Feminist, Gender, and Sexuality Studies Commons^™

George Eliot Birthday Luncheon: The Toast To The Immortal Memory, Beryl Gray

The George Eliot Review Online, ISSN: 2831-5375

A friendly neighbor, who knew I was fond of “old things”, recently offered to let me look at a yellowing, crisply fragile newspaper that was in her possession. Unfolded, the crimbling broadsheet proved to be a copy of the Daily Mail for Wednesday, 23 June 1897- the issue commemorating Queen Victoria’s Diamond Jubilee. I gingerly perused it, enjoying it as a period curiosity without really expecting to see anything of specific interest- until I got to page seven, which presented an article headed “Women in the Queen’s Reign. Some Who Have Made Victorian History”.

The piece- which is about thirty …

The Blessings Of A Good Thick Skirt: Issues Of Dress In Women's Travel Narratives, Lila Marz Harper

All Faculty Scholarship for the College of Arts and Humanities

This paper argues that as illustration became expected in travel accounts between 1870-1900, the visual image produced a constraint on how women presented their dress and general appearance in their narratives.

Ruby Bayou, Fall 1995, Ruby Bayou Staff

Ruby Bayou

3......"IDENTITY POLITICS" .... Pat Dimpfl
6......BEYOND GENDER ....Betty Friedan
9......PEACE IN ISRAEL? ....Jodi Perelman
12....The Threats to Children .....Bill Lofquist
14....Budget Cuts Threaten SUNY System ....Julie Rivchin
18...One More Closet: Lesbian Partner Abuse .... Gregory P. Beehler
20...University Police & Guns .... Victoria Law
21...Letter to President Reagan .... Rev. Douglas Wilson
24...The Controversy Over Our Insurance Plan .... Jodi Perelman
26...WE SHARE YOUR FEAR .... Stefan Reinhardt
28...WHERE THE GIRLS ARE: Growing Up Female With the Mass Media .... Sara Beinert
30...You wouldn't know it to look at him -- .... Matt Derby
31...Strong black hands.... Lisa Glinsky
32...MARIANNA …

The Double In The Bell Jar, Kimberly Kae Allen

All-Inclusive List of Electronic Theses and Dissertations

This thesis focuses on Sylvia Plath and the idea of doubleness in The Bell Jar. Plath's past experiences are closely linked to the novel. Her psychological breakdown and recovery provided Plath with basic plot structure. It also influenced Plath's preoccupation with the concept of the double. In forming these double characters, Plath studied several psychoanalysts, including Sigmund Freud and Otto Rank.

A Collection Of Gay Plays, Floyd Edward Reed

All-Inclusive List of Electronic Theses and Dissertations

This thesis, 8 Collection of Gay Plays, contains three one act plays which reflect different aspects,of gay life. In the first play, "Awakening," a recent college graduate is forced to deal with his own sexuality by watching those around him embrace their respective homosexuality or bisexuality. The second play is a romantic comedy. P.K., the central character in "Something's Cooking in the Kitchen with P.K.," must choose between two men who say they love him. In the process, he learns that he doesn't need to have someone to be whole, and he learns what it means to be loved. Finally, …

Jane Eyre And The Postcolonial Bildungsroman., Patricia R. Payette

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

Charlotte Bronte's Jane Eyre is often considered a classic Bildungsroman and an early example of feminist fiction because its plot concerns the progress of a lonely and outspoken orphaned girl whose self-determination and independence eventually lead her to wealth and a successful marriage. However, as the novels by three twentieth-century Caribbean authors illustrate, the paradigm of female development presented in Jane Eyre is not applicable to females from the West Indies who are faced with racial and cultural barriers that are part of growing up in a colonized society. Jean Rhys's Wide Sargasso Sea (1966), Jamaica Kincaid's Lucy (1990), and …

Wreath-Laying In The George Eliot Memorial Garden, Nuneaton

The George Eliot Review Online, ISSN: 2831-5375

For those of you who don't know who I am, I am currently the Managing Agent on the Arbury Estate, where I am lucky enough to live in South Farm, which will be familiar to you all as the birthplace of Mary Ann Evans.

