Date of Award
8-6-2024
Degree Name
Doctor of Philosophy (PhD)
Degree Type
Dissertation
Abstract
Victorian Gothic Realism examines Gothic manifestations within realist novels, uncovering the female body as a haunted and haunting site in the works of Emily Brontë, Charles Dickens, Mary Elizabeth Braddon, and Thomas Hardy. Victorian women were simultaneously subject to exhibition and invisibility, as objects of the male gaze and silenced angels in the house. Spectrality, though, liberates female characters from their bodies, enabling them to subvert social restrictions and reverse oppressions that haunt their narratives. My project furthers the understanding of this ghostly agency by exposing temporal meanings hidden within transgressive bodies. Framing the study with an extended reading of Catherine Earnshaw’s ghost in Brontë’s Wuthering Heights (1847), I establish a connection between haunted realities and defiant female figures. I present Catherine’s spectral return as a temporal violation, one that allows her to maintain control and even alter larger narratives of female desire. The subsequent chapters explore ways this gendered haunting reappears in the novels of Dickens, Braddon, and Hardy, who replace the ghost with physical, yet still temporally disruptive, ghost-like bodies. Victorians felt drawn to these ghostly, grotesque, mad, and criminal female figures, I argue, because such figures embodied feelings of alienation endemic to a rapidly industrializing society. The incessant exhibition of bodies across a variety of formats in popular culture, from séances to museums to sensational news stories, also created avenues of visibility for women, who were often the central curiosity and main audience in these popular interests. The increasing presence of women in public spaces coupled with the shifting experience of time in response to industrial time-discipline and standardization makes the ghost a seductive symbol: a subject unlinked to time or body that points backwards to a life already lived but also forward in its continual haunting. I reconceptualize the spectral body as a product of commercial modernity and position Victorian time-consciousness as equally central as gender in the understanding of monstrosity. I also center the ghost as a liberated monster that fundamentally alters its living reality, making specters not simply reflections of the past but liminal spaces on which to imagine progressive realities for the present and future. I focus on a particular moment in literary history in which the Gothic merges with the realist novel and brings forth the living ghost as a reflection of the perceived horrors associated with technological change and disrupted gender norms. My work uncovers and seeks meaning in this link between female ghostliness in popular literature and the expanding material culture of spectrality. By centering the Gothic energies within realist novels, I reveal the intense, yet less obvious, anxieties hidden in Victorian domestic and sensation fiction. Victorian Gothic Realism draws new connections between the temporal consciousness of the Victorians, the cultural value of the Gothic tradition, and the lessons this can teach us about our own society.
Language
English (en)
Chair and Committee
William McKelvy
Committee Members
Akiko Tsuchiya; Guinn Batten; Julia Walker; Miriam Bailin
Recommended Citation
Nikravesh, Negeen N., "Victorian Gothic Realism: Ghostly, Grotesque, Mad, and Criminal Women" (2024). Arts & Sciences Electronic Theses and Dissertations. 3315.
https://openscholarship.wustl.edu/art_sci_etds/3315