R-3 Repository :: Browsing by Author "Michie, Helena"

Browsing by Author "Michie, Helena"

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A Woman's Worth: Gendered Concepts of Value in Victorian Literature and Culture
(2017-02-22) Harvey, Margaret Patricia; Michie, Helena
“A Woman’s Worth: Gendered Concepts of Value in Victorian Literature and Culture” examines how Victorian ideas and thinking about value intervened and intersected with the debate about and depiction of the Woman Question. I identify the second half of the nineteenth century as the setting for a crisis of value, where concepts of value were being formulated and revised in almost every sphere of life—economic, material, religious, political, and cultural. At the same time, activists and writers were grappling with the Woman Question, which asked what rights, responsibilities, and roles Victorian woman should have. I argue that these issues became intertwined for mid-Victorian authors, who staged the crisis of value and the woman question as essentially linked: what makes a woman valuable and what is the nature of her value? Conventionally, the answers were found in the marriage plot and depended on exchange value, i.e. the traffic in women. Many Victorian authors critiqued this formulation of value, revealing how little control women were given over their fate. Some authors were compelled to go even further and imagine alternative value systems that were more equitable and empowering for the women in their novels, and, potentially, their female readers. My three chapters each examine how authors used a particular register of value to both depict the problem with female value and experiment with new and potentially progressive models.
Aging by the book: Textual constructions of midlife in Victorian Britain
(2001) Heath, Kay Helen; Michie, Helena
In the last decade, literary studies has been dominated by an examination of race, class, and gender as major categories of subjectivity. Recently, however, this almost holy trinity has been challenged and complicated by new considerations---the concept of "nation" in post-colonial studies and "place" in environmental literature. This dissertation argues for the usefulness of another aspect of being, age, as a determiner of identity that does significant cultural work. The project focuses specifically on midlife in nineteenth-century Britain. In contrast to twentieth-century midlife which some theorists argue is dominated by ideologies of decline, Victorian middle age operates as a protean construction that maintains an unresolved competition between gain and loss. I examine ways in which these two conceptions of midlife vie for cultural authority as they are heavily complicated by gender. In the introduction, I discuss age as a construct largely determined by cultural forces but also subject to certain biological constraints, and I provide a brief history of midlife as well as outlining the major characteristics of middle age in the Victorian era. In chapter one, I identify disputes in beauty and conduct books surrounding the performance of youth versus age in regard to midlife markers such as baldness, gray hair, wrinkles, weight gain, and use of cosmetics. Chapter two explores fictive age anxiety, showing that though women are most at risk for aging, portrayals of middle-age angst occur in marriage plots for both men and women. In chapter three, I consider Victorian brides who are middle aged by comparing Frances Trollope's Widow Barnaby with widows in three of Anthony Trollope's Palliser novels. I show notions of decline giving way to increasingly progress-oriented narratives for midlife women. Chapter four examines discourse surrounding "the change of life" for both men and women. The dissertation employs archival materials from beauty and conduct books, as well as medical and longevity texts. Many novels are included that feature midlife, including texts by Frances Trollope, Anthony Trollope, Charles Dickens, George Eliot, Grant Allen, and Margaret Oliphant.
Animal Remainders, Remaining Animal: Cross-Species Collaborative Encounters in Victorian Literature and Culture
(2014-04-24) Basnett, Kattie; Michie, Helena; Wolfe, Cary; Parsons, William B.; Patten, Robert L.
“Animal Remainders” responds to the challenge of—and challenges to—Victorian animal studies, a sub-field of Victorian scholarship that has not seen the same popular critical reception as modernist or contemporary literary animal studies. Departing from the Victorian critical trend of reading literary animals as salient figures only so long as they can be imagined as symbolic or metaphoric for humans and human concerns, “Animal Remainders” takes literary animals—whether domestic pet or insect—seriously as animals. Moreover, these literary animals are acknowledged as agents of ethical production and transformation structured through a “chimerical collaboration.” The chimerical collaboration is inherently cross-species in nature and, within this collaboration, animals are capable of co-authoring the human and cross-species relations through the act of co-constitution, as well as being capable of explicitly or implicitly co-authoring texts such as literature and music in spite of communications barriers. By reading literary animals as collaborators with, rather than metaphors for, the human I demonstrate that the humanism and anthropocentrism we credit the Victorians and their literatures with as a discipline breaks down—at least in part—as Victorian literary animals are more radical than they have been given credit for. In this spirit, each chapter of “Animal Remainders” focuses primarily on critically marginalized readings of cross-species collaborations as they manifest in Victorian texts—including Charles Dickens’ early novels, Wilkie Collins’s antivivisection novel Heart and Science, animal autobiographies by Virginia Woolf and Anna Sewell, and the poetry of Michael Field—as well as in contemporary literature, experimental music, and the digital humanities. “Animal Remainders” foregrounds important methodological questions about the forces which discipline Victorian scholarship and the history informing our historicism, as well as more intimate questions about ourselves as scholars and living beings in a cross-species world. It enacts a fundamental un-knowing of the Victorian human and its—real or represented—animal other by asking, who is this nineteenth-century human (or) animal we study, but also who is the “we” doing the studying and through what histories and structures of knowledge have we come to know ourselves (and others) as such?
