• Admin
    UC Research Repository
    View Item 
       
    • UC Home
    • Library
    • UC Research Repository
    • College of Arts
    • Arts: Theses and Dissertations
    • View Item
       
    • UC Home
    • Library
    • UC Research Repository
    • College of Arts
    • Arts: Theses and Dissertations
    • View Item
    JavaScript is disabled for your browser. Some features of this site may not work without it.

    Browse

    All of the RepositoryCommunities & CollectionsBy Issue DateAuthorsTitlesSubjectsThis CollectionBy Issue DateAuthorsTitlesSubjects

    Statistics

    View Usage Statistics

    Illness and the construction of femininity in the English novel, 1840-1870

    Thumbnail
    View/Open
    curtis_thesis.pdf (20.04Mb)
    Author
    Curtis, Jennifer Mary
    Date
    1993
    Permanent Link
    http://hdl.handle.net/10092/4588
    Thesis Discipline
    English
    Degree Grantor
    University of Canterbury
    Degree Level
    Doctoral
    Degree Name
    Doctor of Philosophy

    This thesis investigates the part played by the idea of illness in the mid-nineteenth- century construction of femininity and women's sexuality. I have investigated a variety of discourses - medical writing, the debate on prostitution, the conduct books of Sarah Ellis, and the novels of Elizabeth Gaskell, Mary Braddon, and Charlotte Yonge - with the hypothesis that, in the hierarchized opposition that defined gender in the mid-nineteenth century, femininity was constituted in terms of illness, and "to be a woman was to be ill". I have used the theoretical works of Michel Foucault to look at the way in which discourse transmits and produces power. In Part One, I show how the 'masculine' discourses of medical texts and the debate on prostitution produced an ideal of femininity which confined woman to the domestic sphere, and pathologized her sexuality by defining it in terms of reproduction. In these texts, in order to universalize the ideal of domestic womanhood, the differences of class are of less importance than those of gender. Conduct books by women, on the other hand, while constraining women to the domestic sphere, produce a construction of womanhood which is active rather than passive, healthy rather than ill. In Parts Two and Three, I have shown how novels by women engage with the ideal of domestic femininity, and the strategies these authors have used to redefine, appropriate, endorse, or subvert it. In each of these, illness appears in some form - madness, disease, invalidism, or "decline" - in relation to the feminine ideal and the construction of women's sexuality.

    Collections
    • Arts: Theses and Dissertations [1448]
    Rights
    http://library.canterbury.ac.nz/thesis/etheses_copyright.shtml

    UC Research Repository
    University Library
    University of Canterbury
    Private Bag 4800
    Christchurch 8140

    Phone
    364 2987 ext 8718

    Email
    ucresearchrepository@canterbury.ac.nz

    Follow us
    FacebookTwitterYoutube

    © University of Canterbury Library
    Send Feedback | Contact Us