Arts and Humanities Commons^™

Jane Eyre, The Invisible Bisexual: Bisexual Erasure In Historical Literature, Christine L. Roland

PANDION: The Osprey Journal of Research and Ideas

The purpose of this article is to reveal Charlotte Brontë’s canonized heterosexual character Jane Eyre as bisexual and explain why critics unintentionally erase bisexuality in historical literature. Homosexuality emerged as a species in the 1800s, but the heterosexual-versus-homosexual binary scale overlooked bisexuality. Yet, bisexuality existed—and Victorian society encouraged it between women. Lesbianism and female “friendships” were promoted within female boarding schools and between women in heterosexual marriages; the precise relationships exemplified in Jane Eyre. Though Jane marries a man, her heterosexual “familial” marriage emerges only out of her bisexual nature, for she does not marry Rochester until he becomes effeminate. …

Angels Of Many Houses: Reconciling Domesticity In 19th-Century Victorian Literature, Amanda Vierra

College Honors Program

The rise of the Victorian middle class is known for solidifying a separation of gender roles, with women operating in the private, domestic sphere and men in the public sphere. This historical value placed on domesticity is reflected in the rise of domestic fiction, the dominant genre of Victorian literature, which commonly depicts young, middle-class women making their way in the world. The plot of these narratives revolves around women perfecting or contending with their place in the domestic sphere through courtship, marriage, and family. Scholars on domestic fiction have continued to argue over whether domestic fiction reflected the oppressive …

Dorian And The Double: Repressed Homosexual Desire In The Picture Of Dorian Gray, Alexandra Wohlford

Student Research Submissions

Written for Dr. Chris Foss’s English 478 Seminar on Oscar Wilde, “Dorian and the Double: Repressed Homosexual Desire in The Picture of Dorian Gray” examines one of Wilde’s most infamous and beloved works through the lens of both psychoanalytic and queer theory. Drawing on the Romantic and Gothic traditions’ concept of the “literary double,” this research paper explores the dynamic portrait of Dorian Gray as a double for multiple characters in the text, serving as a representation of their repressed homosexual desire. Namely, Basil Hallward and Dorian Gray himself emerge as the primary focus of this analysis. In addition, …

Queer(Ly) Lingering In Nineteenth-Century British Literature, Emily Datskou

Dissertations

This dissertation is a critical critique of Queer Theory as an academic field. It argues that queer theory’s establishment as an academic discipline and as a periodizing and historicizing force through the bibliographies that make up its canon has upheld and supported the very normative models of temporality and progression that the field claims to resist. As a result, I argue, queer theory has focused most heavily on modernism and the twentieth and twenty-first centuries and has positioned the nineteenth century as the precursor to the queer strategies and representations that we see more fully fleshed out in the twentieth …

The Catholic Paradox Of Villette, Kevin R. Bie

Senior Honors Projects, 2020-current

Villette, published in 1853, was Charlotte Brontë’s last novel. Brontë explores both narrative and religious complexities through her narrator, Lucy Snowe. Orphaned Lucy Snowe embarks on a new life in a predominantly Catholic country where her Protestant identity is challenged. Catholicism is presented as a temptation for Lucy. Brontë reveals Lucy’s story through her notable fictional autobiography structure, but Lucy Snowe complicates the relationship between narrator and reader. Lucy explicitly capitalizes on the structure of fictional autobiography, critiquing her narration and fostering a personal relationship with the reader.

This thesis analyzes the Catholic paradox in Charlotte Brontë’s Villette by …

George Macdonald's Phantastes As A Bildungsroman Of Spiritual Reality, Hannah O'Malley

Senior Theses

George MacDonald's 1858 novel Phantastes is one of the first fantasy novels written for adults, but it has received little attention in part because of its confusing structure. I argue that Phantastes is best understood as a Bildungsroman, a novel of formation. While the Bildungsroman is usually a realist novel of commercial society, Phantastes’ fantasy elements allow the protagonist to grow up into a spiritual reality that contrasts with many commercial values. MacDonald uses the fantasy genre to show his protagonist's inner development as he learns humility, gains feminine and childlike virtues, and leaves behind the old self

Orts 77, 2022, The George Macdonald Society

Orts: The George MacDonald Society Newsletter

The last two and half years have seen big changes in how we connect and interact with each other, and this is especially the case for a Society like ours, where many are also geographically separated. While covid is still with us, hopefully things are slowly returning to the “new normal,” however, some of the changes that have occurred will have lasting significance, particularly the accelerated use of technology and move online. There is definitely still a place for face to face meetings, but Societies like ours also need to adapt, and a recurring theme in this newsletter is change. …

