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Darwin's Failures: Childless Women In The Nineteenth-Century British Novel, Rose P. O'Malley
Darwin's Failures: Childless Women In The Nineteenth-Century British Novel, Rose P. O'Malley
Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects
This dissertation uses feminist neo-materialist and evolutionary theory to examine non-maternal relations among childless female characters in nineteenth-century British novels. In both the nineteenth century and the present day there is a tendency to use the authority of evolutionary biology to define women as essentially reproductive beings; their entire physical and intellectual organization is seen as geared toward childbearing and childrearing. Reading childless female characters with this tradition in mind, as well as the more open-minded counter-narrative of feminist engagements with evolution, opens up new questions about their meaning: Are they truly biological failures, or not? What avenues of physical …
Heavy Expectations: Reading Pregnancy In The Victorian Novel, Livia Arndal Woods
Heavy Expectations: Reading Pregnancy In The Victorian Novel, Livia Arndal Woods
Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects
This dissertation articulates the tendency of Victorian novels to make legible only the pregnant bodies of immodest characters who transgress gendered ideologies while the pregnant bodies of modest characters tend to go undescribed. Tracing the medicalization of pregnancy and childbirth over the course of the long nineteenth century, my chapters demonstrate the function of moralizing narrative conventions in the representation of pregnancy in mid-Victorian novels, of a self-conscious use of free indirect diagnosis in high-Victorian fiction, and a shift at the fin-de-siècle from pregnancy as a signifier of morality to a symptom of unstable minds. The novels I read closely …