Buckton, Oliver

In 1890 The Picture of Dorian Gray was published in Lippincott’s Magazine, and the fate of late-nineteenth century Victorian Britain was forever changed. While over a century's worth of studies have been conducted on aestheticism, the novel’s moral story, and whether or not Dorian Gray and Oscar Wilde are both gay figures, this thesis examines the possible intentions behind the writing of Wilde’s novel. Wilde lived during the time of the 1885 Labouchere Amendment, –under which he himself would be prosecuted for “gross indecency”– making the novel's contents risky. Alongside this amendment, there were already existing instances of criminalized homosexuality such as the Cleveland Street Scandal, making the novel’s publication all the more dangerous for Wilde. After publication, Wilde received numerous negative reviews attacking his novel and himself; even today, reviewers and critics have not fully understood why Wilde produced a novel with such an apparent and perilous homoerotic theme.

This thesis explores the limited economic, professional, and political opportunities for women in the Victorian era and how these roles are perpetuated through literature. Often, the lack of opportunities confined women to two choices: the angel or the monster. While there has been significant research on this binary, Virginia Woolf’s cry to “kill the angel of the house” has not been rectified. To discuss the binary, I have analyzed Mary Elizabeth Braddon’s Lady Audley’s Secret and Charlotte Perkins Gilman “The Yellow Wallpaper” to discuss how these female writers reflect their authorial anxieties through Gothic tropes and a close identification with their heroines. Additionally, I have analyzed Thomas Hardy’s Tess of D’Urbervilles and Stephen Crane’s Maggie: A Girl of the Streets to discuss how these male authors take a naturalistic approach to critique the fallen woman trope.

This thesis explores fin de siècle theories of decadence, degeneration, criminology, and evolutionary biology, and their contemporary application to invasion literature written between 1871 and 1915. While there is significant criticism on early invasion narratives, there is little extant on Robert W. Chambers’s The King in Yellow (1895) and Erskine Childers’s The Riddle of the Sands (1903), especially in discussing the importance of their militaristic “calls to action” to convert weak, aesthetically-inclined men into hard-working patriotic soldiers and public servants. Through this conversion, the characters of Chambers and Childers serve as important role models that exemplify Max Nordau’s ideal “all-American boy” and “right-living Englishman,” convincing decadent, unprepared governments to properly prepare for an imminent Great War. However, as much of Anglo-European society ignores these signs, the warnings outlined by Chambers and Childers predict the destructive consequences of World War I and the psychological disassociation of the Modernist period.

This thesis covers the entire range of British and American film adaptations of
Emily Brontë’s novel, Wuthering Heights, as no cumulative study on this larger selection
has been done thus far. However this will not be the only objective of this thesis, as I
create a link between the author’s life to her novel, between the novel to the early
criticism, and the criticism to later adaptations, forming a chain of transformation down
the ages, to the original novel. By linking the adaptations to the earlier reception of the
novel, a change of social interaction will be uncovered as one of its reasons for surviving.
These examples of adaptation will be shown to be just as relevant to popular culture
history as its original inspiration. This is the result of an unfolding movement of change
and mutation, where each adaptation pushes to connect with the past and future.

The works of Kipling are generally read under the discursive ideology of Orientalism. According to Edward Said, Orientalism is an institution for dominating the Orient with Foucauldian power/knowledge. While much of Kipling's work falls easily within the lines of Orientalism, important exceptions disrupt this singular reading. The hybrid character Kim, for example, demonstrates an uncertainty concerning the identity of the Anglo-Indian as colonizer constructed along racial lines, where white Anglo-Indian represents colonizer and brown Indian represents colonized. This simplified racial division is further problematized by Kipling's attention to social class in other works of prose and verse, which place the lower-class white Anglo-Indians as subjects of the colonial system. In addition, Kipling's work often shows an ambivalence concerning the legitimacy of British rule. Therefore, Bakhtin's heteroglossia more appropriately accounts for Kipling's ideological complexity than does the singular ideology of Orientalism.

