In this thesis, I claim that the gaze is central to the courtship process in Austen’s novels. I also propose that an analysis of the gaze is crucial to understanding the gendered power dynamics that are central to these relationships. We tend to think of male gazers as having all the power, but one of Austen’s subversive arguments is that women can also be subjects of the gaze and transform through it. However, limits exist to their power. As I will argue, while men are able to simply project their transformative gaze, women must first use their gaze to perceive their societal position before successfully having a transformative effect.

This thesis delves into the postcolonial genre, examining the novel, The God of Small Things, by Arundhati Roy, and how it highlights the duality in gender roles, social class, and postcolonial society through the narrative style and language.

In the span of this thesis, I investigate the queer nature of John Milton’s epic poem Paradise Lost, and argue that in spite of the biblical subject matter it is in fact a text filled with instances of queer transgression. I focus on preexisting feminist critiques of Milton in my introduction in order to ground myself within the academic field, and in order to illustrate how I will be branching out from it. In my first chapter, I discuss the queered nature of the poem’s landscapes, such as Chaos and Hell, and the specifically queer and masculine nature of reproduction, such as Sin’s birth out of Satan’s head and Eve’s birth from Adam’s rib. I then turn to an in-depth discussion of Sin in Chapter Two, illustrating how she is punished with reproduction and sexual violence, and how this contrasts with her queer birth while illustrating the poem’s problematic stance toward fallen women. In my final chapter, I tackle the character of Eve, and argue that her narcissistic scene at the lake after her birth reveals her queer sexual desire for her feminine reflection. I also discuss how the poem sexualizes Sin and Eve, and how their physical appearances illustrate the state of women in the poem. I finish by arguing that a queer perspective of Milton is important because it allows modern critics to view as both illuminating and empowering.

Thomas Coryate (1577?-1617), the writer, traveler and social climber, embraced various media in order to achieve social gains. This thesis surveys the content and materiality of writings by and about Coryate to investigate the nature of his sociability. The study begins by drawing on John Hoskyns’ (1566–1638) poem, “Convivium philosophicum,” to explore how Coryate used oral and social performance to create a unique form of sociability through which mockery is transmuted into praise. This thesis then addresses how Coryate’s sociability factored into the conflation of aspects of manuscript and print media in the production of the “Panegyricke Verses” that were published with Coryate’s travel narrative, Coryats Crudities (1611). Finally, it gauges the success of Coryate’s social maneuvering by analyzing Coryate’s follow up to his travel narrative, Coryats Crambe (1611) and an anonymously pirated version of the “Panegyricke Verses,” The Odcombian Banqvet (1611).

In Chaucer's Canterbury Tales, The Monk's Tale is compromised of seventeen individual tales, which instead of serving a moral lesson one would expect of a clergy member, serves as a quasi-hunt that allows the Monk to participate in his favorite, violent hobby. The Monk personifies fortune as a hunter, striking down successful men who are unsuspecting of the violent downfall which awaits them. The Monk structures his tale to resemble the different stages of a hunt and fills it with violent, animalistic, and erotic imagery that works to strengthen the Monk's perception of his own masculinity while simultaneously providing a form of sexual pleasure that he is otherwise forbidden to experience. Hunting played a significant role in medieval society and literature. Though clergy members were typically forbidden or discouraged from participating in the sport, significant aspects of the history surrounding medieval hunting shed light on the Monk's identity as primarily a hunter.

This thesis examines the ways that Christopher Marlowe and William Shakespeare use their history plays to subvert the ideals of early modern England. Writing plays about historical events gave the playwrights freedom to depict certain things on stage that would have otherwise been unacceptable, and because they had history as their source, they could show events that were parallel to the current happenings in England and make commentary on those events.

