Becoming Foreign in the Victorian Novel: International Migration in Little Dorrit and Villette

2020 ◽  
Author(s):  
Tamara S Wagner
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Migrant Workers ◽  
Victorian Novel ◽  
The Novel ◽  
Global Studies ◽  
Victorian Fiction ◽  
Time Migration ◽  
Globalizing World ◽  
Social Invisibility ◽  
Nineteenth Century Novels

Abstract This article analyses the representation of migrant workers in Victorian fiction. While exploring the seldom-discussed experience of such migrants, I argue that in the fiction of the time, migration for work outside of the empire expresses the experience of individual isolation as the result of increasing urban anonymity as well as of global exchanges. The figure of the migrant thereby literalizes modern isolation in an emergent society of strangers. In depicting migratory characters as embodiments of loneliness, while establishing it as a shared experience through parallel plots, nineteenth-century novels map out possible connections in a globalizing world. In parsing the interplay of isolation and imaginary sympathy in two texts of the 1850s, Charles Dickens’s Little Dorrit and Charlotte Brontë’s Villette, I argue that the experience of feeling foreign while working abroad enables characters to seek connections that transcend boundaries of class and national identity, even as the sympathy they imagine might be flawed, warped by projection and identification. In Little Dorrit, Cavalletto’s accident in the streets of London enacts a pivotal moment of imagined sympathy for the recently returned Arthur Clennam that ultimately helps to solve the renegotiation of home and host country in the novel, while in Villette, a female migrant articulates an increasingly widespread experience not only of modern isolation, social invisibility, and cultural disorientation, but also of the power of anonymity. A critical analysis of migratory work in Victorian fiction adds an important new dimension to nineteenth-century global studies.

scholarly journals Diagnosis or Detour? The Uses of Medical Realism in the Victorian Novel

2008 ◽  
pp. 0
Author(s):  
Meegan Kennedy
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Clinical Medicine ◽  
Victorian Novel ◽  
The Novel ◽  
Narrative Methods ◽  
Professional Ideology ◽  
Narrative Techniques ◽  
Realist Methodology ◽  
Nineteenth Century Novels ◽  
Literary Techniques

AbstractThis essay attempts to open up our perspective on novels’ use of medical narrative realism. Previous analyses of “medicine and the novel” have focused on a common realist ideal and on novels with medical content. But even a realist methodology shared by the novel and by medicine did not find common expression in both genres. Accordingly, this paper draws on some examples that are representative of nineteenth-century novels and range from literal discussions of disease to scenes much farther removed from literal depictions of medicine or disease, but which still, I am arguing, draw on narrative techniques associated with medical clinical realism for their effect. In fact, novels revised and redirected such techniques, often using them against the grain of the professional ideology from which they arise. Accordingly, this essay will sketch out not only how medical case histories can use supposedly literary techniques, but also how nineteenth-century novels apply the narrative methods of clinical medicine even where medicine is not strictly at issue, and how they adapt those methods to their own literary aims.

Worlds Enough

2019 ◽  
Author(s):  
Elaine Freedgood
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Literary History ◽  
World Literature ◽  
Victorian Novel ◽  
The Novel ◽  
Victorian Novels ◽  
Realist Novel ◽  
Victorian Fiction ◽  
To Come ◽  
The Aesthetic

Now praised for its realism and formal coherence, the Victorian novel was not always great, or even good, in the eyes of its critics. As this book reveals, it was only in the late 1970s that literary critics constructed a prestigious version of British realism, erasing more than a century of controversy about the value of Victorian fiction. Examining criticism of Victorian novels since the 1850s, this book demonstrates that while they were praised for their ability to bring certain social truths to fictional life, these novels were also criticized for their formal failures and compared unfavorably to their French and German counterparts. The book analyzes the characteristics of realism—denotation, omniscience, paratext, reference, and ontology—and the politics inherent in them, arguing that if critics displaced the nineteenth-century realist novel as the standard by which others are judged, literary history might be richer. It would allow peripheral literatures and the neglected wisdom of their critics to come fully into view. It concludes by questioning the aesthetic racism built into prevailing ideas about the centrality of realism in the novel, and how those ideas have affected debates about world literature. By re-examining the critical reception of the Victorian novel, the book suggests how we can rethink our practices and perceptions about books we think we know.

