different aspects of female psychic power. In Part Three, I turn to the image of woman as flower. Whereas Christina Rossetti uses this in conventional ways to expose women's sexual vulnerability, Elizabeth Barrett Browning subverts it to create images of strong female identity. My Conclusion emphasises the ideological, rather than archetypal, origins of literary symbolism, and the ways in which women writers negotiate successfully with the existing traditions.
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Montgomery, Katherine Frances. ""Drear flight and homeless wandering": gender, economics, and crises of identity in mid-Victorian women's fiction." Diss., University of Iowa, 2014. https://ir.uiowa.edu/etd/6809.
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My dissertation begins with the central crisis of Jane Eyre, in which Jane flees Thornfield Hall after her failed marriage, is unable to find work, and almost dies of exposure and starvation on the moors. She finds herself asking "What was I to do? Where to go? Oh, intolerable questions, when I could do nothing and go nowhere!" I suggest that this passage, and others that echo it in Villette and works by Elizabeth Barrett Browning, Mary Elizabeth Braddon, and George Eliot can be read in terms of early Victorian anxieties over middle-class women's inability to support themselves should they need to. Most literary criticism on women and work focuses on the end of the century, which saw an explosion of the topic in public debate and literature of the time; in my work, I explore how these discussions and anxieties about women's work were developing much earlier than is usually discussed. While the fin-de-siècle figure of the New Woman characteristically moves through urban landscapes in ways that emphasize her independence (alone, on bicycles, on buses, to and from places of work and her own domicile), earlier middle-class Victorian women walk out of domestic spaces that are not their own, and any brief sense of freedom is swiftly followed by a sense of desperation or need. These women wander through economic landscapes in ways that point to their profound state of dependence and their inability to support themselves. Given that women are still, today, the first economic victims of a recession, I am interested in tracing how women writers started responding to this vulnerability almost as soon as it became visible with the establishment of an industrial economy and the rise of the middle class in early- and mid-Victorian England.
While some extant criticism examines Victorian gender and economics in literature on a text-by-text basis, I propose a comprehensive model with four modes for understanding how woman move through economic and physical landscapes in Victorian fiction: 1) in a mode of desperation that points to a fundamental problem with middle-class women's vulnerable economic position (Bronte's Jane Eyre and Villette); 2) in a mode of learning to better understand their limited but relative privilege compared to working-class women (Barrett Browning's Aurora Leigh); 3) in a problematized mode of successful self-reinvention, prompted by economic aspirations, that poses a danger to conventional social hierarchy and therefore marks the woman as errant or evil (sensation fiction, Braddon's Lady Audley's Secret and Aurora Floyd); and 4) in a mode of self-revelation in which a woman comes to realize how her own perpetual state of dependence has affected her choices (Eliot's Daniel Deronda and Middlemarch). Desperation, comprehension, problematic self-invention, revelation: Victorian women's wanderings consistently point to, through the movement of the woman's body, the ways that the woman is an economic subject, perhaps before she is anything else.
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Khan, Scheherazade. "Weathering Challenges to the Separate Sphere Ideology: The Persistence of Convention in Victorian Novels, 1850-1901." Thesis, Université d'Ottawa / University of Ottawa, 2021. http://hdl.handle.net/10393/42671.
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The separate sphere ideology, dominant but never hegemonic in Victorian Britain, dictated that women’s natural vocation was to be wives and mothers. Between the years 1850 to 1901, the surplus woman problem and a nascent feminist movement challenged the separate sphere ideology. It was also reinforced by imperialist ideologies that held the British family as a sign of Britain’s superiority, and eugenics which placed great importance on heterosexual marriage and reproduction.
How did novelists, especially women novelists, respond to the challenges against the separate sphere ideology? How did they depict unconventional women such as surplus women, women who behaved in transgressive ways, feminist women, lesbians, and women who were in interracial relationships? The conventional narrative stressed the importance of marriage, and unconventional characters either reformed themselves or met tragic fates. This remained consistent throughout the second half of the 19th century. At mid-century, unconventional women were the ones who rejected marriage, had an affair, etc. As women began to gain rights in education, work, and civic rights, the temptations that drew middle class women away from conventional life shifted to wanting to work or becoming feminists. Novels also depicted alien others, such as lesbians and non-white people, as menaces and threats to conventional marriage. Acceptable unconventionalities were limited: it was acceptable for women to be unconventional if they were exceptional or they broke one convention but upheld another, such as motherhood. At the end of the century, New Women novelists and other novelists that sympathetically depicted unconventional women critiqued the separate sphere ideology, but were overwhelmingly pessimistic about the possibility that women could escape convention.
