In “The Contest of Marriage: Domestic Authority in Victorian Literature”, I argue that depictions of engaged and newlywed couples in the Victorian novel consistently dismantle the concept of marriage, depicting the process of two individuals attempting to become one couple as a tenuous and even dangerous project to be undertaken during the nineteenth century. By looking at works where the decision to marry comes at the beginning of the novel rather than the conclusion, I examine the ways in which different novelists document and anatomize the consistent failures in the theoretical underpinnings of domesticity and conjugality. Given that gender, separate spheres and even the family unit have been increasingly viewed as unstable divisions and demarcations by prominent voices within nineteenth-century criticism, I argue that certain novelists were consistently engaged in exposing these insufficiencies in not only the establishment of marriage as a concept, but in the home space itself as a hypothetical location of domestic stability and success. This project will contribute to scholarship in the field not only by tracing the similar patterns and structures of seemingly disparate novels, but also by suggesting that the domestic instability discussed in groundbreaking accounts of Victorian gender ideology is not merely a feature of historical and personal accounts of the era, but is in fact a tension running through much of the period’s most popular and widely read literature as well. In recent years, Victorian critics have collectively worked to demonstrate that separate spheres ideology is no longer a sufficient interpretive tool to employ in our attempts to excavate the nineteenth century's construction of marriage and conjugality. Just as John Tosh has argued for the husband's place within the home and Mary Poovey and Elizabeth Langland have argued for the woman's place beyond it, so too does my work demonstrate that more complex systems of gender and power relationships were functioning within even a "typical" Victorian home. Studies of domesticity have typically focused on either those citizens who embraced its precepts or the rebels who rejected them. In my work, I turn instead to characters whose earnest attempts to embody and enjoy domestic perfection are continually thwarted, proving that many writers consistently locate the trouble with domesticity not in the flaws of specific married couples, but in the implicitly universal claims domesticity makes on all married couples. I argue that in many novels of the period, even marriage enthusiasts are often transformed into its bitterest critics, due to its demands for performance and self-erasure of both spouses. Furthermore, even the seemingly neutral space of the idyllic Victorian home is often shown to be destructive to domesticity's goals, rather than lending structural support to the matrimonial endeavor. I conclude that these authors are suggesting that even marriage's harshest critics can never manage to be as persuasive about the relationship's pitfalls, hazards, and breakdowns as the actual experience of getting married inevitably proves to be.

This thesis examines the competing frameworks in Vladimir Nabokov’s Lolita—the fictional Foreword written by John Ray, Jr., Ph.D. and the manuscript written by Humbert Humbert—in order to understand to what extent the construction manipulates the rhetorical appeal. While previous scholarship isolates the two narrators or focuses on their unreliability, my examination concentrates on the interplay of the frameworks and how their conflicting objectives can be problematic for readers. By drawing upon various theories by Michel Foucault from Power/Knowledge and Louis Althusser’s “On Ideology,” I look into how John Ray, Jr., Ph.D. and Humbert Humbert use authoritative voices to directly address readers with a specific duty, as “parents, social workers, educators” and “ladies of the gentleman,” and I question to what extent this can force readers to unwillingly forfeit their authority in order to adopt an alternative disciplinary gaze in pursuit of a premeditated idea of truth and justice. Using the concept of truth and justice, I explore how psychological discourse and the court are made up of ideologies that operate like the Panopticon, and I question where readers fit despite the strong influence exerted on to them by this structure.

Blacks who have descended from the nineteenth century Atlantic slave trade have historically debated and worked to claim a sense of cultural identity that reflects their African heritage and their identity as diasporic. I am particularly interested in how people of the black Atlantic claim their multiple identities since, for people of a diaspora, one main factor is the fact that they inhabit multiple spaces but cannot call any home. How does transnationalism become a better way to describe the cultural identity of those in the "black Atlantic" since these people have to create new or adapted identities as they move from place to place? For Paul Gilroy, the "black Atlantic" applies to people who descended from slaves forced to come to New World (19). In a sense, slavery is a major part of African diasporic history, but I would claim that as time has progressed and people of this lineage came to find homes in the Caribbean, America, and Europe and they have not lost their heritage. Instead, they have retained these identities in a transnational sense. Multiple cultural identities become integrated into each transnational individual, making each person unique to his or her culture without losing sight of his or her common heritage. I explore these identity formations through a close reading of The Butterfly's Way: Voices from the Haitian Dyaspora (sic) in the United States (2001), a collection of short stories, poetry, and personal accounts from Haitian diaspora in the United States, whose stories delve into the issue of transnational identity. The idea of diaspora as read in the text of The Butterfly's Way emphasizes that the more fluid and encompassing terms of hybridity and transnationalism more accurately describe the geographical movements and consequential amassing of black identification within Paul Gilroy's concept of the "black Atlantic." My analysis is supported by a survey of theoretical discourses, particularly those related to black identity. I utilize post-colonial theory while focusing particularly on transnationalism and diasporic studies through Stuart Hall, as well as W.E.B. Du Bois's conception of "double consciousness" to support and develop my argument on how blacks negotiate multiple identities (11). To discuss the formation of a people, I use the work of political theorist Ernesto Laclau, in particular, his arguments in On Populist Reason (2007) on group identity and demand. Gilroy's concept of the "black Atlantic" has many similarities to Laclau’s notion of the "empty signifier" as a way for people to form groups for collective action. I conclude that transnationalism works as better way to describe the black diaspora since black descendants of slaves have retained multiple identities as Africans as well as citizens of their current nations. My paper argues that transnationalism and hybridity function as better terms to describe people who have the Atlantic slave trade in their history.

