Gender dissonance and the bourgeois woman in the Victorian novel

Feminist studies of the Victorian novel have persuasively shown how domestic novels typically require the expulsion of the monstrously classed or sexed woman to achieve the individuation of the proper middle-class female subject and to maintain bourgeois hegemony. I argue, however, that domestic novels could alternately seek ways to incorporate the monstrous into constructions of the bourgeois woman, such that the domestic woman remains a site of contestation rather than a stable or homogeneous category. In the texts that I examine, gender dissonance is actively staged as spectacle for purposes of transformation rather than abjection. That is, these texts draw attention to contradictions within middle-class female subjectivity in order to critique the limits of bourgeois domestic ideology. I contend that non-normative or queer female subjectivities are not simply deviant entities intruding upon the domestic narrative from the margins of these novels but, as spectacles of desire, they are more productively represented emerging out of conflicting demands of gender and class in constructions of bourgeois womanhood. In Chapter One, I argue that the middle-class Englishwoman is invited to identify with her Other, the active, independent, and more public working-class woman in Elizabeth Gaskell\u27s mid-Victorian fiction through the trope of the cross-dresser. Chapter Two examines a contrasting deployment of cross-dressing or self-theatricalization in Charlotte Brontë\u27s Villette , whereby the bourgeois female protagonist paradoxically lays claim to an authentic and exceptional subjectivity. To manage anxieties about the bourgeois woman\u27s identification with male authority and desire, however, the text must disavow resemblances between working-class women and the middle-class protagonist. The second half of the dissertation examines novels from the late-Victorian period that make gender dissonance visible by working sexuality against gender. Chapter Three argues that the figure of the lady\u27s companion in Thomas Hardy\u27s fiction registers a slippage between identification and desire between differently classed women within the space of domesticity. Chapter Four tracks the New Woman as queer pleasure-seeker in the space of Empire, in which gender dissonance becomes the norm yet it remains marked by exploitative power relations. A conclusion indicates avenues for further research