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, The Ohio State University, 2018, English

Feminists and gender theorists need a better way of thinking about what it means for a Victorian male character to be in pain. Because we've thoroughly codified the reduction of female characters to vulnerable bodies, we've ended up with an essentialist association between pain, femininity, and disempowerment. Male characters' pain doesn't result from disempowerment or oppression, and so its representation enables female novelists to explore suffering to various political and aesthetic ends. This dissertation illuminates how three Victorian women novelists use this same figure—the suffering man—to highlight different intersections between pain, gender, and the novel form. In Wuthering Heights (1847), Emily Bronte does not imagine a just world in which men's violence is punished but rather creates an aesthetic space in which pain becomes a spiritualized artistic medium. Elizabeth Gaskell's North and South (1855), on the other hand, rejects the political expedience of a sensationless industrial masculinity and advocates instead for the pains of erotic love. Finally, Marie Corelli foments aesthetic and political heresy in her bestselling novel The Sorrows of Satan (1895), which combines Satan and Christ into a tortured outcast genius who both desires and rejects the approval of establishment authorities. Because critics have shown how commonly Victorian female characters in pain are figured either as self-sacrificing martyrs or justly punished sinners, critics have tended to refer to male characters' pain as “feminization,” which they have conflated with reformation. Ultimately, however, I show that rather than merely weaving fantasies of punishing patriarchs, these three novelists reconfigured the relationship between torture, gendered justice, and the novel in unexpected and uncomfortable ways.

Committee: Robyn Warhol (Advisor); Jill Galvan (Committee Member); Amanpal Garcha (Committee Member); Sandra Macpherson (Committee Member) Subjects: Gender; Gender Studies; Literature

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)

Committee: Joseph McLaughlin (Advisor); Carey Snyder (Committee Member); Nicole Reynolds (Committee Member); Albert Rouzie (Committee Member); Jacqueline Wolf (Other) Subjects: British and Irish Literature; Gender Studies; History; Literature; Medicine; Nursing; Public Health; Sanitation; Womens Studies

Doctor of Philosophy, The Ohio State University, 2020, English

This dissertation challenges the standard narrative of nineteenth-century literary secularization by attending to British texts that engage liturgy and ritual. According to once standard accounts of secularization, the development of modernity—the rise of the natural sciences, the spread of market economies, and so forth—necessarily entails the decline and eventual demise of religion. Until recently, many readings of Romantic and Victorian literature have assumed this trajectory of progressive secularization. However, for the last twenty years, scholarship from a variety of disciplines—history, sociology, anthropology, philosophy, and theology—has complicated and often rejected the notion that modernization brings about the death of faith. Such scholarship frequently observes how the concept of religion itself—especially when construed as private belief in supernatural ideas—is a construction of early modern Europe and is born simultaneously with the notion of the secular as the sphere of public reason. Drawing on these recent revisions of secularization theory, I ask why—in a so-called age of doubt—many nineteenth-century writers of various confessional stances nevertheless become fascinated by liturgy and ritual. Rather than simply accept the picture of religion as primarily an interior, otherworldly phenomenon, these writers, I argue, turn to liturgy to enflesh faith—that is, to resist modernity's characteristic bifurcations of natural/supernatural, body/soul, reason/faith, and so on. At once spiritual and material, liturgy incarnates unseen realities in concrete forms—bread, wine, water, the architectural arrangement of churches and temples, and the temporal patterns of ritual calendars. Romantic and Victorian writers deploy this incarnational power for a host of reasons: to reinvest the natural world and material objects with spiritual meaning, to reimagine the human person as porous and malleable rather than as closed and mechanical, to question the homoge (open full item for complete abstract)

Committee: Clare Simmons (Advisor); David Riede (Committee Member); Amanpal Garcha (Committee Member); Norman Jones (Committee Member) Subjects: British and Irish Literature; Literature; Religion; Theology

