Doctor of Philosophy, The Ohio State University, 2018, English

In this dissertation, I draw on folkloristics, feminist and queer scholarship, and narrative theory to propose an interdisciplinary understanding of the Gothic literary aesthetic that hinges on its folkloric debt, particularly its debt to faerie legends and fairy tales. I am interested in how folk narrative intertexts are used in nineteenth-century British literature to produce what we know as “the Gothic.” Notoriously difficult to define precisely, scholars have long settled for linking the Gothic to particular plots and motifs—in contrast, I argue that it is largely the connecting of a text to an unsettling, unexplainable folk past that produces the aesthetic/mode/feel that we now refer to as Gothic. It is no coincidence that the nineteenth-century rise of interest in folklore study and collection corresponds almost exactly to the creation of the first Gothic texts. The thoughtful use of folk narrative—so frequently the voice of the marginalized and forgotten—allows for an engagement with both history and the unknown, a questioning and subversion of constructed societal expectations (particularly with regard to gender and sexuality), and a probing of the deepest, darkest complexities of our selves.

Doctor of Philosophy, The Ohio State University, 2022, 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, (open full item for complete abstract)

Doctor of Philosophy, Case Western Reserve University, 2022, Art History

In British Hong Kong during the second half of the nineteenth century, the central area of the colony was packed with photographic studios. Their close proximity and ambition fueled a dynamic photographic market that was driven by artistic passion, technical innovation, and commercial rivalry. Amid this environment, British photographer William Pryor Floyd (1834–ca. 1900) was among the most active of early photographic practitioners and enjoyed a comparatively long and fruitful career. As an artist, his photographs received official recognition from the British royal family and local dignitaries. As a business owner, he managed to overcome fierce market competition and operate a successful studio. The first scholarly examination of this long-overlooked photographer, this dissertation explores Floyd's art and business in China between 1864 and 1874, doing so with a strong focus on the time he spent in British Hong Kong from 1867. I position Floyd's photographs within commercial, artistic, documentary, and creative contexts. I argue that, to a great extent, Floyd's photography served the interests of British colonial operations in Hong Kong during its formative stage as a colony. Chapter One offers an overview of Floyd's career trajectory in China. Through an unparalleled number of advertisements he placed in the local press, Floyd presented himself as a technical master of permanent photography and an artist who enjoyed the patronage of the colonial officials. The following three chapters examine three genres of Floyd's extant works. I demonstrate the various roles these photographs played in facilitating Victorian colonial ambition and governance in the colony. Chapter Two examines Floyd's Views of Hongkong (1868) and South China Album (1873). Images from these two projects echoed and celebrated the British colonial agenda and infrastructural expansion in Hong Kong. Chapter Three analyzes Floyd's photographs documenting the aftermath of the 1874 typhoon, the m (open full item for complete abstract)

M.A. (Master of Arts in English), Ohio Dominican University, 2017, English

This work examines the correlation between Edgar Allan Poe's detective fiction and the environment that influenced him. It focuses on three areas: his journalistic interests, contemporary inspirations, and the effects of a military education. Positioning Poe's detective stories within a historical and cultural context while tracing influences and motivations, lends understanding to the relevance of his new form of story telling and how it was compatible with the world around it.

Doctor of Philosophy, The Ohio State University, 2017, Theatre

This is a study of theatrical advertising prints and the culture that produced them. The prints in question were first published as a catalog of woodcuts in facsimile by the Ledger Job Printing Office of Philadelphia in 1869, and distributed among theatrical agents on speculation. Their existence, subject matter, mode of production, and the period in which they were produced is significant. The shifts underway in the theatrical paradigm were emblematic of shifts affecting society at large. The railroad was aggressively transforming the structure of the American Theatre; touring productions were displacing and destabilizing the stock company system; and the stage was ceding its space to the spectacle-thrill moments of sensation melodrama. Similar changes were occurring throughout society for the benefit of a new commerce. Just as country life was becoming a relic of the past, so too were the remnants of pre-industrial business practices. The Ledger catalog stands at a critical juncture in this transformation.

