The Midlife Woman in Nineteenth-Century Literature, Periodical Culture, and Medical Discourse.

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This proposal will explore how nineteenth-century femininity was defined at midlife across class and racial divides. It will fill a major gap in scholarship by examining medico-social perceptions of middle-aged women with women writers' perceptions of their ageing bodies. Elaine Showalter's The Female Malady (1987) and Carroll Smith-Rosenberg's Disorderly Conduct (1985) are foundational texts in the field of nineteenth-century gender studies and argue that medical and literary discourses homogenised sick young women as paragons of femininity. However, these texts ignore how women exercised hegemonic femininity when they were no longer young. Scholarship has begun to consider the middle-aged woman but has not yet explored how she interacts with dominant nineteenth-century femininities. Kay Heath in Aging by the Book (2009) argues a 'sexless service' paradigm defined midlife womanhood as 'a job that require[d] [women] to put aside their own attractions' (p. 80). Nineteenth-century literature, however, contains middle-aged women who continue to exercise a sexuality based on the emotionally and physically fragile female invalid. My thesis's central task will be to examine how post-reproductive women use sickness to define age and femininity. Specifically, I will unpick the 'sexless service' paradigm as an appropriate explanation of midlife femininity in British novels, periodical culture, and life writing to argue that middle-aged women use narratives of sickness to challenge nineteenth-century restrictions of gender, class, and race.