عنوان

Fin de siècle horrors :

Number

TLets792210

Title Proper

Fin de siècle horrors :

General Material Designation

[Thesis]

First Statement of Responsibility

Le Fevre, Victoria Frances Louise

Title Proper by Another Author

women, streetwalking, spectacle and contagion in london slum narratives, 1880-1900

Name of Publisher, Distributor, etc.

Royal Holloway, University of London

Date of Publication, Distribution, etc.

2014

Dissertation or thesis details and type of degree

Ph.D.

Body granting the degree

Royal Holloway, University of London

Text preceding or following the note

2014

Text of Note

I aim to make an important contribution to academic discussion of the modes of women's presence in the literatures of modernity, by approaching documentary texts and fictions describing impoverished women, from the perspective of consumption and phantasmagoric cultures. Cultural historians have tended to debate representations of the consuming practices of socially privileged women in the city's leisure spaces. My project draws on different sets of material, engaging with cultural and historical approaches, to examine elite conceptualizations of impoverished women's engagement with urban aesthetics. Opening up critical space through an emphasis on the malleability of images of reversion in late-Victorian social discourse, my thesis reveals how female exposure to the city's phantasmagoria and subjection to the touch of the working-class male, were commonly represented in terms of contamination precipitating moral and organic corruption. In exploring such formulations, I outline intersections between tropes of feminine monstrosity - encoding compatible social, sexual and racial meanings - discernible in fin-de-siècle slum fictions and sociological reports, and those present in works of French naturalism, in graphic art, and in gothic adventure literatures. By attending to a dialectic of dazzling surface and putrid depths, I trace the positioning of the working-class 'girl' and the marital-maternal body in layers of time, including evolutionary time, and their implication in the circulation of disease and in the flow of foul anatomical matter. My work, then, develops insights around female mobility and the prostitute as urban figure, and contributes to a number of debates in the scholarship of modernity.

factory girl

gothic

New Woman

phantasmagoria

Le Fevre, Victoria Frances Louise

Royal Holloway, University of London

Electronic name

p

[Thesis]

276903

a

Y