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Strovas, Karen Beth. "Sleep and Sleeplessness in the Victorian Novel, Jane Eyre to Dracula." Scholarship @ Claremont, 2011. http://scholarship.claremont.edu/cgu_etd/44.
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Victorian inquisitiveness about sleep and dysfunctions of sleep is exemplified in novels published during the fifty-year period from Jane Eyre (1847) to Dracula (1897). This inquisitiveness foreshadows modern medical sleep science and immerses the reading public in a body of popular literature that subverts the concept of "normal" sleep. My dissertation explores the ways in which Victorian fiction brings physiological and psychological female concerns to the fore through the plot devices of sleep and sleeplessness. I examine the Victorians' diverse interpretations of illness, physical and sexual vulnerability, moral insanity, criminality, and anxiety to determine the thematic and narratological ways in which these issues are linked to sleeping and waking states. Drawing on feminist literary criticism, cultural historicism, and medical insight from the early nineteenth-century to the present, I argue that Charlotte Brontë, Wilkie Collins, and Bram Stoker use sleep and wakefulness as vehicles to navigate gendered fluctuations of power and loss. Jane Eyre, The Woman in White, and Dracula each present sleep as a gendered space in which power is contested. I argue that sleeplessness and restlessness are the methods women adopt, either on purpose or unintentionally, to realize self-sufficiency and protect themselves from patriarchal jurisdiction and other social restrictions on women. Women must reject their instinctual desires for a certain amount of sleep so that they can maintain agency and authority over their bodies and narratives. Implicit in the novels is the idea that deep sleep is a mechanism for achieving health and moral strength of character. However, explicitly and without apology, the novels use the trope of sleep for women as a violent instrument of loss, infection, powerlessness, and weakness. The cultural and medical artifacts of the time suggest that deep, indulgent sleep is the only way to achieve or maintain health. Yet Victorian authors write sleep as a sure road to incapacitation and subjugation. Brontë, Collins, and Stoker demonstrate that a woman's mind is only as healthy as her sleep, while her body is always safer awake.
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Dingsdale, Ann. "'Generous and lofty sympathies' : the Kensington Society, the 1866 women's suffrage petition and the development of mid-Victorian feminism." Thesis, University of Greenwich, 1995. http://gala.gre.ac.uk/6380/.
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The women's suffrage petition presented to the House of Commons in June 1866 is credited with being the first move in the British campaign. Yet although given a pivotal position in the women's movement, it and its organisation have received scant attention. This thesis examines the origins of this petition, which was organised by members of the Kensington Society (1865-1868). It investigates the members of this society, and those 1,499 women who signed the petition. This thesis looks in detail at these women both statistically and, in so far as it is ever possible, in terms of the 'experience' of the individuals involved. The thesis uses information from census, directories, etc. as well as biographical resources, in a variety of ways, ranging from 'life histories' of sample rank and file individuals, to statistical data covering several hundred women, and including charts which explore the activities of individual women over time, and case studies of groups of up to fifly women. Following the Introductory chapter, Chapter Two presents the context for change within which the Kensington Society and the petition came into being. Chapter Three introduces some rank and file women, and looks at the role of older women. Chapter Four considers the Kensington Society, and the part its members played in collecting the signatures for the petition in 1866 and looks at the age, marital status, class and geographical distribution of both Kensington Society members and those women who signed this petition. Chapter Five explores shared experience, and Chapter Six shared commitment Chapter Seven considers the implications of this investigation for the history of the early campaigns for women's suffrage in Britain.
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Barnett, Ashley. "Prudery and Perversion: Domination of the Sexual Body in Middle-Class Men, Women, and Disenfranchised Bodies in Victorian England." Digital Commons @ East Tennessee State University, 2016. https://dc.etsu.edu/etd/3172.
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This research argues that with the rise of the middle-class, Victorian England saw the development of a power model in which middle-class men, middle-class women and disenfranchised bodies of children and lower-class women suffered from the demands of bodily domination. Because the bodily health of middle-class men was believed to represent national health, it was imperative that he dominate his body, particularly with regard to sexual urges. Consequently, the bodies of women with whom he sought sexual release suffered from forms of bodily domination as well. Through an analysis of journals and private writings of those living in Victorian England, magazines, books, and advisory texts published during the nineteenth century, and philosophical interpretations of Victorian sexuality by historians, an image emerges in which Victorian sexuality is categorized by the need to dominate the body.
