Ageing and Imperial Mobility in the British Novel, 1845–1945 Ilsu Sohn

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Ageing and Imperial Mobility in the British Novel, 1845–1945 Ilsu Sohn Ageing and Imperial Mobility in the British Novel, 1845–1945 Ilsu Sohn A dissertation submitted in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy University of Washington 2016 Reading Committee: Laura Chrisman, Chair Juliet Shields Jesse Oak Taylor Program Authorized to Offer Degree: English © Copyright 2016 Ilsu Sohn University of Washington Abstract Ageing and Imperial Mobility in the British Novel, 1845–1945 Ilsu Sohn Chair of the Supervisory Committee: Professor Laura Chrisman Department of English This dissertation examines representations of ageing in eight British novels from the mid- nineteenth to mid-twentieth century. The four chapters and one epilogue explore how the novels’ rewriting of the Bildungsroman gives rise to novelistic genres or types of writing, such as realism, detective fiction, modernism, and modern satire. I compare and contrast cultural assumptions of the ageing of each novel with those of the Bildungsroman so as to elucidate the ideological logic and contradiction of the novelistic genres that the individual novels represent. Scholars on the Bildungsroman tend to attend primarily to the evolution or variations of the genre in isolation, rather than how the genre has been revisited by other genres for their self- fashioning. This dissertation illustrates how to investigate the emergence and characteristics of novelistic genres while focusing on their constant interaction with each other. This dissertation also emphasizes historically-modulated spatial conditions for ageing. The modern history of Britain features the earlier and quicker development of capitalist social relations and imperial political-economic expansion. Culturally diverse forms of movement arise in particular moments in this British history of imperial expansion and the development of world-economic system, and enable or limit British subjects’ normative ageing depending on their class, gender, ethnicity or other social qualifications. Among distinct forms of imperial movement this dissertation covers are voyages out for financial or military enterprise, the return of gone-native British subjects alongside the reverse ‘invasion’ of colonial natives, British women’s universalizing Western values to imperial peripheries, and the quest for a recuperative power for the Western civilization in distant lands. Investigating narratives of ageing in eight novels by situating them in these contexts of imperial movement, the dissertation illuminates hitherto unnoticed formal and thematic peculiarities of each novel and its genre. Ultimately, this dissertation attempts to establish a methodology to study the history of the British novel. Table of Contents Introduction: …………………………………………………..…………………………………..1 Chapter I: An Impossible Bildung and the Bounds of Realism and Britishness in Vanity Fair…28 Chapter II: Coming-of-Age and Its Contradiction in The Moonstone and The Sign of Four……66 1. The Moonstone and the Contradictions of Blake’s Coming-of-age……………………....71 2. The Sign of Four and the Severance between Watson’s Bildung and Holmes’s Detection..91 Chapter III: A Passage to India and Sunset Song: Two Modernist Rewritings of the Bildungsroman………………………………………………………………………………….106 1. A Passage to India, Adela’s Frustrated Bildung, and Modernism……………………….110 2. Sunset Song and the Coming-of-age as a Collective Subject………………...………….127 Chapter IV: Satire and Ageing as Endless Repetition in Evelyn Waugh’s A Handful of Dust and W. Somerset Maugham’s The Razor’s Edge…………………………………………………....145 1. Modern Satire and Modernism………………………………………………………….146 2. A Handful of Dust and the Failure of Rebirth……………………………………………156 3. The Razor’s Edge, Endless Ageing, and the Decline of Satire…………..……………...170 Epilogue: Rebirth through the Past and ‘Natural’ Ageing in Between the Acts………….….…187 Works Cited………………………………………………………………………………….…214 i Acknowledgements My first thanks go to my adviser Laura Chrisman for her guidance and mentorship. Her comments and questions kept challenging and inspiring me. The feedback and advice I received from my committee members Juliet Shields and Jesse Oak Taylor were also invaluable at several steps of research and writing. My friend Bob Hodges helped to edit multiple drafts at their final stage. I will always be grateful for the kindness and generosity he has shown me ever since 2011 when I came to America. Tyler Babbie, Eric Morel, and Alex McCauley kindly proofread my writings, too. Many friends, colleagues, and teachers contributed to this work in both tangible and intangible ways. I look forward to opportunities to repay their support and good wishes. Finally, this dissertation is dedicated to my wife and family. I could never have