Browsing by Subject "Victorian"
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Item Dressing for England: fashion and nationalism in victorian novels(2009-05-15) Montz, Amy LouiseVictorian women were not merely the symbols of nation nineteenth-century imagery would suggest in an era marked by the images of Queen Victoria and the symbolic representation of Britannia. They also were producers, maintainers, and even protectors of England at a time when imperial anxiety and xenophobic fears called the definition of Englishness into question. Dress, particularly fashionable dress, often was viewed as a feminine weakness in Victorian England. At the same time women were chastised for their attentions to the details of their clothing, they also were instructed to offer a pretty and neat presentation publicly and privately. Novels by George Eliot, Elizabeth Gaskell, William Thackeray, and H. G. Wells and manners and conduct texts by such authors as Sarah Stickney Ellis, Eliza Lynn Linton, and Margaret Oliphant demonstrate how Victorian women used fashion and dress to redefine and manipulate the socially accepted understanding of traditional English womanhood and to communicate national ideologies and concerns without violating or transgressing completely the more passive construction of Victorian femininity. By declaring their nationality through the public display that is fashion?dress designated by its appeal to a sophisticated, cultured, and perhaps continental society? these fictional and non-fictional women legitimized the demand for female access to social and cultural spheres as well as to the political sphere. Through an examination of the material culture of Victorian England?personal letters about the role of specific dress in Suffragette demonstrations, or the Indian shawl, for example?alongside an examination of the literary texts of the period, ?Dressing for England? argues that the novels of the nineteenth century and that century?s ephemera reveal its social concerns, its political crises, and the fabric of its everyday domesticity at the same time they reveal the active and intimate participation of Victorian women in the establishment and maintenance of nation.Item Louisa May Alcott and George Eliot on Class, Gender, and Marriage(2010-12) Myers, Elizabeth M.; Ransdell, Ann D.; Hurst, Mary J.; Aycock, Wendell M.This comparative dissertation explores in-depth the categories of class, gender, and marriage in both the writings of the American Louisa May Alcott (1832-1888), and the British author, George Eliot (1819-1880). In addition, and when relevant, additional topics and categories are investigated, including, but not limited to: religion, morals, race, and education. The primary Alcott fictional works studied include Moods (1864 & 1882), Little Women (1868-69), and Work (1873). The primary Eliot fictional works studied include Adam Bede (1859), The Mill on the Floss (1861), Middlemarch (1871-72), and Daniel Deronda (1876). Although the focus is on their most famous works, additional novels, essays, and other writings are also considered when relevant. It is the goal of this dissertation to show the impact these two women had on their overall societies by way of their writings. Both Alcott and Eliot relied heavily on the topics of class, gender, and marriage in their storylines, both had revolutionary ideas when it came to these topics, and both implemented these revolutionary ideas into their stories in a way that helped change the way their contemporary readers thought and behaved in their own ways of life.Item Paying respects: Death, commodity culture, and the middle class in victorian London(2005-05) Owens, Tana L.; Wong, Aliza S.; Deslandes, Paul R.; Adams, Gretchen A.This thesis attempts to fulfill the need for a study of the relationship between middle-class consumerism and death culture in nineteenth-century London by analyzing manifestations of middle-class death culture – private cemeteries, mourning, funeral ephemera, and the providers of these. The structure of this thesis provides the reader with a history, as well as a detailed description, of the consumerist aspects of death. The second chapter examines the intellectual roots of the death culture and how new discourses passed through to the denizens of the nineteenth century. The third chapter explores the rising popularity and meanings of the new private cemeteries and the overwhelming sanitary issues of the middle Victorian period. The fourth chapter covers the business of selling death ephemera to the members of the middle class and the people who sold it. The final chapter looks at the decline of Victorian sentimentality and the increasing popularity of "modern" practices. All chapters emphasize