Individual and Social Teleology in Victorian Children's Fiction

UNMAKING PROGRESS: INDIVIDUAL AND SOCIAL TELEOLOGY IN VICTORIAN CHILDREN’S FICTION Justin T. Jones, B.A., M.A. Dissertation Prepared for the Degree of DOCTOR OF PHILOSOPHY UNIVERSITY OF NORTH TEXAS May 2011 APPROVED: Evan Horowitz, Major Professor David Holdeman, Committee Member and Chair of the Department of English John G. Peters, Committee Member James D. Meernik, Acting Dean of the Toulouse Graduate School Jones, Justin T. Unmaking Progress: Individual and Social Teleology in Victorian Children’s Fiction. Doctor of Philosophy (English), May 2011, 245 pp., bibliography, 186 titles. This study contrasts four distinct discursive responses to (or even accidental remarks on) the Victorian concept of individual and/or social improvement, or progress, set forth by the preeminent social critics, writers, scientists, and historians of the nineteenth century, such as Thomas Carlyle, John Stuart Mill, Thomas Macaulay Matthew Arnold, Charles Darwin, and Herbert Spencer. This teleological ideal, perhaps the most prevalent ideology of the long nineteenth century, originates with the Protestant Christian ethic during and in the years following the Reformation, whereupon it combines with the Enlightenment notions of rational humanity’s boundless potential and Romanticism’s fierce individualism to create the Victorian doctrine of progress. My contention remains throughout that four nineteenth-century writers for children and adults subvert the doctrine of individual progress (which contributes to the progress of the race) by chipping away at its metaphysical and narratalogical roots. George MacDonald allows progress only on the condition of total selflessness, including the complete dissolution of one’s free will, but defers the hallmarks of making progress indefinitely, due to his apocalyptic Christian vision. Lewis Carroll ridicules the notion of progress by playing with our conceptions of linear time and simple causality, implying as he writes that perhaps there is nothing to progress toward, no actual telos on which to fix our sights. Oscar Wilde characterizes moral development as nothing short of self-inflicted cruelty, consigning his most scrupulously moral- minded characters to social subversion or untimely death (the dark reflection of MacDonald’s compulsory selflessness). And finally, Rudyard Kipling toys with historical substitutes for conventional progress, such as repetitive cycles, deviating from historical unidirectionality and linear development. He often realigns his characters with their intractable fates at the conclusions of his narratives, echoing Carroll’s suggestion that perhaps our goals are delusional. I conclude that while each individual author fails to holistically undermine the doctrine of progress, taken collectively, these four fantasists represent a heretofore unexamined repudiation of the Victorian era’s most enduring metaphysical conceits. Copyright 2011 by Justin T. Jones ii TABLE OF CONTENTS Page Chapter I. INTRODUCTION……………………………………………………………………….. 1 Progress‘s Pedigree: The Victorian Obsession Evaluating Progress: The Epistemology of Improvement Taking Aim at Teleology: Four Perspectives on Progress II. ―GOOD IS ALWAYS COMING‖: VOLITION AND DEFERRAL IN MACDONALD‘S FANTASY ……………………………………………......... 28 ―TOUCH NOT!‖: Sublimated Volition and Deferred Realization in Phantastes ―To grow to no end‖: Interminable Progress as Virtue in the Fairy Tales ―Following something‖: Obedience v. Initiative in Lilith III. GETTING NOWHERE FAST: PROGRESS AND DEVELOPMENT IN CARROLLIAN NARRATIVE ………………………………………………… 79 Narrative Rabbit-Holes: Space and Time in Wonderland ―Never Jam To-day‖: Progress Postponed in Looking-Glass Country ―Eerie‖ States: Character Disintegration and Development in Sylvie and Bruno ―The Vanishing‖: Futile Quests and the Annihilation of Meaning in The Hunting of the Snark IV. DANGEROUS MORALS: PROGRESS AND HEGEMONY IN WILDE‘S FAIRY TALES………………………………………….................. 135 ―I told him a story with a moral‖: Moral Hegemony in The Happy Prince and Other Tales Mirrors of Wisdom and Opinion: Morality as Self-Loathing in A House of Pomegranates V. ―ALL TIMES, IN ALL PLACES‖: KIPLING AND THE NARRATIVE OF PERENNIALITY ……………………………………………………………... 178 ―And so was England born!‖: Destabilizing Historical Progress in Puck of Pook‟s Hill ―But otherwise I perceive no change‖: Demythologizing the Past in Rewards and Fairies ―I know not what I know!‖: The Question of Development in The Jungle Books BIBLIOGRAPHY ……………………………………………………………………….......... 