Controlling Women’S Appetites: Food And Femininity In Victorian Literature, Elizabeth Murray

Graduate Research Theses & Dissertations

This project contributes to the growing field of feminist food studies by examining Victorian women’s relationships to food. I argue that beginning at a young age Victorian middle-class girls and women had to learn to regulate their appetites and eating as a way of performing “proper” Victorian femininity. Chapter one explains why the Victorian period, the middle-class, and women are apt subjects for a feminist food studies exploration of literature and culture. The second chapter discusses non-fiction advice literature that includes guidance about how middle-class girls and women should eat and control their bodies as part of their performance of …

“All Wrong In Point Of Political Economy”: Attempting To Salvage The Oikos From The Polis In Bleak House, Leah Casey

Independent Student Projects and Publications

This paper proposes that Dickens’s Bleak House is symptomatic of a so-called social realm, in which neither oikos nor polis exists as a distinct, autonomous entity; therefore, neither can offer sanctuary or adequately discharge the historical role of the household – maintaining life. In this zone of indistinction, the symbolic structures of London’s law have become the city’s physical structures, leading to symptoms like Jo the outlaw, whose illness and death is attributed to the failure of both the polis and the oikos – the city’s legal housekeeping and the law-as-house, respectively ­– to maintain life. London’s law has become …

Six Impossible Things Before Breakfast: Girlhood In The Creation, Content, And Consumption Of Victorian Children’S Literature, Betsy Barthelemy

English Honors Projects

The Golden Age of (British) Children’s Literature was famous not only for the proliferation of fiction it hosted, but also for how much of that work featured young heroine protagonists. Starting with the publication of Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland (1865) and examining two other fantasy works compared with three realistic children's novels from this half-century period, this project elucidates the differences between these genres and examines how authors used the characteristics of each to empower their heroines. It argues that these fictitious heroines influenced real-world readers to create progressive futures by providing examples of rebellious girl characters finding happy endings.

Egyptian Stasis And Imperial Quick-Time: Recursive Xenophobia Cloaked In Mysticism, Laura S. Deluca

Undergraduate Honors Theses

I will be examining temporality in British texts about Egypt across time. In order to achieve this, I analyze the play Antony and Cleopatra (1606) by William Shakespeare, and put it in conversation with Pharos, the Egyptian (1899) by Guy Newell Boothby. I will also be discussing Alexandria (2009) by Lindsey Davis, as a demonstration that the pattern in my findings is enduring. I will be dissecting the portrayal of Egyptian temporality, which I have found to be conveyed as a stasis, as contrasted by the quick-time of dominating imperial powers. These sources will allow me to compare depictions of …

Reforming Victorian Sense/Abilities: Disabilities In Elizabeth Gaskell’S Social Problem Novels, Hunter Nicole Duncan

Dissertations (1934 -)

This dissertation rewrites the representations of disability, impairment, and illness throughout Elizabeth Gaskell’s fiction. The project’s four chapters examine blindness in Mary Barton, pregnancy, deformity, and typhus fever in Ruth, tuberculosis and hysteria in North and South, and hysteria and disfigurement in Sylvia’s Lovers, in order to intervene with disability in its literary, historical, medical, and social contexts by uniting methodologies ranging from Disability Studies, Medical Humanities, feminist theory, and Victorian studies. By looking at the novel and rethinking it through Disability Studies, this dissertation joins contemporary theory with historical context, refreshing scholarly attention toward under-represented bodies and minds. This …

Landscape, Gender, And The Politics Of Belonging In Thomas Hardy’S The Woodlanders And Tess Of The D’Urbervilles, Sarah Dickerson

Master’s Theses

In my thesis, I analyze Thomas Hardy’s The Woodlanders (1887) and Tess of the D’Urbervilles (1891), exploring the way that Hardy’s depictions of both landscape and gender are interwoven to illuminate the larger issue of belonging as a central concern for his characters. I argue that in these two novels, we can analyze how one’s belonging to a physical environment and performative gender role directly relate to characters’ tragedy or success in the narratives. Characters who challenge normalized gender roles and characters whose place attachment manifests in natural rather than social spaces, endure worse tragedies than their gendered insider and …

Taming The Beast: Heathcliff As Dog In Wuthering Heights, Anna Cittadino

Theses and Dissertations

This paper examines the human/animal distinction in Wuthering Heights by Emily Brontë, focusing specifically on the animal within Heathcliff, and the way this animal undermines his ability to be human as a result of the violence and abandonment he endured in childhood.

