This doctoral thesis examines the role of animals in nineteenth-century science and Victorian Gothic fiction of the latter half of the century. It is interdisciplinary in its exploration of the interrelationship between science writings and literary prose and it seeks to place the Gothic animal body in its cultural and historical setting. This study is interested in the ways in which Gothic literature tests the limits of the human by using scientific ideas about disease, evolution, species confusion, and disability. In analysing the animal trope in Gothic scientific fiction, this thesis conceptualises the ways in which the Gothic mode functions in relation to, while setting itself apart from, contemporary scientific theories about humankind‘s place in the natural world. Chapter 1, 'Man‘s Best Fiend: Evolution, Rabies, and the Gothic Dog‘, focuses on the dog as an animal whose ability to carry and communicate deadly diseases to humans exemplified the breakdown of the animal-human boundary. I read late-nineteenth-century vampire and werewolf narratives as literary manifestations of social hysteria associated with dogs and rabies. In Chapter 2, 'Shaping Evolution: Amphibious Gothic in Edward Bulwer-Lytton‘s The Coming Race and William Hope Hodgson‘s The Boats of the “Glen Carrig”, I examine the role of the frog in Victorian science as the background to Gothic fiction‘s portrayal of the Gothic body as an amphibious being. The next chapter explores the spider‘s function in Victorian natural history as the background to its role as a protean and unstable Gothic trope in fiction. Chapter four, 'Geological Underworlds: Mythologizing the Beast in Victorian Palaeontology‘, looks at ways in which the dinosaur in science influenced the literary imaginations of Gothic writers Arthur Conan Doyle, Arthur Machen, and Bram Stoker. Under the title "Monsters Manufactured!": Humanised Animals, Freak Culture, and the Victorian Gothic‘, the final chapter concludes the study with a discussion of freak culture, making key links between unusually-shaped people in society and human/animal hybrids in the Gothic fiction of H. G. Wells, Richard Marsh, and Wilkie Collins.

This qualitative essay explores and compares women’s roles and identities in the gothic novels Rebecca and Jane Eyre. The investigation shall be a social critique on feminine ideals from a feminist perspective. Comparable analysis of the "other women" who act as doubles for the protagonists will be essential to understanding the alter egos of Mrs. de Winter and Jane Eyre. These double personalities raise questions of identity and the roles of femininity. Similarly the power struggles between husband and wives and other feminine influences shall throw further light on prevailing feminine ideals of the times. I shall analyze Daphne du Maurier’s Rebecca in relation to the concepts of the "Angel in the house" and the "Mad Woman in the Attic" with Charlotte Bronte’s novel to explore parallels between the plot and female characters. I shall show how Daphne du Maurier offers varying feminine models and ultimately takes a feminist standpoint with her novel much like Brontë’s Jane Eyre before her. Finally, I will show how the suppression of women by men through gender stereotyping can lead to female rebellion and, in turn, the stigmatization of female madness.

Thesis advisor: Judith Wilt / This project argues that the concept of haunting pervaded Victorian society, imagination, and thought and reflected anxieties regarding destabilized conceptions of the self and the world. It spans the nineteenth century from Mary Shelley to Henry James in order to claim that the living can invite and employ haunting in ways useful to self discovery or recovery. Rather than view haunting as a primarily one-directional relationship in which the haunter imposes itself on the haunted, I suggest that haunting can be invoked by the haunted in order to integrate new perspectives, conceptions, information, and situations vital to advancing self-perception and understandings of the surrounding world. Consequently, this study introduces a term I call "hauntedness," which amounts to the state of feeling or being haunted. Through this word, I hope to confer greater agency to the notion of being haunted than the more passive, acted-upon "to be haunted" can sometimes convey. Haunted Mind and Matter employs concepts from Jacques Derrida's Specters of Marx and "Différance" to complicate the question of haunting and enter the critical debate about Victorian haunting in particular. The works of Derrida and critics like Julian Wolfreys, following Sigmund Freud, reveal haunting as not restricted to bonds with spectral ghosts; it exists in every person and discourse. Using the term "haunt" in a multifaceted, flexible manner can challenge notions of the self and what is human through biological, social, and other constructs. The introduction examines Mary Shelley's Frankenstein, in my view an inverted ghost story, to exemplify this text's employment of the term "hauntedness." The project then explores uses of terms related to haunting in texts in which mental, historical, and social haunting are infused with strong gothic and Romantic imagery: Charlotte Brontë's Jane Eyre (1847), Charles Dickens' Our Mutual Friend (1864-65), George Eliot's Middlemarch (1871), and Henry James' The Turn of the Screw (1898). I claim that these works both reveal the powerful presence of haunting in Victorian thought and society and show characters generating productive, reverberating uses for the haunting they experience in order to progress into the future. Haunted Mind and Matter demonstrates what the lens of haunting can reveal about character and social context in fiction. / Thesis (PhD) — Boston College, 2014. / Submitted to: Boston College. Graduate School of Arts and Sciences. / Discipline: English.

