VI2007: Victorian Secrets

Tentative Presentation Schedule

Friday, November 9

Session I 12:45-2:00pm (concurrent panels)

Panel One: Dickens’s Secrets I

Panel Chair: David Bradshaw, Warren Wilson College

Julie Tyler

Emmanuel College

Bleak House's Imperatives of Silence and Speculation: Mute Characters in the Space of the Talking Novel

John McBratney

John Carroll University

"What Connexion Can There Be?": Detection in Dickens's Bleak House

Susan Reynolds

University of Alabama

Without the Ties That Bind: The Role of Jo in Charles Dickens's Bleak House

Panel Two: Hidden Women

Panel Chair: Audrey Fessler, University of Wisconsin—Eau Claire

Heather Miner

Rice University

“Whole Labyrinths of Social Ethics”: Conspiring to Raise the Fallen Women in Gaskell's Ruth

Charles Williamson

Western Kentucky University

Familial Ideologies, Working Class Nightmares, and the Gender of Alcoholism: Harriet Martineau and the Drink Question

Abigail Burnham Bloom

Hunter College, CUNY

Victorian Women's Lives: Revealed and Concealed

Panel Three: Tracing the Echoes of Romanticism

Panel Chair: Anita Rose, Converse College

Denise Tischler Millstein

University of Alabama

George Eliot's Felix Holt, the Radical and Byronic Secrets

Patricia Brody

Letitia Elizabeth Landon: The Secret of her Raw, Bare Powers

Allison Cooper Davis

University of North Carolina at Greensboro

Mopsa and the Mariner: Supernatural Realities

Session II 2:15-3:30pm (concurrent panels)

Panel Four: Sensational Secrets I

Panel Chair: Robin Barrow, University of Tennessee

Maria K. Bachman

Coastal Carolina University

Concealing Minds and the Case of The Woman in White

Heather M. Sowards

Ohio University

Performing the Heart and Mind: Secret Feminine Identities in Wilkie Collins's Heart and Science

Susan Bernardo

Wagner College

Suicide, Secrecy, and Language in Collins's The Law and the Lady

Panel Five: The Oxford Movement, Unreserved

Panel Chair: Heather Shippen Cianciola

David J. Bradshaw

Warren Wilson College

Secrecy and Reticence in John Henry Newman's Loss and Gain

Patrick Scott

University of South Carolina

The Ur-Quiver in the Proto-Stiff Upper Lip: Secrecy and Reserve in Keble, Froude, Newman and Clough

Susan E. Colón

Baylor University

Secret Sins: Pharisaism in The Heir of Redclyffe

Panel Six: Secrecy and the Brontës

Panel Chair: Elizabeth Winston, University of Tampa

Alicia Carroll

Auburn University

The Secret Life of Trees: Inside Out in Wuthering Heights

Lauren Wood Hoffer

Vanderbilt University

“Anxious as ever to avoid discovery": Jane Eyre and Charlotte Brontë's Conflicting Desires toward Fame

Kathleen Conway

Molloy College

Secrets: A Means to Reflection and Growth in Victorian Novels

Session III 3:45-5:00pm (concurrent panels)

Panel Seven: Late-Century Fiction I

Katherine Pionke, Harper College

Anita R. Rose

Converse College

Unfinished Textual Business in The Beetle and Dracula

Rebecca King

Middle Tennessee State University

Secrecy, Denial, and Autonomy in Stevenson's Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde

Brooke McLaughlin Mitchell

Wingate University

Secrets, Silence, and the Fractured Self: Hardy's Tess of the d'Urbervilles

Panel Eight: The Revelations of Vanity Fair

Panel Chair: David Latané, Virginia Commonwealth University

Molly Engelhardt

Texas A&M University—Corpus Christi

The Secret is Out: Note-Passing in the Victorian Ballroom

Leila May

NC State University

Becky Sharp, Lady Audley, and You: The Sociology of Secrecy

Alan LaCerra

University of Central Florida

Narrative Secrecy in Vanity Fair: Names Withheld so as to Be Revealed

Panel Nine: Political Maneuvers

Panel Chair: Patrick Scott, University of South Carolina

Allison L. E. Wee

Luther College

A Secret Censorship: The Victorian Home Office vs. Town Talk

Albert D. Pionke

University of Alabama

Secrecy, Oath-Taking, and Victorian Elite Public Status

Deborah Logan

Western Kentucky University

“My only political plot”: Martineau the Peacemaker and Corn-Law Repeal

Saturday, November 10

Session IV 9:00-10:15am (concurrent panels)

Panel Ten: Dickens’s Secrets II

Panel Chair: Susan Reynolds, University of Alabama

Brigitte Knight

University of North Carolina at Pembroke

Invisible No More: The Secret Lives of Women in Charles Dickens's Great Expectations

Rebecca N. Mitchell

University of Texas—Pan American

Literacy and the "Profound Secret and Mystery" of Dickens's Others

Panel Eleven: Victorian Marital Secrets

Panel Chair: Heather Humann, University of Alabama

Melissa Purdue

University of Kentucky

“I married this man, unknown to anyone, of course": Interracial Marriage in Victoria Cross's Anna Lombard and Life of My Heart

Melanie Ann Hanson

Sam Houston State University

Alice Meynell's "Punch": Privacy and the "Vulgarizing" of the Wedded Victorian English Woman

