Thesis (Ph. D.)--University of California, Los Angeles, 1997. / Typescript. Includes bibliographical references (p. 323-334).

Thesis (Ph.D.)--University of Oregon, 2006. / Adviser: Wendy Larson. Includes vita and abstract. Includes bibliographical references (p. 182-204)

Originally presented as the author's Thesis (Brown University, 1999). / Description based on print version record. Includes bibliographical references (p. [135]-139).

Thesis (Ph. D.)--University of Oregon, 2006. / Typescript. Includes vita and abstract. Includes bibliographical references (leaves 182-204). Also available for download via the World Wide Web; free to University of Oregon users.

This thesis examines the attitudes to love and sex reflected in eight Canadian novels dating from 1925 to 1969. The first three, Frederick Philip Grove's Settlers of the Marsh, Morley Callaghan's They Shall Inherit the Earth, and Hugh MacLennan's The Watch That Ends the Night, were chosen not only as works centrally concerned with love, but also as good examples of their writers' treatment of sexuality in other novels. And since Grove, Callaghan, and MacLennan are generally held to be the major Canadian writers of at least the first half of this century, collectively their novels form an accurate picture of the traditional, mainstream attitude to sex, insofar as it can be seen operating in and through fiction. Chapter One introduces the reader to the ways in which twentieth-century Canadian fictional attitudes to love and sex are directly contiguous with those of Victorian England: the fundamental duality of body and soul; the "worship" of the good woman as the embodiment of the Christian virtue of self-sacrificing, pure love; the resulting splitting off of aggressive sexuality from feelings of tenderness; and the subsequent driving underground of the repressed sexual urges and their emergence into perverse forms. Chapter Two traces Grove's insistence upon a tender, asexual Victorian ideal and his deliberate efforts to eliminate what he regards as degrading and destructive, that is, any sexual urges not strictly passive and subordinate to spiritual love and monogamous procreation. Chapter Three discusses Callaghan's attempt to break away from this traditional duality of love and sex, and then demonstrates how his fusion of body and soul actually breaks down into just another version of the old split so that sex is good only so long as it remains in the service of self-sacrificing love. It also establishes how Callaghan's notion of love comes to depend ultimately upon covert sadomasochism in which both the male and female unconsciously and destructively attempt to break out of sexual roles too rigid and narrow to serve their complex human needs. Chapter Four looks at MacLennan's apparent affirmation of life and sex, and maintains that his mystical message is really a sadomasochistic impulse in which life becomes the unconscious and obsessive pursuit after pain and death. The relationship which emerges between the sexes in all three of these novels is that of dominant female and dependent, resentful, frightened male. Grove, Callaghan, and MacLellan all portray women as essentially stronger than their men: the "good" ones dominate by means of protective, maternal power and the "bad" ones through aggressive, self-gratifying sexuality. The male responses to these powerful women are deeply ambivalent: they seek infantile security and gratification at the breasts of the "good" women, while they simultaneously attempt to establish their potency, autonomy and safety by overtly destroying the "bad" mothers and covertly punishing the "good" ones. Thus Grove, Callaghan and MacLennan all create fictional worlds in which sadomasochism inadvertently works against their notions of idealized love. Chapters Five and Six examine Sheila Watson's The Double Hook and Mordecai Richler's The Apprenticeship of Duddy Kravitz, concentrating on their more contemporary treatment of sexaulity and particularly on their response to the archetype of the castrating mother. Watson pioneers the way out of the Victorian past by exploring aggression as a potentially positive mode of behaviour, and by seeing in the traditional role of the self-sacrificing woman the kind of tyranny-by-guilt which covertly holds sway in the earlier works. Richler also rejects the notion of the efficacy of suffering and thus has his young hero attain manhood partially through his repudiation of the "security" offered in a relationship with a self-sacrificing woman. Moreover, his satire repeatedly focuses on the covert sexual reality which underlies idealistic pretensions, and thus makes the same comment as this thesis is making about the novels of the traditional mainstream. Chapter Seven analyzes the ways in which Leonard Cohen's Beautiful Losers, Margaret Laurence's The Fire-Dwellers and Robert Kroetsch's The Studhorse Man all work through various responses to the repressive limitations of Victorian ideals: Cohen dramatizes an ideal of polymorphous perversity, Laurence "masculinizes" her heroine and "feminizes" her male protagonists, and Kroetsch insists upon an unidealized, aggressively sexual response to life. Nevertheless, as Chapter Seven demonstrates, even contemporary imaginations continue to focus on the woman as castrating mother and the man as threatened son. Thus in the final analysis, the differences between the attitudes of contemporary writers and those of their predecessors lie not in an abandonment of the traditional archtype, but only in the degree to which they are conscious of, and deliberately choosing to work with, sado-masochistic sexuality. / Arts, Faculty of / English, Department of / Graduate

