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The texts and records of the household performances of early modern women collected and examined in this thesis, which together have not yet been the subject of any extended scholarly work, reveal that women performed in the household far more often and in many more ways than is yet acknowledged in scholarship. These texts and records also show that the household could be an amenable performance space for early modern women, both amateur and professional, aristocratic and not. This reconceptualization of the place of women’s performances in the household, I argue, necessitates an adjustment of received ideas of the ethical and moral status of those performances as well as a reevaluation of the household itself. I reassess the equation between theatrical performance and immorality and interrogate the “inheren[t] subversive[ness]” that one critic argues is found in all women’s household plays. While I maintain that women’s household performances could have multiple significations, this thesis focuses on performances that permitted women to shape their own reputations positively in household space, where women were agents influencing domestic life through their theatre. Chapter 1, the Introduction, outlines the critical field, positions women within the performance tradition of the household, and discusses the status of their performances, centering on the relationship between theatrical performance, agency, and feminine virtue. Chapter 2 focuses on royal progress entertainment, discussing the performances of domestic virtue of Queen Elizabeth’s female hosts which not only had the capacity to be received as virtuous, but worked to promote familial and class legitimacy. Chapter 3 talks about the banquets created and served by women, identifying those banquets as a form of theatre, and linking women’s creativity with their embodiment of domestic ideals through the performance of hospitality. Chapter 4 discusses touring women performers as accepted, acknowledged, and skillful theatre professionals who were licenced by the state to perform and who were permitted to perform in households and towns across England. / Thesis (Ph.D, English) -- Queen's University, 2007-09-27 15:08:00.304

This study, which is based on close readings of L'Invitee, Les Belles Images and La Femme rompue, focuses on the textual strategies that Simone de Beauvoir uses in her fiction. It shows that madness is an intrinsic quality of the text. Marks of excess, plurality, disruption and transgression are interpreted as an inscription of madness at a discursive level. Madness is discernable in the text whenever the meaningfulness of language is subverted. Chapter One, `L 'Invitee: The Gothic Imagination', argues that, in her first novel, Simone de Beauvoir created a Gothic textual universe in order to confront pain and madness. Gothic conventions and figures are shown to inform the text. In so far as it is Gothic and transgressive the text is mad. Chapter Two, `Continuities in Change: Imagery in L'Invitee, Les Belles Images and La Femme rompue', examines how madness is mediated in the text by images that evoke pain and distress and a sense of lost plenitude. Detailed readings reveal a close affinity between the symbolic landscapes of L'Invitee and the later fiction where excess and hyperbole persist. Chapter Three, `Instability and Incoherence', investigates how disruptive textual strategies unsettle meaning and contribute to the creation of a mad textual universe. It demonstrates how the text subverts notions of a unified and stable identity. Temporal confusion, fragmentation and multi-layering are seen to be a source of the incoherence which exemplifies madness in the text. Traits that disrupt and destabilise the text and duplicate madness are illustrated and discussed. Analysis also reveals how disarticulated and contorted syntax is instrumental in the evocation of the anguish of madness and how syntax can convey a sense of claustrophobia and obsession. Chapter Four, `Language and Meaning: Les Belles Images', locates madness in the text at those points where the meaningfulness of language is subverted. The way plurality, irony, enumeration and repetition enact madness in the text is the focus of attention. It emerges clearly from the close readings undertaken, that Simone de Beauvoir's writing is inflected by forceful emotions and disrupted and destabilised by the excess of madness.

My dissertation argues for a fundamental reorientation of our approach to public intimacy and identifies a lushly pragmatic rhetorical schema via which black, white, and Native women enter colonial American public life. I contend that these early American women employ the language of personal intimacy -- familial, spiritual, domestic -- to craft wide-ranging public interventions. Through references to their private affiliations, they associate themselves with others who share their religious, economic, political, and social concerns and thereby forge semi-public communities. I demonstrate that because such language retains women's often un-egalitarian and un-affective experiences of quotidian intimacy and therefore appears "natural" for women, it masks the radicalism, formal and substantive, of their interventions. Thus, in making public issues intimate, these women discreetly authorize and advance their interests. They use the same techniques whether they are preaching religious principles, positing alternative political models, or promoting preferred agricultural commodities. I rely upon an interdisciplinary body of scholarship, including studies of anthropology, religion, and economic, political, and regional history, to produce dense local studies. Yet, since I interrogate an array of authors and genres -- published and manuscript poetry, diplomatic and legal documents, commonplace books, spiritual diaries, autobiographies, and letters -- my project synthesizes those studies into a history that is multi-denominational, multi-racial, multi-class, and multi-regional. / text

Parts of Women contains a scholarly preface that discusses the woman's body both in fiction and in the experience of being a woman writer. The preface is followed by five original short stories. "Parts of Women" is a three-part story composed of three first-person monologues. "Controlled Burn" involves a woman anthropologist who discovers asbestos in her office. "Tango Lessons" is about a middle-aged woman who's always in search of her true self. "Expatriates" concerns a man who enters the lives of his Hare Krishna neighbors, and "Rio" involves a word-struck man in his attempt to form a personal relationship.

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This dissertation has examined the tanci fiction Jing zhong zhuan, or A Biography of Dedication and Loyalty, authored by a gentry woman writer Zhou Yingfang in the late nineteenth century. I argue that by adapting the well-known patriotic story of General Yue Fei in Chinese history, Zhou Yingfang suggests new directions in grand historical narrative in her own voice and from her own perspective. Negotiating the writing conventions of earlier legends, she turns the stereotyped masculine image of Yue Fei into a hero in both public and domestic settings. In addition, she adds many detailed episodes from Yue Fei's family life and portrays virtuous women in a chaotic historical period, paralleling the conventional narration of wars and politics. Although often (mis)read as a text that inspires nationalism, Jing zhong zhuan actually redefines significant values in late imperial China, including the importance of family and the complex relation between filial piety and political loyalty. The tanci also enriches the notions of female virtues, expanding them from chastity to beauty, learning and management skills. Employing tanci, a unique genre that is closely associated with and quite dominated by women, Zhou Yingfang demonstrates her gendered consciousness in relationship to late nineteenth-century Confucian family dynamics and her self-representation and literary engagement within grand historical narratives. My dissertation sheds light on the dynamics between women's writing and historiography, as well as on the discourses of patriotism and emerging nationalism at the turn of the twentieth-century in China.

This dissertation examines the intersection of nationalism and gender in theatrical and para-theatrical practices by Canadian women artists between 1880-1930, including the works of Madge Macbeth, Mazo de la Roche, Sarah Ann Curzon, Pauline Johnson and Constance Lindsay Skinner and their historical context in order to elucidate why and how these dramatic and para-theatrical works appeared as they did, where they did and when they did. Drama and para-theatrical performances such as mock parliaments, flag drills, Salvation army spectacles, and closet drama serve an important role as discursive public spaces in which a young democracy and budding nation negotiates its gendered struggles concerning cultural hegemony and political participation. Employing postcolonial and feminist critical practices, “spoken” and “unspoken” ideologies regarding gender and nation manifested in these performances are explored and feminist, nationalist and imperialist discourses informing nineteenth- and early twentieth-century theatricality are analyzed. / Graduate