Abstract not available

Prostitution, an occupation once tolerated in English society, became known as "the great social evil" by the middle of the nineteenth century. This study will examine the way in which three major nineteenth-century novelists--Charles Dickens, Elizabeth Gaskell, and George Eliot--deployed the figure of the fallen woman to comment on various aspects of Victorian society. My critical stance is eclectic, drawing from Michel Foucault's theories of power and discourse, new historicism, feminism, and autobiographical criticism. Newspaper articles, medical journals, and diaries of the period will support my argument that society's ideas about what constituted a "fallen woman" was intimately related to society's ideas about what constituted the Angel in the House as well as what constituted the gentleman. I will argue in my chapter on Dickens that his intense involvement in overseeing Urania Cottage, a prostitute reclamation house, had a major impact on his attitude toward the fallen woman. Dickens moves from a position of the prostitute as victim in Oliver Twist to a more jaundiced view of sexually transgressive women in Dombey and Son and David Copperfield. I will suggest that in Dombey and Son, Dickens's treatment of Polly Toodles, the wet-nurse, was an effort to relieve his own guilt and anxiety about his own family's dependence on wet-nurses, a profession often associated with fallen women. In my analysis of Gaskell, I will suggest that in Mary Barton Gaskell, far from offering a simplistic solution to life's problems, as most critics have posited, actually allies herself with radical thinkers of the period. I read Mary Barton as Gaskell's attempt to wrest the prostitution debate from the confines of right-wing religious thinkers by redefining it as a political problem. In her short story "Lizzie Leigh" and in her novel Ruth, she continues to voice concern about the plight of unwed mothers but retreats from her criticism of industrialization offering instead maternal love as a panacea for social ills. Finally, I will argue that George Eliot's own position as the mistress of a married man provided a spur for her genius, for not until she moved in with G. H. Lewes did she start to write fiction. Eliot's work displays a trajectory, ranging from self-condemnation in her first novel Adam Bede, to an author willing to criticize society for its refusal to let women aspire beyond a domestic role in The Mill on the Floss, to an outright attack in Daniel Deronda on a society she views as patriarchal venal and materialistic. I will suggest that by the time Eliot was writing this final novel, she had finally made peace with her own transgressive self.

Lawrence was familiar with the Demeter-Persephone-Hades triangle from his extensive reading in literature and other disciplines that study myth. He was perhaps too familiar with it from enacting and observing the roles of the three principals in his parents' marriage and his own. Because his fiction followed from his life, the Persephone myth threads through his oeuvre from The White Peacock to The Man Who Died. In this dissertation, I examine the four New World stories, written in 1922–1925 in New Mexico and Mexico, for narrative details of the myth. I first discuss the most authentic version of the myth, Hesiod's Homeric Hymn to Demeter . Then, for each story, I point out which version(s) of the myth and which Great Mother figure(s)—Demeter, Persephone, or Hecate—predominate. Because Lawrence read and responded to Freud and Jung, I use psychoanalysts and analytical psychologists for clarification. Critics accuse Lawrence of misogyny in these works because the myth seems an excuse to visit travails upon women: murder of the Woman in “The Woman Who Rode Away,” a direly rundown ranch for Lou and a nervous breakdown for Mrs. Witt in St. Mawr. multiple rapes for Dollie in The Princess and, for Kate in Ouetzalcoatl and The Plumed Serpent, coarsening of sensibility and danger of assassination. Therefore, I end the interpretation of each story with an explanation of why it's inappropriate to apply “misogynist” to Lawrence. In all of them, Lawrence believes that women need rescue (as do men) from a patriarchal matrix of organized religion', industrialization, and various “isms.” Once sprung, as he and Frieda are, they too can struggle towards individuation, an integration of the four levels of life: intrapsychic, interpersonal, socio-political, and cosmic. What appears to be misogyny I see as an attempt to resolve the isolation/assimilation dilemma and an example of Freud's “feminine repudiation” in “Analysis Terminable and Interminable”: hostility to men who were his real-life competitors and empathy verging on self-masochism towards women which forced him to battle those closest to him for breathing space.

