Abstract
Few figures dominated nineteenth-century British literary culture quite like the woman novel reader. Deemed diseased, dangerous, and irrational, the woman novel reader was widely represented as both a social and national threat in this period due to her excessive emotionality. Rather than dismiss these claims as attempts to undermine women’s intellectual abilities or control women’s bodies and sexuality, as is popular in nineteenth-century British literary and cultural studies, my project instead takes these accusations of danger seriously and asks how feminized, affective forms of reading may have sought to undermine the British patriarchal order both in fiction and reality. I argue that the contagious, immersive forms of reading so denounced by nineteenth-century critics and often dismissed by contemporary Victorian scholars, in fact, acts as a critical and subversive feminized reading practice that challenged the sanity and sanctity of the Victorian so-called “cult of domesticity.” I further suggest that by cultivating contagions of unruly and ugly feeling, this reading practice worked to reorient readers within their own realities and helped audiences recognize idealized domestic spaces and relationships, as well as the patriarchal institutions which upheld them, as both contaminated and contaminating. Investigating how these diseased and ugly feelings were deployed by different kinds of feminized and “poisonous” fiction in the long nineteenth century, including sentimental fiction, Gothic fiction, and sensation fiction, I reconstruct a uniquely readerly archive of “women’s fiction” that reveals a longer and more productive relationship between (proto)feminism and feeling than is often acknowledged. Thus, I reclaim emotion and reading as potential sites of everyday (proto)feminist resistance without relying on or reinscribing gendered hierarchies of knowledge, recognizing instead how various reading practices may result in different forms of power and possibility in the long nineteenth century.
Committee Chair
Jessica Rosenfeld
Committee Members
Amy Pawl; Julia Walker; Lynne Tatlock; Sarah Weston; Vincent Sherry
Degree
Doctor of Philosophy (PhD)
Author's Department
English & American Literature
Document Type
Dissertation
Date of Award
4-27-2026
Language
English (en)
DOI
https://doi.org/10.7936/vqdx-ej78
Recommended Citation
Clayton, Ashni, "A Dangerous Feeling: The Poetics and Politics of Women's Reading Practices in the Long Nineteenth Century" (2026). Arts & Sciences Graduate Student Theses and Dissertations. 3737.
The definitive version is available at https://doi.org/10.7936/vqdx-ej78