A secondary sisterhood: Revisioning nineteenth-century homosocial bonds between women

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.