Using feminist and post-feminist theories of literature and culture, I explore in this dissertation the ways in which Pierre de Coubertin, the founder of the modern Olympic movement, and the novelist ...Émile Zola attempted to remasculinize their country in the wake of the fin-de-siècle crisis in French masculinity. Although the narrative of Coubertin's Olympic movement differs significantly from the narrative of his fictionalized autobiography, Le Roman d'un rallié, the two works nevertheless express a similar, fundamental desire to recapture the resemblance of a more traditional, more phallic French masculinity. And this same desire is also present in two of Zola's Rougon-Macquart novels: La Faute de l'Abbé Mouret and Nana. What unites these two writers in these four works, I argue, is the realization that the ostensibly monolithic nature of French masculinity begins to fragment and deteriorate precisely when masculinity becomes the subject of public analysis. It is the very prominence and visibility of masculine failure that both writers work to overcome. In these four works, I observe a common struggle to retrieve the undivided, seamless construction of French masculinity—however illusory or symbolic—that was lost when the events following 1870 turned the public's eye toward the deficiencies of France's men. But to recover this promise of phallic power, effective and sometimes elaborate strategies of obfuscation are required; to regain a position of conventional masculine authority, Coubertin and Zola must first make effeminized men less noticeable, less susceptible to criticism and examination. They must return the assumption of universality to French masculine identity. In my readings of Nana, La Faute de l'abbé Mouret, Le Roman d'un rallié, and the turn-of-the-century Olympic movement, I argue that Coubertin's and Zola's otherwise divergent social philosophies intersect in their idealization of the masculine and in their common desire to veil and condemn those manifestations of genuine masculinity that do not conform to this idealization. Their common goal, in other words, is to hide what they cannot change. Both writers aspire to reestablish for men the advantage that comes from inhabiting a socially unmarked body whose ordinariness and normativity shield it from analysis, surveillance, regulation, and condemnation.
This dissertation examines fictional representations of drugs and addiction in France between 1870 and 1914. Specifically, it attempts to elucidate the cultural and literary influences working on and ...through narratives of addiction concerning morphine and ether, two substances with known medical applications whose recreational use increases during the era. The literary corpus surrounding these drugs includes numerous popular texts as well as the fiction of a major decadent author and journalist, Jean Lorrain. Arising from naturalist and decadent literary trends and informed by contemporary discourses in medicine and science, these texts help complete the picture of the literary and cultural imaginary of the fin de siècle and Belle Epoque. As I argue, morphine, ether, and the associated problem of addiction serve as ideal narrative vehicles for the anxieties of an era of scientific progress and pessimism that begins with the French defeat in the Franco-Prussian War and ends with the outbreak of World War I. In describing the influence of drugs on individuals and society, these stories consistently invoke scientifically-based notions of influence related to contagion, heredity, and degeneration, all of which subtend a common vision of France as a nation in decline. I attempt to show how the addiction narrative of this period conveys a broader narrative of societal illness and deterioration according to both naturalist and decadent ideologies. These texts illuminate the complex affiliations of science and literature as well as the wider repercussions of nineteenth-century ideas of contagion. The latter inform a modern notion of subjectivity apparent not only in the naturalist and decadent fiction of the era, but also in the surrealist endeavors that would inherit from them.
Critical studies of Zola's Rougon-Macquart novels, while explicating in detail the characterological functions of the women characters, including Gervaise in L'Assommoir and la Maheude in Germinal, ...have neglected the thematic functions of matriarchy in those texts as in the cycle as a whole. The decline of the matriarch is a prominent component of Zola's naturalistic scheme for the Rougon-Macquart , manifests not only in the increasing corruption of the progeny across the cycle, but primarily in the monographic depictions of the matriarchs themselves. Working-class mothers in particular embody the conflictual tensions of gender inequities and socio-economic deprivations that lead them to produce child-workers to support the family, typically becoming ever more negligent, on the model of Gervaise. Specifically in Germinal, Zola's largely negative conception of the fictive matriarch begins to change. This shift is sustained in subsequent texts of the cycle: the matriarch still suffers almost total loss (of husband, children, position), but she attains a new insight into the socio-economic system that so devours her offspring, and a new lucidity about her position within it.
