“Red coats and wild birds: military culture and ornithology across the nineteenth-century British Empire” investigates the intersections between British military culture and the practices and ideas of ornithology, with a particular focus on the British Mediterranean. Considering that British officers often occupied several imperial sites over the course of their military careers, to what extent did their movements shape their ornithological knowledge and identities at “home” and abroad? How did British military naturalists perceive different local cultures (with different attitudes to hunting, birds, field science, etc.) and different local natures (different sets of birds and environments)? How can trans-imperial careers be written using not only textual sources (for example, biographies and personal correspondence) but also traces of material culture? In answering these questions, I centre my work on the Mediterranean region as a “colonial sea” in the production of hybrid identities and cultural practices, and the mingling of people, ideas, commodities, and migratory birds. I focus on the life geographies of four military officers: Thomas Wright Blakiston, Andrew Leith Adams, L. Howard Lloyd Irby, and Philip Savile Grey Reid. By the mid-nineteenth century, the Mediterranean region emerged as a crucial site for the security of the British “empire route” to India and South Asia, especially with the opening of the Suez Canal in 1869. Military stations served as trans-imperial sites, connecting Britain to India through the flow of military manpower, commodities, information, and bodily experiences across the empire. By using a “critical historical geopolitics of empire” to examine the material remnants of the “avian imperial archive,” I demonstrate how the practices and performances of British military field ornithology helped to: materialize the British Mediterranean as a moral “semi-tropical” place for the physical and cultural acclimatization of British officers en route to and from India; reinforce imperial presence in the region; and make “visible in new ways” the connectivity of North Africa to Europe through the geographical distribution of birds. I also highlight the ways in which the production of ornithological knowledge by army officers was entwined with forms of temperate martial masculinity. / Thesis (Ph.D, Geography) -- Queen's University, 2011-09-02 09:17:17.931

Between 1847 and 1851, a series of criminal trials took place in Essex, England, involving a number of women accused of fatally poisoning their husbands and children and even complete strangers. This thesis analyzes the Essex cases and their representation in the Victorian press. It focuses quite intensively on the legal proceedings involved in the Essex cases but also examines issues such as the emergence of toxicology, the availability of arsenic and the campaign against burial societies, issues which informed both the Victorian press’s treatment of the Essex cases and public responses to the story. This thesis challenges and critiques the dominant narrative of the Essex poisonings by revealing the gap between what the press claimed and the evidence actually offered in court and draws from the voluminous media coverage these cases generated to explain how and why this particular episode occurred at this particular historical moment. / Graduate

In 1839 Queen Victoria twice became the focus of a media maelstrom: In April, the publication of what came to be known as the Hastings Correspondence blamed the Queen for having taken part in the perceived persecution of Lady Flora Hastings. In May, Victoria's refusal to allow Sir Robert Peel to replace certain ladies of her bedchamber engineered Lord Melbourne's return as Prime Minister. Both of these events resulted in an outcry, both in opposition to the Queen and in support of her. Many historical works that deal with these events tend to recount them as either trivial anecdotes or as means to criticize Victoria's early years on the throne. However, some recent works have begun to rethink the condemnation of her actions. This paper reassesses Queen Victoria's role in the Hastings Scandal and the Bedchamber Crisis by examining how she was represented in certain London newspapers during these events. Instead of focusing on whether Victoria was right or wrong in pursuing the courses that she did, the emphasis is placed on how both the Tory newspapers, that opposed her actions, and the Whig newspapers, which supported her actions, sought to reduce the appearance of agency on Victoria's part. Papers of both political affiliations made constant reference to Victoria's youth, gender, and inexperience—all factors which also played into developing ideals regarding the roles of both the monarchy and women in the political process. The Hastings Scandal and the Bedchamber Crisis are placed squarely within the midst of these issues. The possibility of a young, unmarried, and female monarch making decisions independent of male political guidance caused unease among newspaper writers grappling with the early nineteenth century's colliding concepts of political reform and cultural ideals. / Graduate / 0578 / 0335 / lfidler@uvic.ca

