Dissertations / Theses on the topic 'Mary Elizabeth Braddon'

Les romans à sensation écrits par Mary Elizabeth Braddon (1835-1915) au début des années 1860, ont particulièrement troublé critiques et lectorat. Cette étude vise à révéler la présence d'une véritable stratégie narrative, fondée sur le flou, c'est-à-dire le secret, le mystère, l'incertitude et l'ambiguïté dans Lady Audley's Secret, Aurora Floyd, John Marchmont's Legacy, Eleanor's Victory et The Doctor's Wife. Les intrigues sensationnalistes se déroulent ainsi dans des lieux étranges, où les perceptions temporelles et spatiales semblent complètement bouleversées. Les personnages sont confrontés à de profonds problèmes identitaires, cachant leur véritable nature sous des mensonges et des faux-semblants. Mais loin de perdre le lecteur dans un dédale d'invraisemblances, cette utilisation récurrente de l'incertain est au cœur d'une dynamique narrative : le « sensation novel », parfaite illustration du roman-feuilleton, est un récit herméneutique qui joue avec le lecteur. C'est aussi un genre, qui, en subvertissant les frontières entre les catégories littéraires, provoqua des réactions extrêmes de la part des critiques de l'époque, profondément choqués par cette fiction populaire qui s'adressait avant tout aux sensations physiques de son lectorat. Le but ultime du roman à sensation est de progresser, par le biais d'un lent et chaotique processus de révélation, vers une certaine clarté, fragile et relative. Le flou braddonnien, sous toutes ses formes, deviendrait alors un moyen de mettre en lumière les angoisses d'une époque en proie au doute et à l'incertitude, en matière de mariage, d'identité et de sexualité
The sensation novels written by Mary Elizabeth Braddon (1835-1915) in the early 1860s were troublesome for literary critics and readers alike. The present study seeks to reveal how in five of M. E. Braddon's novels, Lady Audley's Secret, Aurora Floyd, John Marchmont's Legacy, Eleanor's Victory and The Doctor's Wife, the author pursued a veritable strategy of narrative blurring through an astute use of vagueness, secrecy, mystery, uncertainty and ambiguity. The setting in which the novels' plots unravel - strange dwellings where temporal and spatial perceptions are drastically skewed - mirror the psychological situation of their characters, who face profound identity crises, hiding their real selves behind a veil of lies and pretence. Yet, far from losing the reader in a labyrinth of incongruities, the recurrent use of uncertainty constitutes the very dynamic of the sensation narrative, toying hermeneutically with its readers, as is best illustrated in the serial form of the novel. It is also a genre, which blurred the frontiers between literary categories, often triggering extreme reactions from Victorian literary critics who were utterly shocked by a popular form of fiction that appealed so strongly to the reader's physical sensations. The ultimate goal of the sensation novel was to move toward a fragile and uncertain clarity, through a slow and chaotic process of revelation. Paradoxically, the blurring strategy of Braddon's novels ultimately served to shed light on the anxieties of an era labouring under the burden of doubt and uncertainty concerning the issues of marriage, sexuality and personal identity

Why do we read what we read? Janice Radway examines works that were not popular in an author's time period, but now are affecting the construction of the canon. In her own words, Radway seeks to "establish [popular literature] as something other than a watered-down version of a more authentic high culture [and] to present the middlebrow positively as a culture with its own particular substance and intellectual coherence" (208). Mary Elizabeth Braddon's novels were considered "middlebrow" and were very popular in Victorian England. Along with this facet, her heroines were considered controversial because they were not portrayed as what would be labeled a "proper female" in Victorian society. The popularity of her novels, her heroines, along with facets of her personal life, keep her from being recognized as one of the foremost authors in the Victorian period.

In recent decades, there has been an upsurge in critical attention on the life and oeuvre of Mary Elizabeth Braddon. Most of the critical output, however, relates to Braddon’s sensation novels Lady Audley’s Secret (1861) and Aurora Floyd (1862) (with a minority on her domestic novels and plays), and focuses on Braddon’s representation of a woman’s position in nineteenth-century society. This thesis is therefore the first extended piece to explore her short fiction – which includes short stories, edited collections and novellas – in detail and so contributes significantly to our understanding of Braddon’s life and oeuvre. The thesis begins with an exploration of Braddon’s multiple selves and how she (re)constructs her image throughout her life, and proceeds by an examination of short fiction’s critical position in both contemporary and modern discourse. Following this each chapter is dedicated to a separate subgenre of her short fiction – that of theatrical, supernatural, crime, domestic and children’s literature – and how each of these literary subgenres is another constructed performance, like her ‘multiple selves’. All of these chapters position Braddon and her writing within her contemporary Victorian context, whilst also examining how her contributions developed each of the subgenres considered. This is achieved by a comparison of Braddon’s short fiction with that of other authors of the period, thus our understanding of how Braddon impacted on the larger literary marketplace and influenced other writers will be examined. Furthermore, her short stories will be positioned in relation to her oeuvre as a whole, demonstrating that she did not consider the short story as inferior to the novel, which illuminates our knowledge of the hitherto marginalised genre of the Victorian short story.

