<p>This dissertation argues that the Victorian novel created a sensory self much like that articulated by Victorian physiological psychology: a multi-centered and process-oriented body that reacts to situations and stimuli as they arise by mobilizing appropriate cognitive and nervous functions. By reading Victorian fiction alongside psychology as it was developing into a distinct scientific discipline (during the 1840s-70s), this project addresses broader interdisciplinary questions about how the interaction between literature and science in the nineteenth century provided new ways of understanding human consciousness. I show that narrative engagements with psychology in the novel form made it possible for readers to understand the modern person as productively rather than pathologically heterogeneous. To accomplish this, fiction offered author and reader an experimental form for engaging ideas posed and debated concurrently in science. </p><p>The novels I read - by authors including Charlotte Brontë, Charles Dickens, Wilkie Collins, Mary Elizabeth Braddon, and George Eliot - emerge as narrative testing grounds for constructions of subjectivity and personhood unavailable to scientific discourse. I attribute the novel's ability to create a sensory self to its formal tactics, from composites of multiple first-person accounts to strange juxtapositions of omniscience and subjectivity, from gaps and shifts in narrative to the extended form-in-process of the serial novel. My side-by-side readings of scientific and literary experiments make it clear that fiction is where we find the most innovative methods of investigation into embodied forms of human experience.</p> / Dissertation

This thesis argues that what it terms fever narratives figure prominently in Charles Dickens’s fiction. Fever was regarded not as a symptom but as a generic disease that had sub-species, such as cholera, smallpox, typhus and typhoid, and that presented itself through devastating epidemics that frightened the public and drove the government to enact public health legislation. The core elements of the fever narrative – such as fever’s cause, pathology, treatment and prevention – were still not clearly understood. This inevitably heightened public anxiety and frustration, particularly given lengthy delays in the bureaucratic processes of Parliament and local governments in dealing with fever’s perennial threat. The politically favoured sanitarian narrative influenced Dickens significantly. Sanitarians believed that water and sewer projects in urban localities and improved sanitary practices would prevent most diseases. However, Dickens was influenced also by an alternative approach that this thesis calls the “medical narrative,” comprising a more holistic vision of public health, reliant on improved treatments, greater medical professionalism, and specialized hospitals, in addition to sanitary reform. Dickens’s 1840s novels reflected both approaches, but he emphasized the medical narrative in portrayals of the fevers of individual characters. In the 1850s, the predominant focus of fever narratives in Dickens’s journals and novels became fever of the social body – fever that figuratively infected English institutions or the country as a whole. Dickens’s fever narratives became progressively darker during these two decades and, with each novel onward from Dombey and Son (1846-48), his representations of fever apocalypses infecting both the rich and the poor became more strident, even to the extent of suggesting that the whole institutional and economic infrastructure of the country would suffer an irrevocable blow. The thesis argues that Dickens presented these minatory scenes of vengeance in response to what he perceived as the blindness of the middle class to the condition of the sick and poor of England. This reached a climax with “Revolutionary fever” in A Tale of Two Cities (1859). The thesis presents a final argument that Dickens’s stories of the early 1860s and Our Mutual Friend (1864-65) provided both a continuation of and a denouement for the two previous decades’ fever narratives, by offering a view of the dust of corpse upon corpse of those who were mowed down by fever, and of a river polluted by this dust. However, he foresees also the possibility of the fundamental regeneration of a more humane physical, social and institutional environment in England.

This thesis investigates music in Mexico City, with an emphasis on women's relationship to Romanticism, education, consumption, domestic music-making and public performance. During the first decades after independence in 1821, Mexicans began the process of constructing an identity, which musically speaking meant an expansion of the secular musical world. Such construction involved the development of internal activity alongside a conditional receptivity to external influence in the form of the visits of Italian opera companies such as those of Manuel García and Max Maretzek, and travelling virtuosi such as pianist virtuoso Henri Herz, who brought new repertoire and performance practices to Mexican theatres and homes. As consumers and as musicians, women were at the centre of such developments. In Mexico, both European music and that of local musicians was disseminated by means of ladies' journals and imported and locally-printed sheet music by foreign and Mexican composers, in order to supply a growing home market for amateurs. Abundant surviving repertoire for the home, the widespread availability of musical instruction as revealed through advertisements, and witness accounts of soirées and concerts in the theatre reveal a budding musical world that has hitherto been overlooked and which occurred during a period generally deemed of little importance in Mexican musical history. By investigating a key period in the social-cultural history of Mexican music, this thesis crafts a narrative of intersections between the musical life of Mexican women and the incipient construction of a musical-cultural identity.

The main aim of this interdisciplinary project is to examine attempts to codify sexual knowledge in Egypt between 1830 and 1928. Through surveying medical, religious, legal and moral writings on sexuality, this study aims to examine the underlying politics of sexual knowledge and the structures of permissions and prohibitions within which sexual knowledge was articulated in the period under study. The research recognizes that there are several sources that informed people about sexual behaviour in the period under study. However, the study is concerned only with a number of writings that imparted teachings about sex directly or indirectly to the growing literate middle class, and proceeds to discuss their authors and contexts. The study's main focus is the influence of medical and scientific conceptualization of sex differences on the understandings of gender and sexuality. In nineteenth-century Egypt, the study argues, professional medical authorities promoted medical theories that suggested men's innate active sexuality and inability to control their sexual urges. At the same time, professional Egyptian doctors increasingly projected women as mentally and physically fragile because of their reproductive cycle. Women were increasingly viewed as incapable of being sexually spontaneous. To remain healthy, women were advised to suppress their sexual desires to be satisfied only through marital sex. Through examining the interconnections between medical, legal, religious and moral discursive literature on sexual behaviour, this study brings into light the associations between sex, sexuality and the creation and recreation of gender. The study demonstrates that medical perceptions of male and female sexualities were at the core of moral and intellectual discourses on gender equality as well as religious opinions on sex-related issues. Since there was a multiplicity of ideological and activist stands on questions about sexuality and gender in the period under study, the study explores the variety of ways in which nationalists, feminists and religious scholars adopted, borrowed or negotiated with scientific and medical ideas on female sexuality to support their different views on contemporary controversial issues such as gender equality, polygamy etc. Medical and scientific ideas of male and female sexuality had a complex impact on discursive literature on gender and sexuality. On the one hand, they were employed to justify the continuity of patriarchy and the increasing male regulation of female sexuality. On the other hand, they strengthened arguments in support of the participation of women in public life.

