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UMI A Bell & Howell Infonnation Company 300 NorthZeeb Road, Ann Arbor MI 48106-1346 USA 313/761-4700 800/521-0600 TECHNOLOGIES OF CULTURE; SELF-HELP AND MASCULINITY IN NINETEENTH-CENTURY BRITAIN DISSERTATION Presented in Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements for the Degree Doctor o f Philosophy in the Graduate School o f the Ohio State University By Jean Ann Gregorek, M.A. The Ohio State University 1998 Dissertation Committee: Professor David G: Riede, Advisor Approved by: Professor Audrey Jaffe, Advisor Professor Marlene Longenecker Advisors, English Graduate Program UMI Number: 9911198 UMI Microform 9911198 Copyright 1999, by UMI Company. All rights reserved. This microform edition is protected against unauthorized copying under Title 17, United States Code. UMI 300 North Zeeb Road Ann Arbor, Ml 48103 ABSTRACT In this dissertation I explore the cultural program of "self-help" in nineteenth- century novels and essays in order to elaborate the ways in which the ideal of self­ culture became an internal process of character-building which was applied first to working-class males and then to Victorian society as a whole. My premise is that the influential Amoldian articulation of culture (the foundation of institutionalized literary study) gradually came to be established through the social technology of Self-help, a technology which emerged in popular conduct manuals claiming to transcend class barriers. The chapters entitled "Technologies of Culture" (Parts One and Two), combine readings of Elizabeth Gaskell's North and South. Dinah Mulock Craik's John Halifax. Gentleman. Arnold's Culture and Anarchy, and the "self-help" sermons of Charles Kingsley, working through the lens of Foucault's Discipline and Punish and his essays on govemmentality in order to demonstrate that Victorian Self-help produced a further refinement of Foucaultian disciplinary techniques. I argue that Self-help and its various incarnations in the mid-Victorian period adapted elements of the eighteenth-century cult of domesticity to forge a new, specifically masculine character-ideal which promised individual cultural capital. Chapter Four, "Narratives of Improvement," considers Dickens's Bleak House and Great Expectations alongside popular magazine fiction as illustrations of masculine agency derived through aesthetic self-development. This section highlights the numerous complications which arose in writing the lives of the social climbers who subscribed to Smiles's philosophy of success—the narrative disjunctions and displacements necessary to uncover the secret that beneath a ragged exterior beats the heart of a "true" gentleman; the parallels between delinquency and excessive ambition; the intertwining of self-narratives with narratives of criminality. ii The final section, "Narratives of Ressentiment." focuses on the anxieties about masculinity which were triggered in the gradual process of the internalization of bourgeois culture and the increasing opposition of a masculine high cultural norm to a supposedly corrupt and effeminate bourgeois sphere Here I examine works which explicitly rehearse, but also counter, the Smilesian Self-help paradigm—novels which offer an aesthetic education as the road to improvement but inevitably prove that such a solution is doomed to fail, foundering on the lack of adequate "masculine" attributes on the part of enfeebled protagonists and on the inherent contradictions in late- Victorian views of culture itself. Of particular interest in this vein are such proto- modemist texts as George Gissing's Bom in Exile and The Odd Women. Fredric Jameson's characterization of Gissing as the quintessential novelist of Nietzschean ressentiment is called upon, and I further propose that The Genealogv of Morals constitutes another influential version of late-Victorian self-help, reading Gissing and Nietzsche together as examples of the fin de siecle male sentimental and, as a result, suggesting important revisions to the standard trajectory of literary modernism. In its attention to gender, as well as in its attempt to situate the development of what Ian Hunter terms the "ethical work ethic" of Self-help in relation to nineteenth-century class conflict, my project differs from Chris Baldick's Gramscian account of the rise of literary study and from the genealogy recently put forward by Hunter. Retuming "culture" to the political context of the nineteenth century ultimately leads me to argue that the institutional legacy it has left for contemporary literary and cultural studies remains contaminated by the masculinist tendencies which came to be crystallized in much British high modemism. Ill ACKNOWLEDGMENTS This project has been a very long time in the making and many people have offered me invaluable assistance and encouragement along the way. First and foremost I would like to express my heartfelt appreciation to my wonderfully supportive committee: David G. Riede, Audrey Jaffe, and Marlene Longenecker. There is no way I can ever thank any of you enough—but I really don't think you could have done more. I also need to thank my family, Gerald Gregorek, Rita Gregorek, and my sister, Susan Gregorek, for the many years of inspiration they have provided and for the abundant patience they have continually displayed, and for rescuing me more times than I can count. I would like to note my gratitude towards those besides my dissertation committee members who have taken the time to read and comment on various drafts of this project: Cathy Shuman, Francesca Sawaya, Jacki Spangler, John Heins, Susan Ritchie, Vassilis Lambropoulos, Beth Ina, and Bruce Robbins. And there are many friends, colleagues and teachers with whom I have argued, consulted and conferred; people who have explained new perspectives, who have sustained me intellectually, and who have generally helped me to keep body and soul together. In no particular order, I would like to acknowledge David Howard, Judith Mayne, Anita Pacheco, Christina Moore, Joel Woller, Kendra Hovey, Jacki Spangler, Loren Lazarony, Bruce iv Robbins, Susan Ritchie, Donna De George, Pejmaan Fallah, Reza Reyazi, Yoshia Fumhashi, Tammy Birk, Ken Petri, Wendy Somerson, Karen Woodrum, Grace Ellis, Jack Gruenhagen, Margie Prince, John Heins, Jay Slawney, Margrit Froelich, Josh Piker, Cathy TufarieMo, Mark Wyatt, Kelly Knuth, Chris Love, Kerry Vachta, Elaine Comegys, Dismas Masolo, Shannon Cates, Ruth Hoff, Kurt Miyazaki, Marianne Whelchel, Eric Horsting, Chris Hill, David Duff, Gary Famell, and Clare McGregor. And thanks to all the graduate students in Marlene Longenecker's Dissertation Reading Group: Beth Ina, Julia Keller, Andy Evans, Ken MacNeil, Elizabeth Patnoe, Karin Jacobson, and Paul Eisenstein. Much credit for the completion of this project goes to the tireless librarians at the Olive Kettering Library at Antioch College: Joe Cali, Steven Duffy, Janet Hulm, April Spisak, Jan Miller, and especially Patrick Cates for their generosity with their time and their invariably professional assistance. I must also mention my sincere appreciation of the many amazing students at Antioch College who make learning and teaching such a pleasure. Finally, an extra special thanks to Francesca Sawaya for seeing me through this from start to finish, for reading innumerable drafts, for never tiring of hearing me complain—I could not have done this without you. VITA April 2, 1960......................................................Bom, Columbus, Ohio, U.S.A. 1988......................................................................M.A., English, The University of York, York, England 1988-1994........................................................... Graduate Teaching Associate, The Ohio State University Department of English, Columbus, Ohio 1994-present....................................................... Assistant Professor of Literature, Antioch College, Yellow Springs, Ohio PUBLICATIONS Jean Gregorek. "Horror is What A Girl Might Feel"; Narrative Erotics in Depression-Era Pulp Fiction." Imagine That: Essavs on Imaees of Women in the Media. Ann C. Hall, editor. Greenwood Press, forthcoming Fall 1998. FIELDS OF STUDY Major Field: English VI TABLE OF CONTENTS Abstract li