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For Shame: Emotion, Gender, and Innovation in the Nineteenth-Century British Novel

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For Shame: Emotion, Gender, and Innovation in the Nineteenth-Century British Novel FOR SHAME: EMOTION, GENDER, AND INNOVATION IN THE NINETEENTH-CENTURY BRITISH NOVEL A Dissertation Presented to the Faculty of the Graduate School of Cornell University In Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements for the Degree of Doctor of Philosophy by Ashly Elisabeth Jensen Bennett January 2011 © 2011 Ashly Elisabeth Jensen Bennett FOR SHAME: EMOTION, GENDER, AND INNOVATION IN THE NINETEENTH-CENTURY BRITISH NOVEL Ashly Elisabeth Jensen Bennett, Ph.D. Cornell University 2011 This dissertation argues that the British novel was shaped to a large and as yet unexplored extent by shame. While shame might appear the hallmark of Victorian repression, I examine how its revisionary potential works through nineteenth-century novelistic form, troubling limited constructions of gendered subjectivity, social roles, and modes of literary engagement. From the genre’s inception, novelists and readers courted the shame—linked to the excessively emotional and feminine—that marked novelistic production and consumption. Rather than disavow or downplay such shame, however, nineteenth-century novelists often embraced and reimagined it. Elizabeth Bennet’s “mortifying perusal” of Darcy’s letter, Jane Eyre’s humiliation before the classroom at Lowood, Becky Sharp’s scandalous exposure when caught with Lord Steyne: in these scenes, innovations in novelistic form occur not in spite of shame, but through it. Reading such scenes of shame in works by Jane Austen, Charlotte Brontë, William Makepeace Thackeray, and George Du Maurier, I show how influential experiments in narrative technique engage shame as a model of self- conscious reflection, narration, and reading that refines the novel’s form and cultural status by redefining the implications of close contact with feminized emotion. Such displays of shameful self-consciousness countered the widespread denigration of irrational feminine emotiveness that haunted the novelist and novel reader throughout the century, offering instead an analytic yet still emotionally charged form of investment in literary and social conventions. By placing these texts in dialogue with historical and current theories of emotion that highlight shame’s capacity to forge identity and social attachments in ways that do not depend on strict identification with others or with social norms more broadly, I approach nineteenth-century novels as incisive theorizations of shame in their own right. In thus helping us to think beyond a stark binary of identification or critical detachment, novelistic shame enriches ongoing discussions of the stakes of emotional investments—in others, in social conventions, and in literature. BIOGRAPHICAL SKETCH Ashly Bennett received a B.A. in English with departmental honors and university distinction from Stanford University. In her graduate work at Cornell University, she has specialized in nineteenth-century British literature with a minor in Feminist, Gender, and Sexuality Studies. iii ACKNOWLEDGMENTS I would like to thank my dissertation committee for their encouragement and advice throughout this project. Ellis Hanson, Laura Brown and Harry Shaw have offered invaluable insight at all stages of my research and writing. I have benefited greatly from their generosity, as well as that of the Cornell faculty and community more broadly. In addition to the support I have received from Cornell, I am grateful for the assistance provided by the Mellon Foundation/ACLS Dissertation Completion Fellowship. iv TABLE OF CONTENTS Biographical Sketch iii Acknowledgements iv List of Figures vi Introduction 1 1 | Shame and Sensibility: Jane Austen and the Humiliated Heroine 23 2 | “Half Ashamed of Being Caught in the Melting Mood”: Shame and Sentimentality in Vanity Fair 93 3 | “Erring as I”: Jane Eyre’s Shameful Revisions of Victorian Sympathy 156 Coda: “At the Bottom of All” 203 v LIST OF FIGURES Figure 1 | “Paper X,” Clarissa 41 Figure 2 | Illustration, Chapter XXVI, Vanity Fair 126 Figure 3 | “The letter before Waterloo,” Vanity Fair 129 Figure 4 | “Shame,” Chironomia 130 Figure 5 | “Contempt,” Practical illustrations of rhetorical gesture and action 131 Figure 6 | “Virtue rewarded. A booth in Vanity Fair.” Vanity Fair 152 Figure 7 | “Authors’ Miseries No. 1,” Punch 154 vi INTRODUCTION FOR SHAME Consider, to begin, the following brief montage, culled from the nineteenth- century British novel’s prodigious inventory of shame: “Oh Rebecca, Rebecca, for shame . How can you—how dare you have such wicked, revengeful thoughts?” “—do, for shame; an’ come an’ go on with your patch-work, like a little lady.” “shame on ye! sit ye dahn, ill childer! they’s good books enough if you’ll read ‘em.” “For shame! for