Doctor of Philosophy, Miami University, 2019, English

My dissertation reads key works of Victorian and modernist literature by Alfred Tennyson, Elizabeth Gaskell, H. Rider Haggard, David Jones, T. S. Eliot, and Virginia Woolf alongside contemporaneous scientific texts to illustrate how mass anthropogenic extinction became increasingly recognizable. By bridging periods, my dissertation examines the multiple and sometimes conflicting registers of meaning that extinction accrued throughout Britain's industrial and imperial history as the notion of anthropogenic mass extinction gained traction within the cultural imaginary. Literary critics who discuss the Anthropocene within the context of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries tend to focus squarely on the question of climate, using the geohistorical moment of Britain's industrialization to trace the ideological, material, and scientific developments that gave rise to the notion of anthropogenic climate change within the public imagination, especially through representations of pollution and compromised atmospheres. My project attempts to reframe this conversation by considering the extent to which the Anthropocene became increasingly knowable to both Victorians and modernists through biological registers: as in the observable impacts of imperialist processes and technological modernity on biodiversity and global animal populations. These impacts were recognized in, for example, African species and subspecies that became critically endangered or extinct due to British hunting culture as well as avian species that sharply declined due to British consumer practices. I argue that mid-nineteenth-century authors from Tennyson to Gaskell were beginning to explore the degree to which geological frameworks called into question long-standing beliefs regarding humankind's placement within the natural world as well as the precarity of species within the context of deep time. I consider how such lines of inquiry continued throughout the century in adventure fiction investe (open full item for complete abstract)

Committee: Mary Jean Corbett (Committee Co-Chair); Madelyn Detloff (Committee Co-Chair); Erin Edwards (Committee Member); Andrew Hebard (Committee Member); Marguerite Shaffer (Committee Member) Subjects: British and Irish Literature; Literature

Master of Arts (MA), Bowling Green State University, 2019, English/Literature

Various forms of discipline played significant roles during the Victorian era, yet, as with many aspects of Victorian society, discipline and disciplinary systems were still viewed as being separated between the public and private spheres. However, according to Michel Foucault's theories from Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison (1975) and Psychiatric Power: Lectures at the College De France, 1973-1974, discipline and disciplinary systems are not separate, but are entwined and intrinsically linked to power, particularly power over the body. Using Foucault's theories as a lens, this thesis examines the use of disciplinary systems and their effects on Victorian heroines who are non-docile bodies in three works of fiction: Elizabeth Gaskell's North and South (1854) and “The Poor Clare” (1856) and Sheridan Le Fanu's The Rose and the Key (1871). In these works, the heroines – Margaret Hale in North and South, Bridget Fitzgerald in “The Poor Clare,” and Maud Vernon in The Rose and the Key – all encounter disciplinary systems that are controlled by sovereigns and use surveillance to ensure the people in the disciplinary systems remain docile bodies. Because the heroines are non-docile bodies, they do not conform to the expectations placed upon them by society or the disciplinary system and are each punished for their transgressions. Even so, each heroine reacts differently to the disciplinary systems they find themselves in, and some heroines work to subvert those systems. Margaret Hale is punished within the disciplinary system of Milton because she puts her body and actions on display multiple times, but she manages to subvert her discipline and remain a non-docile body. In contrast, Maud Vernon's non-docile body can withstand the disciplinary system of her family's country house, Roydon, but she becomes a docile body after iv she is sent to the disciplinary system of the private asylum, Glarewoods. Finally, Bridget Fitzgerald uses her pow (open full item for complete abstract)

Committee: Piya Pal-Lapinski PhD (Advisor); Kimberly Coates PhD (Committee Member) Subjects: British and Irish Literature; European Studies; Gender Studies; Literature

Doctor of Philosophy (PhD), Ohio University, 2018, English (Arts and Sciences)

“Mr. Dickens's Book of Household Management: (Re)-Reading Bleak House as Domestic Literature,” explores the relationship between Charles Dickens's ninth epic novel, Bleak House and domestic literature. Through this exploration, Carrie Ann seeks to show the influence social information, in the form of domestic literature, has on the novel, and conversely, how the novel responds to and/or influences/reforms domestic literature. Carrie Ann posits that the novel can be read as domestic literature and that Dickens used his only female narrator, Esther Summerson, as a conductor for his own domestic curriculum. A curriculum that values practical knowledge, based on women's experiences, and recognizes the labor behind household management. Dickens's domestic curriculum can be seen as being progressive in that it champions female education and argues in favor of breaking down rigid household hierarchies, and by extension, class hierarchies. By altering the public's perception of who could occupy certain female roles, for example the “Angel in the House,” and by which route women, of any class, could attain positions within the domestic sphere, Dickens not only demonstrates how conformity to (his) domestic curriculum can be transformative, but that, to a certain extent, class, and other indicators of status, are irrelevant.

