The research field of this thesis is framed by the major political and legal women's movement campaigns from the 1840s to the 1870s: the debates over the Married Women's Property Act; over philanthropy and methods of addressing social ills; the campaign for professional opportunities for women, and the arguments surrounding women's suffrage. I address how these issues are considered and contextualised in major works of Victorian fiction: Anne Bronte's The Tenant of Wildfell Hall (1848), Elizabeth Gaskell's North and South (1855), Charlotte Bronte's Villette (1853), and George Eliot's Middlemarch (1871--2). / In works of fiction by women, concepts of social justice were not constrained by layers of legal abstraction and the obligatory political vocabulary of "disinterest." Contemporary fiction by women could thus offer some of the most developed articulations of women's changing expectations. This thesis demonstrates that the Victorian novel provides a distinct synthesis of, and contribution to, arguments grouped under the rubric of the "woman question." The novel offers a perspective on feminist politics in which conflicting social interests and demands can be played out, where ethical questions meet everyday life, and human relations have philosophical weight. Given women's traditional exclusion from the domain of legitimate (authoritative) speech, the novels of Gaskell, the Bronte's, and Eliot, traditionally admired for their portrayal of moral character, play a special role in giving voice to the key political issues of women's rights, entitlements, and interests. Evidence for the political content and efficacy of these novels is drawn from archival sources which have been little used in literary studies (including unpublished materials), as well as contemporary periodicals. Central among these is the English Woman's Journal. Conceived as the mouthpiece of the early women's movement, the journal offers a valuable record of the feminist activity of the period. Though it has not been widely exploited, particularly in literary studies, detailed study of the journal reveals close parallels between the ideological commitments and concerns of the women's movement and novels by mid-Victorian women.

In my thesis I look at adopted characters in nine nineteenth-century works: Jane Austen's Mansfield Park, Emily Bronte's Wuthering Heights, Charlotte Bronte's Jane Eyre, Elizabeth Barrett-Browning's Aurora Leigh, George Eliot's Silas Marner, Rudyard Kipling's Kim, and both Bleak House and Great Expectations by Charles Dickens. From these works we see that the figure of the adopted child both destabilizes and expands the Victorian concept of the family, a concept which the literature of the time was often concerned to reinforce. Since adoption implies the injection of a foreign element into the fabric of family life, it serves to underline the fragility of blood-ties. In this sense, the adopted child functions as a figure of subversion and instability within the heart of the family. But because adoption also implies a looser acceptance of what family means, it may serve to expand the definition of kinship. The tension between these two ideas is dealt with in my thesis. No two novels treat adoption in the same way and the possibilities for adoptive relationships are endless, with potential for good and bad relationships, allegory and realism, expansion and deconstruction of the family. / 150 leaves : ill. ; 28 cm.

This dissertation examines the behaviours and values that qualify as male sexual deviance in Victorian novels from the mid-century and 1890s. Male seducers from mid-nineteenth-century fiction have often been described as later versions of the eighteenth-century libertine or rake. This dissertation argues for a critical reorientation of these figures towards thefin-de-siecle. Specifically, I argue that mid-century depictions of vexed masculine behaviour anticipate important patterns in the representation of male sexuality and morality, and that they gesture to later-century portrayals of masculinity embodied in figures like the dandy or New Man. Examining fiction from these two periods, which are conventionally treated as ideologically discrete, reveals a dialogue about male sexuality between mid- and late-century novels. Indeed, although the 1890s was a decade of sexual change, a literary discourse questioning the boundaries of male sexuality was in formation throughout the Victorian period. [...] / Cette dissertation examine les attitudes et valeurs considérées comme participant de la deviance sexuelle masculine dans la littérature de l’époque victorienne, de 1850 à 1890. Les personnages de séducteurs présentés par la littérature romanesque du 1ge siècle sont souvent considérés comme ayant leur origine dans les personnages de libertin ou de débauché dépeints par la littérature du 18e siècle. Cette dissertation suggère, cependant, que ce type de personnage a fait l’objet d’une réorientation critique vers la fin de siècle. En particulier, il est suggéré que les représentations, au milieu du siècle, de ces comportements masculins, anticipent d’importants changements dans la représentation de la sexualité et de la moralité masculines, tels qu’incarnés par les personnages du dandy et de l’Homme Nouveau. L’examen des oeuvres littéraires datant des périodes de la mi-siècle et de la fin de siècle, deux périodes habituellement considérées comme étant distinctes, révèle un dialogue entre celles-ci sur le sujet de la sexualité masculine. Ainsi, alors que les années 1890 sont caractérisées par des changements quant à l’approche à la sexualité, un discours littéraire remettant en question les limites de la sexualité masculine existait dès la période victorienne. [...]