Doctor of Philosophy (PhD), Ohio University, 2017, English (Arts and Sciences)

Only relatively recently has paid nursing come to be viewed as a respectable profession for women. Early-nineteenth-century literature describes hired nurses as low-class, slovenly women who smoked, drank, and abused their patients. Middle-class British society feared that hired nurses were low-class, ignorant, unsympathetic, unfeminine, and too independent from men. Beyond Nightingale examines how literature from the early nineteenth century through the early twentieth century helped alleviate these fears and altered the public perception of nursing by presenting paid nurses as middle-class women who were sympathetic, selfless, and subservient to doctors. Many authors suggested that nursing ability was not dependent upon natural femininity or personal character, but relied on training and experience. By altering the public's perception of paid nursing, literary portrayals of nursing facilitated its transformation from an extension of the feminine, domestic sphere into an efficient medical profession for women. Beyond Nightingale examines works by Charles Dickens, Wilkie Collins, William Thackeray, and L. T. Meade, among others, to challenge the prevailing myth that Florence Nightingale single-handedly reformed nursing in the mid-1850s. Using World War I propaganda, periodicals, novels, and memoirs, Benham also explores how the desire for efficiency was encouraged and contested in literary portrayals of nursing from 1900 – 1918. Great War nursing literature emphasized efficiency as the most important objective in nursing care. As a result, sympathy was increasingly devalued because it hindered the efficiency of the medical machine. This tension between sympathetic and efficient care has not been resolved, but continues to plague the medical profession today. Beyond Nightingale considers not only traditional literary works, but also a variety of non-literary archival sources including nursing manuals, sanitary pamphlets, women's periodicals, and Voluntary Aid Deta (open full item for complete abstract)

Doctor of Philosophy, Case Western Reserve University, 2016, History

American concerns about addiction have a long and remarkably consistent history. During the colonial period, Puritan ministers denounced drunkenness as a sin that destroyed the body, stripped individuals of willpower, harmed families and society, plagued racial minorities and the lower classes, and required legal intervention. Despite this, by the early national period, drinking had become an integral part of social and political culture. In response, the temperance movement argued, in similar terms as the Puritans, that alcohol was a social evil that must be eradicated for the moral and political good of the nation. The temperance movement's critique emerged within the context of changing nineteenth-century medical and literary representations of addictive substances. Physicians saw addiction, as they did other diseases, as the result of a physical crisis. Doctors situated substances like alcohol and opium within a framework that saw bodies as nervous, sensitive, and easily overstimulated or drained. Alongside medical writings, literary depictions of addiction stressed sobriety over the sin and shame of intoxication. Throughout the mid-to-late nineteenth century, cultural criticisms of drunkenness became widespread, sensational, and alarmist. Both medical and popular print writings drew upon ideologies such as domesticity and separate spheres to condemn addiction as disrupting the social order by subverting not only male and female social roles, but corresponding racial and class hierarchies. By the early twentieth century, alcohol and opiate consumption continued to come under attack, with physicians, legislators, and opinion makers arguing that these substances harmed physical health, overcame willpower, disrupted all levels of society, led to moral failures, and should be legally prohibited. Their arguments echoed those of the Puritans, suggesting that despite the social, cultural, and medical changes of the nineteenth century, the dynamics of addiction (open full item for complete abstract)

Doctor of Philosophy, The Ohio State University, 2015, Dance Studies

The Real Theatro de Sao Carlos de Lisboa employed Italian choreographers from its inauguration in 1793 to the middle of the nineteenth century. Many libretti for the ballets produced for the S. Carlos Theater have survived and are now housed in the National Library of Portugal. This dissertation focuses on the narratives of the libretti in this collection, and their importance as documentation of ballets of the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, from the inauguration of the S. Carlos Theater in 1793 to 1850. This period of dance history, which has not received much attention by dance scholars, links the earlier baroque dance era of the eighteenth century with the style of ballet of the 1830s to the 1850s. Portugal had been associated with Italian art and artists since the beginning of the eighteenth century. This artistic relationship continued through the final decades of the eighteenth and the first half of the nineteenth century. The majority of the choreographers working in Lisbon were Italian, and the works they created for the S. Carlos Theater followed the Italian style of ballet d'action. Libretti are documented accounts of choreography of this period and contain important information regarding the style of the ballets produced in Lisbon. The narratives of the ballets in these libretti reveal the style of works produced in Lisbon from the late eighteenth to the middle of the nineteenth centuries: the ballet d action that relied on the use of pantomime and gestures to tell stories. The importance of pantomime in ballets of the period covered in this investigation becomes evident in the analysis of several scenarios of ballets produced in Lisbon. This salient characteristic of ballets of the period emerges through the plot developments of the ballets d action produced in Portugal.

