"...With frenzied thoughts beset...": Depictions of female madness on the nineteenth-century English stage.

grantor: University of TorontoNineteenth-century drama has long been viewed as insignificant in its contribution to the intellectual culture of the period. It has been assumed that until the advent of Wilde and Shaw the theatre had nothing to offer the literary scholar beyond a memory of colourful spectacle and theatrical anecdotes. The Victorian drama has been seen as a simple form of escapist entertainment. However, the plays performed in the nineteenth-century theatre reflected contemporary mores and ideals. An examination of a selection of these plays will look at the effect they had in mirroring and solidifying such ideals, especially in the way that women were portrayed. The heroines and villainesses of the nineteenth-century theatre encapsulated the wider societal view of the feminine psyche at a time when psychology began to emerge as a separate discipline. In a comparison of contemporary biological and psychological texts with certain of these popular theatrical female characters, it becomes evident that the theatre was significant in its contribution to the broader culture. While being described by biologists as the weaker sex, women were portrayed as helpless heroines on stage. As women gained more autonomy in society their fictitious stage representations became more threatening and dangerous; this same contention was also put forward by social scientists and biologists. With the advent of the New Woman in the 1880s, the theatre attempted to come to terms with the changing role of women in society and concluded, frequently, that they were a dangerous hybrid which threatened the race. At the same time psychologists continued to warn of the danger of such fractured psyches. An examination of popular nineteenth-century plays will show that the mad woman was not simply a conventional figure of Victorian melodrama, but also a puzzling, and occasionally frightening, reality for society at large.Ph.D