LuAnn McCracken Fletcher

Cedar Crest College

A “narrative hung together but awkwardly”: The Odd Women’s Critique of Marriage

Panel Twelve: Rhyme’s Revelations

Panel Chair: Denise Tischler Millstein, University of Alabama

JJ Pionke

Harper College

A (Not So Secret) Identity: Michael Field

Sharon McGrady

Rutgers University

Behind the Faces of Faith: William Hale White and the Wordsworths

Robert P. Fletcher

West Chester University

The Perverse Secrets of Masculinity in Robert Browning and Augusta Webster

Session V 10:30-11:45am (concurrent panels)

Panel Thirteen: Secrets Surrounding George Eliot

Panel Chair: Charles Williamson, Western Kentucky University

Michael D. Lewis

University of Virginia

National and Personal Secrets in Felix Holt, the Radical

Daniel Cook

Saginaw Valley State University

The Syndrome of the Secret: Hermetic Excess in George Eliot's Amos Barton

Panel Fourteen: Sexuality Exposed

Panel Chair: Melanie Ann Hanson, Sam Houston State University

Emily D. Wicktor

University of Kansas

Imbued with the Science of Venus: The Sexually Savvy Female in Victorian Pornography

Robin Barrow

University of Tennessee

Outraged Silences: The Secret of Sexual Violence in Victorian Fiction

Joseph L. V. Donica

Bob Jones University

Clandestine Sodom: Homosexual Love's Social Role in the Nineteenth-Century British Royal Guard

Panel Fifteen: Magic, Murder, and Madness

Panel Chair: Deborah Logan, Western Kentucky University

Michael Claxton

Harding University

Victorian Conjuring Secrets

Ginger Frost

Samford University

“I Could Not Hold Up My Head": Fatherhood, Murder, and Secrecy in Victorian England

Eleanor Fraser Stansbie

Paul Mellon Centre for Studies in British Art

A Victorian Picture Puzzle: Richard Dadd's The Fairy Feller's Masterstroke

Lunch and VI Business Meeting 12:00-1:45pm

Session VI 2:00-3:15pm (concurrent panels)

Panel Sixteen: Sensational Secrets II

Panel Chair: Marilyn Kurata, University of Alabama at Birmingham

Christina Stevenson

UC Santa Cruz

Secrets and the Sensation Novel: The "Space that Told the Whole Story" in The Woman in White

Kristina Aikens

Tufts University

Wilkie Collins and the Lady Laudanum Drinker

Jenny Kohn

Monash University

Mary Elizabeth Braddon's Novels-with-a-Secret and the Relational Female Self

Panel Seventeen: The Hidden Springs of Empire

Panel Chair: Michael Claxton, Harding University

Chris Hagerman

Albion College

Secret Cyphers, Secret Knowledge and Imperial Power: The Classics in British India

Leslie Rogne Schumacher

University of Minnesota

“Contained in the Records": William Gifford Palgrave: Romance, Secrecy, and Pragmatism in the British Foreign Service

Niharika Dinkar

Boise State University

Behind the Veil: The Development of a Secret National Identity in India

Panel Eighteen: (De)Constructing Gender

Panel Chair: Rebecca King, Middle Tennessee State University

Audrey Fessler

University of Wisconsin—Eau Claire

“The Boy Was a Girl": Reconstructing Gender and Class to Deconstruct Difference in Sarah Grand's The Heavenly Twins

Stephanie Robinson

University of North Carolina at Greensboro

Subversive Shirt-Waists and Coercive Corsets: Transmuting Class and Gender through Dress in Nineteenth-Century Domesticity

Abby Heller

Boys Secrets in Victorian Public School Stories: Functioning as Females

Session VII 3:30-4:45pm (concurrent panels)

Panel Nineteen: Late-Century Fiction II

Panel Chair: Helena Gurfinkel, Southern Illinois University at Edwardsville

Kimberly Manganelli

Clemson University

Bad Blood: The Tragic Mulatta as Villainess in Florence Marryat's Daughter of the Tropics

T. Rebecca Kennamer

CUNY Graduate Center

Re-Reading Ouida: Readerly and Writerly Secrecy in Moths

Helena Gurfinkel

Southern Illinois University at Edwardsville

Special Victims Unit: Corporal Punishment and the Secret Victorian Bildungsroman in Samuel Butler's The Way of All Flesh

Panel Twenty: Theories of Secrecy

Panel Chair: Albert Pionke, University of Alabama

Patricia Michael

Holy Family University

Secrets as Strategies of Power in Gaskell and Dickens

Stephen Arata

University of Virginia

Singing Fire: Walter Pater and the Secrets of Consciousness

Panel Twenty-One: Unearthing “Dead Ground”

Panel Chair: Eleanor Fraser Stansbie, Paul Mellon Centre for Studies in British Art

Deanna K. Kreisel

University of British Columbia

Not-So-Secret Gardens: Area Railings; or, Suburban Residences and How to Circumvent Them

Sarah Hoglund

SUNY at Stony Brook

What Must Remain Hidden: Burial Reform in Early-Nineteenth Century Britain

Mary Flowers Braswell

University of Alabama at Birmingham

Mary Eliza Haweis (1848[?]-1898): Who was this Woman and Why Should we Care?

Keynote Address 5:00-6:30pm

John Kucich, Rutgers University

"Shadow-Discourse, Masochism, and the Hidden Politics of Pain: Psychoanalysis as Historicist Practice."