Theories of beauty normally engage with beauty in the abstract, or with reactions to beauty - beauty’s effect on others. This thesis considers how coquettish female beauty has been embodied in Victorian literature by the Brontës, Dickens, George Eliot, Christina Rossetti, and to a lesser extent women’s periodical literature. It argues that the figure of the coquette addresses antithetical discourses on the Victorian woman and assimilates them in such a way as to express a subversive beauty discourse, in which beauty consolidates differing female experiences and formulates the search for identity as a collective female effort. The coquette is linked with controversial women’s issues such as marriage failure, domestic abuse and female eroticism; the ambivalence of her relationship with the text’s heroine shows the scope and limits of female autonomy. The dialectic between rejection and acceptance in which the coquette participates in specific narrative strategies shows women engaged with women’s problems, their erotic potential, and their relationship(s) to each other. The thesis also reflects on feminist literary theory, especially current ideas on female writing, broadly defined as a search for female belonging. Recent criticism holds that the Victorian coquette operates either to show that eroticism was part of the Victorian woman’s identity, or as a passive surface upon which certain aspects of the protagonist are illuminated. This thesis argues that this is only part of the story; additionally, the issue of eroticism is installed within a framework of women’s social, political, and legal concerns, and the coquette can be read as an active site in which aspects of both the coquette and the protagonist are combined to form an innovative way of seeing the Victorian woman.

In many nations, children's literature is a propaganda element for society. The structure of society, both real and imagined, and the composition of the immature mind make children's literature, both good and bad, a method by which to shape future citizens. Through studying the literature of a particular period and in one country, the relationship between children's literature and the history of the times and the ideals of the adults of that age is made clearer. Literature for the young is a record of the spirit of the times.

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Thesis (Ph.D.)--Boston University / The end of the nineteenth century witnessed a Gothic literary revival, which included the publication of Sheridan Le Fanu's Carmilla ( 1872), Robert Louis Stevenson's Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde ( 1886), Oscar Wilde's The Picture of Dorian Gray (1891), H.G. Wells' The Island of Doctor Moreau (1896), and Bram Stoker's Dracula (1897) within a twenty-five year period. The dissertation interprets such late nineteenth-century Gothic texts in light of the rise of Victorian anthropology and an anthropological paradigm based on Darwinian evolutionary theory. Before the 1860s, the study of human beings had been dominated by the discipline of ethnology; however, the ethnological paradigm, based on a Biblical understanding of human history, began to fracture with the discovery of prehistoric human remains at Brixham Cave (1858) and the publication of Darwin's On the Origin of Species (1859). Those events brought the Biblical framework into question and created a sense of cultural trauma reflected in both scientific and popular debates on the origins of humanity. The anthropological paradigm, articulated in the writings of anthropologists such as Sir John Lubbock, Edward Burnett Tylor, and James Ferguson McLennan, managed the traumatic implications of Darwinian evolutionary theory by creating a hierarchical ladder of biological and cultural evolution that affirmed the primacy of human over animal, and civilized over savage. It also, by implication, supported the colonial enterprise by placing the European at the top of that ladder. Late nineteenth-century Gothic fiction posed a fundamental challenge to the optimistic progressionism of the anthropological paradigm and the hierarchical oppositions on which it was based by implying that Englishmen and women were not as different from the animal or savage as they believed, and that evolution itself was not always upward. By doing so, it re-traumatized what the anthropological paradigm attempted to contain, and pointed toward a more diverse and egalitarian definition of the human. The Gothic has often been seen as a conservative genre: the dissertation argues that understanding the ways in which late nineteenth-century Gothic fiction challenged the anthropological paradigm can reveal its disruptive, iconoclastic potential.

This dissertation investigates the cultural, ideological, and literary background of and assumptions underpinning interpretations and representations of Shakespeare’s Ophelia in nineteenth-century Britain. Ophelia was a fundamental image in Victorian iconography, and was appropriated for and implicated in historically embedded social, cultural, and psychological formations and subjected to new methods of critical scrutiny. In art, poetry, fiction, literary criticism, and medical discourse, Ophelia became an example of feminine purity and tenderness, a prototype of Victorian female insanity, and a model for representations of beautiful, drowning women. Drawing on New Historicist theories and methodologies, I use fictional and non-fictional writing from literary, medical, and social discourses in order to elucidate an understanding of the dynamic and compelling relationship between the Victorian period and this fictional Shakespearean character.

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L. T. Meade (1844-1914) was one of the most popular and industrious writers of the Victorian fin de siècle. She is remembered as the creator of the modern girls’ school story, but over the course of a professional career that spanned four decades, Meade wrote close to three hundred books and countless short stories in a variety of genres for readers of all ages. She also edited the highly regarded middle-class girls’ literary magazine Atalanta from 1887 to 1893. She was considered a literary celebrity by the influential Strand Magazine where her innovative medical mysteries and sensational stories of female criminals competed with the works of Arthur Conan Doyle, the creator of Sherlock Holmes. But Meade was more than a successful author. She was also an influential participant in London’s literary circles and an active member of numerous literary professional, and feminist associations. Despite the scope of Meade’s career and her significant presence in the literary marketplace, her name has now passed into relative obscurity. Assessments of Meade in the twentieth century have been limited, dismissive, and generally negative. But as I demonstrate in this dissertation, many of these assessments are based on a narrow reading of her girls’ fiction and an incomplete sense of her professional activity. This dissertation, based on a historically contextualized reading of a broad selection of Meade’s works, focuses on the author as a professional woman writer and editor and highlights some of her significant contributions to popular literature and popular culture generally. The chapters in this study are organized into sections that reflect the trajectory of Meade’s career. Part I, “Meade and the Market,” introduces Meade as a professional writer. It includes biographical information, a discussion of Meade’s self representation, and an examination of a selection of her texts to show how she identified literary trends and used topical issues to frame her stories and market them to publishers and the reading public. Part II, “Meade and Atalanta,” focuses on Meade as a professional woman editor. It consists of three linked chapters on Meade and the girls’ literary magazine Atalanta and includes an examination of Meade’s contributions to juvenile periodical literature as well as a discussion of Atalanta as a family literary magazine. Part III, “New Markets and New Genres,” focuses on Meade as a popular professional woman writer and examines her involvement with the popular press in the years following her departure from Atalanta. It shows how Meade’s involvement with the Strand Magazine signalled a new direction in her literary style and market orientation and highlights her significant contributions to detective and mystery fiction. Throughout this study, I argue that Meade was more than a popular girls’ author; she was also a successful professional woman writer and editor, a shrewd businesswoman, and a significant participant in the literary marketplace. I also argue that Meade’s career merits consideration because it offers important insights into the way fin-de-siècle women writers shaped their careers and positioned themselves in the literary marketplace. / Graduate / 10000-01-01

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