Master of Arts, Miami University, 2014, History

Using legislative debates and print media, this thesis explores how voters in Wisconsin interpreted and then fully embraced liberal ideology during the mid-nineteenth century. In the span of less than two years between 1854 and 1855, the Republican Party emerged from non-existence to become the dominant party in Wisconsin. Widespread antislavery sentiment in the electorate contributed to the success of the Republican Party. But an antislavery party with broad appeal only emerged after Wisconsinites possessed a unified self-perception as uniquely progressive in their economy and government. Wisconsinites saw themselves as freer, more progressive, and more virtuous than people anywhere else. In turn, they believed that anything that individuals did out of their own economic self-interest was not only acceptable, but also aided in fostering an ordered and virtuous society. The Republican Party in Wisconsin emerged as voters looked for a northern party to protect and promote liberal ideals.

Doctor of Philosophy (Ph.D.), Bowling Green State University, 2012, Communication Studies

This study focuses on two prominent evangelists, Ida Gage and Clara Wetherald, who served as two of the earliest women delegates to the Free Methodist General Conference and argued in defense of their ministries. Rhetorical artifacts include historical writings from both Gage and Wetherald. To illustrate the tension these women faced in gaining acceptance for their ministry, the 1890 and 1894 General Conference debates on ordaining women are analyzed to provide a broader religious and cultural understanding. Using archival research methods, the dissertation emphasizes constructing a rhetorical history narrative about the debates in the Free Methodist Church on women's place in ministry and in the home. The rhetorical concept of “passing” is used to illustrate how both Wetherald and Gage had to construct their narratives in a way that would allow them to be accepted in the male dominated profession of ministry. Additionally, the concept of silence as a rhetorical device is also used to demonstrate how both Wetherald's and Gage's ministries and impact in the denomination quickly vanished after the issue of women's ordination was defeated and both became divorcees. However, while their ministry gains suffered setbacks within the Free Methodist Church, the fact that Wetherald went on to have a thriving preaching career and Gage inspired both her children and grandchildren to start successful ministries outside of the denomination illustrates their long-lasting impact on nineteenth century ministerial culture.

DMA, University of Cincinnati, 2019, College-Conservatory of Music: Piano

The purpose of the document is to advocate for the appreciation and application of the common nineteenth-century practice of improvised preluding. After studying Clara Wieck Schumann's compositional process based on her eleven notated preludes and selected twentieth-century pianist-composers' approaches to preluding, I provide three preludes based on their prelude sketches, styles, and transcriptions. Because I am an advocate of historically informed performance practice, my goal is to delve further into historical piano recordings and the artists who left their legacies through live performances and studio recordings. I endeavor to preserve some of their preluding attempts by way of transcribing them from the selected recordings. The document is organized in three main parts. Chapter one presents Clara Wieck Schumann's training and influences, preluding practices, and her notated eleven preludes. Chapter two provides the transcriptions of the selected twentieth-century pianist-composers' preluding from the recordings of studio and historical live performances, comparing and contrasting their approaches to preluding. Chapter three contains my own transcriptions of performed preludes. The first two preludes are modeled after Einfache Praeludien fu¨r Schu¨ler, and the last prelude will be on my own. All relate to Schumann's concert program on December 14, 1854.

