Between good girls and vile fiends: Femininity, alterity and female homosociality in the nineteenth-century British Gothic novel

This dissertation examines a selection of nineteenth-century Gothic novels and analyzes the types of gender, sexuality, and alterity discourses that these novels participate in and at the same time engender. The three main texts that I explore in this project---Zofloya: Or, the Moor (1806) by Charlotte Dacre, Villette (1853) by Charlotte Bronte and Dracula (1897) by Bram Stoker ---center on the question of female virtue as it pertains to sexual desire and autonomy but also as a nodal point in articulations of Englishness in nineteenth-century Britain. The figurations of alterity in these novels are essential to articulations of femininity. More importantly, the deployment of the desires, bodies and images of the Other to articulate virtuous English femininity points to the imbrication of discourses on gender and national identity, and the centrality of both to the project of Empire.Even though this is mostly a project in the field of literary studies and gender is its main concern, the complex discursive nature of gender mandates a cross-sectional analysis of gender figurations in terms of alterity---mostly ethnic and racial but in terms of class as well. While it is not post-colonial in its ambition and methodology, this project attempts to enrich our understanding of the role of popular literature as a cultural artefact: it studies the Gothic novel as it participates in multiple discourses of alterity and nationality in the articulation of normative femininity in nineteenth-century Britain. My interpretation of the multiple intersections of discourses on femininity and alterity attempts to complicate readings of the Gothic novel as preoccupied mostly with cultural ideologies of domesticity and the role of woman in the domestic field as a social domain separate from the project of Empire. Such articulations are not simply external to an already existing monolithic and stable femininity but intrinsic to its very coherence in the discursive field. In other words, this project does not study images of the Other as figurations of difference that are contrasted to a virtuous middle-class female body but rather attempts to show how these images of otherness are themselves fundamental to the very coherence of both Englishness and femininity.Methodologically speaking, this study is most indebted to Foucault's conceptualization of the discursive nature of power and the engendering of the subject in discourse but also augmented and enriched in important ways by Butler's revisions of Foucauldian theory in relation to the performative nature of gender Sedgwick's concept of homosociality and work by Said, Bhabha and Zizek, among others, that has influenced my thinking about questions of alterity in the structuration of gender.The analysis occasionally but necessarily ventures beyond the literary text to engage other contemporary discourses in British culture in the late eighteenth and the nineteenth centuries: painting, medicine, anatomy, conduct books and travel literature. They all form, in various groupings at different times, a complex grid of interconnected discourses and thus participate, together with the literary text proper, in the "great surface network" of the Foucauldian power/knowledge system.