Theses and Dissertations - Department of English

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Browsing Theses and Dissertations - Department of English by Author "Beeler, John F."

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    Images of race and the influence of abolition in jane eyre and wuthering heights
    (University of Alabama Libraries, 2018) Tolbert, Laura; Pionke, Albert D.; University of Alabama Tuscaloosa
    Charlotte and Emily Brontë’s masterpieces, Jane Eyre and Wuthering Heights, respectively, reflect the sisters’ life-long investment in the abolitionist movement. Despite being written over a decade post-abolition, the novels’ retrospective settings lend weight to the sisters’ usage of distinctive language associated with the rise of slavery in the British West Indies and the subsequent push for its elimination. This language, largely centered around the characters of Bertha Mason and Heathcliff, seems to support an antislavery stance on the part of the Brontë sisters. A conflict arises, however, when considering that Bertha and Heathcliff are racially-Othered within the texts, and their aggressive and immoral behavior does nothing to redeem or flatter their characters. Indeed, the language in both Jane Eyre and Wuthering Heights leave the novels supporting the antislavery discourse of the early nineteenth century while also unsympathetically portraying stereotypical and derogatory representations of racially-Othered individuals. The Brontës’ antislavery sentiments, it seems, are not necessarily free of racial prejudice, but neither is the abolitionist rhetoric that influenced the novels. This project draws upon historical context to trace the major developments in abolition into the nineteenth century, including various sides of the debate and how rural areas throughout England influenced how the movement came to be organized on a national level. Furthermore, biographical information on the Brontës helps contextualize their personal involvement in the abolitionist movement, while an analysis of select works from their juvenilia shows how their knowledge of the movement inspired their writings from an early age. This background lays the foundation for a reading of Jane Eyre and Wuthering Heights that details how the conflicting sentiments of these novels are ultimately indicative of Charlotte and Emily Brontë’s awareness and participation in the abolitionist movement.
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    Masculinity in peril: mutiny fiction and Victorian man-making
    (University of Alabama Libraries, 2009) Phillips, Amanda Lynn; Pionke, Albert D.; University of Alabama Tuscaloosa
    In Victorian Masculinities, Herbert Sussman identifies the emergence of the "masculine plot" in mid-nineteenth century writing by male authors. The masculine plot, an alternative to the marriage plot's bourgeois domestic masculinity, provides a hero who eschews the threatening feminine realm and enters a world exclusive to men where he gathers male wisdom leading up to a test of his masculinity. Rewriting masculinity as the sublimation of male desire into productive labor in a solely male world and replacing the marriage bond with male-male relationships demanded that authors of the masculine plot unfold it somewhere outside of contemporary England. British writers displaced the masculine plot either geographically, historically, or both. By the close of the nineteenth century, the Indian Mutiny offered a location for the masculine plot both physically and temporally removed from home. India during the Mutiny also offered a stage for the masculine plot that was already heavily gender-inflected. When news of the Mutiny first reached London in 1857, the British struggled to build a narrative of the causes and outcomes of the Sepoy Rebellion and to systematize their relationship to a frighteningly unfamiliar imperial holding. Periodicals seized upon a set of stock devices with which to frame their Mutiny narratives, wherein developed a subtext in which a masculine England triumphed over a feminine India. These same gendered dramas appear in children's adventure novels about the Mutiny published in the late nineteenth century--such as George Manville Fenn's Gil the Gunner--that operate according to the masculine plot. My thesis examines ways in which children's adventure novels about the Mutiny explore tensions inherent in late-Victorian constructions of masculinity. These books exploit both the useful features of the masculine plot and the very failures that make it an insufficient technology for making masculine men, whether real or fictional.
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    Oliver all over again: Dickensian narratives of orphanhood in the Victorian novel
    (University of Alabama Libraries, 2012) Reynolds, Susan Elizabeth; Pionke, Albert D.; University of Alabama Tuscaloosa
    This dissertation examines the trope of orphanhood in mid-nineteenth century novels and argues that the orphan emerges as a symbol of middle-class fears about legitimacy and survival. Though many critics concentrate their analysis upon orphaned street children, arguing that authors used these figures to elicit sympathy for various social and political causes, the majority of orphans in nineteenth-century novels are members of the middle-class. In my dissertation, I examine the origin of the orphan as a synecdoche of middle-class anxiety in Charles Dickens's Oliver Twist, a novel whose title character Dickens and other authors continue to revise throughout the early and mid-Victorian era. Analysis of Oliver and his many reincarnations shows the evolution of an eighteenth-century orphan prototype into a character distinctly Victorian. The orphan, taking on a specific trajectory of middle-class formation that would culminate in the cultivation of morality and authenticity, symbolized the middle-class desire to survive and legitimize itself in England. As the century progresses, male and female literary orphans, who came to embody the complex gendered behavior requirements of the nineteenth-century middle class, had to undertake different, though equally important, courses of formation in order to ensure middle-class survival. Male and female authors continually reproduced this character throughout the era, but by mid-century, the Dickensian orphan narrative shifted slightly to reveal a stable middle class no longer worried about its origin or long-term survival but instead concerned about its need to reform England as a whole, so that the country adhered to middle-class values and becomes moral and authentic. Chapters of the dissertation explore the evolving character of the orphan, including analysis of orphaned characters in Wuthering Heights, The Mill on the Floss, A Child's History of England, Bleak House, No Name, and The Small House at Allington. The latter two novels will show a distinct shift away from Dickens's use of the orphan as a middle-class symbol embodying fears about survival and explore how the orphan begins to evolve to emulate new class-based concerns about masculinity and professionalization. Always key, however, was the orphan's ability to cultivate and maintain a distinctly Victorian morality and authenticity.
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    Women discussing men: gender as it is written in letters to Vernon Lee
    (University of Alabama Libraries, 2019) Bailey, Lily; Pionke, Albert D.; University of Alabama Tuscaloosa
    In "Between Women: Friendship, Desire, and Marriage in Victorian England," Sharon Marcus effectively complicates earlier critics’ definitions of gender by examining letters exchanged between women. Offering an ideal framework for future projects, such as this one, that attempt to study relationships between women constructed through life writing, she proposes epistolary exchange as a relatively under-examined genre through which women’s polyvalent participation in the process of gender normalization can be studied. Somerville Library, Oxford England, hosts a special collection of letters written to Vernon Lee/ Violet Paget, donated by her estate. This collection is in the process of being digitized and until now, no major moves have been made towards transcription and/or critical interaction with these letters. This overlooked collection contains almost 2,500 letters, many of which were written by prominent figures in the later Victorian era, and holds numerous possibilities for critical evaluation and engagement, especially for gender, cultural, and queer studies. Vernon Lee was a popular writer of her time, and the number of prestigious correspondences she maintained, contained in Somerville’s collection, reflect her popularity and importance. Letters and life writing hold the unique ability to provide some level of insight into the era from which they originated: discussions hosted in a patriarchal society have the power to complicate the standard perception of gender roles in the Victorian era, and the focus on language surrounding the performance of gender can be used to ascertain the different forms women’s dissidence can take. In particular, the letters Emily Sargent, Kit Anstruther-Thomson, and Ethel Smythe wrote to Vernon Lee about men and their behavior refocus women’s conversations around gender in the late 19th Century and illustrate the power these letters hold for providing an un-essentialized, moderated, look into the past.