Fairy Tales in the Victorian Novel Jessica A. Campbell a Dissertation
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Tradition and Transformation: Fairy Tales in the Victorian Novel Jessica A. Campbell A dissertation submitted in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy University of Washington 2015 Reading Committee: Charles LaPorte, Chair Marshall Brown Jennifer Bean Program authorized to offer degree: English 2 ©Copyright 2015 Jessica A. Campbell 3 University of Washington Abstract Tradition and Transformation: Fairy Tales in the Victorian Novel Jessica A. Campbell Chair of the Supervisory Committee: Professor Charles LaPorte Department of English The popularity of fairy tales in Victorian England frequently seeped into novels of all kinds. But scholarship on fairy tales in Victorian novels is doubly inadequate: first, today‘s fairy- tale scholars tend to pigeonhole all Victorian texts as passé, reflections of a misguidedly conservative time that can only interest us now as a foil to later, more ―progressive‖ adaptations; second, too many scholars of the Victorian novel handle fairy tales with offhand or knee-jerk responses. This dissertation argues that we ought to investigate the rich intertextual relationship between fairy tales and Victorian novels in a thoroughgoing way. I focus primarily on the incorporation into novels of two related fairy tales popular in the nineteenth century: ―Beauty and the Beast‖ and ―Bluebeard.‖ ―Beauty and the Beast‖ is a story about doubles and opposites, about the relationship between the self and the feared other. From the perspective of the heroine, the story ends in the realization that the frightening, animalistic other is not actually very different from the self and can be incorporated into the self through marriage. The tale‘s dark cousin, ―Bluebeard,‖ is about discovering the beastly other inside the new husband and expelling 4 him. Chapter 1 demonstrates the affinity between Great Expectations (1860-1) and ―Beauty and the Beast,‖ especially the original literary version by Madame de Villeneuve (1740). Villeneuve‘s version features several particularly Dickensian elements: confused identities, intricate and surprising family relationships, dream visions, and doubles. Both tale and novel are centrally about learning to shed surface assumptions in favor of a method of perception flexible enough to reveal underlying connections. Chapter 2 first establishes that ―Bluebeard‖ underlies Anne Brontë‘s The Tenant of Wildfell Hall (1848). Even though Brontë, unlike Dickens, does not explicitly allude to fairy tales in this novel, the heroine‘s marriage to a suspicious man, discovery of his villainy, and attempt to distance herself from him is exactly the process Bluebeard‘s wife undergoes. Second, ―Bluebeard‖ links Wildfell Hall to novels from which it otherwise seems quite different: Robert Louis Stevenson‘s Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde (1886) and Oscar Wilde‘s The Picture of Dorian Gray (1890). As Doppelgänger tales, these novels house the monstrous villain and the human self in the same person, thus making literal the violation of the borders of self. Chapter 3 explores how ―Beauty and the Beast‖ and ―Bluebeard‖ patterns vie for dominance in Jane Eyre and Wuthering Heights (both 1847). In Jane Eyre, they drive both the plot structure and the characterization of Rochester as a combined ―Beast figure‖ and ―Bluebeard figure.‖ But whereas Jane follows the trajectory of a fairy-tale protagonist, ultimately forging a new place in a new situation, no character enjoys such stability in Wuthering Heights. The novel portrays not typical ―selfhood‖ but something like the ―subjecthood‖ articulated in the psychoanalytic theory of Jacques Lacan. Whereas Jane Eyre and most fairy tales enact the fantasy of a person‘s reaching a satisfactory place or role in the world, Wuthering Heights depicts an essentially Lacanian subjecthood marked by instability and alienation. Finally, 5 Chapter 4 reveals the intersection of fey and fateful in Thomas Hardy‘s Tess of the D’Urbervilles (1891). Even though Hardy detested ―happily ever after‖ endings, he frequently borrowed discrete elements from fairy and folk tales. His deployment of fate takes on a new dimension when we note that ―fate‖ and ―fairy‖ come from the same Latin word, fatum. Hardy sets Tess up like a fairy-tale heroine, but whereas every dark fairy-tale plot is confirmed, every happy one is truncated or cruelly distorted. The novels I discuss are high-profile and various, demonstrating that incorporation of fairy-tale material was no fringe strategy. The frequency and variety with which authors deployed fairy tales requires us to keep them firmly in mind when we study Victorian fiction, lest we miss a crucial dimension of the novels‘ production and reception. 