1. Across modern literature focusing on Victorian views of animals, scholars have observed that Victorians compare non-European people, women, and children to animals via anthropomorphization or the attribution of human characteristics to an animal. It is crucial to look at non-Europeans, women, and children because they represent a Populus that Victorians perceived as needing to be civilized. During this time period, colonization by Britain was rampant, women were questioning the validity of their societal roles, and children needed to be a successful generation for the future of Britain. The Victorian novels, Heart and Science and The Island of Doctor Moreau both provide fascinating examples of anthropomorphization in entirely different ways. Heart and Science takes place in the British metropole and merely fantasizes about anthropomorphization while The Island of Doctor realizes that fantasy on a remote island controlled by a French scientist who turns animals into humanized Beast People. Analysis of these novels allows readers to see how Victorians fantasized about anthropomorphization and how that connects back to their need for control and dominance. Furthermore, the various scholars brought up in this thesis discuss how non-Europeans, women, and children were all alike compared to canines, birds, and primates across Victorian literature and art. These scholars begin to point out the anthropomorphization that occurred in Victorian society and literature, but they either downplay the role of anthropomorphization or fail to address it. This failure leads to an inability to see the full subtly of British dominance over people regarded as undisciplined and could lead to ignorance of how long anthropomorphization has existed.

First-wave ecocriticism, while studying the relationship between humans and the environment with the focus of emphasizing the value of nature, maintains a categorical divide between these two highly connected subjects. However, second-wave ecocritical studies reduce this gap between nature and humans by analyzing the environment’s ultimate self, humans as part of that environment, and comparisons between the treatment of enslaved bodies and the land. A second-wave ecocritical approach is used to examine the vilification of wilderness versus the claim of the cultivated environment despite its violent history and its impact on other captive bodies within Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness (1899) and Toni Morrison's Beloved (1987). It finds the perception of the wilderness is used to define other enslaved entities, characterizing them as villainous and so excusing their exploitation and mistreatment. Conrad's novel follows the story of Marlow and internally, the story of Kurtz, both of whom are members of The Company that goes on expeditions to find ivory in the Congo. The jungle, which is seen as a possession and exploitable by other colonists, differs from Kurtz’ view after living with the Natives in the Congo. Rather, Marlow finds that European colonists possessive hunt for ivory, a sought-after commodity, into territory they claimed for themselves after brandishing it wild, reflected their perceived darkness of the jungle back onto themselves. Morrison’s novel introduces Sethe, who kills her child, Beloved, to spare her from the life of a slave. In both novels, the utility of the enslaved body is regarded as more important than its selfhood, which serves to not only categorize slaves as lower than both humans and animals, but removes their ability to represent themselves through communication, further disallowing them to own themselves or speak against actions that have been taken against them.

The nineteenth-century invention of smallpox vaccination in Great Britain has been well studied for its significance in the history of medicine as well as the ways in which it exposes Victorian anxieties regarding British nationalism, rural and urban class struggles, the behaviors of women, and animal contamination. Yet inoculation against smallpox by variolation, vaccination’s predecessor and a well-established Chinese medical technique that was spread from east to west to Great Britain, remains largely understudied in modern scholarly literature. In the early 1700s, Lady Mary Wortley Montagu, credited with bringing smallpox variolation to Great Britain, wrote first about the practice in the Turkish city of Adrianople and describes variolation as a “useful invention,” yet laments that, unlike the Turkish women who variolate only those in their “small neighborhoods,” British doctors would be able to “destroy this [disease] swiftly” worldwide should they adopt variolation. Examined through the lens of Edward Said’s Orientalism, techno-Orientalism, and medical Orientalism and contextualized by a comparison to British attitudes toward nineteenth century vaccination, eighteenth century smallpox variolation’s introduction to Britain from the non-British “Orient” represents an instance of reversed Orientalism, in which a technologically deficient British “Occident” must “Orientalize” itself to import the superior medical technology of variolation into Britain. In a scramble to retain technological superiority over the Chinese Orient, Britain manufactures a sense of total difference between an imagined British version of variolation and a real, non-British version of variolation. This imagination of total difference is maintained through characterizations of the non-British variolation as ancient, unsafe, and practiced by illegitimate practitioners, while the imagined British variolation is characterized as safe, heroic, and practiced by legitimate British medical doctors. The Occident’s instance of medical technological inferiority brought about by the importation of variolation from the Orient, which I propose represents an eighteenth-century instance of what I call medical techno-Orientalism, represents an expression of British anxiety over a medical technologically superior Orient—anxieties which express themselves as retaliatory attacks on the Orient and variolation as it is practiced in the Orient—and as an expression of British desire to maintain medical technological superiority over the Orient.

