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Thesis Submitted for the Degree of Doctor of Philosophy Department Of LADIES , LUNATICS AND FALLEN WOMEN IN THE NEW MILLENNIUM : THE FEMINIST POLITICS OF NEO -VICTORIAN FICTION , 2000-2010 NADINE MULLER Thesis submitted for the Degree of Doctor of Philosophy Department of English University of Hull October 2011 CONTENTS Acknowledgments ......................................................................................................................... i List of Illustrations ..................................................................................................................... iii List of Abbreviations ................................................................................................................. iii Introduction Through the looking glass: the feminist politics of neo-Victorian fiction ............................... 1 Neo-Victorian fiction and third-wave feminism: beginnings and contexts ................................... 4 Prefixing history: terminologies and definitions ............................................................................ 8 Defining the present through the past: the politics of writing history ......................................... 15 Beyond (dis)identification: historiographic potentials ................................................................. 22 Consuming women: neo-Victorianism, third-wave feminism and the sexualisation of culture .. 28 The feminist politics of neo-Victorian fiction: chapters and themes ........................................... 35 Chapter 1 (Re)Writing genealogies: feminism, matrilinealism and neo-Victorian fiction .................... 38 Feminist genealogies: histories and contexts ............................................................................... 39 ‘And what of history?’: The feminist genealogies of A Short History of Women ....................... 51 Not my mother’s daughter: Fingersmith ’s matrilineal fictions .................................................... 63 Conclusion ................................................................................................................................... 77 Chapter 2 Hystoriographic metafiction: gender, madness, therapy and power .................................... 79 Feminism and mental health: hystories and theories ................................................................... 80 Rewriting and overwriting the Victorian madwoman: Human Traces ........................................ 91 An Inconvenient Wife : hypnosis, power and the ambiguities of liberation .................................. 99 Conclusion ................................................................................................................................. 114 1 Chapter 3 Sexual f(r)ictions: women, sex and pornography .................................................................. 117 Pornography in Britain: definitions, contexts, debates .............................................................. 118 The Journal of Dora Damage : pornography’s feminist failures ................................................ 135 Fingersmith : pornography’s feminist potentials ........................................................................ 147 Conclusion ................................................................................................................................. 159 Chapter 4 Pimping the neo-Victorian prostitute: the feminist politics of sex work ............................. 161 Constructing the prostitute: discourses and politics ................................................................... 162 Re-colonising feminism: prostitution and Western superiority in The Linnet Bird ................... 177 Selling Sugar: the sexual and textual economies of The Crimson Petal and the White ............. 190 Conclusion ................................................................................................................................. 204 Chapter 5 Writing women’s lives: neo-Victorian fiction as feminist biography .................................. 206 Feminism and biography: writing the female subject ................................................................ 206 Girl in a Blue Dress : the feminist lives of Catherine Dickens ................................................... 221 Gendering art, space and identity: Keeping the World Away ..................................................... 236 Conclusion ................................................................................................................................. 247 Conclusions ............................................................................................................................... 249 Bibliography ............................................................................................................................. 258 ACKNOWLEDGMENTS This thesis is the product of one of the University of Hull’s 80 th Anniversary Doctoral Scholarships in Neo-Victorianism, without which this project could neither have been begun nor completed. I am grateful for the additional financial support provided by the Carl Baron Memorial Fund, the English Department’s Research Student Support Fund, and the Graduate School. This generous material assistance was matched by the advice, encouragement and help I received from the academic and administrative staff at the Department of English and the Graduate School. Particular thanks, however, must go to my exemplary and inspiring supervisor, Ann Heilmann, for her indefatigable enthusiasm, dedication, insight, guidance and patience. Earlier versions of some sections of this thesis have appeared in the form book chapters and journal articles as: ‘Hystoriographic Metafiction: Victorian Narratives of Madness and Women’s Mental Health in 21st- Century British Fiction’, Gender Forum , Special Issue: Literature and Medicine: Women in the Medical Profession , 25 (Autumn 2009); and ‘Not My Mother’s Daughter: Matrilinealism, Third-Wave Feminism and Neo-Victorian Fiction’, Neo-Victorian Studies , Special Issue: Adapting the Nineteenth Century , ed. by Alexia Bowler and Jessica Cox, 2:2 (Winter 2009/10), pp.109-136. I am grateful to the editors – Carmen Birkle, Alexia Bowler and Jessica Cox, and Marie- Luise Kohlke – and the anonymous peer-reviewers of these publications for their insightful comments. I am indebted to many colleagues and friends whose support has been vital to my professional development as well as to the (partial) retainment of my sanity. Here, particular thanks are due to Joel Gwynne, Mark Llewellyn, CWWA executive committee member Helen Davies, FWSA executive committee members Stéphanie Genz, Alison Phipps, Srila Roy and Katya Salmi, and to my wonderful University of Salford colleagues, friends and mentors Janice Allan, Lucie Armitt, Scott Brewster, ii Kristin Ewins, Sue Powell and Maggie Scott. Alexia Bowler, Kym Brindle and Elizabeth Howard-Laity have willingly shared their PhD completion experiences with me, and their motivational comments in the virtual world of social networking have been more helpful than they know. Special thanks go to Jessica Cox and Claire O’Callaghan, whom I admire both as academics and as women and whose ears and inboxes have suffered greatly during the time it has taken me to research and write this thesis. I am grateful to my parents for their support and for their selflessness in enabling me not only to pursue my studies but to pursue them so far away from them. I thank Peter Harrison for sharing and inspiring my bibliophilia willingly and shamelessly at all times and for being one of the most inspiring readers I know. I dare not imagine the past three years without Theresa Jamieson and thank her wholeheartedly for simply everything, knowing she will insist that it was nothing. Finally, and most importantly, I thank Nathan Harrison, who has had the patience to share with me six years of emotional and academic highs and lows without ever faltering in his encouragement. iii LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS 1.1 Untitled illustration by Adam Simpson © New York Times 2009 LIST OF ABBREVIATIONS BD Gaynor Arnold, Girl in a Blue Dress (2008) CP Michel Faber, The Crimson Petal and the White (2002) DD Belinda Starling, The Journal of Dora Damage (2007) FS Sarah Waters, Fingersmith (2002) HT Sebastian Faulks, Human Traces (2006) IW Megan Chance, Inconvenient Wife (2004) KtWA Margaret Forster, Keeping the World Away (2006) LB Linda Holeman, A Linnet Bird (2004) SHoW Kate Walbert, A Short History of Women (2009) UW Hebe Elsna, Unwanted Wife (1963) GENERAL NOTES Emphases in quotations appear in the original unless otherwise stated in the relevant footnote reference. A text’s original year of publication is provided in square brackets after the author name(s) in footnotes and bibliography entries where relevant. 1 INTRODUCTION Through the looking glass: the feminist politics of neo-Victorian fiction Figure 1.1 Illustration by Adam Simpson © New York Times 2009 There are few means by which the purpose of this thesis could be captured more effectively than Adam Simpson’s visual evocation of a meeting between two women who represent different stages in feminist history – one a suffragette, visibly marked by her ‘Votes for Women’ sash, the other her mid-century successor, perhaps a feminist too, yet not overtly identifiable as such. Simpson’s illustration, which accompanied a New York Times review of Kate Walbert’s A Short History of Women (2009), 1 implies both a clear historical separation and connection between past and present: each woman perceives the other as (and reaches out
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