Although the letter purports to represent fact, it cannot avoid having a partly or potentially fictive status, turning as it does on the complex interplay between the real and the imagined. Consequently, the main critical approach of this paper is to consider the interactions between conflicting modes of expression in eighteenth- and nineteenth-century epistolary fiction. The rhetorical and conceptual contrarieties that I examine are broadly characterized by the contradiction between the implied spontaneity of the familiar letter and the inevitable artifice of its form. Working with familiar letters by four writers between the years 1740 and 1825, I specifically address various narrative patterns by which each turns to the act of communication to draw upon the experience of an isolated self. Against a background which explores the main developments in epistolary fiction and a historical progression of the uses and significance of letter-writing, I investigate epistolary texts by Lady Mary Wortley Montagu, Lord Byron, John Keats, and William Hazlitt. In turning to letters by each author, I explore the literary, theoretical and especially the psychological implications of the tenuous divisions between fact and fiction. In particular, my analysis stresses that letter-writing is an authorial act in which writing about the self can be understood as a literary form of self-portraiture or creative expression. / I examine this claim---and the metaphors defining it---in two ways. First, by focusing on selected letters, I foreground each writer's language as an agent of internal conflict. In so doing, I am able to formulate distinctive questions regarding the potential of epistolary narratives to transform emotional or psychological schisms into fictions which become explicitly creative texts. Secondly, I analyze the changing nature of the fictions which emerge through this process. My findings conclude that authors' letters must be read, at least very often, as a constituent part of their literary work and as interpretive models of a shifting dynamic of psychological expression.

This dissertation covers five female Victorian authors (Elizabeth Gaskell, M.E. Braddon, Dinah Craik, Juliana Horatia Ewing, Edith Nesbit) and the representations of masculinity in their novels. By taking a masculinity studies approach, this dissertation finds that these novels, in an attempt to gain authority and legitimacy in the male-dominated social sphere, often promoted middle-class masculine gender identities as the dominant, ideal masculinity for others. I will argue that female authors in the Victorian period took part in this struggle over re/defining hegemonic male gender identity in different ways, in different genres, for different purposes. Gaskell’s Mary Barton and North and South seek to ensure middle-class dominance over the working classes. Braddon’s novels Lady Audley’s Secret and Aurora Floyd illustrate the unnaturalness of gender (and thus to call into question notions of “natural” differences between men and women, or men and other men) and broaden the definition of acceptable gender identities for men and, by extension, women. The authors of late-period children’s literature created texts that either changed or shield from change both male and female gender identities to define the proper way to educate children during a time when gender roles were undergoing changes due to innovations in industry, education, and calls for equal rights for women and non-hegemonic men. All of these texts display a great amount of confidence in the power of literature to shape gender identity. The male characters in novels covered in this dissertation help govern the individual from abstract potential to concrete reality in terms of how masculinity is lived in the everyday world. While pamphlets, medical journals, and conduct books can instruct the reader on ideal conduct (or, conversely, warn against inappropriate conduct) for men, women, boys, and girls, these texts often function in the abstract. The belief held by these authors in the power of literature is enables them to position fictional men in the real world under the assumption that these characters are therefore able to “live out” these ideas of what is and what is not appropriate in performing one’s male gender identity. / Department of English

It has been the object of the writer, in preparing this thesis, to emphasize the influence of British literature upon the Pre-Rapheelite Brotherhood of painters who lived and worked during the reign of Queen Victoria. It is the hope of the writer to show, in treating these artists who revived the truthfulness of nature as applied to painting, that those who were realists were also idealists, and that those who were romanticists were yet realists in the broader sense of the term, for realism may interpret the larger elements of imagination. With due recognition of her limited ability, the author desires to dispel what to her seem several narrowly critical edicts pronounced against the Brotherhood by various students of art, thereby freeing the Brotherhood from a maze of confusing "isms" and placing them on a humanized plane of appreciation as highly inspirational artists. Perhaps the most important contribution of the Pre- Raphaelites lies in the fact that they nationalized British art and at the same time gave it individuality by introducing into it for the first time subjects from British literature. It is furthermore the desire of the writer to emphasize the position of William Morris not as an adjunct of the Pre-Raphaelite group, but as a conciliatory figure who united the two factions of the Brotherhood, the realistic and the romantic, into a harmonious group of individualists. Lastly, as interesting sidelights upon the Pre-Raphaelites, the author wishes to present in the final chapter of this paper, a brief discussion of two themes relative to the main topic: the interrelationship of the Pre-Raphaelite painters and writers who formed a larger brotherhood, and the contribution which the Pre-Raphaelites have made to British art from foreign sources, As such material is not strictly in keeping with the subject of the work, it was thought advisable to reserve such digressive discourse for the final pages.

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