'Gentle and lovely form, what didst thou here?': Women and rebellion in English and Irish literature, 1789--1848

This project explores the relationship between literary representations of women and women's political practices. Utilizing poetry, novels, and other genres of literature, I examine depictions of English and Irish women (both historical and fictional) who participated in social movements such as the 1798 United Irish rebellion and the Chartist and Young Ireland movements. These activities functioned to subvert the state despite (or within) the limitations of class-, religion-, and gender-based ideologies that strove to relegate women to the private sphere. I analyze works by authors such as Samuel Taylor Coleridge, William Wordsworth, Percy Shelley, Anna Doyle Wheeler, and Emily Bronte in order to show that literary representations of women's relationships are more contested than many scholars have allowed. For example, I examine Robert Southey's poems on Joan of Arc and Charlotte Corday and show that his representations of these women draw on conventionally "feminine" and "masculine" qualities. This ambiguity confers acceptability on the characters' political actions by appealing simultaneously to two types of readers: those who accept the dominant ideology regarding gender roles and those who are critical of it. I also examine the ways in which less canonical works like letters and popular songs functioned in a kind of dialogue with non-verbal signifying acts such as the exchange of nationalist symbols; this dialogue both reflected and facilitated women's political involvement. An important component of this dissertation is my proposal for a re-formulation of the "public/private" model. I present a less rigid scheme which better accounts for women's political participation. My work thus explores the connections between England and Ireland as well as those between history and literature, offering a new and significant contribution to current literary scholarship.