Differentiating Female Adolescent Bodies in Dickens’s Our Mutual Friend : The Historic Thames and Menstrual Metaphors

Abstract: In analyzing nineteenth-century fiction featuring and written for the coming-of-age female, I show how authors manifested their own authorized vocabularies in relation to bio-politics—a coded language that euphemistically, metaphorically, and thematically reveals the signs of the sexually developing female body. In so doing, these men and women defy hierarchical structures of the dominant medical, scientific, political, and social communities that enforced codes of propriety upon others by their dissemination of texts to lower-, middle-, and upper-class audiences that include these physical signifiers.