Antipodal England: Emigration, gender, and portable domesticity in Victorian literature and culture
(2000) Myers, Janet C.; Michie, Helena
This dissertation explores representations of nineteenth-century middle-class emigration from Britain to Australia, with particular attention to the gendered dynamics of displacement Building on the work of scholars who have theorized the performative aspects of national identity, I focus on practices of self maintenance that enable emigrants, with varying degrees of success, to retain their ties to Britain and the middle classes despite displacement. One such practice involves the performance of what I call "portable domesticity," or the transplantation of British national identity through the replication of British domestic values and practices aboard emigrant ships and in Australia. I argue that even as portable domesticity reinforces the values of British culture, it also subverts them since the domestic practices enabling emigrants to transplant their national identity also initiate the process of settlement that ultimately leads to Australian independence. I explore this paradox in novels by Charles Dickens, Anthony Trollope, Mary Elizabeth Braddon, and Catherine Helen Spence, and in cultural artifacts such as emigrant guides, memoirs, letters, and a narrative painting. My first chapter considers the centrality of domestic practices aboard emigrant ships, where family life is modeled in order to prepare individual emigrants for the roles they will subsequently adopt in the colony. The second chapter focuses on the extent to which performances of domesticity, leisure, and strategic amnesia enable female emigrants to maintain their affiliations with the British middle class both during the voyage out and in Australia. The third chapter analyzes representations of returned male emigrants and explores how they become embroiled in criminal plots at home that signify their divided allegiances in familial as well as national terms. The concluding chapter discusses the transplantation of genre as another manifestation of portable domesticity, demonstrating how the iconography of the domestic novel is transformed and adapted to a colonial setting. Together, these chapters highlight the paradoxical effects of portable domesticity in Australia and argue for the status of the British settler colonies as important sites for the exploration of various forms of postcolonial ambivalence.
Attitude toward women in Thackeray's "Catherine", Collins's "Man and Wife", and Dickens's "Dombey and Son" (William Makepeace Thackeray, William Wilkie Collins, Charles Dickens)
(1993) Mallow, Dawn; Michie, Helena
Catherine, Man and Wife, and Dombey and Son will be compared with respect to their treatment of women characters. Each novel is either sympathetic to feminism and the treatment of women as equals, or constraining in its attitudes toward women. This assessment will be based on the fate of the rebellious woman character, the degree of conventionality found in its women characters and whether the attitudes toward women expressed generally in the novel are enlightened, or conventional. Also discussed will be how novels by nineteenth-century British novelists such as Thackeray and Collins and nineteenth-century British marriage laws were interrelated. In each of the three novels, there is one unconventional independent woman character whose presence encourages the reader to be sympathetic to women's concerns. However, if the novel views the rebellious woman character negatively and punishes her, then the novel did not accept this new woman.
Awkward visits: Distr ict visiting, gender and middle-class identity in the Victorian imagination
(2009) Dayton, Anne LeBeau; Michie, Helena
This project explores the textual representation of district visiting, a form of philanthropy in which a volunteer, usually a middle-class woman, called on working-class homes within a geographically specified district. Drawing on novels and non-fiction prose published between 1850 and 1900, I argue that district visiting is best understood in the context of middle-class anxieties about upward mobility and the expansion of their own class. While guidebook authors were limited to exhaustive descriptions of the proper behavior of district visitors, novelists imagined successful district visiting as evidence that a woman of questionable class origin had internalized the identity of a lady. The status of male charitable visitors, most of whom were clergymen, was less defined: some authors relished visiting as a site of female influence, while others feared the feminizing influence of lady visitors. District visiting evolved in the last half of the nineteenth-century from the voluntary duty of gentry daughters at home to a professionalized commitment with protocols and training regimes. This changes led, in turn, to new ways of plotting female character development; plots that earlier in the century might have ended in marriage and a retreat from public commitments were now imagined as culminating with marriage to a man who shared the heroine's dedication to the “slums” or a renunciation of marriage in favor of a life of service and often female companionship. My chapters interweave literary and archival sources, including novels, memoirs, advice manuals, religious tracts, and the archived records of Victorian charities.