The trope of the discovered manuscript, in which a narrator or character finds a document and presents it to the readers or other characters, has been a part of the Gothic genre since its inception. The discovered manuscript trope persists, despite criticism and satire, in part because it enables Gothic stories to situate their readers. In the nineteenth-century, as the presence of lawyers, doctors, scientists, journalists and other experts grew in society, Gothic novelists drew upon their methodologies and their records to revise the discovered manuscript trope. This project examines the trope of the discovered manuscript throughout Gothic literature in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries in order to discuss how the Gothic functions as a literature of terror and how its techniques evolved in response to the epistemologies espoused by empiricist philosophers and professional scientists. I draw upon Jacques Rancière's theories about the representative and aesthetic regimes for the identification of the artistic image to support three central, interrelated claims about the role, and evolution, of the discovered manuscript trope within Gothic fiction: 1) Gothic literature responds to an epistemological problem in the empiricist tradition revolving around the connections between sensory uncertainty and linguistic gaps; 2) reading and interpreting documents play vital roles in the Gothic tradition; and 3) examining documents in Gothic fiction as image operations illuminates how they participate in a story's epistemological drama. In order to support these claims, this project presents four chapters that discuss a broad range of Gothic texts from Walpole's <italics>The Castle of Otranto<italics> to Stoker's <italics>Dracula<italics>.

This dissertation investigates how three significant nineteenth-century American female writers strategically transform a central Gothic motif – the virtuous heroine pursued by a villain who lusts for sexual and socioeconomic power – to tell new stories about gendered bodies and the erotic relations between them. Established in the genre-defining British Gothic novels of the late eighteenth century, this popular motif endured throughout the nineteenth century in texts written and read on both sides of the Atlantic. This project examines understudied texts by E.D.E.N. Southworth, Louisa May Alcott, and Julia Ward Howe that exhibit a striking intertextual awareness of the motif, reformulating it to critique the era’s marital and inheritance practices that enable and reinforce persistent gender inequities. These texts presciently recognize the performative nature of gender, centering on protagonists that move fluidly between genders with strategic choices about dress, speech, and social roles. By examining these texts together, this project shows that they anticipate the insights of contemporary feminist and queer theory as their protagonists deliberately calculate how to blend traditionally gendered behaviors and transform sexual threats into situations in which they can either consensually participate or cleverly elude. Chapter One argues that E. D. E. N. Southworth’s popular serial novel The Hidden Hand (1859) rewrites the narrative pattern that situates Gothic heroines as vulnerable to rape by positioning its heroine as aware of her fictional status and therefore capable of using her metafictional knowledge to reconfigure sexually threatening situations. Chapter Two examines how Louisa May Alcott’s sensation tale A Long, Fatal Love Chase (1866) blends traditionally male and female Gothic narratives to cast its heroine as a female Faust figure whose desperate desire for freedom leads her to enter naively into a bigamous partnership with a Mephistophelean man whose relentless pursuit ultimately causes her death. Chapter Three contends that Julia Ward Howe’s recently recovered manuscript The Hermaphrodite (1848) situates its ambiguously sexed but male-identifying protagonist as a Gothic “heroine” who employs unconventional strategies to cope with conventional threats to his physical and financial autonomy and rejects all interpersonal bonds because of the gendered restrictions they impose upon him. / 2019-07-31T00:00:00Z

