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Author ORCID Identifier

https://orcid.org/0009-0005-4263-6714

Date Available

4-30-2026

Year of Publication

2026

Document Type

Doctoral Dissertation

Degree Name

Doctor of Philosophy (PhD)

College

Arts and Sciences

Department/School/Program

English

Faculty

Jill Naomi Rappoport

Faculty

Matthew Giancarlo

Abstract

The professionalization and institutionalization of care in the Victorian era ushered in a growing societal concern about the pitfalls of care being “systematized and depersonalized” and treating people as burdens, problems to be solved. Given the increasing attention paid to people’s welfare and well-being during this period, the cultural shift from intimate community care to professional and institutional care, and the growing stigmatization of disabled bodyminds, the fiction produced amidst these cultural changes makes a compelling site for a study of care. Critical scholarship attending to Victorian novels’ representations of care, however, has largely concentrated on specific categorizations of care and has consequently overlooked novel’s representations of care as care. By examining representations of care “as care,” this dissertation looks at care in its myriad embodiments and how specific actions are care instead of focusing on how characters’ care conforms to common conceptualizations of categories of care.

Building on the works of Talia Schaffer, D. Christopher Gabbard, and Clare Walker Gore, this dissertation examines representations of care in Jane Eyre (1847), The Woman in White (1860), and Great Expectations (1861). This focused scope affords a closer examination of how these authors imagine care and disabled characters, and use care and disability to construct and explore themes of injustice, oppression, and autonomy. Looking at these novels’ representations of care from a care ethics perspective grounded in feminist disability studies, this dissertation examines the ways that the novels’ characters give and receive care, how care sustains or enhances cared-fors (or fails to do so), and how care is used as a mechanism for abuse and oppression.

This dissertation scrutinizes which characters are and are not given good care and unpacks what these novels’ representations of care suggest about who is deemed worthy (or not worthy) of good care. The first chapter challenges scholars’ sympathetic readings of the novel that have downplayed characters’ poor treatment of Bertha while also overestimating Jane’s sympathy for Bertha. This chapter argues that the novel’s portrayal of Bertha degrades her, dispossesses her of personhood, reduces her to a fearsome spectacle—thus perpetuating the myth that mentally disabled bodyminds are dangerous to others—and that care is narratively used as a mechanism to disable and disadvantage

Bertha for the advantage of other characters. The second chapter explores how characters in Wilkie Collins’s The Woman in White use the guise of care to conceal, justify, and/or rationalize the harming, or contributing to the harming, of cared-fors. This chapter argues that reading the novel for its representations of good care, conversely, reveals that the novel also functions as Walter’s embodied act of care for Laura. The final chapter argues that Dickens narratively uses care to construct Pip’s emotional maturation as dependent on his implementing what he learns from good and bad care into his relationship with his benefactor, Magwitch. This dissertation challenges literary representations of care and disability that figure the cared-for as a burden, unpacks the ways that these authors have imagined good care to be a source of joy, gratification, and hope, and explores how attending to representations of bad care affords readers insights into how to give good care.

Digital Object Identifier (DOI)

https://doi.org/10.13023/etd.2026.189

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