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 explores the possibility and challenges of international/interracial female friendship and anti-communitarian hospitality through writings of Victorian female travellers to Meiji Japan between 1854 and 1918. It features three travellers, viz. Isabella Bird, Mary Crawford Fraser, and Marie Stopes. The introduction delineates the context of key events in the Anglo-Japanese relationship and explores the representation of Japan in Victorian travelogues and literary works. Chapter I considers the philosophical dialogue between Jean-Luc Nancy, Maurice Blanchot, and Jacques Derrida on community, friendship, and hospitality. It demonstrates the potential of applying their thinking, notwithstanding its occasional complicity, to an analysis of the place of hitherto marginalised groups, women and foreigners, in Western philosophical models. Chapter II examines relationships between Bird and Japanese natives, especially her interpreter, Ito in Unbeaten Tracks in Japan (1880) in terms of questions of stable identity and translation. It further undertakes a comparative study between the travelogue and Itō no koi (2005) by Nakajima Kyōko. I explore the afterlife of Bird in Japanese literature. Chapter III investigates friendships in Fraser’s A Diplomatist’s Wife in Japan (1898). It uncovers her connection with Japanese female writers in oblivion, Yei Theodra Ozaki and Wakamatsu Shizuko. I discuss the influence her friendships had on Fraser’s fictional works such as The Stolen Emperor (1903), especially on the fair portrayals of Japanese women. Chapter IV explores friendships between the sexes in Stopes’ A Journal from Japan (1910) and articulates its relationship with Love-Letters of a Japanese (1911) and Plays of Old Japan (1913). I examine Stopes’ romantic relationship with Fujī Kenjirō and its influence on her career in sexology. It also investigates Stopes’ collaboration with Sakurai Jōji on Nō translation and exposes complex gender, racial, and linguistic politics. The conclusion explores three Japanese female travellers to Victorian Britain, focusing on their contact with local women. It considers Tsuda Umeko’s Journal in London, Yasui Tetsu’s Wakakihi no ato, and Yosano Akiko’s Pari yori (1914).

O objetivo desta dissertação é apresentar uma leitura de O Morro dos Ventos Uivantes (1847), de Emily Brontë, e de Jane Eyre (1847), de Charlotte Brontë, com foco nas convenções góticas contidas nas duas obras e observando as maneiras como tais convenções interferem nos movimentos das duas protagonistas, Catherine e Jane, cada uma lutando para se adaptar ao seu espaço e, ao mesmo tempo, para realizar seus anseios. Apesar de as duas obras serem estruturalmente diferentes uma da outra, ambas compartilham uma atmosfera gótica intensa, bem como uma consequente densidade psicológica que influencia a disposição mental das duas protagonistas. A leitura dos dois romances foi conduzida com a finalidade de explorar as relações encontradas entre os aspectos estruturais, sociais e psicológicos envolvidos, ressaltando os elementos góticos que representam os desafios que Catherine e Jane são forçadas a enfrentar. A obra The Coherence of Gothic Conventions (1986), da crítica literária Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick, é utilizada para identificar e contextualizar a capacidade que as imagens góticas têm de traduzir o peso imposto pelas convenções sociais sobre o processo natural de crescimento das duas protagonistas. Considerando que esse peso é consideravelmente ampliado pelas práticas sociais ligadas a questões de gênero, foi explorado o conceito de Gótico Feminino, como apresentado pela Professora Carol Margaret Davison. Especial atenção é reservada para as imagens relacionadas com espaço – o espaço psicológico necessário para o crescimento emocional das protagonistas; e o espaço físico, que determina onde e como elas devem se movimentar. Aqui o suporte teórico é oferecido pelas poéticas dos elementos primitivos, de Gaston Bachelard, para análise do corpo de imagens apresentadas nos dois romances. A conclusão comenta as soluções encontradas por Catherine Earnshaw e Jane Eyre para abrir caminho e superar os obstáculos que se lhes apresentam; e também ressalta o quanto as convenções góticas conseguem revelar sobre a estrutura social que elas representam. / This thesis consists of a reading of Emily Brontë‘s Wuthering Heights (1847) and Charlotte Brontë‘s, Jane Eyre (1847), focusing on the body of Gothic conventions they hold, and the ways in which such conventions interfere with the movements of the two female protagonists, Catherine and Jane, each struggling to fit into their space, while trying to accomplish their desires. Although the two works are structurally different in several ways, they share an intense Gothic atmosphere and its consequent psychological density, which influences the mental frame of the two protagonists. In order to explore the relations among the structural, social and psychological aspects involved, a reading of the novels has been conducted, focusing on the presence of Gothic elements that stand for the challenges Catherine and Jane are bound to face. Literary critic Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick‘s work The Coherence of Gothic Conventions (1986) is used to identify and contextualise the capacity of Gothic imagery to reveal the weight of social conventions upon the natural process of growth of the two protagonists. Inasmuch as the pressure becomes intensified by the rules of gender settlements, the concept of Female Gothic is explored, as presented by Professor Carol Margaret Davison. Particular attention is paid to the imagery related to space – psychological space for the protagonists to grow emotionally, and physical space, as determinant of where and how they must move. Here the theoretical support is offered by Gaston Bachelard‘s poetics of the primitive elements, unveiling the body of images presented in the two novels. The conclusion indicates the solutions found by Catherine Earnshaw and by Jane Eyre to find their way and overcome the obstacles they meet; with comments on how revealing Gothic imagery is of the social conventions it represents.