Anne Brontë The Universalist: Religion And Patriarchal Subversion In The Tenant Of Wildfell Hall And Agnes Grey, Ardyn Tennyson

Senior Honors Projects, 2010-2019

Anne Brontë (1820-1849) was an English novelist and religious poet, the youngest of the literary Brontë siblings. Charlotte, Emily, and Anne Brontë wrote some of the most esteemed novels of the Victorian canon. Children of an Anglican minister, the Brontës were accustomed to clerical life and the conventions of nineteenth-century religious observance. Anne’s faith, however, was unique and radical, an unorthodox form of Christianity called Universalism, which held that all human beings would be saved, not just those chosen by God. This thesis examines her two novels, Agnes Grey and The Tenant of Wildfell Hall, in the context of …

An Incurable Malady? Representations Of Female Madness In Nineteenth Century-Twenty-First Century Literature, Kimberly Sooklall

Theses and Dissertations

From the mad heroines of classic Victorian literature to the depictions of female insanity in modern Western writing, women suffering from mental instability have been a common recurrence at the center of plotlines. This thesis will explore the historical context of madness as a gendered concept by examining several literary works published in different centuries.

Values In The Air: Community And Capital Conversion In The Nineteenth-Century Novel, Deirdre Mikolajcik

Theses and Dissertations--English

Values in the Air argues that nineteenth-century authors attempted to challenge the individualizing and atomizing effects of the increasingly powerful and abstract investment economy by portraying the necessity of other fields of capital (cultural, social, domestic) to the formation and maintenance of local, knowable communities. I first look at the depiction of a successful integration of diverse capitals embodied in the figure of the male mill owner, wherein the idea of land stewardship is repurposed to include factories. Chapter 2 depicts an encroaching pessimism about tradition’s ability to answer the demands of the modern industrial economy even as the possibility …

Obscure, Unclassed And Undefinable: Social Immobility For Mixed Races In The Nineteenth Century Presented In Jude The Obscure And Of One Blood, Kendall Geed

Graduate Dissertations and Theses

This paper examines the problematic nature of western reliance on class-based societies through looking at postbellum United States and Victorian England through a transatlantic lens. I prove how the classification system produces a group of “unclassed” peoples based on a racial and intellectual status, by looking at Thomas Hardy’s Jude the Obscure and Pauline Hopkins’ Of One Blood. These two nineteenth-century novels expose the production of unclassifiable who are outcast based on what I call a “class-race-intellect disagreement.” By revealing the life and struggles of the mixed-raced individual, I will show how the class systems used by western nations not …

Untangling Late-Victorian Anxieties: Hair Symbolism In Drcula, Nancy Rosenberg England

Journal of Dracula Studies

No abstract provided.

Transferring The Mantle: The Voice Of The Poet Prophet In The Works Of Elizabeth Barrett Browning And Emily Dickinson, Heidi Brown Hyde

MA in English Theses

Elizabeth Barrett Browning and Emily Dickinson are arguably two of the most recognized names in nineteenth-century poetry. One was famous in her lifetime, a pioneer of women’s poetics with a searing vision of what her world was, her place in it and how to live. The other was only recognized for her poetic genius after her death, and but for the love of her family and friends, her poetic voice would have never transformed the landscape of American literature. Although these two women were separated by culture and geography, they both had a shared Congregationalist heritage, a poetic gift and …

Victorian Short Fiction Project, Leslee Thorne-Murphy

Journal of Undergraduate Research

Our project was to prepare a digital collection of short stories, The Victorian Short Fiction Project (VSFP), for a scholarly review process. The VSFP is a digital anthology of Victorian-era short stories compiled and edited by students in undergraduate Victorian literature classes here at BYU. Leslee Thorne-Murphy designed the project to expand students’ knowledge of the Victorian-era short story, an under-studied genre in the field of Victorian literature, and to give them experience in the fields of scholarly editing and the digital humanities. Students would conduct research in the L. Tom Perry Special Collections library to find short fiction to …

The Romance Of Terror: Stevenson's Dynamiter And Verne's Submariner, David Robb

Studies in Scottish Literature

Discusses Robert Louis Stevenson's co-authored novel The Dynamiters (More New Arabian Nights, 1885) in the context of late Victorian bombing campaigns and use of dynamite by Irish Fenians and anarchists, exploring the generic differences between Stevenson's use of romance and Joseph Conrad's The Secret Agent (1907), with extensive comparison between Stevenson's dynamiter Zero and Jules Verne's Captain Nemo in Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea (1869-1870).

