My dissertation examines the cross-class relations of Victorian women separated by social status but brought together by their faith in a subversive Christian God who supports female labour. Using original archival research, this project documents the untold story of working-class women and their middle-class allies who challenged patriarchal interpretations of Christian theology and, particularly, the limitations placed on women’s material lives. Drawing on Victorian social thought, feminist autobiography theory, and contemporary body theology, my project pursues two complementary objectives. The first aim is to bring the neglected voices of working-class women into the debates about gender, labour, and cross-class relations that defined the Victorian period. The second is to trace the origins of a feminist “theology from below,” which, born out of the material grittiness of everyday life in the nineteenth century, emphasized the incarnational nature of all bodies, including those labeled dirty, disabled, and perverse. My first two chapters respectively explore the diaries of two well-known Victorian women, Josephine Butler and Hannah Cullwick. Both reconfigure Christian discourses of mission and servitude, seeking not only agency within their positions of subjugation but also new models of relationality. The final two chapters bring together the voices of Jane Andrew (a farm worker) and Ruth Wills (a factory worker) with the writings of fin-de-siècle Christian socialists to construct a politics of redemption based on an ethics of inter-relation that, instead of positioning some bodies as “godly” and others as in need of “saving,” recognizes the immanent divine spirit animating all material life. Using contemporary feminist theology to strengthen the incarnational politics found in these Victorian writings, I argue in favour of bodily transgression—the willingness to walk, talk, touch, and labour in ways that are thought to be “perverse” and “ungodly”—as a legitimate answer to Christ’s call to defy social hierarchies, especially the ones established by capitalist modernity. / Thesis / Doctor of Philosophy (PhD)

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This work examines women's relationships to language through the work of Canadian and American innovative women writers who write in, out of and through multiple non-English languages as a way of challenging English linguistic dominance and the patriarchal and imperial power structures upheld therein. The theoretical thrust of "The Translating Subject" is to explore the politics of multilingualism as an aesthetic strategy. Multilingualism, a notable strategy in women's writing of the last thirty years, permits the post-colonial writer to resist discursive colonization, as well as express bi-cultural identity through bilingual writing and what Evelyn Nien-ming Ch'ien calls "weird English." The three women about whom I write, Erin Mouré, Nicole Brossard and Kathy Acker, do not use multilingualism to express bi-cultural identity, but rather write in multiple non-English languages as part of a feminist knowledge project that challenges the dominance of English as a lingua franca and in so doing creates estrangement from western humanistic philosophical systems. While each writer’s works have received much critical recognition, to date their use of multiple non-English languages across their corpuses remains one of the most striking yet under-theorized aspects of their writings. / Thesis / Doctor of Philosophy (PhD)

This thesis examines trans women's contemporary writing in relation to a theory of the excessive object, sublimity, transmisogyny and minor literature. In doing so, this text is influenced by Susan Stryker's work on monstrosity, abjection and transgender rage in the article “My Words to Victor Frankenstein Above the Village of Chamounix: Performing Transgender Rage” (1994). The excessive object refers to a concept coined in this thesis to describe sublimity from another perspective than that of the tradition following from Immanuel Kant's A Critique of Judgment, building on feminist scholarship on the aesthetic of the sublime. Of particular relevance are critiques of the patriarchal dynamics of sublimity and the idea of the feminine sublime as it is explored with reference to literature by Barbara Freeman in The Feminine Sublime: Gender and Excess in Women's Fiction (1995). Following from the feminist critique of sublimity, trans women's writing is explored as minor literature through a re-reading of Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari's work on Franz Kafka in Kafka. Toward a Minor Literature (1986), with attention to the importance that conditions of impossibility, marginality and unintelligibility holds for the political possibilities of minor literature. These readings form the basis for an analysis of four literary texts by two contemporary authors, Elena Rose, also known as little light, and Sybil Lamb, in addition to a deeper re-engagement with Stryker's work. In so doing, this thesis also touches on topics of power, erasure, trauma, self-sacrifice, appropriation and unrepresentability.