Master of Arts, Miami University, 2018, History

This thesis considers the origins of the embourgeoisement of the mid-nineteenth-century German aristocracy through the lens of the summer 1855 travel diary of twenty-year-old Landedelfraulein (country noble maiden) Marie von Bonin, the oldest daughter of Maria Keller and landowner and politician Gustav von Bonin. Scholars of German history have often contended that the influence of middle-class values on German nobles originated with print culture and socio-political movements. While this thesis neither contradicts, nor focuses on these claims, it examines the ways that the lived experiences of everyday people also gave birth to middle-class values. Focusing on the themes of Heimat (home), travel and education, and romantic courtship, this thesis concludes that Marie's bourgeois views were not revolutionary; rather, they exemplified the influence of middle-class values on the mid-nineteenth century German aristocracy.

PHD, Kent State University, 2017, College of Arts and Sciences / Department of English

This project comprises a digital edition of a selection of letters by American poet Edwin Arlington Robinson (1869-1935), including all known letters written by the poet between 1889 and 1895, and hosted online by Colby College Libraries' Digital Collections. The edition is based on work started last century by Professor Wallace L. Anderson of Bridgewater State University, and left unfinished by him at his death in 1984. Professor Anderson collected a vast quantity of Robinson's letters from various repositories and private parties around the country. He transcribed them and provided annotations and textual notes for about three-quarters of them. For my project, I have edited, updated and corrected a substantial portion of Anderson's transcriptions, as well as completed fresh transcriptions of my own, checking them for accuracy against Robinson's holographs held at Harvard and the University of Virginia. I have formatted the new edition so as to more accurately represent the holographs, and have added my own textual notes and annotations to those of Anderson, along with an introductory critical essay detailing my methods and principles. It is of primary importance to me that these letters be accessible to both the scholarly community and the general public, with a view to maximizing their usefulness for literary and historical research. I have settled on digital publication as the best means to achieve this end because it will render the letters accessible to anyone with a computer and internet connection, free of charge. The project of publishing the remainder of Robinson's letters in this format is expected to continue beyond the dissertation.

Master of Arts (MA), Ohio University, 2017, Art History (Fine Arts)

Forging reputations as the greatest women artists of their generation, Mary Cassatt and Cecilia Beaux embodied the autonomous, ambitious, and complex characteristics that came to represent the New Woman at the turn of the nineteenth century. Their comparable levels of success as well as their conflicting ideologies concerning the role of feminine expression in art resulted in a personal and professional rivalry. Shifting the debate away from which of these women was the superior artist, scholars have begun to dispute the social and symbolic implications of their work in an effort to determine which artist proved to be the exemplary feminist. Utilizing inferences drawn from autobiographical and primary sources, secondary sources, and iconographic and semiotic analysis, this study explores the divergent impact of Mary Cassatt and Cecilia Beaux's work as visual manifestations of the New Woman, their diverse but equally significant contributions to the equal rights movement and the professionalization of the late-nineteenth and early-twentieth century woman artist.

Doctor of Philosophy, Miami University, 2016, English

Mediums and Their Material investigates how late-nineteenth and early-twentieth century women mediums interrupt and re-contour discourses of the body—biologically, medically, textually—through their representations of technological and spiritual contact. Recent critics have regarded women as particularly suited for mediating communication, be it through technological devices such as the typewriter or telegraph, or spiritualist practices like the seance or automatic writing. What made these women's bodies so viable for these ends, scholars have noted, was the ubiquitous perception at the turn of the century that the female body possesses “natural” feminine qualities: passivity, moral refinement, spiritual superiority, and sympathy. Developed out of the supposed weakness of the female body, this critical attention on the social construction of femininity and women's mediation has, to this point, eschewed any discussion of mediums' actual bodies and the agency those bodies might express. Where most critical discussions of mediation explore the gender lines that qualify, or circumscribe, the female medium's agency and the vulnerability afforded her by her passive qualities, my project takes a material feminist approach to develop an alternative reading of female mediation that retrieves the female body from paternalistic, patriarchal, and racist constructions, and demonstrates how female mediums' bodies and their organic function operate as powerful sites of agency. Contributing to both material feminist conversations and the fields of Victorian and Modernist studies more generally by looking closely at the materiality of the bodies employed in spiritual and technological mediation, Mediums and Their Material imagines women mediums and their technological and spiritualist experiences as working in their own time to promote their economic and political development—through authorship, women's rights movements, and other systems of knowledge conveyance.