In this thesis I contend that evolutionary scientific discourses were integral to the work of "New Woman" writers of late Victorian literary culture in Britain. In the cultural debates that raged over the new gender politics and their relationship to social and moral values at the fin de siècle, the questions raised about femininity, modernity and the "woman question" were also central to the "new sciences" of sexology, eugenics, psychology and anthropology. This thesis investigates the issue of whether the new sciences offered an enabling set of discourses to New Women through which to produce new artistic, professional and personal feminine identities and to campaign for feminist goals. An understanding of the field of cultural production informs this discussion; I argue that science functions as cultural and symbolic capital in literary production of the period, and consider the dynamics between constructs of value, status, and the feminine in the literary market-place and their relationship to scientific narratives. This analysis is developed through the illumination of the relationship between New Woman novelists and poets, female aesthetes, and other forces in the field, in discussion of the thematic concerns and literary strategies of those participating in these debates: amongst others, Mona Caird, "Iota" (Katherine Mannington Caffyn), Victoria Cross(e) (Annie Sophie Cory), Sarah Grand (Frances Elizabeth McFall), Vernon Lee (Violet Paget), Alice Meynell, May Kendall, Constance Naden, and the anti-New Woman male writer, Grant Allen. An examination of a variety of literary forms and genres, in addition to the novel — the principal focus for much scholarship on the New Woman — such as the feminist periodicals, poetry, journalism and the short story, is central to the thesis and enables identification of shared literary strategies and techniques as well as consideration of readers and critical contexts. The roles and representation of "woman" in this period were produced within biological determinist concepts of sex and Nature. The study concentrates on ways in which essentialist dichotomies of cultural and biological reproduction redefined notions of literary and artistic "genius", motherhood and female citizenship, as they intersect with "race" and sexuality in imperial contexts. Women's critique and construct of these subjectivities differed; study of the women's journals reveals a consumer culture saturated in discourses of health and hygiene, negotiated by a divided community of readers. Focus on theories and representation of the child in late Victorian culture finds that Alice Meynell's writing challenged evolutionary psychology, and relates Sarah Grand's child genius to emergent Galtonian eugenics. I argue that late nineteenth-century feminism was intimately involved in imperialism and eugenics, and suggest that current feminist scholarship must confront and analyse these investments. In this thesis I find that boundaries between the groups' identities are fluid; points of intercourse and affiliation are revealed, such as the ways in which scientific constructs of "race", as in Mona Caird's use of the Celtic, are deployed in order to comment on literary value. I have highlighted the ambivalences at work in these appropriations, and suggest that the New Woman text was not always polemical, nor did it reject "high art" values, and that the female aesthetes also express feminist convictions. I contend that for many feminist writers, participation in these late nineteenth-century debates was a necessary and productive critical intervention, with radical, if not always progressive, implications.

This thesis examines the history of the performance and dissemination of chamber music in Melbourne during the period 1877 to 1901. It explores the role and development of chamber music in concerts held by Melbourne’s leading musical societies and public subscription series, and various concerts featuring local and touring performers. Discussion is placed within an international context and the thesis asks whether local musicians were influenced by contemporary developments in Europe and if so, was the primary influence English or German? / The bulk of the thesis explores the history of some of Melbourne’s musical societies and public concerts and focuses in particular on the repertoire that was performed, methods of program construction, the perceived ‘educational’ value of chamber music and performances within educational institutions. It demonstrates that performances of chamber music flourished during Melbourne’s economic boom of the 1880s, and that although performances declined during the following depression of the 1890s, standards of performance had improved, audiences were better educated and informed about chamber music, and Melbourne was relatively quick to introduce contemporary chamber repertoire. The first chamber works by local musicians and composers were also composed and performed in Melbourne during this period. / The availability of competent musicians was a significant factor and played a role in determining the type of repertoire that was performed. With large numbers of competent pianists and string players, and very few wind players, present in Melbourne during this period, for example, the repertory tended to focus on works for piano and/or strings. The contribution of local and international performers, particularly English and German-born and/or trained instrumentalists, is also considered. English and German musicians not only had an impact on the shaping of the repertory, but also influenced the way that concerts were organized. These influences, however, often overlapped and were not always clearly defined.