shame! . What shocking conduct Miss Eyre.” Together these moments—from Vanity Fair, The Mill on the Floss, Wuthering Heights, and Jane Eyre, respectively—illustrate the invocation of shame that ushers many of the nineteenth-century novel’s most famously mortified heroines into its narratives and onto the literary scene.1 In mapping the conspicuously rich and troublesome site, and source, of shame presented by the nineteenth-century British novel, it is worth lingering briefly on the shaming that starts Jane Eyre, that novel whose eponymous narrator has been dubbed the “heroine of fulfillment” and whose “I” has been widely understood as a model of engaging and empowered female voice.2 Anger and sympathy have attained pride of place in feminist assessments of Jane Eyre’s highly emotive voice and of nineteenth-century novelistic feelings more 1 William Makepeace Thackeray, Vanity Fair (New York: Norton, 1994), 10; George Eliot, The Mill on the Floss (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1961), 13; Emily Brontë, Wuthering Heights, 4th ed. (New York: Norton, 2003), 17; Charlotte Brontë, Jane Eyre, 2d ed. (New York: Norton, 1987), 9. 2 Elaine Showalter reads Jane Eyre as the “heroine of fulfillment” in A Literature of Their Own: British Women Novelists from Brontë to Lessing, rev. ed. (Princeton: Princeton Univ. Press, 1999), 112. Carla Kaplan provides a useful overview of feminist criticism’s longstanding investment in reading Jane Eyre’s personal fulfillment and ownership in relation to her authentic and empowered voice: noting that Jane “does move from silence to speech, thus providing a model of feminist resistance and liberation,” Kaplan finds it “hardly . surprising that feminist criticism would borrow much of its romance with women’s narration, its metaphorics of voice, and its own self-understanding as an enterprise from this novel” (6). See “Girl Talk: Jane Eyre and the Romance of Women’s Narration,” Novel 30, no. 1 (1996): 5-31. 1 generally—yet what are we to make of the emotion that inspires the first diegetic mention of Jane Eyre’s surname, and punctuates her physical imprisonment in the metaphorically rich red-room as a young girl—“For shame! for shame! . What shocking conduct, Miss Eyre”?3 This call “for shame” suggests that shame constitutes both an introduction of “Miss Eyre” to the reader and an interpellation of Jane into the contours of gendered interiority and social relations. We might imagine the call “for shame” as the invasive voice of society threatening to repress the more authentic self-expression of the angry Jane, or, perhaps, as an affective force imposed from outside the individual that exposes the disciplinary violence inflicted by all emotions, even those seemingly more personal and salutary feelings like sympathy. In the chapters that follow, however, I explore the implications of the formative call “for shame”—for Jane Eyre and for the nineteenth-century novel more broadly—as it weaves into the presentation of characters’ interiorities and social relations, and into novels’ structures and narrative techniques, in forms not easily accounted for as either pronounced repression or covert Foucauldian discipline. In the case of Jane Eye, the feminist potential of the novel’s distinctive voice largely emanates from Brontë’s formal enactment of a shame that mingles with and negotiates the extremes of anger’s potentially antisocial alienation and sympathy’s potentially oppressive socialization. The novel’s initial demand “for shame” accompanies Jane’s experience of being forced into the red-room and “thrust . upon a stool,” yet it sets in motion a series of shameful spectacles that Jane, as 3 Sandra Gilbert and Susan Gubar position Jane Eyre’s anger as central to her “rebellious feminism” in The Madwoman in the Attic: The Woman Writer and the Nineteenth-Century Literary Imagination (New Haven: Yale Univ. Press, 1984), 338. Criticism that has more recently shifted the focus to sympathy in Jane Eyre includes: Nancy Armstrong, How Novels Think: The Limits of British Individualism from 1719-1900 (New York: Columbia Univ. Press, 2005), 139; Lorri G. Nandrea, “Desiring Difference: Sympathy and Sensibility in Jane Eyre,” Novel 37, no. 1/2 (2003): 112-34; Amit S. Rai, Rule of Sympathy: Sentiment, Race and Power, 1750-1850 (New York: Palgrave, 2002); Lara Freeburg Kees, “‘Sympathy’ in Jane Eyre,” Studies in English Literature, 1500-1900 45, no. 4 (2005): 873-97. 2 character and narrator, embodies, witnesses and stages with increasing agency, aesthetic control and erotic investment.4 In many respects Jane Eyre crystallizes the novelistic form of shame that I trace across the nineteenth century, focusing particularly on work by Jane Austen, William Makepeace Thackeray and Charlotte Brontë in which shame-inflected narration intersects with physical spectacles of shame to fashion—in lieu of a sympathetic sameness—intimate
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