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Creativity and Growing up in Literatures of Maturation, 1850-1920

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Creativity and Growing up in Literatures of Maturation, 1850-1920 University of Tennessee, Knoxville TRACE: Tennessee Research and Creative Exchange Doctoral Dissertations Graduate School 8-2014 Innocent Artists: Creativity and Growing Up in Literatures of Maturation, 1850-1920 Whitney Elaine Jones University of Tennessee - Knoxville, [email protected] Follow this and additional works at: https://trace.tennessee.edu/utk_graddiss Part of the Literature in English, British Isles Commons Recommended Citation Jones, Whitney Elaine, "Innocent Artists: Creativity and Growing Up in Literatures of Maturation, 1850-1920. " PhD diss., University of Tennessee, 2014. https://trace.tennessee.edu/utk_graddiss/2890 This Dissertation is brought to you for free and open access by the Graduate School at TRACE: Tennessee Research and Creative Exchange. It has been accepted for inclusion in Doctoral Dissertations by an authorized administrator of TRACE: Tennessee Research and Creative Exchange. For more information, please contact [email protected]. To the Graduate Council: I am submitting herewith a dissertation written by Whitney Elaine Jones entitled "Innocent Artists: Creativity and Growing Up in Literatures of Maturation, 1850-1920." I have examined the final electronic copy of this dissertation for form and content and recommend that it be accepted in partial fulfillment of the equirr ements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy, with a major in English. Amy Billone, Major Professor We have read this dissertation and recommend its acceptance: Nancy Henry, Urmila Seshagiri, Art Smith, Rosalind Hackett Accepted for the Council: Carolyn R. Hodges Vice Provost and Dean of the Graduate School (Original signatures are on file with official studentecor r ds.) Innocent Artists: Creativity and Growing Up in Literatures of Maturation, 1850 – 1920 A Dissertation Presented for the Doctor of Philosophy Degree The University of Tennessee, Knoxville Whitney Elaine Jones August 2014 Copyright @2014 by Whitney Elaine Jones All rights reserve ii DEDICATION To the quiet girl who found a voice. iii ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS I would like to express my sincere gratitude to my dissertation committee, whose combined dedication to this project and to me has been inspiring and humbling. To Dr. Billone, who encouraged me to think outside the box and to assert my expertise, and who gave me the opportunity to teach some of the best students I have encountered while collaborating in the classroom with brilliant faculty and fabulous graduate students. My thanks goes also to Dr. Henry, who refused to let me produce anything other than my best, and for knowing, better than I did sometimes, how good my best was. I cannot thank Dr. Seshagiri enough for being calm, collected, and brilliant at each turn of this project, and for encouraging the same traits in me when I felt my most frazzled. Because this project is about growing up I must also thank my parents, siblings, grandparents, aunts, uncles, and cousins who unfailingly think better of me than I do of myself. You build the image of me I hope to live up to. You yourselves, by the kind, passionate, and intellectual lives you live, inspire me daily. Also, I must acknowledge the professors I had at the University of Central Arkansas, who instilled in me an unquenchable drive to know, to sing, and to inspire others to want to know and sing as well. An eternal thank you to the triumvirate, whose courage, love, and unfailing professionalism has helped me through the last five years. You read draft after draft and helped me find my voice. You shared with me wine and laughs and sun drenched days in the square, working or not working, but always supporting one another. Finally, but perhaps most importantly, I could not have survived even under the triumvirate’s ministrations if it were not for Brian Francis, who watched books take over every corner of the house and of my mind, who knew how to distract me from anxiety and how to get me to play when I needed it most. He is my own personal comedian, accountant, cook, space heater, and chauffer and I could not have done any of this without him. I hope someday to have the opportunity to be for you what you have been for me. iv ABSTRACT This project combines three subgenres of the novel—children’s literature, the Bildungsroman, and the Künstlerroman—under a new comprehensive category I term “literatures of maturation,” or texts that share a concern with the inner and outer formation of the individual, with growing up, and with childhood. By reading British literatures of maturation from both the Victorian and modern eras (that is, within the time frame of the Golden Age of children’s literature), I reveal that, creativity disrupts literary plots of growth and development, and that social integration and artistic maturation battle for dominance in the child’s journey to adulthood, resulting in a narrative and in a developmental outcome that reflects the changing historical plot of childhood itself. When the recognition of adolescence as a developmental stage interrupts the linear historical plot of maturation at the beginning of the twentieth century, so too does creativity’s disruption of fictional plots of maturation increase, causing a shift from the social integration of the Bildungsroman to the artistic triumph of the Künstlerroman. This study is organized by gender and time because these two contexts greatly affect patterns of maturation. The four major chapters of Innocent Artists read a Bildungsroman or a Künstlerroman and a work of children’s literature that fall between, or right outside of the dates 1850-1920. Each combined reading shows how the necessity of social maturation suppresses the child’s creativity or how the child flees the social in pursuit of artistic maturation. Addressing the centrality of the creative child and the process of growing up in literatures of maturation reveals how changing historical plots of childhood reorganize literary genres and how the creative child’s liberation from narratives of social integration and from adulthood itself is crucial for the formation of the Künstlerroman. v TABLE OF CONTENTS INTRODUCTION Literatures of Maturation and the Plot of Childhood ..................................................... 1 The Creative Child .................................................................................................................................... 4 The Victorian Bildungsroman and the Linear Pattern of Growing Up ..................................................... 9 The Modernist Künstlerroman and the Fragmented Pattern of Growing Up ......................................... 16 The Golden Age of Children’s Literatures and Shifting Patterns ........................................................... 23 CHAPTER ONE The Creative Victorian Boy: Romantic Artist or Man in Training ................................. 29 David Copperfield’s Fairy Tale Terrors .................................................................................................. 37 The Princess, The Goblin, and Getting Lost ........................................................................................... 57 CHAPTER TWO The Creative Victorian Girl: Creative “Counternarratives” of Female Maturation ....... 75 Creative Madness in Jane Eyre ............................................................................................................... 83 The Madness of the Child Mind in the Alice books ............................................................................. 102 CHAPTER THREE Twentieth-Century Creative Boys: Imaginative Flights into Childhood ................. 119 Peter Pan and the Play Pattern .............................................................................................................. 125 Stephen’s Epiphanic Play ..................................................................................................................... 140 CHAPTER FOUR Twentieth-Century Creative Girls: Creation, Procreation, and Narrative Play .......... 158 From Doll Child to Eternal Child ......................................................................................................... 165 Broken Games ....................................................................................................................................... 179 CONCLUSION: Innocent Artists ............................................................................................................ 202 WORKS CITED ....................................................................................................................................... 211 VITA ......................................................................................................................................................... 238 vi INTRODUCTION Literatures of Maturation and the Plot of Childhood The Golden Age of children’s literature (1860 - 1920) is loosely bookended by two works written for adult audiences, but that are concerned with childhood, creativity, and the process of growing up: William Wordsworth’s autobiographical poem The Prelude (1850) and Katherine Mansfield’s autobiographical modernist short story “Prelude” (1918). During the almost seventy years between these two “preludes,” a bevy of creative children appeared in literary genres concerned with growth and maturation, such as the Bildungsroman, the Künstlerroman, and Golden Age children’s literature. Creative child characters like David Copperfield, Arthur Pendennis, Aurora Leigh, Maggie Tulliver, Alice, Kim, Peter Pan, and Stephen Dedalus (to name a well-known few)
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