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Newnum, Anna Kristina Stenson. "The poetry of religion and the prose of life: from evangelicalism to immanence in British women's writing, 1835-1925." Diss., University of Iowa, 2014. https://ir.uiowa.edu/etd/5819.
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The Poetry of Religion and the Prose of Life: From Evangelicalism to Immanence in British Women's Writing, 1835-1925&" traces a tradition of religious women poets and women's poetic communities engaged in generic and theological exploration that I argue was intimately intertwined with their social activism. This project brings together recent debates about gender and secularization in sociology, social history, and anthropology of religion, contending that Victorian and early-twentieth-century women poets from a variety of religious affiliations offer an alternative path into modernity that embraces the public value of both poetry and religious discourse, thus questioning straightforward narratives of British secularization and poetic privatization during the nineteenth century.
These writers, including contributors to The Christian Lady's Magazine, Grace Aguilar, Dora Greenwell, Alice Meynell, Eva Gore-Booth, and Evelyn Underhill, turned to social engagement and immanence, a theory of divinity within the world rather than above and apart from it, to bridge a widening gap between religious doctrine and poetic theory. Appropriating the growing interest in immanent theology within British Christianity allowed women to write about the small, the domestic, the human, and the everyday while exploring the divine presence in them, thus elevating and publicly revealing experiences traditionally allocated to women's private lives. Just as the women in this study questioned the distinction between the divine and the everyday, they also blurred the generic boundaries of poetry and theological prose. As lyric poetry was increasingly identified with private experience, they used literary experimentation across the genres of poetry and theological prose to engage public debates on a surprisingly large number of issues from factory reform, to mental disability, to urban poverty, to women's suffrage, to pacifism.
This project includes four chapters, each of which examines a female poet or a poetic community of women connected through the publishing world. The first two chapters focus on tensions among commitments to poetry, religion, and social reform within Anglicanism. Trapped between the desire to encounter a transcendent God and the desire to celebrate earthly ephemera and improve earthly conditions, these poets demonstrate the tension from which a poetics of immanence arose. My third and fourth chapters follow the extension of immanence in late-nineteenth-century Catholic verse and early-twentieth-century mystical verse. These writers used a growing theological emphasis on immanence to justify poetry that relied on female experience, to suggest that the divine was at home in the constantly evolving natural and social worlds, and to illustrate God's equal proximity to the mundane and the marginalized, inspiring challenges to social and institutional hierarchies.
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Lind, Norah Hardin. "Lilian Westcott Hale and Nancy Hale: From Victorian to Modern in Art and Text." VCU Scholars Compass, 2010. http://scholarscompass.vcu.edu/etd/81.
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Lilian Westcott Hale (1880-1963) and her daughter Nancy Hale (1908-1988) built successful careers during a period of transition in America, as Victorian mores were replaced by new modern freedoms. Greater independence for women had evolved during the preceding century, before the influential cultural factors which occurred during the early twentieth century like urbanization and world war. This interdisciplinary analysis of Lilian Hale‘s artwork and Nancy Hale‘s writings demonstrates the imprint of the surrounding world on their work. Lilian Hale‘s art is influenced by her Victorian childhood, and Nancy Hale‘s fiction reveals many conflicts of the modern era. The study of these two women is enhanced by the wealth of primary documentation connecting their ideas and their lives to their artistic works. Both of the women ranked among the most respected in their fields during their lifetimes. Their works resonate with elements of their eras, demonstrating what it was to be a woman during the first half of the twentieth century. Lilian Westcott Hale and Nancy Hale both engage the gender constructs of their periods through their work. Lilian Westcott Hale‘s art is divided here into three distinct genres: her still lifes and landscapes express the confining environment the Victorian woman occupied; her idealized women reflect the period‘s taste for female perfection and beauty; her portraits and figure studies point to Hale‘s own distinction between males and females through their clothing and their poses. Unlike Lilian Westcott Hale, Nancy Hale demonstrates woman‘s new freedoms in an open manner, a result of the break with Victorianism. Hale‘s use of a literary medium allows her direct examination of the turmoil caused by the modern breakdown of Victorian structures. Lilian Westcott Hale refrains from harsh judgment of her daughter‘s world, while Nancy Hale‘s modern challenge of the previous era‘s standards leads her into troubling relationships and difficulties balancing her career with her personal life. Their work reveals the cultural ideologies of their respective eras and particularly the changes taking place for women.
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Hill, Leslie Anne. "Theatres and friendships : the spheres and strategies of Elizabeth Robins." Thesis, University of Exeter, 2014. http://hdl.handle.net/10871/17879.
