"What a Poor, Passive Machine": The Psychosomatic Heroine from Richardson to Austen

<p>This project examines the psychosomatic heroine, a character type I observe emerging throughout the long eighteenth-century who responds to social, domestic, and personal pressures and stressors with mental and emotional preoccupations that lead to physiological symptoms. I demonstrate through close textual analysis that the psychosomatic heroine originates with Samuel Richardson’s Clarissa and continues as a trope that Frances Burney’s Cecilia and The Wanderer, Jane Austen’s Sense and Sensibility and Persuasion, and Geraldine Jewsbury’s The Half Sisters interrogate and transform. Like other heroine types, the psychosomatic heroine reveals sociocultural discourses that speak to what it means to be a woman in the long eighteenth-century. My project identifies, however, that unlike other heroine types, the psychosomatic heroine redefines ideas of women’s work in the eighteenth century. Rather than domestic work, maternal work, or professional work, the psychosomatic heroine demonstrates that the most important work a woman does is on and for herself: she must find a way to manage her mind-body reactions in order to present the necessary image that allows her to navigate her world.</p>

Name thesis:degree_name

PhD

Level thesis:degree_level

One-year Embargo

Discipline thesis:degree_discipline

English

Year dc:date.available

2017

Author dc:creator

• Tavela, Sara Elizabeth

Contributors dc:contributor

• Laura Engel
• Anna Gibson
• Marilyn Francus
• Susan Howard

• Character Types
• Mind-Body
• Performance
• The Novel
• Work

Language dc:language

English

Repository record dc:identifier

https://dsc.duq.edu/etd/149

OAI identifier oai:identifier

oai:dsc.duq.edu:etd-1148