Committee: Joseph McLaughlin (Committee Chair) Subjects: Literature

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

Reading as Forgetting interprets representations of immersive readers within Victorian novels and cultural criticism in four major moments in nineteenth-century literary history: in the novels of industrial contact in the 1840s and 50s, the popular sensation fiction of the 1860s, the late-century representations of the 1857 Indian Rebellion, and the incipient modernist writing of Joseph Conrad. In new readings of novels, letters, advertisements, and journalism, I contend that the authorial tendency to show readers in a state of self-forgetful absorption offered a means to define the value of the novel in its relation to developments such as the rise of the railroad, the explosion of magazines and newspapers, and the growth of English colonial communities abroad. Revealing the often contradictory uses of readerly immersion as a sympathetic ideal, a vulnerable experience, an important part of imperial solidarity, or a symptom of imperial disintegration, Reading as Forgetting investigates how the Victorians vigorously debated local reading practices in the context of global developments in industry and Empire. The relationship between emotional and physical “transport” emerges as a crucial component of these debates. Throughout Reading as Forgetting, I show how the supposed ability of the novel to transport the reader into an immersive, self-forgetful state interacted with spatial dislocations caused by the physical movements of industry and Empire. Though the Victorian period is often conceived as an era of unabashed publicity and popular appeal, I discuss how warring representations of readerly immersion acted as strategies of authentication. Immersion is revealed to be a critical concept associated with readers, but one that helped authors and critics create cultural distinctions across the literary landscape that are traditionally associated with twentieth-century writing.

Committee: Jill Galvan PhD (Advisor); Robyn Warhol PhD (Committee Member); Thomas Davis PhD (Committee Member) Subjects: British and Irish Literature; History; Literature

Master of Arts in English, Cleveland State University, 2017, College of Liberal Arts and Social Sciences

In recent years, there has been a trend in young adult adaptations of Wuthering Heights to amend the plot so that Catherine Earnshaw chooses to have a romantic relationship with Heathcliff, when in Bronte's novel she decides against it. In the following study, I trace the factors that contribute to Catherine's rejection of Heathcliff as a romantic partner in the original text. Many critics have argued that her motives are primarily Machiavellian since she chooses a suitor with more wealth and familial connections than Heathcliff. These are indeed factors; however, by engaging with contemporary research on adolescent development, I show that the primary reason she rejects Heathcliff is because he has exhibited a propensity for violence and other abusive behaviors. I also analyze the consequences of reversing her decision in the updated young adult versions, which include the made-for-television film MTV's Wuthering Heights (2003), the Lifetime original film Wuthering High School (2012), and the novel Catherine (2013). The most significant consequence of this change is that in order to make Heathcliff a “chooseable,” twenty-first century hero, the writers of these works have to romanticize his violent tendencies through the perspectives of their female protagonists. When the young women begin to question how secure they are around their partners, they ultimately decide that fidelity to their “soulmate” relationship is more important than safety or autonomy, with the writers using Catherine Earnshaw's famous “I am Heathcliff” speech to support their protagonists' conclusions. I argue, though, that while Catherine does allude to the type of otherworldly love these young women are venerating, Bronte uses her speech to confront the limitations of that love, not to hold it up as an ideal.

Committee: Rachel Carnell (Committee Chair); Gary Dyer (Committee Member); Frederick Karem (Committee Member) Subjects: American Literature; Behavioral Psychology; British and Irish Literature; Gender; Literature; Modern Literature; Motion Pictures; Personal Relationships

Master of Arts (MA), Bowling Green State University, 2016, English/Literature

The Gothic has become a mode of transforming reality according to the writers' and the audiences' imagination through the reproduction of hellish landscapes and nightmarish characters and occurrences. It has also been used though to address concerns and criticize authoritarian and power relations between citizens and the State. Lewis Carroll's Alice's Adventures in Wonderland and its sequel Through the Looking Glass are stories written during the second part of the 19th century and use distinct Gothic elements to comment on the political situation in England as well as the power of language from a child's perspective. Guillermo Del Toro's Pan's Labyrinth on the other hand uses Gothic horror and escapism to demonstrate the monstrosities of fascism and underline the importance of revolt and resistance against State oppression. This thesis will be primarily concerned with Alice and Ofelia as Gothic protagonists that become agents of revolt against their respective states of oppression through the lens of Giorgio Agamben and Hannah Arendt. I will examine how language and escapism are used as tools by the literary creators to depict resistance against the Law and societal pressure; I also aim to demonstrate how the young protagonists themselves refuse to comply with the authoritarian methods used against them by the adult representatives of Power.