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Victorian women used strategies that allowed them to not only work as actresses but also as directors, producers, translators, and playwrights, thus transforming theatre at the cusp of the New Drama. Female friendships were particularly integral to these strategies as women employed secretiveness and anonymity, charm and shrewdness, networking and collaborating in small and large groups to meet their creative and professional goals. Through these means of sociability women enlarged their spheres of influence beyond the stage. Elizabeth Robins is a superb example of these strategies, particularly when theatrical realism was her primary focus. Though she also collaborated well with men, William Archer and Henry James among them, it was Robins’s female friends who helped her to establish a London career. This project shows how Robins and her women friends contributed to the New Drama in dynamic, critical, and often-secret ways. Marion Lea and Robins finagled the rights to Hedda Gabler in 1891. Lea and Florence Bell helped Robins to translate plays for production and to develop new acting techniques suited to realism. After Lea left England, Robins and Bell joined Grein’s Independent Theatre Society to present their anonymously written protest play Alan’s Wife. These efforts illustrate the adaptive functions of female friendships. Through closer examination of their relationships, particularly the one Robins and Bell called a sisterhood, we see the nurturing functions of female friendships. This project explains some of the reasons why, despite being famous in their day, these women disappeared from history. It was not just because of male control of the theatre, but was also a product of their own desires to protect themselves. Secrecy had served them well in the 1890s, but their fame faded as even friends forgot them. Yet, since female socialization taught them to be group-focused, these women’s stories are highly pertinent to the history of the theatre, an art form that is collaborative by its nature. Through study of their work and their relationships, we can fill some gaps in theatre history, women’s history, and nineteenth-century history, adding resonance to their voices that may carry to coming generations.
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Dominguez, Danielle T. ""The more they’re beaten the better they be": Gendered Violence and Abuse in Victorian Laws and Literature." Scholarship @ Claremont, 2019. https://scholarship.claremont.edu/cmc_theses/2270.
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During the Victorian age, the law and society were in conversation with each other, and the law reflected Victorian gender norms. Nineteenth-century gender attitudes intersected with the law, medical discourse, and social customs in a multitude of ways. Abuse and gender violence occurred beneath the veneer of Victorian respectability. The models of nineteenth-century social conduct were highly gendered and placed men and women in separate social spheres. As this research indicates, the lived practices of Victorians, across social and economic strata, deviated from these accepted models of behavior. This thesis explores the ways that accepted and unaccepted standards of female behavior manifest in Victorian legal discourse and literary sources. The three tropes of female behavior analyzed in this thesis are: “the angel in the house,” “the mad woman,” and “the fallen woman.” Victorian men repeatedly failed to protect their wives, daughters, and companions and were often the sources of abuse and violence. Women, in turn, were unable to shape themselves to fit the accepted model of Victorian womanhood. This thesis suggests that widespread Victorian gender attitudes and social causes that are taken up by politicians are reflected in the legal system. This thesis unearths the voices of Victorian women, both literary and historical ones, in order to tell their stories and analyze the ways that their experiences are a result of social conventions and legal standards of the nineteenth-century.
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Kim, Koeun. "Going beyond the domestic sphere : women's literature for children, 1856-1902." Thesis, University of Exeter, 2015. http://hdl.handle.net/10871/18802.
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My thesis explores how female writers of the Golden Age of children’s literature used their domestic stories to convey their visions of a more desirable society to their child readers, and thus to widen their influence beyond the homely sphere. My first chapter reconsiders the nineteenth-century historical circumstances wherein the woman and the child came to be constructed and enshrined as the domestic woman and the Romantic child within the home, and excluded from the public discourses. I then consider how in domestic stories women writers tried to overcome this shared deprivation of autonomy with the child, focusing on the works of Charlotte Yonge, Juliana Ewing, and Mary Louisa Molesworth. It emerges that these women writers were all keen to encourage their young readers to question the boundaries that separate home from the public realm, and to imagine a society wherein these dividing lines would be mitigated and even be extinguished. The thesis argues that these female writers’ literary efforts to exhaust the potential of the domestic story, and that their motivation to provide their child readers a sense of agency were integral in the development of Golden Age children’s literature. Charlotte Yonge’s technique of evoking sympathy for the child characters forged a more intimate relationship between adult author and young reader, and initiated the unsettling of the hierarchy between old and young, and author and reader. Juliana Ewing’s experiments with child narrators and her mingling of adventure and fantasy stories with domestic stories showed successive writers the various directions the domestic story could go. Mary Louisa Molesworth’s nursery stories realized the purpose of Ewing’s literary experiments, as her stories’ natural interweaving of quotidian nursery and fairy tale elements not only alleviated the hierarchy between fantasy and domestic realism, but also opened an era in which the blending of these two modes would become one of the most popular genres in children’s literature.