The application of Toni Morrison’s Beloved as a lens through which one can analyze intergenerational trauma on an individual and communal level results in a blueprint towards a remedial process. The characters and their experiences in her novel are representative of a myriad of ways in which trauma is manifested. I have broken down the concept of intergenerational trauma into the idea that it can be seen as the state where one is both simultaneously “falling” and “fallen” at the same time. Used here, the term “falling” refers to the consistent, individual trauma that one is experiencing. On the other hand, the term “fallen” refers to the trauma that a community as a whole has experienced and internalized. This framework that I establish based off of Beloved is a launching point for the conversation surrounding the topic of remedial actions in relation to intergenerational trauma that resulted from slavery. Using it as a basis of knowledge allows one to truly gather the weight of the situation regarding trauma postbellum. Considering the current climate surrounding any meaningful dialogue, knowledge is one of the most important aspects. Along with the concepts of “falling”/”fallen,” I also coined the term productive memory, which refers to the act of confrontation as well as the remembering of intergenerational trauma. The use of productive memory is imperative in addressing the prior ideas presented regarding intergenerational trauma and the possible pathways to move forward.

Universal Basic Income is a proposed policy where the government would regularly pay all citizens in cash. The idea of a Universal Basic Income (UBI) has had a resurgence in recent years because of popular figures like Andrew Yang and Elon Musk, but its history and potential implications go deep into the structure of human society. This thesis delves into how a basic income would transform social concepts of work and disrupt the personal economic model. With the bargaining power and freedom granted by a basic income, workers would find themselves in a position of work freedom and choice that has never existed in human history. With new freedom to do as they wish, the place of work in people’s lives needs to be reimagined as a source of fulfillment instead of an unlikeable but necessary part of everyday life. Workers will be given the choice to leave unfair or unfulfilling work and decide for themselves how they want to contribute within society. From increasing mental and economic well-being for most Americans to serving as a response to unemployment trends in the automated future, to encouraging greater business innovation, there are myriad ways in which basic incomes have the potential to benefit society. Framed by Martin Luther King Jr. and Franklin Delano Roosevelt as the only policy capable of abolishing poverty forever, Universal Basic income will be an important feature of transformative innovative policy advocacy until it is adopted by a major world government at which point the effects in practice will become clear.

In recent years, immigration, especially concerning those individuals immigrating from Central America and Mexico, has become increasingly controversial. Within the last five presidents, policies concerning immigration have shifted. Under President Bill Clinton in 1997, the Flores Settlement, an agreement between immigration activist organizations and the government that created standards for detaining accompanied and unaccompanied minors was made. Following 9/11, in 2005, President George W. Bush increased the amount of money spent on immigration enforcement in an effort to deport more immigrants. President Barack Obama increased the number of deportations from President Bush during his first term. However, in 2014, an already imperfect immigration system was disrupted by an influx of child immigrants. As a result, detention centers were at capacity and unable to accommodate the increasing numbers of immigrants. Child migrants were placed in caged-areas, immigration lawyers and courts quickly became overwhelmed with cases, and children were alone and could barely communicate. This thesis explores the various relationships between accompanied and unaccompanied minors from Central America, the American legal system, and the media and broadcast news outlets’ rhetoric concerning child migrants. Focusing on the ways in which immigrant minors are objectified by the legal system and the framing of immigrants in the media, it is evident that their complex interaction allows for the oppression of the child migrants. Since the American legal system and the media influence and respond to each other, the responsibility of the child migrants’ dehumanization is on both the legal system and the rhetoric of the media and broadcast news outlets.

This excerpt of my novel, The Letter, is about a girl named Gwen who moves across the country to deal with the loss of her father. When she moved into Palm Castle and creates a connection with Blake Everton both through a magical portal and through letters they exchange, she begins to heal from her trauma caused by grief.

This thesis explores how the characterization of mentally ill characters evolves in literature within the United States in order to understand if and how modern notions of mental illness have impacted American writers’ fictional depictions of insanity. For this reason, this project compares and contrasts American fiction from the 19th century and 21st century. More specifically, the thesis explores the two centuries to trace evolutions in the use of gothic tropes, the progression of the theme of identity, relevant paratexts, and public conversations about fictional mental illness in modern texts—all of which send specific messages about mental health and impact the ways in which the reader understands the characters with mental illness. Ultimately, this thesis argues that the evolved use of tropes, the theme of identity, paratexts, and public conversations suggest there has been a shift from othering characters with mental illness towards accepting these characters and normalizing mental illness as an ordinary and familiar part of the human experience. In short, an increased understanding of mental health accompanies literary choices that create a more sympathetic representation of mental illness overall, even when fiction writers might still rely heavily on 19th-century tropes regarding madness.

Once planted firmly in America, murder ballads old and new sparked the Southern imagination, and familiar motifs and formulas were sung with a distinct American twist. The moral standards and beliefs of Christianity, specifically those of Baptist and Methodist denominations, are weaved through a majority of Southern murder ballads, which reflects the impact of the Second Great Awakening, a religious revival founded in the South during the 1790s and early 1800s. Murder ballads found in the American South from 1800 to 1950 follow a structure that reinforces southern expectations for men and women, emphasizing moral and immoral traits in a way that encourages the listener to adhere to strict gender roles. The question of who the villain is and who the victim is must be confronted while examining American murder ballads, because the answer is not as clear cut as one would assume. Virginal women and sinful women, hapless men and cold-blooded men, each play a role in these ballads and the way in which they are perceived shifts the moral weight of the song. Heterosexuality and gender norms are heavily enforced in murder ballads from the South, and any deviations from these norms leads to murder, execution, or eternal damnation.