A lonely damsel's imprisonment within a castle or convent cell; the eavesdropping of a prisoner next door; the framed image of a woman with a mysterious past. These are familiar themes from 1790s gothic novels, which exploded onto the scene with milestone works like Ann Radcliffe's The Mysteries of Udolpho and Matthew Lewis' The Monk. They are also key features, however, of canonical nineteenth-century poems, from Tennyson's "Mariana" to Browning's "My Last Duchess." In this dissertation, I argue that tropes of the gothic novel became disseminated in poetry of the Victorian era, manifesting as formal features that have not heretofore been recognized by scholars as essentially gothic. While most scholars recognize gothic poetry only in a small subset of poems that include ghosts, graveyards or superstition, I contend that gothic tropes became definitive of what we now regard as quintessentially "Victorian" poetic forms: the dramatic monologue, women's sonnets, and Pre-Raphaelite picture poems. "Framed, Imprisoned, Overheard" explores feminist arguments and interdisciplinary crossings between painting and poetry, focusing on both canonical and lesser-known poems of major Victorian poets. Close reading fiction by Ann Radcliffe, Matthew Lewis and Mary Wollstonecraft, and poems by Charlotte Smith, John Keats, William Wordsworth, Robert Browning, Elizabeth Barrett Browning, Christina Rossetti, D. G. Rossetti and G. M. Hopkins, I offer a revisionist history that looks beyond the small subset of poems about ghosts or other "gothic" themes, demonstrating how innovations in 1790s sensation fiction contributed to the evolution of major Victorian verse forms.

This study foregrounds the problem of the center and periphery of Gothic architecture near Paris. Taking architectural citation as its interpretive framework, it focuses on a core group of rural parish churches situated in the land of the Paris cathedral chapter. It addresses the visual links between Notre-Dame of Paris and the village churches, the ways in which architectural citation was put into practice, and the institutional context that imbued the resemblances with meaning. It demonstrates that quoting the architecture of the cathedral of Paris was the exception, not the rule, in the villages of the cathedral chapter. When they occurred, the citations were mostly superficial, not structural, and resulted from contact between the community of secular canons installed at the cathedral and the administrators responsible for the village churches. The introduction sets the problem of architectural citation in the land of the Paris cathedral chapter against the backdrop of architectural citation in other contexts in medieval France: namely, Cluniac, Cistercian, and Capetian. Proceeding according to the Notre-Dame of Paris construction sequence, Part One reveals the architectural citations of the cathedral of Paris found in the chapter’s land: at Saint-Germain of Andrésy, Saint-Hermeland of Bagneux, Saint-Lubin of Châtenay, Saint-Christophe of Créteil, Saint-Germain of Itteville, Notre-Dame of Jouy, Saint-Mathurin of Larchant, Saint-Nicolas of Mézières, Notre-Dame of Rozay, Saint-Martin of Sucy, and Saint-Fortuné of Vernou. Part Two introduces the Paris cathedral chapter as an institution and a community of individual canons, maps the chapter’s rural property as it expanded from the ninth to the fourteenth century, articulates the language the chapter used to describe its villages and land, and explores the canons’ secular and sacred authority in its villages. Part Two concludes by bringing the institutional relationship to bear on the architectural evidence presented in Part One.

