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Catherine Clément, in <I>The Newly Born Woman</I>, regards 'magic, spectacle and illness' as the performance of the feminine. In studying the narratives of masquerading and miming women, these are the images which I locate: the magic of the sorceress, the spectacle of the transvestites or the illness of the hysteric. Within this thesis, I study instances of masquerade or mimicry, and their influence upon gender identity, in a selection of texts by nineteenth century women written for a particularly feminine audience: <I>Belinda</I> (1801) by Maria Edgeworth, <I>Lady Audley's Secret </I>(1861) by Mary Elizabeth Braddon, <I>The Chase, Or, A Long Fatal Love Chase</I> (1866) by Louisa Alcott, <I>Through One Administration</I> (1883) and <I>The Secret Garden</I> (1913), both by Frances Hodgson Burnett. My approach is neither historical nor chronological. Moving away from historicising the masquerade, I mirror the fate of the masked occasion in history: its attenuation and sublimation inside the domestic. Rather than focusing on contextuality, I concentrate on textuality. The interiorised nature of that performance demands that my approach becomes theoretical, and in particular, psychoanalytic, given that both the masquerade and psychoanalysis deals with gender as construction and representation. By resisting chronology, I can express a reluctance to assume a progression towards a 'truth' or 'reality' and allow the masquerade to remain complex. Primarily I am interested in examining the 'theatrical' representation of the various female bodies written into the narratives. However, I am also concerned with textual masquerade/mime: whether the novels studied operate within a system of masquerade or mimicry and whether the discursive impulse is one of the capitulation or subversion. As I read femininity as performance, or as spectacle, constructed by a masculine audience, and represented by the feminine, I question the area 'behind-the-mask', and what lies there - indeed, whether it is possible to articulate it.

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The fiction of Dickens and Collins abounds with references to the illegitimate. In the mid-Victorian period there is an increase in illegitimate characters and circumstances which relates both to the topicality of the issue and to events in the authors individual and collaborative private lives. Illegitimacy addresses personal and social anxieties in four major novels of the 1850s and 1860s: Bleak House (1852-53), Little Dorrit (1855-57) by Dickens and The Woman in White (1860) and No Name (1862) by Collins. Dickens analyses illegitimacy in Bleak House psychologically and socially through Esther Summerson, but her narrative reveals contradictions between Dickens challenge of contemporary attitudes towards the illegitimate and his subscription to the moral code behind the views. In Little Dorrit Dickens confines his study of illegitimacy to character in order to examine the psychological consequences of illegitimacy on the individual. The novel suggests that illegitimacy is another form of social and legal imprisonment. In contrast in The Woman in White Collins exploits the sensationalism surrounding illegitimacy by using it to create an exciting plot at the inception of the sensation genre. His suggestion in this novel that bastards are legally blank and able to reconstruct their identity is continued in No Name; this later novel directly challenges the laws defining and controlling illegitimacy. While Collins never matches Dickens integration of social and moral issues into the novel s structure, the older author appreciated Collins strength in creating detective narratives. Illegitimacy was relevant to the private lives of both Dickens and Collins in the period. While the authors always tried to keep their public and private lives separate, their romantic relationships reveal a personal motive for discussing the plight of the illegitimate in their novels. There is a distinct possibility that Dickens had an illegitimate child with his mistress Ellen Ternan while Collins had three illegitimate children with Martha Rudd. The novels articulate the tension between what Dickens and Collins the authors were trying to achieve and what the novels themselves disclose.

