In “The Contest of Marriage: Domestic Authority in Victorian Literature”, I argue that depictions of engaged and newlywed couples in the Victorian novel consistently dismantle the concept of marriage, depicting the process of two individuals attempting to become one couple as a tenuous and even dangerous project to be undertaken during the nineteenth century. By looking at works where the decision to marry comes at the beginning of the novel rather than the conclusion, I examine the ways in which different novelists document and anatomize the consistent failures in the theoretical underpinnings of domesticity and conjugality. Given that gender, separate spheres and even the family unit have been increasingly viewed as unstable divisions and demarcations by prominent voices within nineteenth-century criticism, I argue that certain novelists were consistently engaged in exposing these insufficiencies in not only the establishment of marriage as a concept, but in the home space itself as a hypothetical location of domestic stability and success. This project will contribute to scholarship in the field not only by tracing the similar patterns and structures of seemingly disparate novels, but also by suggesting that the domestic instability discussed in groundbreaking accounts of Victorian gender ideology is not merely a feature of historical and personal accounts of the era, but is in fact a tension running through much of the period’s most popular and widely read literature as well. In recent years, Victorian critics have collectively worked to demonstrate that separate spheres ideology is no longer a sufficient interpretive tool to employ in our attempts to excavate the nineteenth century's construction of marriage and conjugality. Just as John Tosh has argued for the husband's place within the home and Mary Poovey and Elizabeth Langland have argued for the woman's place beyond it, so too does my work demonstrate that more complex systems of gender and power relationships were functioning within even a "typical" Victorian home. Studies of domesticity have typically focused on either those citizens who embraced its precepts or the rebels who rejected them. In my work, I turn instead to characters whose earnest attempts to embody and enjoy domestic perfection are continually thwarted, proving that many writers consistently locate the trouble with domesticity not in the flaws of specific married couples, but in the implicitly universal claims domesticity makes on all married couples. I argue that in many novels of the period, even marriage enthusiasts are often transformed into its bitterest critics, due to its demands for performance and self-erasure of both spouses. Furthermore, even the seemingly neutral space of the idyllic Victorian home is often shown to be destructive to domesticity's goals, rather than lending structural support to the matrimonial endeavor. I conclude that these authors are suggesting that even marriage's harshest critics can never manage to be as persuasive about the relationship's pitfalls, hazards, and breakdowns as the actual experience of getting married inevitably proves to be.

This thesis is set within a framework of the revivalist Christians’ Inner Mission, and presents as a case-study their mission to conscripts stationed in military exercise areas and garrison towns across Sweden. The revivalists’ evangelical zeal is given special attention. This is in contrast to much of the earlier research, which worked with the secularization paradigm formulated by the founders of sociology. Conscription in the early 20th century was regarded in various civilian and military circles as a platform for social and national integration, although these attitudes remain largely unstudied in Sweden’s case. Those engaged in missionizing the army were also drawn to this ‘School of the Nation’. The thesis shows that the motives of those involved in this home mission to soldiers were grounded in religion. However, the expansive missionary work was strengthened by the positions held by its male protagonists in the power structures of society. The mission was maintained by social contacts between an informal alliance of upper-class officers from among the mission’s military members, and by civilian missionaries from lower social classes. A decisive contextual factor for the army-mission as an educational project was that Sweden remained at peace. The civilian contribution to the mission grew as it spread more widely through the country. It is argued in this thesis that the soldiers’ homes were dominated by a discourse of domesticity. This discourse designated a place, a relationship, and a state of mind for the conscript during his free time at the military base. The missionaries were convinced that contact with the domestic and family values of civilian society should be preserved by the soldiers’ homes. The discourse of domesticity also looked ahead to the conscript’s subsequent life in civilian society: the missionaries wished to train up conscripts to be sober, moral family breadwinners.