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Malone, Katherine. "The Lady Critic: Women of Letters and Critical Authority in British Periodicals, 1854-1908." Diss., Temple University Libraries, 2009. http://cdm16002.contentdm.oclc.org/cdm/ref/collection/p245801coll10/id/57913.
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EnglishPh.D.
This study considers how and why the established histories of criticism fail to recognize the Victorian woman critic. Although many women wrote critical essays for Victorian periodicals, the practice of anonymous publication and the gendered coding of certain genres ensured that the image of the critic was masculine for Victorian readers. And despite the ongoing work of The Wellesley Index to Victorian Periodicals, the growing field of periodicals research, and forty years of feminist scholarship, the Victorian critic remains, by and large, a male figure for us as well. In order to understand how women critics justified their authority and negotiated the gendered assumptions of critical discourse over the second half of the nineteenth century, this project explores the rhetorical strategies used by four prolific women journalists: Margaret Oliphant, Anne Mozley, Julia Wedgwood, and Anne Thackeray Ritchie. These case studies demonstrate how women critics defined their role in response to an expanding reading public, conservative gender ideology, the professionalization of criticism, changing aesthetics, and the establishment of English as a university discipline. They also reveal that both anonymous and signed women critics addressed these contentious issues to subtly undermine prejudices about gender and genre. In addition to demonstrating the feminist agenda of these (sometimes conservative) critics, this study also seeks to complicate the image of the moralizing woman critic symbolized by Mrs. Grundy. Moral rhetoric was common among both male and female critics in the nineteenth century, and this project argues that moral considerations are not necessarily antithetical to artistic ones in nineteenth-century discourse. We must begin to view women's critical arguments in their full context of political, aesthetic, and professional concerns if we truly wish to understand what was at stake for Victorian critics and readers. Thus, by presenting a fuller portrait of these individual women authors, this study not only critiques the gendered definitions of genre that continue to shape literary history, but also revises our understanding of Victorian critical theories.
Temple University--Theses
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Nicol, Jennifer. "Escape artists : adventure and isolation in women's writing at the fin de siècle." Thesis, Loughborough University, 2017. https://dspace.lboro.ac.uk/2134/25494.
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Recent scholarship has examined the lived experience of unmarried women in nineteenth- and twentieth-century Britain, both in cities and in the countryside. Typically, scholarship in this field has focussed on women's social identity whether spinster, widow or lesbian and addressed how these types of women were variously used in fiction and the press to contest or uphold the gendered status quo. This thesis problematises the distinct characterisation of these social identities by examining works which seek to unify female social identity at the fin de siècle through a common modern experience: the conflict between individual and collective life. All of the female subjects examined in this thesis whether author, artist, or fictional character, and whether married, separated, unmarried, widowed, homosexual, or not easily identifiable either way are solitary figures. Their movement within and interaction with their environments reveal the uneasy combination of separation and exposure experienced by working women of all classes at the fin de siècle. This thesis examines the solitary female figure in works of British fiction produced between 1880 and 1922. It considers the pressures and implications of separation and exposure in relation to female celebrity and creative practices at the fin de siècle. My methodology involves examining the biography and auto/biographical works of Amy Levy (1861-1889), George Egerton (pseud. of Mary Chavelita Dunne Bright; 1859-1945), Sarah Grand (pseud. of Frances Elizabeth Bellenden McFall; 1854-1943) and Charlotte Mew (1869-1923), and drawing out aspects that speak to the desires for privacy and, conversely, publicity and/or companionship. I identify how their lived experience of this conflict broadly, between society and solitude affected the depiction of modern female consciousness in their literary works by examining their female characters subjective interaction with three environments: the foreign landscape, the home, and the city. My aim is to identify how Levy, Egerton, Grand and Mew used their literary works to acknowledge and retaliate against the restrictions which continued to limit urban women's physical, social and psychological autonomy.
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Pinzone, Sharon Morrison. "The Sociocultural Context of Cleveland’s Miss Mittleberger School For Girls, 1875-1908." Cleveland State University / OhioLINK, 2009. http://rave.ohiolink.edu/etdc/view?acc_num=csu1248799957.
