My thesis examines the concept of sweetness as an aesthetic category in nineteenth-century British culture. My contention is that a link exists between the idea of sweetness as it appears in literary works and sugar as an everyday commodity with a complex history attached. Sugar had changed from being considered as a luxury in 1750 to a mass-market staple by the 1850s, a major cultural transition which altered the concept of sweetness as a taste. In the thesis I map the consequences of this shift as they are manifest in a range of texts from the period, alongside parallel changes in the aesthetic category of sweetness. I also assess the relationship between the material history of sweetness and the separate but related concept of aesthetic sweetness. In focussing on the relationship between sugar and sweetness in the Victorian period this thesis examines an area of nineteenth-century life that has previously never been subject to detailed study. Although several critics have explored the connection between sugar and concepts of sweetness as they relate to abolitionist debates in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, my focus differs in that I assert that other material histories of sugar played as significant a role in developing discourses of sweetness. Throughout this study, which spans the period 1780-1870, I draw on a range of sources across a variety of genres, including abolitionist pamphlets, medical textbooks, the novels of Charlotte Brontë and Wilkie Collins, the cultural criticism of Matthew Arnold and Walter Pater, and the poetry of Christina Rossetti and Algernon Charles Swinburne. I conclude that literary cultures in the nineteenth century increasingly use discourses of sugar to relate to the mass market and explore the commercialisation of literature, at a time when a growing commodity culture was seen as a threat to literary integrity.

Submitted by Fabiano Vassallo (fabianovassallo2127@gmail.com) on 2017-05-03T18:56:30Z No. of bitstreams: 2 license_rdf: 0 bytes, checksum: d41d8cd98f00b204e9800998ecf8427e (MD5) eduardo graca dissertacao mestadoOKOK2.pdf: 595408 bytes, checksum: 6e6751f6eea0075617111a0afc57394b (MD5) / Approved for entry into archive by Josimara Dias Brumatti (bcgdigital@ndc.uff.br) on 2017-05-29T17:45:30Z (GMT) No. of bitstreams: 2 license_rdf: 0 bytes, checksum: d41d8cd98f00b204e9800998ecf8427e (MD5) eduardo graca dissertacao mestadoOKOK2.pdf: 595408 bytes, checksum: 6e6751f6eea0075617111a0afc57394b (MD5) / Made available in DSpace on 2017-05-29T17:45:30Z (GMT). No. of bitstreams: 2 license_rdf: 0 bytes, checksum: d41d8cd98f00b204e9800998ecf8427e (MD5) eduardo graca dissertacao mestadoOKOK2.pdf: 595408 bytes, checksum: 6e6751f6eea0075617111a0afc57394b (MD5) / Coordenação de Aperfeiçoamento de Pessoal de Nível Superior / O objetivo desta dissertação é a abordagem das relações entre os conceitos de mecanismos de poder e de linhas de fuga – concebidos nas obras dos filósofos Michel Foucault e Gilles Deleuze, respectivamente - e os romances de Emily Brontë e Virginia Woolf que intitulam nosso trabalho. Os mecanismos de poder, segundo Foucault, seriam os dispositivos políticos e filosóficos instalados na sociedade e no pensamento com o intuito de conduzir as relações de conhecimento, as disposições, e os desejos humanos à afirmação e à conservação das relações de poder vigentes. Interessados somente na manutenção das estruturas hegemônicas, os mecanismos de poder investiriam no cultivo de nossas potências tristes e servis para subjugarnos aos desígnios dominantes, dirigindo-nos, assim, ora à adequação compulsória e à reafirmação espontânea dos regimes hegemônicos, ora ao desespero, à loucura e à morte. As linhas de fuga deleuzianas constituiriam movimentos de ruptura com tais regimes dominantes, que possibilitariam novas relações com a sociedade, com a subjetividade, com a linguagem e com o pensamento; o cultivo de potências ativas e criadoras; e, afinal, a emergência de uma vida estética. Analisando os materiais narrativos de O morro dos ventos uivantes e Mrs. Dalloway observamos como tanto os jogos narrativos dos dois romances quanto os próprios enredos e personagens narrados se engajam nestas mesmas discussões a respeito do confronto entre forças conservadoras e libertárias, do cultivo de potências diminutivas e aumentativas, e da produção de corpos servis e elétricos / The aim of this dissertation is an approach of the relations between the concepts of mechanisms of power and lines of flight – conceived in the works of Michel Foucault and Gilles Deleuze, respectively – and the novels by Emily Brontë and Virginia Woolf that entitle our work. Mechanisms of power, according to Foucault, would be the political and philosophical devices installed in our society and in our thought with the intent of driving our relations with knowledge, our disposition and our desire towards the affirmation and conservation of established relations of power. Interested only in the maintenance of hegemonic structures, mechanisms of power would invest on the cultivation of our sad and servile potencies to submit us to the dominant designs, driving us either to compulsory adequacy and to the spontaneous reassurance of hegemonic regimens, or to despair, insanity and death. The deleuzian lines of flight would consist in rupturing movements with such dominant regimens, that would enable new relations with society, subjectivity, language and with thought; the cultivation of active and creative potencies; and the eventual emergency of a aesthetic life. Analyzing the narrative materials of Wuthering Heights and Mrs. Dalloway we observe that both the narrative strategies of the novels and their plots and characters engage on these same discussions about the confrontation between conservative and libertarian forces; the cultivation of diminutive and augmentative potencies; and the production of servile and electric bodies