233 iii CHAPTER I INTRODUCTION Unstained by wasteful deformities, by wasted tears or heart‘s- blood of men, or any defacement of the Pit, noble fruitful Labour, growing ever nobler, will come forth,—the grand sole miracle of Man; whereby Man has risen from the low places of this Earth, very literally, into divine Heavens. Ploughers, Spinners, Builders; Prophets, Poets, Kings; Brindleys and Goethes; Odins and Arkwrights; all martyrs, and noble men, and gods are of one grand Host: immeasurable, marching ever forward since the Beginnings of the World. – Thomas Carlyle, Past and Present But for us,—who believe in right reason, in the duty and possibility of extricating and elevating our best self, in the progress of humanity toward perfection,—for us the framework of society, that theatre on which this august drama has to unroll itself, is sacred; and whoever administers it, and however we may seek to remove them from the tenure of administration, yet, while they administer, we steadily and with undivided heart support them in repressing anarchy and disorder; because without order there can be no society, and without society there can be no human perfection. – Matthew Arnold, Culture and Anarchy Man needed one moral constitution to fit him for his original state; he needs another to fit him for his present state; and he has been, is, and will long continue to be, in process of adaptation. And the belief in human perfectibility merely amounts to the belief that, in virtue of this process, man will eventually become completely suited to his mode of life. Progress, therefore, is not an accident, but a necessity. As surely as the tree becomes bulky when it stands alone, . so surely must the human faculties be moulded into complete fitness for the social state; so surely must evil and immorality disappear; so surely must man become perfect. – Herbert Spencer, Social Statics, Abridged and Revised 1 ―I should see the garden far better,‖ said Alice to herself, ―if I could get to the top of that hill: and here‘s a path that leads straight to it—at least, no, it doesn‘t do that—‖ (after going a few yards along the path, and turning several sharp corners), ―but I suppose it will at last. But how curiously it twists! It‘s more like a corkscrew than a path!‖ – Lewis Carroll, Alice‟s Adventures in Wonderland This study proposes the existence of a sustained, covert repudiation of the prominent social doctrine of progress, both individual betterment and historical amelioration, in the works of four well-known yet highly disparate authors of nineteenth-century British children‘s fiction: George MacDonald, Lewis Carroll, Oscar Wilde, and Rudyard Kipling. These four writers, with the qualified exception of Carroll, have traditionally been critically evaluated in terms of their personal ideologies and / or contributions to generic reform in the field of children‘s literature. However, even Carroll has been burdened with the synchronic distinction of ushering in the so- called ―Golden Age‖ of British children‘s literature with the publication of Alice‟s Adventures in Wonderland in 1865, and the critical emphasis on his work tends to foreground its role as the nonsensical antithesis to its earlier, more didactic counterparts.1 In contrast to these more disciplinarily insular approaches, this study‘s argument lends an unnerving philosophical gravity to the works of these authors, one which, taken collectively, transcends their relative positions in literary history and their admitted promulgations of specific political or religious ideologies. These four men use their writing for children to chip away at the very foundations of Western thought, to challenge one of its most fundamental ideas concerning the movement of individuals 1 See Gillian Avery, ―Fairy Tales for Pleasure,‖ in Nineteenth Century Children: Heroes and Heroines in English Children‟s Stories, 1780-1900 (London: Hodder and Stoughton, 1965), 121-137, 129: ―1865—Alice‟s Adventures in Wonderland comes within the decade of [Frederic Farrar‘s] Eric, or Little by Little (1858), [Charles Kingsley‘s] The Water-Babies (1863), and Jessica‟s First Prayer [by ‗Hesba Stretton,‘ pseudonym of Sarah Smith], but the pious, the moralistic, and the didactic are as much absent from its pages as if they had never existed at all in children‘s literature.‖ 2 and societies through time.2 Utilizing various, occasionally hybridized forms of the fairy tale narrative, these writers dispute the verifiability of progress, each one arguing for the unreliable nature of one of progress‘s means or standards of measurement, from ontological perception to individual volition, from morality to the structure of history. If, as Humphrey Carpenter writes, ―all children‘s books are about ideals,‖ these writers‘ children‘s books are about the systematic deconstruction of popular ideals, or more precisely, the untenable premises of ideality itself. The choice of authors and works reflects my decision to highlight the singular qualities of the Victorian fairy tale,

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