And Everything Nice: Girls, Aggression, and the Nineteenth- Century British Novel
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And Everything Nice: Girls, Aggression, and the Nineteenth- Century British Novel A dissertation submitted by Lauren Byler In partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy in English TUFTS UNIVERSITY August 2011 © 2011, LAUREN BYLER ADVISER: Joseph Litvak ii Abstract This dissertation investigates the aggression variously expressed by and directed at girls in several nineteenth-century British novels. In doing so, it traces the girl‘s doubled role in the novel and nineteenth-century culture as a socio-historical subject position and a trope for failure and contradiction that certain novelists map onto this subject position. The girl‘s highly elastic subjectivity stretches in age and sex, bringing into question the assumption of a clearly-bounded human subject and thus vexing the nineteenth-century novel‘s promissory cover stories of developmental progress and replete personhood. I argue that Jane Austen, Charles Dickens, Anthony Trollope, and George Eliot each use the girl in distinctive but related ways to indicate fissures in dominant literary and cultural narratives and to figure discrepancies in their most cherished novelistic preoccupations. As a means of illustrating this latter point, every chapter considers (through texts including letters, illustrations, and autobiographical documents) the similar behaviors and fascinations of particular girl characters and their authors, drawing out the writers‘ concerns with their own repetition of the girl‘s affective, ethical, and pedagogical failures and successes. These novelists interrogate the sacrosanct Victorian values of maturity, self-abnegation, usefulness, and sympathy through the figure of the girl, whether in her dexterous capacity for deploying covert aggression or in the abject sentimentality of her uselessness and naïveté. The girl‘s niceness—her socially prescribed selflessness, purity, and tractability—like the girl herself, is a doubled and sometimes duplicitous thing. She encapsulates and complicates the nice distinctions between unadulterated goodness, self-consciously well-mannered conduct, and noxious banality that the nineteenth-century novel cannot quite uphold. iii Acknowledgements It is a pleasure to tally up the debts I have accrued while writing this dissertation by naming those who donated their intellectual, emotional, and material support to me. My dissertation committee offered invaluable feedback on the project, helping me to twist and turn ideas and structures in ways that led me to see in my work what L.M. Montgomery would call its ―scope for imagination.‖ Rosmarie Bodenheimer graciously agreed to be my outside reader though she had only met me once. I am grateful for both her praise and her incisive criticism of the final document I produced. Lee Edelman is not only the ideal model of intellectual rigor and pedagogical praxis; he also connected me with two long-term teaching positions that eased the financial burden of continuing the writing process after my Tufts University funding ran out. Sonia Hofkosh gave generously of her time and was always willing to think with me and to treat my ideas seriously no matter how awkwardly they might be expressed in prose. Her encouragement and interest in this project helped me to move forward at a moment when I considered giving up. My dissertation advisor, Joe Litvak, repeatedly asked pointed questions that spurred important revisions and sharpened arguments. His analytical style continues to dazzle and inspire me. Special thanks also to Sheila Emerson, who read an abbreviated version of my third chapter that was eventually published in Novel, and offered a bracing allegory about the caprices of academic publishing. Several fellow graduate students at Tufts read drafts of chapters, gave thoughtful feedback, and allowed me to be part of their own dissertation writing process and insights. Many thanks to Kristina Aikens, Ashley Shelden, and Amy Woodbury Tease. Other friends who have shared with me their academic perspectives and many convivial dinners include Pam Buck, iv Cheryl Alison, Michelle Maiese, Nathan Wight, Brianna Burke, Mike Goebel, Mikal Gaines, Dan DeGooyer, Sharon Harper, Matt Elliott, and Mary Beth Pope. My brother Chad has always been interested in what I‘m up to academically, eager to talk sci-fi or to puzzle over a Lacanian diagram with the eye of a mechanical engineer. Thanks for letting your feckless sister mooch off of your cell phone plan for the past few years. To my parents Carol Byler and Charles Byler, thank you for creating a home for me and Chad where ideas and language and books were the family values and matters of daily discussion. Without your emotional and financial support, I would not have been able to achieve the academic successes that I have. Big hugs to my grandparents, Russell and Maxine Stright and Charlie Byler, who think my job is very strange but love me anyway. The best and most sustaining figure in this dissertation process, first