Type
Text
Type
Thesis
Advisor
Tondre, Michael | Thompson, Roger.
Date
2017-05-01
Keywords
Literature
Department
Department of English
Language
en_US
Source
This work is sponsored by the Stony Brook University Graduate School in compliance with the requirements for completion of degree.
Identifier
http://hdl.handle.net/11401/77524
Publisher
The Graduate School, Stony Brook University: Stony Brook, NY.
Format
application/pdf
Abstract
“Tennyson’s Adulteress and Doyle’s Villain: Non-Normative Victorian Women and Narrative Failure†explores Guinevere from Alfred Lord Tennyson’s Idylls of the King and Irene Adler from Sir Arthur Conan Doyle’s “A Scandal in Bohemia.†This paper examines how Guinevere and Adler are represented as “fully human†characters that embody masculine traits and exist in opposition to two-dimensional Victorian feminine ideals; it focuses the actions of the characters and their relationships with their respective male protagonists, Arthur and Holmes. Arthur and Holmes are “perfect†embodiments of Victorian masculine norms that are unable to understand Guinevere and Adler as they do not subscribe in turn to Victorian feminine norms; the ensuing misrecognition leads to the conflicts in their texts: the fall of Camelot and Holmes’ singular failure to solve a crime. It is the conflict between the perfection of the male characters and the humanity of the female characters that reveals Tennyson’s and Doyle’s commentary about gender norms in the Victorian era. By following Guinevere and Adler, we see that Tennyson and Doyle show us that refusing to understand women as more than domestic beings leads to catastrophic consequences. | 46 pages
Recommended Citation
Sukhu, Julia Shivani, "Tennyson’s Adulteress and Doyle’s Villain: Non-Normative Victorian Women and Narrative Failure | Tennyson’s Adulteress and Doyle’s Villain: Non-Normative Victorian Women and Narrative Failure" (2017). Stony Brook Theses and Dissertations Collection, 2006-2020 (closed to submissions). 3328.
https://commons.library.stonybrook.edu/stony-brook-theses-and-dissertations-collection/3328