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Coastal Feelings: Colonizing Affects in Nineteenth-Century Australia
(2024-06-27) McCullough, Meredith; Michie, Helena; Joseph, Betty; Wildenthal, Lora
My dissertation, “Coastal Feelings: Colonizing Affects in Nineteenth-Century Australia,” produces an affective account of settler colonialism in the context of Australia’s coastal environments. In nineteenth-century Australia, coasts were the first environments to be seen, then settled, by invading British colonists. They remained places not only of encounter but also of connections to England, and were central to the nostalgia and violence of the settler imaginary. Coasts provided settlers with a site for defining themselves against Indigenous peoples, for imagining their new home, and for mourning the home they left behind. I argue for the centrality of affect to the settler colonial project by focusing on textual and visual depictions of coastal environments in nineteenth-century Australia. I find that gender is central to many of these accounts, which coalesce around real and fictional White women. The four chapters of my dissertation take me to four places along the southern Australian coast. Each is an example of a different kind of geographically-inflected discourse. Whether about the shore, islands, a coastal classroom, or a seemingly tranquil bay, each chapter shows how literature captures and creates affective relationships with coastal environments. It is my hope that by naming and understanding the violent colonial imperatives shaping the history of literary coasts we will be able to reexamine our contemporary relationships with coastal environments and reorient them toward justice, inclusion, and ethical littoral living.
Communities of Place: Making Regions in the Victorian Novel
(2013-09-16) Miner, Heather; Michie, Helena; Patten, Robert L.; Wiener, Martin J.; Logan, Thad
Mid-way through George Eliot’s Middlemarch, the heroine of the novel develops a plan to move from her country estate in England’s Midlands to the northern industrial county of Yorkshire, where she intends to found a model factory town. Dorothea Brooke’s utopian fantasy of class relations, ultimately abandoned, hints at the broader regional and geospatial discourse at work in this canonical Victorian novel, but is as equally ignored by critics as by other characters in Eliot’s realist masterpiece. In Communities of Place, I explore a new current of scholarship in Victorian studies by examining the role that England’s historic and geographic regions played in the development of the novel. Scholars of British literature and history have long argued that Victorian national and cultural identity was largely forged and promulgated from England’s urban centers. Over the course of the nineteenth century, the center became synonymous with London and, in the national metropolitan imagination, counties outside of London seemingly became homogenized into peripheral, anti-modern spaces. The critical tradition reinforces this historical narrative by arguing that the rise of nationalism precludes the development of regionalism. Thus, theorists of British nationalism have glossed over England’s intranational identity and have directed attention beyond England’s borders, to France or Scotland, to analyze national identity within Great Britain as a whole. Scholars of intra-English culture, meanwhile, often narrowly focused on county histories and the working classes in isolation. Both types of studies effectively argue that the English middle class, and the middle-class Victorian novel, lack regional affiliation; as Raymond Williams argues, middle-class Victorians were “external” to regional life. With Communities of Place, I join a scholarly conversation that offers an alternative to these scholarly cul-de-sacs: a critically engaged and historically responsive account of English regionalism. My project demonstrates how the development of distinctive English regional cultures paralleled, and occasionally destabilized, the formation of English national identity in the Victorian period. Central to this project is my assertion that the English upper and middle classes, like the working classes, were in part defined by their regional affiliations. Communities of Place, then, offers a historically specific understanding of regionalism as an important structuring framework for the social, geographic, and environmental relations in post-Romantic English literature, by drawing attention to four formulations of English regionalism: the early-Victorian defenses of industrial Northern Englishness, mid-Victorian regional conceptions of mixed rural and factory spaces, the repurposing of non-industrial landscapes for leisure, and the late-century return to the materiality of countryside, now emptied of Romantic naturalism. In each chapter I study geographically-specific cultural regions, from Elizabeth Gaskell’s industrial Lancashire to Thomas Hardy’s rural Wessex, in order to explore more generally how local class relations, topography, and recreational activities helped to shape discrete notions of Englishness outside of London. This methodology offers a productive alternative to center/peripheral models for understanding relations within England. By focusing on the depiction of regional responses to topics of national discussion, ranging from industrialism to the rise of consumer culture, I show how these issues were negotiated by the middle classes Victorian literature. These responses influence contemporary discussions about regional authority over landscape policy, the cultural status of the vernacular, and the preservation of green spaces in the urban nation.
