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" 'A large and passionate humanity plays about her' : "
Murdoch, Christina
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Latin Dissertation
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| Record Number
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1099149
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| Doc. No
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TLets566434
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| Main Entry
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Murdoch, Christina
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| Title & Author
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'A large and passionate humanity plays about her' :\ Murdoch, Christina
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| College
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University of Glasgow
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| Date
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2012
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| student score
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2012
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| Degree
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Ph.D.
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| Abstract
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This thesis examines responses to the idea of a specific female moral agency in depictions of women’s philanthropic work by late nineteenthcentury female novelists. Focusing on depictions of romantic and sexual female experience in the late nineteenth-century campaign against poverty, I explore the role of gender and sexuality in the making of the female moral self in novels by Mrs. Humphry Ward, Iota, Margaret Harkness, Jane Hume Clapperton, Gertrude Dix. I demonstrate the manner in which altruism was linked to romantic love and sexual desire, and show how this idea surfaced in the love-plot in novels by late nineteenth-century women. I argue that the novel was regarded as a valuable instrument to further the process of social reform, owing to its perceived unique ability to arouse the reader’s sympathies; therefore, these novelists used the novel as a tool for constructing the altruistic self. Reading the novels alongside contemporary non-fiction discourse, I undertake an analysis of different romance plots and show how they relate to the debates of the social reform movement of the late nineteenth century. Finally, I suggest that by using the novel, and especially the romance plot, which was regarded as a feminine form of expression, these novelists are defending the idea of a feminine ethic, and a feminine conception of morality that was defined by emotion, feeling, and sympathy, as opposed to the more masculine scientific and sociological ideas behind the late nineteenth century social reform movement.
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| Subject
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PR English literature
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| Added Entry
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University of Glasgow
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