Thesis (Ph.D.)--Duquesne University, 2009. / Title from document title page. Abstract included in electronic submission form. Includes bibliographical references (p. 158-171) and index.

Mary Wollstonecraft’s ghost haunts women’s writing of the Romantic period. After her untimely death in 1797, and the publication of William Godwin’s candid biography in 1798, Wollstonecraft’s reputation was besmirched by the reactionary press in an attack on radical support for revolutionary ideals. Wollstonecraft’s campaign for women’s rights was conflated with a representation of her as sexually promiscuous, politically dangerous and religiously unorthodox. For women writing after Wollstonecraft’s death, an engagement with her political ideals risked identification with her lifestyle, deemed both improper and impious. My thesis explores how women writers negotiated Wollstonecraft’s scandalous reputation in order to discuss her influential feminist arguments and develop their own positions on these pressing issues in post-revolutionary Britain. In the early nineteenth century, Wollstonecraft’s life and work gets elided with the figure of the female philosopher, already popular in both pro- and counter-revolutionary writing of the 1790s. After Wollstonecraft’s death, fictional female philosophers echo elements of her biography whilst voicing an often caricatured version of her arguments. By rejecting these satirically overblown feminist positions, women writers could adopt a more moderate form of feminism, often closer to Wollstonecraft’s original polemic, to critique cultural restrictions on women, revealing how these warp female behaviour. My project modifies our understanding of the origins of modern feminism by focussing on Wollstonecraft’s reception across a range of socially and politically diverse texts, and the ways in which the process of reading itself is treated as potentially revolutionary.

The late eighteenth century marks an era where authors began forging identities that rebuffed the influences of the local communities to which they belonged. As literacy increased, so too did the notion of individuality, as members of the middle and lower orders soon saw themselves as separate, independent beings. The crowd, of course, helped simplify the management of complex emotions like anger through mutual demonstration; the greater number of participants in a protest, the more fitting the sense of indignation seemed to be. For cases of personal anger, however, the suitability and expression of the emotion were problematic, especially for those marginalized by gender, status, and political affiliations. While polite society deemed their anger unwarranted, odious, and threatening, subaltern authors simultaneously realized that the continued denial of the passion would cripple individual and artistic development, but excessive expression would yield further ridicule and ostracism. Anger, therefore, stimulated these authors to discover their actual worth as artists and individuals and carve unique identities that completely disregarded the restrictive characterizations assigned by a hierarchical society. Nevertheless, anger’s volatility meant that discovering oneself from a passion commonly represented as a moment “when we are not ourselves” was a particularly precarious endeavor since righteous indignation could quickly ignite into a mindless, destructive rage. Subaltern authors needed to authenticate the legitimacy of their anger to not only a largely unsympathetic audience, but also themselves, and the apparent foreignness of rage created confusion over the passion’s exact relation to the individual; anger is frequently emblematized in contradictions—internal vs. external, activity vs. passivity, sanity vs. insanity, reality vs. fantasy—to emphasize its deceptive fluidity. As this study argues, anger was fundamental to marginalized figures in achieving selfhood, but the passion’s overall instability and the objection by hierarchical society encouraged a literary treatment that was cautious, unique, and at times, clandestine.

The least popular of all her novels, Jane Austen’s Mansfield Park (1814) depicts a heroine, precariously situated in the margins of the aristocracy, who is intellectually educated rather than accomplished. As the timid Fanny Price navigates the morally fraught social world of Mansfield Park, Austen comments on the exclusion and mistreatment of women in the British public sphere at large as well as criticizes the practice of educating women into accomplishment as exemplified by the sparkling socialite, Mary Crawford. This thesis positions Austen in context with educational writers William Cowper, the poet, and Mary Wollstonecraft, the philosopher. I analyze all three writers’ messages about education, along with the implications of the genre/form with which they choose to enter public discourses, including the poem, the political tract, and the novel. Considering the historical and cultural conceptions of the novel as trivial and feminine during Austen’s day, her decision to employ this form suggests that she is interested in reforming the novel into a platform for serious public engagement. Austen ultimately anticipates the Victorian novel by revealing the form’s potential value as intellectual exercise and an important tool for women to join public conversation. / Thesis / Master of Arts (MA)

The word "necrophilia" brings a particular definition readily to mind – that of an act of sexual intercourse with a corpse, probably a female corpse at that. But the definition of the word did not always have this connotation; quite literally the word means "love of the dead," or "a morbid attraction to death." An examination of nineteenth-century literature reveals a gradual change in relationships between the living and the dead, culminating in the sexualized representation of corpses at the close of the century. The works examined for necrophilic content are: Mary Wollstonecraft’s Mary, A Fiction, Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein, Emily Brontë’s Wuthering Heights, and Bram Stoker’s Dracula and The Jewel of Seven Stars.