Everyday Imperialism: The Landscape of Empire, London, 1870-1939
(2013-12-05) Francis, Pamela; Michie, Helena; Doody, Terrence A.; Sanders, Paula
While many historians of the British Empire have dismissed the presence of imperial motifs and themes in Britain in the early twentieth century, this dissertation identifies and analyzes two discourses of Empire that shaped the material and cultural landscape of London during that period. Chapter one establishes several contexts relating to this period, including New Imperialism, as outlined by Disraeli and later, Joseph Chamberlain. As Disraeli?s New Imperialism evolved, it incorporated the national efficiency movement as a way to make the Empire modern and relevant while maintaining traditional social and political hierarchies, resulting in a cultural milieu of ?conservative modernity.? While uncovering these ideas in the imperial spectacle of the first four decades of the twentieth century, I employ aspects of critical human geography to demonstrate how those ideas inscribed themselves onto the urban landscape of London. Chapter two describes three royal Jubilees in terms of imperial spectacle. These events reflect an imperial ethos built on the concept of the Empire as modern, prosperous, healthy, and tasked by Providence with a civilizing mission. Once identified, I introduce seemingly opposite ways of talking about the Empire: discourses of exceptionalism, and discourses of degeneration and decline. I explain that these discourses manifest themselves in numerous cultural practices as well as official programs and policies that are then reflected in the urban landscape. A description of the British Empire Exhibition at Wembley in 1924-1925 focuses on public and private responses to the dominant narrative of empire. Chapters three and four investigate exceptionalism and decline and provide examples of ?official? responses to these themes, as in the institution of new bureaucracies, such as the Ministry of Health, as well as from ?below,? as in the celebration of Empire Day. A close look at both formal and informal responses to these discourses of exceptionalism proves that patriotic imperialism was very much a part of the cultural and material landscape of London until 1939, when German bombs erased the landscape of empire, clearing the ground for the construction of a new landscape of nation.
Fantastic Journeys: Resisting Growth in Golden Age Children's Novels
(2014-04-11) Elliott, Heather D; Michie, Helena; Patten, Robert L.; Fette, Julie
During the Golden Age of children’s literature (1865-1914), authors both clung to the Romantic ideal of the innocent child and desired to acknowledge the child’s capacity for agency. This Romantic ideal of innocence was necessarily threatened by the child’s potential for agency—the more power the child wielded, the more likely she was to have her innocence tainted by experience and knowledge. This dissertation contends that the tension between the ideas of the child as innocent and the child as powerful led to the invention of a trope that I have named the “fantastic journey.” The fantastic journey occurs when a child character travels to a marvelous space (such as fairyland), has an adventure there, and returns to her ordinary world without her adult guardians ever discovering that she has been away because the journey has been either an out-of-body or an out-of-time experience. The journey may be explained as a dream or vision, or as an instance of time travel where the child returns to the same moment that she left in her ordinary world. The purpose of the fantastic journey is to allow a child to wield agency without any damage to her essential child identity. Each journey does this in different ways, but all allow child characters to gain knowledge and experience or to perform actions that would normally cause them to move closer to adulthood without losing any part of their child identity. Additionally, the journey also results in metamorphosis—abrupt change that is not the result of progress or process—for the child. This change always either enhances or protects the protagonist’s essential child identity. It is not change toward adult maturity. This dissertation traces the development of the fantastic journey through five texts, beginning with its initial formation in The Water-Babies; continuing through its various forms in Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland, At the Back of the North Wind, and The Story of the Amulet; and concluding with its deconstruction in Peter Pan.