‘The poet’, Eliot wrote, ‘is occupied with frontiers of consciousness beyond which words fail, though meanings still exist’. This dissertation is an investigation into the ways in which four poets – Alfred Tennyson, Thomas Hardy, Gerard Manley Hopkins, and T. S. Eliot – imagine what it might mean to labour in verse towards the ‘frontiers of consciousness’. This is an old question about the value of poetry, about the kinds of understanding, feeling, and participation that become uniquely available as we read (or write) verse. But it is also a question that becomes peculiarly pressing in the nineteenth- and early twentieth-centuries. In my introductory chapter, I sketch out some of the philosophical, theological, and aesthetic contexts in which this question about what poetry might do for us becomes particularly acute: each of these four poets, I suggest, invests in verse as a means of sustaining belief in those things that seem excluded, imperilled, or forfeited by what is felt to be a peculiarly modern or (to use a contested term) ‘secularized’ understanding of the world. To write poetry becomes a labour towards enabling or ratifying otherwise untenable experiences of belief. But while my broader concern is with what is at stake philosophically, theologically, and even aesthetically in this labour towards the frontiers of consciousness, my more particular concern is with the ways in which these poets think in verse about how the poetic organisation of language brings us to momentary consciousness of otherwise unavailable ‘meanings’. For each of these poets, it is as we begin to listen in to the paralinguistic sounds of verse that we become conscious of that which lies beyond the realms of the linguistic imagination. These poets develop figures within their verse in order to theorize the ways in which this peculiarly poetic ‘music’ brings us to consciousness of that which exceeds or transcends the limits of the world in which we think we live. These figures begin as images of the half-seen (glimmering, haunting, dappling, crossing) but become a way of imagining that which we might only half-hear or half-know. Chapter 2 deals with Tennyson’s figure of glimmering light that signals the presence, activity, or territory of the ‘higher poetic imagination’; In Memoriam, I argue, represents the development of this figure into a poetics of the ‘glimpse’, a poetry that repeatedly approaches the horizon of what might be seen or heard. Chapter 3 is concerned with Hardy’s figuring of the ‘hereto’ of verse as a haunted region, his ghostly figures and spectral presences becoming a way of thinking about the strange experiences of listening and encounter that verse affords. Chapter 4 attends to the dappled skins and skies of Hopkins’ verse and the ways in which ‘dapple’ becomes a theoretical framework for thinking about the nature and theological significance of prosodic experience. And Chapter 5 considers the visual and acoustic crossings of Eliot’s verse as a series of attempts to imagine and interrogate the proposition that the poetic organisation of language offers ‘hints and guesses’ of a reality that is both larger and more significant than our own.

<p>This thesis examines the ways in which various practices, such as novel-writing, publishing, book-reviewing, reading for pleasure, adaptation and studying English literature, have produced <i>Jane Eyre</i>’s complex cultural profile. The organizing principle of the study is Paul du Gay, Stuart Hall et al’s ‘circuit of culture’, which identifies five key processes or ‘moments’ as being productive of the meanings that a cultural artefact or text comes to possess. Explaining the meanings which have been attached to <i>Jane Eyre</i> partly involves trying to understand why it has been perceived and described dichotomously. For example, it has been thought of as trivial and serious, radical and conservative, feminine and unfeminine. The investigation begins with the writing process, exploring how and why Charlotte Brontë embedded the text with specific hybrid features. The study then traces how these textual features have acquired meaning in different discourses, focusing primarily on the novel’s reception in Britain in the mid-nineteenth century and in the 1990s. The thesis points to the role played by distinct target-audiences in configurations of <i>Jane Eyre</i>; Charlotte Brontë, publishers, biographers, literary critics, film-makers and teachers have all had specific audiences in mind when they have described, evaluated, regulated and/or creatively reworked the novel, its author’s life and/or the culture in which the author lived. During the course of the twentieth century, <i>Jane Eyre</i> became increasingly thought of as a legitimate object of study at all levels of the education system. The thesis examines how the text has been studied, and contributes to ongoing debates about National Curriculum English by offering ways of allowing more creativity into the classroom.</p>

