Master of Arts (MA), Bowling Green State University, 1955, Theatre

Committee: Elden T. Smith (Advisor) Subjects: Theater

Master of Arts (MA), Bowling Green State University, 1955, Theatre

Committee: Elden T. Smith (Advisor) Subjects: Theater

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)

Committee: Michelle Abate (Advisor); Patricia Enciso (Committee Member); Clare Simmons (Committee Member); Victoria Ford Smith (Committee Member) Subjects: American Literature; British and Irish Literature; Gender Studies; Literature

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

The animated statue represented one of the central magical figures in French musical theater of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. During the period covered by this dissertation, 1661-1748, animated statues appeared in more than sixty works of musical theater of almost every available genre. This number does not include the many works containing statues that demonstrated magical or otherworldly properties through means other than movement or song. Some of the works of this period that feature living statues are well-known to musicologists—e.g. Moliere/Jean-Baptiste Lully's comedy-ballet Les Facheux (1661), Lully's opera Cadmus et Hermione (1673), and Jean-Philippe Rameau's one-act ballet Pigmalion (1748)—while others have received little recognition. This dissertation is the first study to consider the history of animated statues on the French stage during this period, and the first to reveal music as a defining feature of these statues. Over the course of nearly ninety years, music assumed an increasingly important role in the theatrical treatments of these figures that operated in the space between magic and mechanics. At the beginning of Louis XIV's reign, animated statues appeared with some frequency in both public and court spectacles. By the mid-eighteenth century, the animated statue had become the central focus of many works and had transformed into a potent symbol of, among other ideas, the power of music and dance, as most dramatically realized in Rameau's Pigmalion. This dissertation traces the history of this transformation.

Committee: Georgia Cowart (Committee Co-Chair); Francesca Brittan (Committee Co-Chair); Susan McClary (Committee Member); Elina Gertsman (Committee Member) Subjects: Art History; Dance; European History; Music; Theater