Food for Sympathy: Illness, Nursing, and Affect in Victorian Literature and Culture
(2011) Demirhan, Basak; Michie, Helena
The profuse illness and nursing narratives in Victorian texts frequently feature sympathy for physical suffering as a major cultural and literary trope. In a wide variety of texts ranging from social reform writing to autobiographies, from novels to poetry, physical suffering was often closely associated with a specific cultural form of affect called sympathy. While earlier epistemologies of sympathy developed by Scottish Enlightenment writers defined it as a free agent that autonomously flowed through individuals, toward the mid-century, this model left its place to formulations of sympathy as an alignment of affect between clearly separated subjects that could be achieved through sympathetic imagination. This epistemological and cultural shift is strongly apparent in both fictional and nonfinctional depictions of sympathy for the sick. Critical works on the nineteenth-century culture of illness and medical care have tended to focus on the community-building functions of the sickroom. However, the illness-nursing dyad constitutes an affective structure through which some less examined aspects of sympathy for physical suffering, such as the alterity and abjection of bodies in pain, can be explored. Descriptions of physical suffering usually followed certain narrative conventions that positioned the sufferers and their nurses as objects or subjects of sympathy. This particular object-subject relationship facilitated the construction, negotiation, and redefinition of collective identities like nationality, gender, and class. While nursing memoirs and conduct manuals adhered to conventional ideals of femininity, they also expanded definitions of feminity and maternalism to include competence. In their war nursing memoirs, unprivileged or marginalized women who worked as nurses were able to inscribe themselves as professional women and national subjects by contributing to the national narratives of the war with soothing narratives of their nursing experience. In Bildungsromans, their sympathy for disabled male companions enabled socially and economically disenfranchised male protagonists to reconstruct wounded masculinity as a hegemonic masculinity model. Destabilized social identities, on the other hand, culminated in novelistic examples of resistance to sympathy on the level of character or narrative, which the authors used as a representational strategy to approach dilemmas for which there are no solutions.
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Formal Invitations: Techniques of Interpolation in Visual and Verbal Art, 1760-1880
(2024-04-15) Cook, Nina Elisabeth; Michie, Helena; Regier, Alexander
Formal Invitations: Techniques of Interpolation in Visual and Verbal Art, 1760-1880 argues that nineteenth-century literature and visual art share a common investment in audience immersion. Beginning from the hypothesis that various representational techniques in prose and painting (in function, if not form) mirror one another, this project identifies and deconstructs these techniques, grouping them by their functions of identification, recognition, collaboration, and immersion. The innovative formal techniques I identify¬¬– such as free indirect discourse and direct address in the novel, and the Rückenfigur and multiperspectivalism in painting–trouble the boundary between subject and object, audience and artwork. Juxtaposing novels such as Tristram Shandy, Emma, Jane Eyre, and Middlemarch with visual artifacts such as William Hogarth’s prints, John Constable’s six-footer landscapes, Pre-Raphaelite narrative paintings, and the panorama, my chapters probe the period’s formal devices and their peculiar capacity both to absorb the audience and invite interactivity. From the first chapter, which shows how free indirect discourse and the Rückenfigur device open a space for the audience to identify with characters, to the final chapter that explores how the panorama and Middlemarch spatially surround and rhetorically assimilate the audience, I ground the genesis of this desire for immersion in the Victorian era. The techniques of immersion I analyse were developed over a lengthy period, reaching, like the novel, a level of sophisticated self-referentiality and refined articulation during the core of the nineteenth century. This evolution continues beyond the nineteenth century, however, and in its broadest ambitions, my project sketches a genealogy of techniques of immersion that culminates in technologies such as interactive gaming and virtual reality.
Genres of Population: Biopolitics and the Victorian Novel
(2017-04-20) Hsu, Sophia; Michie, Helena
Despite being famously overpopulated with characters, nineteenth-century novels are typically read in terms of the individual. Addressing this incongruity, “Genres of Population: Biopolitics and the Victorian Novel” examines how novels imagine the human mass in an era of rapid demographic growth. My dissertation argues that Victorian novels conceptualize the population by turning a seemingly inscrutable collective into an object of knowledge and control. I contend that biopolitics—Michel Foucault’s term for the discourses and practices of managing lives—depends on novels to articulate the conditions, methods, and experiences of demographic regulation. Though attempts to enumerate the English population date back to the 1085 Domesday Book, the first census of 1801 made demographic information available at unprecedented levels. The census launched an age of population management that, I assert, influenced and was influenced by novels. Analyzing what I call narratives of demographic crises, my project shows how Victorian novels depict the population as intractable yet governable—prone to chaos, degeneration, and extinction while also amenable to governmental intervention. Extending Foucault’s claim that biopolitical theories and mechanisms emerged in the nineteenth century, “Genres of Population” examines the historical roots of biopower, situating its early moments in a century known for