Mary Elizabeth Braddon's popular novels surged into the literary marketplace following her bestseller Lady Audley's Secret (1862). One reason for this was the burgeoning availability of miscellany journals after the repeal of the 'taxes on knowledge'. Fresh avenues to the reading public were unlocked for aspiring authors, and Braddon's novels were offered increasingly prominent positions for serialisation. Contemporary critics' inflated responses reflect the cultural anxiety that this phenomenon evoked - Braddon's sensation fiction was charged as both cause and effect of a 'negative' development in reading practices. This thesis suggests an alternative view of Braddon's cultural significance. Braddon's novels scrutinised the fast-paced industrial society that impacted her readers' lives and value systems. She forged an affinity with readers through her engagement with subjects of popular interest. Her serialisation history rejects conventional nineteenth-century formulations of artistic value in which the literary hierarchy reflects the values of the social hegemony. Two of the most prominent journals that carried her fiction, Temple Bar and Belgravia, actively challenge this tenet. Yet they also reveal how the interdependence between serialised fiction and framing material could both aid, and hinder, an author's wider ambition. Braddon's serialisations demonstrate how her artistic and professional development responded to fluctuating evaluations of quality in art. Through them, we can trace the increasing significance of her readerships, not just as conveyers of commercial success, but also as the determiners of quality in popular fiction. As Braddon's reading public continued to develop, so too did the vehicles that carried her fiction. This resulted in a pioneering role in the emerging weekly newspaper syndicates that offered broad new readerships. Sensation in fiction became legitimate creative expression in the publications that carried Braddon's fiction to its diverse primary readerships. Her popular novels reflect these readers' desire to participate in an extensive range of social and political debates. Ultimately Braddon's artistic and professional progress responds to her readers' evolving cultural perceptions, representing the cause and effect of continuous ideological transformation in popular fiction.

Examining periodicals and novels from 1847 to 1886, I analyze the feminine fake to argue that individuals were beginning during this period to grapple with the discomforting idea that identity, especially gender, might be a social construct. Previously, scholars have contended that this ideological shift did not occur until the 1890s. I apply the term "feminine fake" to the tools that women use to falsify their identities and to the women who counterfeit their identities. Equally, I consider the fake as a theatrical moment of falsifying one's identity. In my first chapter, I set up my theoretical framework, which draws from Laqueur's writings on the cultural history of sex and gender, Poovey's work on the "uneven development" of gender ideology, and Baudrillard and Eco's respective concepts of the simulacra and the hyperreal. Chapter II examines issues of The Englishwoman's Domestic Magazine and La Mode illustrée to analyze the feminine fake during the period surrounding the Franco-Prussian War. Using Fraser, Green, and Johnston's writing on the periodical alongside Hiner's theories of the ideological work of the accessory, I argue that the women's magazine, particularly via the "rhetoric of the fake" therein, fashion, and the accessory were crucial sites for the construction of gender at the time. Chapter III looks at performance and the feminine fake in Vanity Fair and La Curée. I re-evaluate Voskuil's theories of "acting naturally" to analyze the charades and tableaux vivants within the novels and illustrate how these performances metaphorically function as society's failed efforts to render feminine identities legible. In Chapter IV, I analyze Lady Audley's Secret and L'Eve future, situating Lady Audley and the android as hyperfeminine, or marked by an identificatory excess rendering them more feminine than any real woman. The threat they pose to legible feminine and human identity drives the need to control their unmanageable identities: at the ends of the novels, the women, along with what I characterize as their inhuman fakery, are irreversibly contained.
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abstract: John Herdman provides a brief explanation for neglecting the Victorian sensational double in his work The Double in Nineteenth-Century Fiction, "Nor have I ventured into the vast hinterland of Victorian popular fiction in which doubles roam in abundance, as these are invariably derivative in origin and break no distinctive new territory of their own" (xi). To be sure the popular fiction of the Victorian Era would not produce such penetrating and resonate doubles found in the continental, and even American, literature of the same period until the works of Scottish writers James Hogg and later Robert Louis Stevenson; and while popular English writers have been rightly accused of "exploit[ing] it [the double] for sensational effects," (Herdman 19) the indictment of possessing "no distinctive new territory of their own" is hardly adequate. In particular, two immensely popular works of fiction in the 1860's, Wilkie Collins' The Woman in White (1860) and Mary Elizabeth Braddon's Lady Audley's Secret (1862), employ the convention of the double for a simultaneous sensational and sociological effect. However, the sociological influence of the double in these two texts is not achieved alone: the "guise of lunacy" deployed as a cover-up for criminality acts symbiotically with the sensational double. The double motif provides female characters within these works the opportunity to manipulate the "guise of lunacy" to transgress patriarchal boundaries cemented within the socio-economic hierarchy as well as within other patriarchal institutions: marriage and the sanatorium. Overall this presentation formulates "new distinctive territory" in the land of the Victorian sensational double through the works of Collins and Braddon.
Dissertation/Thesis
M.A. English 2012

碩士
國立中山大學
外國語文學系研究所
107
The sensation novel is a narrative genre flourishing in the Victorian period, with leading authors such as Wilkie Collins, Mary Elizabeth Braddon and Ellen Wood. As a subgenre of Gothic literature, the sensation novel involves themes such as insanity, inheritance, murder and identity issues. Following Gothic tradition, some sensation novels are situated in an upper class setting or in the respectable middle class domestic setting with an atmosphere found in thrillers. Sensation novels oftentimes deal with crime and mystery; to the moralists such as John Ruskin and Dean Mansel, sensation novels appeal to the words and the dark side of the human soul. The purpose of this thesis is to discuss the discrepancy between appearance and reality, which intertwine social expectation and transgression of morality that threaten social order. This thesis employs Emile Durkheim’s theory of deviance and his understanding of social structure and social morality in order to analyze the theme of appearance and reality as represented in the two sensation novels The Woman in White (1860) by Wilkie Collins and Lady Audley’s Secret (1862) by Mary Elizabeth Braddon. These two novels not only represent the anxieties of the Victorian era but also the discrepancies between social norms and the darker side of society.