As a Christian, Emily Pfeiffer (1827-1890) saw women's fight for emancipation as a crusade that transcends the earthly state. Yet, although her poetry was well-received during her life-time, Pfeiffer remains obscure. In order to challenge values that may have helped to perpetuate Pfeiffer's non-canonical status, I examine Pfeiffer's poetry against a broader definition of religious practice and worship than was traditionally applied to Victorian women's poetry. Responding to a recent re-evaluation of the criteria for what constitutes nineteenth-century religious literature, I demonstrate that Pfeiffer's poetry occupies a unique position in the canon of Victorian women's religious poetry. To determine what made Pfeiffer such an original thinker, my research considers childhood experiences from which the psychological imprint nev~r faded. In order to compensate for losses and disappointments, Pfeiffer learned to channel her frustrations into her poetry early in life. A Central Anglican, Pfeiffer belonged to a declining strand of the Established Church during a period when other branches of Christianity were expanding.

This thesis examines the processes of writerly and editorial literary production undertaken by women sensation authors in the 1860s and 1870s. This focus represents a shift from the prevailing critical emphasis on the consumption of sensation fiction to the realm of production and therein allows the thesis to analyse the ways in which sensation operates as a set of rhetorical and linguistic strategies for women writers in the changing publishing conditions of mid-to-late Victorian society. I consider the ways in which sensation is an idiom that permeates all aspects of magazine publishing in this period and demonstrate how it could be adapted and become an empowering discourse for women writers and editors. Furthermore, this thesis sees sensation as an important component in the transformation of the press in the 1860s and 1870s. By analysing the specific ways in which sensational strategies were appropriated and transformed, this thesis reassesses the role of sensation in the creation of women’s writing in the second half of the nineteenth century, and consider its legacies in later ‘New Woman’ writers. I achieve this by examining three women editors, who were part of the transformation of magazine publishing in the period. Mary Elizabeth Braddon (1835-1915), Ellen (Mrs. Henry) Wood (1814-1887), and Florence Marryat (1837-1899) all operated as writers and editors in the mid-to-late nineteenth century. They produced varying types of sensational fiction that they serialised in their own monthly magazines, Belgravia, Argosy, and London Society respectively. Sensation provided a dynamic and flexible means for these women author-editors to assert their status in the context of the expansion of the press in the 1860s and 1870s. I argue that their work invites a more fluid and generous critical definition of sensation.

The Discourse of Embodiment in the Nineteenth-Century British and North American Sign Language Debates examines the transatlantic cultural reception of deafness and signed languages to determine why a largely successful nineteenth-century movement known as Oralism advocated the eradication of signed languages. The dissertation answers this question through exploring a range of texts including fiction by Charles Dickens and Wilkie Collins, Oralist texts by Alexander Graham Bell and Thomas Arnold, and deaf resistance texts including poetry and proposals to establish Deaf settlements. I argue that Oralists – and a wider Victorian culture – believed that signed languages were inferior to spoken and written languages because they believed that signed languages were more embodied than these other modes of language. This charge of embodiedness produced negative constructions of signed languages as more concrete, iconic, and primitive than speech and writing. In chapter one, I examine poetry written by deaf people in order to uncover the phonocentrism that underscored both Oralism and the dominant nineteenth-century construction of the importance of aural and oral sound to poetry. In chapter two, I consider the relationship between the sign language debates and the debates around evolution in order to argue that both sides of the evolutionary debate were invested in making deaf people speak. In chapter three, I consider Wilkie Collins’s depiction of a deaf heroine in his novel Hide and Seek. I argue that Collins’s desire to make his heroine speak through her body rather than sign points to the difficulties of representing a signing deaf person within the conventions of the Victorian novel. Finally, chapter four focuses on the rhetoric around deaf intermarriage and community as it arose in the eugenicist turn taken by Oralism. Using a variety of theoretical approaches including Deaf and Disability Studies, post-structuralist understandings of language, and animal studies, I examine how cultural constructions of deafness and signed languages reveal nineteenth-century anxieties about the nature of language, the meaning of bodily difference, and the definition of the human in the post-Darwinian era. / Thesis (Ph.D, English) -- Queen's University, 2008-09-23 17:20:59.793