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McIntyre, Megan. "'Adding wisdom to their natures': British colonial educational practices and the possibility of women's personal emancipation in Charlotte Brontë's Jane Eyre, Buchi Emecheta's Joys of motherhood and Tsitsi Dangrembga's Nervous conditions." Scholar Commons, 2009. http://scholarcommons.usf.edu/etd/2093.
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Popular opinion suggests that education is the 'silver bullet' to end poverty, famine, and all the worlds' ills. The reality of education for women, however, is not as easily classified as transformative. This paper seeks to illuminate, through historical research and literary analysis, the connections between the charity education of Victorian Britain, a system examined in Jane Eyre, and the missionary education which comprised the majority of the educational systems in the British colonies, including Nigeria and Zimbabwe, the settings of Emecheta and Dangarembga's works.
Beginning with Charlotte Brontë's Victorian classic, Jane Eyre, and moving through time, space and situation to the colonial experience novels of Buchi Emecheta and Tsitsi Dangarembga, we find instead that education, particularly British philanthropic education, from charity schools for children without means in the 18th and 19th century to the mission schools that comprised the basis for British colonial education in Africa, produces women who benefit only in very limited ways. For Charlotte Brontë's title protagonist, as for many of the characters in Jane Eyre, Nervous Conditions, and The Joys of Motherhood, education represents a new life. Brontë, Dangarembga, and Emecheta all offer education as a possible escape for characters within their novels, but the length of and price for that escape differs based on a character's role within a colonial set of identities, whether the character in question is part of the colonizing power or one of its colonial victims.
When taken together, Jane Eyre and these two African experience novels demonstrate that British education is largely ineffectual in granting female characters the kind of freedom that education is supposed to instill. The price of the hybridity necessary to survive in the colonial situation could very well be the complete loss of self, a disintegration of identity, as it is for Nyasha, who is, according to her own analysis of her situation, neither Shona nor British and therefore is no one at all.
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Palmer, Beth Lilian. "Strategies of sensation and the transformation of the Press, 1860-1880 : Mary Braddon, Florence Marryat and Ellen Wood, female author-editors, and the sensation phenomenon in mid-Victorian magazine publishing." Thesis, University of Oxford, 2008. http://ora.ox.ac.uk/objects/uuid:30a509c7-2ba3-4477-9d3e-801f61e1b8c1.
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This thesis examines the processes of writerly and editorial literary production undertaken by women sensation authors in the 1860s and 1870s. This focus represents a shift from the prevailing critical emphasis on the consumption of sensation fiction to the realm of production and therein allows the thesis to analyse the ways in which sensation operates as a set of rhetorical and linguistic strategies for women writers in the changing publishing conditions of mid-to-late Victorian society. I consider the ways in which sensation is an idiom that permeates all aspects of magazine publishing in this period and demonstrate how it could be adapted and become an empowering discourse for women writers and editors. Furthermore, this thesis sees sensation as an important component in the transformation of the press in the 1860s and 1870s. By analysing the specific ways in which sensational strategies were appropriated and transformed, this thesis reassesses the role of sensation in the creation of women’s writing in the second half of the nineteenth century, and consider its legacies in later ‘New Woman’ writers. I achieve this by examining three women editors, who were part of the transformation of magazine publishing in the period. Mary Elizabeth Braddon (1835-1915), Ellen (Mrs. Henry) Wood (1814-1887), and Florence Marryat (1837-1899) all operated as writers and editors in the mid-to-late nineteenth century. They produced varying types of sensational fiction that they serialised in their own monthly magazines, Belgravia, Argosy, and London Society respectively. Sensation provided a dynamic and flexible means for these women author-editors to assert their status in the context of the expansion of the press in the 1860s and 1870s. I argue that their work invites a more fluid and generous critical definition of sensation.
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Sowards, Heather M. "Mad, Bad, and Well Read: An Examination of Women Readers and Education in the Novels of Mary Elizabeth Braddon." Ohio University / OhioLINK, 2013. http://rave.ohiolink.edu/etdc/view?acc_num=ohiou1377080923.
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Howe, Lisa A. "Spirited Pioneer: The Life of Emma Hardinge Britten." FIU Digital Commons, 2015. http://digitalcommons.fiu.edu/etd/2292.
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Emma Hardinge Britten’s life encompassed and reflected many of the challenges and opportunities afforded to women in the Victorian world. This dissertation explores the multi-layered Victorian landscape through the life of an individual in order not only to tell her individual story, but also to gain a more nuanced understanding of how nineteenth-century norms of gender, class, religion, science and politics combined to create opportunities and obstacles for women in Britten’s generation. Britten was an actor, a musician, a writer, a theologian, a political activist, a magazine publisher, a spirit medium, a lecturer, and a Spiritualist missionary. Taking into account her multiple subjectivities, this dissertation relies on historical biography to contextualize Britten’s life in a number of areas, including Modern Spiritualism and political and civic engagement in the second half of the nineteenth century in Britain, the U.S., and Australia.