L’étude comparative de Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl (Harriet Jacobs), Our Nig ; Sketches from the Life of a Free Black (Harriet Wilson) et The Bondwoman’s Narrative (Hannah Crafts) s’attache à ouvrir de nouvelles perspectives sur la singularité du sujet féminin noir dans les anfractuosités de l’écriture autobiographique du récit d’esclave. Si ces femmes auteurs se constituent en témoins privilégiés de la condition féminine noire de l’Amérique « antebellum », elles n’engagent pas moins leur plume dans l’activisme. L’enjeu de cette thèse est de revenir sur les liens entre écriture et féminin en prenant comme point de départ l’œuvre elle-même, fût-elle autobiographie ou fiction. La saisie de soi et du monde et la quête identitaire sont des thèmes fondamentaux de la tradition romanesque africaine américaine où des voix marquantes se succèdent. L’affranchissement du genre autobiographique s’affirme comme instance de survie où la mise en perspective de la fiction permet de révéler la vérité du sujet. Ainsi, la question du genre constitue la trame de ce panorama où sont examinés la nature du discours du sujet noir, l’écriture du corps féminin, et le théâtre « ima-gyn-aire » d’un sujet en crise. En véritable héritière de Dickens et Byron, Hannah Crafts s’attache à créer des correspondances entre les genres, tandis que Harriet Wilson adresse une lettre ouverte à Emerson et Harriet Jacobs subvertit le roman sentimental. Ces trois femmes situent, contre toute attente, l’esthétique du récit d’esclave au carrefour de la littérature autobiographique, sentimentale, gothique et picaresque. Nous verrons, à travers ce travail, que ce n’est pas tant l’anatomie qui distingue le sujet mais plutôt la façon qu’a le sujet de se ranger d’un côté ou de l’autre du genre ; le sujet féminin peut désormais évoluer dans un nouvel espace le libérant de l’emprise du masculin. Cette thèse est également l’occasion d’une réflexion sur la dialectique de l’historicité et la littérarité où l’engagement politique de l’auteur du récit d’esclave, qui est appelé à s’imposer comme littérature, invite à porter un nouveau regard sur la production littéraire féminine avant-gardiste, et ainsi donner un nouvel élan à la littérature africaine américaine. / The comparative study of Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl (Harriet Jacobs), Our Nig ; Sketches from the Life of a Free Black (Harriet Wilson), and The Bondwoman’s Narrative (Hannah Crafts) aims at opening up new perspectives on the specificity of the female subject, through the slave narrative’s autobiographical writing. If these women writers stand as privileged witnesses of the female condition in Antebellum America, they do not remain passive nonetheless. The aim of this dissertation is to approach the links between « writing » and « feminine », by taking into account the text itself, be it autobiographical or fictionalized. Significantly enough, self-consciousness, identity and the construction of a self through writing are definitely major components of the African American literary tradition in which outstanding voices are singled out. The slave narrative tends to drift away from autobiography in order to afford its survival and conforms to the conventions that proved successful, thus revealing the truth of the subject. In this perspective, gender is the key issue of this study which brings an exclusive insight on black women’s writing. Discursive difference, writing the female body, and a staged conflicted subject are the core themes of this work. As a follower of Dickens and Byron, Hannah Crafts creates a unique blend of genres, while Harriet Wilson’s modus operandi is to rewrite Emerson’s reflections on society, and Harriet Jacobs offers a subversion of the sentimental novel. By all means, these female slave narratives’ « tour de force » lies in the aesthetics and poetics of the genre located at the crossroads of autobiography, sentimental fiction, the gothic and the picaresque. The subject determines its own sexuation, which enables the female subject to break free from the male subject. This dissertation also offers the opportunity to raise the question of history and literature. The slave narrative falls within the frame of literature as the writer’s political stance is an invitation to reconsider avant-garde women’s literary production within the African American literary canon.

