Engendering melancholy: Romantic gender performance and the pre-history of abnormality

In recent years, academics such as Eve Sedgwick and popular publications such as The Advocate have reported the high rate of self-inflicted violence and suicide among people whose gender or sexual identity does not conform to social norms. My dissertation traces this correlation between self-inflicted violence and non-normative gender to the Romantic period and theorizes its social and psychological causes. Bringing canonical Romantic poetry into conversation with late eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century novels, I argue that subjects whose performance of gender deviates from social norms often experience socially expected ('normal') gender as something unattainable or lost. This performative melancholia creates a profound ambivalence within the subject, which manifests itself as self-inflicted violence (masochism) in many Romantic texts. My project is designed to further scholarship in three ways: it distinguishes between sadism and masochism to show that many instances of violence that have been discussed as sadism actually stem from masochism; it shows that Romantic authors explored the emotional impact of rigid gender norms from a variety of ideological positions; and it provides a genealogy of what Michel Foucault has termed "the individual to be corrected," one of three distinct figures that emerged in the eighteenth century and eventually gave rise to the late nineteenth-century idea of the abnormal individual.;Section one examines the violence that melancholia produces in failed romantic couples in William Blake's Visions of the Daughters of Albion and Fanny Burney's Camilla. Section two focuses on the relationship between transgressive femininity and violence in Charlotte Dacre's Zofloya and George Eliot's The Mill on the Floss. Section three addresses failed masculinity as a source of violence in William Godwin's Caleb Williams, James Hogg's The Private Memoirs and Confessions of a Justified Sinner, and Byron's The Giaour. Section four assesses the relationship between failed gender performativity and madness in William Wordsworth's The Ruined Cottage and "The Thorn," Amelia Opie's The Father and Daughter, and Percy Shelley's Julian and Maddalo. The study concludes by reading the memoirs of Herculine Barbin as a bridge between the Romantic period and more contemporary concerns surrounding gender identity and self-inflicted violence in contemporary queer subcultures.