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<p>This dissertation argues that nineteenth-century novelists depended on aesthetically unremarkable—or plain—women characters to establish the realist novel as the genre of the British middle class by mapping class values onto plain women’s bodies. By creating female characters with an unremarkable appearance, novelists train readers in the skills necessary to read the realist novel by focusing on interiority rather than materiality. I theorize plainness as a middle ground between beautiful and ugly that allowed authors to define a morality distinct from the upper and lower classes; plain heroines’ unremarkable exteriors embodied middle-class British values of authenticity, restraint, and morality. More than merely the non-beautiful, plainness delineated a very specific kind of moral and classed female subjectivity.</p> <p>The aesthetic of plainness allowed novelists to engage with cultural discussions of modern female subjectivity, for in creating plain female characters, novelists wrote against idealized depictions of passive women. To accentuate a female character’s inner life, plainness in novels functions primarily through comparison, through networks of represented women. Whereas the literary angel-whore binary has been well-established, I am interested in how the presence of a plain woman—neither angel nor monster—complicates our understanding of heroines in novels. The progressive potential of plain woman speaks to a contemporary movement that rebukes the misogynistic trope of distrusting a woman’s surface and instead portrays plain women with deep feeling and individuated identities.</p>

Thesis (M.A.)--Miami University, Dept. of History, 2007. / Title from first page of PDF document. Includes bibliographical references (p. 76-85).

This thesis compares the status of upper-class widows in England to Colonial America. The common law traditions in England established dower, which was also used in the American colonies. Dower guaranteed widows the right to one-third of the land and property of her husband. Jointure was instituted in England in 1536 and enabled men to bypass dower and settle a yearly sum on a widow. The creation of jointure was able to proliferate in England due to the cash-centered economy, but jointure never manifested itself in Colonial America because of the land centered economy. These two types of inheritance form the background for the argument that upper-class women in Colonial America had more legal and economical freedoms than their brethren in England.

From the adventures of Odysseus to those of the male Grand Tourist, travel has often been regarded as an important rite of masculine self-fashioning. However, as this thesis argues, travel and travel writing also provided a valuable opportunity for women's self-fashioning: journeys offered women a means of altering themselves, enabling them to assume a novel identity abroad and in text, whether it be a subversive or idealised version of themselves. Drawing upon Judith Butler's and Sidonie Smith's theories of performativity, this thesis investigates Victorian women travel writers' impulse to self-fashioning, and argues for travel writing as a performative act of identity-formation. Drawing on Butler's notion of subversive repetition, this thesis also demonstrates the ways in which the instability of women authors' narrative identities gives them a potential for agency, enabling authors to unsettle prescribed gender boundaries and challenge cultural constructions of femininity. In particular, I examine the constructed textual travel identities of the following nineteenth-century British women: Anna Jameson, Susan Horner, Emily Lowe, and Frances Minto Elliot. I highlight the discursive strategies that these four authors use in order to create certain images of themselves for their readers in their travelogues about Italy, all published (or, in the case of Horner, written) between the years 1826 and 1881. Jameson, Horner, Lowe, and Elliot also reconfigure traditional notions of travel and gender in their travelogues to articulate and perform definitions of selves that are not necessarily exemplary – at least not at first glance. I examine the ways in which these nineteenth-century authors adopt apparently undesirable selfhoods ('ill', 'intellectual', 'unprotected', and 'idle') and turn supposed weaknesses into strengths. This thesis also analyses the significance of Italy for the travel narrators and their self-representation in relation to the peninsula. Italy signalled a meaningful difference from Britain, and these authors represent it as a positive space for healing, intellectual growth, pleasure, fulfilment, and self-determination. The constructed identities of these four authors result in 'travel performances' that aim to persuade readers of the narrators' aptitude for travel and of their especially meaningful attachment to, experience of, and understanding of Italy. This thesis does not only provide a space for voices which have until now been little recognised in contemporary scholarship. It also sheds light on an important form of Victorian women’s writing that was a valuable route towards cultural and intellectual authority and self-empowerment, as well as a means of personal and professional self-fashioning.

Th. lett. Genève, 1998 ; L. 442. / Im Buchh.: Basingstoke etc. : Palgrave. Register. Includes bibliographical references (p. 203-213) and index.

in English The aim of this thesis is to interpret and categorize the lesser known novel Thaddeus of Warsaw by the Scottish author Jane Porter. The novel is characterised by the use of several genre conventions - most importantly those commonly found in the conservative anti-jacobin novel or national tale, historical novel and novel of sensibility. Porter's novel is interpreted from all three perspectives and also compared to other relevant novels from roughly the same period: Self- Control by Mary Brunton, The Old English Baron by Clary Reeve and The Wild Irish Girl by Lady Morgan. The comparison aims at the contextualization of Thaddeus of Warsaw and the observation of similarities and differences in the approach to certain themes or motives. The most important motives is that of a trial that shows the character of the protagonist in action, continuity, universality and even a certain parabolic nature of history, an emphasis on virtue and the use of sentimental conventions to portray the emotions of characters. This analysis is preceded by an interpretation of two authorial prefaces. The new one (from 1831) claims that the work it comments on is a historical novel published even before Sir Walter Scott's Waverley, usually considered the first historical novel. The older preface published alongside...

Establishing India explores how British Protestant women’s foreign missionary societies of the mid nineteenth century established and negotiated outreach to the women and girls of India. The humanitarian claims made about Indian women in the missionary press did not translate into direct missionary activity by British women. Instead, India was adopted as a site of missionary activity for more complex and local reasons: from encounters with opportunistic colonial informants to seeking inclusion in national organisations. The prevailing narrative about women’s missionary work in nineteenth-century India is both distorted and unsatisfactory. British women’s missionary work has been characterised as focused on seeking to enter and transform the high-caste Hindu household. This both obscures other important groups of females who were key historical actors, and it reduces the scope of women’s work to the domestic and private. In fact, British women missionaries sought inclusion in mainstream missionary strategies, which afforded them visibility, largely through establishing schools and orphanages. They also engaged with mainstream discourses of colonial and missionary education in India. Establishing India also details how India was established for British missionary women through texts and magazines. Missionary magazines provided British women with a continuous record of women’s work in India, reinforcing a belief in the providential rightfulness of the project. Magazines also both facilitated and misrepresented various types of work that British women engaged with in India: orphan sponsorship was established through the magazines and myths of zenana work were constructed. Missionary magazines were crucial to counteracting male narratives of white female absence or victimhood in India and they served to keep the women’s missionary project in India both visible and intact.

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