Despite the designation of Olive Schreiner's Lyndall in The Story of an African Farm as the first "New Woman" in literature, the nineteenth-century New Woman, with her high ideals and belief in an androgynous compromise of sex roles, is exemplified by Fanny Fern's heroine Ruth in the novel Ruth Hall. While Lyndall speaks of social injustice done to women, the limitations of her provincial setting preclude her protests from achieving the level of social activism; however, Ruth's protests, in the form of newspaper articles, do reach the level of social activism. Schreiner's androgynous ideal becomes lost in a role reversal rather than role dissolution, while Fern's Ruth achieves the metamorphosis from voiceless stereotype to empowered woman, breaking established gender conventions. Ruth, revealed to the literary world before Schreiner's Lyndall, is not only an earlier New Woman but also a stronger and more successful New Woman.

Matthew Lewis's The Monk portrays the catastrophic effects that sexual repression has on Ambrosio, a monk who is raised in a monastery. Lewis also demonstrates the freedom found in sexual fulfillment in the form of Matilda, the woman who seduces Ambrosio and leads him toward his final destruction. A Nietzschean critique of Christianity provides a connection between eighteenth century dissatisfaction with Roman Catholic doctrines and Nietzsche's aversion to the self-abnegation required to save the soul from eternal perdition. Ambrosio is the Nietzschean paradigm of the hypocritical ascetic, who hides his vice beneath the monkish robes of piety. Matilda, on the other hand, is the Ubermensch that Nietzsche discusses in Thus Spoke Zarathustra, because she sheds religious constraints and becomes a sexual being capable of experiencing sexual pleasure without guilt.

D. H. Lawrence's companion novels, The Rainbow and Women in Love, both depict homosexual relationships. Lawrence's portrayal of alternative sexual lifestyles, while sometimes negative, still offers the possibility of bisexuality, an option the author himself explored in his personal life as a reaction against repressive Victorian attitudes. Ken Russell, on the other hand, in adapting these novels to film, offers a more traditional, polarized view of homo- and heterosexuality. Though his first adaptation is more open-minded, having been filmed in the liberated 1960s, his second film is more conservative, since it is a product of the homophobic 1980s. As is the case with Lawrence, Russell's personal life, especially his religion, holds a great deal of influence over his artistic work. Therefore, this analysis argues the close link between biography and artistry, especially when a controversial subject like homosexuality is involved.

In her first novel, The Voyage Out, Virginia Woolf captures the complexity of human relationships and the difficulty of establishing meaningful connections with people. Her main character, Rachel Vinrace, struggles with these issues as she embarks on a discovery of self. Rachel's journey begins with a disrupted childhood, moves through her battle to regain a sense of belonging, and ends with her eventual withdrawal from the human struggle, thereby recreating herself and transcending the limitations of society and relationships. Rachel's actions throughout the novel mirror an oscillation between the fundamental concerns of personality development. Her behavior reflects the typical ego defense mechanisms employed by people preoccupied by interpersonal relatedness followed by an exaggerated emphasis on self-definition.

In Chapter Five of his Autobiography, John Stuart Mill discusses a "mental crisis" which struck in 1826 and lingered for some time. Mill addresses one causative element of this crisis, a perception of himself at twenty as a "mechanical man." Yet these much-quoted words understate a greater point. I shall argue that Mill's crisis was the destruction of an almost purely mechanical consciousness, or at least a strike at his foundations of a breadth and severity that has not been fully addressed by Mill scholarship. I shall consider various aspects of Mill's life and thought before and after the crisis as a means of identifying the nature of this fundamental change in Mill. These aspects of Mill's thought include philosophy, economics, epistemology, poetry, and politics, and these aspects of Mill's life include education, his relationship with his father and Bentham, his early activism, his influences, and his perceptions of man and society.