Les romans de Jane Austen sont souvent perçus comme étant une narration parfaite de la vie domestique au dix-neuvième siècle. La plupart des intrigues sont centrées autour de quelques familles et d'une héroïne qui, à la fin du roman, est récompensée à travers son mariage avec l'homme de son choix (qui s'avère souvent riche et muni d'une bonne position sociale). Puisque les romans d'Austen se terminent généralement par un mariage conventionnel et apparaissent d'une envergure limitée, les analyses des thèmes féministes sous-jacents ne sont pas apparues avant le vingtième siècle. Plusieurs études ont révélé qu'au dessous de ces romans à caractère domestique se cache des arguments féministes en faveur de l'éducation des femmes et une critique des inégalités entre les sexes et des codes de conduite. L'étude qui suit comparera le féminisme d'Austen à celui de Mary Wollstonecraft, à partir de ses essais A Vindication of the Rights of Woman, A Vindication of the Rights of Men, ainsi que ses romans Mary et The Wrongs of Woman. Cette analyse portera aussi sur trois des romans d'Austen : Northanger Abbey, Sense and Sensibility et Mansfield Park. Ces romans reflètent clairement la situation des femmes de l'époque et s'attardent sur l'importance de l'éducation des femmes, les stéréotypes socialement définis, les relations homme-femme et les situations de violence dans le mariage et la famille. En comparant son engagement avec cette problématique aux oeuvres de Wollstonecraft, cette étude démontre que, au travers de ses romans, Austen était beaucoup plus consciente et engagée avec la société dans laquelle elle vivait qu'on ne l'imaginait

Cette thèse étudie un corpus de romans anglais, encore peu étudiés en France et jamais étudiés collectivement, publiés entre 1782 et 1805 par des écrivains et des écrivaines se rattachant par leurs idées et, pour certains, leur militantisme actif, au mouvement radical qui se développe en Angleterre dans la seconde moitié du XVIIIe siècle, s’amplifie et s’organise sous l’impulsion de la Révolution française, puis, sévèrement réprimé par le gouvernement de William Pitt, s’effondre à la fin de la décennie. Cette séquence historique laisse des traces profondes dans l’œuvre des romanciers radicaux, dont beaucoup, comme William Godwin, Mary Wollstonecraft et John Thelwall, sont philosophes ou polémistes avant d’être romanciers et prennent la plume pour défendre les droits de l’homme (et de la femme) dans le débat anglais sur la Révolution française qui oppose Edmund Burke à Thomas Paine. En croisant l’histoire des idées politiques, l’histoire sociale et culturelle du mouvement radical, l’histoire du livre et la narratologie classique, ce travail s’efforce de mettre en lumière la façon dont les romans encodent une certaine idéologie politique dans leurs formes – du discours des locuteurs au format de publication des romans, en passant par leurs narrateurs, leurs intrigues, leurs personnages, leur style et leurs silences signifiants. Un tel examen fait ressortir, plutôt qu’une idéologie radicale unifiée, une tension récurrente entre deux versions, libérale et jacobine, bourgeoise et plébéienne, du radicalisme, dont l’articulation conflictuelle revêt différentes formes d’un auteur à l’autre et d’un terme à l’autre de la période étudiée, à mesure que la réaction conservatrice enterre les espoirs radicaux de réformes. / This dissertation examines a corpus of English novels which have been little studied in France as yet and never as a whole. The novels were published between 1782 and 1805 by a group of writers who, by their ideas and in some cases active political commitment, belong to the radical movement which developed in England in the second half of the eighteenth century, gained impetus and structure in the wake of the French Revolution, and collapsed at the end of the decade when faced with repression from the government of William Pitt. Radical novelists, many of whom, like William Godwin, Mary Wollstonecraft and John Thelwall, were philosophers and pamphleteers before they took to novel-writing, flew to the defence of the rights of man (and of the rights of woman) in the revolution controversy which pitted Thomas Paine against Edmund Burke – and their work bears the mark of the rise and demise of the radical movement. Combining intellectual history with classical narratology, book history, and the social and cultural history of radicalism, this dissertation seeks to highlight the way in which political ideology is built into the very forms of the novels – in the characters’ speech and the characters themselves, in the novels’ plot and narration type, in their style and publishing format, as well as in their meaningful silences. Such a study brings to light, rather than a coherent radical ideology, a recurring tension between two versions of radicalism, liberal and jacobin, bourgeois and plebeian, whose partly conflicting conjunction assumes different shapes from one novelist to the other and between the early 1780s and late 1790s, as radical hopes of reform sink under the conservative backlash.

Thesis (M.A.)--University of Alabama at Birmingham, 2008. / Additional advisors: Randa Graves, Daniel Siegel, Samantha Webb. Description based on contents viewed Feb. 10, 2009; title from PDF t.p. Includes bibliographical references (p. 68-71).

