The form of fits: Proto-feminism in the British Realist Novel, 1798-1887.

摘要

"The Form of Fits" rereads the hysteria archive to reveal a narrative form that challenges our standard reading of gender politics in the nineteenth-century realist novels of Jane Austen, Charles Dickens, George Eliot, and Thomas Hardy. The project situates the nineteenth-century novel between two fundamental shifts in the novel's and medicine's history---at the end of the eighteenth century and beginning of the twentieth century---arguing that nineteenth-century hysteria discourse necessitated a new narrative form for proto-feminist writers concerned with women's mind-body connections. The causality-knowledge model fit proto-feminist writers' literary and political needs, allowing them to grapple with tension between medicine's prescriptions and their own theses on women's agency while also appearing to support conservative renderings of women's ontology. As the novels propose a more fluid mind-body connection than hysteria discourse, they engage with debates over women's labor, education, marriage, and sexuality. The formal aesthetic thus becomes a political aesthetic. By locating the beginning of the continuum with Austen, this project calls attention to the subtle ways in which Sarah Grand's "New Woman" politics manifested long before the discourse was available to the social imagination.