Browsing by Subject "Mary Elizabeth Braddon"
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Item Illegible women : feminine fakes, façades, and counterfeits in nineteenth-century literature and culture(2013-05) Eure, Heather Latiolais; Wettlaufer, AlexandraExamining periodicals and novels from 1847 to 1886, I analyze the feminine fake to argue that individuals were beginning during this period to grapple with the discomforting idea that identity, especially gender, might be a social construct. Previously, scholars have contended that this ideological shift did not occur until the 1890s. I apply the term "feminine fake" to the tools that women use to falsify their identities and to the women who counterfeit their identities. Equally, I consider the fake as a theatrical moment of falsifying one's identity. In my first chapter, I set up my theoretical framework, which draws from Laqueur's writings on the cultural history of sex and gender, Poovey's work on the "uneven development" of gender ideology, and Baudrillard and Eco's respective concepts of the simulacra and the hyperreal. Chapter II examines issues of The Englishwoman's Domestic Magazine and La Mode illustrée to analyze the feminine fake during the period surrounding the Franco-Prussian War. Using Fraser, Green, and Johnston's writing on the periodical alongside Hiner's theories of the ideological work of the accessory, I argue that the women's magazine, particularly via the "rhetoric of the fake" therein, fashion, and the accessory were crucial sites for the construction of gender at the time. Chapter III looks at performance and the feminine fake in Vanity Fair and La Curée. I re-evaluate Voskuil's theories of "acting naturally" to analyze the charades and tableaux vivants within the novels and illustrate how these performances metaphorically function as society's failed efforts to render feminine identities legible. In Chapter IV, I analyze Lady Audley's Secret and L'Eve future, situating Lady Audley and the android as hyperfeminine, or marked by an identificatory excess rendering them more feminine than any real woman. The threat they pose to legible feminine and human identity drives the need to control their unmanageable identities: at the ends of the novels, the women, along with what I characterize as their inhuman fakery, are irreversibly contained.Item Unknown publics : Victorian novelists and working-class readers, 1836-1870(2015-05) Ptacek, Jacob Charles; MacKay, Carol Hanbery; Hutchison, Coleman, 1977-; Lesser, Wayne; MacDuffie, Allen; Winship, MichaelIt is well known that readerships exploded during the Victorian era, as transformations of social structures, education, and print technology created a mass readership hungry for literature. Unknown Publics examines how Victorian novelists responded to the pressures these new mass readerships generated in the cultural sphere, a problem that seemed especially pressing in the moment between the First and Second Reform Acts. Using the work of public sphere theorists Jürgen Habermas and Michael Warner, my dissertation argues that the Victorian novel became a contested arena for the representation of that public. Beginning with the staggering success of Charles Dickens’s Pickwick Papers (1836-7), Victorian novelists entered into an ongoing, dialogic debate about the novel’s relationship with the mass reader. As authors writing directly for working-class publishers sought to expand the novel tradition by incorporating non-representational elements of parody, fantasy, and folktale, mainstream middle-class authors consolidated the novel’s form by emphasizing realism. Unknown Publics traces the development of the novel in the Victorian era by examining key moments in this debate between 1836 and 1870. Beginning with the critical response to Pickwick Papers¸ I examine how both G. W. M. Reynolds’s Pickwick Abroad (1837-8) and Dickens’s own Martin Chuzzlewit (1843-4) respond to the questions of working-class agency, urban identity, and literary form that Pickwick articulated. I next read William Harrison Ainsworth’s Jack Sheppard (1839-40) alongside William Makepeace Thackeray’s Catherine (1839-40) in order to discuss how the production of realism is predicated on a fantasy of working-class depravity. In my final chapters, I examine how the discourse of sensationalism interacted with the realist novel. I read Mary Elizabeth Braddon’s Rupert Godwin (1864) and The Doctor’s Wife (1864) to track how the divide between “realist” and “idealist” fiction was deployed for mass and middle-class readers. In my final chapter, I discuss Wilkie Collins’s The Moonstone (1868) in terms of the reading practices encouraged for mass readers by the architects of the Second Reform Bill, revealing how Collins’s mystery story is predicated on the political project of reform. Reading the presence (or absence) of realism as a crucial feature of the Victorian novel, Unknown Publics calls for a new understanding of the cultural and social work of realism accomplishes, and of how it came to be.