This thesis explores the relationship between the Female Gothic novel of the late eighteenth and early nineteenth century and the social context of women at that time. In the examination of the primary works of Ann Radcliffe, Mary Wollstonecraft and Mary Shelley, this study investigates how these female writers work within the Gothic genre to explore issues related to the role of women in their society, in particular those concerned with sexual identity. It is contended that the Gothic genre provides these authors with the ideal vehicle through which to critique the patriarchal definition of the female, a definition which confines and marginalizes women, denying the female any sexual autonomy. The Introduction defines the scope of the thesis by delineating the differences between the Female Gothic and the Male Gothic. Arguing that the Female Gothic shuns the voyeuristic victimisation of women which characterizes much of the Male Gothic, it is contended that the Female Gothic is defined by its interest in, and exploration of, issues which concern the status of women in a patriarchy. It is asserted that it is this concern with female gender roles that connects the overtly radical work of Mary Wollstonecraft with the oblique critique evident in her contemporary, Ann Radcliffe’s, novels. It is these concerns too, which haunt Mary Shelley’s texts, published two decades later. Chapter One outlines the status of women in the patriarchal society of the late eighteenth century, a period marked by political and social upheaval. This period saw the increasing division of men and women into the “separate spheres” of the public and domestic worlds, and the consequent birth of the ideal of “Angel in the House” which became entrenched in the nineteenth century. The chapter examines how women writers were influenced by this social context and what effect it had on the presentation of female characters in their work, in particular in terms of their depiction of motherhood. Working from the premise that, in order to fully understand the portrayal of female sexuality in the texts, the depiction of the male must be examined, Chapter Two analyses the male characters in terms of their relationship to the heroines and/or the concept of the “feminine”. Although the male characters differ from text to text and author to author, it is argued that in their portrayal of “heroes and villains” the authors were providing a critique of the patriarchal system. While some of the texts depict male characters that challenge traditional stereotypes concerning masculinity, others outline the disastrous and sometimes fatal consequences for both men and women of the rigid gender divisions which disallow the male access to the emotional realm restricted by social prescriptions to the private, domestic world of the female. It is contended that, as such, all of the texts assert the necessity for male and female, masculine and feminine to be united on equal terms. Chapter Three interprets the heroine’s journey through sublime landscapes and mysterious buildings as a journey from childhood innocence to sexual maturity, illustrating the intrinsic link that exists between the settings of Gothic novels and female sexuality. The chapter first examines the authors’ use of the Burkean concept of the sublime and contends that the texts offer a significant revision of the concept. In contrast to Burke’s overtly masculinist definition of the sublime, the texts assert that the female can and does have access to it, and that this access can be used to overcome patriarchal oppression. Secondly, an analysis of the image of the castle and related structures reveals that they can symbolise both the patriarchy and the feminine body. Contending that the heroine’s experiences within these structures enable her to move from innocence to experience, it is asserted that the knowledge that she gains, during her journeys, of herself and of society allows her to assert her independence as a sexually adult woman.

This thesis is a study of the representations of childhood in the works of the family circle of Mary Wollstonecraft and William Godwin and their intellectual inheritors, Mary Shelley and Percy Bysshe Shelley. It argues that their literary representations of the child, as a group, form an index of their political resistance to the dominant cultures of their era. The thesis situates these representations of childhood against the backdrop of the Romantic-era cultural celebration of childhood as established in works by historians and critics such as Philippe Ariés and James McGavran, Jr. It argues that the new sentimental category of the child established in the writings of Rousseau and Wordsworth, paradoxically, tends to marginalise the child from the socially powerful world of adults, even while establishing the child’s new specificity. This ethical impasse is resolved by the Wollstonecraft-Godwin family circle through its literary representations of the child, where the child becomes a shifting metaphor for all socially oppressed groups. Moreover, the adult author invites the child to participate in the world of adult power, eschewing a totalising adult perspective that erases the child’s specific concerns. This thesis tracks the development of the versions of the child in the works of the Wollstonecraft-Godwin family circle, from their early, discursive, political works such as Wollstonecraft’s A Vindication of the Rights of Woman and Godwin’s Political Justice, where they represent their late-eighteenth century ideals of political emancipation through the education of the child, to more imaginative versions of the child in their later works. I locate a moment in each writer’s career at which the adult-child divide observed in their early works collapses: their doubts about rationalist epistemology crystallise, and they switch to open-ended modes of discourse in literary genres such as novels, which allow more freedom for the coded expression of radical political ideas through the representations of the child. In their later works, especially in Godwin’s radical publications for children, the adult-child hierarchy is dissolved: the child becomes a complex metaphor, representing the varied political concerns of disempowered adults and children. The discussion concludes with a sketch of the imaginative appropriation and transformation of the Wollstonecraft-Godwin representations by the Shelleys. Mary Shelley, and to a lesser extent, Percy Bysshe Shelley, adapt the radicalism of their predecessors’ literary representations of the child to suit their own altered socio-political contexts.