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Forming Person: Narrative and Psychology in the Victorian Novel by Anna Marie Gibson Department of English Duke University Date

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Forming Person: Narrative and Psychology in the Victorian Novel by Anna Marie Gibson Department of English Duke University Date Forming Person: Narrative and Psychology in the Victorian Novel by Anna Marie Gibson Department of English Duke University Date:_______________________ Approved: ___________________________ Nancy Armstrong, Co-Supervisor ___________________________ Kathy Alexis Psomiades, Co-Supervisor ___________________________ Rob Mitchell ___________________________ Charlotte Sussman Dissertation submitted in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy in the Department of English in the Graduate School of Duke University 2014 ABSTRACT Forming Person: Narrative and Psychology in the Victorian Novel by Anna Marie Gibson Department of English Duke University Date:_______________________ Approved: ___________________________ Nancy Armstrong, Co-Supervisor ___________________________ Kathy Alexis Psomiades, Co-Supervisor ___________________________ Rob Mitchell ___________________________ Charlotte Sussman An abstract of a dissertation submitted in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy in the Department of English in the Graduate School Of Duke University 2014 Copyright by Anna Marie Gibson 2014 Abstract This dissertation argues that the Victorian novel created a sensory self much like that articulated by Victorian physiological psychology: a multi-centered and process- oriented body that reacts to situations and stimuli as they arise by mobilizing appropriate cognitive and nervous functions. By reading Victorian fiction alongside psychology as it was developing into a distinct scientific discipline (during the 1840s– 70s), this project addresses broader interdisciplinary questions about how the interaction between literature and science in the nineteenth century provided new ways of understanding human consciousness. I show that narrative engagements with psychology in the novel form made it possible for readers to understand the modern person as productively rather than pathologically heterogeneous. To accomplish this, fiction offered author and reader an experimental form for engaging ideas posed and debated concurrently in science. The novels I read – by authors including Charlotte Brontë, Charles Dickens, Wilkie Collins, Mary Elizabeth Braddon, and George Eliot – emerge as narrative testing grounds for constructions of subjectivity and personhood unavailable to scientific discourse. I attribute the novel’s ability to create a sensory self to its formal tactics, from composites of multiple first-person accounts to strange juxtapositions of omniscience and subjectivity, from gaps and shifts in narrative to the extended form-in-process of the serial novel. My side-by-side readings of scientific and literary experiments make it clear that fiction is where we find the most innovative methods of investigation into embodied forms of human experience. iv For Rosie And for my Dad For encouraging me to begin v Contents Abstract ......................................................................................................................................... iv List of Figures ............................................................................................................................. viii Acknowledgements ..................................................................................................................... ix INTRODUCTION Form, Person, and Experiment ................................................................... 1 The Form of the Person .......................................................................................................... 5 Strategy and Tactics .............................................................................................................. 16 Overview of the Dissertation ............................................................................................... 23 Literary Experiments ............................................................................................................ 27 CHAPTER ONE The First Person in Jane Eyre and Villette .................................................... 33 I. Mind and Body: Brontë and Nineteenth-Century Personal Identity ......................... 40 II. Jane Eyre’s Narrative Strategies ..................................................................................... 54 III. Lucy Snowe’s Tactics ...................................................................................................... 66 IV. The Dancer and the Archivist ....................................................................................... 86 CHAPTER TWO Our Mutual Friend and Network Form ..................................................... 101 I. Serial Form ........................................................................................................................ 103 II. Seriality, Character, and Life in Aggregate ................................................................ 122 III. Victorian Networks: Dickens and Science ................................................................. 128 IV. The Novel as Network ................................................................................................. 134 V. Network and Affect ....................................................................................................... 145 VI. Hallucinatory Dickens .................................................................................................. 157 CHAPTER THREE Sensation and Detection ......................................................................... 162 I. Sensation and Detection in Combination ..................................................................... 168 vi II. Sensation Debates and the Science of Psychology ..................................................... 178 i. Scientific Detection and Objectivity ........................................................................ 181 ii. Sensation and the Sensory Consciousness ............................................................ 191 III. Detective Narrative, Sensational Narrative ............................................................... 201 IV. Detective Fever and Lady Audley’s Secret ................................................................... 217 V. Detection and Excess ..................................................................................................... 222 CHAPTER FOUR Daniel Deronda’s Experiments in Life ...................................................... 228 I. Eliot, Psychology, and the Novel .................................................................................. 234 II. Narrative Knowledge .................................................................................................... 240 III. Consciousness of Self .................................................................................................... 247 IV. Gwendolen’s “Subjection to a Possible Self” ............................................................ 259 V. Daniel “Transforming Influence” and Gwendolen’s “New Consciousness” ....... 266 VI. What Becomes of the “Bird’s-Eye” Perspective ........................................................ 274 VII. “A Set of Experiments in Life” .................................................................................. 280 Bibliography ............................................................................................................................... 285 Biography .................................................................................................................................... 304 vii List of Figures Figure 1: [O.S. Fowler], A phrenological chart of the head divided into over thirty images, mostly of individual people performing the faculties. (London: Straker, c. 1845); Wellcome Collection, 27921i .......................................................................................... 49 Figure 2: Image from Dickens’s working notes for the fifth installment of Our Mutual Friend. ................................................................................................... 108 Figure 3: Image from Dickens’s working notes for the seventh installment of Our Mutual Friend. ................................................................................................... 112 Figure 4: Pages 10 and 3 of Dickens’s Book of Memoranda .................................................... 116 Figure 5: Galton, Prevalent Types of Features Among Men Convicted of Larceny, 1880 ......... 222 Figure 6: Galton, Criminal Composite (New York Public Library/Science Photo Library http://sciencephoto.com) ............................................................................................... 223 viii Acknowledgements This dissertation owes its existence to the support of so many mentors, friends, and family members. My first thanks must go to my first mentors. To Rosie Davis, who taught me how to read a novel and to whom this dissertation is dedicated, and to Anne Wallace, my college advisor, whose clear-eyed passion for Victorian novels inspired me from my first week in a university classroom to keep on reading them. I have been lucky to have two incredible dissertation directors and mentors at Duke. In particular, this dissertation has been profoundly shaped by the always- generous guidance of Nancy Armstrong, whose support, determination, and attention to detail never cease to amaze me. Thank you for always pushing me one step further, for always being available, and for reading (and re-reading, and re-re-reading) these pages so thoroughly. I have
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