Poets such as Thomas Hardy, Augusta Webster, and Amy Levy portray prostitutes who seem guiltless about their choice of profession. Hardy's Amelia seems to symbolize the mutation of a pure country girl into a soiled disciple of evil; yet in the poem the changes in her life brought on by prostitution are evident in her drastically changed physical appearance and mannerism. Webster's Eulalie is an intelligent and well-spoken woman who undermines the stereotypical generalizations about prostitutes, relocating the source of the Great Social Evil from her profession to the institutionalized educational failure that trains women for nothing better than housekeeping. Levy's unnamed Magdalen, disease ridden and dying, may resemble a fallen woman. However, her lack of regret over the out-of-wedlock relationship with a man would make her an unrepentant prostitute in the eyes of the Victorians and she openly points to the real unmentionable of Victorian prostitution—the male client.

Because of its importance in the history of the verse novel and the history of women’s writing, Elizabeth Barrett Browning’s Aurora Leigh (1856) has overshadowed the works of other female verse novelists in Victorian studies scholarship. By focusing on non-canonical works by four understudied women poets writing in the late nineteenth century— Augusta Webster’s “Lota” (1867), Violet Fane’s Denzil Place: A Story in Verse (1875), Emily Pfeiffer’s The Rhyme of the Lady of the Rock, and How It Grew (1884), and Emily Hickey’s “Michael Villiers, Idealist” (1891)—this dissertation expands our understanding of both women’s poetry and the verse novel in the Victorian period. It demonstrates that the genre was taken up in multiple ways after Aurora Leigh by women poets who, like EBB, addressed urgent and controversial social and political issues—such as parliamentary enfranchisement, adultery, marital rape, political sovereignty and land use in the Scottish Highlands, as well as socialism and the Irish Question— through inventive and complex generic combinations. This dissertation does not outline a teleological development of genre but, rather, recovers works through case studies that offer microhistories of verse novels at particular historical moments in order to expand the canon and definition of the Victorian verse novel. / Graduate / 2020-04-25

My dissertation, "Renovating the Closet : Nineteenth-Century Closet Drama Written by Women as a Stage for Social Critique," contributes to a new understanding about nineteenth-century closet drama through three distinct and innovative texts: George Eliot's The Spanish Gypsy (1868), Michael Field's Stephania (1892), and Augusta Webster's A Woman Sold (1867). I contend that these three women writers employed the closet drama, a genre written in dramatic form but intended to be privately read or performed, to critique the social, cultural, and ideological limitations placed upon women of their time. In their symbolic use of the genre and innovative experiments with form, Eliot, Field, and Webster created a new stage on which their female protagonists challenge belief systems, institutions, and conventions that confine their gender roles, sexual identity, and social power. My chapter, "'Angel of the Homeless Tribe' : The Legacy of The Spanish Gypsy," shows how George Eliot melds the conventions of epic narrative with those of Victorian closet drama and reveals a dynamic connection between the character development and genre. Eliot's canonical novels are famous for their indictment of the limited roles Victorian culture offered to women. Equally famous are the tragic destinies of her rebellious heroines: they end up dead, unfulfilled, or virtually imprisoned. But scholars have failed to notice that in her experiment with The Spanish Gypsy, Eliot created a female epic: Fedalma, a woman of fifteenth-century Spain, becomes the leader of her "Gypsy" nation, sung into the future by an admiring bard. Eliot's formal experiment makes The Spanish Gypsy an important text for understanding how genre shaped gender representation in Eliot's canon, and in Victorian literature generally. My chapter, "'Something of His Manhood Falls' : Stephania as Critique of Victorian Male Aesthetics and Masculinity," offers Stephania as Katharine Bradley and Edith Cooper's commentary on the predominantly-male Aesthetic and Decadent movements of the 1890s. Through the pseudonym Michael Field, Bradley and Cooper wrote their way into, and claimed their own space inside, a very exclusive males-only closet. The chapter demonstrates how Stephania, set in Rome 1002 A.D., reclaims agency for a Victorian artistic "sisterhood" adulterated and exiled by a "brotherhood" of male Decadents (who saw woman as a nemesis to social order, personal salvation, and creative production), both through its form, and its cast of three: Stephania, Emperor Otho, and his old tutor Gerbert. Stephania, a former Empress turned courtesan bent on revenge for her husband's murder, challenges homosocial exclusivity and ultimately triumphs as a symbolic queen and emperor. Successful in her plan to bring down Otho through her seduction and manipulation of both men, Stephania is redeemed and saved; she has restored social order. In its resistance of the boundaries and expectations of the closet drama genre, Stephania projects a new ideology for Victorian womanhood and female authorship. My last chapter, "'I Could Be Tempted' : The Ev(e)olution of the Angel in the House in A Woman Sold," presents A Woman Sold as an early example of Augusta Webster's strategic social rhetoric, as her use of the closet drama acts as a structural metaphor for the sociomythological confinement of the nineteenth-century middle class woman. I investigate how A Woman Sold exposes the notion that marriage for nineteenth-century middle class women symbolized a closet of social and cultural paralysis, as grown from a history of socially and culturally institutionalized gender expectations. At the same time, I demonstrate how Webster employs irony through a nexus of genre, narrative, and form to support and advocate for opportunities outside marriage that encourage female agency to develop. Essentially, the fundamental argument in this dissertation hinges on the ways in which Eliot, Field, and Webster revised the conventional closet drama to renovate and, in turn, reveal the metaphorical and literal closets that confined social and cultural possibilities for nineteenth-century women. / text

