Doctor of Philosophy, Case Western Reserve University, 0, English

In this dissertation, I consider a range of texts from the nineteenth century including novels, personal essays, and diaries in which authors attempt to narrate experiences of illness in light of the shifting cultural perceptions of how the physical body and the concept of “self” relate to each other. The Diary of Alice James, Robert Louis Stevenson's “Ordered South,” Harriet Martineau's Life in the Sick-Room, and Henry James's The Wings of the Dove are the main texts analyzed. In each of these examples, I examine the ways that authors compose texts to understand the self alongside the “nerves and fibres” of bodily lived experience. Of primary interest to this dissertation is considering how the texts I examine can be fruitfully analyzed when concepts gleaned from the realm of medical humanities are applied to illness stories. This is a necessary intervention because much of the recent work in the broader field of medical humanities seeks to present illness narratives as artifacts of patient experiences that can be approached as acts of testimony or as evidence of therapeutic exercises. The primary concept that I rely on throughout my dissertation is the “corporeal gap” taken from the work of one of the founders of the practice of Narrative Medicine, Dr. Rita Charon. I use this concept as my way of accounting for some of the ways the texts I examine invent approaches to the difficult work of talking about how sickness disrupts the relationship between bodies and selves. The “corporeal gap,” functions as both feature and analytical tool throughout my dissertation. Primarily, I use the corporeal gap as an interpretive tool that allows me to attend to the various ways the texts I examine deal with the interruptive and disruptive experience of illness.

Committee: Kimberly Emmons (Committee Chair); Erin Lamb (Committee Member); Athena Vrettos (Committee Member); Kurt Koenigsberger (Committee Member) Subjects: British and Irish Literature; Literature; Rhetoric

Doctor of Philosophy, The Ohio State University, 2012, English

My dissertation argues that nineteenth-century British women writers' understanding of embodied female experience as disabling enabled their feminist interventions in the discourse of "fallenness." Using insights from feminist disability theory, I consider how throughout the nineteenth century, femininity, disability, and fallenness (a category associated with violations of sexual standards, but encompassing a number of transgressive female identities) are discursively constructed as conditions similarly "out of control." My study focuses upon four women writers of the long nineteenth century (Mary Robinson, Amelia Opie, Elizabeth Gaskell, and Harriet Martineau) who speak for or as fallen women in their texts-- a potentially risky choice at a time when women's professional authorship already carried associations of prostitution. My project connects this textual adoption of fallen subject positions to the writers' first-hand experiential knowledge of female embodiment as disabling (in terms of both physical impairments and societal barriers), and thus with their own negotiations of potentially "fallen" reputations and identities. I argue that these writers create, model, and advocate for female communities and cooperation between "proper" and "improper" women in their texts as part of a conscious rhetorical strategy through which they expose the culturally fabricated scripts that surround the variously "fallen" body. Not only do these projects allow women writers to recover control of the public narratives that surround their own personal lives and bodies, but they ultimately critique-- and importantly, offer readers ways to challenge-- the limited gender ideologies to which so many other nineteenth-century women are subjected. Through these very means, many of the social conditions that disable women's bodies are also combated. Thus, I argue, the experience of female embodiment as disability actually enables the possibility of large-scale feminist activism.

Committee: Clare Simmons PhD (Advisor); Brenda Brueggemann PhD (Committee Member); Marlene Longenecker PhD (Committee Member); Roxann Wheeler PhD (Committee Member) Subjects: Literature