I arrived at Arbury approximately 183 years after Robert Evans, Mary Ann's father, who was also the Agent on the Estate and on whom it is my intention to reflect today. Robert was born in 1773, the son of a carpenter. He had a limited early education in the local school which was run by Bartle …

Women And Family In The Fiction Of Barbara Kingsolver, Laura Ann Gussett

Theses & Honors Papers

Realizing the situations facing the American family and the changes it underwent, Kingsolver chooses to use her works as a means to explain how nontraditional families can succeed in American society. Kingsolver describes the evolution of Taylor Greer from a woman trapped in a hopeless situation into one with opportunities for success. Taylor discovers who she is but additionally learns through her relationships and from nature’s cycles that her interdependence with others permits the simultaneous growth of her identity and family. Her new found acquisition of an abused child, her new-found motherhood, and her decision to establish close ties with …

The Inner Voice, Janis Ruth Bagnall Cochrane

Institute for the Humanities Theses

The scope of this project is two-fold. The key purpose is to demonstrate the relationship between the voice of Lee Smith, a Southern writer from Appalachia and the voice of the author, another Southern writer from the Outer Banks. The foremost conclusion that has been drawn is that a writer's voice comes from deep inside the writer's unconscious. It is a product of generations of experiences that have embedded themselves in the writer's psyche. Some of the assumptions and prejudices surrounding southern women are discussed to some degree.

The second purpose is for this writer to show her work. This …

Asses And Wits: The Homoerotics Of Mastery In Satiric Comedy, Mario Digangi

Publications and Research

This essay explores master-servant homoeroticism in three seventeenth-century satiric comedies: Ben Jonson's Epicoene and Volpone and George Chapman's The Gentleman Usher. Whereas "sodomy" always signifies social disorder, "homoerotic" useful for describing same-sex relations that are socially normative or orderly. Thus homoerotic master-servant relations become "sodomitical" only when they are perceived to threaten social order. In Epicoene, the character associated with the disorder of "sodomy" is neither Dauphine or Epicoene, but the "unnatural" Morose, even though he has not literally had sex with the boy he marries. The erotic master-servant relationship in Volpone is sodomitical because it transgresses against …

The Female Body As Icon: Edna Millay Wears A Plaid Dress, Cheryl Walker

Scripps Faculty Publications and Research

The female body has never been so prominently displayed or so critically examined as it is today under the dominance of late capitalism. The results of this display, we can now see, have been mostly negative: women regard themselves at best self-consciously, at worst with disgust. Given this emphasis on self-scrutiny, it comes as no surprise that middle-aged women experience a reduction of self-confidence regarding their physical presences and a concomitant increase in self-dissatisfaction. It is also worth noting that a querulous tone often afflicts them as they grow older, suggesting that they are at odds not only with others …

Ivy Leaves, 1994-1995, Ivy Leaves Editorial Staff

Ivy Leaves

The 1995 edition of the Anderson College journal of art and literature, Ivy Leaves.

The names of the known editors for this issue of Ivy Leaves were Andi Jacoby, Daryl McCord, Ricky Riendeau, Katherine Ross, Mary Nell Tysinger, Anna Whalen, Julie Banker, Kimberly Elmore, Angela Martin, Brent Smith, Misty Taylor, Armeal Thompson, Joel Wightman, Wayne Cox, and Susan Wooten. Cover art by Julie Banker.

"Dismal Loneliness": George Eliot, Auguste Comte And "The Lifted Veil", Judith Siford

The George Eliot Review Online, ISSN: 2831-5375

'The Lifted Veil' is a curious novella from an author who made the organic form so much her own, focusing as it does upon actions which continually interrupt and fragment the narrative; with its emphasis on the supernatural, on bizarre pseudo-scientific experiments, attempted murder and gothic horror it seems out of place in the canon of a maker of 'realist' fictions. Yet bizarre though this tale undoubtedly is, it is not merely the mental aberration from an author under stress that Blackwood supposed it to be.'

In 1859, the year she first offered it for publication, Eliot had been diffident …

Thou Shalt Not Read: Maggie's Arrested Development In The Mills On The Floss, Karen E. Hottle

The George Eliot Review Online, ISSN: 2831-5375

The Mill on the Floss opens and closes with visions of a girl out of place - initially in a dream and finally in a grave. In between, this lost soul tries to find her way in the world, and she often uses books as her guides. While books give the young Maggie a certain freedom, her status as a woman in the society into which she is born forces her to read in certain ways which constrain and eventually destroy her.

