Thesis (M.A.)--Villanova University, 2009. / English Dept. Includes bibliographical references.

My dissertation, The Endless Roar in which We Live: The Figure of Noise in Nineteenth-Century U.S. Fiction is the first extended study that locates an intersection between sound studies and literary studies in order to examine noise as it defines spaces and places, and the characters that live and work in them, in American literature from the second half of the nineteenth century through the beginning of the twentieth century. I evaluate noise in a sampling of American fiction, and consider how the imagined sounds of fiction echo nineteenth-century soundscapes and underscore contemporary discernment of noises – and sometimes the lack of noises – in the national consciousness. I consider the street noise that the upper classes wished away, the factory noise that so many women workers spent a lifetime hearing, and the resounding noise of the United States’ expansion westward. Conversely, I also consider how authors and characters respond to the noises that penetrate their ears and create their soundscapes. Together, these considerations shape my argument that sounds help to construct and characterize localities, just as certain places construct particular sounds. Moreover, however, I argue that noise creates spaces wherein identities – such as those of gender, class, and ethnicity – also often tied to place, are discovered, defined, and challenged. In many ways, classifications of noise are subjective and varied, depending on who makes and who hears the noise, where and why the noise is produced, and how and by whom is the noise interpreted. Considering noise as malleable and interpretable based on context allows me to most effectively examine noise as a facilitator of identity formation.

Since the publication of Laura Mulvey's influential article 'Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema,' in which she identifies the pervasive presence of the male gaze in Hollywood cinema, scholars have sought to account for the female spectator in her paradigm of gendered vision. This thesis suggests that women writers have long debated the problem of the female spectator through literary depictions of the female artist. Women writers of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries'including Elizabeth Stuart Phelps, Edith Johnstone, and Virginia Woolf'recognized the power of the woman artist to undermine the trope of the male gazing subject and a passive female object. Examining Phelps's The Story of Avis (1877), Johnstone's A Sunless Heart (1894), and Woolf's To the Lighthouse (1927) illustrates how the woman artist's active vision disrupts Mulvey's 'active/male and passive/female' binary of vision. Phelps's painter-heroine Avis destabilizes the power of the male gaze not only by exerting her own vision, but also by acting as an active object to manipulate the way she is seen. Johnstone uses artist Gasparine to demonstrate the dangers of vision shaped by either aesthetic or political conventions, suggesting that even feminist idealism can promote the objectification of its heroines. Finally, Woolf redefines the terms of objectification through painter Lily Briscoe, whose vision imbues material objects with subjectivity, thereby going beyond the boundaries between male and female to blur the distinction between subject and object. Through their novels, Phelps, Johnstone, and Woolf suggest that depictions of human experience need to be radically re-thought in order to adequately represent the complexity of subjectivity.