Committee: Piya Pal-Lapinski (Committee Chair); Kimberly Coates (Committee Member) Subjects: American Studies; Cinematography; Comparative Literature; Film Studies; Gender Studies; Literature; Philosophy; Political Science

Doctor of Philosophy, The Ohio State University, 2015, English

Early children's literature took the forms of complex, distinct genres that, much more than the novels being published contemporaneously with them, were employed in the didactic effect of literary structures. These works, published roughly from 1750-1850, do not assume a simple, one-to-one relationship between fictional worlds and the real world. They are aware of the complexities of representation, and, written and read predominantly by women and girls, they are especially aware of representation's effects on gender. Early children's fiction, I argue, treats literary and social forms alike as structure-at-work in the world, and this treatment had a substantive impact on fiction that shares its interest in the subtleties of gender formation and the disparate treatment of gendered beings in fiction and in fact: the nineteenth-century realist novel. From one perspective, this project is a straightforward, genre-study of early children's fiction and its influence on the Victorian realist novel. I focus on four major genres, selected for their numerousness and their continued though adapted use in fiction, and I think carefully about the bids they made on readers. Rather than teach simple morals, I argue that these works teach people to analyze in culturally-prescribed ways: to see a situation in the world, understand what it means, and react to it accordingly. By emphasizing analysis as a response to structure, this fiction signals the construction of social categories. By adopting and adapting these forms, novelists like Dickens and the Brontes engage children's fictions' educational goals and emphasize the degree to which reality is defined by social, material, embodied, and familial forms. Ultimately, I demonstrate that that the didacticism which we have for so long assumed was simple and straightforward is, in fact, a kind of formalism, one that codifies structures of response and embodiment that belie its reputation as pure content.

Committee: Robyn Warhol (Advisor); Jill Galvin (Committee Member); Sandra Macpherson (Committee Member); Simmons Clare (Committee Member) Subjects: British and Irish Literature; Early Childhood Education; Gender; Gender Studies; Literature; Womens Studies

Master of Arts in English, Youngstown State University, 2009, Department of Languages

George Eliot was not a typical woman of the Victorian era. She lived openly with a man who was not her husband despite familial and societal disapproval. Eliot was also an ambitious woman, one who would become one of the greatest authors of her time. Yet in spite of – or because of – her unique lifestyle, Eliot punishes her female characters that pursue their own ambitions. Those who meet or attempt to meet her rigorous standards of female behavior – service to others and resignation to fate – are permitted some measure of happiness in the end.Hetty Sorrel of Adam Bede and Gwendolen Harleth of Daniel Deronda are Eliot's spoiled girls. Their greatest ambition is to marry into wealth and live a life of luxury and freedom. This ambition is furthest from Eliot's ideal, and Hetty and Gwendolen are harshly punished. Dinah Morris of Adam Bede and Dorothea Brooke of Middlemarch are George Eliot's martyrs. They begin closest to Eliot's standard, and therefore, though they are punished for pursuing their ambitions, they are rewarded with happiness at the end of their respective novels. Maggie Tulliver of The Mill on the Floss is, much like Eliot herself, too clever for her simple country existence and unable to find her place in society. While Eliot was able to find love and success in her own life, Maggie Tulliver is never able to find a vent for her passionate nature, and after repeated discouragements and punishments, she is killed in a flood. Eliot was the exception to the rule with regard to female ambition in Victorian society, and her own successes were not without their sacrifices. She illustrates this in her work by exacting punishment on her ambitious female characters.

