Bound by Narrative: ‘Reading’ the Female Body and Genre in Nineteenth-Century British Literature Charlotte Eliza Brake Kelso Submitted in fulfilment of the Degree of Masters of Philosophy in the School of Humanities, Department of English and Creative Writing The University of Adelaide September 2019 1 2 Table of Contents Abstract ......................................................................................................................... 4 Thesis Declaration ........................................................................................................ 5 Acknowledgements ....................................................................................................... 6 Introduction: The female body, the male gaze, and discourses of femininity .............. 7 Chapter One: George Eliot’s The Mill on the Floss and the Overflow from the Realist Body ............................................................................................................... 27 Chapter Two: The Uncontainable Female Body in Henry Rider Haggard’s She: A History of Adventure ................................................................................................... 67 Chapter Three: Self-Fashioning New Woman Identity in George Egerton’s “The Regeneration of Two” ............................................................................................... 103 Conclusion ................................................................................................................ 141 Works Cited .............................................................................................................. 147 3 Abstract In George Eliot’s 1860 realist novel, The Mill on the Floss, Henry Rider Haggard’s 1887 adventure romance She: A History of Adventure, and George Egerton’s 1894 New Woman short story, “The Regeneration of Two”, the female body becomes a representative surface upon which is inscribed the discourses and conflicting ideologies of the social context. This thesis examines authors’ engagement with conventional narratives of femininity in their representations of the physical female body, and in its absence or presence. The representation of female characters within frameworks of genre both reflects and represents changing concerns about bodily identity, gender, and national identity. 4 Thesis Declaration I certify that this work contains no material which has been accepted for the award of any other degree or diploma in my name, in any university or other tertiary institution and, to the best of my knowledge and belief, contains no material previously published or written by another person, except where due reference has been made in the text. In addition, I certify that no part of this work will, in the future, be used in a submission in my name, for any other degree or diploma in any university or other tertiary institution without the prior approval of the University of Adelaide and where applicable, any partner institution responsible for the joint- award of this degree. I give permission for the digital version of my thesis to be made available on the web, via the University’s digital research repository, the Library Search and also through web search engines, unless permission has been granted by the University to restrict access for a period of time. I acknowledge the support I have received for my research through the provision of an Australian Government Research Training Program Scholarship. Charlotte Eliza Brake Kelso 08/07/2019 5 Acknowledgments This thesis would not have been possible without the support of a number of significant people. Firstly, my supervisor, Associate Professor Mandy Treagus, and co-supervisor Dr Maggie Tonkin, for their guidance, encouragement, and patience, and for motivating me to pursue postgraduate studies through their inspiring courses during my time as an undergraduate. I am also incredibly grateful to the University of Adelaide and the Australian Government for the financial and educational support I have received during my candidature, and to the staff of the Department of English and Creative Writing and School of Humanities. Thank you to Dr Felicity Brake and Associate Professor Richard Kelso, Mum and Dad, for their constant, unwavering support of my education, and for encouraging me to pursue any and all of the many and varied things I fill my life with. To Fergus Kelso for keeping me updated on memes, to Robert Macfarlane, my love and my ever-dedicated 2am proofreader, to Céline Zerna for her constant support, and to my devoted partners in writing, Beatrice, Timmy, and Tim Tam. 6 Introduction The female body, the male gaze, and discourses of femininity “The discourse of man is in the metaphor of woman.” (Spivak 44) Cultural understandings of the embodiment of femininity have undergone major shifts and changes throughout history, though perhaps none so significant to modern conceptions of femininity as in the Victorian period. From scientific understandings of the female body as evolutionarily inferior to male bodies, the physically and mentally restrictive modes of dress, and the ideology of separate spheres, to the emergence of feminism and women’s suffrage at the fin de siècle, the Victorian period was a time of both regression and progress in gender equality, and of ambivalent expectations of women. The female body and its performative signifiers of identity were thus sites of conflict and subjects of contention, with Victorian women’s bodies both bound to and shaped by narratives of morality and propriety. These narratives, whether implicitly or explicitly, converge upon the Victorian feminine ideal, a “golden mean” (Thayer 159) of womanhood “poised over contradictory discourses which the rise of capitalism brought to climactic excess” (Talairach-Vielmas 5). This thesis examines the female body as a representative surface upon which the discourses and conflicting ideologies of the social context are inscribed. The position of the female body in the Victorian period is both reflected in and upheld by its representation and presence in cultural products such as literature, which demonstrate and perform the changing social standing of women through narrative. 7 The physical body is as much constructed by ideological systems as it is by its biological and physiological makeup. As “a microcosm replicating the anxieties and vulnerabilities of the macrocosm” (Warwick and Cavallaro 14), the body is bound to the context in which it functions. As Alexandra Warwick and Dani Cavallaro suggest, the individual body “can never be assessed, studied, indeed enjoyed, according to extralinguistic criteria: its representations are always incarnations of belief systems and always bear witness to a society’s validation of certain attitudes and stigmatising of others” (6-7). At the same time, the body both “practices and signifies identity” (P. Gilbert 15), combining and replicating tropes and signifiers of identity as a method of self-fashioning. As a representative surface that both performs identity and subjectivity, while also reflecting the dominant cultural ideology, the body then exists as a text that both inscribes and is inscribed by the “discourses and material practices that constitute its social environment” (Cranny-Francis 2). The Victorian woman’s body, represented within contemporaneous texts, is thus represented in relation to dominant understandings of femininity – whether in support or subversion of those ideals. This thesis uses the symbolic re-writing of the female body as a point from which to explore how Victorian texts represent women’s narratives. Through close readings of literature written between 1860 and 1894, namely George Eliot’s The Mill on the Floss (1860), Henry Rider Haggard’s She (1886-7), and George Egerton’s short story “The Regeneration of Two” (1894), this project explores feminine embodiment in the second half of the Victorian period. These three texts, examples of Victorian literary realism, Adventure romance, and New Woman fiction respectively, span a time period during which the position of women and indeed, of Victorian Britain, underwent a great shift. As Casey Finch has suggested, “[t]he 8 body’s relation to itself, to its clothing, to reproduction, to its political and architectural environment, is reshaped in the second half of the nineteenth century” (340). Issues of bodily identity, boundaries, and image are “basic concerns which are periodically foregrounded, coming into sharper focus in periods of particular tensions” (P. Gilbert 2), and during this period these issues, and the tensions that accompanied them, became pervasive anxieties that would shape the social and legal world for the next century. During this time, Britain saw the publication of Charles Darwin’s On the Origin of Species (1859), the death of Prince Albert in 1861, the passing of the Second and Third Reform Acts (1867, 1884), and the Married Women’s Property Acts of 1870 and 1883. In this period, the First Boer War broke out (1880-1), and amidst the passing of the Labouchere Amendment condemning homosexuality between men in 1885, and the growing of the women’s suffrage movement, the social climate was one in which anxieties about sexual deviance, cultural degeneration, and women’s social position came to the fore, challenging deep-seated conceptions of masculinity and national identity. As Pamela K. Gilbert suggests, “the more highly charged the discourse … the more anxiety is displayed in the discussion of what the “essential” properties, including