Jungah Kim

I am currently a Ph.D. Candidate of English at Texas A&M University. My research centers on Victorian Literature, Gender Studies, New Materialism, and Posthumanism. 

My dissertation project, “Re-claiming (Lost) Rhythms of Life in Victorian Female Characters,” explores the long known relationship that Victorian female characters have had to objects. It is not an overstatement to say that female characters within the novel are constantly in relation with objects, due to their rooted domesticity. They are almost always engaging with these objects by way of working with the needle, writing a diary, painting a painting, reading a book, typing on a typewriter, wielding the oar, or playing the piano. And each time they continue this movement, they are in fact, creating a rhythm that caters to their own body, and it is possible to read it as a way that they are matching to what the patriarchal society expects of them, by molding themselves in domesticity (such as sewing or even cooking with objects). However, it can also be viewed as an act of subversion, depending on how we read the author’s intentions in placing those objects, how the characters create that rhythm and how we reread that rhythm.

My project proposes to observe this pattern on “rhythm” when female characters actively and continually engage with objects that do not assimilate into their domesticity. I look at how the production of this rhythm centers on how female characters were often using these objects creatively to tend to their own desires, as opposed to using it, purely for domestic house chores that appeased other’s desires (men or children). In looking at works by Anne Brontë, Charlotte Brontë, George Eliot, and Neo-Victorian novelist, Patricia Park, I ultimately argue that this rhythm eventually leads them into a semi-cyborgian status or a posthuman figure where they are no longer the same “human” they were before and transcend their physicality.

For more information about me or any of my projects, please contact me at myjungah92@tamu.edu