"I am still what he made me"; A Foucauldian Analysis of Disciplinary Power, Female Madness, and Queer Resistance in Sarah Waters’ Fingersmith

Abstract

This thesis examines Sarah Waters’ Fingersmith through a framework of Michel Foucault’s concepts of madness, disciplinary power, and internalised surveillance to reveal the text’s argument that Victorian diagnoses of female hysteria functioned as a tool of patriarchal control. Through analyses of passages that highlight the medicalisation of women’s emotions, sexualities, and behaviours, the thesis unpacks how madhouses and domestic spaces in the novel both operate as Foucauldian sites of observation and regulation. The first chapter investigates the internalisation of social norms through Maud’s, the upper-class protagonist, relationship with her uncle, utilising Foucault’s concept of the panopticon to demonstrate how surveillance creates self-disciplining subjects. The second chapter explores working-class protagonist Sue’s ‘wrongful’ institutionalisation as a criticism of how patriarchal Victorian medicine pathologised social deviance and argues that the ascription of hysteria was strategically employed to suppress female autonomy and queer desire. Lastly, the third chapter examines how the novel challenges heteronormative ideologies through its portrayal of queerness, its disruption of narrative conventions, and its emphasis on Maud’s evolving role in relation to pornographic writings. Through the destabilisation of the construction of madness, Fingersmith not only critiques systems of control but also highlights the possibility of subversive modes of living within oppressive power systems. This thesis ultimately argues that Waters’ Neo-Victorian novel reclaims historically silenced narratives and reconstructs the Victorian novel to evoke ongoing discussions about the intersections of gender, sexuality, and institutional power.