In this dissertation, I explore the ways in which mothers and motherhood are represented in relationship to daughters in the three late Middle English romances, Sir Degrevant, Floris and Blancheflour, and Lay le Freine. Throughout my dissertation, I seek to shed light on the revisionary or utopian inclination that romances as a genre embody through their marginal characters, including mothers and daughters, and their transgressive desires. And I conceptualize mothers in the three medieval romances as agentic subjects who not only enact but also reshape the established power that is most often represented as patriarchal authority and patrilineal inheritance system. As I construct mothers as subjects who assume ambivalent agency, Judith Butler's theories on the relationship between subjects and the power have been very useful. As a way to think about the socio-cultural context where medieval mothers may experience their individuality and motherhood and exert their agency, I look into historical accounts, including the Paston letters, that register particular aspects of realities in late medieval England that are important to my argument but romances do not illumine extensively. Then, in order to investigate the psychological and affective dimension of mothers in relation to daughters, I make use of some feminist psychoanalytical and socialist approaches. These concepts help me to perceive how the overdetermined circumstances make impacts on the psyche of maternal subjects. Keywords. Mothers, Motherhood, the Middle Ages, Romances, Agency, Subjects, Affect, Daughters, Family/Household.

The fear of plague was inherent in Renaissance English society. On average, at least two periods of extensive mortality occurred within each reign of a monarch from 1500–1700. All kings and queens knew that plague might in any year visit and force them to abandon their thrones in flight. A court page or cook breaking out in a fever was enough to shake the national foundation, as John Davies of Hereford records in his poem, “The Picture of the Plague According to the Life as it was in Anno Domini 1603”: The King himself (O wretched Times the while!) From place to place, to save himselfe did flie, Which from himselfe himselfe did seeke t'exile, Who (as amaz'd) know not where safe to lie. Its hard with Subjects when the Soveraigne Hath no place free from plagues, his head to hide; And hardly can we say the King doth raigne, That no where, for just feare, can well abide. For, no where comes He but Death followes him Hard at the Heeles, and reacheth at his head. (1.45) This was no way to keep a monarchy intact or a society stable. In their new worlds, Thomas More, Francis Bacon, and Margaret Cavendish each constructed a “no-place” for the king “his head to hide”; however, containing the plague was not simply a matter of dreaming up a panacea. Rather than easily eliminate plague from their worlds, they grappled with the very presence of plague, both releasing and controlling it within their borders. This dissertation examines the specific religious, scientific, and literary regimens each writer utilized and depicted. The last chapter analyzes the less optimistic response to plague and utopia, assessing the failed utopian world presented by Shakespeare in Timon of Athens and by Jonson in The Alchemist.

In real life, virtuous women have no stories. Or, at least, their brief stories always end in marriage. But in the novel, heroines must have stories for the novel to even exist. This helps explain the omnipresence of the fallen woman as a secondary character in the novel from roughly 1740 to 1850. The threat of “ruin” to the heroine, which the fallen woman represents, compels narrative, and the fallen woman's story “breaks” into the virtuous woman's narrative. Thus, although the history of the fallen woman in the novel could easily be extended backwards to include the sexually transgressive women in Behn's or Defoe's fiction, the association of the ruined body with ruined narrative, which is central to my argument, only finds its first expression during a literary shift towards respectability for the novel, occurring roughly around the mid-eighteenth century. As it became more important for central heroines in novels to be pure (unlike those earlier heroines), the fallen woman becomes a necessary secondary character. My study links the formal and the cultural by using narrative theory, close reading, feminist approaches, and cultural history in order to explain a phenomenon that, despite its cultural roots, must grow out of formal necessity, as well, in order to last over one hundred years. The narrative “breaks” I discuss can be categorized into three major types: embedded texts framed by and breaking into the larger text of the novel, gaps in narrative time, or the momentary freezing of narrative into a sort of tableau, a highly visual representation that seems to exit narrative mode and imitate a painting rather than a story. I trace these breaks through the narratives of eighteenth- and nineteenth-century authors including Samuel Richardson, Henry Fielding, Charlotte Lennox, Frances Sheridan, Frances Burney, Jane Austen, George Eliot, and Elizabeth Gaskell.

