Critics' Views of the Orphan

View metadata, citation and similar papers at core.ac.uk brought to you by CORE provided by Stirling Online Research Repository 1 Orphans of British Fiction, 1880-1911 William David Floyd Submitted in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the award of Doctor of Philosophy English Studies University of Stirling September 2011 2 For Buddy, Boo and Flea and Dr. Ed Eleazer 3 Contents Acknowledgments and Declaration 4 Chapter 1: Introduction 5 Chapter 2: The Wretch in the Hovel: Predecessors of the Fin-de-siécle Orphan 54 Chapter 3: Stoker’s Emblematic Orphans 84 Chapter 4: Rebellious Orphans 123 Chapter 5: The Orphan Island 156 Chapter 6: Orphans of Empire 200 Chapter 7: Orphans in Haunted Arcadia 236 Conclusion 289 Bibliography 293 4 Acknowledgements I would like to thank my wife, Chanel, for all of the encouragement, support and understanding that someone could ask for. You are my best friend. Thank you too to my children, Ella and Liam, who put up with this third child in their house. Thanks to my mother for the numerous get-aways at Chez Katherine‟s, and to my sister, Jennifer, for a reliable source of humor. I love and appreciate you all more than I can say. I am indebted to my supervisor, Glennis Byron, not only for working alongside me and challenging me throughout this entire project, but for her hospitality and generosity. I consider it a privilege to have been able to work with you. Thanks also to my secondary supervisor, Dale Townsend, for your insight and assistance. Declaration I declare that this thesis is my own work and that all critical and other sources (literary and electronic) have been specifically and properly acknowledged, as and when they occur in the body of my text. William David Floyd 30 September 2011 5 Chapter 1: Introduction “Get thee gone. Get thee gone. Thy mother dwells not in this city.” Oscar Wilde, “The Star Child” Intentions and Definitions The “long nineteenth century”1 might also be called “the century of the orphan.” From the notable emergence of orphan figures in late eighteenth-century literature, through early- and middle-period Victorian fiction, and, as this study argues, well into the fin-de-siécle, this potent literary type is remarkable for its consistent recurrence and its metamorphosis as a register of cultural conditions. The remarkable ubiquity of orphans in the literature of these periods encourages inquiry into their metaphoric implications and the manner in which they function as barometers of burgeoning social concerns. Despite the consistency of their appearance in works of these periods, the cultural elements to which they are literary responses alter significantly toward the century‟s end. My primary aim in this study is to examine the noticeable difference in orphans of genre fiction of the fin-de-siécle from their predecessors in works including first-wave Gothic and the majority of Victorian fiction, noting the variance in their symbolic references. 1 The term “the long nineteenth-century” was coined by British Marxist author Eric Hobsbawn as being 1789-1914. Hobsbawn lays out his theories in The Age of Revolution, 1789-1848; The Age of Capital, 1848-1875; and The Age of Empire, 1875-1914. 6 I have chosen to examine genre fiction specifically, for it offers non-traditional depictions of orphans that are not present in realist and domestic narratives, which tend to express a preoccupation with the “feminine” concerns of the home, the concept of the nuclear family, and parental influence. Furthermore, orphans of realist and domestic works typically allude to economic concerns and notions of social class that are not an issue with the fin-de-siécle orphan. Likewise, realist and domestic texts predominantly present the ideal family as the reliable emblem of stability to which the orphan aspired for its promise of security both financial and psychological. Late-century genre fiction, however, whether in the form of second-wave Gothic, science-fiction, imperial romance or fantasy, instead is disruptive and anxious, offering orphan narratives bereft of the stable home and dealing with “male” concerns of action and adventure, and is notable for its allusions to cultural factors particular to the fin-de-siécle, such as degeneration, sexual ambiguity and imperial enterprise, which were particularly threatening to notions of patriarchy and masculinity.1 These variations in conception and depiction of orphanhood were the result of several factors. For one, deviations emerged in literary representations of the family, that unit to which the orphan is intrinsically linked; the ideal family, that attrahent to which the orphan drifted so frequently and naturally in earlier texts, gradually declined as a realistic notion, and even became targeted and maligned by some authors. In addition, the consideration of other previously marginalized figures, such as women, criminals and foreigners, altered the presentation of the different and outcast. 