This dissertation argues that Henry James deliberately and ingeniously wrote The Ambassadors (1903) as a double-plotted novel. The traditional plot which follows Lambert Strether to Paris provides cover for the detailed story of Strether’s experiences in Paris as a homosexual man seeking his identity. James conveys the Other Plot by means of code, the primary signifiers of which are references to the well-established homosexual subcultures of London and Paris. In-depth historical research on diverse aspects of homosexual life in the nineteenth century are presented in order to demonstrate how James addresses an audience sympathetic to same-sex love without raising condemnation from moral and literary critics.

Edgar Allen Poe and Nathaniel Hawthorne are arguably two of the most highly read and heavily debated nineteenth-century antebellum authors in America. Their writings fascinate readers, while their character depictions, particularly their characterizations of fictional women, prompt intense academic debate. This thesis examines the previously less-studied historical developments surrounding Poe and Hawthorne in the antebellum era that shaped their approach to writing fiction. In particular, this study scrutinizes the effects of the development of a newly popular art form, ballet, the ascendency of female authorship, and the impact of American theatrical reform upon antebellum authors’ authorial faculties, especially Hawthorne and Poe.

This thesis explores how Shakespeare was used by Antebellum American writers to frame slave revolts as either criminal or revolutionary. By specifically addressing The Confessions of Nat Turner by Thomas R. Gray and "The Heroic Slave" by Frederick Douglass, this paper looks at the way invocations of Shakespeare framed depictions of black violence. At a moment when what it means to be American was questioned, American writers like Gray and Douglass turned to Shakespeare and the British roots of the English language in order to structure their respective arguments. In doing so, these texts illuminate how transatlantic identity still permeated American thought. This thesis also argues that the conscious use of British literature, Shakespeare in particular, by abolitionists constitutes a critique of the unfulfilled American ideals they believe slavery undermines. In addressing depictions of slave revolts and black masculinity in this period, this thesis explores how allusions to Shakespeare helped frame the historiography surrounding how slave revolts in America were and are remembered.

This dissertation, G.A.M.E., refashions James McNeill Whistler’s book, The Gentle Art of Making Enemies, into a hypermediated facsimile text and archive. By remediating the text, the socio-historical context of the Victorian time period in which Whistler lived is reestablished, making his book more accessible to twenty-first century audiences. The era studied in this dissertation includes the expansion of the idea of celebrity, the power of the press, and the concept of art for art’s sake from 1863 through 1892. In order to showcase these concepts, archival materials, such as personal correspondence, newspaper clippings, and published pamphlets, from this period were collected, digitized, and organized into a digital archive and edition. In 1890, Whistler, an American-born, British-based artist known for his arguments with the critics of his day, published The Gentle Art, a collection of previously printed letters and pamphlets. Throughout the book, Whistler refers to people, publications, and events relevant to himself and his work. Persons unfamiliar with those references may find themselves frustrated while reading due to the lost social and historical context referred to on the pages, because those references remain difficult to access. G.A.M.E., makes Whistler’s The Gentle Art more accessible by realizing the proto- hypertextual nature of his book. Like many modern-day websites, The Gentle Art contains numerous references to references – a virtual daisy chain of associations Whistler made to and with his work encircling his artistic philosophy, art for art’s sake. From 1890, when the book was published, until now, Whistler’s “links” have remained dormant on the page. G.A.M.E. activates those links and reanimates The Gentle Art via a hypermediated facsimile text for twenty-first century readers. The Gentle Art of Making Enemies is a window into the late Victorian art world. G.A.M.E. houses and archives this contextual material in order to resurrect The Gentle Art and reconcile it with the man who created it.

While John Keats never traveled to America and only wrote a handful of admittedly hostile lines about it in his poetry, American writers and readers have consistently regarded Keats as one of the greatest and most influential poets of the past two centuries. His critical reputation in America has been stable since the 1840s, enduring throughout changing tastes and movements, and his biography and work have been utilized in manifold appropriations by American poets and writers. I examine Keats’s attitude toward the United States—which was in conflict with the general feeling regarding the country by his fellow Romantic poets—and briefly review the American reception of Keats’s poetry in the late nineteenth and twentieth centuries before considering quintessential appropriations of Keats and the Keats biography in works by three American poets: Amy Clampitt, Stanley Plumly, and B.H. Fairchild.

This thesis provides a comparative analysis of seven different variants of the fairy tale commonly known as “Donkeyskin,” classified in the Aarne-Thompson-Uther folktale motif index as ATU 510B. By comparing so many different iterations of one fairy tale, it is easier to recognize the inherent attitudes concerning women and their place in society contained in this tale. Additionally, reading multiple variants from different centuries lends a perspective on the way that these attitudes changed over the centuries. Each of the thirteenth century texts considered end with their heroines trapped in loveless marriages, much like the seventeenth-century fairy tale, “Donkeyskin,” their direct literary descendant. The nineteenth century texts then present death or marriage as the alternatives for women, while the twentieth century brings the first instance of a heroine choosing for herself. This comparison allows the reader to learn not only what was considered a “happy ending” at the time, but also to gain a better understanding of the means by which a woman could gain agency.

Excerpt: On 6 February 1824, Joanna Baillie Notified Her Friend Walter Scott that Scottish poet James Montgomery, then living in Sherrield, England, had written to ask her for a poem on the plight on chimney sweeps, also known as climbing boys.