Browsing by Subject "Victorian"

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"A series of waves" : melodramatic rhythms in Victorian serial fiction
(2022-05-06) Christoffersen, Anna; MacKay, Carol Hanbery
The English melodramatic plays and novels of the 19th century have many notable features in common: variation between comedy and tragedy, dastardly villains and dashing heroes, and a fascination with sensationally dramatic tropes like bigamy, mistaken identity, and false death. Underwriting these superficial features, Peter Brooks identifies the melodramatic impulse, or a desire to create “a fictional system for making sense of experience” (xiii) by turning to style of moral polarization that charges every gesture with “the conflict between light and darkness, salvation and damnation” (5). Brooks’s conception of melodrama is compelling, but it fails to fully elaborate what makes melodrama so exciting to engage with. I argue that the other driving force of melodramatic tropes is the necessity of melodramatic rhythm—a cyclical pulsing wherein delicious and tantalizing suspense is built up and released over and over again. As Juliet John describes, such rhythm is “a series of waves: the moment of stasis is remarkable because it is transitory; moments of excess signify imminent excess and vice versa” (31). Turning to Charles Dickens’s Nicholas Nickleby, Wilkie Collins’s Woman in White, and Mary Elizabeth Braddon’s Lady Audley’s Secret, in this paper I establish how all three authors betray an investment in melodramatic rhythm with their construction of installments. Dickens with his variation between comedic and tragic, Collins with his shameless and frequent use of intense intrigue and shattering revelations, and Braddon with her negotiation between the readers’ relative surplus and Robert Audley’s relative lack of information. All three of these authors, too, are linked by the medium of serial publication. Whether or not there is a causal relationship between publication in monthly/weekly installments and melodramatic rhythm, each author begins and ends their installments very strategically, using the gap between installments as another technique to enhance their novels’ melodramatic rhythms. Ultimately, this paper argues that the engrossing and dependable melodramatic rhythm that drives these three novels is the key to their popularity.
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 Hanbery
My 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.
The narrative dimensions of empire : time and space in the British imperial imaginary, 1819-1855
(2017-09-19) Wehrle, Cole Thomas; Baker, Samuel, 1968-; Hoad, Neville Wallace, 1966-; MacKay, Carol; MacDuffie, Allen; Louis, William R
Over the course of the nineteenth century, writers showed an increased interest in the representation of two or more moments of simultaneous action. Often this interest has been understood as a response to the new “space-collapsing” technologies of the age such as the railway or the telegraph. However, I argue that such narratives are better understood in the context of the storytelling practices of the imperial state. These practices, which I call “proximity plots,” minimize the anarchic geographic realities faced by states while comforting and their audiences with the assurance that the world is smaller than it seems. I begin my project with the stakes of that lie. In my first chapter I consider the travel writings of Joseph Wolff, whose ill-fated attempt to rescue two British officers imprisoned in central Asia was informed, in part, by a sense of the world cultivated through these proximity plots. While his attempt ended in failure, the narrative of that attempt relies on the same storytelling gymnastics that helped justify it. To understand these techniques, I next look to Walter Scott’s three “crusader” novels. In my analysis, Scott emerges as a crucial thinker whose novels conjure a nation unified both socially and temporally. Wolff’s application and replication of narrative techniques employed by Scott helps us understand how literary production can directly shape how we understand the world around us. After Scott, I turn to William Makepeace Thackeray’s The Newcomes and consider how that novel undermines Scott’s temporal politics, offering a view of the world as significantly bigger and less manageable than Scott’s marauding knights might prefer. Critically, in the story I tell, it is the novelist Thackeray, rather than the journalist-adventurer Wolff, who ultimately recognizes the limits of the narrative production of proximity. Thackeray’s era saw the realization of these dreams of simultaneity with the expansion of the telegraph network and the growth of steam packets that offered global service. But rather than take these innovations for granted or use them as the foundation for an even more aggressive temporal utopianism, Thackeray emphasizes their fragility.
“The secret of the universe” : ether theory and British fiction, 1880-1930
(2020-08-10) Senzaki, Sierra Miyone; Cullingford, Elizabeth; MacDuffie, Allen, 1975-; Carter, Mia; Henderson, Linda; Hunt, Bruce
How is the literary imaginary shaped by an understanding of the materiality of the universe? More specifically, if an author believed the universe was composed of a substance called ether, how did that impact the worldviews represented in their fiction? Today “the ether” refers to a mysterious realm into which car keys disappear and where emails languish, but before Einsteinian relativity became accepted in the 1920s, and for at least a decade afterward, the ether was an established scientific concept that formed the backbone of electromagnetics. Electricity, light, and radio were all believed to be waves carried by the luminiferous (or light-bearing) ether. What began as a mechanical explanation for the propagation of light waves ultimately became the hypothesized foundation for myriad phenomena – even, according to late-nineteenth century universal ether theories, matter. In the British literary imaginary, the ether’s role as unifying principle of the physical universe was expanded further: it became the concept through which other forms of connection – media, empire, and Spiritualism – could be represented. This dissertation argues that British authors of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries used the ether to represent and conceptualize continuity in narratives of modernity. In theorizing the role of the ether in literature, this dissertation advances an alternative understanding of literary Modernism that is based in mainstream culture. Traditional understandings of Modernism, grounded in elite, “highbrow” texts, characterize it in terms of formal experimentation that responds to the fragmentation, isolation, and rupture of modernity. I approach Modernism instead by using historicism and new materialism to examine fictional representations of the ether in texts that are mostly popular or middlebrow. These texts characterize the experience of modernity in terms of connection: telecommunication, imperialism, and spiritualist connection with the afterlife are figured in terms of the ethereally connected universe. I uncover an understanding of Modernism founded on continuity rather than discontinuity, and that acknowledges the Victorian and the Modern as two ends of a historical continuum rather than distinctly separate periods. Ultimately, this dissertation reconstructs the atmosphere, both literal and cultural, in which Victorian and Modernist literature circulated.
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, Linda
This 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.