In the mid-nineteenth century, Paris served as the epicentre for artistic creation; artists flocked to the French capital in search of training, camaraderie, and, ultimately, success. Henri Fantin-Latour, Alphonse Legros, and James McNeill Whistler were amongst these hopeful artists in the 1850s. While each eventually created a thriving practise for himself, each also fought to establish his artistic career and identity during these early years. Because the narrative of a young, struggling artist is not an uncommon one, this stage is often brushed aside when examining the trajectory of these artists’ careers. However, such a dismissal does not allow for a full contextualization of an artist’s life and oeuvre. Fantin, Legros, and Whistler evidence this truth, both individually and as a small group. While attempting to define their maturing artistic identities, these three artists deliberately elected to join forces and become the Société des trois. This era bore witness to the birth of the artistic avant-garde, which elevated expression and individualism; with this in mind, the decision to develop a closed artistic society is unique. Fantin, Legros, and Whistler adhered to specific societal tenets and maintained loyalty to each other in an artistic environment that praised the individual. There are many reasons that supported their decision; for example, the Société enabled them to transition from the student to professional phases of their careers between 1858 and 1868. Eventually, as the choices the artists made in the formation of their artistic identities diverged, the Société was no longer necessary, and each member went his own way. In light of their decisions to unite as a formal society, Fantin, Legros, and Whistler’s period of maturation must be understood through the lens of the Société des trois. / Graduate / 2018-05-01

During the first half of the nineteenth century in many cities in Germany, England and the United States, free and public galleries were opened to encourage the purchase of art works. Some sponsoring organizations were controlled by artists and some by interested lay persons. All of the sponsors hoped to educate the public and to elevate artistic taste as well as to sell works of art. Many of the organizations offered a premium in the form of a yearly engraving to induce interest and to promote membership. Often there was an annual distribution of paintings and other works of art by lottery. In several cities in the United States these organizations, which were called art unions, began offering memberships. The largest and most influential in the United States was the American Art-Union in New York. However, their success was short lived; by the mid-eighteen fifties, they had closed their doors.

This thesis asks whether there existed a unified view of the Arctic during the time period connected to the high point of British endeavour to find a Northwest Passage, from the first expeditions of the nineteenth-century in 1818 to the return of the last Franklin search party in 1859, forty-one years later. Using this time frame as its marker, the focus of the thesis is primarily on British representations of Arctic landscapes, exploration and Inuit peoples. Through careful empirical analysis of a variety of media, including professional painting, on-the-spot sketches, prints and popular exhibitions, it examines from an art historical viewpoint the historical, political, social and aesthetic contexts in which Arctic representations occurred.

New Orleans failed to solve its water infrastructure problems in the nineteenth century because a shifting locus of power in a variable political and financial environment hampered wise decision making, while technology choices were limited by contemporary knowledge, scientists' ignorance, or by technicians' poor presentation skills for new ideas. And, selection was often governed by prejudice: personal, racial, or against technology. New Orleans was able to deal with its water difficulties only when those with the power to make or influence decisions had an available technology capable of handling the problem and they chose to use it. Power and science had to flow together. New Orleans' situation is excellent: a crossroads of trade, an entrepot for the agricultural heartland, the Mississippi River's premier port. And yet, the city's site is dreadful. New Orleans sits in a bowl of land rimmed by water, with the river and the brackish Lake Pontchartrain on either side, amid swampy environs in a hot and wet climate. This city exists only because of the complex system by which it deals with water. The conundrum of New Orleans lies at the confluence of science and power. Whoever holds the power can choose the science and technology with which New Orleans handles water, its everpresent best friend and worst enemy. From the colonial era to the twentieth century, the power to make those choices shifted from the private sector to the public sector and back, with the press and, eventually, women ultimately having influence. Under the fading Spanish empire, from the age of Jefferson to the era of Jacksonian democracy, during the Civil War and Reconstruction, through the dawn of Progressivism: New Orleans confronted the problems of flood prevention, drainage, the omni-present need for a dependable water source for its citizens, and eventually sewerage disposal. This study investigates how those problems were faced, what technology was used and how the work was financed; and also illuminates the lives of those who dealt with New Orleans and water during that time.

In 1881, Margaret Bartlett of New Orleans crafted the Christian Woman's Exchange using the New York Exchange chapter as a model. Bartlett hoped this new organization would help alleviate at least some of the economic suffering "reduced gentlewomen"faced. Despite the Exchange's original mission to help the elite, the group soon crossed class and racial boundaries in a campaign of conservative activism. The Christian Woman's Exchange helped women provide for their families by training them to produce homemade goods for sale in consignment shops. Simultaneously, working-class women found employment within the Christian Woman's Exchange lunch room and other business ventures. Since the group's consignors had the opportunity to earn wages while remaining at home, and working-class women tied themselves to a respectable business, the accepted societal expectations for all women involved remained intact. In the group's first decade, the Christian Woman's Exchange members managed to maintain the Southern lady veneer while attracting attention from women around the world.

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