Stroud, Charlotte (2013) Body matters: female subjectivity and the material body in the neo-Victorian novels 'Nights at the circus', 'Tipping the velvet' and 'Fingersmith'. (MA(R) thesis), Kingston University, .

Abstract

The neo-Victorian novel has received increasing critical attention over the past decade for the way in which it engages with the politics of history and the act of remembering the past. What has received little consideration with regards to this genre is its capacity to address contemporary concerns. This thesis regards the neo-Victorian novel as a contemporary, rather than a historical novel. By focusing on the way in which the Victorian setting provides a landscape for thinking through contemporary critical debates, I will be looking at the ways in which this genre engages with the present. More specifically, I will argue that in Angela Carter's Nights at the Circus and Sarah Waters' Tipping the Velvet and Fingersmith the Victorian setting is employed as a way of playing out the on-going feminist debate surrounding the materiality of the body. Indelibly linked to our conception of sexuality and the body, the Victorian era provides a rich context for an interrogation of what it means to have a female body. While both Carter and Waters play with and subvert the ambiguous and contradictory Victorian representations of the body their approaches are very different, as this thesis demonstrates. Whereas Carter fantastically explodes the oppressive Victorian metaphors that have dispossessed women of their bodies, Waters takes a more realist approach and subverts these representations from within traditional Victorian literary conventions. Ultimately, this thesis will demonstrate that, despite their difference in tone and style, the neo-Victorian novels by Carter and Waters use the Victorian setting to envision an embodied female subjectivity.

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