This thesis examines the popular and non-canonical Victorian novelist Ouida (Maria Louise de la Ramée) her relationship with her publishers and the reception of her works. In particular, through the study of published and unpublished correspondence, as well as nineteenth century periodicals, certain views concerning the writer and her oeuvre will be revised and amended, especially in the context of social and moral standards, anticipated from the female fictional character and the artist, the writer. The first chapter will concentrate on Ouida’s correspondence and will argue that the author’s reputation and sales were not only damaged by her ostensibly immoral plots but also as a result of her publishers’s differing priorities. In order to delineate the content of these ‘indecent’ novels and later the impact they had on reviewers, critics and readers, as well as Ouida’s writing, four of her three-decker novels have been selected for critical discussion. Strathmore (1865) is discussed in relation to sensation fiction and marriage law and Folle-Farine (1871) as an examination of inequality between classes and genders. Francis Cowley Burnand’s parody Strapmore (1878) is then read as a critical account of and response to Ouida’s ideologies. The thesis will then examine the controversy surrounding Moths (1880), and In Maremma (1882) will be read as a response to this controversy through its relation to mythology and the representation of the artist. The analysis of these novels and Ouida’s correspondence with her agent and publishers will trace the path that led to the gradual decline in her reputation and the posterior obscurity of her works.

Dans l'échange verbal entre plusieurs personnes, des termes en particulier sont souvent employés pour s'adresser à autrui : il s'agit des termes d'adresse. Ces termes peuvent être considérés comme créateurs de liens entre le langage et la société par le fait qu'ils fournissent des informations non sans intérêt sur la relation unissant les interlocuteurs. Il existe divers moyens de communiquer et de traduire une certaine forme de politesse, de familiarité, de distance, d'affection, de haine, etc., dont ces termes font partie. En plus de leur valeur sémantique, ils possèdent une valeur sociale et culturelle non négligeable.Les huit romans retenus dans cette étude, écrits par quatre grands écrivains de l'époque victorienne (Charlotte Brontë, Charles Dickens, George Eliot et Anthony Trollope), offrent au lecteur curieux un aperçu privilégié de la deuxième moitié du XIXème siècle. Outre l'aspect littéraire, les thèmes abordés en relation avec les événements de l'époque intéresseront le lecteur historien et le mode de vie et les mœurs décrits fourniront de précieux détails au lecteur sociologue, tous ces aspects étant également facilement accessibles au lecteur ordinaire. Cet examen synchronique des termes d'adresse permet, non seulement de montrer la pluralité des termes pouvant être utilisés en adresse directe, mais aussi de souligner l'importance des facteurs linguistiques, paralinguistiques et extra-linguistiques dans toute étude de cette nature. / In verbal exchange between several speakers, a particular category of linguistic sign is frequently used when naming the participants: these are known as terms of address. Insofar as they provide information about the nature of the relation that unite the members of the group, these terms can be regarded as a means of creating links between language and society. They are also among the main contributors to the various systems implemented in the expression and communication of courtesy, familiarity, distance, affection, loathing, etc. Apart from their semantic value, they are of an indubitable socio-cultural interest.The eight novels, written by four major Victorian authors (Charlotte Brontë, Charles Dickens, George Eliot and Anthony Trollope) that have been chosen for this study, provide, for the curious reader, a precious insight into the second half of the nineteenth century. Of great appeal to the lay reader, the themes developed in their historical context – apart from the purely literary aspect – cannot fail to interest the social historian and the customs and conventions described contain precious data for the sociologist. This synchronic study of terms of address, not only reveals the plurality of the terms that are available in verbal exchange, but also underlines the importance of the linguistic, paralinguistic and extra-linguistic factors that should be taken into account in any study of this nature.

This dissertation joins a vibrant conversation in the social sciences about the challenging nature of care labor as well as feminist discussions about the role of the daughter in Victorian culture. It explores the literary presence of the middle class managing daughter in the Victorian home. Collectively, the novels in this study articulate social anxieties about the unclear and unstable role of daughters in the family, the physically and emotionally challenging work they, and all women, do, and the struggle for daughters to find a place in a family hierarchy, which is often structured not by effort or affection, but by proscribed traditional roles, which do not easily adapt to managing daughters, even if they are the ones holding the family together. The managing daughter is a problem not accounted for in any conventional domestic structure or ideology so there is no role, no clear set of responsibilities and no boundaries that could, and arguably should, define her obligations, offer her opportunities for empowerment, or set necessary limits on the broad cultural mandate she has to comfort and care others. The extremes she is often pushed to reveals the stresses and hidden conflicts for authority and autonomy inherent in domestic labor without the iconic angel in the house rhetoric that so often masks the difficulties of domestic life for women. She gains no authority or stability no matter how loving or even how necessary she is to a family because there simply is no position in the parental family structure for her. The managing daughter thus reveals a deep crack in the structure of the traditional Victorian family by showing that it often cannot accommodate, protect, or validate a loving non-traditional family member because it values traditional hierarchies over emotion or effort. Yet, in doing so, it also suggests that if it is position not passion that matters, then as long as a woman assumes the right position in the family then deep emotional connections to others are not necessary for her to care competently for others.

