Struck: the Victorian Female Novelist and Male Pain

Struck: The Victorian Female Novelist and Male Pain Dissertation Presented in Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements for the Degree Doctor of Philosophy in the Graduate School of The Ohio State University By Colleen Morrissey, MA Graduate Program in English The Ohio State University 2018 Dissertation Committee: Robyn Warhol, Advisor Amanpal Garcha Jill Galvan Sandra Macpherson Copyright by Colleen Morrissey 2018 Abstract 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 Brontë 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 ii punishing patriarchs, these three novelists reconfigured the relationship between torture, gendered justice, and the novel in unexpected and uncomfortable ways. iii Dedication This dissertation is dedicated to my family, who have always supported my education, and to my fiancé Sean Kamperman. iv Acknowledgements This dissertation was an effort that would not have been possible without the support of many people in my life. I would like to take a moment to thank them for their role in my graduate education. First, so many thanks to my soon-to-be husband, Sean Kamperman, for his unfailing love and for taking such good care of me, our home, and our cat while I’ve finished this dissertation. I thank my family, especially my parents, who have given me so much, and Aunt Patty and Aunt Carolyn, who, as PhDs, have offered advice, perspective, and commiseration. I consider myself unspeakably lucky to have such an amazing adviser in Robyn Warhol. Robyn’s stunning generosity has made completing this degree so much more rewarding. She has spent innumerable hours counseling me, responding to my work, and encouraging my professional and personal goals. I could not envision a better mentor. I consider her my true friend, and I cannot thank her enough. So many sincere thanks also go to my committee members. Jill Galvan, who provided guidance from the very first moments of this dissertation in her literature and dissertation-writing courses, has always given me a perspective I knew I would get nowhere else. She has clarified so many tangles in my ideas. Amanpal Garcha was there for me whenever I needed options. He not only provided multiple ways to move forward, v he also provided the down-to-earth advice that I really needed amid all of the abstraction. Sandra Macpherson’s insight blows me away. She was the person who showed me the true theoretical stakes of what I was trying to say. Thanks, too, goes to the steadfast support of my English A-team friends, who have offered the best distractions as well as the best support: Caitlyn “Gam” McLoughlin, Zach “bbz” Harvat, Pritha “PP” Prisad, Lou “Louise Marie” Maraj, and Drew “just Drew” Sweet. Untold credit goes to my “perverse dissertation” exchange group: Michael Harwick, whose genius has made my own ideas sound so much smarter, and Sara Cleto and Brittany Warman, whose style and insight made me see nineteenth-century literature in a whole new light. Finally, thanks goes to all of my teachers, colleagues, friends, and students at OSU and also at the University of Kansas, who all contributed to this accomplishment in many, many ways. vi Vita 2006................................................................Duchesne Academy of the Sacred Heart 2010................................................................Bachelor of Arts, English, University of Iowa 2012................................................................Master of Arts, English, University of Kansas 2013 to present ..............................................Graduate Teaching Associate, Department of English, The Ohio State University Publications “A Genealogy of Collision: Robyn Schiff’s A Woman of Property,” Review Essay. Iowa Journal of Cultural Studies 17.1 (Spring 2017): 54-58. Fields of Study Major Field: English vii Table of Contents Abstract ............................................................................................................................... ii Dedication .......................................................................................................................... iv Acknowledgements……………………………………………………………………… v Vita .................................................................................................................................... vii Table of Contents ............................................................................................................. viii Introduction ......................................................................................................................... 1 Chapter 1. “The Colours of the Rainbow”: Blood, Bruising, and the Painful Artistry of Wuthering Heights ........................................................................................................ 43 Chapter 2. Alive to Distant, Dead to Near: Masochism, Suicide, and Masculinity in North and South ................................................................................................................ 98 Chapter 3. Rewriting the Romantic Satan: Marie Corelli, Our Lady of Perpetual Pain …………………………………………………………………………………………..149 Conclusion & Coda ......................................................................................................... 191 Bibliography ................................................................................................................... 199 viii Introduction Foreword: “No Pain, No Gain” For a good four years in my early twenties, I was lost in the gym. An initially modest fitness regimen that shaved a few pounds from my body became, slowly, a grueling regimen of self-punishment. As my fat shrunk and my limbs hardened, I relished the way I looked, yes, but I grew to relish more the constant ache of exhausted, overworked muscles. Perhaps this was not so unexpected a turn from a cradle Catholic, educated from kindergarten to twelfth grade in Catholic schools where I was taught to emulate the suffering of Christ and the saints. Working out began to feel like a holy penance. First I was punishing myself for all those years of preteen and teenage indulgence in mozzarella sticks, in ramen noodles, in peanut butter. Then I continued to hurt myself, exercising to the point of injury and denying myself enough food, because I knew that self-betterment and self-control required pain. That’s the hokey slogan of all athletes and gym-rats, after all—no pain, no gain. Some time into my gym days, I became convinced that the real path to perfection lay not in running on the treadmill or slaloming on the elliptical but in lifting heavy weights. Cardio is all very well, but strength training is the real deal, a much more precise and visible measure of one’s discipline. Over the years, a woman lifting heavy weights 1 has become a commoner sight, but when I started down that path, every gym I walked into was segregated by gender. Women occupied the treadmills, ellipticals, and bikes. Men occupied the weight room. So I was usually the only woman in that particular area of the gym, lifting quietly among the jacked men who groaned or screamed every time they bench-pressed or squatted. Strength training was, and still is, men’s domain. When working out, women are told not to “bulk up” lest we lose our feminine curves and softness. I felt a strange combination of hostility and solidarity with the men in the weight room. I began to read and internalize slogans from the active online lifting community, overwhelmingly written by and for men: Better sore than sorry. Pain is weakness leaving the body. I saw these slogans over and over again as I researched how to tone my arms or abs. I even saw them on t-shirts at the gym. My favorite was, I don’t stop when I’m tired. I stop when I’m finished. It encapsulated my total control over my body which, in turn, was proof of my discipline, my virtue. One of the many things I did not realize at the time was that I was, in some ways, coopting a “masculine” standard of virtue. Women’s self- control was supposed to look like a thin, slightly

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