This thesis examines the ways in which various practices, such as novel-writing, publishing, book-reviewing, reading for pleasure, adaptation and studying English literature, have produced Jane Eyre’s complex cultural profile. The organizing principle of the study is Paul du Gay, Stuart Hall et al’s ‘circuit of culture’, which identifies five key processes or ‘moments’ as being productive of the meanings that a cultural artefact or text comes to possess. Explaining the meanings which have been attached to Jane Eyre partly involves trying to understand why it has been perceived and described dichotomously. For example, it has been thought of as trivial and serious, radical and conservative, feminine and unfeminine. The investigation begins with the writing process, exploring how and why Charlotte Brontë embedded the text with specific hybrid features. The study then traces how these textual features have acquired meaning in different discourses, focusing primarily on the novel’s reception in Britain in the mid-nineteenth century and in the 1990s. The thesis points to the role played by distinct target-audiences in configurations of Jane Eyre; Charlotte Brontë, publishers, biographers, literary critics, film-makers and teachers have all had specific audiences in mind when they have described, evaluated, regulated and/or creatively reworked the novel, its author’s life and/or the culture in which the author lived. During the course of the twentieth century, Jane Eyre became increasingly thought of as a legitimate object of study at all levels of the education system. The thesis examines how the text has been studied, and contributes to ongoing debates about National Curriculum English by offering ways of allowing more creativity into the classroom.

In his groundbreaking work of postcolonial theory, Orientalism, Edward Said puts forth the idea that imperial Europe asserted an identity by constructing the character of its colonized subjects. Said writes that his book tries to “show that European culture gained in strength and identity by setting itself off against the Orient as a sort of surrogate and even underground self” (3). The object of this thesis is a related project, for it too is a search for imperial Britain’s surrogate or underground self. Yet rather than positioning this search within the British colonies, this thesis takes as its context a land and people that were at once more intimate and more alien: the races and landscapes of Fairyland. This Thesis attempts to situate the fairy folklore and literature from the Victorian era within the context of greater social and political ideologies of the age, specifically those pertaining to national identity, imperial power and race. In doing so it will analyze Charles Kingsley’s Water-Babies, Lewis Carroll’s Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland, Kenneth Grahame’s The Golden Age, George MacDonald’s The Princess and the Goblin, Charlotte Brontë’s Jane Eyre and Frances Hodgson Burnett’s The Secret Garden concluding that the British self proposed by these works was an uncomfortable manifestation, and haunted by the anxieties and discontinuities that arose as imperial Britain attempted to navigate an identity within Victorian conceptions of race and power.

This dissertation critically examines why mid-Victorian fiction often dismisses or complicates monetary transactions and monetary charity, even as it negatively portrays differences in social status and wealth. I argue that the novel uses representations of failed charity to reconstruct, however briefly, a non- monetary and non-economic source of value. Further, I examine how the novel uses techniques of both genre and style to predict, form, and critique alternate, non-economic, social models. While tension surrounding the practice of charity arises in the late eighteenth century, the increasing dominance of political economy in public discourse forced Victorian literature to take a strong stance, for reasons of both ethics and genre. This stance is complicated by the eighteenth-century legacy that sees charity as a kind of luxury. If giving to the poor makes us feel good, this logic suggests, surely it isn’t moral. Thus, while much eighteenth- and nineteenth-century literature remains dedicated to the ethics of charity, the practice becomes immensely complex. By discussing the works of Tobias Smollett, Charles Dickens, Elizabeth Barrett Browning, and George Eliot, this project exposes a wide variety of responses to this deep cultural anxiety. These authors are, ultimately, strongly invested in redefining the meaning of benevolence as a valid form of social action by moving that benevolence away from monetary gifts and toward abstractly correct moral feelings, though their individual solutions vary widely. / text

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This dissertation focuses on the triangulated relationship among female sexuality, patriarchy, and empire and examines literary and historical texts to understand how Britons increasingly identified as imperialists over the course of the nineteenth century. This project, the first book-length study of its kind, features analyses of canonical works like Mansfield Park, David Copperfield, and Adam Bede as well as analyses of paintings, etchings, conference proceedings, newspaper advertisements, colonial reports, political tracts, and medical records from Britain and its colonies. I challenge critical conceptions of the fallen woman as a trope of domestic fiction whose position as outcast illustrates the stigmatization of female sex during the nineteenth century, and I argue that the depiction and punishment of fallen women in multiple genres reveal an interest in protecting and maintaining an imperial system that claims moral superiority over the people it colonizes. My critical stance is both feminist and postcolonial, and my work complicates readings of fallen women in Victorian literature while also adding significantly to scholarship on gender and empire begun by Anne McClintock and Philippa Levine. I claim that during the nineteenth century, the fallen woman comes to represent that which will threaten patriarchal and imperial power, and her regulation reveals an intent to purify the British conscience and strengthen the nation’s sense of itself as a moral and exceptional leader in the world. My investigation into fallenness and empire through a wide range of texts underscores the centrality of imperialism to British society and to the lives of Britons living far removed from colonial sites like India or East Africa.