Committee: Julia Gergits PhD (Advisor); Stephanie Tingley PhD (Committee Member); James Schramer PhD (Committee Member) Subjects: English literature; Literature; Womens Studies

Doctor of Philosophy, The Ohio State University, 2005, English

Drawing on literary texts by Charles Dickens, Anthony Trollope, and George Gissing and non-literary texts appearing in periodicals, comic newspapers, and music-hall songs this dissertation show how the lower middle class consisting of those members of British society working variously as Civil Service, commercial, and retail clerks, school teachers, and living in the suburbs of London and other large cities is represented as dangerous, laughable, and pitiable. Through readings of self-improvement books by Samuel Smiles, conduct and instruction manuals, and didactic literature I show how middle-class anxieties about its own position vis-a-vis the aristocracy and the working class drive middle-class elites to represent the lower middle class as dangerous, in need of containment, and surveillance. One of the constant fears of the middle class is that the lower middle class will develop a cultural and economic identity of its own. I then show how the lower middle class poses a threat to the heteronormative order that both underwrites and is underwritten by the bourgeois order. The lower middle class enjoyment of female to male cross-dressing performers like Vesta Tilley highlights how the music hall develops into a place where lower-middle-class men and women can re-imagine their class, gender, and sexual identities. As such, it becomes the locus of an emergent lower-middle-class cultural identity independent of middle class influence. The dissertation also shows how Dickens in David Copperfield offers up a solution to the socio-literary problem of the lower middle class by deploying the Bildungsroman to allow for the social mobility of some members of the lower middle class. Specifically, David Copperfield enters into the Victorian debate over the nature of the gentleman and proposes that the best way for young lower-middle-class men to rise to the rank of middle-class gentlemen is through authorship. The dissertation then turns to a discussion of how Born in Exile and (open full item for complete abstract)

Committee: David Riede (Advisor) Subjects: Literature, English

Doctor of Philosophy (PhD), Ohio University, 2006, English (Arts and Sciences)

This dissertation explores the British representations of the Indian Mutiny through an examination of the English novel, interspersed with careful attention to the media coverage of the Mutiny and personal accounts of the uprising. I argue that the Mutiny novel in particular becomes a stage on which the issues of race, gender, and culture are enacted. Throughout my project I utilize the guiding metaphor of the imperial scaffold, which is both “a stage where theatrical productions take place” and also “a platform that aids in the repair or the erection a building” (OED). The imperial scaffold operates in these novels as a system of rhetorical principles–primarily set up through the binary of East versus West—that seeks to reaffirm, reconstruct, and eventually re-imagine British imperial ideals. Through an examination of four Mutiny novels, my project argues that Mutiny novelists, as well as newspaper reporters, employ a rhetorical framework in their writing that attempts to reaffirm British imperial power, but that also exposes the “fissures” in imperial ideology at the same time.

Committee: Joseph McLaughlin (Advisor) Subjects: Literature, English

Doctor of Philosophy (PhD), Ohio University, 2004, English (Arts and Sciences)

Charlotte Bronte's visually detailed character descriptions illustrate her participation in the Victorian fascination with the legibility of the inner self. Although much has been said about her use of visual imagery to evoke interiority, critics have not yet addressed her treatment of dress as a signifier. This dissertation examines Bronte's use of clothing in characterization, particularly how it engages the Victorian discourses of physiognomy and phrenology. In her writing she frequently employs these culturally accepted pseudo-sciences, which posit that the face and the skull offer clues to identity. These taxonomies presume that character is more or less fixed according to one's physical features. This dissertation demonstrates how Bronte uses dress in order to subvert the pseudo-sciences' notion that the body houses a relatively stable, unitary self. Over time, she shifts her attention from the coded face to clothing as a more suitable means of representing subjectivity since it better expresses the performative aspect of identity. The emergence of the plain heroine in the juvenilia and published novels contributes to this shift; her contradictory facial features and distinctly unfashionable mode of dress index her process of self-development. The first chapter addresses the influence of the silver-fork school on her early character descriptions and the first appearance of the plain heroine in the juvenilia. The second chapter demonstrates how, in Jane Eyre, the protagonist manages contradictory elements of her character by dressing plainly, and the third explores how, in Villette, Lucy Snowe extends the boundaries of her identity by wearing unlikely costumes. By investing materialist pseudo-science and material garments with psychological meaning, Bronte achieves an unprecedented representation of women's interior lives in nineteenth-century fiction.

