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A secondary sisterhood: Revisioning nineteenth-century homosocial bonds between women
Joughin, Frances E.
Joughin, Frances E.
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2014
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dissertation
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Abstract
This dissertation explores the ways in which revisionary fiction engages with understanding
that nineteenth-century gender constructs negatively impacted women’s homosocial bonds. It examines three different periods throughout the nineteenth-century to reflect upon the ways
in which revisionary texts engage with changing cultural ideologies throughout the period.
Beginning with Austen’s Pride and Prejudice (1813), and comparing this to the text and
television adaptation Death Comes to Pemberley (2011, 2013), Chapter one examines the ways in which James’s text interprets Austen’s potentially proto-feminist comment on female homosocialism. It draws upon the ways in which the ‘Jane Austen’ brand has potentially influenced James’s text, but also reflects on how the brand continues to move with changing
modern cultures through recent representations such as the internet comic, Manfeels Park. Chapter two takes a leap forward into the mid- to late-Victorian period and explores the ways in which lesbian potential may have also been affected by the secondary conditions of
women’s homosocial bonds. It examines how Sarah Waters’ neo-Victorian texts Fingersmith
and Tipping the Velvet write over the dearth of lesbian representation in canonical literature of the period. Chapter three examines representation of the New Woman in The Odd Women (1893), the film, Hysteria (2011) and The Crimson Petal and the White (2002). It compares
the ways in which her attempt to carve out a new kind of female homosocialism has a unique link to the present because of the New Woman’s ‘modern’ approach. It examines the
representation of her as an individual in revisionary texts, compared to her as part of a
collective in The Odd Women, and how this makes suggestions about the state of modern
feminism.
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University of Chester
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Thesis or dissertation
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en
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Images from http://www.manfeels-park.com/comic/lake-scene/ reproduced with permission