Master of Arts in English, Cleveland State University, 2023, College of Liberal Arts and Social Sciences

With her body of work, Virginia Woolf joins a host of female novelists decrying the lack of power that women in general wield in a patriarchal society. Specifically, her novels To the Lighthouse and Orlando provide a hopeful response to the dismal depiction of the female artist in Victorian literature, namely Anne Bronte's The Tenant of Wildfell Hall. Because of its subject matter of domestic abuse, unfortunately the experience of too many women in a society in which husbands are given too much power, Tenant was not regarded with respect in Bronte's lifetime. The novel so obviously portrays a woman without power in such dire circumstances it is indeed unsettling for most audiences. However, in her novel, Bronte's inventive techniques of using embedded and nonlinear narration to bring this mistreatment to light illustrates how the unbalance of power debilitated the expression of the female artist in her character Helen Graham. Although there is no direct evidence that Woolf read Anne Bronte's novel, Woolf responds to this hopeless depiction with modernist experimental and more nuanced strategies such as free indirect style and interrupted narration to paint a much more hopeful picture of the possibility of the female artist confronting the power of the patriarchy with success and freedom of expression. In doing so, she upends Victorian tropes and expected narrative structure to provide a scathing critique of the Victorian patriarchal culture in which she, herself, was raised.

Committee: Rachel Carnell (Advisor); Frederick Karem (Committee Member); Adam Sonstegard (Committee Member) Subjects: Literature; Modern Literature

Master of Arts (MA), Bowling Green State University, 2013, English/Literature

Charlotte Bronte's literary oeuvre, while rife with characters that are cold and cruel, continues to spark interest in readers and scholars today. Characters such as Lucy Snowe in Villette, William Crimsworth in The Professor, and the Duke of Zamorna and Mina Laury in Bronte's Tales of Angria frustrate and delight readers with their unreliable narration and frozen visages. The coldness that renders these characters distant from their respective narratives has been widely discussed by scholars as an effect of the repressive society of Victorian England and the result of Bronte's inexperience as a writer, etc. A closer examination of these characters' psyches and personal histories reveals an extended process of mourning that leads to their masochistic tendencies throughout texts like Villette. Bronte's characters, throughout her works, are well acquainted with loss and it is this loss that becomes the impetus for their masochistic mourning. The extended mourning process that Bronte's characters suffer from begins to take a masochistic turn as the lost love object becomes the fetish for their masochistic pleasure. These love objects represent people that have abandoned Bronte's characters at some point in their personal histories. This loss can occur as the result of a traumatic death or at the hands of a negligent lover. Regardless of how the love object abandons a character, I argue that in the narratives of Bronte's Tales of Angria, The Professor, and Villette Bronte's characters move toward coldness and isolation because of their desire to fetishize their lost loved ones. Therefore, the intersection of Deleuzian masochism and Freudian mourning provides another lens through which readers can engage with Bronte's intoxicatingly cold characters.

Committee: Piya Pal Lapinski (Advisor); Khani Begum (Committee Member) Subjects: Literature