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

这项提案将探讨如何在19世纪的女性在中年跨越阶级和种族划分的定义。它将通过检查中年妇女的医学社会观念与女作家对其衰老身体的看法来填补学术界的一个重大空白。伊莱恩·肖瓦尔特的《女性疾病》（1987）和卡罗尔·史密斯-罗森伯格的《无序行为》（1985）是19世纪性别研究领域的基础性文本，它们认为医学和文学话语将患病的年轻女性同质化为女性气质的典范。然而，这些文本忽略了女性在不再年轻时如何行使女性霸权。学术界已经开始考虑中年妇女，但尚未探讨她如何与19世纪占主导地位的女性互动。凯·希思（Kay Heath）在《书中的衰老》（Aging by the Book，2009年）中提出，“无性服务”范式将中年女性定义为“一种要求[d] [女性]抛开自身吸引力的工作”（第80页）。然而，在19世纪的文学作品中，中年妇女继续以情感和身体上脆弱的女性残疾人为基础进行性行为。我的论文的中心任务将是研究如何后生育妇女使用疾病来定义年龄和女性气质。具体来说，我将解开“无性服务”的范式作为一个适当的解释中年女性在英国小说，期刊文化和生活写作认为，中年妇女使用疾病的叙述，挑战十九世纪的性别，阶级和种族的限制。

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.