1 Mallet notes, for example, that the “picturesque elements” of Kipling‟s Kim “distinguish [the novel] from the realistic fiction of the nineteenth century” (119). Daly remarks that post-1880 romance and Gothic fiction has a connection with escapism and that “experiential reality was undergoing a fundamental mutation, and that the phantasmagorias of modern, global consumer society were closer to the dream than to nineteenth-century realism” (161). 7 The years 1880-1911 form the parameters of this study for several reasons. 1880 marks the period when anxieties particular to the fin-de-siécle begin to manifest themselves, with genre literature of the period being particularly symptomatic of their development. The earliest text I examine is Robert Louis Stevenson‟s adventure novel Treasure Island, published in 1883, which reveals that those anxieties had already begun to loom on the period‟s psychic landscape. The decade examined in Holbrook Jackson‟s study of the fin-de-siécle, The Eighteen Nineties (1913), falls into the center of my own. Jackson notes that the final ten years of the decade were “remarkable for a literary and artistic renaissance” and “a new sense of patriotism” that degenerated respectfully into decadence and jingoism.1 How portraits of orphans relate to these factors is part of my thesis. I felt it important to consider the trajectory of this development of the orphan figure beyond the turn of the century as well; therefore my study extends into the Edwardian period, where I make particular emphasis on the era‟s children‟s fantasy, whose renditions of the orphan are particularly salient and revealing. 1911 is the year of publication of the latest narratives I consider, J.M. Barrie‟s Peter Pan and Francis Hodgsen Burnett‟s The Secret Garden. I chose this year as well at the suggestion of Juliet Nicolson‟s The Perfect Summer: England 1911, Just Before the Storm.2 Nicolson discusses England in the summer at the end of the Edwardian period, just prior to the advent of the Great War, a period that compelled Ben 1 Jackson 62. 2 Nicolson, Juliet. The Perfect Summer: England 1911, Just Before the Storm. New York: Grove Press, 2006. 8 Tillet to claim that the country was on the verge of collapse, and Winston Churchill to write in his diary, “all the world is changing at once.”1 Colin Manlove states that the protagonist of the eighteenth-century novel “often finds out what he or she is, while in the nineteenth-century novel the process is one of learning what one may become.”2 This generalization applies as well to the role of the orphan, who in late eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century literature is often in pursuit of his or her true identity, or is in the service of a reform moral aimed at societal improvement, in either case signaling the fulfillment of some potential. Later versions of the orphan tend toward a more ominous nature, frequently portending some form of psychological malleability, degeneration both moral and physical, or the reality of an unreconciled orphan condition, a disquieting implication of “what one may become.” The orphan of fin-de-siécle genre fiction becomes less a contrasting referent to ensure family validity or a convention speaking to social reform, as was often the case in earlier manifestations, and more a potentially wildly unstable entity or permanently unparented casualty. Whereas in earlier texts the orphan is a sympathetic character, parentless or abandoned, the late-century orphan is sometimes relentlessly autonomous, dangerously individualistic, and even capable of metaphorical and even literal acts of patricide. Orphanhood in earlier narratives is a result of wretched adult figures or of a mechanized and impersonal society, but in later texts it emerges instead to speak to crises particular to the end of the century. And while in earlier fiction orphanhood often proves a temporary 1 Tillet (1860-1943) was a Christian Socialist and Founder and Secretary of the National Transport Workers‟ Federation; Churchill (1874-1965) was Liberal Party Secretary in 1911 and served as Prime Minister during World War II. 2 Manlove “Kingsley” 214. 9 predicament capable of reparation, fin-de-siécle genre fiction often presents it as an unalterable state, a persisting and at times even desired condition. While much criticism has been written concerning various interpretations of the orphan of late-eighteenth and particularly early to middle periods of Victoria‟s reign, virtually no consideration has been made of the way fin-de-siécle conditions produced portrayals of this figure, particularly in the later genre literature upon which this study will concentrate. Indeed, the majority of criticism concerning orphans focuses on the aspect of the secular moral which they provided, for instance, in regards to the oppression of women or the wretched conditions of the poor. But once the urgency of that moral seems diminished, and emphasis shifts instead, for example, to the threat posed by the New Woman or the implications of the evident degenerative potential of the lower classes, the symbolic import of the orphan shifts as well.

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