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Genre, Gender, and the Cartographical Imagination in Popular British Literature, 1830-1880

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Genre, Gender, and the Cartographical Imagination in Popular British Literature, 1830-1880 City University of New York (CUNY) CUNY Academic Works All Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects 10-2014 Standard Deviations: Genre, Gender, and the Cartographical Imagination in Popular British Literature, 1830-1880 Taylor R. Kennamer Graduate Center, City University of New York How does access to this work benefit ou?y Let us know! More information about this work at: https://academicworks.cuny.edu/gc_etds/488 Discover additional works at: https://academicworks.cuny.edu This work is made publicly available by the City University of New York (CUNY). Contact: [email protected] STANDARD DEVIATIONS: GENRE, GENDER, AND THE CARTOGRAPHICAL IMAGINATION IN POPULAR BRITISH LITERATURE, 1830-1880 by TAYLOR REBECCA KENNAMER A dissertation submitted to the Graduate Faculty in English in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy, The City University of New York 2014 © 2014 TAYLOR REBECCA KENNAMER All Rights Reserved ii This manuscript has been read and accepted by the Graduate Faculty in English in satisfaction of the dissertation requirement for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy. Talia C. Schaffer Date Chair of Examining Committee Mario DiGangi Date Executive Officer Talia C. Schaffer Anne Humpherys Richard Kaye Supervisory Committee THE CITY UNIVERSITY OF NEW YORK iii Abstract STANDARD DEVIATIONS: GENRE, GENDER, AND THE CARTOGRAPHICAL IMAGINATION IN POPULAR BRITISH LITERATURE, 1830-1880 by TAYLOR REBECCA KENNAMER Adviser: Professor Talia C. Schaffer While cartography is understood to undergird the spatial interventions integral to Victorian reform in areas such as sewerage and housing, little critical attention has been paid to the influence of cartographical discourse in itself, rather than through its concrete products, as a force that fundamentally altered nineteenth-century conceptions of self, other, and environment. Standard Deviations fills that gap, studying the changing parameters of spatial epistemology by monitoring expanding and contracting definitions of bodily deviance across four generic modes historically associated with the nineteenth century: detective, sensation, and domestic fiction, and the household management guide. Altered perceptions of spatial reality and possibility result in altered definitions of deviance, and those definitions in turn manifest in generic innovations. The texts considered here outline a dilemma: the tension between scientific and personal, imaginative mapping practices. As Chapter One shows, Martin Chuzzlewit delineates Charles Dickens’s engagement with the issue of accurate spatial perception, particularly in the urban milieu. For Dickens, mapping is freighted with ethical cargo, so that accuracy of vision is equated with moral sight – the science of cartography – and imaginative modes of mapping suggest ambiguity. Dickens employs detective fiction to discipline his imaginative; thus cartographical discourse and generic conventions develop symbiotically. Chapter Two continues the exploration of deviance within the urban context in Wilkie Collins’s The Woman in White, a meditation on the over-determined status of middle-class female bodies. Collins’s streetwalking character is iv illegible because she harbors too many possible identities (wife, servant, prostitute, criminal, victim). Chapters three and four demonstrate the influence of cartographic discourse on the domestic, an area coded by the Victorians as separate, yet highly permeable. Household management guides were verbal maps that employed cartographical strategies in order to subject domestic space to discipline and regulation. Such texts and domestic fiction show the development of a semiotic system based on spatial integrity – a place for everything, and everything in its place – that led to cultural obsession with a particular type of deviance: bad housekeeping. v Acknowledgements I am deeply grateful to the members of my dissertation committee: Professor Richard Kaye, for his insights into death-by-bookshelf; Professor Anne Humpherys, in whose seminar this project germinated many years ago with ruminations on Mary Kingsley; and my director, Talia C. Schaffer, without whose guidance, patience, encouragement, humor, and, when necessary, firmness, this dissertation would never have been completed. Without the critical reading skills and brilliant suggestions of Talia’s dissertation group, this project would be less interesting and approximately the length of a Victorian three-volume novel. I extend my warm gratitude to Mia Chen, Colleen Cusick, Meechal Hoffman, Livia Woods, Miciah Hussey, and Anastasia Valassis. We’ll always have