Victorian women used strategies that allowed them to not only work as actresses but also as directors, producers, translators, and playwrights, thus transforming theatre at the cusp of the New Drama. Female friendships were particularly integral to these strategies as women employed secretiveness and anonymity, charm and shrewdness, networking and collaborating in small and large groups to meet their creative and professional goals. Through these means of sociability women enlarged their spheres of influence beyond the stage. Elizabeth Robins is a superb example of these strategies, particularly when theatrical realism was her primary focus. Though she also collaborated well with men, William Archer and Henry James among them, it was Robins’s female friends who helped her to establish a London career. This project shows how Robins and her women friends contributed to the New Drama in dynamic, critical, and often-secret ways. Marion Lea and Robins finagled the rights to Hedda Gabler in 1891. Lea and Florence Bell helped Robins to translate plays for production and to develop new acting techniques suited to realism. After Lea left England, Robins and Bell joined Grein’s Independent Theatre Society to present their anonymously written protest play Alan’s Wife. These efforts illustrate the adaptive functions of female friendships. Through closer examination of their relationships, particularly the one Robins and Bell called a sisterhood, we see the nurturing functions of female friendships. This project explains some of the reasons why, despite being famous in their day, these women disappeared from history. It was not just because of male control of the theatre, but was also a product of their own desires to protect themselves. Secrecy had served them well in the 1890s, but their fame faded as even friends forgot them. Yet, since female socialization taught them to be group-focused, these women’s stories are highly pertinent to the history of the theatre, an art form that is collaborative by its nature. Through study of their work and their relationships, we can fill some gaps in theatre history, women’s history, and nineteenth-century history, adding resonance to their voices that may carry to coming generations.

Poets such as Thomas Hardy, Augusta Webster, and Amy Levy portray prostitutes who seem guiltless about their choice of profession. Hardy's Amelia seems to symbolize the mutation of a pure country girl into a soiled disciple of evil; yet in the poem the changes in her life brought on by prostitution are evident in her drastically changed physical appearance and mannerism. Webster's Eulalie is an intelligent and well-spoken woman who undermines the stereotypical generalizations about prostitutes, relocating the source of the Great Social Evil from her profession to the institutionalized educational failure that trains women for nothing better than housekeeping. Levy's unnamed Magdalen, disease ridden and dying, may resemble a fallen woman. However, her lack of regret over the out-of-wedlock relationship with a man would make her an unrepentant prostitute in the eyes of the Victorians and she openly points to the real unmentionable of Victorian prostitution—the male client.

From action movies to video games to sports culture, modern masculinity is intrinsically associated with violent competition. This legacy has its roots in the 19th-century Romantic figure of the Byronic hero--the ideal Victorian male: devoted husband, sexual revolutionary and weaponized servant of the state. His silhouette can be traced through the works of authors like Lord Byron, Jane Austen, Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, Rudyard Kipling and Oscar Wilde. More than a literary genealogy, this history of the Byronic hero and his heirs follows the changes that masculinity has undergone in response to industrial upheaval, the rise of the middle class and the demands of global competition, from the Victorian period through the early 20th century. / https://dc.etsu.edu/etsu_books/1121/thumbnail.jpg

abstract: In the last 200 years, advancements in science and technology have made understanding female sexual function and the female body more feasible; however, many women throughout the US still lack fundamental understanding of the reproductive system in the twenty-first century. Many factors contribute to the lack of knowledge and misconceptions that women still have. Discussing sexual health tends to make some people uncomfortable and this study aims to investigate what aspects of somewhat recent US history in women’s health care may have led to that discomfort. This thesis examines the question: what are some of the factors that shaped women’s reproductive medicine in the US from the mid 1800s and throughout the 1900s and what influence could the past have had on how women and their physicians understand female sexuality in medicine and how physicians diagnose their female patients in the twenty-first century. A literature review of primary source medical texts written at the end of the 1800s provides insight about patterns among physicians at the time and their medical practice with female patients. Factors like gendered expectations in medical practice, misconceptions about the female body and behaviors, and issues of morality in sex medicine all contributed to women lacking understanding of sex female reproductive functions. Other factors like a physician’s role throughout history and non-medical reproductive health providers and solutions likely also influenced the reproductive medicine women received. Examining the patterns of the past provides some insight into some of the outdated and gendered practices still exhibited in healthcare. Expanding sexual education programs, encouraging discussion about sex and reproductive health, and checking gendered implicit bias in reproductive healthcare could help eliminate echoes of hysteria ideology in the twenty-first century medicine. / Dissertation/Thesis / Masters Thesis Biology 2019

