Counterproductions: Gender and authenticity in nineteenth-century narrative

Counterproductions examines the interplay between nineteenth-century concepts of aesthetic authenticity and attempts to define the relationship between women and the object world. The rise of the modern art market in the middle of the century was accompanied by a rapid increase in the production of forgeries, leading to a new field of expertise based on the detection of fakes. Both the production and investigation of forgeries were firmly established as the work of men. Despite its exclusion of women, the language of fakes—and of originality—was crucial to the construction of gender in the last two centuries. The resulting discourses relocated the problems emerging around the categories of the fake and the real to definitions of female ownership and object relations in narrative. The first part of the dissertation centers on the gendering of forgery and authenticity in the public art world, focusing on a selection of forgery detection manuals, forger autobiographies and handbooks, as well as a number of narratives of the fake, including Wilkie Collins's A Rogue's Life (1856), Nathaniel Hawthorne's The Marble Faun (1860), Oscar Wilde's “The Portrait of Mr. W. H.“ (1889), and selected stories by E. M. Forster and Henry James. The second section transports issues of forgery and authenticity from the public sphere of museums, archaeological sites, and the art world to the feminized domains of jewelry possession (Wilkie Collins's The Moonstone [1868] and Anthony Trollope's The Eustace Diamonds [1872]), personal adornment (Guy de Maupassant's “Les Bijoux” [1883] and “La Parure” [18841, and James's “Paste” [1899]), and theatrical performance (George Du Maurier's Trilby [1894]). While the thesis centers primarily on mid-to-late nineteenth-century narratives, it also explores how questions of gender and authenticity pervade later cinematic and literary discourses, which have been informed by these earlier works.