This thesis explores the transformation of the mirror's symbolic role in the poetry and visual art of late nineteenth-century Paris. For centuries the mirror has been associated with both truth and artifice, whether in religion, popular culture, art, or theories of aesthetics. In the context of nineteenth-century literature, M.H. Abrams uses the mirror to represent the age-old idea of the artist as an objective reflector of the world, juxtaposing this with the nineteenth-century notion of the artist as a subjective lamp. However, this thesis shows that, far from being abandoned as a symbol of artistic expression, the mirror motif was reclaimed and reinterpreted by Baudelaire and his artistic and poetic successors. The thesis argues that their works highlight the distortions and ambiguities that the mirror can produce, using it as a motif to challenge and alter our mode of vision. This thesis focuses on the visual and poetic culture of Paris between 1850 and 1900, when mirrors were increasingly visible in a range of public and private settings. Building on Walter Benjamin's descriptions of Paris as a city of mirrors and a locus of multiple, shifting gazes, the thesis examines how the perceptual experiences of modernity feed into the development of the mirror's symbolic role. Through a series of close readings, the thesis analyses the dynamics of mirror-vision and explores the shared preoccupations of art and poetry in their treatment of subjectivity, vision, and self-reflexive artistic practices. The thesis is arranged into three sections, examining texts by Charles Baudelaire, Henri de Régnier, Jules Laforgue, Stéphane Mallarmé, and Marie Krysinska, and artworks by Edgar Degas, Edouard Manet, Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec, Berthe Morisot, and Mary Cassatt. The first section assesses Baudelaire's works as a turning point for the mirror's symbolic significance, particularly examining how Baudelaire reinterprets the association between mirrors and femininity. The second section explores this latter connection in the art and poetry of Baudelaire's late nineteenthcentury successors. The third section examines the mirror's appearance in various ambiguous or ill-defined spaces, assessing how this affects the reader's or viewer's perceptions. I conclude that in the art and poetry of this period, the mirror becomes an emblem of self-reflexivity. Through works that prioritise mobility, multiplicity, and fragmentation, these artists and poets subvert the mirror's associations with mimesis in order to expose the dynamic uncertainty of vision and artistic representation.

Research conducted on emotion by psychologists has produced numerous understandings of the concept and there is currently no consensus as to how it should be defined (Russell, 2012). Despite some general agreement among some theorists as to certain aspects, such as physiological response, eliciting events, and related facial expressions, it is a persistent issue and discussions as to how a solution may be found have recurred at various points throughout the history of psychology. Some work has been done to address the problem through the meta-analysis of various definitions and this has proved to be useful in showing the areas where psychologists might agree (e.g. Izard, 2010; Kleinginna & Kleinginna, 1981; Plutchik, 1980). There is an assumption, therefore, that with enough research and debate a solution will be found. However, this assumption neglects to take into account the changing ontological and methodological contexts through which emotion has been defined in psychological science. For this reason the current debates lack a broader contextualisation which could reveal what has influenced the production of particular definitions and the reasons why the problems of definition have come about. This thesis aims to address this gap in the literature by presenting a historical analysis of the understandings of emotion which were produced during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Although there has been a great deal of historical work produced which examines psychological theories from this time, there is little, apart from Dixon (2012) which is specifically aimed at contextualising this particular issue. In particular, this thesis will examine one respect in which emotion is often defined; as that of being a subjective experience. This understanding, whilst it most often seems to be the way in which people, if asked, define emotion (Davitz, 1970) has, historically, proved to be contentious in psychological science, perhaps because it is difficult to capture. The thesis describes the method of introspection and its use as a means to examine the subjective experience of emotion during the early years of psychology, and looks at what can be learned about the issue of definition through an understanding of the work conducted during that period. It is shown that introspective analyses often presented a picture of emotions as complex, idiosyncratic and individual experiences and that these characteristics contrasted with the assumptions of the emerging scientific psychology that emotion should be defined as structured, predictable and universal. The search for a concept of emotion which embodied the latter rather than the former characteristics is described, and it is demonstrated that the result was a variety of different conceptualisations. The thesis concludes that it is important not to view the current problem simply as one of academic differences over the veracity of definitions, but to contextualise it in relation to the psychologist’s search for a definition of emotion that assumes the characteristics of a scientific concept.

