History Commons^™

Janeites And Their Benefactors: The Heritage Industry And The Commodification Of Nostalgia, Emma Swidler

Lawrence University Honors Projects

This project sets out to understand how Jane Austen's House Museum and Chawton House have told the stories of Jane Austen and British heritage over the course of the past 72 years. The two houses are nine minutes apart by foot, a walk taken regularly by Austen herself from her home at Chawton Cottage (now the Museum) to her brother’s home down the road (Chawton House). However, since the Museum’s establishment in 1947 and the House’s founding in 2003, the two houses have remained separate nonprofit cultural institutions with distinct purposes: the Museum preserves Austen’s home and legacy, and the …

Cuckoldry And The “Gone For A Soldier” Narrative: Infidelity And Performance Among Eighteenth-Century English Plebeians, Elias Hubbard

Lawrence University Honors Projects

This project addresses existing historical arguments about the role of performance in eighteenth-century English plebeian infidelity cases, identifying some of the cultural scripts available to married men and women from popular texts in order to better understand cases of infidelity in contemporary plebeian marriages. The thesis seeks to clarify the effect of infidelity on a plebeian individual’s social standing and relationships, and to draw conclusions about the nature of plebeian infidelity, marriage, and gender in England through the long eighteenth century.

While examining contemporary public texts of cuckoldry, I address how homosocial behavior appears in narratives of cuckoldry, how the …