Rhetorically Speaking: English Actresses Writing “Woman” examines the complexity of actresses' ideas as found in their writing, particularly in how they define “woman” on the page at the end of the ...nineteenth and beginning of the twentieth centuries. For actresses as writers, the fluidity and possibilities of the definition “woman” was heavily influenced by the intersection of two movements in England: the height of the women's suffrage movement and the increasing popularity and acceptance of New Drama, a genre that based its newness partly on the rewriting and restaging of women. This dissertation considers the actresses as writers on the page rather than artists on the stage, which clarifies not actresses' performance of a text but instead actresses' performances in a text as women writers and presenters of their own brand of feminism, their own definitions of “woman”. Situating this idea of “performance in” in a context made up of rhetorical theory, feminist criticism, and theatre history allows an exploration of the actress as an artist who negotiated rhetorical conventions and different genres to purvey a definition of “woman.” Specific genres also influence how “woman” is communicated, including the giving of advice to other theatre hopefuls (Chapter II), the telling of life stories (Chapter III), the promotion of their politics through organizations such as the Actresses' Franchise League (Chapter IV), and the test of “woman” in the context of war work (Chapter V). It is in the actresses' words that the exploration of “woman” takes place most actively.
In his Rougon-Macquart, Emile Zola was the first nineteenth-century French author to offer a broad and profound literary portrayal of working-class women. Using a socio-linguistic theoretical ...approach, this dissertation analyzes Zola's innovations in using literary devices to amplify authentic female working-class voices, and identifies how this discourse differs from male discourse in Le Ventre de Paris, L'Assommoir, Au Bonheur des dames and Germinal. Chapter I discusses the general orality of Zola's text, achieved by punctuation, intonation, phrasing, and the inspired use of popular language and style indirect libre. Zola's creative use of these literary techniques heightens the reader's appreciation for and knowledge of the discourse habits and speech patterns of working-class women. Chapter II applies Mikhail Bakhtin's concepts of polyphonic discourse and the polyphonic heroine to the discourse of Lisa Quenu, Denise Baudu and la Maheude. Bakhtin's definition of the polyphonic novel revolves around theories of the hero(ine), dominant idea and word. Polyphonic heroines speak with full-valued voices and embrace dominant philosophies which motivate their actions. Chapters III and IV analyze the dynamics, logistics and importance of working-class female group discourse. This discourse influences the unfolding of events in many novels, and supersedes male group discourse in effectiveness and importance. Chapter III analyzes organized group discourse which takes the form of a classical Greek Chorus and of rumors. Chapter IV treats unorganized group discourse in a delineated milieu and in a crowd or mob. Being marginalized from the male power and authority hierarchy, women create their own communication systems and find strength and legitimacy in uniting their voices. Discourse between working-class women is more prevalent than between men or women and men. Furthermore, women are more often portrayed gathering in groups and working than are men. Zola was quite forward-looking in his serious depiction of working-class women in the Rougon-Macquart. He uses various literary devices to let these women speak through him, resisting the temptation to give them a voice in order to claim it as his own. This portrayal supports Zola's stated goal to realistically depict life at all levels of society during the Second Empire.
Controversies surround Irish poet and dramatist Oscar Wilde's role in freeing Alfred Dreyfus. Wilde was known as a great talker and scholar. He allegedly gave information that resulted in the suicide ...of Colonel Henry and the results of Dreyfus' second court martial. Journalist Chris Healy wrote a series of articles about Wilde's scheme and named Carlos Blacker as a witness. Moreover, Wilde was suspected of perfidy with Greek scholar W.R. Paton.
Nineteenth-century European Realist and Naturalist fiction celebrated the growing cultural authority of scientific reasoning over religious doctrine. This dissertation analyzes the polemic between ...scientific and religious discourses as it relates to the period's vision of gender in works by Emile Zola. The advocates of science and religion in the nineteenth century framed their polemic by emphasizing the absence of common ground between them; similarly, the period defined male and female as being entirely different from each other. In novels which interpret a central female character, Zola uses the assumption of total difference between the sexes as a way to discuss discursive difference. Striving to promote scientific discourse as true and spirituality as false, these narratives associate science with male superiority and religion with female inferiority. Literary scholars have intensively studied the influence of scientific discourse--especially medical discourse--upon the Realist novel's form and ideological content. Others have also discussed the novelist's definition of sexual roles.While agreeing with Bakhtin that the Realist novel contains and represents competing ideological forces, these scholars have largely confined their analyses to the importation of extradiegetic discourses into fictional diegeses, and have neglected to analyze the interactions between religious and scientific discourses embedded within the diegesis, as well as the science-versus-religion polemic's links to sexual identity. Drawing upon feminist and psychoanalytical scholarship, I examine Zola's use of nineteenth-century medical theories about women in developing female characters whose actions and psychological makeup bear out science's truth and woman's inherent pathology. Narratological analysis of primary texts Madeleine Ferat, La Conquete de Plassans, Une Page d'amour and Lourdes, as well as several other related works, concludes that: (1) female characterization provides discursive and generic binary oppositions with a pathologized forum for their arguments; (2) such characterization is regulated by the work's ideologized textuality, whether medical or religious; (3) the discourses join forces in legitimizing gender inequality, while concealing their interdependence through manipulations of narrative voice, temporal sequencing, and rhetorical insistence upon their differences; (4) Zola's use of the science-versus-religion polemic as a means to define human identity anticipates many of Freud's formulations on the influence of gender difference upon psychological development.
