This dissertation examines representations of the horse in Victorian literature and culture and reads it as a social and historical construct that simultaneously bears and bucks dominant ideologies of gender and class. Because traditionally, horses act as enduring markers of cultural value, representations of horses in Victorian literature often reveal their complicity with dominant patriarchal, classist, and nationalist ideologies. I argue, however, that as a cultural icon, the Victorian horse is ideologically conflicted: it operates not only to consolidate social, economic, and political power, but works to confound these discursive categories as well, functioning as a figure of displacement for anxieties regarding industrialism and technology, ruptures in the social fabric caused by class conflict and mobility, shifting constructions of masculinity and femininity, the crisis of identity formation within an environment of mass cultural production and consumption, and the heady but uncertain energies of national 'progress' and imperial expansion. While attempts to define 'horse' in the Victorian period underscore its ideological instability, rendering it in multiple guises that a single interpretation cannot entirely control, I claim that the horse in the Victorian age operates as an unsettling intermediary between nature and culture at large, laboring as a repository of desire and despair in a society responding to astonishing social, economic, political, and technological alteration. I examine representations of horses and horse culture in Charles Dickens's The Pickwick Papers and Dombey and Son, Mary Elizabeth Braddon's Lady Audley's Secret, Aurora Floyd, and Vixen, Anna Sewell's Black Beauty, and George Moore's Esther Waters, in addition to works of Victorian nonfiction and the visual arts. I read the horse's body as a text within the text, and one that informs and is informed by the discourses of power and resistance circulating at given cultural and historical moments. Moreover, in this project of interpreting the ideological meanings inscribed upon the horse's body, I treat all texts as narratives operating contingently within a nexus of other discursive practices. Therefore, my critical approach is new historical, and I draw on the recent work of cultural and gender studies and feminist theory to formulate and present my thesis / acase@tulane.edu
| Identifer | oai:union.ndltd.org:TULANE/oai:http://digitallibrary.tulane.edu/:tulane_27179 |
| Date | January 2000 |
| Contributors | Dorre, Gina Marlene (Author), Harpham, Geoffrey (Thesis advisor) |
| Publisher | Tulane University |
| Source Sets | Tulane University |
| Language | English |
| Detected Language | English |
| Rights | Access requires a license to the Dissertations and Theses (ProQuest) database., Copyright is in accordance with U.S. Copyright law |
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