Homeless Boys: Male Development and Imperial
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View metadata, citation and similar papers at core.ac.uk brought to you by CORE provided by Texas A&M Repository HOMELESS BOYS: MALE DEVELOPMENT AND IMPERIAL EXPANSION IN VICTORIAN FICTION A Dissertation by SOYOUN KIM Submitted to the Office of Graduate and Professional Studies of Texas A&M University in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of DOCTOR OF PHILOSOPHY Chair of Committee, Claudia Nelson Committee Members, Mary Ann O'Farrell Lucia Hodgson Brian Rouleau Head of Department, Maura Ives August 2017 Major Subject: English Copyright 2017 by Soyoun Kim ABSTRACT The purpose of this dissertation is to examine the ways in which traveling boys in Victorian fiction embody and complicate cultural ideas concerning the formation of masculinity and the imperial expansion. Both literary critics and historians of Victorian Britain have investigated how the discourse over the construct of masculinity intersects with the values of the domestic, seeking to challenge traditional thinking around the dichotomy of masculinity/femininity and public/domestic spheres. Extending upon recent studies of male domesticity, this dissertation focuses not on adult men who are defined in terms of the domestic but on boys who have no secure place within home/home country. I define boyhood as a state in which one is settled nowhere but is expected to demonstrate maturity by finding one's own home; it includes not only boys in the biological sense but also the marginalized boy-men with no rightful position in the domestic sphere and/or in the home country. Nineteenth-century British fictions often confirm the myth of male self-development through portraying boy characters' leaving and returning to home and home country. To reintegrate into those spaces, they must demonstrate their acquisition of manliness. By reading their rite of passage in terms of homelessness and at-homeness, I contend that the figure of the traveling boy helps to illuminate unresolved contradictions lurking within the Victorian idea of home building, whether the word "home" addresses the domestic space that is in opposition to the public sphere or the center of the empire that is in opposition to the foreign. ii One of my central arguments is that by associating boyhood with its national character, Victorian Britain celebrates its continuing advancement to the margins, as well as imagining its subjects being stably anchored at its center even while being away from it. Identifying themselves as displaced from the domestic space, boys seek a sense of at-homeness during journeys, and their homelessness is expected to contribute both to the establishment of a new household and to the expansion of the empire. While the dominant discourse of Victorian Britain asserts that male subjects contribute to the expansion of the home through leaving and returning to it, fictions illuminate that they come to lose their home irrecoverably instead of feeling at home anywhere. Boy characters' relationship with their home and their home country change while traveling, thereby changing nationhood as well. Although they attempt to transform certain places into their homes, such spaces cannot be the same as the home that they have left behind, and the idea of home itself becomes complicated. iii ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS First of all, I would like to express my deepest appreciation to my committee chair, Dr. Claudia Nelson, who guided and encouraged me every step of the way. Without her persistent help I would have felt like a lost child during my dissertation journey. I would also like to thank my committee members, Dr. Mary Ann O'Farrell, Dr. Lucia Hodgson, and Dr. Brian Rouleau, for their precious feedback and encouragement. Thanks also go to the Melbern G. Glasscock Center for Humanities Research for offering me the graduate research fellowship. I extend my gratitude to the friends I came to know in College Station−my church friends and friends at the English Department−for helping me to survive all the stress and loneliness. If I did not know them, I might not have found College Station homelike. I owe a huge debt of gratitude to my parents and my brother for always being there for me. I would not have finished this work without their never-ending trust and love. I also thank the guy who waited for me in South Korea for four years as my boyfriend and one year as my husband. I now return to you with a heart full of love, gratitude, and hope. iv TABLE OF CONTENTS Page ABSTRACT ……………………………………………………………………… ii ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS ……………………………………………………… iv TABLE OF CONTENTS ………………………………………………………… v CHAPTER I INTRODUCTION ................................................................................ 1 Victorian Domesticity and Gender ……………………………………. 1 The Boy's Self-Advancement and Nation Building………………….... 14 Chapter Overviews…………………………………………………….. 20 II HOMECOMING AND HOMEMAKING: THE CONSTRUCTION OF MIDDLE-CLASS MASCULINITY IN DAVID COPPERFIELD…… 26 Men's Journey to Marriage…………………………………………….. 31 A Child's Make-Believe Play………………………………………….. 