finished this work and be writing these words now without their steadfast support, patience, and love. Thoughts of them rescued me from numerous moments of anxiety, fear, and frustration. I hope writing this dissertation has made me a better son, brother, and husband. No goal makes this dissertation more worthwhile. This journey is coming to an end. Five years of work, experience, and partnership in Seattle will live on within me. At a café in Seattle on July the 5th, 2016, looking over Green Lake. 1 Introduction This dissertation explores representations of ageing in a variety of British novels from the mid-nineteenth to mid-twentieth century. The four chapters focus on the ways in which representations of ageing in eight novels contribute to the development of novelistic genres, particularly realism, detective fiction, modernism, and modern satire. The years also mark an era of imperial political-economic expansion and of the development of transportation technology, during which time increasing numbers of people, items, and capital moved between the metropole and imperial peripheries. This mobility provided opportunities for Western subjects to come of age and mature both financially and spiritually. Among distinct forms of imperial movement this dissertation analyzes are voyages out for financial or military enterprise, the return of gone-native British subjects alongside the reverse ‘invasion’ of colonial natives, British women’s involvement in universalizing Western values to imperial peripheries, and the quest for a recuperative power for the Western civilization in distant lands. Investigating narratives of ageing in eight novels by situating them in these contexts of imperial movement over the years, the dissertation ultimately attempts to provide a new framework to study the history of the British novel. The Bildungsroman is a representative novelistic genre that centers upon the biographical form and stylizes the story of individual characters’ ageing and eventual socialization. As we shall see in details below, academia generally locates the origin of the classical Bildungsroman in the late-eighteenth German literary tradition, particularly in Johann Wolfgang von Goethe’s Wilhelm Meisters Lehrjahre, and regards the coming-of-age story as a cultural form of reconciliation between the individual and society. British novels written during the Victorian and 2 modern periods and widely considered as Bildungsromane include, but are not limited to, David Copperfield, Jane Eyre, Jude the Obscure, The Story of an African Farm, The Way of All Flesh, The Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, The Voyage Out and The Rainbow. However, this dissertation does not call attention to those novels commonly referred to as the Bildungsroman.1 Many of the novels this dissertation covers do not belong to the category of the Bildungsroman because of their primary themes and the brevity of the time their plot covers. Throughout this dissertation, I analyze eight novels roughly in chronological order: William Makepeace Thackeray’s Vanity Fair (1848), Wilkie Collins’s The Moonstone (1868), Arthur Conan Doyle’s The Sign of Four (1890), E. M. Forster’s A Passage to India (1924), Lewis Grassic Gibbon’s Sunset Song (1932), Evelyn Waugh’s A Handful of Dust (1934), W. Somerset Maugham’s The Razor’s Edge (1944), and Virginia Woolf’s Between the Acts (1941). The plot of The Sign of Four, for example, covers only a few days; Sherlock Holmes infamously never takes long to solve his cases. The novel that is discussed in the Epilogue—Between the Acts— depicts only a single day’s event: the modern English pageant. Instead of attempting to categorize the novels as Bildungsromane, I plan to elucidate how each of the eight novels rewrites or even radically transforms the classical Bildungsroman and represents ageing in a distinct fashion. The Bildungsroman per se is not the main focus of this dissertation; instead, it will be frequently referred to as a standard against which I analyze diverse forms of ageing stylized in the eight novels. The classical Bildungsroman speaks to particular historical and cultural conditions as we shall see below, and serves the ideological 1 For a study on the classical Bildungsroman, its European variations, and its eventual, if still arguable, decline in the early twentieth century, see Franco Moretti’s The Way of the World, which I believe remains the most comprehensive and authoritative. 3 purpose that those conditions require. This dissertation shows what happens when, in later periods of history, authors question the ideological assumptions of the Bildungsroman while continuing to utilize certain aspects of its structure in developing another novelistic genre. That is also the reason I often use, instead of the Bildung, the term ‘ageing’ which is a purely
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