Extraordinary sensations: Imagining the body in Victorian popular culture

In my dissertation, I examine Victorian fads and the corresponding hyper-visceral responses of fad participants in order to reveal a powerful social mechanism that helped to standardize non-standard or even aberrant forms of embodiment. By grounding my discussion in analyses of Charles Dickens, Wilkie Collins and George Du Maurier, I focus on Victorian middlebrow culture. In many ways an elusive concept, the middlebrow cannot necessarily be identified by a set of easily recognizable characteristics. Instead, I suggest that the term middlebrow often describes how and by whom a text is consumed more than it does the actual content of the text itself. The term "middlebrow" and the voracious method of consumption it implies thus quite effectively describes the disparate texts of Dickens, Collins and Du Maurier and the disparate experiences of attending a freak show, participating in an athletic activity and longingly gazing at advertisements. In taking middlebrow culture as my subject, I extend upon the recent work of Janice Radway and Theresa Mangum in order to complicate a long-standing critical tradition (a tradition that arguably began with Virginia Woolf) that defines the middlebrow as absolutely conservative. Though I am not interested in either deriding or defending the middlebrow, I seek to shift the terms of the discussion and consider not only the middlebrow's relationship to consumer culture but also the middlebrow's relationship to the body.; In making the relationship between extreme forms of embodiment and middle class popular culture the focus of my study, I also expand upon critical analyses of Victorian sensation (such as James Secord's Victorian Sensation or Ann Cvetkovich's Mixed Feelings), in order to consider how various texts (not just those texts that comprise the relatively small generic category of sensation fiction) and large cultural movements were at once "sensational" and able to produce "sensation." Through my analysis of fictional best-sellers and cultural manias, I argue that what participants desired from cultural crazes or what readers sought from best-selling novels was the possibility of experiencing an extraordinary, though culturally acceptable and commonly experienced, form of embodiment.