| dc.description | This study examines representations of the single woman as a figure simultaneously both present and absent, visible and invisible, during the period 1835 to 1875 when the spinster, a traditionally marginal creature, drew society's attention with her growing numbers. Her paradoxical presence and absence operates on three levels: family/society, text and body. The dissertation focuses on the spinster body and examines the ways in which mid-Victorian writers of fiction and social criticism figure that body as potentially powerful and often transgressive, using tropes of somatization, pathology and orality. These authors frequently isolate the hands as a synechdoche for celibate female power, and some writers express concern that female independence will result in masculine qualities. The spinster's potential autonomy thus provokes both anxiety about the single woman's disruptive power and excitement concerning new ways of thinking about women's role in society. Many of these writers therefore undertake a revision of femininity, arguing for a more comprehensive womanhood; the figure of the spinster is at the centre of this discussion. Chapter One analyzes the ways in which selected essays describe and categorize types of single women in order to identify and/or contain this diverse segment of society. At times, this classification functions as a means to redefine the conventionally unhappy marginal old maid as a vital force, an untapped resource of social power. In Chapter Two I examine the strategies the essayists employ to deal with the spinster's paradoxical position, their proffered solutions to the issue of 'surplus' women and the anxiety these apparently unnatural beings provoke as they challenge existing beliefs about women's function in society. I preface my discussion of these topics with a section on marriage, for it is the lack of marriage that constitutes the single woman as a social problem. Chapter Three examines issues of the single woman's power and the ways in which the essay writers figure the celibate female body as the repository of this power, either positively or negatively. This chapter concludes with a section on self-interest, a key quality for female independence. Chapter Four analyzes Bronte's topical treatment of the spinster as a social phenomenon in Shirley through her interrogation of gender boundaries and her exploration of illness as a strategy for visibility. In Chapter Five I discuss Villette, identifying Bronte's radical recognition of the celibate female body and her continued challenging of cultural gender distinctions. Chapter Six explores Wilkie Collins's The Woman in White and continues my analysis of the ways in which the androgynous single female utilizes her lack of visibility to her advantage while negotiating strategies for recognition as a valid visible entity. I conclude that the essay writers, Bronte and Collins interpret the spinster body, with its potential mutability, as a repository for energy and power, independence and strength, and that this dynamism anticipates the shift from faded Old Maid to vibrant New Woman. | en_US |
