School of Culture and Communication - Theses
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ItemContesting womanhood: the American New Woman in literary and popular culture, 1890-1930( 2015)Who was the American New Woman and why was she important to female literary writers from the period 1890 to 1930? My thesis explores this question by focusing specifically on the relationship between literary writings and the popular culture portrayals of the New Woman appearing in American magazines, many of which were in the form of advertisements and visual illustrations. I critically examine selected works of five American female writers who engaged with this figure in notably different ways, exploring among other things the socio-historical contexts of their literary works in order to understand why the ideology of the New Woman was so appealing and so pervasive, why it spawned so many different responses from female writers and why it changed so dramatically over time. Beginning with major works by Kate Chopin and Charlotte Perkins Gilman, followed by Jessie Fauset and Edith Wharton and finishing with Nella Larsen, the thesis argues that in America the changing nature of the New Woman in popular culture helped lay the framework for female literary writers to imagine and create new forms of American womanhood. It further contends that although she was often stereotyped in popular culture, the New Woman’s identity proved to be more flexible in literary works and that this complexity extended to both “white” and “black” writers. An additional contention is that unlike white women writers, African-American women writers were obliged to suppress their sexuality since to do otherwise was to reinforce the stereotype of animality that had been projected upon them since the era of slavery.
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ItemNarratives of emergence( 2010)This thesis is a two-pronged creative and critical exploration of the mother-daughter relationship and female subjectivities as they emerge from or remain entwined within that relationship. Within this analysis, I also explore the tensions between female subjective crisis and agency, as they extend from the mother-daughter relationship. The critical component focusses on two autobiographical texts of twentieth-century French author, Violette Leduc. These texts, L’Asphyxie (1946) and La Bâtarde (1964), were originally published in French. However, I refer to the translations by Derek Coltman. Primarily, my questions investigate the ambivalence of the mother-daughter dynamic in Leduc’s texts and the impact of this ambivalence on female subjectivities. With the aid of object-relational theory and the psychoanalytic theories of Julia Kristeva, Judith Butler and Luce Irigaray, I explore how Leduc’s psychological patterns inform her textual practice and narrative temporality. In doing so, I propose that Leduc’s writing conveys female subjective crisis as a manifestation of the psychic struggle between the unconscious influences of both the paternal and maternal imaginaries and her personal, human desires for liberation from homogenous and suppressive sex/gender categories. I conclude that through a process of writing that engages “negative narcissism,” mimesis, and transgressive sexuality as modes of resistance, Leduc negotiates a stronger sense of herself, as an empowered figure of resistance, both inside and outside the text. The creative component, Spin is an autobiographically based novella dealing with similar complexities in the mother-daughter relationship. I approach subjective crisis from multiple angles, in its relationship to embodiment, gender, sexuality, agency and desire. Set in contemporary Melbourne, the narrative is staged around the residual pain of familial dysfunction. I explore melancholic attachment, alienation and the ambivalence of the mother-daughter dynamic from the perspective of a daughter, struggling to escape the legacy of a disturbing Tasmanian childhood, with a mentally unwell, absent mother and a father with Asperger’s syndrome.
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ItemSadomasochism as aesthetic sexuality: a cultural history from the late eighteenth century to the present( 2010)Foucault’s ars erotica, one of the most enigmatic concepts in history-of-sexuality studies, has been largely overshadowed by the examination of scientia sexualis and its creation: sexuality constructed as a natural, inborn and permanent function of the body subject to acquired or congenital pathologies. With sexuality, a truth to be discovered and analysed, sexual acts and desires became involuntary manifestations of a fixed biological cause. Foucault argues that only scientia sexualis has operated in modern Western culture whilst ars erotica belongs to Eastern and ancient societies, although in his late essays he suggests that invoking ‘sex as aesthetics’ may be a useful political strategy for marginalised sexualities. Ars erotica, then, is framed as preceding sexuality and as a possible replacement for it. In this thesis, I suggest that modern Western culture has indeed witnessed a form of ars erotica, encompassed in what I term ‘aesthetic sexuality’, which I argue has existed since the eighteenth century. To argue for the existence of aesthetic sexuality, I show how sexuality is constructed as having aesthetic value, a quality that marks this experience as a form of art. Value and meaning are located within sexual practice and pleasure rather than in their underlying cause; sexuality’s raison d’être is tied to its aesthetic value, at surface level rather than beneath it. Aesthetic sexuality is a product of choice, a deliberate strategy of self-creation as well as a mode of social communication, and therefore can be chosen and cultivated by potentially any