QUAKER DRESS, SEXUALITY, AND THE DOMESTICATION OF REFORM IN THE VICTORIAN NOVEL

2002 ◽  
Vol 30 (1) ◽  
pp. 211-236 ◽  
Author(s):  
Suzanne Keen
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
George Eliot ◽  
Charlotte Bronte ◽  
Female Sexuality ◽  
Victorian Novel ◽  
Jane Eyre ◽  
Religious Groups ◽  
Victorian Fiction ◽  
Core Function ◽  
Nineteenth Century Novels

WHY ARE JANE EYRE AND DOROTHEA BROOKE clad by their creators in “Quakerish” garb? The oppositional plainness and simplicity of Quakerish heroines have often been read as signs of classlessness and sexlessness.1 Plain and simple clothing seems, to both Victorian and contemporary eyes, part of the package of reticence, reserve, and repression associated with the evangelical wing of nineteenth-century dissenting sects.2 The typical sociological view of the function of dress within conservative religious groups holds that “strict dress codes are enforced because dress is considered symbolic of religiosity. Hence dress becomes a symbol of social control as it controls the external body” (Arthur 1). The control of female sexuality and the restraint of desire would seem to be the core function of modest clothing. Then the plain dress of some of the liveliest heroines of Victorian fiction presents a puzzle that can be solved only by recuperating the meaning of that clothing for Victorians. As fashion historian Anne Hollander points out, nineteenth-century novels testify to the way that clothes “always correctly express character” (Feeding the Eye 12), but the meaning of particular articles of clothing or styles can slip away. Accurately reading the characters of Charlotte Brontë and George Eliot thus requires careful interpretation of their dress, in this case reversing the conventional reading of their plain, modest, and simple style. This essay argues that Quakerish clothing expresses both a promise of spirited sexuality and an admonition about the class-crossing potential of the respectable female contained within it.

scholarly journals “I am rather strong on Voyages and Cannibalism”: The other Dickens and other Victorians in Richard Flanagan’s Wanting

2019 ◽  
Vol 8 (1) ◽  
pp. 161-177
Author(s):  
Bożena Kucała
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Charles Dickens ◽  
The Other ◽  
Public Image ◽  
The Novel ◽  
Moral Norms ◽  
Critical Attitude ◽  
Victorian Fiction ◽  
Inner Self ◽  
Public Persona

Abstract This paper analyses Richard Flanagan’s novel Wanting (2008) as a narrative informed by a revisionary and critical attitude to nineteenth-century ideologies, which is common to, and, indeed, stereotypical in much neo-Victorian fiction. Drawing on the biographies of two eminent Victorians: Charles Dickens and Sir John Franklin, Flanagan constructs their fictional counterparts as split between a respectable, public persona and a dark, inner self. While all the Victorian characters are represented as “other” than their public image, the focus in the novel, and in this paper, is on Dickens’s struggle to reconcile social propriety with his personal discontent. Flanagan represents this conflict through Dickens’s response to the allegations that starving survivors of Franklin’s ill-fated Arctic expedition resorted to cannibalism. The zeal with which the Victorian writer refuted such reports reveals his own difficulty in living up to social and moral norms. The paper argues that the main link between the different narrative strands in the novel is the challenge they collectively pose to the distinction between the notions of civilization and savagery.

NEO-VICTORIAN STUDIES

2012 ◽  
Vol 40 (1) ◽  
pp. 339-346 ◽  
Author(s):  
Margaret D. Stetz
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Victorian Novel ◽  
Vantage Point ◽  
Point Of View ◽  
First Century ◽  
The Novel ◽  
Literary Genres ◽  
Victorian Studies ◽  
Remarkable Effect

Long ago, Margery Williams'sThe Velveteen Rabbit(1922) taught us that toys become real when they are loved. Literary genres, however, become real when they are parodied. The neo-Victorian novel, therefore, must now be real, for its features have become so familiar and readily distinguishable that John Crace has been able to have naughty fun at their expense inBrideshead Abbreviated: The Digested Read of the Twentieth Century(2010), where John Fowles'sThe French Lieutenant's Woman(1969) stands as representative of the type. Crace's treatment of Fowles's first-person narrator results in a remarkable effect: the ironic commentary upon the nineteenth century from a twentieth-century vantage point that runs throughout the novel gets subjected, in turn, to ironic commentary from a twenty-first-century point-of-view:

Adaptive/appropriative reuse in neo-Victorian fiction: having one’s cake and eating it too

Interventions ◽  
2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Marie-Luise Kohlke
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Historical Fiction ◽  
Adaptive Reuse ◽  
Victorian Novel ◽  
Victorian Culture ◽  
Victorian Novels ◽  
Victorian Fiction ◽  
Fiction Writers ◽  
Historic Conservation ◽  
Adaptive Practice