This dissertation posits a crucial and profound relationship between the Victorian crisis of faith and the simultaneous emergence of fantasy and science fiction novels. Grouping these genres under the term "supernatural novel," the following chapters examine this relationship through close readings of novels published between 1818 and 1897, showing the variety of ways in which this new type of literature spoke to a Victorian sense of being caught between a staunchly traditional religious faith and a newly accessible agnostic materialism. At times, for example, these texts suggest ways to negotiate a compromise between these two viewpoints, and at others they voice a longing for the experience of religious belief in previous centuries. Charles Taylor's A Secular Age highly informs the readings of these novels in its articulation of the complexity of the Victorian religious crisis, emphasizing changes in the character and experience of belief, even for the majority of Victorians who remained devout Christians. Taylor's seminal work joins with histories of religion, biographies, reviews and articles from Victorian periodicals, and theories of genre to discuss how the supernatural novel can uniquely address the anxieties and frustrations inherent to the crisis of faith. Through combining the literary form of the novel, strongly associated with realism and secular ways of knowing, with fantastic and imaginary content, this expanding genre reflected the "cross pressures" of faith and rationalism experienced by a Victorian readership.

Les études qui entreprennent d’évaluer la place de la maladie dans les romans de Dickens et Collins adoptent souvent le point de vue du médecin, montrant comment leurs peintures de la maladie constituent des diagnostics scientifiquement exacts. Or la médecine est d’abord un discours sur la maladie : diagnostiquer les personnages des romanciers reviendrait donc à considérer la grille de lecture médicale comme outil d’analyse valable pour évaluer la maladie dans leur œuvre. Cette thèse se propose d’interroger la pertinence d’une telle grille de lecture, qui semble anachronique [ce discours se construit tout au long du XIXe siècle, il n’est donc pas constitué au moment où les deux romanciers écrivent]. Il s’agit de comprendre comment le discours médical s’est imposé au fil du XIXe siècle : pour dire et écrire la maladie, la médecine s’est inspirée d’autres types de discours, et en premier lieu celui du roman, qu’elle a utilisé pour tenter de prendre place dans les esprits victoriens. Après avoir établi les conditions dans lesquelles est né ce nouveau discours normatif, cette thèse analyse la relation de Dickens et Collins avec ce discours. Conscients que les médecins tentent de passer d’un art à une science positive, les deux romanciers semblent se méfier des nouvelles catégories nosographiques et méthodes cliniques. Nous sommes alors fondés à lire leurs romans non plus seulement comme des documents qui questionnent la pathologie scientifique, mais aussi comme des prismes d’autres imaginaires du corps malade. L’étude de leur œuvre dévoile ainsi les soubassements imaginaires de la nouvelle médecine, mais aussi l’esthétique du morbide propre à chacun des deux auteurs. / Studies concentrating on the value of disease in novels by Collins or Dickens often adopt a medical point of view, showing that the novelists depict illness with the eyes of trained clinicians, offering surprisingly precise case studies and diagnoses. This approach sheds light on some episodes; yet, the “medico-realists” seem to overlook that by viewing literature through a medical prism, they are using the tools and rationale of a constructed discourse. Pathology, which is the science that studies the disease and not the disease itself, was created all long the 19th century. Viewing the novelists’ treatment of disease only through the filter of pathology gives a reductive image of the way they understand morbidity. This research aims at deconstructing the medical discourse, and at showing how, to take up Dickens’s words, “for theories, as for organised beings, there is also a Natural Selection and a Struggle for Life”, which str! uggle scientific medicine has apparently won. Doctors have used other types of discourse to create their own, and in so doing, novels have been a great source of inspiration. After positing that medicine creates a myth of positivism, this study goes on to analyse the way Dickens and Collins considered the rise of this new field. Unlike what medico-realists seem to take for granted, the novelists did not subscribe to the new medical methods and even denied understanding disease according to pathological categories. Their use of diseases unexpectedly unveils the way doctors wrote and imagined disease. Studying Dickens’s and Collins’s ways of conceiving pathology offers insight into the imaginary origins of a burgeoning science.

My thesis problematizes the simplistically and widely accepted idea of a Victorian ‘crisis of faith’ or religious ‘decline.’ Most historical and critical narratives of nineteenth-century Britain portray the Victorian Age as a period marked by a crisis of faith and a gradual secularization through (Darwinian) scientific developments. My work questions this by examining the late-Victorian novels of colonial India and the British New Woman novels. My first chapter deals with Victorian popular fiction that presents the invasion of Victorian London by colonial idols. The idols, overdetermined as both Hindu and Theosophist in inspiration, force the British legal system to recognize the limits of its own materialist perceptions of reality, so that it finally arrives at a deeper understanding of spirituality. My second chapter deals with Victorian New Woman novels where I study how the British New Woman as a literary figure, despite apparent unbelief and disempowerment, embodies a deep-seated religious power that can be assumed only by a woman and that helps challenge the assumption of declining faith. My final chapter examines the shift of scene to India, where once again the English men and women inadvertently express their fears of British secularization in the context of their encounter with Oriental faiths, but ultimately arrive at a richer appreciation of the religious ‘impossible’ through this encounter with colonial ‘otherness.’