to last, has been David Palumbo. He read and listened to every word of this project, argued points, soothed, triaged, cooked, afforded me a room of my own for the past four years, allowed me to manage the Netflix queue and the remote, and somehow managed to give me his patience, love, and respect despite being witness to some girlish moods that rivaled the most abject and terroristic described in these pages. I love you. I promise I‘ll calm down now and start doing the dishes again. v Table of Contents Introduction: Just a Girl 1 Chapter 1: Reading (Austen) Like a Girl 37 Chapter 2: Dickens‘s Little Women: Cute as the Dickens 80 Chapter 3: If the Shoe Fits…Trollope and the Girl 128 Chapter 4: George Eliot and Maggie: Fetishism, Sympathy, and Silliness 171 End Notes 221 Works Cited 240 vi List of Figures Figure 1 Dickens Public Reading Cartoon 107 (Artist Unknown) Figure 2 Illustration, Framley Parsonage 164 (John Everett Millais) Figure 3 Illustration, The Small House at Allington 166 (John Everett Millais) 1 Introduction: Just a Girl This dissertation examines the aggression variously expressed by and directed at girls in several canonical nineteenth-century British novels. It focuses less intently on the question of why girls feel angry or frustrated than in tracing how they act out on these emotions. The rich tradition of feminist critical work about the nineteenth-century novel—on which many influential feminist literary critics cut their teeth—has extensively mapped the causes of girls‘ and women‘s anger and outrage: the almost complete lack of women‘s rights in nineteenth- century England, limited educational and professional opportunities, the intermittently chivalrous and more bluntly derogatory construction of women‘s inferiority, the imperatives to marriage, motherhood, and selflessness, and the injunction to ―be nice.‖1 Focusing on how Jane Austen, Charles Dickens, Anthony Trollope, and George Eliot imagine the girl‘s expression of aggression, I trace the translation of this emotion into a number of structures and affects, including love, cuteness, renunciation, and masochism. Widely acknowledged as a cherished figure of innocence and nostalgia throughout the nineteenth-century, the girl may appear an illogical irritant for anyone‘s aggression, yet in the story I plot from novel to novel, she emerges as a composite figure of sentimentality and abjection.2 The flipside of innocence is stupidity, of preciousness uselessness, of selflessness non-humanity. Representing for different authors ineptitude, oppressive obedience, destructive innocence, and a state of impasse, the girl should be understood not just as a particular subject position but as a trope through which aggression, and the anxieties and frustrations that cause it, can be articulated. This is why I will insist upon the girl‘s figural status as a marker that certain novelists use to indicate contradictions in their most cherished values and the disruption of dominant literary and cultural narratives. 2 This project is informed by the dual view of the girl as a literary trope and as a person inhabiting a particular cultural and historical context that produces specific limitations, expectations, possibilities, and friction. Critical studies of the nineteenth-century girl emerging over the last 15 years frequently cite the elasticity of the girl as a figure. In their introduction to The Girl’s Own: Cultural Histories of the Anglo-American Girl, 1830-1915, Lynne Vallone and Claudia Nelson note that ―[t]he anxiety surrounding Victorian commentary on girlhood seems to have arisen in part from the Girl‘s refusal to be categorized,‖ and this ―protean quality‖ of the girl is reflected in the diverse approaches the essays in this collection take to the girl as ―simultaneous subject, object, and opponent of cultural classification‖ (3, 5). In the present study, the girl presents herself most straightforwardly in a series of young female characters ranging in age from nine-years-old to their early 20s: the adolescent period that is fleeting and messy in its developmental arc. Anterior to the dignity of womanhood and the rigidification of conventions of femininity, this period allows for the dramatic overlap of aggression and niceness, and it affords the novelists I investigate a metaphor for inconsistency and impasse that parallels and emblematizes other concerns in their novels. The preoccupations and anxieties of these novelists—men and women for the most part writing in their 40s and 50s—also bring them into intersection with certain girl characters and girlish behaviors in their novels. By teasing out the nature of these intersections, I try to complicate any notion that the girl inhabits only a clearly-bounded territory of gender and age. George Eliot, in fact, schematically maps girlishness as a devalued and useless state through her boy character, Tom Tulliver, who is fully confident in his belief that ―all girls were silly—they couldn‘t throw a stone so as to hit anything, couldn‘t do anything with a pocket- knife, and were frightened at frogs‖ (The Mill on the Floss 44).