Comment comprendre l’abjection qui travaille les textes littéraires de femmes auteures contemporaines ? Quelle abjection habite les récits Putain (2001), Folle (2004) et À ciel ouvert (2007) de la Québécoise Nelly Arcan? D’abord, sont esquissées une synthèse des multiples acceptions théoriques de l’abjection et une liste d’« objets » à l’abjection archétypale, avant de montrer comment l’abject est susceptible d’être dialectiquement relevé en son contraire, notamment dans l’œuvre littéraire. Une carte de l’imaginaire de l’abjection arcanienne est ensuite dressée : les représentations abjectes du féminin donnent naissance à plusieurs topos spécifiques, et des mécanismes abjects dé-forment le corps du texte, entraîné dans la logique tragique de l’éternel retour. Puis les effets performatifs du texte arcanien sont examinés : sur le plan affectif, il permettent une purification de l’abjection et, sur le plan discursif et énonciatif, une critique de celle-ci. Enfin, le corpus arcanien, à la fois poétiquement, esthétiquement et performativement, s’inscrit dans le sillage des grands écrivains de l’abjection du XXe siècle. C’est, en tout cas, ce que les résultats de cette étude permettent de conclure. / How the abjection inhabiting women’s writing can be understood? What abjection lies in Quebec writer Nelly Arcan’s narratives Putain (2001), Folle (2004) and À ciel ouvert (2007)? First of all, a synthesis of the theoretical perspectives among abjection and a list of archetypal abject « objects » are drawn, before presenting how the abject can be solved dialectically into its opposite, notably through a work of art. The imaginary of the Arcanian abjection is then mapped. Feminine abject representations draw specific topoï and abject mecanisms un-shape the text’s body, led by the eternal return’s tragic logic. Further on, performative effects of Arcan’s text are explored : on an affective level, they allow the purification of abjection, and on a discursive and uttering level, a critique of the later. Finally, as shown by this study’s results, the Arcanian corpus should be considered in the wake of the great XXth century writers of abjection.

Through her texts depicting amorous adventures, Eliza Haywood engages with critical, contemporary discussions about power relations and consent in both social and legal constructs. Her texts resist the boundary between the private domain of interpersonal relationships and the public domain of political relations. Rather, her fiction engages in a wide-reaching discourse that explores the interrelations between power, agency, consent, and education, and lays bare the ways in which societal roles and expectations are reinforced in damaging ways. This thesis aims to prove that Haywood’s repetition of central motifs—including the continued tension between resisting and yielding to sexual pressure or temptation, and the line between seduction and rape—serves to question how these behaviours become normalized and naturalized. Through analyzing three categories of relationships—women and their fathers or guardians, women and their lovers, and women with other women—this thesis unpacks how women’s agency is stifled by parental relationships, transferred to male lovers, and finally empowered by female intimacy.

