Author Type

Graduate Student

Date of Award

2006

Document Type

Thesis

Publication Status

Version of Record

Submission Date

October 2026

Thesis/Dissertation Advisor [Chair]

Low, Jennifer A.

Abstract

Feminist literary critics often praise Mary Elizabeth Braddon's sensation novels for undermining Victorian gender ideologies, and yet by failing to scrutinize aspects of maternity and female sexuality, they overlook some of her work's most subversive potential. In Aurora Floyd, for instance, Braddon deploys the trope of the missing mother to deconstruct the Victorian maternal ideal of a pure, passive angel in the house. Her text proposes a notion of motherhood, which is more concerned with internal goodness and vitality, rather than with the Victorian era's emphasis on external proprieties and socially constructed notions of femininity. Braddon's Aurora is a motherless girl who develops into a strong, sexually assertive and, thus, unfeminine woman by Victorian standards. In positioning Aurora as the narrative's heroine, Braddon promotes female dominance and male masochism as alternative gender relations to the traditional domestic economy of male mastery and female submission.

Extent

88 p.

Comments

Dorothy F. Schmidt College of Arts and Letters|Thesis (M.A.)--Florida Atlantic University, 2006.|FAU Electronic Theses and Dissertations Collection|Dorothy F. Schmidt College of Arts and Letters

Identifier

FA00000921

Format

pdf

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