its state paternalism, statistical advances, and social reforms. Even as Foucault locates the concept in the nineteenth century, scholarship on biopolitics tends to focus on the present or recent past. By contrast, I historicize biopolitics and demonstrate how Victorian novels portray the population as a collective to be protected. While Victorians had their own terms for this collective—such as the social body, the aggregate, and the crowd—I call this collective the population so as to emphasize the state’s role in its management. My research thus challenges the usual approach of studying biopolitics in a twentieth- and twenty-first-century setting and the usual critique that the novel is a genre that posits the individual as an agentive subject. In revealing the confluence of Victorian fiction and biopolitical thought, my project exposes the nineteenth-century literary influences of population discourses. To track how novels form the concept of a governable population, I analyze a diverse set of texts—from social problem novels, where one would expect to find representations of the population, to sensation novels, where the population is no less important but less obviously an issue. I focus each chapter on a novelistic subgenre and an aspect of demographic control. By pairing form with history, I show how each subgenre reacts to the historical circumstances affecting the population. The first three chapters illuminate how social problem, sensation, and slum novels construct ideas of the population in response to advances in statistics and demography, changes in family structure and reproduction, and movements for housing reform. The final chapter departs from discussing novels’ roles in molding the population into an object of state power by offering the socialist novel as an example of how novels participate in creating rather than regulating mass life. These chapters illustrate Victorian novels’ contribution to theories of population management, ultimately revising our narratives about the rise of demography and the novel. Chapter 1 examines Elizabeth Gaskell’s and Charles Dickens’s social problem novels, Mary Barton and Bleak House, to consider how statistical counting impacts the state’s ability to oversee the population. Gaskell’s working-class radical John Barton and Dickens’s vagrant Jo show how the abstraction necessary to quantify the population also obscures attempts to know it. Continuing to explore the effects of counting and the census, chapter 2 analyzes the household as a tool for population management via readings of Wilkie Collins’s The Woman in White and Ellen Wood’s The Shadow of Ashlydyat. The household emerges in these sensation novels as the preferred avenue for perpetuating the population, as the aristocratic family becomes associated with antiquated ideas about patrimony, reproduction, and land ownership. Chapter 3 also looks at the unit of the household but in the setting of slum fiction; in it, I show how housing reform colludes with the state’s efforts to track the population. Focusing on George Gissing’s The Nether World and Arthur Morrison’s A Child of the Jago, I explain how these texts use cartographic language to turn the population into a spatial entity. My final chapter departs from emphasizing control to exploring how socialist novels redeploy biopolitical ideas to imagine a social body that circumvents state power. The utopia in William Morris’s News from Nowhere and the cultural center in Walter Besant’s All Sorts and Conditions of Men offer alternative forms of mass organization.
Historicizing performativity: Constructing identities in Victorian England
(1997) Stern, Rebecca F.; Michie, Helena
This dissertation draws upon performance theory and new historicism to read Victorian literature and culture. By fusing the gender consciousness and social constructionist agenda of the former with the rigorous dedication to historical specificity of the latter, I am able both to ground potentially amorphous theoretical assertions and, through readings of novels, nonfiction prose, and other historical documents, to comment upon the constructedness of what the Victorians fought to maintain as "natural" aspects of character. The focus on gender that defines so much work in performance theory is a prominent concern here, but it is not the organizing principle of the dissertation; rather, following the lead of recent feminist criticism, I explore masculinity and femininity within the contexts of other social categories such as class, work, sanity, and race. The first chapter locates Victorian antitheatricality within the context of industrial culture. Reading political tracts alongside conduct books, I attribute Victorian antipathies to visibly repetitive or rehearsed behavior to the monotonous actions of the machines that increasingly replaced human labor. The second chapter reads the Victorian fantasy of class transcendence against the fear of fraud, focusing on the conflicting pressures in narratives of upward mobility to reshape oneself to conform to a new class standing and yet to maintain a "genuine" self. The third chapter explores the performances that constituted professional identity and the tremendous latitude the Victorians allowed theatricality so long as "acting" was troped as "activity." The fourth chapter focuses on the demise of moral treatment (a form of therapy that sought to cure the mad by teaching them to behave sane), to examine sanity and shifting strategies for treating and explaining madness. My final chapter unsettles the stability of skin as a reliable determinant of racial identity, exploring the performative aspects that enabled white Victorians to seem racially invisible and the acts and attributes that risked that invisibility. The dissertation examines texts by many authors, including Mary Elizabeth Braddon, Thomas Carlyle, Wilkie Collins, Dinah Mulock Craik, Charles Dickens, George Eliot, John Stuart Mill, John Ruskin, and Mrs. Henry Wood.
"In Maiden Meditation": Readership and the Victorian Girl
(2013-11-08) Weeks, Jennifer; Michie, Helena; Patten, Robert L.; Wiener, Martin J.; Logan, Jill T.
