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"I Am A Living Enigma - And You Want To Know The Right Reading Of Me": Gender Anxiety In Wilkie Collins's The Haunted Hotel And The Guilty River, Hannah Allford

MA in English Theses

This paper discusses gender anxiety in two of Wilkie Collins's novellas, The Haunted Hotel and The Guilty River.As each of Collins's novella was written near the turn of the nineteenth century, commonly known as the Fin de Siècle, the author explores the social construction - and subsequent subverting - of Victorian notions of genderideology in each text. Arguing that the novella's emphasis on marginalized characters demands scholarly attention and literary worth, the author next investigates three discourses through which traditional genderspheres are subverted. In examining each novella's use of embedded narratives, discussion of science (specifically chemicals), and portrayal of …