Gender and the body in Charles Dickens's novels of the 1850s

The dissertation examines the ways in which cultural concerns and questions about the body and its relation to gender, power, and visuality are represented in Dickens's five novels of the 1850s—David Copperfield (1850), Bleak House (1853), Hard Times (1854), Little Dorrit (1857), and A Tale of Two Cities (1859). In their concern with visual, somatic representations of female nature, especially of female criminal and pathological nature, many of these novels, especially David Copperfield and Bleak House, demonstrate the new significance of the female body as a site of visual meaning in the nineteenth century in general, and more specifically in the 1850s, a decade characterized by several intersecting cultural phenomena: a proliferation of discourses about gender issues, including female sexuality, prostitution, divorce, and women's rights to property; an increased emphasis on the specular and on the reproduction of images; and the development of medicine as an organized (male) profession, which fostered new ways of reading and observing the body.; In David Copperfield and Bleak House, female sexuality is deeply problematic, linked with prostitution in David Copperfield and with criminality in Bleak House. A discussion of Victorian theories about female nature, especially as expressed in the discourse surrounding the 1849 case of Maria Manning, the original of Hortense, illustrates how the cultural practice of reading the body as a sign informs Bleak House. Through its many grotesque female characters,{09}Little Dorrit suggests anxieties about social and economic concerns, especially instability in the economy, which is represented as a decrepit female body. In Hard Times and A Tale of Two Cities, class anxieties appear as gender anxieties; the possibility of class revolt in Hard Times is suggested by Stephen's grotesque wife, and the violence of the French Revolution is thoroughly feminized in A Tale of Two Cities. The dissertation situates this novel in a tradition of ambivalent English responses to the French Revolution, and, for perhaps the first time, discusses in depth Dickens's probable French sources, and the original of Madame Defarge, Theroigne ´de Méricourt. A locus for anxieties relating to the Victorian women's movement and to fears of revolution in England, the image of the monstrous woman was an important figure in the mid-Victorian cultural and literary imagination.