Haunted by the New Woman

• Thesis title in Czech: Nová žena coby strašák své doby
• Thesis title in English: Haunted by the New Woman
• Key words: Nová žena|pozdně Viktoriánský gotický román|upír|duch|přežití|ideály
• English key words: New Woman|late Victorian Gothic|vampire|ghosts|survival|ideals
• Academic year of topic announcement: 2020/2021
• Thesis type: diploma thesis
• Thesis language: angličtina
• Department: Department of Anglophone Literatures and Cultures (21-UALK)
• Supervisor: doc. Clare Wallace, M.A., Ph.D.
• Author: hidden - assigned and confirmed by the Study Dept.
• Date of registration: 19.10.2020
• Date of assignment: 19.10.2020
• Administrator's approval: not processed yet
• Confirmed by Study dept. on: 23.10.2020
• Date and time of defence: 07.09.2022 00:00
• Date of electronic submission: 16.06.2022
• Date of proceeded defence: 07.09.2022
• Submitted/finalized: committed by student and finalized
• Opponents: Mgr. Miroslava Horová, Ph.D.

Guidelines

The Gothic has a long tradition as a literary genre that works with gender conventions. When it first appeared in the second half of the 18th century, the female character’s function is to be an object of interest for both the villain and the hero. For the narrative purposes, the repressed heroine becomes a damsel in distress, a romantic interest, and a trophy to be earned. She is an expression of anxiety; she does not control her fate, her property, nor her own body, and yet she cannot escape this situation forced upon her by the contemporary conventions.
Hundred years later, the Gothic reappeared in the Victorian culture. The heroine’s later incarnations include the madwoman in the attic and the senseless wife scraping at the living wallpaper. The traditional threat of a Gothic villain remained at the heart of the tale – but their nature transformed. This was brought by the development of the Woman Question that characterized the change in the social and cultural spheres of the second half of the 19th century. The reforms regarding divorce, childcare, and female rights culminated in the journalistic phenomenon of the New Woman that was both a cultural and political tool. She was the child-eating, man-hating, and family-breaking monster. She served both as a scarecrow and an alleviation for more conservative feminists of the time.
Within the landscape of the Gothic novel of the late 19th century, the female characters were portrayed either as the angel in the house or the nightmarish fury personifying the fears and threats of the New Woman. If they did not adhere to the social norms, the events of the novel would conspire against them to force them. The fate of such women in fiction would more often than not result in death that transformed them back into the Victorian ideal of a good woman: an unchanging image put in stasis, never to change or to shed the social shackles, obedient and above all beautiful.
The Gothic as a genre, then, offers a perspective on the shift of gender conventions in the Late Victorian era. Especially, fiction concerned with female vampires, ghosts, and other mysterious beings thought to be dead offer themselves to an analysis of pressures, tensions, and anxieties connected with the otherized New Woman. As the Other, the New Woman becomes an enemy and a monster rather than the perfect angel in the house that the Victorian era celebrates. Gothic fiction becomes a tool of political debate – both normalizing the first-wave feminist movement and providing a common enemy for both camps of the issue.
The objective of the MA thesis will be to analyse a selection of the Victorian Gothic tales written in the 1880s and 1890s with the focus on the female perspective: to examine its political role in the development of the Woman Question and to establish the female characters’ relation to the constructed ideal of the New Woman. It will work with the metamorphoses of the main female characters: from the perfect lady to the destructive fury, from a living woman to the dead painting, from a victim to the villain, and the implications of the said transformations.

References

Primary Sources:
Grafton, John, ed. Classic Ghost Stories by Wilkie Collins, M.R. James, Charles Dickens and Others. New York: Dover Publications Inc., 1998.
James, Henry. Ghost Stories of Henry James. Hertfordshire: Wordsworth Edition, 2008.
Lee, Vernon. Hauntings and Other Fantastic Tales. Peterborough: Broadview Editions, 2006.
Marryat, Florence. The Blood of the Vampire. Richmond: Valancourt Books, 2009.
Stoker, Bram. Dracula. Hertfordshire: Wordsworth Edition, 2000.

Secondary Sources:
Auerbach, Nina. Woman and the Demon: The Life of a Victorian Myth. USA: President and Fellows of Harvard College, 1982.
Baldick, Chris. In Frankenstein’s Shadows: Myth, Monstrosity, and Nineteenth-Century Writing. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1990.
Basch, Francoise. Relative Creatures: Victorian Women in Society and Novel 1837 – 1867. London: Penguin Books, 1974.
Cunningham, Gail. The New Woman and the Victorian Novel. London and Basingstoke:
The Macmillan Press, 1978.
Guy, Josephine M. The Victorian Age: An Anthology of Sources and Documents.
London: Routledge, 1988.
Horner, Avril, and Sue Zlosnik. Women and the Gothic: And Edinburgh Companion. Edinburgh: Edinburgh UP, 2016.
Houghton, Walter. The Victorian Frame of Mind, 1830-1870. New Haven: Yale UP, 2001.
Hughes, Willaim. Beyond Dracula: Bram Stoker’s Fiction and its Cultural Context. London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2000.
Morgan, Simon. A Victorian Woman’s Place: Public Culture in the Nineteenth Century. London & New York: Tauris Academic Studies, 2007.
Richardson, Anqelique, and Chris Willis. The New Woman in Fiction and Fact: Fin de Siecle Feminisms. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2002.