The counter-narratives of the (neo-)sensational half-sisters, sapphics, and mothers in Wilkie Collins’s The Woman in White (1860) and Sarah Waters’s Fingersmith (2002): subversions of fabricated intersectional identities of (neo-)Victorian womanhood through re-obtaining female narrative power
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2023-12-18
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en
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This thesis argues that Collins’s The Woman in White (1860) and Waters’s Fingersmith (2002) function as Plummer’s radical and revolutionary counter-narratives, since the female protagonists subvert the narrative constructedness and performativity of their fabricated identities of (neo-)Victorian womanhood within the domesticity of compulsory heterosexual marriages through the conventions of the (neo-)sensation genre. By combining the theoretical frameworks of Kimberlé Crenshaw’s intersectionality, Judith Butler’s gender performativity, Ken Plummer’s counter-narratives with references to Hanna Meretoja, and the essays of Tara MacDonald, Laurence Talairach-Vielmas, and Richard Nemesvari from Andrew Mangham’s The Cambridge Companion to Sensation Fiction (2013), this literary research postulates that Anne, Laura, and Marian in The Woman in White and Susan, Maud and Mrs. Sucksby in Fingersmith re-obtain their narrative power in order to provide testimonial accounts for women’s structural marginalizations within the institutions of law on the intersectional axes of their feminine gender, illegitimacy, lower-class status, and/or queerness. By analyzing The Woman in White and Fingersmith through an intersectional-feminist lens, this thesis can prompt critical reflection on women’s stereotyped identities and compound marginalizations within contemporary heteronormative patriarchies, since their varying degrees of oppression are historically accounted for by the privileged parameters of maleness, legitimacy, an upper-class status, and/or heterosexuality. The radical and revolutionary counter-narratives of Susan and Maud in Fingersmith that advocate female queerness provides modern readers with a more inclusive representation of the (neo-)Victorian society in which marginalized homosexual women are favourably centralized. The radical and revolutionary counter-narratives of Anne and Laura, however, promote the rights of illegitimate women and offer readers an alternative view of the Victorian era centred on their compound oppressions.
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