Neo-Victorian Novels of Spectacle: Mapping Gendered Spaces in the City

Abstract

The scope of the present PhD thesis is to analyse the process of spatialising identities in neo-Victorian literature. This study explores how space and gender converge in the formation of subjective identities using a multidisciplinary approach combining spatial theory and Feminist Geography with a socio-historical perspective on Victorian women. It focuses on female figures as urban strollers (the flâneuse, the philanthropist and the prostitute) and artists (the music-hall actress, the circus artist and the freak performer) and examines how these are represented in neo-Victorian novels and for what purposes. The four novels under analysis are Angela Carter’s Nights at the Circus (1984), Sarah Waters’s Tipping the Velvet (1998), Michel Faber’s The Crimson Petal and the White (2002), and Rosie Garland’s The Palace of Curiosities (2013). As novels of spectacle these works are sustained by the inherent power dynamics and power structures of different modes of watching and establish the perspective of the reader-as-observer. One of the main objectives is to find out how these authors engage with the neo-Victorian performative mode to explore the Victorian world of spectacle as well as the nineteenth-century culture of urban spectacle and for what purposes.