The period spanning from the late 1850s to the mid-1860s frames a historical moment in Victorian England when lactation and breastfeeding came under intense public scrutiny in both medical and creative writing. While popular domestic author Isabella Beeton wrote on the dangers that an unwary mother’s milk represented for her child and herself in her serial publication, Mrs. Beeton’s Book of Household Management (1859-1861), prominent physicians C.H.F. Routh and William Acton launched a public dispute in medical journals contesting the physiological and moral dangers that the fallen wet nurse posed for the middle-class household (1859). Meanwhile, the medical community catalogued the bizarre long-term physical and dispositional side-effects of an infant’s consumption of “bad milk” – among them, syphilis, swearing, sexual immorality, and death (Matus 161-162). But it is not only medical writers who were latching on to the breastfeeding debate as a means of voicing social and political concerns of the day; recent literary critics have gestured towards the troubling manifestations of lactation in popular mid-century novels like Charles Dickens’s Dombey and Son (1848) and George Eliot’s Adam Bede (1859) as entry points into Victorian anxieties about classed and gendered embodiment. This project stipulates that the mid-century preoccupation with managing women’s milk represents an intersection of two overlapping cultural paradigms pertaining to female expression: a cultural devaluation of female physiological expression as unconscious if not dangerous leakage, and a deprecation of female linguistic and poetic expression as an analogously unmeditated and potentially disruptive kind of communication. Mid-century manuals, articles, and novels offered public voice to a number of existing anxieties surrounding breastfeeding which accompanied the mid-nineteenth century, a historical moment at the cusp of a waning popularity in wet nursing and at the advent and rise of patented infant formula. This project stipulates that at least three female poets of the mid-nineteenth century employ lactation imagery in their works as a means of recasting a cultural devaluation of female expression – inventing a new critical terminology of feminine poetic signifiers that uses the symbolic medium of breastmilk as its ink. Informed by the medical and cultural context of the High Victorian age, I explore how poets Elizabeth Barrett Browning (1806-1861), Christina Rossetti (1830-1894), and Augusta Webster (1837-1894) not only participate in the preoccupation with unstable bodies and fluids, but capitalize on female leakage in an elaborate rhetorical strategy that embarks on a new embodied female poetics. Barrett Browning’s Aurora Leigh, Rossetti’s “Goblin Market,” and Webster’s Mother and Daughter all enlist the lactating and feeding breast in a series of elaborate metaphors of female identity construction, literary expression, and poetic voice.

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