Declamation and dismemberment: Rhetoric, the body, and disarticulation in four Victorian horror novels

The fundamental question this dissertation seeks to answer is how late-Victorian horror fiction produced fear for its contemporary audiences. This study argues that the answer to this question lies in the areas of rhetoric---more specifically, oratory---and the body. This may seem unremarkable, but the notion of a rhetorical body was problematic for Victorians due to suspicion of eloquence and anxiety over the instability of bodies. This ambiguity is expressed through recurring images in horror fiction of the destruction of the monstrous body---typically through cutting---in relation to rhetorical performance and display. This study appropriates a medical term to refer to this phenomenon, disarticulation, which means amputation. Disarticulation, then, becomes a form of control of the transgressing body. It is expressed in society and literature in three forms, either as allusions or direct representations: public execution, including torture and dismemberment; anatomical dissection and its suggestion of vivisection; and aestheticization, which refashions death as life. Proponents of these practices claimed that they produced social order, scientific knowledge, and art. In the larger culture, however, they produced horror. But disarticulation is just one explanation for the fear produced by late Victorian horror fiction. This study also speculates that dread is produced by epideictic, which seems peculiarly present alongside other Classically-inspired rhetorical performances and displays in the five primary texts selected for examination: Frankenstein by Mary Shelley; Dracula by Bram Stoker; The Island of Dr. Moreau by H.G. Wells; The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde by Robert Louis Stevenson; and The Picture of Dorian Gray by Oscar Wilde.