The dissertation is organized thematically in a quasi-chronological manner. Time frames overlap between chapters, as Britten travels from the realm of politics to that of science and to religion. Each chapter reflects this transformation of Britten’s multiple intellectual and spiritual engagements, including performance, religion, politics and science.
Emma Hardinge Britten challenged, whether consciously or not, gendered expectations by attaining a presence in a male-dominated public. Even though her life and accomplishments pre-date the New Woman of the fin de siècle, Britten established a successful career and her life creates a foreshadowing of the larger movements to come. She was an extraordinarily politically active woman whose influence reached three continents in her lifetime and beyond.
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Achee, Ashley. "A Deconstruction of the Effects of Race, Gender, and Class in the Nineteenth Century British Asylum Complex." Scholarship @ Claremont, 2016. http://scholarship.claremont.edu/scripps_theses/889.
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This thesis will explore the intersectional construction of the British asylum network in the nineteenth century. It will look at gender, race, and class as factors in the diagnostic process, in addition to the confinement and treatment of the insane.
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Tolley, Rebecca. "Maria de Victoria." Digital Commons @ East Tennessee State University, 2010. https://dc.etsu.edu/etsu-works/5604.
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Limond, Kate Elizabeth. "Authorship and strategies of representation in the fiction of A.S. Byatt." Thesis, University of Exeter, 2017. http://hdl.handle.net/10871/30175.
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This thesis examines the portrayal of authorship in Byatt’s novels with a particular focus on her use of character-authors as a site for the destabilisation of dominant literary and cultural paradigms. Byatt has been perceived as a liberal-humanist author, ambivalent to postmodern, post-structuralist and feminist literary theory. Whilst Byatt’s frame narratives are realist and align with liberal-humanist values, she employs many different genres in the embedded texts written by her character-authors, including fairy-tale, life-writing and historical drama. The diverse representational practices in the novels construct a metafictional commentary on realism, undermining its conventions and conservative politics. My analysis focuses on the relationship between the embedded texts and the frame narrative to demonstrate that Byatt’s strategies of representation enact a postmodern complicitous critique of literary conventions and grand narratives. Many of the female protagonists and minor characters are authors, in the broad sense of cultural production, and Byatt uses their engagement with representation of women in literature to pose questions about how cultural narratives naturalise patriarchal definitions of femininity. That Byatt’s female characters resist patriarchal power relations by undermining the cultural script of conventional femininity has been under-explored and consequently critics have overlooked significant instances of female agency. Whilst some branches of postmodern and feminism literary theory have conceptualised agency differently, this thesis emphasises their shared analysis of the discursive construction of subjectivity, as it illuminates Byatt’s disruption of literary conventions. My focus on the embedded texts and the discursive construction of authorship in Byatt’s fiction enables me to address the numerous paradoxes and inconsistencies in the novels as fertile sites that undermine Byatt’s presumed politics.
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Sheffield, Suzanne Le-May. "Revealing new worlds : three Victorian women naturalists /." London [u.a.] : Routledge, 2001. http://www.loc.gov/catdir/enhancements/fy0650/2003427615-d.html.
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Sheffield, Suzanne. "Revealing new worlds : three Victorian women naturalists /." London : Routledge, 2001. http://catalogue.bnf.fr/ark:/12148/cb391176699.
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Reus, Anne Maria. "Virginia Woolf's rewriting of Victorian women writers' lives." Thesis, University of Leeds, 2018. http://etheses.whiterose.ac.uk/20896/.