O presente trabalho propõe a leitura da obra de Adolf Loos (1870-1933) através das transformações históricas que marcaram a Europa na passagem da segunda metade do século XIX à primeira do século XX. A complexidade de sua obra é uma expressão privilegiada para o entendimento das contradições instauradas no período. Por um lado, o fôlego de suas ideias é dado pela persistência de problemáticas que surgiram no século XIX; por outro, parte de sua obsolescência também se explica pela resistência que Loos apresentou a tais mudanças. Transformações que ele identificou como perdas. O tema da perda permeia toda sua produção: nos edifícios, por vezes ele figura na justaposição de elementos contraditórios (tradição ou modernidade), por outras na cisão irreparável entre interior e exterior (público ou privado) e, em alguns casos, o uso de espelhos e aberturas simetricamente dispostas cria uma tensão de ambiguidade entre espaço e imagem (realidade e representação). O eixo de leitura proposto nesta dissertação se estabelece a partir das reações do arquiteto às perdas impostas por sua época. A obra estudada é interpretada como um trabalho de luto. Textos e edifícios representativos do pensamento de Adolf Loos são investigados à luz de algumas reflexões de importantes pensadores da cultura europeia do período, como Walter Benjamin, Camilo Sitte, Georg Simmel e Sigmund Freud. A abordagem se dá através de três temas centrais: a morte da tradição, a perda de vitalidade no espaço público das metrópoles e a decadência da experiência subjetiva. / It has been over a century since Adolf Loos\'s (1870-1933) most famous works, such as Ornament and Crime (1908) and Goldman & Salatsch building (1911), came to fruition. And, in spite of that, the contradictory nature of his legacy as an architect and writer still fuels and replenishes the debates and investigations of scholars to this day. This dissertation proposes a look at Adolf Loos\'s works through the historical transformations that characterized the transition of the second half of the nineteenth century to the twentieth century. The complexity of his production is a powerful expression of the contradictions that established this period. On one hand, the perseverance of his ideas comes from the persistence of issues that were originated on the nineteenth century, on the other; his obsolescence can also be explained by his opposition to the changes that came along with the new century. Loos identifies these changes as losses. Loss is a theme that impregnates all his production. In his architecture it often surfaces as contradictory elements (tradition and modernity) overlapping one another, or, at times, as an irreparable rupture between interior and exterior (public and private), and in some cases he creates a tension of ambiguity between space and image (reality and representation) by the use of mirrors and symmetrically opposed openings. It is this demeanor, and his reactions to the losses imposed by his time, that will be the axis that guides this dissertation. We can interpret many signs in his work as symbols of mourning. We investigate writings and buildings that represent his thought through the light of important contemporary thinkers of occidental culture, such as Walter Benjamin, Georg Simmel, Camilo Sitte e Sigmund Freud. We will approach his production by three lines: the death of tradition, the loss of vitality of public spaces in the metropolis and the decadence of subjective experience.

Sara Payson Willis Eldredge Farrington Parton, more famously known as the elusive Fanny Fern, employs three autobiographical personae mediated by fiction in her debut novel, Ruth Hall: (1) Ruth Hall, the novel's protagonist; (2) Floy, the fictional Ruth's pseudonym; and (3) Fanny Fern, Parton's real-life pseudonym and the name under which Ruth Hall was published. Together these personae assert a fragmented presence that incorporates various voices and lives, allowing for exploration, growth, and interactivity.Philippe Lejeune's autobiographical contract outlines three specific guidelines for autobiography—that it be a narrative, that it explore personal history, and that it link author and protagonist. Ruth Hall participates in two-thirds of Lejeune's contract, though Parton's conscious fictionalization demands a revisiting of the autobiographical contract, revealing the impossibility of recording truth as well as the impracticality of a unitary self.Through her use of autobiographical personae in Ruth Hall and in her personal life, Parton succeeds in rewriting the narrative of domesticity for the nineteenth-century American woman. Her self-conceptualization embraces multiplicity as she demands to be seen as "more than."

The First World War wrought untold destruction on the physical and psychological landscape of Europe. For Britain, the immediate post-war period represented no less than a national “nostos,” or homecoming, and few social institutions were so fragmented by the conflict as the home. This thesis will explore the various conceptions of “home,” from the nation and the domestic sphere to post-war consciousness, through the lens of Virginia Woolf’s Mrs. Dalloway and Rebecca West’s The Return of the Soldier. Though unique in style and scope, Woolf and West interrogate and revise pre-war notions of “home” and suggest a Modernist aesthetic of what it is to be both at “home” and at home in the world.

The First World War wrought untold destruction on the physical and psychological landscape of Europe. For Britain, the immediate post-war period represented no less than a national “nostos,” or homecoming, and few social institutions were so fragmented by the conflict as the home. This thesis will explore the various conceptions of “home,” from the nation and the domestic sphere to post-war consciousness, through the lens of Virginia Woolf’s "Mrs. Dalloway" and Rebecca West’s "The Return of the Soldier." Though unique in style and scope, Woolf and West interrogate and revise pre-war notions of “home” and suggest a Modernist aesthetic of what it is to be both at “home” and at home in the world.

