Thesis

Writing unity : a practice-led exploration of female embodiment in historical fiction set in early twentieth-century Britain

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Awarding institution
  • University of Strathclyde
Date of award
  • 2021
Thesis identifier
  • T16522
Person Identifier (Local)
  • 201891869
Qualification Level
Qualification Name
Department, School or Faculty
Abstract
  • This doctoral thesis examines how historical fiction can creatively explore female embodiment in early twentieth-century Britain. The creative component is a historical novel titled Unity, which is set in the spring of 1948, against the backdrop of the birth of the National Health Service and the death of Unity Mitford. It utilises female protagonists and medical contexts to explore attitudes towards female bodies, bodily knowledge, and contraception, using focalised narratives to represent the experience of female embodiment itself. The critical component sets out the rationale behind this agenda, demonstrating the complexity of how the female body has come to be shaped in western philosophy, before presenting and analysing the female body within the socio-historic and literary contexts of the early twentieth century. By analysing the work of historical novelists Pat Barker and Sarah Waters alongside Unity, drawing on feminist criticism and women’s history, this thesis highlights how women’s bodies and body images have been socially-constructed by the body politic and the medical gaze. Whilst women writers of the early twentieth century were limited in terms of how they could articulate embodied experience – through the twin forces of obscenity laws and the self-policing fostered by gendered sexual codes – historical novelists such as Barker, Waters, and myself, have a broader range of organs, sensations, and bodily fluids that we are able to present on the page. These representations can in turn be read for contemporaneous gender dynamics, producing bodies that are both viscerally engaging and socio-historically specific. This thesis also investigates how embodied narratives function, and the multi-disciplinary research methods employed to create them. Trapped within our own bodies it is our creative and empathic abilities that allow us to reach outside ourselves, and even back in time. Connecting to the past thus becomes part of the path towards positive embodiment.
Advisor / supervisor
  • Kelly, Laura, 1986-
Resource Type
Note
  • This thesis was previously held under moratorium from 28/09/2021 to 01/10/2026.
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