Choose one of the following questions and write an essay in answer that is at least 1,500 words. You should use your book for quotations and other supporting material, but do not use any other outside sources.

1) In our discussions of gender in the Victorian period, we have returned repeatedly to the idea that masculinity and femininity are mutually dependent. Choose one author and explore the ways in which she/he establishes the differences and interconnections between these two gender constructions.

2) When Victorians highlight the problems with Industrialization, they almost inevitably call on the pastoral in order to make a contrast between the morality of past and present. Choose two works and compare and contrast the different ways the pastoral may be used in this rhetorical move. Be sure to define what the pastoral past and industrial present means for each author

3) As I have said in class many times, if Our Mutual Friend is about nothing else it is about London and its river. To take that idea a step further - to what extent does Dickens construct the city and its river govern the characters in the novel? Choose one character and explore how the city and/or the river works to create and control the destiny of that character.

4) Discuss how either Elizabeth Barrett Browning or Mary Elizabeth Braddon reconcile their positions as women writers within their works. Namely, how do these two women who defined themselves as conventional nineteenth-century women work out the contradictions between that role and the role of the author. Be sure to reference specific poems or moments in the novel. Also, you must define the conventional roles of author and middle-class woman at some point in your answer.

5) Many of the writers we have read spend a great of time considering the current unhealthy state of Victorian society and arguing for a particular way of curing those social ills to make England healthy and strong once again. Choose two authors and compare and contrast both their critiques and plans for improvements.

6) Constructions of gender played a larger part in the way in which the Industrial Revolution affected Victorian England. Choose either femininity or masculinity and discuss how two different works connect that gender and industrialization. You must of course define how each author constructs the gender identity you are focusing on as well as what that particular author means by industrialization. In addition, be sure to pay attention how class differences inflect the construction of gender you are writing about.