This dissertation is an examination of nineteenth-century British elegiac poetry. It focuses on poems written by both Romantic and Victorian poets—William Wordsworth, Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Percy Bysshe Shelley, John Clare, Lord Alfred Tennyson, Emily Brontë, James Thomson (B. V.), Thomas Hardy—and argues that much of nineteenth-century British poetry is elegiac, even when the poems are not strictly elegies by form. The last four decades of critical discussions of the elegy and elegiac writing have tended to focus almost exclusively on the psychological interpretations of the written word within the confines of the conventions of the genre. Throughout this period of stagnation, students and scholars of the elegiac vein have by and large been spoon-fed with this mainly Freudian theoretical bent which has been spearheaded by the psychoanalytic critic Peter M. Sacks. In an attempt to construct an alternative critical perspective that detracts from this psychoanalytic methodology, I explore varying attitudes to loss that elicit elegiac responses in the form of elegiac impulses. My dissertation also works to bridge the conventional divide between the Romantic and Victorian eras which too often results in oversimplifications. I believe it is essential to see not only the ruptures, but also the continuities of the elegiac traditions throughout the nineteenth century. The unique differences between the two eras are certain and well documented. However, little has been said about the textual, thematic, and stylistic value of elegiac poems written throughout the century in question. I argue further that there is a long-neglected need for a distinct delineation of the intrinsic characteristics of nineteenth-century elegiac poetry through a number of specific paradigms. At this juncture, I divide nineteenth-century elegiac poetry into two main conceptual categories: sense of loss and elegiac response, where the former derives from and operates upon the paradigms of either physical death or the idea of death (i.e. perceptual death), while the latter works through the paradigm of either silence or tautology and circularity. In the final analysis, the nineteenth-century poet's inherent preoccupation with absence and the void and his/her response to loss becomes manifest in the form of elegiac impulses, and ultimately creates its distinctive watermark that is visible to the discerning eye by virtue of its tautological and circuitous pattern.

In Irish nineteenth-century novels, allegorical romances employ a love story between an Irish and Anglo character to enact Ireland's fraught position within Great Britain. While the overall arch of the plot with its message of love and compatibility emphasizes the incorporation of Ireland into Great Britain, writers articulate ambivalent messages that often expose or question the colonial project in Ireland. Such narrative ambiguity, which allows the allegorical romance simultaneously to suture and open the wounds of empire, makes the trope productive in a colonial situation. This dissertation examines such inconsistencies by exploring not only the narrative trajectory of the romance but also the generic modes and cultural forms that conceal or expose the workings of power in the novels. These stories of cross-cultural romance evolve throughout the nineteenth-century Irish and British novel. Romantic allegory's most important predecessor, the native Irish aisling, a type of Irish political poetry that reached its zenith in the eighteenth century, gives the allegory an important valence in Irish literature and creates an audience receptive to specific literary patterns. Sydney Owenson's novel The Wild Irish Girl (1806) incorporates Gothic and epistolary forms to articulate anxiety regarding the proposed union between England and Ireland. Maria Edgeworth's The Absentee (1812), Charles Maturin's The Milesian Chief (1812), and John Banim's The Boyne Water (1826) all deploy pairs of characters to demonstrate the internal divisions as well as the complex allegiances within Irish society. In Castle Richmond (1860), Anthony Trollope uses an allegorical romance to support Ireland's union with England, yet the emotional register of the love story frequently contradicts the pro-British arguments that he embeds in the novel. The dissertation concludes by discussing the reasons for the popularity of the allegorical romance in Ireland and sketching out its development in late-nineteenth and twentieth-century Irish literature.

