| After the First World War, identity categories of race, gender and sexuality which only a few short decades earlier could have been identified as binary, polar and discrete had melted into one another in ways that led people with short memories to exclaim: "The world has gone mad today." In modern novels, "women curse and men cry." Flappers cut their hair short, smoke, drink and sleep with whomever they choose. Black women pass for white. Women desire women; men desire men; everyone, it seems, desires each other simultaneously. Anything goes. What caused this dramatic change?; A shift in identity constructs that conforms to the structure of scientific revolutions as described by Thomas Kuhn is responsible for the dramatic change visible in modernist narratives. According to Kuhn, a scientific paradigm that is repeatedly challenged by nonconforming anomalies can result in the emergence of an acute crisis; an unresolved crisis driven by external forces propels a revolution and ultimately the complete collapse and replacement of the paradigm. This dissertation argues that this same process can be applied to the transformation of the identity concepts of race, gender and sexuality between the end of the nineteenth century and the nineteen twenties.; In late Victorian British and late nineteenth-century American narratives, identity anomalies challenged established categories of race, gender and sexuality. These anomalies, which I call queer characters, created what Majorie Garber describes as a "category crisis" by creating racial, gender or sexual ambiguities which, in turn, repeatedly failed to conform to cultural standards. Ultimately, this continued nonconformity combined with extreme pressure from external forces generated an "acute crisis," resulting in the collapse of the Victorian/19th Century identity paradigm and the shift evident in British and American narratives after World War I to multiple, relative, fluid and unstable identity.; Narratives from both periods demonstrate anomalous characters before the shift and fluid characters after the shift including: Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, The Heavenly Twins, Dracula, Heart of Darkness, The Hidden Hand, Pudd'nhead Wilson, The Awakening, Contending Forces, The Sun Also Rises, Passing, A Passage to India, Mrs. Dalloway and The Well of Loneliness . |