the middle-class association and the deeper meanings.Item Paying respects: death, commodity culture, and the middle class in victorian london(Texas Tech University, 2005-05) Owens, Tana L.; Wong, Aliza S.; Deslandes, Paul R.; Adams, Gretchen A.This thesis attempts to fulfill the need for a study of the relationship between middle-class consumerism and death culture in nineteenth-century London by analyzing manifestations of middle-class death culture – private cemeteries, mourning, funeral ephemera, and the providers of these. The structure of this thesis provides the reader with a history, as well as a detailed description, of the consumerist aspects of death. The second chapter examines the intellectual roots of the death culture and how new discourses passed through to the denizens of the nineteenth century. The third chapter explores the rising popularity and meanings of the new private cemeteries and the overwhelming sanitary issues of the middle Victorian period. The fourth chapter covers the business of selling death ephemera to the members of the middle class and the people who sold it. The final chapter looks at the decline of Victorian sentimentality and the increasing popularity of “modern” practices. All chapters emphasize the middle-class association and the deeper meanings.Item Renovating the closet : nineteenth-century closet drama written by women as a stage for social critique(2009-05) Lee, Michelle Stoddard; Moore, Lisa L. (Lisa Lynne); MacKay, Carol HanberyMy dissertation, "Renovating the Closet : Nineteenth-Century Closet Drama Written by Women as a Stage for Social Critique," contributes to a new understanding about nineteenth-century closet drama through three distinct and innovative texts: George Eliot's The Spanish Gypsy (1868), Michael Field's Stephania (1892), and Augusta Webster's A Woman Sold (1867). I contend that these three women writers employed the closet drama, a genre written in dramatic form but intended to be privately read or performed, to critique the social, cultural, and ideological limitations placed upon women of their time. In their symbolic use of the genre and innovative experiments with form, Eliot, Field, and Webster created a new stage on which their female protagonists challenge belief systems, institutions, and conventions that confine their gender roles, sexual identity, and social power. My chapter, "'Angel of the Homeless Tribe' : The Legacy of The Spanish Gypsy," shows how George Eliot melds the conventions of epic narrative with those of Victorian closet drama and reveals a dynamic connection between the character development and genre. Eliot's canonical novels are famous for their indictment of the limited roles Victorian culture offered to women. Equally famous are the tragic destinies of her rebellious heroines: they end up dead, unfulfilled, or virtually imprisoned. But scholars have failed to notice that in her experiment with The Spanish Gypsy, Eliot created a female epic: Fedalma, a woman of fifteenth-century Spain, becomes the leader of her "Gypsy" nation, sung into the future by an admiring bard. Eliot's formal experiment makes The Spanish Gypsy an important text for understanding how genre shaped gender representation in Eliot's canon, and in Victorian literature generally. My chapter, "'Something of His Manhood Falls' : Stephania as Critique of Victorian Male Aesthetics and Masculinity," offers Stephania as Katharine Bradley and Edith Cooper's commentary on the predominantly-male Aesthetic and Decadent movements of the 1890s. Through the pseudonym Michael Field, Bradley and Cooper wrote their way into, and claimed their own space inside, a very exclusive males-only closet. The chapter demonstrates how Stephania, set in Rome 1002 A.D., reclaims agency for a Victorian artistic "sisterhood" adulterated and exiled by a "brotherhood" of male Decadents (who saw woman as a nemesis to social order, personal salvation, and creative production), both through its form, and its cast of three: Stephania, Emperor Otho, and his old tutor Gerbert. Stephania, a former Empress turned courtesan bent on revenge for her husband's murder, challenges homosocial exclusivity and ultimately triumphs as a symbolic queen and emperor. Successful in her plan to bring down Otho through her seduction and manipulation of both men, Stephania is redeemed and saved; she has restored social order. In its resistance of the boundaries and expectations of the closet drama genre, Stephania projects a new ideology for Victorian womanhood and female authorship. My last chapter, "'I Could Be Tempted' : The Ev(e)olution of the Angel in the House in A Woman Sold," presents A Woman Sold as an early example of Augusta Webster's strategic social rhetoric, as