The opening scenes of the novel establish Maggie's place in the hierarchy of learning. Mr. Tulliver's first words …

The Transformation Of Rage: Mourning And Creating In George Eliot's Fiction, Peggy Fitzhugh Johnstone

The George Eliot Review Online, ISSN: 2831-5375

The thesis of this book is as follows. In her early life George Eliot experienced a number of bereavements: the deaths of her baby twin siblings in 1821, after which her mother withdrew emotionally from her life; her mother's own death in 1836, when she was sixteen, and her father's death in 1849. Failing to complete 'the mourning process' adequately, and experiencing unconscious 'rage' as a consequence, Eliot had to work through these and other traumatic experiences as an adult, using her novel-writing as a therapy. Her own unconscious aggression comes out in the aggression of her heroines, of which …

Charles Christian Hennell And George Eliot: Human And Narrative Affinities, Graham Handley

The George Eliot Review Online, ISSN: 2831-5375

On 13 November 1841 the twenty-two year old Marian Evans wrote to her then mentor Maria Lewis 'My whole soul has been engrossed in the most interesting of all inquiries for the last few days, and to what results my thoughts may lead, I know not - possibly to one that will startle you'.1 On 16 September 1847 ,just over a year after the publication of her translation of Strauss's Life of Jesus Marian wrote to her close friend Sarah Hennell, whose brother's An Inquiry concerning the Origin of Christianity (2nd edition, 1841) she had just re-read 'with delight and …

The Twenty-Third George Eliot Memorial Lecture- 1994, Canon Michael Sadgrove

The George Eliot Review Online, ISSN: 2831-5375

On Sunday, 2 January 1842, Mary Ann Evans's father wrote in his diary: 'Went to Trinity Church in the forenoon" Miss Lewis went with me. Mary Ann did not go. I stopd the sacrament (sic) and Miss Lewis stopd also.' Two weeks later, again: 'Went to church in the forenoon. Mary Ann did not go to church'.

Robert Evans was perhaps principally interested in making sure that his daughter behaved as was proper for a middle class young woman with eligible prospects. Her scruples may have concerned him less. But there is no disguising the genuine grief he felt at …

New George Eliot Letters At The British Library, William Baker, Donald Hawes

The George Eliot Review Online, ISSN: 2831-5375

The British Library Catalogue of Additions to the Manuscripts New Series 1981-1985 (2 vols., London: The British Library, 1994), records the acquisition of new George Eliot letters to its holdings.' Its Index lists under 'Cross nee Evans ... "George Eliot''' three items: 'Letter to J. T. Delane from George Eliot, 1859.61891, f.88'; 'Letter to E. L. Stanley from George Eliot, 1869.61891, f.90'; 'Letters to Florence Hill from George Eliot, [1869-?]- 1873.61891, ff.92-101' (p. 410).

The text of George Eliot's [30 November 1859] letter of protest to Delane, Editor of the London Times, about Newby, the publisher's 'issuing a work under …

Race And Myth: The Spanish Gypsy, Brenda Mckay

The George Eliot Review Online, ISSN: 2831-5375

Although it cannot be claimed that George Eliot's poetry ranks with her prose fiction, it is nevertheless unjustifiably marginalized in discussion of her work. Among the more distinguished pieces - which include the important blank-verse drama 'Armgart' - is George Eliot's longest excursus into poetry, The Spanish Gypsy. Set in Spain, this drama is the spiritual background of themes later developed in Daniel Deronda, on the nature of racial inter-relationships. In Romola too, Eliot had shown an interest in exploring a culture different from that of England, but also sharing many points of resemblance with that country. The medium of …

Impressions Of Theophrastus Such, Rosemary Ashton

The George Eliot Review Online, ISSN: 2831-5375

George Eliot's last published work, Impressions of Theophrastus Such (1879), has hitherto not been much read or attended to by readers, critics, or even scholars. Now two editions have appeared almost simultaneously, both annotated and furnished with readable introductions. While welcoming the revival of the book in this form, I have to confess to not having had my mind much changed about its merits by the skillful introductions of Nancy Henry and DJ. Enright.

The work still seems to me to be chiefly interesting for the extra light it occasionally throws on George Eliot's character representation in the novels, on …

American Branch Report, Linda K. Robertson

The George Eliot Review Online, ISSN: 2831-5375

The annual American dinner of the Fellowship was held on 28 December 1994 at The Harbor House restaurant in San Diego, California, site of the Modem Language Association convention. Arrangements for the dinner were made by Harriet Williams, and Linda Robertson hosted the dinner and served as recorder for the evening. Those who attended included William Baker, Margaret Carter, Catherine Civello, Connie Fulmer, Shoshana Knapp, Carol Martin, Solveig Robinson, and Jeanette Shumaker.

