The Ends of Aloneness: Scenes of Solitude in Nineteenth-Century Fiction

The Ends of Aloneness: Scenes of Solitude in Nineteenth-Century Fiction By Patricia Frank A dissertation submitted in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy (English) at the UNIVERSITY OF WISCONSIN-MADISON 2015 Date of final oral examination: 9/5/2014 This dissertation is approved by the following members of the Final Oral Committee: Susan D. Bernstein, Professor, English Caroline Levine, Professor, English Mario Ortiz-Robles, Associate Professor, English Theresa Kelley, Professor, English Mary Louise Roberts, Professor, History i Table of Contents Acknowledgments ….................................................................................................................... ii Abstract ….................................................................................................................................... iv Introduction: Negotiating Solitude in the Nineteenth-Century Novel ………………………….. 1 Chapter One: Romantic Aloneness Revisited: Domestic Solitude in Persuasion ...................... 36 Chapter Two: Across the Room, Across the Channel: Villette and Spatial Solitude .................. 68 Chapter Three: Alone Together or Just Alone?: Solitude, The Odd Women, and an Economics of Choice .……………………………………………………………………………...…........ 101 Chapter Four: Money and Mechanization: Institutional Solitude and Counterplots in Our Mutual Friend ………………………………………………………………………………... 131 Coda: What Nineteenth-Century Solitude Tells Us of Perceptions Today ….……………...… 163 Bibliography ………………………………………………………………………………….. 170 ii Acknowledgments At early points in this dissertation, several people wondered—politely—if doing a project on solitude might make things especially hard, turning the loneness of composition into active loneliness. Of course, there is this potential in writing, insofar as it's on us to bring our core ideas to light in a way that communicates. And even with a comfortable chair and iced tea and lemonade, it's surprisingly easy to feel that this task is just too much: too much for our words, our motivation, our basic ability to think straight. Luckily, as things turned out, I didn't often feel this loneness tip the scales into a funk, a fact that bolsters one claim of this work, which is that states of solitude do not have to equal loneliness. And actually, my writing process wasn't solo in many ways. Due to the kindness of certain souls whom I can only start thanking here, I never felt a void of support. Instead, I knew that I could draw on others' careful readings and thoughts, as well as on their tolerant ears. My advisor, Susan David Bernstein, was a model of calm leadership, always responding to my drafts with helpful and timely feedback. Caroline Levine, Mario Ortiz-Robles, Theresa Kelley, and Mary Louise Roberts are all warm souls and probing scholars of the type I aspire to be. To Justin Kolb and Karina Mendoza, your thoughts about learning and literature have helped me greatly over the years. I have valued picking your brains, but even more, your roles as friends: without them, the grind of graduate work would have had a much different face. To my in-laws, the Van Dams, thank you for always asking me how the dissertation was going, and, importantly, how I felt: did I still like what I was writing? Was it starting to weigh me down? You recognized the emotional component of a long project, and that you did so made me feel understood in special ways. To my wonderful Frank family—mother Bel, father Alan, iii sister Chris—thank you more than I can say for making my interests so deeply your own. It humbles me to think about how much care I've had from you, and to have had you as examples of honor, laughter, and great hearts and minds. For your play, for your faith in learning (how can I ever properly thank my parents for my education?), and for your loving principles, I am truly lucky to say that you are my family, my models, my tribe. To Lingo, our smartest purchase ever, thank you for being such a sweet friend. To Auggie and Annie, both of whom were born during this work's duration, as well as little A. number three (sex unknown; due in three weeks), thank you for being so life-affirming: you are my best, and you are the best. You make me smile and laugh and think, empathize and take deep breaths, and I couldn't cherish you more. You have so much liveliness inside your three-and- under selves, it constantly amazes me. It is my joy to be your mother, including hearing the older ones chat—your observations are like gold—and kissing you grandly every day. Doing so, I have learned that your dear Vovó is right: as lovely as you are everywhere, the neck is where the honey is. And lastly, to Mark, who will probably read these lines to both our dog and babies, thank you first for doing that, and then for your enduring support. The late-night snacks, the computer repairs, the cups of tea placed by my elbow helped me stay charged