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Men, Women, And Italians: The Masquerade Of Narrative And Identity In Richardson's Sir Charles Grandison, Ruth A. Holmes
Men, Women, And Italians: The Masquerade Of Narrative And Identity In Richardson's Sir Charles Grandison, Ruth A. Holmes
English Theses & Dissertations
The chaotic masquerades that proliferated during the British long eighteenth century punctuated the period’s preoccupation with order and categorization. The identity categories that the masquerade disrupted, the novel reinforced, or perhaps even created. It was in the middle of this period, in the political center of Britain, that Samuel Richardson published his third and final novel, The History of Sir Charles Grandison (1753), a novel which centers England and was also centered by England, a national treasure entangled in literary and cultural history. Tracing the nexus of gender and nationalism in Grandison then becomes important given the novel’s active entanglement …
Defining Heroinism: Heartthrobs Refining Heroines In 18th And 19th Century Women's Literature, Grace M. Gibson
Defining Heroinism: Heartthrobs Refining Heroines In 18th And 19th Century Women's Literature, Grace M. Gibson
Honors College Theses
This project will explore the emergence of “heroinism,” a uniquely feminine way in which early female authors approached the heroine’s journey. Barred by male expectations of female conduct both in society and literature, eighteenth and nineteenth century women daring to “attempt the pen” forged stories of heroines with conventions and tropes distinctly, though not entirely, separate from those told of centuries of heroes. I intend to track the ways in which these early tales of heroines told by women strayed from the traditional heroic plot, with unique motivations, mentors, trials, and rewards, but also how they were shaped and confined …
Playing To Win: The Marriage Market In Jane Austen’S Northanger Abbey, Sense And Sensibility And Emma, Caroline Elizabeth Nall
Playing To Win: The Marriage Market In Jane Austen’S Northanger Abbey, Sense And Sensibility And Emma, Caroline Elizabeth Nall
Honors Theses
This thesis aims to analyze the implications of the marriage market in Jane Austen’s novels Northanger Abbey, Sense and Sensibility and Emma. In these books, the main focus will be on Isabella Thorpe, who is actively participating in the “game” of the marriage market, Charlotte Palmer, who has won the “game” of marriage, and Miss Bates, who has lost the “game” of marriage. The historical context of these situations, taking place in eighteenth and nineteenth century England, has been taken into account. Austen has created characters to demonstrate the many aspects of a female’s life and how it relates …
"'Violent Love': Jane Austen And Eighteenth-Century Marriage Laws", Brianna Bicho
"'Violent Love': Jane Austen And Eighteenth-Century Marriage Laws", Brianna Bicho
Seton Hall University Dissertations and Theses (ETDs)
In several of Jane Austen’s novels, her heroines are confronted more than once with the proposition of marriage. Many of the primary proposal scenes in these tales contain violent language seemingly at odds with the romantic context, and the romance convention, of a proposal scene. Austen’s rhetoric of violence functions as a critique of contemporary laws defining and regulating marriage, particularly Blackstone’s Commentaries on the Laws of England, published in 1765. These laws negated a woman’s ownership – both personal and financial – upon her marriage: they outlined both the illegality of a wedded female to own property and the …
Theatrical Weddings And Pious Frauds: Performance And Law In Victorian Marriage Plots, Adrianne A. Wojcik
Theatrical Weddings And Pious Frauds: Performance And Law In Victorian Marriage Plots, Adrianne A. Wojcik
Dissertations (1934 -)
This study investigates how key Victorian novelists, such as Anne and Charlotte Brontë, Elizabeth Gaskell, Charles Dickens, Wilkie Collins, Mary Elizabeth Braddon, George Eliot, and Thomas Hardy, emphasize performativity in their critiques of marriage. Given the performative nature of wedding ceremonies, this project focuses on wedding descriptions in select novels by the aforementioned authors. Such a focus highlights an interesting dilemma. Although we often think of Victorian novels as overwhelmingly concerned with marriage, the few wedding descriptions found in Victorian fiction are aborted, unusually short or announced after the fact. Those Victorian novelists who do feature weddings often describe them …
Separate Ways Or Til Death Do Us Part?: Divorce In Victorian Literature, Ashley L. Felder
Separate Ways Or Til Death Do Us Part?: Divorce In Victorian Literature, Ashley L. Felder
Honors Theses
Divorce laws changed radically across the Victorian period (1837-1901), making divorce more accessible, particularly for men. Considering how those changes affected the portrayal of divorce in early, mid, and late Victorian novels, this study analyzes the literary representation of divorce in Charlotte Brontë’s Jane Eyre (1847), Charles Dickens’s Hard Times (1854), and George Meredith’s Diana of the Crossways (1885), contextualizing this analysis with literary criticism and legal history. No matter how accessible divorce became during the nineteenth century and no matter a character’s reason for wanting to end his/her marriage, divorce is not presented as a legitimate option for characters …
“The Bedroom And The Barnyard: Zoomorphic Lust Through Territory, Procedure, And Shelter In ‘The Miller’S Tale’” & Haunchebones, Danielle N. Byington
“The Bedroom And The Barnyard: Zoomorphic Lust Through Territory, Procedure, And Shelter In ‘The Miller’S Tale’” & Haunchebones, Danielle N. Byington
Undergraduate Honors Theses
“The Bedroom and the Barnyard: Zoomorphic Lust Through Territory, Procedure, and Shelter in ‘The Miller’s Tale’” is an academic endeavor that takes Chaucer’s zoomorphic metaphors and similes and analyzes them in a sense that reveals the chaos of what is human and what is animal tendency. The academic work is expressed in the adjunct creative project, Haunchebones, a 10-minute drama that echoes the tale and its zoomorphic influences, while presenting the content in a stylized play influenced by Theatre of the Absurd and artwork from the medieval and early renaissance period.
Happily Ever After? Redefining Womanhood And Marriage In Nineteenth-Century Novels, Laura Elizabeth Cox
Happily Ever After? Redefining Womanhood And Marriage In Nineteenth-Century Novels, Laura Elizabeth Cox
Graduate Theses and Dissertations
Jane Austen, Elizabeth Gaskell, Charlotte Brontë, and Henry James challenged patriarchal conventions and assumptions by redefining womanhood and marriage in their novels, particularly by breaking from the traditional marriage ending. While Pride and Prejudice, North and South, and Jane Eyre end in marriage, these novels depict a freely chosen companionate marriage based on equality; Villette replaces the typical marriage ending with complete independence; and Washington Square and The Portrait of a Lady both portray the decisive rejection of the marriage ideal for a life of renunciation. This thesis analyzes the ways in which these novels challenge nineteenth-century society, as well …
Secrets And Hiding Places: The Worth Of Women In Nicholas Nickleby, Elizabeth Redmond
Secrets And Hiding Places: The Worth Of Women In Nicholas Nickleby, Elizabeth Redmond
Seton Hall University Dissertations and Theses (ETDs)
In early Victorian England, married women were denied the legal right to own property, and social convention remanded them to ostracism if they chose to remain single. Likewise, jobs that were available to women failed to pay a living wage, so women were placed under tremendous economic and social pressure to marry. In Charles Dickens' novel, Nicholas Nickleby, he depicts how marriage becomes manipulated within the working and middle classes as a means to acquire wealth. Dickens also compares the repression of women to the abuse suffered by school children in the Yorkshire schools, which had a reputation for neglecting …