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Sexual Violence and Burdened Motherhood in Nineteenth-Century British Literature

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Sexual Violence and Burdened Motherhood in Nineteenth-Century British Literature SPECTACULARLY CONCEIVED: SEXUAL VIOLENCE AND BURDENED MOTHERHOOD IN NINETEENTH-CENTURY BRITISH LITERATURE Doreen Thierauf A dissertation submitted to the faculty of the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy in the Department of English and Comparative Literature. Chapel Hill 2017 Approved by: Beverly Taylor Ruth Salvaggio Kimberly J. Stern Danielle Coriale Robyn Wiegman © 2017 Doreen Thierauf ALL RIGHTS RESERVED ii ABSTRACT Doreen Thierauf: Spectacularly Conceived: Sexual Violence and Burdened Motherhood in Nineteenth-Century British Literature (Under the direction of Beverly Taylor and Ruth Salvaggio) This dissertation responds to the traditional scholarly assumption that near universal censorship prevented discussion of sexual assault and pregnancy in nineteenth-century British literature. I argue that these issues are not only at the heart of Mary Prince’s slave narrative The History of Mary Prince (1831), Elizabeth Barrett Browning’s verse novel Aurora Leigh (1856) and her slave poems, as well as George Eliot’s Middlemarch (1871) and Daniel Deronda (1876), but that women’s reproduction is represented in remarkably similar ways in each of these texts. Elite women writers staged abused, suffering, or pregnant bodies in spectacular and often exploitative ways, utilizing a mode of representation that derived from sentimental genres of the late eighteenth century. Reading these women-authored texts in the context of abolitionist, medical, and legal literature, I show that the creation of female writers’ authority in the Victorian literary marketplace was intimately tied to the rise of professional discourses, and that both processes depended on the prurient display of non-elite women’s bodies in distress. I conclude that female Victorian novelists and poets, echoing male professionals, accepted the notion that the public display of women’s sexuality threatened the institutional stability of marriage, procreative norms, and cultural reproduction. Spectacular displays of women’s sexuality were strongly associated with working-class femininity, and writers’ depiction of women’s reproductive troubles supported a fundamentally conservative political message. My argument thus complicates previous scholars’ understanding of nominally progressive nineteenth-century iii writings. I demonstrate that rhetorical strategies marked by sentimental appeal, professional detachment, and half-concealed eroticism allowed elite women writers to position themselves as major spokespersons for cultural reform. These strategies ultimately helped cement the economically dependent status quo of female working-class and colonial subjects in Victorian Britain. iv ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS First and foremost, I would like to express my sincere gratitude to my co-directors, Beverly Taylor and Ruth Salvaggio, who have provided the essential mentorship, cheerful guidance, and kind encouragement without which this dissertation would not exist. A thousand thanks also to my committee members, Kimberly J. Stern, Danielle Coriale, and Robyn Wiegman, whose thoughtful advice and critique have proven invaluable over the years. As a graduate student, I have worked with many faculty members whose professionalism and rigorous yet sympathetic teaching I try to emulate, including Daniel Anderson, Nancy Armstrong, David Baker, Reid Barbour, Karen Booth, Pamela Cooper, Roxanne Eberle, H. Gustav Klaus, Laurie Langbauer, Gabriele Linke, Tricia Lootens, Gesa Mackenthun, Richard Menke, Jeanne Moskal, Eliza Richards, James Thompson, and Ariana Vigil. Thank you for your example. The Department of English and Comparative Literature and the UNC Graduate School have been immensely generous in their material support of this project. Among other recognitions, I received a W. Bruce Lea, Jr. Dissertation Fellowship, a Fred and Joan Thomson Award, and a year-long Dissertation Completion Fellowship. The time away from teaching made it possible for me to complete this dissertation, and I am very thankful for the opportunity to read, think, and write at leisure. I am further indebted to the editors of Victorian Studies who solicited an early version of my Middlemarch chapter in 2014, boosting my confidence and sense of disciplinary belonging. Moreover, I was very lucky to receive the 2016 Midwest Victorian Studies Association’s Arnstein Prize, and am grateful to Professor Walter L. Arnstein and the v members of the selection committee for their very generous support of this project and for welcoming me in their midst. My dear friends and colleagues allowed me to interweave our professional and private worlds in the