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Exoticism and Mass Media in Nineteenth-Century British Fiction

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Exoticism and Mass Media in Nineteenth-Century British Fiction Automatically Popular: Exoticism and Mass Media in Nineteenth-Century British Fiction By Bethany Shepherd M.A. University of Arizona, 2000 Dissertation Submitted in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the Degree of Doctor of Philosophy in the Department of English at Brown University PROVIDENCE, RHODE ISLAND MAY 2011 Copyright Page This dissertation by Bethany Shepherd is accepted in its present form by the Department of English as satisfying the dissertation requirement for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy. Date____________ _______________________________________ Kevin McLaughlin, Advisor Recommended to the Graduate Council Date____________ _______________________________________ William Keach, Reader Date____________ _______________________________________ Vanessa Ryan, Reader Approved by the Graduate Council Date____________ _______________________________________ Peter M. Weber, Dean of the Graduate School iii Curriculum Vitae Bethany Shepherd holds a master’s degree from the University of Arizona and a bachelor’s degree from Kalamazoo College. She currently teaches courses in writing, literature and media studies at Oakland University and has also taught courses at both Brown University and the University of Arizona. Her work on nineteenth-century British literature and culture is in preparation for publication. She was born in Michigan in 1974. iv Acknowledgments I would like to thank Kevin McLaughlin, whose work inspired me to think about literature in a new way, and whose support enabled this project from its very beginning. I am very grateful for the advice and encouragement of William Keach; he helped me find my way again at crucial points in my writing process. Vanessa Ryan’s incisive written comments and suggestions have been extremely valuable in the completion of my dissertation. Early phases of my project benefited greatly from Nancy Armstrong’s insight and direction. Several other members of the Brown University community have supported me in substantial ways. I particularly wish to thank Rebecca Summerhays, Sian Roberts, John Melson, Lea Snyder, John Funchion, and David Babcock for their warm friendship. Lorraine Mazza’s generosity and professionalism has made all the difference. Financial assistance from Brown University’s Graduate School made it possible for me to complete my research while living with my family in Michigan. Most of all, I am deeply grateful to my parents, Gary and Lauren Shepherd, and to Michael Quesenberry, for their patience and unfailing support. v Contents Acknowledgements v Introduction: The Familiar Face of Exoticism 1 Chapter 1 Mechanical Reproduction and De Quincey’s Opium-writing 28 Chapter 2 Imperial Expansion: The Serial Character of Mass Media and Charles Dickens’s Bleak House 61 Chapter 3 Choosing the Unpopular: Mass Media, Realism, and Romance in Villette 101 Chapter 4 Exile and Evolution: Cultural Inheritance in The Moonstone 154 Conclusion: Mass Media and Cultural Reproduction 201 Works Cited 201 Notes 215 vi INTRODUCTION The Familiar Face of Exoticism Early nineteenth-century British fiction began supplementing the language of progress and civilization with another kind of image to describe the emerging mass media. Fiction began using imagery associated with oriental, uncivilized, barbaric, and savage motifs to narrate the foreign characteristics of its own reproducible print medium. This strategy emerged with the application of technologies like the steam engine that dramatically increased the scale of production and distribution of mechanically reproducible media. As Britain’s industrializing economy expanded British imperialism, its fiction incorporated the resulting influx of foreign imagery as the parallel expansion of its cultural domain. Even as this material was used to reinforce a central national identity, the representation of mass media as foreign simultaneously invoked the power of fiction to destabilize cultural traditions as the condition of expansion. The connection I propose between exoticism in fiction and the rise of mass media will appear less far-fetched from the outset if we recall how dramatically our present-day world is transformed by digital media; because of the internet, changes in the practices of reading and writing may be measured on an almost daily scale. In the first few decades of the nineteenth century, the mechanization of the technologies for producing print and other types of media similarly changed so rapidly that a literary culture unlike anything that had ever existed before came into being as if by magic. Charles Knight was one of 1 many who believed that the mass production of print media afforded a unique opportunity for the advancement of civilization. Even if one agreed with Adam Smith that “all nobler parts of the human character may be, in a great measure, obliterated and extinguished in the great body of the people” as the nation’s division of labor increased, the sudden possibility of cheap mass produced periodicals appeared to offer the means of countering the “mutilating” effects of labor with education (736-7). Affordable print material seemed to promise a way of counter-balancing, if not altogether eliminating, “the gross ignorance and stupidity which, in a civilized society, seem so frequently to benumb the understandings of all the inferior ranks of people” (Smith 740). And indeed it is difficult to escape the similarity between the early nineteenth-century belief in the power of technology and industry to overcome ignorance and suffering and the late twentieth-century belief in the power of the Internet to overcome the social injustice and geography. 1 Beneficent forecasts about the educational reach of mass print culture appeared to remove Smith’s indictment of the division of labor and encouraged the unrestrained celebration of the economic growth it made possible. Knight’s response is characteristic in its optimism, but unique in its emphasis on the “copying” process of print media as the key that will make the good thing of education available to the laboring classes: It has been said that the bent of civilization is to make good things cheap. […] the more the ‘bent of civilization’ leads to an extension of demand, the more will scientific knowledge, and the division of labour, be called into employment. But this is peculiarly the case in all copying processes, among which printing is the foremost. (127) The rhetoric of civilization and progress, illustrated in this passage, climaxed in The Great Exhibition of 1851.2 Its purpose was to display Great Britain’s imperialism as the 2 greatest synthesis between technology and art ever achieved. Knight identifies the reproducibility of print media in particular as the vanguard of changing economies of scale that would advance all branches of civilization. His vision of knowledge increasing in proportion to the increasing divisions of labor also indirectly implies that print media will transform existing economic relationships from top to bottom. It is this transformative potential, I argue, that fiction engages more fully through exoticism. The marked popularity of the exotic in fiction is linked to its power as a device for generating suspense, melodrama, or sentiment provides; its popularity also points to the way fiction supplemented the rhetoric of civilization that was often overtly paternalistic. It is very much to this point that Knight’s weekly Volume series of useful literature for the poor (1844-6) ultimately failed to compete successfully with more entertaining fiction. This was evidence enough for Q.D. Leavis that an anti-intellectual popular taste was by then well-established (162). Thus far, critics have primarily discussed the transformations brought about by mass media through the categories of reader, audience, author, publisher, editor and technology. Relations between these constituents are variously summarized as print- capitalism, mass culture, and popular culture. Though I am in part referring to the same cultural content indicated by all of these terms, my use of “mass media” is most indebted to Kevin McLaughlin’s term “mass mediacy” by which he refers to the matrix of material and ideological forces generated by the simultaneous relations among all of these components. My methodology is to trace the relationship between the exotic content of fiction and the larger cultural changes associated with mass media. From the outset, we can broadly observe that it made a kind of sense to exoticize a medium that was visibly 3 changing the culture from the inside in ways that were often difficult to fully understand or anticipate. The exoticism in nineteenth-century literature, particularly orientalism, has its most influential roots in Romantic poetry, a point of discussion to which I will return later in the introduction and in chapter one. But the novel was quick to adapt exoticism as a means of authenticating its representation authority and maintaining its increasing popularity as entertainment. Austen tartly rejects Radcliffe’s heady gothic mixtures of sensation, sentiment set in Europe not only through the romance-inspired misperceptions of Catherine in Northanger Abbey , but also through the realistic portrayal of the dark, corrupting influence of England’s slave trade on the domestic center of Mansfield Park . Walter Scott’s protagonist Waverly comes to desire the reproductively appropriate native English Rose through the ways in which she contrasts with the object of his first immature passion, the alluringly exotic Scottish Flora
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