Thesis
Inconvenient Women: Creatures of the Night
Washington State University
Master of Arts (MA), Washington State University
2023
DOI:
https://doi.org/10.7273/000005132
Abstract
This M.A. thesis serves to explore the innate inconvenience of Victorian women in the uniquely patriarchal society of nineteenth-century Great Britain through the use of Gothic literature. The non-ideal Victorian woman is consistently portrayed in Gothic texts as a supernatural, preternatural creature, most often the ghost or vampire popular in Gothic texts. Unable, or unwilling to endure the assimilation necessary to belong in Victorian society or fulfill her roles in domestic space, she is juxtaposed with the more ideal, willfully or forcefully assimilated Victorian woman. This thesis traces a lineage of inconvenient women from Gothic texts such as Wilkie Collins’ The Woman in White, Charlotte Brontë’s Jane Eyre, Joseph Sheridan Le Fanu’s Carmilla, and Bram Stoker’s Dracula in order to explore the ways nineteenth-century authors sought to either illuminate or perpetuate the patriarchal oppression of Victorian women through the supernatural.
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Details
- Title
- Inconvenient Women
- Creators
- Christina Michelle Gerard
- Contributors
- Louis K McAuley (Advisor)Donna L Potts (Committee Member)Roger T Whitson (Committee Member)
- Awarding Institution
- Washington State University
- Academic Unit
- English, Department of
- Theses and Dissertations
- Master of Arts (MA), Washington State University
- Publisher
- Washington State University
- Number of pages
- 75
- Identifiers
- 99901019536701842
- Language
- English
- Resource Type
- Thesis