The Politics of Female Touch in Nineteenth-Century British Literature." Dissertation, Georgia State University, 2015
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Georgia State University ScholarWorks @ Georgia State University English Dissertations Department of English 5-11-2015 Touching Scenes: The Politics of Female Touch in Nineteenth- Century British Literature Molly Livingston-Martin Georgia State University Follow this and additional works at: https://scholarworks.gsu.edu/english_diss Recommended Citation Livingston-Martin, Molly, "Touching Scenes: The Politics of Female Touch in Nineteenth-Century British Literature." Dissertation, Georgia State University, 2015. https://scholarworks.gsu.edu/english_diss/146 This Dissertation is brought to you for free and open access by the Department of English at ScholarWorks @ Georgia State University. It has been accepted for inclusion in English Dissertations by an authorized administrator of ScholarWorks @ Georgia State University. For more information, please contact [email protected]. TOUCHING SCENES: THE POLITICS OF FEMALE TOUCH IN NINETEENTH- CENTURY BRITISH LITERATURE by MOLLY LIVINGSTON Under the Direction of Michael Galchinsky, Ph.D. ABSTRACT Victorian literature is crowded with scenes of women reaching out and touching one another. Women regularly show their affection through physical manifestations such as hugging, kissing, walking arm-in-arm, and with hands clasped warmly around one another’s waists. Physical manifestations of female affection recur in the great majority of Victorian fiction, from the early to the late period, in a variety of genres, in literature by both male and female authors, and often recur in chapter after chapter. My study recognizes that in any society, the tacit rules of who touches whom, when, why, where, and how, are complex and deeply-engrained social issues, and close analysis thereof may thus yield much information about a society’s most deeply held values. In addition, nineteenth-century England, with its popular reputation for extreme prudery and restraint, is an enticing place to find such myriad description of physical touch. Why, then, are they there, and why so prevalent? What functions do they serve in the texts? How were these women, and their bodies, read by onlookers? And what meaning and values were ascribed to such depictions by Victorian readers? This work begins to answer these questions, codify the implicit politics of social touching between women in Victorian England, provide a justification for the analysis of such scenes in literature, and develop an initial framework for these analyses. My research has determined that touching behaviors function as markers of various identity constructs including gender, (chapter one of this work), and nationality and social standing (chapter two). In addition, some women were able to manipulate expectations surrounding their physical behavior to accomplish their own ends (chapter three), while the physicality of others results in significant or lasting consequences for the individuals who are touched (chapter four). INDEX WORDS: Victorian literature, Victorian novel, Gothic romance, Parody, Künstlerroman, Etiquette, Conduct literature, Haptic, Elizabeth Gaskell, Charles Dickens, Elizabeth Barrett Browning, Sheridan LeFanu, Charlotte Brontë, Jane Austen, William Thackeray, Margaret Oliphant, George Eliot, Mary Augusta Ward, Touch, Habitus, Bodily hexis, Performativity. TOUCHING SCENES: THE POLITICS OF FEMALE TOUCH IN NINETEENTH- CENTURY BRITISH LITERATURE by MOLLY LIVINGSTON A Dissertation Submitted in Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements for the Degree of Doctor of Philosophy in the College of Arts and Sciences Georgia State University 2015 Copyright by Molly Livingston-Martin 2015 TOUCHING SCENES: THE POLITICS OF FEMALE TOUCH IN NINETEENTH- CENTURY BRITISH LITERATURE by MOLLY LIVINGSTON Committee Chair: Michael Galchinsky Committee: LeeAnne Richardson Paul Schmidt Electronic Version Approved: Office of Graduate Studies College of Arts and Sciences Georgia State University May 2015 iv DEDICATION This work is dedicated to all those who supported me in this process, including my grandparents, John and Annette Livingston, whose loving encouragement was invaluable; My father, Colin Martin, whose love of literature and education inspired my own; Peter Koop, without whose endless support this work would not have been completed; All the women who taught me what it means to be a friend; And especially my first friend, my best friend, my mother: Peggy Livingston Martin. v ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS In the production of this work I am indebted to the guidance of Dr. Michael Galchinsky, especially for his clarity of instruction, and the manner in which he perseveringly unraveled many a convoluted idea. I would also like to thank my dissertation committee members, Dr. LeeAnne Richardson and Dr. Paul Schmidt, as well as the members of my dissertation group, Kathryn Huie-Harrison and Ellen Stockstill, for their boundless wisdom, encouragement, and patience. vi TABLE OF CONTENTS ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS ............................................................................................. v 1 Introduction: The Phenomenon of Female Affectionate Touch ............................. 