her use of the closet drama acts as a structural metaphor for the sociomythological confinement of the nineteenth-century middle class woman. I investigate how A Woman Sold exposes the notion that marriage for nineteenth-century middle class women symbolized a closet of social and cultural paralysis, as grown from a history of socially and culturally institutionalized gender expectations. At the same time, I demonstrate how Webster employs irony through a nexus of genre, narrative, and form to support and advocate for opportunities outside marriage that encourage female agency to develop. Essentially, the fundamental argument in this dissertation hinges on the ways in which Eliot, Field, and Webster revised the conventional closet drama to renovate and, in turn, reveal the metaphorical and literal closets that confined social and cultural possibilities for nineteenth-century women.Item Sympathy for the Devils: An Analysis of the Villain Archetype Since the Nineteenth CenturyMartin Del Campo, Michel; Dean, JohnThe portrayal of villains has changed dramatically since the late nineteenth century. Modern villains are not necessarily punished, and they are presented as relatable or at the very least sympathetic. An analysis of the major events that shook the Western World in the last century reveals a pattern that links the classical style villain to the modern anti-villain via sociological and cultural changes. The Victorian period showed the West that the British Empire was not eternal and could be threatened. Count Dracula in Bram Stoker’s Dracula represented these fears and forced the Victorians to reexamine everything from their belief in science to the role of family. The Modernists came to further question the validity of things like manhood and bravery, and characters like Robert Cohn Ernst Hemingway’s The Sun Also Rises served as a way to teach readers that even assumptions about race said more about those who made the assumptions than the targets of said prejudices. His portrayal as a complex human being labeled as a “villain” simply because the other characters vilified him helped set up the idea that antagonists need not be vile creatures to stand against the “heroes.” Finally, the Post-Modern period continued this trend by showing the West that nuclear weapons could destroy life on Earth, not just target nations. As the Cold War overshadowed politics, the Joker in Batman comics came to symbolize the grotesque and evil Other, and yet his characterization in The Killing Joke draws parallels between his relationship with Batman and the relationship between the United States and Russia. The Joker represents the final evolution before the twenty-first century anti-villain. He forced readers to question just what separates a hero from a villain. These three examples explain today’s anti-villain. Today’s antagonists are charismatic and sympathetic. The new wave of fear following the 9/11 attacks rekindled the old colonial fears of the Victorians, and the threat of nuclear or biological weapons has brought back the fears of the Cold War. Additionally, the War on Terror has created the kinds of trauma that plagued the Modernist period. Villains today help us cope with these problems by offering a way to examine questions that “heroes,” by virtue of being “good,” cannot answer.Item When fairy godmothers are men : Dickens's gendered use of fairy tales as a form of narrative control in Bleak House(2011-05) Smith, Melissa Ann, master of arts in English; MacKay, Carol Hanbery; Ferreira-Buckley, LindaThis paper explores how Charles Dickens’s use of a female narrator in Bleak House (1853) fundamentally problematizes and undermines his use of the fairy tale’s cultural cachet, motifs, and characters to prop up and project his fantasies of the feminine ideal. More specifically, it examines the effects of the thematic presence of several tale-types and stock fairy tale figures on Dickens’s ability to prescribe ideal feminine behaviors, such as incuriosity and selfless obedience, to both his characters and his female audience. Because Esther’s ability to write and her interest in either discovering or constructing her own identity establish her as competitor to the males who attempt to script her life, Dickens tries to control and circumscribe her ability to know and act through her own and other characters’ resemblance to traditional fairy tale character types, especially Bluebeard and Griselda. Esther’s narrative, however, betrays these unnatural delimitations in telltale interruptions and denials as Dickens attempts to circumvent the constraints he has placed on her voice. Esther’s narrative therefore resists but imperfectly overcomes the Victorian male author’s scripting of femininity.