My project argues that a private, autodidactic model of girls' readership is challenged within mid-Victorian culture, as formal education for girls became more accepted and itself underwent reform. While discourses of public and private spheres dominated Victorian ideology related to women and girls, the schoolroom became an imagined space where larger concerns about the social and political role of women were played out as understandings of the role of reading shifted. I examine the ways that readership and education interacted in the period as the purpose of reading was culturally determined and redetermined. My dissertation uses literary criticism and cultural history to investigate different models of education: fictional and real, formal and informal. Fictional portrayals of girls' reading and their education provides a way to chart changes in the public understanding of what girlhood meant in the Victorian period. While I examine models of readership provided for girls by various authorities, I also use women's and girls' life-writing to shape my understanding of how girls perceived their own reading. My work intervenes in the field of readership studies primarily, complicating current understandings of how girls shaped and were shaped by their literature.
Inhabiting liberalism: politics, culture, and the spaces of masculine professionalism, 1823-1903
(2009) Morrison, Kevin A.; Michie, Helena; Patten, Robert L.; Wiener, Martin J.; Hennessy, Rosemary
Inhabiting Liberalism: Politics, Culture, and the Spaces of Masculine Professionalism, 1823-1903 investigates the physical, social, and epistemological spaces of Victorian liberalism. It argues that liberalism is locatable and that its locations matter. By locatable, I mean that the tenets of liberalism—a set of contentions about how one should live in the world—were formulated from within preexisting physical environments and also served as the basis for new ones. These environments were the places where liberalism was conceived or put into practice, its sites of meaning. This dissertation, therefore, takes up the following questions: How did the structures constitutive of particular environments shape Victorian intellectuals' conceptions of liberal norms and practices? What kinds of spatial configurations did they think were ideally suited to liberalism? Why do liberal characterological and temperamental ideals—detachment, objectivity, many-sidedness—seem so inextricably intertwined with the physically objectified social spaces that these intellectuals inhabited but often thought themselves to have transcended? And, if the places where liberalism was conceptualized or put into practice provide the background conditions of its intelligibility, then what might this mean for the recuperative approach to liberal theory recently advanced by a number of scholars working on the period? Although the following chapters explore various answers to these questions, my underlying premise is that social space, or the arrangement of differentiated positions, is instantiated by physical structures and inscribed within cognitive faculties that are themselves constituted, at least in part, by these structures. Through an examination of key architectural sites—including India House, the House of Commons, the country estate, the Athenaeum Club, and the People's Palace—as John Stuart Mill, Anthony Trollope, Matthew Arnold, and Walter Besant adapted, imagined, or lived in them and represented them in literary texts, I delineate the relationship between liberalism and the physical locations of its production and reception.
Maritime Networks: The Oceanic Imaginary in the British Long Nineteenth Century
(2019-04-16) Celeste, Mark; Michie, Helena
This project argues that maritime history and culture shape both the form and the content of the nineteenth century British novel. Each chapter takes up a different historical genre of maritime writing—the shipwreck tale, the steamship story, the logbook, the sea chantey, and the ship surgeon’s manual—as a heuristic for oceanic reading. In recovering these maritime contexts, I track what I call the “oceanic imaginary”: not only how novels literally represent life on and around the ocean, but also how novels draw upon oceanic circulations and exchanges to imagine and craft complex literary systems. Specifically, I chart how novels incorporate historically specific maritime styles, allusions, and structures and how those texts, in so doing, register the flows and frictions of a radically networked world—a world connected and divided, more often than not, by water. As I show, we can read any novel as maritime fiction—regardless of whether the action takes place on land or at sea—if that novel registers the influence of maritime history upon its textual world. My project merges the historicist concerns of oceanic studies with the renewed critical attention to form. To track the influence of a historical maritime ethos upon literary style, I consider not only large-scale sociopolitical forms (such as the distributed network) but also sentence-level figurations (such as metonymy) that register the text’s engagement with culture and history. Maritime details and figurations provide more than just historical flavor; they serve, rather, as the formal anchors of historicity, the nodes that link the literary text to paraliterary movements across both land and sea. Taken together, my chapters surface how the literary marketplace overlaps with the political, social, economic, and ecological networks of the nineteenth century maritime world. In tracing the distributed maritime networks of the oceanic imaginary, I also work to remap the literary landscape. In place of the traditional spatiotemporal divisions of Romanticism and Victorianism, I opt for a longer, wider period drawn together by water. As I see it, an oceanic nineteenth century spans multiple bodies of water, from the English Channel to the Caribbean to the Pacific to the South China Sea to the Suez Canal, and stretches from the second voyages of James Cook (1772-75) to the sinking of the Titanic (1912). Framed so expansively, an oceanic nineteenth century affords new literary historical connections—not only between land and sea, but also between certain peoples, places, goods, ideas, events, and technologies previously separated by longstanding trends in academic literary study.