The history that H. Rider Haggard writes about in his imperial adventure romance fiction is neither collusive nor consensual with the Zulu who are often the focus of his novels. He writes a complex colonial narrative that characterises the Zulu as a proud and mythic, yet ultimately doomed, race. His early twentieth century trilogy, Zikali, is unique in that he uses the three books, Marie, Child of Storm and Finished, to narrate three pivotal events in the nineteenth century history of the Zulu Kingdom. In Zikali, he simultaneously propounds the legitimacy of the colonial endeavour, so effectively that he rewrites history, to ensure the primacy of the Englishman in nineteenth century Southern Africa historiography, whilst aggrandising the Zulu kingdom. This reframing of the colonial narrative—to suit the Western interloper—would be evidence of what is a standard trope within imperial adventure romance fiction, were it not for the fact that Haggard is ambivalent in his imperialism. He is both recorder and creator of imperial history, bewailing the demise of the Zulu Kingdom whilst validating the importance of the role of the colonial white Englishman; he senselessly kills hundreds of natives within his books, yet privileges the Zulu. Referencing one of the primary motivational sources in Haggard's own colonial experience, Theophilus Shepstone, I propose to show Haggard's sublimation of Shepstone's ideas into his own African Arcadian romances, and his creation of a Zulu historiography, which would go on to be lauded by the early South African National Native Congress as being one of the foundations of early twentieth century native socio-political self-fashioning. Haggard's work provides a fragmentary and elusive insight into nineteenth century southern African history and offers an abstruse glimpse into colonial culture rarely found in other imperial adventure romance fiction.

This dissertation explores transitions in women's photographic practice in the United States from roughly 1885 to 1915. I examine the work of three photographers who negotiated the path from the more traditional and private Victorian ideal of womanhood to turn-of-the-century advanced ideas of a more public New Woman: Alice Austen (1866-1952), Catharine Weed Barnes Ward (1851-1913), and Frances Benjamin Johnston (1864-1952). Concurrently, a shift occurred within photography as women encountered changing definitions regarding what it meant to be an amateur, and it became increasingly acceptable for them to work as professionals. Finally, in the last decades of the nineteenth century women's photographic workspaces also transformed from makeshift home studios to professional spaces outside the home. I center my focus in the place where these three transitions merged: Victorian to New Woman, amateur to professional, and home to studio. I analyze how women photographers actively and creatively negotiated gender and used domestic ideology as a catalyst for personal advancement. Austen used her home, and the homes of her friends, as the stage for private performances and tableaux mocking Victorian conventions. Chapter One focuses on her use of the parlor and bedroom as photographic sites. The subject of Chapter Two, Barnes Ward established her first studio in the family attic yet wrote public articles advocating for women photographers and served as a national editor for The American Amateur Photographer. She considered interior photography the purview of women, yet wrote tirelessly for gender equality across the medium. Johnston, the subject of Chapter Three, opened a fully professional photographic studio in Washington D.C., an elaborate two-story addition behind her parents' home including studio, darkroom, and personal office space. References to the Arts and Crafts movement, the colonial revival, and Kodak informed the decoration of her studio and her identity as a professional photographer. All three photographers used current domestic ideologies and spaces as empowering tools to further their photographic work rather than as a cage trapping them within a gendered role. Each will be considered within a wider social network rather than as exceptional figures who veered far from the norm.

One of the more pervasive clichés regarding women in late nineteenth-century French literature is the commonplace that treats social spaces as metaphors for the women who inhabit them. An idea inherited from older traditions that trace their roots back to the Middle Ages, this commonplace often appears as a parallel drawn between women and the social spaces (often a garden or other “natural” setting) ascribed to them. Émile Zola and Guy de Maupassant both make extensive use of this commonplace. While some recent research, Heidi Brevik-Zender’s book Fashioning Spaces: Mode and Modernity in late Nineteenth Century France (2015) for instance, has examined the phenomenon of women and social spaces, thus far the focus has been on Paris and the urban setting. Less work has been done on women and their “natural” spaces. This dissertation examines Émile Zola’s La Faute de l’abbé Mouret (1875), where the garden of the Paradou becomes an explicit metaphor for the body of the novel’s central female character, Albine. In Zola, the garden functions as an “other” space that at first appears to underscore woman’s difference from man. Zola, meanwhile, undermines this insistence on difference. Guy de Maupassant, in his short stories Miss Harriet and “Première neige” and in his first novel, Une Vie (all published for the first time in 1883) represents the notions of separate male and female space as entirely illusory constructs that disguise the male domination that obtains nearly everywhere. While Maupassant’s short fiction shows a pessimistic outlook on correcting this “problem,” his novel, Une Vie, proposes a radical solution, based in non-traditional family structures and female homosociality. I conclude this study by looking more broadly at the pervasiveness of the femino-spatial cliché with reference to examples from contemporary culture.