Men and women in motion: Mobility and fixity in eighteenth-century British literature (Samuel Pepys, Mary Wortley, Lady Montagu, Daniel Defoe, Jane Austen, Mary Wollstonecraft).

摘要

This dissertation, “Men and Women in Motion: Mobility and Fixity in Eighteenth-Century British Literature,” argues for a re-examination of widely accepted theories that stress a growing division by gender into a private/female sphere centered in the home, and a public/male sphere which encompassed trade, travel and other non-domestic interests. Though I assume that these binary, static figurations of public/private spheres can be helpful in any discussion of gendered mobility—especially in understanding how they are perceived and expressed in contemporary texts—I employ the dichotomous model primarily as a point of departure from which to explore a richly productive continuum of social and geographical spheres, through which members of both genders move.; The dissertation takes the eighteenth-century domestic circle both as its point of departure and as its ultimate destination. It examines the dialectical relationship between home and away from home, fixity and mobility, and tries to understand the ways in which the traditional gendered opposition of women at home and men away is, in fact, complicated and even undermined by the same social and political pressures it is meant to resist. Relying upon a broad range of literature including diaries, travel logs, novels and treatises by writers like Samuel Pepys, Lady Mary Wortley Montagu, Daniel Defoe, Jane Austen and Mary Wolstonecraft, I interrogate the processes by which the domestic sphere and its influence expand and extend beyond the four walls of home, creating complex relationships which are continuously renegotiated and explored throughout the long eighteenth century.; Chapter one discusses early modern concepts of home and domesticity in a historical and literary context, with an emphasis on gender roles. Chapter two examines gendered boundaries in the immediate environs of the home. Chapter three explores the official Coming Out into Society and the Grand Tour as instruments of socialization and mobility for both genders. Chapter four presents gender-transgressive travel. Chapter five examines the reconstruction of the “traditional” British domestic circle under the emphatically non-traditional circumstances of colonial settlement in the West Indies and Australia, where conventions of domesticity must be translated into new ethnic and social environments.