Victorians frequently conflated body and text by using terms of medical diagnosis to talk about literature and, in turn, literary terms to talk about the body. In light of this conflation, this dissertation focuses on the intersection between narrative form and disability in nineteenth-century fiction and interrogates how the shape of Victorian fiction both informed and reflected the era’s developing notions of disability. Examining this intersection of body and text in several genres and across seven decades, from Frederic Shoberl’s 1832 English translation of Victor Hugo’s Notre-Dame de Paris to Arthur Conan Doyle’s “The Adventure of the Crooked Man” (1893) from the Sherlock Holmes series, I show how the structural forms of these works reveal that disability’s conceptualization during the Victorian era was frequently dialogic, incongruously understood as both deviant and commonplace. My research thus contributes to our understanding of disability’s complex development as a concept, one that did not immediately or irrevocably marginalize people, but rather struggled to negotiate the limits, capabilities, and meanings of bodies in a rapidly changing culture. / Graduate / 2020-04-19

Late nineteenth-century Victorian adventure novels offer a complex depiction of manhood in relation to colonial adversaries. H. Rider Haggard's 1880s novels portray imperial adventure as an opportunity for masculine rejuvenation, while later adventure novels express a sense of imperial dread and suggest that adventure traumatizes, instead of rejuvenates, masculinity. All of these novels offer insight into a larger shift in Victorian thought concerning Britain's role as an imperial power. The novels define masculinity in two distinct ways: as modern and as medieval. Each novel approaches modern manhood as impotent when faced with the colonial threat, but the narratives all offers a different interpretation of medieval masculinity, underscoring the vexed nature of the Victorian's relationship with the past. H. Rider Haggard's novels, King Solomon's Mines (1885) and She (1887), suggest that imperial adventure offers modern manhood rejuvenation and purpose through interaction and eventual suppression of the colonial female. Haggard offers an optimistic portrayal of adventure because of both the men's distinctly medieval form of physical rejuvenation and the men's ability to influence the landscape in their favor. Authors Bram Stoker and Richard Marsh present a vastly different interpretation of empire and medieval masculinity in their 1897 novels Dracula and The Beetle. Adventure traumatizes the men in the later novels, and their hysteria attests to their effeminate lack of masculine virility. The 1897 novels critique both the optimistic depiction of imperial adventure and the unnatural reliance on medieval forms of masculinity offered in novels such as Haggard's.

Victorian scholars of fiction have hitherto largely overlooked that fiction was an important site for Victorian authors and readers to engage in open discussion of religious issues in the Victorian period, often known, even to itself, as the "Age of 'Faith and Doubt.'" Along with sermons and religious tracts, which often directly addressed popular audiences, fiction became one of the most popular arenas for debating theology and religious practices. My project aims to revive interest in the religious novel genre by defining the genre, positioning it within its cultural context, and looking at how it engages in active and reciprocal conversations with other genres, fictional and nonfictional. This new approach reveals how the religious novel, long derided or ignored by critics, often leads the way with narrative innovations. Most interestingly, the religious novel, whose alternative name is tellingly the "theological romance," embraces and adopts one of the most popular plot lines of the Victorian novel tradition, namely the marriage/courtship plot, and develops it into the post-marriage plot, a plot that focuses on and examines marital life. The marriage plot serves, for many of these novels, in place of detailed theological arguments as a way of producing and embodying conversion. The religious novel actually anticipates changes in the nineteenth- century novel by expanding the plot beyond courtship and marriage.