Marriage and nation: Victorian literature, the Anglo-Indian tradition, and the 19th-century Indian novel
(2009) Hariprasad, Jaya; Michie, Helena
My project looks at the ways that the marriage plot in three literary contexts (Victorian fiction, 19th-century Anglo-Indian fiction, and 19th-century Indian fiction) allegorizes questions of independence and imperialism in both Victorian England and 19th -century India. I argue that in many instances marriage is liberating for Indian women and confining for Victorian women; the ramifications of this argument on idioms of freedom and choice are crucial to critical issues such as nationalism and imperialism. To this end, I have examined works such as Jane Eyre, Dombey and Son, The Moonstone, Seeta, The Slaying of Meghanada, and Anandamath. Looking at imperialism through an analysis of the marriage plot will allow a literary relationship to be plotted along the axes of marriage and nation in both 19th-century India and Victorian England.
Narrative under the microscope: Evidentiary discourses in Victorian literature and culture, 1829--1876
(2000) Penner, Anna Louise; Michie, Helena
This dissertation traces evidence of the competing epistemologies of the individual and the social through four Victorian novels and through the scientific, philosophical, and medical discourses that were emerging at the time that the novels were being written. Though the two types of epistemology are not necessarily inimical to each other, the heavily empirical and positivist climate of intellectual opinion between the years 1829--1876 fostered the notion that statistical observation was inherently superior to the study of individuals as individuals, a notion confronted by each of the studies my dissertation addresses. I describe how the discourses of medical statistics, natural history, physiology, and psychology inflected the narrative structures and styles of the industrial novel, sensation fiction, the high realist novel, debates about public health, and writings about the sciences themselves during a period of considerable scientific change, the years 1829--1876. The epistemological tensions I locate within the scientific discourses may better explain aspects of the novels that have been previously identified as thematic incoherences or confusions of genre. All of the chapters together provide a sense of both the Victorians' investment in and suspicion about the efficacy of empiricist claims of objectivity and certainty, particularly the suggestion that the intense empirical study of aggregate populations would necessarily lead to the identification of fixed laws of nature and social behavior. As my readings of both earlier and later novels indicate, some Victorians hoped to move from observable laws to an understanding of the unobservable and unpredictable, perhaps even to provide a language for those words and behaviors that could not be plainly spoken or readily classified. This dissertation shows, however, a conflicted philosophical and scientific vision produced in each of these novels as a result of their dual focus on individuals and aggregates, a double vision that for us brings into focus the Victorians' uncomfortable awareness of the limits of empiricist description.
Obeying God rather than men: Protestant individualism and the empowerment of Victorian women
(2008) Chance, Janna Smartt; Michie, Helena; Arnold, Agnes Cullen
This dissertation looks at Protestant individualism and the degree to which it was potentially empowering to Victorian women. By Protestant individualism, I mean a way of thinking about and speaking about the self that arises from and is closely associated with Protestant theology. As I argue, this newfound emphasis on Protestant individualism placed Victorian women in a promising position. Unlike philosophy and political theory, which have traditionally based a person's claim to be an individual on his or her reason---something that women have often been believed to lack, Protestantism has generally made a person's individual status the product of a far more universal condition: each person's ultimate accountability to God. People are all primarily individuals, Protestant individualism asserts, because each of them---whether male or female---must stand individually before God on Judgment Day. Since Western political thought has generally predicated a person's claim to rights on his status as an individual, Victorian women's improved claims to individual status gave them, in turn, improved cases for arguing for their personal and political rights. Included among these rights would have been their right to consent (to marriage, sex, etc.) and their right to follow their own consciences (in moral, religious, and political matters). The first two chapters of this dissertation focus on Protestant individualism as it appears in Evangelical Anglican and Broad Church Anglican religious writings, chapter one examining the individualistic and anti-individualistic currents within such theological texts and chapter two exploring the degree to which such works make Protestant available to women. Chapters three and four turn to Victorian women novelists Charlotte Bronte and Mary Augusta Ward and how their novels dramatize the promises and perils of female Protestant individualism. Bronte, who, as I argue, depicts a fairly religiously orthodox Protestant individualism, presents such orthodox Protestant individualism as generally available and empowering to women. In contrast, Ward, who portrays a much less orthodox Protestant individualism, presents such heterodox Protestant individualism as difficult, if not impossible, for women to realize.

Browsing by Author "Michie, Helena"

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