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Full text release has been delayed at the author's request until December 19, 2027

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Articulating Dolls: Pygmalionism in Nineteenth-Century Literature and Culture

Matlock, Michelle Marie
http://orcid.org/0000-0001-5178-8035
http://rave.ohiolink.edu/etdc/view?acc_num=osu1668773882391045

Abstract Details

2022, Doctor of Philosophy, Ohio State University, English.
When a children’s recital piece from the nineteenth century opens with the interrogation, “Well, Dolly, what are you saying, / When you blink and wink your eyes?” the implication is clear: the doll’s silence speaks volumes. Articulating Dolls means to anatomize Dolly’s cryptic body, to decipher dolls not just as articulated figures of parts but as articulated figures of speech. Dolls in the Victorian popular imagination are saying something, and this dissertation designs to find out what. Speaking the Victorian pediolect that molded Woman like a statue, played her for a puppet, transacted her like a doll, or took her for a dummy (a sororal synonymy that contemporary Dolls Studies is only just beginning to elaborate), this project dissects the doll-inflected discourse framing femininity to anatomize how true womanhood was made to share the mold with ideal sculpture and other dolliform bodies of man-ufactured perfection. Following an introductory etiology that historicizes definitions of Pygmalionism--a paraphilia that to the Victorians inscribed a desire not for the simulated woman who comes alive but for the Gal(atea) who (re)turns to stone--chapter one emphasizes how the desire for women who were statues(que) compels their decease as the feminine form was sartorially and semiotically impressed into a fashion for mortification. Showing that the sculptural was intrinsically sepulchral, chapter two analyzes the intrinsically (nec)romantic idioms of dollification in Dickens’s Our Mutual Friend. More expressly executed female bodies are the subject of chapter three, in which ventriloquial phonodolls are made of the morbid (and thus more biddable) “Venuses” in Du Maurier’s Trilby and Villiers’s The Future Eve. The still(ed) lifes of statues (non) vivants are the focus of Carroll’s narrative photography in chapter four, while chapter five filters his Alice books through the author’s “photographic memory” of a lost Liddell doll. Decoding the crypsis of girls, or “dolls,” of the period and literary doll-players like Vanity Fair’s Becky Sharp, chapter six considers how the Gal(atea) who plays dummy turns the tableaux on the chauvinist Pyg(malion). Pursuing cryptic dollification through sensation fiction, chapter seven de-crypts graven Galateas, examining how the fatal affects of an oppressive gender binary are re-fused by the guise and dolls of femmes fatales. The epilogue surveys the antiprosopopoeic anti-Pygmalionism of anti-Alice texts that play on dolls precisely as they play on words--as paranomasiac acts of dissent, re-articulations that empower Gal(atea)s caught between petrification and a hard place to turn their pedestals into platforms and use their marble(s). Articulating Dolls articulates the joints within the interdisciplinary field of Dolls Studies, suturing the seams and interrogating the interstices between material histories, poststructuralist theories, and feminist epistemologies. Reading dolls as they are materially or metonymically construed decodes how the nineteenth-century feminine subject is (en)gendered as object--commoditized, socialized, sexualized, and essentialized--but also how the terms of that construction might be re-articulated to object. Assembling dolls to deconstruct a histoire de mentalité, Articulating Dolls plays out the ambiguous, ambivalent, or even antithetical ways that dolls signify within the Victorian imaginary and, ultimately, our own.
Michelle Abate (Advisor)
Patricia Enciso (Committee Member)
Clare Simmons (Committee Member)
Victoria Ford Smith (Committee Member)
808 p.
American Literature; British and Irish Literature; Gender Studies; Literature
English literature; British literature; American literature; Victorian literature; Victorian; nineteenth century; nineteenth-century literature; gender; feminism; femininity; girlhood; dolls studies; Pygmalionism; Pygmalion; Galatea; doll; statue; puppet; automaton; tableau non vivant

Recommended Citations

Citations

  • Matlock, M. M. (2022). Articulating Dolls: Pygmalionism in Nineteenth-Century Literature and Culture [Doctoral dissertation, Ohio State University]. OhioLINK Electronic Theses and Dissertations Center. http://rave.ohiolink.edu/etdc/view?acc_num=osu1668773882391045

    APA Style (7th edition)

  • Matlock, Michelle. Articulating Dolls: Pygmalionism in Nineteenth-Century Literature and Culture. 2022. Ohio State University, Doctoral dissertation. OhioLINK Electronic Theses and Dissertations Center, http://rave.ohiolink.edu/etdc/view?acc_num=osu1668773882391045.

    MLA Style (8th edition)

  • Matlock, Michelle. "Articulating Dolls: Pygmalionism in Nineteenth-Century Literature and Culture." Doctoral dissertation, Ohio State University, 2022. http://rave.ohiolink.edu/etdc/view?acc_num=osu1668773882391045

    Chicago Manual of Style (17th edition)

osu1668773882391045
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