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Struck: The Victorian Female Novelist and Male Pain

Morrissey, Colleen

Abstract Details

2018, Doctor of Philosophy, Ohio State University, 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.
Robyn Warhol (Advisor)
Jill Galvan (Committee Member)
Amanpal Garcha (Committee Member)
Sandra Macpherson (Committee Member)
222 p.

Recommended Citations

Citations

  • Morrissey, C. (2018). Struck: The Victorian Female Novelist and Male Pain [Doctoral dissertation, Ohio State University]. OhioLINK Electronic Theses and Dissertations Center. http://rave.ohiolink.edu/etdc/view?acc_num=osu1524145187359308

    APA Style (7th edition)

  • Morrissey, Colleen. Struck: The Victorian Female Novelist and Male Pain. 2018. Ohio State University, Doctoral dissertation. OhioLINK Electronic Theses and Dissertations Center, http://rave.ohiolink.edu/etdc/view?acc_num=osu1524145187359308.

    MLA Style (8th edition)

  • Morrissey, Colleen. "Struck: The Victorian Female Novelist and Male Pain." Doctoral dissertation, Ohio State University, 2018. http://rave.ohiolink.edu/etdc/view?acc_num=osu1524145187359308

    Chicago Manual of Style (17th edition)