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This thesis examines Virginia Woolf’s representation of the lives of nineteenth-century women writers in her journalism and essays. I study Woolf’s lifelong engagement with Jane Austen and Charlotte Brontë, as well as her sporadic interest in Mary Russell Mitford, Elizabeth Barrett Browning, George Eliot, Mary Augusta Ward and Margaret Oliphant to reveal her enduring engagement with the Victorian period and complicate her famous feminist statement that ‘we think back through our mothers if we are women’. Woolf’s literary criticism has a strong biographical component and often blends discussions of women’s literary works with extensive examinations of women’s historical and social circumstances. It is therefore perfectly situated for an analysis of the continued influence of Victorian biography and gender ideology on her writing. Based on an analysis of Woolf’s engagement with these writers’ rich biographical afterlives, I argue that Woolf’s responses to Victorian ideology are varied and complex, and range from the outright rejection of exemplary domesticity to the perpetuation of harmful stereotypes and limiting definitions of femininity. My thesis establishes that Woolf ignores changing modes of female authorship as well as the increasing professionalization of literature throughout the nineteenth century and instead prioritizes domestic amateur writers. While Woolf’s engagement with early nineteenth-century writers like Austen and Mitford often revolves around an imaginative reconstruction of their lives, her attitude towards later, better-documented writers like Brontë and Eliot is more contentious and demonstrates that Woolf used her predecessors to position herself as a modern woman writer who is not limited by her gender.
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Tiers, Jane Elizabeth. "Impressions of Meiji Japan by five Victorian women." Thesis, University of British Columbia, 1986. http://hdl.handle.net/2429/26617.
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This thesis examines five travelogues written by Victorian ladies who visited Japan between 1889 and 1906. These works are useful as historical documents because they give a first-hand account of life in Meiji Japan that is different from other sources. The authors portrayed the everyday lifestyle and customs of the Japanese people, including many things considered so commonplace most writers did not consider them worth recording. By comparing the authors' observations with modern sociological and historical studies, these travelogues have been shown to be remarkably accurate. The women's observations have been organized into the following catagories: etiquette, aesthetics, religion, family life and the women's ideas on Japan's modernization.Arts, Faculty of
History, Department of
Graduate
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Green, Katie. "Victorian governesses : a look at education and professionalization /." Connect to full text in OhioLINK ETD Center, 2009. http://rave.ohiolink.edu/etdc/view?acc%5Fnum=toledo1240932232.
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Thesis (M.A.)--University of Toledo, 2009.Typescript. "Submitted as partial fulfillment of the requirements for The Master of Arts in History." "A thesis entitled"--at head of title. Bibliography: leaves 87-93.
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Netherton, Caroline Marie-Thérèse. "Women and self-sacrifice in the mid-Victorian novel." Thesis, Bath Spa University, 2004. http://researchspace.bathspa.ac.uk/1452/.
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Simpson, Jennifer Lesley. "'Magic, spectacle and illness' : masquerade and gender identity in nineteenth century fiction by women." Thesis, University of Aberdeen, 1999. http://digitool.abdn.ac.uk/R?func=search-advanced-go&find_code1=WSN&request1=AAIU484336.
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Catherine Clément, in The Newly Born Woman, regards 'magic, spectacle and illness' as the performance of the feminine. In studying the narratives of masquerading and miming women, these are the images which I locate: the magic of the sorceress, the spectacle of the transvestites or the illness of the hysteric. Within this thesis, I study instances of masquerade or mimicry, and their influence upon gender identity, in a selection of texts by nineteenth century women written for a particularly feminine audience: Belinda (1801) by Maria Edgeworth, Lady Audley's Secret (1861) by Mary Elizabeth Braddon, The Chase, Or, A Long Fatal Love Chase (1866) by Louisa Alcott, Through One Administration (1883) and The Secret Garden (1913), both by Frances Hodgson Burnett. My approach is neither historical nor chronological. Moving away from historicising the masquerade, I mirror the fate of the masked occasion in history: its attenuation and sublimation inside the domestic. Rather than focusing on contextuality, I concentrate on textuality. The interiorised nature of that performance demands that my approach becomes theoretical, and in particular, psychoanalytic, given that both the masquerade and psychoanalysis deals with gender as construction and representation. By resisting chronology, I can express a reluctance to assume a progression towards a 'truth' or 'reality' and allow the masquerade to remain complex. Primarily I am interested in examining the 'theatrical' representation of the various female bodies written into the narratives. However, I am also concerned with textual masquerade/mime: whether the novels studied operate within a system of masquerade or mimicry and whether the discursive impulse is one of the capitulation or subversion. As I read femininity as performance, or as spectacle, constructed by a masculine audience, and represented by the feminine, I question the area 'behind-the-mask', and what lies there - indeed, whether it is possible to articulate it.
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Zedner, L. H. "The criminality of women and its control in England 1850-1914." Thesis, University of Oxford, 1988. http://ethos.bl.uk/OrderDetails.do?uin=uk.bl.ethos.384008.
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Yang, Hao-han Helen. ""A lady wanted" Victorian governesses abroad 1856-1898 /." Click to view the E-thesis via HKUTO, 2008. http://sunzi.lib.hku.hk/hkuto/record/B41633805.
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