Hollywood productions of Shakespeare often strive for accessibility by extensively reducing the complexities of the plays. The characters are turned into familiar types and ambiguities are erased. Postmodern productions attempt to problematise the supposed ideological assumptions behind the plays as well as Shakespeare's iconic status in our culture. The result is often irreverent, shocking, “subversive.” Characters and situations lose their original complexity and irony by being subjected to a metatheatrical irony imposed by the production. Both the Hollywood and the postmodern performances are attractive to adolescents, who are typically reassured by the familiar types and revel in rebellion against perceived “authority.” While many are tempted to praise this attractiveness as a service in rendering Shakespeare “accessible” to adolescents, what is rendered accessible is not Shakespeare. This is deeply unfortunate, as a rich understanding of Shakespeare—one which allows for his multifaceted vision of the human condition, his endless perspectivising on problems of morality and character, his skepticism of values and ideologies—is of great value precisely at this stage of life, when the jumbled world invites simple solutions. Evidence of the ability of adolescents with a wide range of backgrounds and intelligences (as conventionally measured) is provided by firsthand accounts of student productions of Love's Labour's Lost, The Winter's Tale, and Romeo and Juliet. The reactions of a group of adolescents to Baz Luhrmann's film William Shakespeare's Romeo + Juliet (1996) before and after they themselves had worked on a production of the play demonstrate a sea change in attitude toward the film. Luhrmann's movie, which has elements both of Hollywood reduction and postmodern irony, is subjected to a thoroughgoing critique in an attempt to explain this shift in attitude. Ultimately it is the demoting of the language of the play which condemns the audience of such “accessible” productions to a superficial and misleading encounter with Shakespeare.

Renaissance drama, viewed against the new, fame-obsessed restlessness of Petrarch, Cardan, and Montaigne, engenders an imperial selfhood that fashions itself with narcissistic aggression and simultaneously undermines itself by becoming an agent in its own destruction. Selfhood issues in a restless self-overcoming in which the individual struggles to outdo himself in dizzying jousts of self-rivalry. "Victims" often follow a self-destructive career; self-fashioning and self-cancellation are not really that far apart. Doctor Faustus examines the Reformation impulse toward self-fashioning in relation to an "other." It signals not the fullness but the dissolution of identity through pride, despair, and death. Faustus internalizes Mephastophilis, the great "other" of Marlowe's age; this results in satanic parody. His quest for self-knowledge mimics the Protestant's journey toward God. But in parody, selfhood and self-cancellation become interchangeable. In King Lear, Lear's actions are almost death-driven. His libido moriendi is connected to his quest for self-knowledge; finally, it is death alone that teaches self-knowledge. Aided by thumos, Plato's "high rage," Lear acknowledges his mortality, and knows himself through rage and madness. Awakening to find Cordelia, he repossesses everything that makes life worthwhile. In The Revenger's Tragedy, Vindice takes Renaissance self-fashioning to a sinister extreme, enacting several roles in a revenge drama written, directed, and performed by himself. He transforms his dead mistress into his grisly doppelganger whose charms rival those of Petrarchan beauties. He usurps the divine function and metes perfect poetic justice, initiating his own death, and laying claim to a perverse fame. In 'Tis Pity She's A Whore, Giovanni perverts the laws of kinship and social exchange through incest. Unable to give the "gift" of his sister to another, he loses his place in the kinship structure. Her repentance indicates that her heart has been "stolen" by a higher deity, and she becomes a defiled object in his eyes. To purify her and to recover his lost heart, Giovanni offers a violent sacrifice where he is both an enraged god and a sacrificer seeking to placate that god with the "gift" of Annabella's heart.