individual on the basis of its intended aesthetic value. I suggest that, in contrast with the legal, medical and psychiatric discourses and practices that composed the scientia sexualis, aesthetic sexuality is founded upon discourses pertaining to aesthetic theory and philosophy. I construct a cultural history of aesthetic sexuality using the case study of sadomasochism. Each chapter advances my argument by demonstrating the evolving aesthetic value of sadomasochism—the different ways in which the practice has been constructed as art—and showing how different aspects of aesthetic sexuality have been emphasised in different historical periods. I begin this cultural history by examining novels by the Marquis de Sade through the aesthetic philosophy of Kant, Shaftesbury, Hutcheson, Hume and Burke, before employing the aestheticism of Walter Pater to discuss the sadomasochistic poetry of Algernon Charles Swinburne and the novel Torture Garden by Octave Mirbeau. I then provide an exposition of Nietzsche’s aesthetics in order to show their influence on constructions of sadomasochism by Bataille, Réage and de Berg. The aesthetics of Baudrillard, Foucault, Jameson and Butler are then used to examine American political and pornographic writing from 1981 to the early twenty-first century. I conclude this thesis by investigating what the model of aesthetic sexuality developed in the preceding chapters reveals about the most conspicuous articulations of sadomasochism in popular culture today, that is, in mainstream fashion and the subcultural forms defined against it. These particular constructions of sadomasochism, and the aesthetics that inform them, have been selected as those that contribute most significantly to the history of aesthetic sexuality.
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ItemErasmus Darwin and the poetry of science( 2010)In the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, significant changes occurred in the ways in which the general public engaged with scientific discoveries through popular literature. Poetry in particular brought science to a larger audience, one which included those, such as women and children, traditionally excluded from the more mainstream cultural centres of the “new science,” such as gentlemen’s clubs and friendly societies. This thesis examines the changes that occurred in popular science writing, particularly in terms of that writing’s discourses of morality and gender. It explores why verse was so popular (albeit briefly) as a medium for conveying scientific discoveries and research, and why it moved from being a form of scientific discourse primarily authored by men to one in which female writers dominated, before disappearing as a significant form of science writing in the mid-nineteenth century. To this end, the thesis focuses on the reception of Erasmus Darwin’s scientific poetry. Darwin was the period’s most popular and influential verse science writer. For this reason his initial reception and on-going reputation, traced and analysed in depth in this thesis, shed a good deal of light on the cultural shifts occurring in popular science at this time. The thesis also situates Darwin within a long didactic and scientific literary tradition. In contrast to pioneering and influential studies by Desmond King-Hele, Jenny Uglow and Maureen McNeil, I challenge the critically dominant understanding of Darwin as a unique genius whose novelty was the primary force behind both his early success and ultimate obscurity. I elucidate the links between Darwin and his predecessors and contemporaries, demonstrating the significance of this association of his work with pre-existing genres and literary traditions – particularly those concerned with moral didacticism and public improvement. In terms of reception, the thesis draws on published reviews, letters from Darwin's contemporaries, and poems written in praise of his works to examine why the initial publication of Darwin’s The Loves of the Plants (1789) and The Economy of Vegetation (1792) were relatively uncontroversial, despite the emphasis placed by many modern critics on their provocative sexual and philosophical content. I argue that contrary to the prevailing critical consensus, the political backlash against Darwin’s work in the 1790s has been overstated and that his works continued to remain popular into the early 1800s. The thesis examines the significance of this in light of Darwin’s liberal political and religious views, and the high-profile nature of satires of his work such as T.J. Mathias’ The Pursuits of Literature (1794) and The Anti-Jacobin, or Weekly Examiner’s The Loves of the Triangles (1798). I also examine the relatively measured response to Darwin’s final poem, The Temple of Nature (1803), in which biological evolution is explicitly described, as suggestive of both greater diversity and less extremism in public opinion than is usually associated with this period. Lastly, this thesis argues that the presence of a rich tradition of women’s scientific writing in verse in the early decades of the nineteenth century, much of it directly influenced by Darwin, suggests that didactic poetry remained a vital form for much longer than has been previously thought, and that the genre suffered a slow decline and transformation into other related forms rather than a catastrophic and sudden end. The strong presence of female writers within this tradition also suggests that women found a variety of ways to negotiate the increasing restrictions that the institutionalisation of science placed on their participation, that included drawing on traditional religious and moral sources of authority as a way of maintaining their stature as educators - a position that may ultimately have become problematic as disciplines further solidified.