Le Pain Quotidien. Likewise, thanks to my writing partners, Amanda Springs and Lindsey Freer, and to those whose insights, companionship, late-night philosophizing, and positive energy helped along the way: Anne McCarthy, Allyson Foster, Jen Jack Gieseking, Kiran Mascarenhas, and the shining spirit of Diana Colbert, to name only a few. Funding opportunities from the Graduate Center, including a Chancellor’s Fellowship, a Graduate Teaching Fellowship at Queens College, and various travel grants made my life in this very expensive city less difficult and enabled me to conduct extensive research at the British Library and to develop my own imaginative map while walking many, many miles in contemporary London, without which this project would have been much poorer. Ultimately, this dissertation traces my growing investment in humanity’s inexhaustible imagination and need for self-expression, so often seen as impolite, deviant, or just plain criminal. Thus I dedicate it to the women who have taught me to live outside the lines: my mother, Rebecca Allen; my late, indomitable grandmother, Lucille Marion Singleton; my sister, vi Julie Marion; my dear friends Lauren Sarlo, Pam Bryant, and Melissa Gluck; both Stanwycks; and, last but certainly not least, my partner in life, love, and all things, Danielle Poulin. May we all be imaginative and unruly for many years to come. vii Table of Contents INTRODUCTION Stopping Up the Strand with a Pair of Gloves: Narratives of Scientific and Imaginative Cartography…………………………………………. 1 CHAPTER I Detecting Genre: Imaginative Cartography and Narrative Perspective in Martin Chuzzlewit and Bleak House ...……………………………… 18 CHAPTER II Illegibility Takes a Walk: Anne Catherick and the Problem of Narratability in The Woman in White ...…………………………………................ 68 CHAPTER III “'If you only knew the price of butter': Aspirational Mapping and Rhetorics of Domesticity ...……….……………………………… 118 CHAPTER IV Safe as Houses: Servanthood, Role-Play, and Middle-Class Identity in East Lynne ...………………………………………………....... 177 APPENDIX ...………………………………………………………………………………… 232 BIBLIOGRAPHY ..…………………………………………………………………………... 234 viii INTRODUCTION Stopping Up the Strand with a Pair of Gloves: Narratives of Scientific and Imaginative Cartography In the midst of The Old Curiosity Shop (1840-41), a novel haunted by the voracious appetite of a London so rapidly gobbling up the countryside that the city cannot be escaped by protagonist Little Nell, Charles Dickens briefly presents a character who, rather than being mastered by the modern metropolis, has mastered it in a singular fashion: “I enter in this little book the names of the streets that I can’t go down while the shops are open. This dinner to-day closes Long Acre. I bought a pair of boots in Great Queen Street last week, and made that no thoroughfare too. There’s only one avenue to the Strand left open now, and I shall have to stop up that to-night with a pair of gloves. The roads are closing so fast in every direction, that in about a month’s time, unless my aunt sends me a remittance, I shall have to go three or four miles out of town to get over the way.” (67-68) Dick Swiveller uses his expert knowledge of the city-space to reorganize it in a manner that allows him to continue enjoying the lifestyle to which he is accustomed. Dick draws his own map of London, centered on the possibility of economic exchange. The most striking feature of this navigational method is that in the midst of a novel obsessed with the unstoppable expansion of London, it causes the outward growth of the metropolis not only to stop but to change directions: Dick’s London is actually contracting. On the surface this is certainly not a liberating vision of the city, as the blocking up of thoroughfares potentially heralds the end of mobility – a desirable goal for Nell, who only wants her journey to end, but not for Swiveller, whose free circulation is constitutive of his character. It is even embodied in his name: he is physically and morally flexible, swiveling in and out of trouble as he swivels through the streets. Such a map 1 might stifle the city’s energy by quashing the liberty of its inhabitants. This gloomy destiny does not, however, belong to Dick; despite his lack of ready money, he stays true to his name, continuing to move easily from one area of the city to another, his physical presence connecting diverse elements of this geographically disparate narrative. Even more significant for a study of Victorian mapping practices is the ideology at work in the passage above. To re-center the city as Dick Swiveller has done, both experiential and abstract, factual knowledge – represented here by familiarity with street names, the number of possible routes to a destination, and the “three or four miles” extra distance Dick may have to travel to cross the street – are necessary,
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