1 1.1 The Research Question ........................................................................................ 1 1.2 Literature Review ................................................................................................. 3 1.3 Methodology: Judith Butler and Pierre Bourdieu .............................................. 7 1.4 Chapter Descriptions .......................................................................................... 21 2 “This little action”: The Feminine Manner of Touch ........................................... 25 2.1 Displaying the Inner Self ................................................................................... 27 2.2 Displaying a Feminine Manner: Affection, Sincerity, and Spontaneity .......... 32 2.3 The Value of Female Friendship ....................................................................... 36 2.4 “Hovering about my darling”: Femininity in Bleak House ............................. 40 2.5 Signifying Touch in Gaskell’s Wives and Daughters ....................................... 51 2.6 Touch and Femininity: Concluding Remarks .................................................. 63 3 “Calm and unruffled behaviour”: Touch and Englishness in Victorian Fiction 65 3.1 Display and Restraint for Middle-Class English Women ................................. 68 3.2 Bodily Behaviors................................................................................................. 79 3.3 “Half a dozen turns in the pump-room”: Touch in Northanger Abbey .......... 83 3.4 Touch as an indicator of nationality and breeding in Villette .......................... 88 3.5 Touch, Breeding, and Nationality in Aurora Leigh ......................................... 94 vii 3.6 Otherness, and “the power of the hand” in “Carmilla” ................................. 101 3.7 Conclusion ........................................................................................................ 106 4 “A perfect performer”: Touch and Agency ......................................................... 108 4.1 Advanced Agency ............................................................................................. 110 4.2 Obstacles to Agency .......................................................................................... 112 4.3 “She redoubled her caresses”: Agency in the hands of Becky Sharp ............ 119 4.4 “Under the guidance of her genius”: Agency and Miss Marjoribanks ......... 130 4.5 Final Remarks on Female Affectionate Touch and Agency .......................... 140 5 “If words had been all . .”: The Power of Touch in Scenes of Duress ............. 142 5.1 Victorian and Eliotian Conceptions of the Power of Sympathy ..................... 144 5.2 Abrogated Rules: Extreme Situations and the Body ....................................... 159 5.3 Conversion ........................................................................................................ 162 5.4 Touch, Sympathy, and Influence in Middlemarch ......................................... 165 5.5 Touch, Sympathy and Influence in Sir George Tressady ............................... 177 6 Conclusion: Final Thoughts ................................................................................... 194 Works Cited ................................................................................................................... 199 1 1 Introduction: The Phenomenon of Female Affectionate Touch 1.1 The Research Question Writing of a trip he made to England in the fifteenth century, the intellectual and philosopher Desiderius Erasmus wrote: there is a fashion [here] which cannot be commended enough. Wherever you go, you are received on all hands with kisses; when you take leave, you are dismissed with kisses. If you go back, your salutes are returned to you. When a visit is paid, the first act of hospitality is a kiss, and when guests depart, the same entertainment is repeated; wherever a meeting takes place there is kissing in abundance; in fact whatever way you turn, you are never without it. Oh Faustus, if you had once tasted how sweet and fragrant those kisses are, you would indeed wish to be a traveler, not for ten years, like Solon, but for your whole life, in England. (Erasmus 1962:203) Whatever Erasmus’ experiences may have been in the Middle Ages, English manners would become more “physically uneffusive” by the nineteenth-century (Classen 4). Indeed, in the popular imagination