L’étude comparative de Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl (Harriet Jacobs), Our Nig ; Sketches from the Life of a Free Black (Harriet Wilson) et The Bondwoman’s Narrative (Hannah Crafts) s’attache à ouvrir de nouvelles perspectives sur la singularité du sujet féminin noir dans les anfractuosités de l’écriture autobiographique du récit d’esclave. Si ces femmes auteurs se constituent en témoins privilégiés de la condition féminine noire de l’Amérique « antebellum », elles n’engagent pas moins leur plume dans l’activisme. L’enjeu de cette thèse est de revenir sur les liens entre écriture et féminin en prenant comme point de départ l’œuvre elle-même, fût-elle autobiographie ou fiction. La saisie de soi et du monde et la quête identitaire sont des thèmes fondamentaux de la tradition romanesque africaine américaine où des voix marquantes se succèdent. L’affranchissement du genre autobiographique s’affirme comme instance de survie où la mise en perspective de la fiction permet de révéler la vérité du sujet. Ainsi, la question du genre constitue la trame de ce panorama où sont examinés la nature du discours du sujet noir, l’écriture du corps féminin, et le théâtre « ima-gyn-aire » d’un sujet en crise. En véritable héritière de Dickens et Byron, Hannah Crafts s’attache à créer des correspondances entre les genres, tandis que Harriet Wilson adresse une lettre ouverte à Emerson et Harriet Jacobs subvertit le roman sentimental. Ces trois femmes situent, contre toute attente, l’esthétique du récit d’esclave au carrefour de la littérature autobiographique, sentimentale, gothique et picaresque. Nous verrons, à travers ce travail, que ce n’est pas tant l’anatomie qui distingue le sujet mais plutôt la façon qu’a le sujet de se ranger d’un côté ou de l’autre du genre ; le sujet féminin peut désormais évoluer dans un nouvel espace le libérant de l’emprise du masculin. Cette thèse est également l’occasion d’une réflexion sur la dialectique de l’historicité et la littérarité où l’engagement politique de l’auteur du récit d’esclave, qui est appelé à s’imposer comme littérature, invite à porter un nouveau regard sur la production littéraire féminine avant-gardiste, et ainsi donner un nouvel élan à la littérature africaine américaine. / The comparative study of Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl (Harriet Jacobs), Our Nig ; Sketches from the Life of a Free Black (Harriet Wilson), and The Bondwoman’s Narrative (Hannah Crafts) aims at opening up new perspectives on the specificity of the female subject, through the slave narrative’s autobiographical writing. If these women writers stand as privileged witnesses of the female condition in Antebellum America, they do not remain passive nonetheless. The aim of this dissertation is to approach the links between « writing » and « feminine », by taking into account the text itself, be it autobiographical or fictionalized. Significantly enough, self-consciousness, identity and the construction of a self through writing are definitely major components of the African American literary tradition in which outstanding voices are singled out. The slave narrative tends to drift away from autobiography in order to afford its survival and conforms to the conventions that proved successful, thus revealing the truth of the subject. In this perspective, gender is the key issue of this study which brings an exclusive insight on black women’s writing. Discursive difference, writing the female body, and a staged conflicted subject are the core themes of this work. As a follower of Dickens and Byron, Hannah Crafts creates a unique blend of genres, while Harriet Wilson’s modus operandi is to rewrite Emerson’s reflections on society, and Harriet Jacobs offers a subversion of the sentimental novel. By all means, these female slave narratives’ « tour de force » lies in the aesthetics and poetics of the genre located at the crossroads of autobiography, sentimental fiction, the gothic and the picaresque. The subject determines its own sexuation, which enables the female subject to break free from the male subject. This dissertation also offers the opportunity to raise the question of history and literature. The slave narrative falls within the frame of literature as the writer’s political stance is an invitation to reconsider avant-garde women’s literary production within the African American literary canon.

One of the many cultural anxieties that existed during the nineteenth century in antebellum America centered on the dubious status of authenticity of one’s emotions, gender expression, or socioeconomic class. The fluctuating socioeconomic landscape of antebellum America destabilized the logic of categorization, rendering it an ineffectual means by which to evaluate others’ identities. In her novel The Hidden Hand, or, Capitola the Madcap, E. D. E. N. Southworth explores instead of censures the transformative properties of the self, specifically in terms of gender and class. Her interest in this lack of authenticity, or transparency regarding one’s self and intentions, is reflected by several characters in the novel who regularly engage in performance. Southworth codes manipulation, inauthenticity, and performance as distinctly masculine traits, whereas honesty, transparency, and guilelessness are coded as feminine. She draws on these idealized depictions to make a point about the limiting nature of such codified standards—and to disavow masculine manipulation and feminine passivity—before going on to complicate these binaries through Capitola Le Noir and Traverse Rocke. The implicit ideological thrust of The Hidden Hand points to the unstable, performative nature of gender as a construct. Both characters destabilize identity categories to reveal the arbitrary nature of gender and the harmful constraints of gender roles. They stage the confrontation between the reality of one’s body and the antebellum ideologies of femininity and masculinity. Capitola and Traverse are ultimately held up as ideal figures of femininity and masculinity, respectively, because their synthesis of traits produces an androgyny valorized by Southworth.

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