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The murderess in the twenty-first century is a figure of particular cultural fascination; she is the subject of innumerable books, websites, documentaries and award-winning movies. With female violence reportedly on the increase, a rethinking of beliefs about women's natural propensity towards violent and aggressive behaviours is inevitable. Using the Victorian period as a central focus, this thesis explores the contradictory ideologies regarding women's violence and also suggests an alternative approach to the relationship between gender and violence in the future. A study of violent women in representation reveals how Victorian attitudes towards violence and femininity persist today. On the one hand, women have traditionally been cast as the naturally non-aggressive victims of violence rather than its perpetrators; on the other hand, the destructive potential of womanhood has been a cause of anxiety since the earliest Western mythology. I suggest that it is a desire to resolve this contradiction that has resulted in the proliferation of violent women in representation over the last one and a half centuries. In particular, an analysis of mid-nineteenth-century popular fiction indicates that the stronger the ideal of the angelic woman was, the greater the anxiety produced by her demonic antithesis. Wilkie Collins's Armadale and Mary Elizabeth Braddon's Lady Audley's Secret illustrate both the contradictory Victorian attitudes towards violent women and a need to reconcile the combination of good and bad femininity that the murderess represents. Revisiting the Victorian murderess in the late twentieth century provides a potential means for resolving this contradiction; specifically, it enables the violent woman to engage in a process of self-representation that was not available to her in the nineteenth century. Margaret Atwood's Alias Grace suggests that any insight into the murderess begins with listening to the previously silenced voice of the violent woman herself.

This thesis examines the popular Victorian novelist Ouida (Maria Louisa Ramé) in the context of women’s authorship in the second half of the nineteenth century. The first of its two intentions is to recuperate some of the historical and literary significance of this critically neglected writer by considering on her own terms her desire to be recognised as a serious artist. More broadly, it begins to fill in the gap that exists in scholarship on women’s authorship as it pertains to those writers who come between George Eliot, the last of the ‘great’ mid-Victorian women novelists, and the New Woman novelists of the fin de siècle. Four of Ouida’s novels have been chosen for critical analysis, each of which was written at an important moment in the history of the nineteenth century novel. Her early novel Strathmore (1865) is shaped by the rebelliousness towards gendered models of authorship characteristic of women writers who began their careers in the 1860s. In this novel, Ouida undermines the binary oppositions of gender that were in large part constructed and maintained by the domestic novel and which controlled the representation and reception of women’s authorship in the mid-nineteenth century. Tricotrin (1869) was written at the end of the sensation fiction craze, a phenomenon that resulted in the incipient splitting of the high art novel from the popular novel. In Tricotrin, Ouida responds to the gendered ideology of occupational professionalism that was being deployed to distinguish between masculinised serious and feminised popular fiction, an ideology that rendered her particularly vulnerable as a popular writer. Ouida’s autobiographical novel Friendship (1878) is also written at an critical period in the novel’s ascent to high art. Registering the way in which the morally weighted realism favoured by novelists and critics at the mid-century was being overtaken by a desire for more formally oriented, serious fiction, Ouida takes the opportunity both to defend her novels against the realist critique of her fiction and to attempt to shape the new literary aesthetic in a way that positively incorporated femininity and the feminine. Finally, Princess Napraxine (1884) is arguably the first British novel seriously to incorporate the imagery and theories of aestheticism. In this novel, Ouida resists male aesthetes’ exploitative attempts to obscure their relationship to the developing consumer culture while confidently finding a place for the woman artist within British aestheticism and signalling a new acceptance of her own involvement in the marketplace. Together, these novels track Ouida’s self-conscious response to a changing literary marketplace that consistently marginalised women writers at the same time that they enable us to begin to uncover the complexity of female authorship in the second half of the nineteenth century.

This thesis examines the important role of female same-sex relationships in nineteenth-century literature and culture. Whilst drawing directly upon Sharon Marcus's recent book, Between Women: Friendship, Desire, and Marriage in Victorian England, a revisionary queer reading of inter-dependent same-sex female intimacy and mainstream middle-class heteronormative ideals, my own study extends the parameters of Marcus's work by focussing on alternative contexts and previously overlooked same-sex female relationships. This thesis argues that the culturally endorsed model of Victorian female homosociality identified by Marcus was subject to disruption and transformation both within and beyond the institutions of marriage and the family. It concludes that various forms (rather than one definitive model) of homosocial desire shaped nineteenth-century female bonding. In the first chapter I explore the unstable social status of working middle-class women, and identify instances of employer/employee female intimacy organised upon a disturbance or reversal of social hierarchy. In the second chapter I demonstrate how the ideal of female amity was inevitably undermined in the literary marketplace, and that whilst women writers were engaged in constructing and disseminating this ideal in their novels, they were also embroiled in a series of professional jealousies with one another which served to undo the very ideal they were promoting. In the second part of this chapter I highlight the pluralism of mainstream homoerotic femininity by examining Dinah Mulock Craik's fictional representation of homoerotic surveillance manifest in a culturally endorsed adolescent female gaze. In the third chapter I challenge Marcus's claim that well-known independent nineteenth-century lesbians were fully accommodated into mainstream 'respectable' society by demonstrating that some of these women informed Eliza Lynn Linton's homophobic portrait of radical feminist separatism. I also explore in this chapter Linton's fictional representation of sororal eroticism, and argue that (notwithstanding mother/daughter bonds) Linton, like many of her contemporaries, regarded sisterhood as the primary bond between women. I also evidence in this chapter that Linton's portrait of 'sororophobia' is comparable with cultural ideals regarding the important function that female friends had in facilitating one another's marriage.