L’église Saint-Michel de Bordeaux est construite à la fin du Moyen Âge au centre d’une paroisse urbaine très dynamique. L’activité portuaire et commerciale fait vivre de nombreux artisans et enrichit les puissants marchands du quartier de la Rousselle. Ils sont investis dans le gouvernement de la commune et financent copieusement le chantier de leur église paroissiale. Leurs pratiques pieuses et leur activité à la tête de l’administration de la fabrique et des confréries sont représentatives de la religion civique à la fin du Moyen Âge. L’église accueille depuis la fin du XVe siècle un collège de prêtres-bénéficiers, au service des nombreuses fondations pieuses et des confréries installées dans les chapelles latérales. Elles sont construites durant le second chantier gothique, qui met en œuvre à partir du second quart du XVe siècle une vaste église flamboyante de plan basilical. Celle-ci succède à une première église gothique menée à son terme durant le XIVe siècle selon un parti-pris architectural de type « halle ». Le chantier de la cathédrale, qui introduit à Bordeaux les formes du gothique rayonnant du Nord de la France, est une source d’inspiration à Saint-Michel, dans le domaine de la modénature et de la sculpture monumentale. Le chantier flamboyant voit l’arrivée de maîtres-maçons dont l’œuvre a pu être identifiée. Elle se réfère aux chantiers normands, parisiens ou financés par le roi de France. Les Lebas de Saintes apportent leur culture artistique et leur technique à l’accomplissement du transept, à la conception de la nef et du clocher isolé. La faible influence de l’œuvre de Saint-Michel sur la création artistique locale est compensée par le rayonnement de son clocher-tour, un des plus hauts clochers du royaume. Son chantier exceptionnel est très bien renseigné par 11 années de comptes de la fabrique. Ils illustrent les conditions de travail et l’équipement nécessaire à la construction à grande hauteur. Un des autres chefs-d’œuvre de l’église, le portail nord, est probablement réalisé vers 1520 par Imbert Boachon, maître-maçon, imagier, menuisier, selon la nature des travaux et selon les villes ou il travaille. Aujourd’hui, la silhouette de l’église et du clocher, tous deux isolés au milieu de plusieurs places, ne reflète plus totalement la morphologie de l’œuvre médiévale. Des faiblesses structurelles obligent les hommes du XIXe siècle à reconstruire le chevet. Le clocher est rénové par Paul Abadie et l’église reçoit une esthétique gothique influencée par l’archéologie monumentale et les doctrines de la restauration patrimoniale de l’époque. / The church of St Michael of Bordeaux has been built in the late Middle Ages, in a very dynamic urban parish. The fluvial and commercial activities of the port generate work for craftsmen and enrich the powerful merchants from the borough of La Rousselle. These merchants are invested in the communal government and finance the building of their parish church. Their pious practices and their activity at the head of the parish fabric and friaries are good examples of the late medieval civic religion. From the end of the fifteenth century, the church receives a college of priest provided by religious benefits. They are in the service of many pious foundations and friaries which are established in the lateral chapels. These chapels are built during the second gothic construction, which makes a big Flamboyant style church with the plan of a basilica. This building follows a first gothic church, conducted at its term during the fourteenth century in accordance to a “halle” architectural volume. The construction of the cathedral of Bordeaux, which introduces the gothic style from the north of France, is an inspiration for St Michael, in the domain of modenature and monumental sculpture. The Flamboyant construction induces the arrival of some master mason, whose work can be identified. That work is influenced by Norman, Parisian and French king’s financed buildings. The Lebas from Saintes give their artistic culture and their technique to the accomplishment of the transept, to the conception of the nave and the isolated bell tower. The low influence of the work of St Michael of Bordeaux on the local artistic creation is balanced with the bell tower, one of the tallest in the French kingdom. Its constructions are well informed thanks to an eleven years’ register for the fabric accounting. It illustrates the work conditions and the necessary equipment for high tall building. One of the masterworks of the church, the north portal, is probably made around 1520 by Imbert Boachon, master mason, sculptor or joiner according to the kind of the work or the town where he works. Nowadays, the silhouette of the church and the bell tower are isolated in the middle of many places and are not totally representative of the medieval made morphology. Some structural frailties oblige the nineteenth century men to rebuild the chevet. The bell tower is renovated by Paul Abadie and the church receives a gothic aesthetic which is influenced by monumental archaeology and the patrimonial restorations doctrines of that period.

The St. Johns Bridge is a 1,207 foot span suspension bridge crossing the Willamette River in Portland, Oregon, connecting the Portland communities of St. Johns and Linnton on the eastern and western banks, respectively. Commissioned in 1928, the bridge was completed in 1931, with much fanfare in the local community. The two neighborhoods are some distance from downtown Portland, and the bridge brought prestige to an otherwise nondescript locale. It was designed by the New York-based firm of Steinman & Robinson. David Barnard Steinman (1886-1960) acted as the public face for the firm, however, and the design of the bridge has traditionally been ascribed to him in the literature. Steinman was one of the most prominent bridge engineers of the twentieth century, and is recognized today, as he was even within his lifetime, as such. It was a position which he worked fervently to attain. Steinman wrote extensively concerning the St. Johns Bridge and spoke of it as his own; his extensive use of the St. Johns Bridge as an example of aesthetics in bridge engineering is related to the early twentieth-century debate between engineers and architects regarding the role of each in bridge design. As an engineer who sought, without the aid of the architect, to build bridges which were objects of beauty, he asserted the role of the engineer as artist. The predisposition toward the engineered machine aesthetic in the intellectual climate of the avant-garde in the early twentieth century enabled Steinman to style himself as such an artist--even though the St. Johns Bridge, which he frequently employed in this regard, was not a work of functionalist aesthetics. While the architectural avant-garde was borrowing from the engineer for artistic rejuvenation, Steinman was in an advantageous position to argue for the engineer-artist, thereby casting the engineer as an individual sui generis, equal to and without need of the architect.

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