Marie-Luise Kohlke’s chapter on ‘Adaptive/Appropriate Reuse in Neo-Victorian Fiction: Having One’s Cake and Eating it Too’ argues that historical fiction writers’ persistent fascination with the long nineteenth century enacts a simultaneous drawing near to and distancing from the period, the lives of its inhabitants, and its cultural icons, aesthetic discourses, and canonical works. Always constituting at least in part as a fantasy construction of ‘the Victorian’ for present-day purposes, the process of re-imagining involves not just a quasi resurrection (of nineteenth-century historical persons, fictional characters, traumas, aesthetics, values, and ideologies) but also a relational transformation – a change in nature, a conversion into something other, namely what we want ‘the Victorian’ to signify rather than what it was. Hence adaptive practice in the neo-Victorian novel, applied both to Victorian literary precursors and the period more generally, may be better described as adaptive reuse (to borrow a term from urban planning’s approach to historic conservation) or, perhaps, appropriative reuse. Drawing on a range of neo-Victorian novels Kohlke explores the prevalent perspectival frames and generic forms employed in neo-Victorian appropriative reuse and their divergent effects on present-day conceptions of Victorian culture.

Aspects of the Novel

Russomania ◽  
2020 ◽  
pp. 158-212
Author(s):  
Rebecca Beasley
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
British Literature ◽  
The Novel ◽  
World War ◽  
British Novel ◽  
The First World War ◽  
The Future ◽  
Nineteenth Century Novels ◽  
Modern British Literature ◽  
First World

This chapter addresses the debates about the future of the British novel in the years leading up the First World War. The initial focus is Ford Madox Ford’s English Review. By reading the magazine forward from the ‘Art of Fiction’ debates of the 1880s, rather than—as is usual—back through canonical modernism, we see how Ford deliberated staged comparisons between what he saw as the two distinct possibilities for the future of modern British literature: the ‘artists’ drawing on a French, specifically Flaubertian, tradition with which Ford aligned his own ‘impressionism’, and the ‘propagandists’ deriving from English and Russian nineteenth-century novels. The literary relevance of the anti-tsarist politics of the magazine is discussed, and the chapter concludes by analysing Joseph Conrad’s work of the period.

The Professionalization of the Woman Artist in Anne Brontëë's The Tenant of Wildfell Hall

2003 ◽  
Vol 58 (1) ◽  
pp. 1-41 ◽  
Author(s):  
Antonia Losano
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Narrative Structure ◽  
Gradual Transition ◽  
The Novel ◽  
Early Nineteenth Century ◽  
Women's Role ◽  
The Moment ◽  
Historical Transition ◽  
Nineteenth Century Novels

Critics of Anne Brontëë's The Tenant of Wildfell Hall (1848) have frequently noted the artistic endeavors of the novel's heroine, Helen Graham, yet they have not fully considered the historical and narratological ramifications of Helen's career as a painter. This essay argues that Helen's artworks cannot be considered as mere background to the novel or as simply symbolic reflections of the heroine's (or the author's) emotions. Instead, we must see the scenes of painting in Tenant as indicators of the novel's radical view of women's role as creative producers during a particularly complex moment in art history, one in which early-nineteenth-century female amateurism began its gradual transition from amateur "accomplished" woman to the professional female artist——a historical transition that, as is suggested in readings of various nineteenth-century novels, is in its earliest stages at precisely the moment of the writing and publication of Tenant. At the narrative level, the novel's many scenes of painting provide its readers with detailed, if oblique, guidelines for interpretation; the novel is formally and ideologically impacted by the presence of its painter-heroine. Most particularly, such a reevaluation of the role of painting in the novel resolves a central critical debate over the novel's problematic narrative structure.

Oh Capitano!

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Rudolph J. Vecoli ◽  
Francesco Durante
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Migrant Workers ◽  
Native Hawaiians ◽  
Globalizing World ◽  
The World ◽  
Imperial Expansion ◽  
Cultural Traits

Italian adventurer and sea captain Celso Cesare Moreno traveled the world lying, scheming, and building an extensive patron/client network to establish his reputation as a middleman and person of significance. Through his machinations, Moreno became a critical player in the expansion of western trade and imperialism in Asia, the trafficking of migrant workers and children in the Atlantic, the conflicts of Americans and Native Hawaiians over the fate of Hawaii, and the imperial competitions of French, British, Italian, and American governments in an important era of imperial expansion during the nineteenth century. This book teases out Moreno's enormous peculiarities and fascination as well as his significance. It examines how he repeatedly sought a role at the center of a globalizing world with gusto and had no qualms about lying or betraying others. Dragged by his uncontrollable polemical passions, the old Captain died alone, unloved by anyone and with no meaningful relations to others. With its focus on Moreno, this book illustrates some of the most puzzling cultural traits of emigrant Italian elites. Called a “carpetbagger,” “land pirate,” “extinct volcano,” among many other derogatory monikers, Celso emerges in this fascinating biography as a multifaceted, chameleon-like personality not reducible to a single epithet.

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