Charlotte Mew (1869-1928) published short stories, essays, and poetry between 1894 and the time of her death. She published a slim volume of poems in 1916, a few of which place her as one of the great English poets. Indeed, both Thomas Hardy and Virginia Woolf thought her one of the greatest living female poets. Mew is particularly interesting as a poet who was born in the Victorian period, published during the “decadent decade” of the nineties, throughout Edward’s reign, and well into the reign of George V. Although few of Mew’s poems are dated, there is a gradual yet continual change from her early work to her latest. In her work, Mew questions her relationship with God, nature and humanity. She asked questions asked by Emily Bronte, George Meredith, and Thomas Hardy. Like them, she was knowledgeable in the new science and believed in its results. She was a seeker for a workable philosophy on which to base her life, which she never fully found. It is both painful and fruitful to join her in her search through her works as she tries to come to terms with these issues.

Although many critics have commented on various aspects of balance, symmetry, and order in Shakespeare’s As You like It, others have given the impression that the play uses a carefree series of episodes to give the audience lighthearted entertainment. Few, if any have discussed the extent to which these elements are exemplified through the remarkable skill and craftsmanship of the playwright. The coordination of these elements shows that the work is not, as it frequently has been considered, a simple romance, but is rather a superlative exemplification of Shakespeare’s remarkable artistry. Through the use of various devices, Shakespeare constructs for his audience a model of the harmony for which man should strive. One of the most obvious devices used by the dramatist is the groupings found among the characters. In addition, Shakespeare also employs the dual setting of court and country to aid in establishing his ideal of balance and harmony. This model does not degenerate into excessive artificiality, partly because Shakespeare uses both a reconciliation and a synthesis of opposites, and partly because he also utilizes, while gently mocking them, such literary traditions as the pastoral and the Euphuistic. He keeps both his characters and his audience firmly based in reality. Moreover, Shakespeare utilizes the Elizabeth idea of order and the concepts of nature and nurture, as additional means through which he establishes the ideal of harmony. All of these devices are aided by the basic comic structure itself, one which begins in sadness and ends in happiness. With this comic resolution the dramatist establishes his idea of the balance and harmony necessary in society. The play itself becomes a nurturing device, a model of harmony teaching and exemplifying happy reconciliation.

This thesis examines the constructions of madness and hysteria as diagnoses used to subjugate the protagonists in Bessie Head’s A Question of Power and Kate Chopin’s The Awakening. In juxtaposing these texts, themes including “lone womanhood” surface to identify both protagonists’ means for liberation from patriarchal and colonialist oppression. While for Edna of The Awakening, liberation from the hysteria diagnosis comes through bodily sovereignty, A Question of Power’s Elizabeth is freed from the madness rendering by reclaiming her mental interiority.

This thesis examines the celebrity of governesses in British culture during the nineteenth and early twentieth century. Victorian governess-mania was as pervasive as it was inexplicable, governesses comprising only a tiny fraction of the population and having little or no ostensible effect on the social, political, or economic landscape. Nevertheless, governesses were omnipresent in Victorian media, from novels and etiquette manuals to paintings, cartoons and pornography. Historians and literary critics have long conjectured about the root cause of popular fixation on the governess, and many have theorized that their cultural resonance owed to the host of contradictions and social conundrums they embodied, from being a `lady' who worked, to being comparable to that bugbear of Victorian society, the prostitute. However, while previous scholarship has maintained that governess-mania was produced by their peculiarity as social or economic actors, I intend to demonstrate that this nonconformity was extrapolated in visual and literary depictions to signify a more prurient deviance, specifically a fixation on human suffering. This analysis reveals that whether depicted in mainstream press or in nefarious erotica, popular interest in governesses was contoured by a fixation on their perceived relationship to corporal violence. Over the course of the nineteenth century governesses were increasingly portrayed as the victims of a huge range of internal and external threats, such as disease, sterility, assault, murder, rape, and even urban accidents like train crashes or gas leaks. Cast as flagellant birching madams in pornographic fantasy, governesses were also construed as deriving erotic authority through the infliction of pain on others. From imagining the governess as a pitiful victim of brutality or conversely eroticizing her as the stewardess of sadomasochism, all of these constructs rely on the dynamics of violation, on bodies that experience misfortune and bodies that mete that it out. Utilizing a wide array of sources and methodological approaches, I will demonstrate that the Victorian governess was not only popularly correlated with social or sexual irregularity, but that these themes were ultimately circumscribed by a larger preoccupation with the governess as an icon of violence and pain.