Committee: Linda Beckman (Advisor) Subjects: Literature, English

Doctor of Philosophy, The Ohio State University, 2022, English

Reading a ghostly company of lyric and epic poetry, treatises on aesthetics and poetics, manuals of technical prosody, and works of occult speculation across one and a half centuries, "The Phantoms of a Thousand Hours" argues that eighteenth- and nineteenth-century poets and poetic theorists seize on the ghost as the inchoate form of poetry itself. Beginning in the pious meditations of the eighteenth-century "Graveyard School," these writers spectralize the operations of the poem and fashion poetic structures into chambers of vigil where the ghost might be awaited and encountered. Alive to the recursive directions of contemporary historical poetics, this study challenges the emerging scholarly consensus on the ghost in the long nineteenth century as either a creature of fiction, born almost coeval with the novel in the work of Defoe, or a residual form, a remainder from folklore and oral balladry that glides uncertainly into Gothic's set dressing. Rather, just as poets envisioned their craft as instinct with ghostly measures, rhythms, and pauses, occult writers from antiquaries to Spiritualists substantialized and realized the ghost through the opaque lyricism and manifest technique of poetry. Accepting neoformalism's sound insistence on the historicity of form itself, my work nonetheless eschews New Formalism's frequent dismissal of the specter from the spectral: even the most evanescent, technical traces of the ghost in the poetry of the long nineteenth century recall and reflect living structures of preternatural belief and occult vision. Like Shelley in his "Hymn to Intellectual Beauty," these poets "sought for ghosts," and, if they were "not heard" and "saw them not," they could yet take solace in "the phantoms of a thousand hours," of the myriad ideal visions of poetry's ghosts across a long Graveyard Century. Across the Graveyard Century spanning from Thomas Gray to Thomas Hardy, this study argues that the ghost haunts poetry's sense of its own form precisely (open full item for complete abstract)

Committee: Jill Galvan (Committee Co-Chair); Sandra Macpherson (Committee Member); Hannibal Hamlin (Committee Member); Jacob Risinger (Committee Co-Chair) Subjects: Literature

Bachelor of Arts (BA), Ohio University, 2022, English

This thesis explores the prevalence of disability in Charlotte Bronte's Villette and how conceptions of race, gender, wellness, and physical appearance within Victorian England influence the novel's conceptions of disability. Several authors such as Bronte took to literature to attempt to depict and understand what constitutes disability and how disability determines individuals' perceived social status and value. Relying on Lennard Davis's theory of disability/impairment—that impairment relates to the actual loss of a biological function while disability relates to society's unwillingness to accommodate this loss—this thesis suggests that the disabled identity is socially constructed, and that the hierarchies of race, gender, wellness, and physical appearance helped produce how the Victorians understood disability. Villette has created a divide between disability studies scholars, as some are convinced that Bronte creates an ableist narrative in the novel, while others suggest that she represents disabled characters as integral and accepted parts of society. By exploring four main bodily dichotomies shown in the novel, including the English vs. the foreign body, the pretty vs the plain body, the reproductive vs. the working body, and the healthy vs. the ill body, I suggest that Villette both affirms and denies the worth of the social hierarchies that create disability. Observing the ambiguity in Villette allows for a greater understanding of the construction of “normality” within texts, and the subjective, evolving nature of the norm of the human body.

Committee: Linda Zionkowski (Advisor) Subjects: Literature; Mental Health; Minority and Ethnic Groups; Psychology; Womens Studies