Master of Arts (MA), Bowling Green State University, 2016, American Culture Studies

At the turn of the twentieth-century Americans across the nation were theorizing about diet; what diets were best, what diets could lead to individual and national degeneration, which diets could solidify white American superiority, and how the eating habits of individuals reflected the character of America more broadly. I describe this popular conversation as the diet debate. Although this was not a debate in the sense that there were two individuals or two very distinct camps arguing over a point, I have found patterns in my primary source analysis that reveals an informal debate with various actors expressing contrary opinions on the subject of diet across the nation between 1890 and 1914. This project also specifically looks at the diet debate through the lens of prominent cultural anxieties at the turn of the twentieth-century. Contextualizing the diet debate alongside broader cultural anxieties allows for a nuanced look at turn-of-the-century American culture and the role diet played in identity formation and the negotiation between individual Americans and broader societal fears. The three cultural anxieties explored here are the neurasthenia epidemic, the progressive concerns about poverty, alcoholism, and safe food, and the general anxiety about race deterioration and race relations associated with growing the American empire through immigration and imperialism. This project, by looking at how these general anxieties surfaced in the diet debate, shows how cultural anxieties permeated the diet debate and, conversely, how diet debaters capitalized on those anxieties to stake their claims in both reassuring and inciting ways.

Doctor of Philosophy, The Ohio State University, 2015, Germanic Languages and Literatures

The end of the nineteenth century marked the slow shift from home births towards an increased hospitalization of birthing, which became a firmly established practice in twentieth-century German-speaking countries. In this project, I analyze and contextualize representations of birthing, birthing assistants, and the medicalization of the female body in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries in Helene Boehlau's Halbtier! (1899), Ilse Frapan's Arbeit (1903), and Gabriele Reuter's Das Traenenhaus (1908). Boehlau, Frapan, and Reuter wrote their novels at the cusp of a new approach to birthing, and their protagonists grapple with the transition from giving birth at home with minimal medical intervention to viewing birth as a pathological condition that requires support from medical personnel. By bringing together theoretical discourses on the body and on medicalization, I examine what effect the restructuring of birthing assistance, and later the development of the medical specialty of obstetrics, had on women in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, and how women perceived these changed birthing conditions. I argue that each of these literary works challenges the medical history narratives that have portrayed medical advances in obstetrics as a positive change for women across the world. Rather, these works take up questions of female agency and the human cost resulting from medical advancements. I identify the three authors' preoccupation with unwed mothers' birthing experiences and the socio-economic and moral factors that influence their patient care and access to health care as a crucial commonality between the works examined. The project begins with a historical overview of the medicalization of birthing in German-speaking countries and of the changing discourses about the female procreative body from the 1750s onwards. The subsequent three literature chapters focus on the portrayal of women's perceptions of the birthing experience, the loc (open full item for complete abstract)

M.M., University of Cincinnati, 0, College-Conservatory of Music: Music History

Chromatically meandering, even teasing, Carmen's Seguidilla proves fatally seductive for Don Jose, luring him to an obsession that overrides his expected decorum. Equally alluring, Dalila contrives to strip Samson of his powers and the Israelites of their prized warrior. However, while exotic femmes fatales plotting ruination of gentrified patriarchal society populated the nineteenth-century French opera stages, they contrast sharply with an eighteenth-century model populated by merciful exotic male rulers overseeing wandering Western females and their estranged lovers. Disparities between these eighteenth and nineteenth-century archetypes, most notably in treatment and expectation of the exotic and the female, appear particularly striking given the chronological proximity within French operatic tradition. Indeed, current literature depicts these models as mutually exclusive. Yet when conceptualized as a single tradition, it is a socio-political—rather than aesthetic—revolution that provides the basis for this drastic shift from femme ideale to femme fatale. To achieve this end, this thesis contains detailed analyses of operatic librettos and music of operas representative of the eighteenth-century French exotic archetype: Arlequin Sultan Favorite (1721), Le Turc genereux, an entree in Les Indes Galantes (1735), La Recontre imprevue/Die Pilgrime von Mekka (1764), and Die Entfuhrung aus dem Serail (1782). Taking cues from Edward Said's concept of Orientalism as a reflection of the collective fears of western society, it places them within a socio-political and cultural context via appropriate primary and secondary sources. It applies the same method to operas representative of the nineteenth-century French exotic archetype: L'Africaine (1865), Carmen (1875), Samson et Dalila (1877) and Lakme (1883). To account for the nineteenth century's break with eighteenth-century exotic plot archetypes, this study documents the socio-political backlash against female li (open full item for complete abstract)