Recent scholarship has examined the lived experience of unmarried women in nineteenth- and twentieth-century Britain, both in cities and in the countryside. Typically, scholarship in this field has focussed on women's social identity whether spinster, widow or lesbian and addressed how these types of women were variously used in fiction and the press to contest or uphold the gendered status quo. This thesis problematises the distinct characterisation of these social identities by examining works which seek to unify female social identity at the fin de siècle through a common modern experience: the conflict between individual and collective life. All of the female subjects examined in this thesis whether author, artist, or fictional character, and whether married, separated, unmarried, widowed, homosexual, or not easily identifiable either way are solitary figures. Their movement within and interaction with their environments reveal the uneasy combination of separation and exposure experienced by working women of all classes at the fin de siècle. This thesis examines the solitary female figure in works of British fiction produced between 1880 and 1922. It considers the pressures and implications of separation and exposure in relation to female celebrity and creative practices at the fin de siècle. My methodology involves examining the biography and auto/biographical works of Amy Levy (1861-1889), George Egerton (pseud. of Mary Chavelita Dunne Bright; 1859-1945), Sarah Grand (pseud. of Frances Elizabeth Bellenden McFall; 1854-1943) and Charlotte Mew (1869-1923), and drawing out aspects that speak to the desires for privacy and, conversely, publicity and/or companionship. I identify how their lived experience of this conflict broadly, between society and solitude affected the depiction of modern female consciousness in their literary works by examining their female characters subjective interaction with three environments: the foreign landscape, the home, and the city. My aim is to identify how Levy, Egerton, Grand and Mew used their literary works to acknowledge and retaliate against the restrictions which continued to limit urban women's physical, social and psychological autonomy.

O presente trabalho propõe a leitura da obra de Adolf Loos (1870-1933) através das transformações históricas que marcaram a Europa na passagem da segunda metade do século XIX à primeira do século XX. A complexidade de sua obra é uma expressão privilegiada para o entendimento das contradições instauradas no período. Por um lado, o fôlego de suas ideias é dado pela persistência de problemáticas que surgiram no século XIX; por outro, parte de sua obsolescência também se explica pela resistência que Loos apresentou a tais mudanças. Transformações que ele identificou como perdas. O tema da perda permeia toda sua produção: nos edifícios, por vezes ele figura na justaposição de elementos contraditórios (tradição ou modernidade), por outras na cisão irreparável entre interior e exterior (público ou privado) e, em alguns casos, o uso de espelhos e aberturas simetricamente dispostas cria uma tensão de ambiguidade entre espaço e imagem (realidade e representação). O eixo de leitura proposto nesta dissertação se estabelece a partir das reações do arquiteto às perdas impostas por sua época. A obra estudada é interpretada como um trabalho de luto. Textos e edifícios representativos do pensamento de Adolf Loos são investigados à luz de algumas reflexões de importantes pensadores da cultura europeia do período, como Walter Benjamin, Camilo Sitte, Georg Simmel e Sigmund Freud. A abordagem se dá através de três temas centrais: a morte da tradição, a perda de vitalidade no espaço público das metrópoles e a decadência da experiência subjetiva. / It has been over a century since Adolf Loos\'s (1870-1933) most famous works, such as Ornament and Crime (1908) and Goldman & Salatsch building (1911), came to fruition. And, in spite of that, the contradictory nature of his legacy as an architect and writer still fuels and replenishes the debates and investigations of scholars to this day. This dissertation proposes a look at Adolf Loos\'s works through the historical transformations that characterized the transition of the second half of the nineteenth century to the twentieth century. The complexity of his production is a powerful expression of the contradictions that established this period. On one hand, the perseverance of his ideas comes from the persistence of issues that were originated on the nineteenth century, on the other; his obsolescence can also be explained by his opposition to the changes that came along with the new century. Loos identifies these changes as losses. Loss is a theme that impregnates all his production. In his architecture it often surfaces as contradictory elements (tradition and modernity) overlapping one another, or, at times, as an irreparable rupture between interior and exterior (public and private), and in some cases he creates a tension of ambiguity between space and image (reality and representation) by the use of mirrors and symmetrically opposed openings. It is this demeanor, and his reactions to the losses imposed by his time, that will be the axis that guides this dissertation. We can interpret many signs in his work as symbols of mourning. We investigate writings and buildings that represent his thought through the light of important contemporary thinkers of occidental culture, such as Walter Benjamin, Georg Simmel, Camilo Sitte e Sigmund Freud. We will approach his production by three lines: the death of tradition, the loss of vitality of public spaces in the metropolis and the decadence of subjective experience.

By using the concept of forms in this analysis of “The Renegade,” postwar domestic life is analyzed for the uncanny. By locating repetitions in domestic life, between characters, and in speech, situations are identified where the uncanny moves into the domestic. As a result, the perception of reality of the protagonist, Mrs. Walpole, is damaged, reiterating the impossibility of sanity in a postwar housewife’s domestic life.

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