The Poetry of Religion and the Prose of Life: From Evangelicalism to Immanence in British Women's Writing, 1835-1925&" traces a tradition of religious women poets and women's poetic communities engaged in generic and theological exploration that I argue was intimately intertwined with their social activism. This project brings together recent debates about gender and secularization in sociology, social history, and anthropology of religion, contending that Victorian and early-twentieth-century women poets from a variety of religious affiliations offer an alternative path into modernity that embraces the public value of both poetry and religious discourse, thus questioning straightforward narratives of British secularization and poetic privatization during the nineteenth century. These writers, including contributors to The Christian Lady's Magazine, Grace Aguilar, Dora Greenwell, Alice Meynell, Eva Gore-Booth, and Evelyn Underhill, turned to social engagement and immanence, a theory of divinity within the world rather than above and apart from it, to bridge a widening gap between religious doctrine and poetic theory. Appropriating the growing interest in immanent theology within British Christianity allowed women to write about the small, the domestic, the human, and the everyday while exploring the divine presence in them, thus elevating and publicly revealing experiences traditionally allocated to women's private lives. Just as the women in this study questioned the distinction between the divine and the everyday, they also blurred the generic boundaries of poetry and theological prose. As lyric poetry was increasingly identified with private experience, they used literary experimentation across the genres of poetry and theological prose to engage public debates on a surprisingly large number of issues from factory reform, to mental disability, to urban poverty, to women's suffrage, to pacifism. This project includes four chapters, each of which examines a female poet or a poetic community of women connected through the publishing world. The first two chapters focus on tensions among commitments to poetry, religion, and social reform within Anglicanism. Trapped between the desire to encounter a transcendent God and the desire to celebrate earthly ephemera and improve earthly conditions, these poets demonstrate the tension from which a poetics of immanence arose. My third and fourth chapters follow the extension of immanence in late-nineteenth-century Catholic verse and early-twentieth-century mystical verse. These writers used a growing theological emphasis on immanence to justify poetry that relied on female experience, to suggest that the divine was at home in the constantly evolving natural and social worlds, and to illustrate God's equal proximity to the mundane and the marginalized, inspiring challenges to social and institutional hierarchies.

My dissertation, Understanding the Gray:Aging Women in Victorian Culture and Fiction, explores the cultural construction of aging for middle-class Victorian women and how aging was experienced and then depicted within novels. Chiefly, I work from midcentury to the end of the century in order to understand the experience of aging and ways women were ascribed age due to their position in society as spinsters, mothers, and progressive women. I explore how the age of fictional women reflects and contributes to critical debates concerning how Victorian women were expected to behave. Debates over separate spheres, how women were perceived in British society, and how women’s rights changed during the 19th century highlight how aging affected women and how they were treated throughout the century. Victorian fiction illustrates the ways women achieved different roles in society and how age and the perception of age affected their ability to do so. Understanding how aging was experienced, understood, and ascribed to Victorian women who fought in various ways for new terms of citizenship and mobility helps us begin to trace how we treat and respond to aging in women today. The first chapter outlines the social status of unmarried women and spinsters, considering how age affected women’s ability to lead professional lives in Charlotte Brontë’s Villette (1853). The second chapter, on George Eliot’s Felix Holt: The Radical, explores older motherhood through Mrs Transome and illustrates how the novel seeks to teach younger women of the pitfalls of unequal marriages. The third chapter builds a cultural understanding of how aging was linked to progressive, anti-domestic womanhood and racial impurity through the New Woman and in H.R. Haggard’s She.

Values in the Air argues that nineteenth-century authors attempted to challenge the individualizing and atomizing effects of the increasingly powerful and abstract investment economy by portraying the necessity of other fields of capital (cultural, social, domestic) to the formation and maintenance of local, knowable communities. I first look at the depiction of a successful integration of diverse capitals embodied in the figure of the male mill owner, wherein the idea of land stewardship is repurposed to include factories. Chapter 2 depicts an encroaching pessimism about tradition’s ability to answer the demands of the modern industrial economy even as the possibility of bringing women into the center of industrial capital as equal participants is foreclosed. With chapter 3, I turn my attention to the way that the abstract nature of the investment economy obscures the value of—and relationships between—different fields of capital. The focus of chapter 3 is how land becomes implicated in the abstract economy, revealing the country estate to be little more than a bargaining chip, and reducing its ability to act as a foil for capitalism. Finally, the relationship between women and the country bank depicts the clash of the myth of separate spheres and the myth of a logical economy. While the scales of Victorian studies generally emphasize the novel’s development of the individual, or its representation of uncountable populations, Values in the Air plots a middle stratum wherein novels model networks and relationships that structure local, knowable communities. Within these communities, it is possible to imagine individual women in positions of financial power even as it is unclear how multiple forms of value can be gendered and exchanged.