Horses And Hounds: The Importance Of Animals In The Mills On The Floss, Linda K. Roberston

The George Eliot Review Online, ISSN: 2831-5375

It is not surprising that George Eliot's The Mill on the Floss, set in rural Warwickshire in the early 1800s, should contain references to domestic animals and livestock. What is remarkable is the variety, including dogs, kittens, sheep, cattle, horses, rabbits, ferrets, rats, snakes, toads, spiders, wasps, snails, bears, wolves, boars, a beaver, a chimpanzee, a lion, and an assortment of fish and fowl. From the barking cur in the opening chapter to Bob Jakin's dog Mumps, who comforts Maggie Tulliver after her disastrous trip down the river with Stephen Guest, Eliot uses animals to develop the setting and to …

Obituary Dorothy Edmands 1911-1995

The George Eliot Review Online, ISSN: 2831-5375

Dorothy Edmands had been a member of the George Eliot Fellowship for well over 30 years and during that time had been a most supportive member... She served on the Fellowship Council for very many of those years and, although a quiet and very modest lady, had been extremely generous. Whenever money was needed for whatever project, Dorothy was there with her ever open purse.

Dorothy trained to be a teacher at Furzedown College in London and began her teaching career at Stratford upon Avon. A few years later she moved to George Street School in Bedworth, her home town, …

University Of London, Centre For English Studies: Conference Report, Caroline Levine, Mark Turner

The George Eliot Review Online, ISSN: 2831-5375

George Eliot claimed that Romla was written with her 'best blood', and her contemporaries certainly knew and appreciated the novel. Until late in the century Romla was even being regularly employed as a guidebook to Florence. But despite contemporary uses and accolades, the text has been largely overlooked by scholars, who have typically relegated the novel to footnotes and fleeting allusions. In response to this neglect, admirers of Romla have begurr to ask why it has attracted so little scholarly attention, given its thematic and theoretical abundance, its cultural and critical complexity.

In the spirit of what we perceive as …

Loyola College, Baltimore, Nineteenth-Century Studies Association: Conference Report, Rosealind De Sailly

The George Eliot Review Online, ISSN: 2831-5375

The 14th conference of the Nineteenth Century Studies Association was held at Loyola College, Baltimore, Maryland at the end of March. The conference theme, 'Conflict and Resolution’, allowed examination of the period from the French Revolution to the end of the Victorian era in terms of artistic, literary, philosophical, political, economic, religious, scientific and social change. This rich theme attracted papers on many of the issues that now interest George Eliot scholars and other Victorianists.

Christine Morris (University of South Carolina at Chapel Hill) examined Victorian keepsake annuals in her paper, 'Marketing Femininity in the 1830s: The Case of Heath's …

A New Sense Of Time In Female Development: Linearity And Cyclicity In Atwood's Surfacing And Cat's Eye, Diana L. Unes

Masters Theses

No abstract provided.

Grupo Ubú: El Edificio De La Identidad En Barriendo Sombras, Cesar Valverde

Scholarship

No abstract provided.

The Battle Rages On: The Psychomachia And The Faerie Queene, Book I, Aparajita Nanda

English

The conception of Christian life as a pilgrimage towards God, a war against the forces of evil, has been reiterated right through the literature of late antiquity and the Middle Ages well into the Renaissance. This 'war' between Virtues and Vices, who fight for dominion over the Christian soul, possibly found its first poetic representation in Prudentius' Psychomachia. The action of this personification-allegory is fairly simple. The Christian Virtues led by Faith, despite certain initial reversals, ultimately triumph over the Vices in a series of combats and move on to build a holy city (in man's soul) in which will …

Southern Africa And The Themes Of Madness: Novels By Doris Lessing, Bessie Head, And Nadine Gordimer, Nancy Topping Bazin

English Faculty Publications

However different their lives, Doris Lessing, Bessie Head, and Nadine Gordimer share the common heritage of having grown up in southern Africa. All three were profoundly affected by that experience. Their responses to the colonialist, racist, and sexist attitudes that permeated their lives have determined, to a major extent. the nature of their fiction. Their novels reflect the grotesque situations and bizarre human relationships created by prejudice, injustice, and the desire to dominate. These three authors focus on the mad nature of this social and political situation in southern Africa. In their works, dystopian and utopian visions of the future …

Romancing Visual Women: From Canon To Console, Roberta Sabbath

English Faculty Research

This dissertation juxtaposes the romantic modal treatment of powerful, admired women which canonical male authors and feminist authors and critics construct with those constructed by contemporary women for the visual mass media of video, broadcast television, and computer. The discourse of the former produces the figure of a fragmented woman who is rare, supernatural, marginalized, and impossible. The discourse of the latter produces the figure of a psychologized woman who is typical, natural, mainstream, and possible. To examine the discourse of impossibility, I use three canonical works: Augustine's Confessions; Chretien de Troyes' Perceval; and Dante's Divine Comedy. I also survey …