6 Acknowledgments With good reason do my three committee members, Charles LaPorte, Marshall Brown, and Jennifer Bean, appear on the front page of this document. They have been providing me with resources, writing advice, and invaluable mentoring since I took seminars with all of them during my first year of graduate school. Gillian Harkins and Raimonda Modiano opened the doors to the strange and fruitful realms of the theoretical texts that underpin some of the following chapters; I have not read books the same way since taking their classes. I am endlessly grateful to my various reading and writing group companions, who have provided just the kind of intellectual and congenial community I always wanted. Neither without them nor without all my other graduate school comrades can I imagine getting through these years. I have benefited from the staunch confidence of family and friends near and far—above all, I am grateful to my mom, a wellspring of support; to Becky, the ever-present giver of calm; and to Rachel, who turned up not a moment too soon. 7 Table of Contents Introduction………………………………………………………………………………………..8 Chapter One. ―Yet it looked so like it‖: Great Expectations and ―Beauty and the Beast‖………19 Chapter Two. One Flesh: Violence and Victorian Bluebeards…………………………………..44 Chapter Three. Bluebeard or the Beast? Patterns for Selfhood in Jane Eyre and Wuthering Heights……………………………………………………………………….84 Chapter Four. Happily Never After: Hardy, Tess, and the Fairy Tale Manqué………………...132 Conclusion……………………………………………………………………………………...167 Works Consulted………………………………………………………………………………..175 8 Introduction Victorian England was steeped in fairy tales and other stories of supernatural beings. Such tales appeared regularly and in many forms—art, poetry, children‘s literature, theatre, ballet, non-fiction writing. Quite naturally, they seeped into Victorian novels as well. But scholarship on fairy tales in Victorian novels is doubly inadequate: first, today‘s fairy-tale scholars tend to pigeonhole all Victorian texts as passé, reflections of a misguidedly conservative time that can only interest us now as a foil to later, more ―progressive‖ adaptations; second, too many scholars of the Victorian novel handle fairy tales with offhand or knee-jerk responses instead of serious engagement. This dissertation argues that we ought to investigate the rich intertextual relationship between fairy tales and Victorian novels in a thoroughgoing way. Such an investigation applies not only to writers like Charles Dickens who avowed an interest in fairy tales. There is no doubt that other novelists wrote with them in mind as well, because fairies and fairy tales were demonstrably ubiquitous throughout the nineteenth century. Victorian writers produced a plethora of short stories that were overt fairy-tale revisions. This Victorian use of fairy tales, fortunately, has received thorough attention in recent decades from several scholars, including Jack Zipes, Nina Auerbach, U.C. Knoepflmacher, Jason Harris, Roderick McGillis, Jennifer Schacker, Nicola Bown, Molly Clark Hillard, Caroline Sumpter, and Laurence Talairach-Vielmas. This previous scholarship has accomplished several things. It has shown that supposedly idle tales of fairies and pixies provided a space for Victorians to work through real concerns. It has brought to light many formerly obscure Victorian fairy tale writers. It has demonstrated the sheer pervasiveness of fairies and fairy tales in the Victorian period. It has made great progress in tracing the transmission of continental fairy tales and The Thousand and One Nights to Britain. But many scholars have been unwilling to move beyond the concrete 9 and historically demonstrable. A glaring casualty of scholarly hesitation to leave empirical territory is the relationship between fairy tales and fairy lore and the Victorian novel. Even though the majority of Victorian novels (highbrow and popular alike) contain at least one allusion to fairy tales or supernatural beings, comparatively few scholars have thoroughly probed the resulting intertextual possibilities. The traditional association of the Victorian novel with realism has not helped; too long, it discouraged discussions of the incorporation of fairies and fairy-tales as anything other than a sign of frivolity or immaturity. Increasingly, though, scholars have demolished the perception of a conflict between fanciful elements and the aims of realist fiction by showing that incorporating fairy tales into novels can actually contribute to their realism. Fairy tales appear most often in Victorian novels as passing allusions assumed to be meaningful to the reader. Sometimes fairy- tale comparisons offer more extensive illustrations. Pip‘s avowed intention in Great Expectations of emulating the knight in the tale who tears down