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The Eternal Rehearsal: Judith Butler's Gender Performativity In Wilkie Collins, Sarah Waters, And Tana French, Jillian Slezek

Honors Theses

Judith Butler’s Gender Trouble proposed the groundbreaking theory of gender as a constant performance: a series of cues observed, internalized, and repeated over time. Her argument benefits society’s desire to deconstruct gender, and her ideas apply to a vast array of texts and periods. In fact, whereas Butler’s text was published in 1990, over a hundred years earlier Wilkie Collins already toyed with gender performance in his formative novel, The Woman in White (1860). In this thesis, I examine The Woman in White through a Butlerian lens, illuminating how Collins began critiquing the concept of performative gender, especially with regard …