Wallpaper is a significant decorative finish of late nineteenth century interiors. Determining the appropriate approach for treatment in situ, execution of a custom reproduction, or the selection of an appropriate reproduction for a "period look" requires extensive research by an interior designer. The integrity of the historic interior can be lost or compromised during the restoration or rehabilitation process if it is based on misguided decisions. The conservation principles established in the Venice Charter and the criteria or guidelines established in the Secretary of the Interior's Standards for Rehabilitation must be considered before a plan is implemented.The emphasis of this thesis will be establishing a methodology which addresses the design issues confronting interior designers with regard to historic wallpaper in the context of restoration and rehabilitation or adaptive use projects. The period of 1870-1900 reflects a major change inexhibitions have examined aspects of this complex period and it style and the peak period for production and use of American wallpaper. This is the most misunderstood period with regard to wallpaper because the rejection of wallpaper by the modern movement lingers today. In the past decade, four major museum is now being viewed as a critical cultural and artistic watershed.Through research, an appreciation of the various patterns and colorways will be developed. The technological innovations which affected the quality and quantity of wallpaper will also be examined. Documentation of wallpaper for this period will also include reference collections, interior photographs taken during the period, and examination of original sources written during or preceding the period. A survey of what documented reproductions are available on the market today and which are appropriate for interiors of American buildings constructed in the decades 18701900 will be reviewed. Books have been written on the subject of wallpaper, but a single reference does not exist with the information and guidelines needed by designers working on restoration and rehabilitation projects.The selected case studies examine the restoration and rehabilitation approaches to wallpaper. Conclusions were drawn from the diverse projects to reveal the broad range of appropriate treatments or solutions in the context of projects and issues. / Department of Architecture

Focusing on the poetry published in the Cornhill, Once a Week, Good Words, and the Argosy, four of the most prominent illustrated literary periodicals of the 1860s, this dissertation contends that the popular poetry found in mid-century periodicals is not only essential to our understanding of the periodical press, but also that the periodical is integral to our understanding of Victorian poetics. Each chapter examines the poetry and poetics of a single periodical title and addresses several key issues related to the publication of poetry in the periodical press: the power and influence of illustrated poetry in contemporary visual culture, the intended audience of the literary periodical and the issues that raises for editors and poets, the sociology and networks of print, and the ways in which periodical poetry participated in contemporary debates about prosody. This dissertation thus offers an alternative history of Victorian poetry that asserts the centrality of the periodical and popular poetry. In other words, it argues that without a consideration of the vital importance of periodical poetry, Victorian poetry studies is quite simply anachronistic. / Graduate / 2015-04-22 / 0593 / 0391 / caley.ehnes@gmail.com

H. G Wells’s novel The Time Machine is a significant work of science fiction that dramatizes the themes of degeneration and social inequality, themes that were very relevant during the Victorian era in relation to the discovery of evolution. Degeneration was seen as the degradation of society into primitiveness far from the Victorian standards, and the problem of social difference, where the gap between poor and rich was very wide, became the visible proof of the difference between the evolved and civilized and the degenerated and primitive. The purpose of this essay is to analyse how the frame narrative, the story surrounding the main adventure, affects the theme of degeneration in the novel. The framework reveals the reactions of the people present at the dinner parties, where the Time Traveller recounts his journey into a degenerated future. The guests are all representing different factions of Victorian society, such as the Provincial Mayor, the Very Young Man and the Editor who all have their own motives and agendas in relation to degeneration, social differences and time travel. By examining the guests’ individual motives, the essay argues that they do not want to believe in time travel since it would include believing in a degenerated future where all the glory of their present-day Victorian era would crumble into chaos and pandemonium. This essay shows that by denying the relevance of the Time Traveller’s story, despite the evidence presented, the dinner guests are condemning themselves to the degenerated future they are afraid of, hence making the novel a warning example of not accepting new ideas.