While the works of women and other groups typically excluded from the canon are becoming more common in concert programs and historical survey texts, musicological interrogation into the subversive potential of these pieces lags far behind our colleagues in the humanities. This thesis serves as a framework for an intersectional approach to musicology, using the life and oeuvre of self-consciously feminist composer Dame Ethel Smyth (1858-1944) as a case study. Much of her musical output remains understudied in relation to the social, political, and cultural climate of Victorian England and in the context of Western art music. Each chapter takes a specific genre of Smyth’s music and uses a multidisciplinary approach to illuminate the political work of select, representative pieces. Chapter One draws on the fields of literature and narratology to unpack the feminist potential of minor-mode sonatas. In Chapter Two, I evaluate the lasting impact of Smyth’s choral literature, both apolitical and suffrage-oriented, in terms of their contributions to the British nationalist movement. Finally, I turn to Smyth’s operatic masterpiece, The Wreckers, in Chapter Three; I call on sociology, anthropology, and history to contextualize how the composer pits moral tropes against ideas about female sexuality. Together, these chapters suggest that early feminist politics pervade Ethel Smyth’s music more than originally thought, thus encouraging music scholars to look more deeply at works that we have, as a field, perhaps dismissed too quickly as simple, straightforward, and even trivial.
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