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The Figure Of The Nun And The Gothic Construction Of Femininity In Matthew Lewis’S The Monk, Ann Radcliffe’S The Italian, And Charlotte Brontë’S Villette, Marie Hause May 2010

The Figure Of The Nun And The Gothic Construction Of Femininity In Matthew Lewis’S The Monk, Ann Radcliffe’S The Italian, And Charlotte Brontë’S Villette, Marie Hause

Masters Theses, 2010-2019

The treatment of nuns and convents in gothic novels contributes to the presentation of various attitudes toward women who resist normative female roles. This is illustrated in the consideration of three central, and very different, gothic or post-gothic works: Matthew Lewis's The Monk (1796), Ann Radcliffe's The Italian (1796), and Charlotte Brontë's Villette (1853). These novels draw on conflicting popular associations of nuns and convents, including nuns as chaste, sexual, or tragic and convents as brothels, prisons, or liberating communities. In each novel, anti-Catholicism also comes into play in the way that nuns work as foci for explorations of female …


Scopophilia And Spectacle: Fashion And Femininity In The Novels Of Frances Burney, Cheryl Denise Clark May 2010

Scopophilia And Spectacle: Fashion And Femininity In The Novels Of Frances Burney, Cheryl Denise Clark

Dissertations

My dissertation investigates how the relationship between looking and being seen, or the interaction between scopophilia and spectacle, intersects with the rise of consumer culture and the ascendance of eighteenth-century fashion and fashionable places. By using Frances Burney’s novels as a lens through which to examine the eighteenth century’s fascination with looking, I consider the ways in which attracting “the look” or gaining attention through the visibility of stylish apparel and goods becomes a pathway to social agency in Burney’s novels. Fashion for Burney, I argue, emerges as a multifaceted system that manifests as a means of as social power …


Apt Renderings And Ingenious Designs: Eavan Boland's New Maps Of Ireland, Rebecca Elizabeth Helton May 2010

Apt Renderings And Ingenious Designs: Eavan Boland's New Maps Of Ireland, Rebecca Elizabeth Helton

Masters Theses

Although many critics, and Eavan Boland herself, have written about how her poetry functions to reclaim the Irish feminine image from its static position as lyric representation of the nation, much remains to be said about how Boland represents and reimagines Ireland in her poetry. Using the metaphor of cartography, which Boland frequently refers to in her writing, I argue that she lyrically "maps" the nation across space, time, and language. Her palimpsestic poetic maps of Ireland include what a mere pictorial representation could never, and what prior male-written poetry never did, show: the space of a Dublin suburb, the …


Sisterhood Articulates A New Definition Of Moral Female Identity: Jane Austen's Adaptation Of The Eighteenth-Century Tradition, Katherine Curtis Jan 2010

Sisterhood Articulates A New Definition Of Moral Female Identity: Jane Austen's Adaptation Of The Eighteenth-Century Tradition, Katherine Curtis

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

Writing at a moment of ideological crisis between individualism and hierarchical society, Jane Austen asserts a definition of moral behavior and female identity that mediates the two value systems. I argue that Austen most effectively articulates her belief in women's moral autonomy and social responsibility in her novels through her portrayal of sisterhood. Austen reshapes the stereotype of sisters and female friendships as dangerous found in her domestic novel predecessors. While recognizing women's social vulnerability, which endangers female friendship and turns it into a site of competition, Austen urges the morality of selflessly embracing sisterhood anyway. An Austen heroine must …