Doctor of Philosophy, The Ohio State University, 2021, English

Since the initial proposal of the Affordable Care Act, the number of bills introduced in state and national legislatures relating to women's reproductive health has increased markedly, sparking greater public interest in the legal and sociocultural debates surrounding access to abortion services. Scholarship on these issues in English literature usually begins with the late-nineteenth century and the beginning of the twentieth century, when discourse on contraception and birth control emerged as a parallel current with the women's suffrage movement in the United States and Great Britain. However, the way discourse on abortion in particular manifested during the earlier part of the Victorian Era has not been explored in depth, leaving a discursive gap regarding understandings of women's reproductive health in nineteenth-century print culture. Reading Con(tra)ceptions: Women, Abortion, and Reproductive Health in Victorian Literature and Culture, 1840-1880, aims to remedy this gap by exploring abortion more directly, specifically, and contextually in mid-Victorian literature – especially as represented in the novel, contemporary periodicals, and various forms of epistolary works. Focusing on realist texts, I consider Elizabeth Gaskell's Mary Barton with an eye toward the historically classed associations behind herb gardens and how access to different forms of medicine informs depictions of working-class motherhood. I then examine the ways George Eliot's Middlemarch effectively works to counter rather than reinforce Darwinian notions of “male-dominated choice,” instead underscoring how representations of family planning showcase instances of women's reproductive choice. Finally, I explore how examples of Victorian erotica such as My Secret Life also maintain critical rhetorical roots in realism, providing important, explicit glimpses into mid- century discourses about sexuality – including notably clearer, straightforward discussions about abortion and women's reproduc (open full item for complete abstract)

Committee: Clare Simmons (Advisor); Amanpal Garcha (Committee Member); Robyn Warhol (Committee Member) Subjects: British and Irish Literature; Gender Studies; History; Womens Studies

Doctor of Philosophy, Case Western Reserve University, 2018, English

This dissertation examines contradictory representations of the figure of the muscular woman in Victorian fiction and the periodical press. Throughout the second half of the nineteenth century, writers debated whether the muscular female body should be celebrated as a fresh alternative to the wasp-waisted ideal of female beauty or condemned for its perceived destabilization of established social and aesthetic codes of feminine decorum. Within this debate, commentators advanced competing views about the efficacy of rigorous physical fitness regimens for women, the relationship between muscularity and women's reproductive capacities, and the coherence of female musculature and traditional formulations of womanhood. These conflicting views illuminated wider cultural concerns about national fitness and changing configurations of gender. My project analyzes representations of muscular women in chapters that focus on women's physical fitness commentaries, magazine illustrations, sensation narratives, and New Woman novels in order to demonstrate how muscular women necessitated revisions to Victorian cultural configurations of beauty, motherhood, femininity, and masculinity. The dissertation also explores connections between the muscular woman's unconventional embodiment of physical culture ideals and the “transgressive” forms of the literary genres in which she appeared. I argue that depictions of muscular women in Victorian fiction and the periodical press reveal fissures and contradictions in the gender and sexual ideologies underpinning Victorian physical culture, thus illuminating the muscular woman's versatility as both a fictional character and real-life social conundrum. My project demonstrates how muscular women's bodies could figure as both objects of social construction and agents of social change, as they called into question Victorian cultural understandings of gender, sexuality, and female physicality. The muscular woman's challenge to the boundaries of aesthe (open full item for complete abstract)

Committee: Athena Vrettos (Advisor); Christopher Flint (Committee Member); Kurt Koenigsberger (Committee Member); Renee Sentilles (Committee Member) Subjects: British and Irish Literature; Gender; Literature

Master of Arts (MA), Bowling Green State University, 2017, English/Literature

In the Victorian period, photography was associated with the ghosts of history, con artists in the streets of London, and cultural anxieties about the future of Victorian society. The Victorian practice of photographing ghosts, or spirit photography, showed how Victorians viewed the past, present, and future. By examining the cultural artifact of Georgiana Houghton's Chronicles of the Photographs of Spiritual Beings (1882), it becomes clear how photography affected Victorian literature as well as Victorian culture. In the short stories, “Oke of Okehurst” (1886) and “A Wicked Voice” (1887), Vernon Lee compared Victorian produced art to art from history. For Lee, the fast paced and highly commercialized art, which was influenced by photography, was not as powerful as art with historical context. An earlier work, Thomas Hardy's A Laodicean: A Story of To-Day (1881), also showed the connections between photography, history, and uncertainty. The characters try to use photography to try and preserve a crumbling medieval castle, but their attempts end in failure. While technology like telegraphs gives Paula a sense of power, the novel leaves her wishing she had a more stable connection to the past and the future. These examples of Victorian literature show that photography affected Victorian culture at a deeper level than previously thought. Photography changed the way Victorians thought about the past, present, and future.

Committee: Piya Pal-Lapinski Dr. (Advisor); Kim Coates Dr. (Committee Member) Subjects: Art History; British and Irish Literature; Gender; Literature