53 Absent or Mad…………………………………………………………. 74 III HOMESICKNESS IN/FOR SCHOOL: DOMESTICITY AND BOYHOOD IN PUBLIC SCHOOL NARRATIVES………………… 83 Homesickness in the School………………………………………….... 88 Homesickness for the School………………………………………….. 114 Homeless Boys Who Know No Homesickness……………………….. 127 IV HOME-BUILDERS AND ROVERS: NATIONHOOD IN ISLAND ADVENTURE STORIES …………………………………………….. 141 Domestication in Foreign Islands ……………………………………... 148 Pirates as Lost Boys……………………………………………………. 179 V THE INDIAN-BORN WHITE BOY'S QUEST FOR HOME: KIM AS A TURN-OF-THE-CENTURY BILDUNGSROMAN……………….. 196 The Boy Who Has Never Left Home………………………………….. 205 Punch of "Baa, Baa, Black Sheep"−Social Pariah……………........ 207 Mowgli of The Jungle Books−Superhuman……………………..... 214 Kim of Kim−"Little Friend of All the World"…………………….. 217 The Son Who Does Not Return………………………………………... 229 v VI CONCLUSION……………………………………………………….. 251 WORKS CITED…………………………………………………………………... 254 vi CHAPTER I INTRODUCTION Victorian Domesticity and Gender This dissertation explores the ways in which the figure of the homeless boy embodies and complicates the Victorian discourse over the formation of masculinity and empire building. It is noteworthy that both adult and juvenile fictions of the nineteenth century frequently present male characters who travel outside their home and/or home country. Traveling boys and men are portrayed in various ways, appearing as orphans, public school students, colonialists, adventurers, and immigrants. Oliver Twist, Charles Dickens's famous orphan character, travels to London and navigates the urban criminal world until he reaches his final destination, a middle-class household. Pip, another orphaned Dickens character, leaves his hometown and occupies a lodging in London as a bachelor, until Magwitch returns from Australia to England and reunites with him. Public school narratives present schoolboys leaving their childhood homes and struggling to feel at home in an all-male environment. In Jane Eyre (1847), male characters such as Edward Rochester and St. John Rivers travel overseas, whether for trade or missionary purposes, while Jane Eyre remains in England and Bertha is confined to the domestic space as soon as she arrives in England. Marlow and Kurtz, the two main characters of Joseph Conrad's fin-de-siècle novella Heart of Darkness (1899), meet in the heart of Africa while both traveling far away from their home countries. Although some writers−especially female writers−portray traveling girls and women, it 1 is middle-class boys and unmarried men who are most frequently and systematically sent out of the home and home country, sometimes suffering from a sense of displacement and sometimes seeking to find a new home. Why do so many nineteenth-century British writers like to describe their male protagonists as homeless? How does the ideology concerning nation building relate to the issue of men's place at home? Importantly, the very meaning of "returning" becomes complicated in nineteenth- century British fictions with the journey motif. Some of the traveling male characters return, while others do not. For instance, in Heart of Darkness Marlow returns from Congo to England, unlike Kurtz who dies outside the national border. Yet the question of whether Marlow truly returns home is hard to answer; since what he experiences during his journey affects him so much, he may not feel "at home" any longer in the empire though he physically returns to his point of departure at the end of the story. Similarly, some characters who seemingly get reconnected to a domestic circle as a father and husband after growing up may remain emotionally homeless, cherishing the memory of the childhood home as the symbol of an irrecoverable past. As will be demonstrated in this dissertation, the problem of leaving and returning home complicates the definition of masculinity, as well as illuminating contradictions in the discourse over the expansion of the British Empire. Although this dissertation focuses mainly on texts that are set in sites conducive to male companionship, I attempt to expand the current interest in the intersection between the construction of masculinity and domestic ideology. Since the 1980s, nineteenth-century studies have challenged the traditional notion of separate spheres, 2 which is most famously articulated in Sesame and Lilies (1865), the published version of the text of two lectures that John Ruskin delivered at Manchester in 1864. 1 In this book Ruskin comments on the ways in which men and women function in their separate spheres. While we cannot consider Ruskin as representing all male writers' views on gender, "Of Queen's Gardens," one of the two lectures, tells us something about nineteenth-century discourses of women's role in the home. Ruskin associates the ideal of womanhood with the image of an idealized domestic space that is free "not only from all injury, but from all terror, doubt, and division" (77) of the outside world. Adopting the metaphor of a garden, Ruskin portrays an ideal woman occupying the center of the home as well as extending influences over its boundary: And wherever a true wife comes, this home is always round her.