According to classical Greek mythology, Eros was one of the first beings to arise out of Chaos and represented the concepts of harmony and union necessary in creating the world and its creatures. The primary fear that Zola addresses (and exploits) in Germinal is the fear of anarchy and of social chaos. This is accomplished thanks to a relentless textual insistency on eroticism. This emphasis on human sexuality, along with Zola's ground-breaking treatment of the working class, represents the breaking of the two greatest literary taboos in nineteenth century French literature: the vivid depiction of bodily urges and the minute examination of the proletariat. Our thesis is that the revolutionary impact and the incontestable literary longevity of Germinal stem largely from Zola's successful shattering of these timorous traditions--the logical extension of reigning bourgeois morals--via his persistent depictions of the corporeal and the erotic. This essay, therefore, is an attempt to analyze, to describe, and to reconcile the diverse and contradictory elements which comprise the erotic subtext in Zola's most famous novel, that is to provide an erotic reading of Germinal. / Arts, Faculty of / French, Hispanic, and Italian Studies, Department of / Graduate

No description available.

This dissertation examines the problem of women, marriage, and sexuality in Melville's work. The general absence of female characters in his stories, his frequent depiction of horrific marriages, and his seeming reticence about sexuality have all contributed to the long-standing critical view that his writing reveals a deep-seated hatred and fear of women. In disputing these critical commonplaces, the study argues that Melville always reinforces the importance of the sexual element in human relations. His ideas about women, marriage, and sexuality are informed by his perception of a disturbing tension between men and women in his society, and he makes the paradoxes of his culture concerning gender relations central to his work. The dissertation is organized thematically to isolate and explore the primary manifestations of sexualized human relations in Melville's work: desire, frustration, marriage, transgression, and homoeroticism. Close readings of specific stories, poems, and sections of novels suggest new interpretative trajectories based primarily on considerations of how culture influences gender and sexual meaning. The introduction surveys the tradition of Melville scholarship on the problem of women and sexuality. The sources of the prevailing negative impression concerning his attitudes are traced largely to the demands of the theoretical approaches which have dominated discussion of the sexual issues in Melville's writing. Evidence from Melville's marginalia is then offered to establish the ground for a more balanced view of his perceptions. The second chapter asserts that, for Melville, much of the difficulty of human experience can be attributed to sexual desire. Within his work he probes the psychological nature of these desires, and he interrogates the cultural codes by which desire is regulated. The next chapter, on the marriage theme, locates Melville within the nineteenth century turmoil in marriage ideologies, while chapter four is an analysis of the sexual transgression motif. The violation of cultural rules through which sexual pleasure is licensed and controlled is used metaphorically by Melville to represent the individual quest for personal or artistic freedom. The final chapter describes Melville's consistent use of figurative language associated with negative homoeroticism to dramatize disproportionate power relations between men.

This dissertation uses the concept of erotic conduct to rethink theatre’s role in Victorian society and its influence on the novel more specifically. Though uncommon today, the term “conduct” was widely used by Victorian commentators seeking to identify what facets of erotic experience were most important to social life and the formation of individual character. Instead of parsing the pathologies of desire, as Michel Foucault would lead us to expect, commentators directed their attention to volitional—and often habitual—behaviors that took pleasing erotic sensations as their primary end. Such conduct transpired in all spaces of everyday life, but this project turns to a diverse set of archival sources to make the case that it was conduct at the theatre that held the greatest fascination. A mass culture of an exceptional magnitude, situated in discrete physical spaces, the Victorian commercial theatre provided ample opportunities for both fleeting and enduring encounters between people who weren’t married or even necessarily of the opposite sex. This dissertation shows how new varieties of sexual character emerged at the theatre, where they were either tacitly permitted or flamboyantly indulged: the imperious actress; the ardent female spectator; the cruising sodomite; and the female dandy. Drawing on a breadth of archival research, "Eccentric Conduct" makes the case that just as the theatre affected the erotic habits of many Victorians, so did it influence the storytelling habits of many Victorian novels. Explicit depictions of performers and theatergoing have led many critics to characterize the Victorian novel as anti-theatrical, eschewing the fleshly and meretricious matter of live performance in favor of representing the superior qualities of privacy, domesticity and moral continence associated with the bourgeois home. This project counters this view by uncovering the subtler yet more pervasive influence theatre had on the characters, vocabulary, images and narrative devices of realist fiction. Novelists most often deployed theatrically-derived storytelling habits when seeking to represent pleasures inconsistent with the institution of patriarchal marriage. Instead of imitating the disciplinary conduct of the police or patriarch, to which the novel is often compared, novels by Eliot and Hardy sought to convey and thus promote the pleasures they also represented. In order to make theatre’s effect on the metalanguage of Victorian fiction intelligible, I reconstruct the conduct to which novelists elude by juxtaposing artifacts such as theatergoing diaries, scrapbooks, trial records and cabinet photographs alongside the “actress novel” genre, Middlemarch, Teleny, The Heavenly Twins, and Jude the Obscure.

published_or_final_version / Chinese / Master / Master of Philosophy