best ways possible, and I appreciate looking back on many years of collaboration and camaraderie. Lauren Cameron, my graduate mentor and friend, deserves special recognition because she first drew my attention to the fact that there’s something going on with Rosamond and Gwendolen. Meredith Ringel-Ensley and Eric Ensley always had my back and invited me into their family. April Munroe and Rebecca Shores were sources of unparalleled kindness and solidarity. Thank you, Katie Walker, for holding me accountable and modeling true academic grit. The reliable presence and hospitality of others made my graduate experience a joyous one, among them Kevin Chovanec, Marc Collins, Josh Doty, Adam Engel, Vera Foley, Laurel Foote- Hudson, Ani Govjian, Rachael Isom, Ashley King, Leslie McAbee, Adam McCune, Christin Mulligan, Rebecca Nesvet, Lauren Pinkerton, Caitlin Watt, and Rae Yan. Thank you, all. Finally, to my family: Thank you for everything. I am immeasurably indebted to my mother, who taught me to love books, revere history, and distrust authority. She never wavered in her wholehearted support of my unexpected intellectual and personal journey across the Atlantic, and I am unable to express the immensity of her gift and sacrifice. Although we began dating a decade ago, my husband, Richard, has only ever known me as a graduate student. It would be an understatement to say that I am happy to shed this identity and, with him as my companion, explore other ways of learning. Richard’s endless supply of loving patience is the fuel that powered my engine throughout the writing process. vi TABLE OF CONTENTS LIST OF FIGURES .................................................................................................................... viii LIST OF ABBREVIATIONS ....................................................................................................... ix INTRODUCTION .......................................................................................................................... 1 PART 1. SLAVERY’S LEGACIES: MARY PRINCE, PORNOGRAPHY, AND THE MISSING CHILD ..................................................................................................... 24 Chapter I. How to Get a Character: White Fantasies of Abolition .................................. 39 Chapter II. Slavery’s Pornotopias: Mary Prince and the Non-Optional Visibility of Scars ..................................................................................... 88 Chapter III. What’s Not in the History .......................................................................... 123 PART 2. MOTHERHOOD’S BURDENS: ELIZABETH BARRETT BROWNING, RAPE, AND THE PLEASURES OF THE SPECTACLE ........................................................ 146 Chapter IV. Abolition and the Violent Erotics of Reading ............................................ 153 Chapter V. The Hard Whiteness of “Hiram Powers’ Greek Slave” ............................... 185 Chapter VI. Welcome to Aurora’s Home for Fallen Women: Aurora Leigh as Reform Manual ................................................................................... 211 PART 3. ELIOT’S COQUETTES: ABORTED REPRODUCTION IN MIDDLEMARCH AND DANIEL DERONDA ..................................................................... 254 Chapter VII. Middlemarch’s Hidden Abortion Plot ...................................................... 259 Chapter VIII. Tending to Old Stories: Daniel Deronda and Hysteria ........................... 284 Chapter IX. Daniel Deronda and the End of Reproduction ........................................... 315 vii CODA ........................................................................................................................................ 351 APPENDIX: MARY PRINCE TIMELINE ............................................................................... 354 BIBLIOGRAPHY ...................................................................................................................... 356 viii LIST OF FIGURES Figure 1. Hiram Powers’s The Greek Slave at the Yale University Art Gallery ....................... 194 Figure 2. The Virginian Slave, Intended as a Companion to Power’s ‘Greek Slave’ ............... 201 ix LIST OF ABBREVIATIONS AL Aurora Leigh. By Elizabeth Barrett Browning. New York: W. W. Norton, 1996. BC The Brownings’ Correspondence. By Elizabeth Barrett Browning, Robert Browning, et al. Ed. Philip Kelley and Ronald Hudson. 24 vols. Winfield, KS: Wedgestone Press, 1984-2016. DD Daniel Deronda. By George Eliot. New York: Oxford University Press, 1998. EBB Elizabeth Barrett Browning GEL The George Eliot Letters. Ed. G. S. Haight. 9 vols. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1954-78. LEBB The Letters of Elizabeth Barrett Browning. Ed. Frederic G. Kenyon. 2 vols. London: Smith, Elder, & Co., 1897. MM Middlemarch. By George Eliot. New York: Oxford
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