Dissertation
Queer Cryptographers: Jane Austen, Charlotte Brontë, and Sarah Orne Jewett
Doctor of Philosophy (PhD), Washington State University
01/2017
Handle:
https://hdl.handle.net/2376/118190
Abstract
This dissertation coins the term “queer cryptography” to discuss the creation of multiple perceived realities as a means to undermine heteronormative sanctions for female writers in the nineteenth-century. I use the term “queer cryptographer” to discuss a uniquely feminine literary tradition of constructing coded, subversive, narratives within the seemingly benign genre of the domestic fiction. My dissertation is a chronological study of how three queer cryptographers discuss same-sex desire in their nineteenth-century works of domestic fiction. I begin my study with Jane Austen, following Austen with Charlotte Brontë, and finishing with Sarah Orne Jewett. Interestingly, not only did each successive queer cryptographer in my dissertation read the former’s work, establishing a very real female literary community, but they also each participate within a conversation concerning same-sex relationships and their permanence in societies that criminalize homosexuality. I look at Austen’s Pride and Prejudice, Emma, and Persuasion, Brontë’s Jane Eyre, and Jewett’s Deephaven to demonstrate a progression of the depictions of same-sex relationships from simply understanding same-sex desire as a state between erotic innocence and heterosexual marriage to portraying same-sex relationships as of equal importance as heterosexual marriages. Thus, I understand these coded discussions of same-sex desire as having a positive role in the very fabric of heteronormativity. By understanding this progressive commentary, we must reconsider what we think we know about works of domestic fiction in the nineteenth century and the female writers behind them.
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Details
- Title
- Queer Cryptographers: Jane Austen, Charlotte Brontë, and Sarah Orne Jewett
- Creators
- Jennifer Anne Leeds
- Contributors
- Debbie Lee (Advisor)Carol Siegel (Committee Member)Donna Campbell (Committee Member)Roger Whitson (Committee Member)
- Awarding Institution
- Washington State University
- Academic Unit
- Department of English
- Theses and Dissertations
- Doctor of Philosophy (PhD), Washington State University
- Number of pages
- 172
- Identifiers
- 99900581824601842
- Language
- English
- Resource Type
- Dissertation