MA, University of Cincinnati, 2012, Arts and Sciences: Spanish

The thesis focuses on defining identity in selected Latin American essays from the nineteenth to mid twentieth century. Thus, my main lines of research are devoted to the complex issues of representation of identity in selected essayistic works in the context of postcolonial Latin America. The first chapter is dedicated to three essayists of the nineteenth century and has three parts corresponding to the selected essayistic works of the Argentinean writer and statesman Domingo Faustino Sarmiento (1811 -1888), the Uruguayan essayist Jos¿¿¿¿ Enrique Rod¿¿¿¿ (1872 -1917), and the Cuban national hero and writer Jose Mart¿¿¿¿ (1853 - 1895). The second chapter is devoted to three essayists of the twentieth century: the Mexican essayist and poet Alfonso Reyes (1889-1959), the Peruvian journalist, political philosopher and activist Jos¿¿¿¿ Carlos Mari¿¿¿¿tegui (1894-1930,) and the great Mexican writer Octavio Paz (1914-1998), who is the Nobel Prize winner for Literature (1990). Our selection of texts consists of selections from Facundo (1845) by Sarmiento, Ariel (1900) by Rod¿¿¿¿, “Nuestra Am¿¿¿¿rica” (1891) by Mart¿¿¿¿, “Visi¿¿¿¿n de An¿¿¿¿huac” (1915) by Reyes, selected parts of Siete ensayos de interpretaci¿¿¿¿n de la realidad peruana (1928) by Mari¿¿¿¿tegui, and El laberinto de la soledad (1950) by Paz. The main research question is how each of these six authors imagine/ represent the identity of their nation and at a higher level of identity in Latin America? My research question is mainly based on the theoretical findings of Benedict Anderson and Fredric Jameson. My question is mostly determined by the definition of “national allegory,” given by Fredric Jameson in his article “Third-World Literature in the Era of Multinational Capitalism.” The main lines of my analysis are dedicated to find and interpret examples in each of the authors of the national allegories through which they represent/imagine their national communities.

Doctor of Philosophy, The Ohio State University, 2008, English

England has historically conceived of chastity in two ways: 1) virginity prior to marriage followed by continence – i.e., self-restraint from sexual intercourse – within marriage and 2) simplicity of clothing and ornamentation. This dissertation, Fashioning Chastity: British Marriage Plots and the Tailing of Desire, 1789 and 1928, focuses on a time when these two definitions coexisted. British marriage plots typically concentrate on two female characters: one who overvalues fashion and engages in pre-marital sexual activity (only to make a poor marriage or become a fallen woman) and another who favors conservative dress and guards her chaste reputation (for which she is rewarded with an affectionate marriage). While the fallen women's scandalous sexuality attracts critical attention, the marriage plot's heroines – perhaps because they appear to reify orthodoxy – tend to generate less analytical attention. This dissertation examines the latter group: the overlooked, chaste protagonists. By unpacking sartorial motifs in Matthew Lewis's The Monk (1796), George Eliot's Adam Bede (1859), Thomas Hardy's Jude the Obscure (1895), and Virginia Woolf's Orlando (1928), I illustrate how these authors use clothing's symbolic relation to contemporary issues to complicate the appearance feminine, chaste sexuality. Ultimately, this dissertation draws upon and contributes to feminist and sexuality studies by helping us to better understand the complexity of female chastity throughout the long nineteenth century. While Enlightenment thinking led contemporary religious, marital, and sartorial discourses to back away from defining husbands as the undisputed rulers of their households, the Marriage Act of 1753 solidified the importance of female virginity, as verbal spousehoods were no longer legally binding. Concurrently, republican and capitalist belief systems deified the pursuit of happiness in marriage and promoted the interests of the rising middle-class, emphasizing women as the (open full item for complete abstract)