Bringing the Body to Bear on Neo-Victorian Fiction: Non-normative Femininity, Gendered Embodiment, and the Legacy of the Victorian Feminine Ideal

Abstract

The representation of women's bodies in neo-Victorian fiction has implications for assessing the genre's capacity to intervene in contemporary debates about gender. Such textual representations - particularly those focused on non-normative women's bodies - form part of a larger generic interest in the experiences of historically marginalised subjects. This interest has been variously interpreted by critics as a way to displace anxieties about contemporary social inequalities onto a salacious version of the nineteenth century past, a means for interrogating the legacies of Victorian-era attitudes toward differently raced, classed, and gendered subjects in the present, and as a self-congratulatory impulse designed to emphasise our supposed evolution beyond Victorian prejudices. In relation to gender, critics are increasingly exploring the intersections between contemporary feminist theory and feminist neo-Victorian fiction, with a particular focus on the influence of postfeminism. However, what such approaches have thus far elided is the centrality of the body to women's identities, an (albeit problematic) equivalence which is present in both neo-Victorian portrayals of non-normative femininity and debates about women's status in both Victorian and contemporary culture.

To address this gap, this thesis analyses non-normative feminine embodiment in eight neo-Victorian novels published between 1983 and 2012, using a framework comprised of neo-Victorian criticism, contemporary feminist theories of the body, and scholarship on Victorian-era scientific, medical, and cultural discourses on women's bodies. Adopting this framework makes it possible to see the parallels these novels construct between nineteenth and late-twentieth/early twenty-first century approaches to defining (ideal) femininity. Attending to how particular modes of non-normative femininity - including freakery, (failed) maternity, madness, non-binary gender identities and queer sexualities - are embodied by characters in these novels reveals their shared interest in portraying the body as the locus of women's exclusion from various realms of social, political, and cultural life. By suggesting that contemporary categories of exclusion are indebted to Victorian-era gender norms, these texts engage with the question of whether such legacies are capable of being discarded in favour of a conception of the body that refuses to enact women's disempowerment.