Thesis (M.A.)--Boston University / The theories ot empathy in the visual aesthetic experience as propound by Theodor Lipps, Vernon Lee and Hugo Munsterberg attempt to explain cognition ar qualities that do nat correspond to any specific sensations due to an object, but are nevertheless attributed to the object just as the specific sensations (e.g. of red or blue) are attributed to it. Pleasure felt as a result of experiencing the aesthetic object is not felt as occurring in the observer's body but as tied up with the object. The empathists discussed haw different explanations for the way that this attribution ot what seem to be "illusory qualities" is achieved. For Theodor Lipps empathy is a more complex process than it is for the other empathists. According to his view the observer, on one hand, participates in the life and activity of the object, and, on the other hand, attributes these "illusory" qualities to the object. [TRUNCATED]

The Victorian obsession with the child is also often, in the world of literary criticism at least, an obsession with death, whether the death of the child itself or simply the inevitable death of childhood as a seemingly Edenic state of being. This study seeks to consider the way in which the child figure, in texts by four authors published at the end of the nineteenth century, is aligned with an inversion of this relationship. For Walter Pater, Vernon Lee, George MacDonald, and Henry James, the child is bound up instead with un-death, with a construction of death which seeks to remove the finitude, even the mortality, of death itself, or else a death which is expected or anticipated, yet always deferred. While in “The Child in the House” (1878) and “Emerald Uthwart” (1892), Pater places the child at the nexus of his construction of a death which is, rather than a finite ending, a return or a re-beginning, Lee's interest in the child figure's unique access to a world of art, explored in “The Child in the Vatican” (1883) and “Christkindchen” (1897) culminates in a dazzling vision of aesthetic transcendence with “Sister Benvenuta and the Christ Child” (1906). MacDonald, for whom death is already never really death, uses the never-dead child figure in At The Back of the North Wind (1871) and Lilith (1895) as an embodiment of his own distinct engagement with aestheticism, as well as a means by which to express the simultaneous anticipation and depression he experienced in contemplation of death. Finally James, in What Maisie Knew (1897), explores the child's inherent monstrosity as he crafts the possibility of a childhood which consciously refuses to die. This study explores a trajectory in which the child’s place within such reconsiderations of death grows increasingly intense, reaching an apex with MacDonald’s fantastic worlds, before considering James’s problematisation of the concept of the un-dead child in What Maisie Knew.

This dissertation presents an interdisciplinary investigation into the construction of gender-transgressive supernatural voices in Gothic media, drawing on works in queer and feminist theory, voice studies, and performance studies. Spanning two centuries and case studies including Gian Carlo Menotti’s The Medium, art and popular song including Franz Schubert’s “Erlkönig” and Kate Bush’s “Leave It Open,” literary works by Charles Brockden Brown and Vernon Lee, and the Spiritualist séances of Louisa Ann Meurig Morris and Jesse Shepard, I argue that these gender-transgressive voices offer a striking alternative theorization of the “disembodied voice” that, in direct contrast to techno-determinist narratives, is created in performance through unsettling the voice-body-gender relationship. I locate the origins of the connection between gender-transgressive and supernatural or disembodied voices in the early nineteenth century, where rapidly changing ideas about of gender and the body collided with a parallel retheorization of voice as both an important locus for understanding social difference and a site of identity formation. The Gothic became an important mode to explore and destabilize the relationship between voice, body, and gender, particularly for voices that did not conform to increasingly rigid gender expectations; high male and low female voices are consistently used to mark alterity in Gothic media across genres, as are other queer-coded vocal acts. This context sets the stage for what I term performed disembodiment; moments in which a voice is understood as being disembodied, despite the visible presence of the vocalizer. My work argues that some forms disembodiment can be produced not by making a performer’s body absent, but precisely through marking the body’s presence and setting the performing body at odds with the voice through gender-transgressive techniques. One of the primary methods of effecting this performed disembodiment is through “cross-gender vocalization,” wherein pitch, timbre, and articulation are manipulated resulting in, for example, female bodies that appear to produce “male” voices. My dissertation thus argues that “disembodiment” can be produced not only via technologies but through contextual strategies of performance, involving both performers and audiences in the creation of the disembodied voice