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Anne Brontë's Agnes Grey and The Tenant of Wildfell Hall were published more than forty years before the appearance of the feminist type that the Victorians called the “New Woman;” yet, both novels contain characteristics of New Woman fiction. By considering how Brontë's novels foreshadow New Woman fiction, the reader of these novels can re-enact the “gentlest” Brontë as an influential feminist whose ideology informed the construction of the radical New Woman. Brontë, like the New Woman writers, incorporated autobiographical dilemmas into her fiction. By using her own experiences as a governess, Brontë constructs Agnes Grey's incongruent social status and a morally corrupt gentry and aristocracy through her depiction of not only Agnes's second employers, the Murrays, but also the morally debauched world that Helen enters upon her marriage to Arthur Huntingdon in The Tenant of Wildfell Hall. Moreover, Brontë incorporates her observations of Branwell's alcoholism and her own religious beliefs into The Tenant of Wildfell Hall. Although Brontë's novels contain autobiographical material, her heroines are fictional constructions that she uses to engage her readers with the woman question. Brontë accomplishes this engagement through her heroines' narrative re-enactments of fictional autobiographical dilemmas. Helen's diary and Agnes's diary-based narrative produce the pattern of development of the Bildungsroman and foreshadow the New Woman novelists' Kunstlerromans. Brontë's heroines anticipate the female artist as the protagonist of the New Woman Kunstlerromans. Agnes and Helen both invade the masculine domain of economic motive and are feminists who profess gender definitions that conflict with dominant Victorian ideology. Agnes questions her own femininity by internalizing the governess's status incongruence, and Helen's femininity is questioned by those around her. The paradoxical position of both heroines anticipates the debate about the nature and function of art in which the New Woman writers engaged. Through her reconciliation of the aesthetic and the political, Brontë, like the New Woman novelists who will follow, explores the contradiction between art and activism.

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The discursive and critical positions of the ‘classic’ nineteenth-century novel, particularly the woman’s novel, in the field of adaptation studies have been dominated by long-standing concerns about textual fidelity and the generic processes of the text-screen transfer. The sociocultural patterns of adaptation criticism have also been largely ensconced in representations of literary women on screen. Taking a decisive twist from tradition, this thesis traces the evolution of representations of masculinity in the malleable characters of Rochester and Heathcliff in film and television adaptations of Charlotte Brontë’s Jane Eyre and Emily Brontë’s Wuthering Heights between 1939 and 2009. Concepts of masculinity have been a neglected area of enquiry in studies of the ‘classic’ novel on screen. Adaptations of the Brontës’ novels, as well as the adapted novels of other ‘classic’ women authors such as Jane Austen, George Eliot and Elizabeth Gaskell, increasingly foreground male character in traditionally female-oriented narratives or narratives whose primary protagonist is female. This thesis brings together industrial histories, textual frames and sociocultural influences that form the wider contexts of the adaptations to demonstrate how male characterisation and different representations of masculinity are reformulated and foregrounded through three different adaptive histories of the narratives of Jane Eyre and Wuthering Heights. Through the contours of the film and television industries, the application of text and context analysis, and wider sociocultural considerations of each period an understanding of how Rochester and Heathcliff have been transmuted and centralised within the adaptive history of the Brontë novel.

My thesis explores why beauty became so much more important in nineteenth-century Britain, especially for marriageable young women in the upper and middle class. My argument addresses the consequences of that change in the status of beauty for plain or ugly women, how this social shift is reflected in the novel, and how authors respond to the issue of plainer women and issues of their marriageability. I look at how these authorial attitudes shifted over the century, observing that the issue of plain women and their marriageability was dramatized by nineteenth-century authors, whose efforts to heighten the audience's awareness of the plight of plainer women can be traced by contrasting novels written early in the century with novels written mid-century. I argue that beauty gained more significance for young women in nineteenth-century England because the marriage ideal shifted, a shift which especially influenced the upper and middle class. The eighteenth century brought into marriage concepts such as Rousseau's "wife-farm principle" the idea that a man chooses a significantly younger child-bride, mentoring and molding her into the woman he needs. But by the end of the century the ideal of marriage moved to the companionate ideal, which opted for an equal partnership. That ideal was based on the conception that marriage was based on personal happiness hence should be founded on compatibility and love. The companionate ideal became more influential as individuality reigned among the Romantics. The new ideal of companionate marriage limited parents' influence on their children's choice of spouse to the extent that the choice lay now largely with young men. Yet that choice was constrained because young men and women were restricted by social conventions, their social interaction limited. Thus, according to my reading of nineteenth-century authors, the companionate ideal was a charade, as young men were not able to get to know women well enough to determine whether or not they were compatible. So instead of getting to know a young woman's character and her personality, they distinguished potential brides mainly on the basis of appearance.