Real work: the stage actress in the Bildungsromans of Geraldine Jewsbury and Louisa May Alcott

Restricted until 15 May 2013. This dissertation situates authors Louisa May Alcott and Geraldine Jewsbury in shared cultural movements and personal social networks, with particular focus on how the famous actor Charlotte Cushman affected their positive narratives of an actress-heroine in an age of self-conscious hero worship; gender performance and first wave feminisms are basic to the construction of a different kind of actress hero in these novels. I read the novels' representations of the actor among a range of cultural texts and discourses that take the actor's life, mind, and creative process as their subject--conversation circulating among writers and actors, scientists, and the public in novels, letters, journals, dramatic heroine character studies, performance reviews, lecture essays, journalism, and autobiography. To understand the novel as a form closely implicated with theater, I turn to theater studies and methods as well as literary studies. Closer attention to the development of the subgenre of the "theatrical" novel allows us to glimpse how nineteenth-century writers understood and helped to structure the personal and cultural value of the novel and the theater as artistic practice, communal metropolitan activity, and also as a window into the developing nineteenth-century science of mind.