I Hate It, But I Can't Stop: The Romanticization Of Intimate Partner Abuse In Young Adult Retellings Of Wuthering Heights, Brianna R. Zgodinski

ETD Archive

In recent years, there has been a trend in young adult adaptations of Wuthering Heights to amend the plot so that Catherine Earnshaw chooses to have a romantic relationship with Heathcliff, when in Bronte’s novel she decides against it. In the following study, I trace the factors that contribute to Catherine’s rejection of Heathcliff as a romantic partner in the original text. Many critics have argued that her motives are primarily Machiavellian since she chooses a suitor with more wealth and familial connections than Heathcliff. These are indeed factors; however, by engaging with contemporary research on adolescent development, I show …

“Not As She Is” But As She Is Expected To Be: Representations, Limitations, And Implications Of The “Woman” And Womanhood In Selected Victorian Literature And Contemporary Chick Lit., Amanda Ellen Bridgers

MA in English Theses

In this thesis, I address the influences of the Separate Spheres ideology on representations of women in both Victorian women’s literature and modern Chick Lit. I analyze three primary images of women – the Angel of the House, the Governess, and the New Woman, the relationships between these images and the Spheres ideology, and how modern images have been influenced by the social impacts of the gendered expectations within the ideology. Within each investigation, I include a discussion on works of literature including Charlotte Yonge’s The Daisy Chain, Jennifer Weiner’s Little Earthquakes, Anne Brontë’s Agnes Grey, Emma McLaughlin and Nicola …

Moving Words/Motion Pictures: Proto-Cinematic Narrative In Nineteenth-Century British Fiction, Kara Marie Manning

Dissertations

In the broadest sense, this project is about nineteenth-century narrative texts and optical toys, or those devices that were originally created to demonstrate scientific knowledge related to vision but that would also become popular for home and public consumption. I argue that nineteenth-century British writers borrowed and adapted the visual effects of such toys, making fiction as participatory as the toys themselves in the development of image culture and the viewing practices that would become necessary for the production and dissemination of cinema in the early twentieth century. Narrative fiction, then, should be considered along with the other precursors of …

Addictive Reading: Nineteenth-Century Drug Literature's Possible Worlds, Adam Colman

Doctoral Dissertations

This dissertation looks at nineteenth-century British writers who developed strategies for making use of the patterns of addiction. I consider how writers built texts around addicted characters whose condition drives them always to search for something more even while they live repetitiously, resulting in repetitive texts of endless pursuit. Such literary strategies of addiction, evident in works by writers ranging from Percy Shelley to George Eliot and beyond, emphasize narratives structured around affectively charged, exploratory repetition. The theoretical framework for this project draws from a tradition of criticism that focuses on literary orientation toward possibility and possible worlds. Possible-worlds theorists …

The Industrial Fairy Tale: The Adaptable Narrative In Charles Kingsley's The Water-Babies, Emily Handy

Graduate Theses

Though Charles Kingsley’s mid-nineteenth century children’s book, The Water-Babies, is generally out of favor with canons of Victorian or children’s literature, I argue that The Water-Babies is a highly adaptable text because it is made up of conjoined opposites. The text’s multiplicity of form and content as well as its emphasis on imagination make the The Water-Babies malleable for variation and adaptation, while the approach Kingsley took to the child audience prepared the text for an indefinite future readership. Moreover, the work’s initial intent to be utilized for social change and the proto-environmentalist messages already present in the text situate …

Orts 75, 2015, The George Macdonald Society

Orts: The George MacDonald Society Newsletter

Over the past year, I and a couple of other postgraduate/early career researchers who share my interest in fantasy studies have launched an initiative called Reading the Fantastic (www.readingthe- fantastic.tumblr.com) at the University of Leeds (UK); our focus is the exploration of fantasy, fairy tale and folk tale texts as spaces of multi-cultural and intercultural connection. Initially involving a guest speaker talk and regular reading group sessions collecting fantasy and fairy tale texts from a wide range of cultures, our activities have expanded (thanks to various funding grants). In addition to adding a regular seminar series to our reading group …

The Beauty And The Barrister: Gender Roles, Madness, And The Basis For Identity In Lady Audley's Secret, Corey Hayes

Senior Honors Theses

This thesis examines the concept of identity in the novel Lady Audley’s Secret by Mary Elizabeth Braddon. In the mid to late Victorian period, self-definition was strongly tied to gender roles. Men were expected to be mentally active, physical strong, and morally guiding leaders of society, and women were to be their passive, pious, domestically minded followers. These expectations for behavior were so strong that those breaking them were in danger of being considered insane. In Braddon’s novel, the behavior of most characters does not align with the expectations for their gender. The exception is Lady Audley, the apparently ideal …

"Long, Long Disappointment": Maternal Failure And Masculine Exhaustion In Margaret Oliphant’S Autobiography, Laura Green

Laura Green

No abstract provided.