and see the light. There surely isn't a steadier husband, or one with a more twinkling eye. I love you and will always be grateful for your help and our work as a team. iv Abstract The Ends of Aloneness explores the role of solitude in nineteenth-century realist novels, making a case for the import of its partial nature, one that helps subjects navigate tensions and conflicts in their surroundings. Arguing for solitude's power in novels from this time because of its porosity, rather than in spite of it, The Ends of Aloneness seeks middle ground between pitfalls of Michel Foucault's vibrant theories of the era and Ian Watt's description of the novel genre's rise. The first outlook, which focuses on Victorian social surveillance, makes it easy to see distance as upsettingly compromised; with the second, it is easy to read aloneness through too much triumph as the basis of an ethos of liberal sovereignty. Working against both poles of thought, this project studies the hidden value of solitude's daily frictions, featuring writers who admit that being alone cannot be ''pure'' in a mechanized modern world, yet who show that partialness in solitude can be a boon, helping subjects mediate the plural demands of modernity. For Jane Austen, Charlotte Brontë, Charles Dickens, and George Gissing, taking a sound approach to distance means accepting alienation as a feature of everyday life, but also as its own answer, a kind of auto-antidote. To this end, they politicize what I call "solitary styles," particularly in gendered terms. For example, they show that if distance can be a unique trial for women, then it can be uniquely agentic, yielding room for spontaneity and deeply considered responses to restrictive cultural norms. Building on the work of scholars like Jeff Nunokawa, Christopher Lane, and Amanda Anderson, this project departs from recent ones by not privileging solitude that implies a rare event or set of possibilities. While this project does explore the thrills of choosing time apart, its full interest is in the mundane. Focusing respectively on women's time, women's space, v and economic organization of women's time and space, the first three chapters make a case for reading a trio of prominent texts—Persuasion, Villette, and The Odd Women—through an undernoted support for women's right to elective withdrawal. As for Dickens's Our Mutual Friend, while it shows women gaining ground through co-opting alienation, it cannot keep from wanting to contain female shrewdness as a rule, making it resist and bolster strains of social hypocrisy. Notably, the novels here craft endings that reward strong solitaries with affection. Without erasing solo resilience or impressive habits of mind, they imagine solitaries ''alone together'' in connections that take cues from canny ways of blending dictates from self and world—in other words, that take their cues from proactive distance itself. Thus, while the phrase ''the ends of aloneness'' speaks to aims or goals for conduct, another aspect has to do with formal choices in closing scenes with regards to the marriage plot. Together, the works included here reveal how solitude's imposition, yet imperfection, in modern times can yield new ways of managing frictive, demanding social codes. Further, they assert that women can especially profit from distance as a site of tactical acts. And third, they crystallize their views through key refashionings of the traditional marriage plot. Using it to show the lure of a strong solo stance, they do not resolve this stance through appeals to unity, but make it a guiding light for a shared commitment to distance, a way of being jointly apart that allows eccentric views to combine with others' and thrive, yet also merges them into even more habits of compromise. 1 Introduction: Negotiating Solitude in the Nineteenth-Century Novel At first blush, the novel Quite Alone, serialized in All the Year Round in 1864 and written mostly by George Augustus Sala, seems to gesture on every level to the perils of solitude. Its heroine, Lily, shy and subdued, becomes prey to unflattering gossip about the depths of her separation, with people from all walks of life speculating about her psyche and her personal circumstances. For his part, Sala, a journalist, had promised to finish writing the tale while working in the Americas, yet had a crisis from overexertion made worse by the trials of his expatriation: "I was in … a new world," he would later write, "baited and hated, always abused" (ii-iii).1 Wringing out pages like "drops of blood" for several brutal, exhausting months, Sala arrived at a breaking point in the summer of 1864 (ii). He had writer's block; he was horribly anxious; he had promised much more than he could do. And so, he stopped sending new installments to the office of All the Year Round. His editors there, in ''desperation" (iii), quickly scrambled to find a new writer to finish up the story's threads.

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