Scholarly studies on Mercedes Cabello have generally examined her naturalism from the perspective of aesthetic valuation, and view her novels as yet another example of clumsy and poor narrative ...technique. My research attempts to characterize her naturalism by comparing it to the European model, and to elucidate critical parameters that spring from Mercedes Cabello's historical reality and her position as a woman writer in a traditional society. This study revises the established view of Mercedes Cabello's naturalism by contrasting it with Emile Zola's, thus establishing points of contact, divergences, clarifying new approaches, and raising questions regarding the function of literature with respect to the role of the novelist. Mercedes Cabello's naturalism can be described as an eclectic approach to the French model. Whereas in Zola's novels characters are subject to deterministic factors rooted in concrete, material, and "scientific" realities, the Peruvian author interprets all actions according to Catholic conceptions of marked romantic overtones. In this framework, she presents an ahistorical and essentialist vision of the world, which serves to reconcile her repudiation of a falsified Peruvian society, and her longing to rescue the values of a traditional aristocratic past. Therefore, she depicts an idealization of goodness with the view of serving a corrective and moral purpose. The novel Blanca Sol, which explores the life of pretense and vanity of the eponymous protagonist, is a prime example of her eclectic attitude toward naturalism. A characterization of her "spiritual naturalism" may be drawn by comparing Blanca Sol to La Curee by Zola--a novel of similar narrative characteristics (plot, themes, characters). Three themes (marriage for money, fashion, and the bourgeoisie) in these two novels serve to link the characteristics of a venal society with the literary intentions of the authors. The portrayal of marriage as a business transaction, reveals that Blanca Sol's marriage is just a form of prostitution sanctioned by society, and for Renee in La Curee the degree of perversion in which she is immersed. The superficiality of fashion is a mirror of the prevalent spiritual crisis, and the bourgeoisie's materialistic and frivolous lifestyle becomes a target of harsh reproof.
This project explores the affirmative visions of the modern city that distinguish three novels of the 1930s: Henry Roth's Call It Sleep (1934), James T. Farrell's Studs Lonigan Trilogy (1935), and ...Younghill Kang's East Goes West: The Making of an Oriental Yankee (1937). I argue that each of them asserts the diversity of the modern American city as the condition for the kind of affective community John Dewey discerned as central to democracy. In his book The Public and Its Problems (1927), Dewey raised one of the crucial concerns Americans faced at the turn of the century: the future of democracy in a society increasingly marked by uncertainty and dislocation. Although Dewey maintained the feasibility of democracy, he did not identify the processes that would transform the impersonal modes of modern life into the humanizing local communities he associated with it. In their novels Roth, Farrell, and Kang pick up where Dewey left off by demonstrating modernity's potential for the increased understanding of self and others conducive to modern communion. My dissertation, then, centers on three related phenomena: modernity, immigration, and the city, particularly in their American manifestations at the beginning of the twentieth century. I read each novel within a cluster of other contemporary texts that address its key concerns. These texts vary from the Chicago school of sociology's writings to popular songs, from the philosophical essays of the American pragmatists to pamphlets on educating industrial workers. Yet, I argue, the novelists' analyses of the relationship between modernity, immigration, and the city yielded an insight missing from then current attempts to theorize their connections. Three such attempts figure prominently in my project: American urban literature, especially through the writings of Walt Whitman; the sociological essays of Georg Simmel and the Chicago urban sociologists; and two major modernist texts of the 1920s: T. S. Eliot's The Waste Land and James Joyce's Ulysses . Each chapter considers one novel's engagement with these texts in order to tease out the writer's portrayal of the modern city's potential for democratic communion.
