| The dissertation studies how Victorian concepts of identity, gender and genre are revealed through the disposition of the female body, particularly as it is identified as a domestic body, in Victorian sensation fiction. Sensation fiction criminalizes the female who, for the Victorian reader, had become a passive emblem of Victorian morality and idyllic domesticity. The genre exploits these emblems by creating transgressive females, but then manages them through body-centered means--exposure of a disguise, incarceration, pain and disfigurement, and so on--and, consequently, reinstates Victorian social and moral constructs. In this way, the sensation genre effectively embraces subversive elements and criminal acts, while remaining inherently non-subversive, precisely because of its somatic emphasis.; The group of sensation novels considered here invoke the Victorian reader's desire to stabilize margins of identity, morality, privacy, and authority as they resolve economic, social and legal inequities. The narrative portrayals of the female body in these novels not only reveal the issues important to the Victorian reader, but also illustrate the non-subversive nature of sensation fiction: in fact, the narrative management of the female body duplicates the social, legal and economic management of the female in Victorian culture. In all of these novels, the female body's own unstable meaning serves to reflect the instabilities of relevant Victorian reality constructs--identity, class, morality, authority and truth. The novels considered in depth include: Wood's East Lynne, Braddon's Lady Audley's Secret and Eleanor's Victory, and Collins's The Woman in White, The New Magdalen, and No Name. |
