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Murtagh, Joseph.Pdf (714.1Kb) CAREER FICTIONS: THE REPRESENTATION OF THE CAREER IN THE VICTORIAN 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 Joseph Cannon Murtagh August 2009 © 2009 Joseph Cannon Murtagh CAREER FICTIONS: THE REPRESENTATION OF THE CAREER IN THE VICTORIAN NOVEL Joseph Cannon Murtagh, Ph.D. Cornell University 2009 Career Fictions: The Representation of the Career in the Victorian Novel explores the impact on the novel of what sociologists have termed “professionalization,” the complex pattern of sociological and economic change through which Britain was transformed from a semi-feudal aristocratic culture in the eighteenth century to a nation of job-holders in the nineteenth. As I show, between the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, the definition of what it meant to be a “professional” underwent a radical change, as traditional occupations that had been considered trades in the eighteenth century, such as surgeons and apothecaries, as well as newer occupations that arose to meet the industrial revolution’s increasing demand for technical specialization, were invested with a much higher degree of public authority than they had been in the past. My dissertation examines the challenges this process presented to novelists, arguing that the expansion of the division of labor and increased specialization in society brought about a fundamental shift in the novelistic representation of work. One of the chief concerns of the dissertation is to show how the older Protestant notion of the “vocation,” understood as a calling to serve a higher purpose, comes into conflict with the “profession” in the nineteenth century novel. Professionalism, in which individual desire is made to conform to certain codes of social uniformity built around the workplace, was a widely celebrated ideal among the British middle-class in the nineteenth century, but many Victorian novelists, from Dickens to Hardy, were particularly attuned to the way it could force individuals into positions of social alienation. Lydgate in Middlemarch, for instance, begins the novel with a “vocation,” in the sense that he’s experienced a spiritual calling to create something new in medicine, but ends with a “profession:” an “excellent practice” we’re told, but certainly not the future he’d envisioned for himself as a young man. Broadly- speaking, the vocation relies on an ideal projection of an imagined social community that a character can improve through his or her work, while the profession signifies an occupation a character enters into for the purpose of securing a social standing and the necessities of life. In my dissertation, I explore the conflict between these two modes in Eliot’s Middlemarch , Dickens’s David Copperfield , and Hardy’s The Return of the Native . BIOGRAPHICAL SKETCH Joseph Cannon Murtagh grew up in the Finger Lakes region of NY State, where he still resides. He was the recipient of the 2004 Mid-American Review Creative Nonfiction Award, and the winning essay “To Noah Daniel Kooperman” was published in the Spring 2005 issue of MAR . He has taught writing and literature courses at Cornell and Auburn Correctional Facility. In his spare time, he enjoys reading, writing, and playing music. iii To my parents iv ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS Writing a dissertation is an epic project that couldn’t be accomplished without the help of a great number of people. I’d first like to thank the generous support of my committee at Cornell: James Eli Adams, Laura Brown, and Harry Shaw, all of whom were excellent about offering advice and encouragement to guide me through the trickier spots in the dissertation. My family too was incredibly supportive: Marty, Louise, Troy, Ben, Eliza, and Fina. Finally, I’d like to extend a warm thank-you to the many friends and colleagues I’ve met in Ithaca for offering me a wonderful stay here over the last few years. v TABLE OF CONTENTS BIOGRAPHICAL SKETCH iii DEDICATION iv ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS v CHAPTER 1 Vocation, Profession, and the Narrative of the Victorian Career 1 CHAPTER 2 30 Social Alienation and the Discourse of Professionalism in George Eliot’s Middlemarch CHAPTER 3 69 “Nature and Accident had made me an Author”: the Idea of Vocation in Charles Dickens’s David Copperfield CHAPTER 4 106 “A Nearly Perished Link”: Diggory Venn as Prototypical Professional in Thomas Hardy’s Return of the Native CHAPTER 5 138 Postscript: Some Reflections on Specialization and the Novel vi WORKS CITED 157 vii CHAPTER 1 VOCATION, PROFESSION, AND THE NARRATIVE OF THE VICTORIAN CAREER The story of a young, ambitious person trying to figure out what to do with his or her life is so ubiquitous in Victorian fiction that it’s tempting to class it as a genre all to itself, a variation on the Bildungsroman that dominated European high society during the eighteenth century. The career becomes something of an organizing force in nineteenth century fiction, a means of appeal to a reading public for whom the career was the primary means of advancement in a modern, secular society. As a subject of interest, the career has its own narrative cohesion, its own set of dramatic characteristics that are especially suited to representation in fiction: there’s a self- contained story arc, with a beginning, middle, and an end; a central hero who in picaresque fashion must choose which among a number of possible life paths is the best match for his own talents; a world to throw up obstacles that either prove too great for the hero’s strength, or are overcome through patient self-mastery and discipline; and a denouement that runs the gamut between success and failure. As the growing critical literature on nineteenth century professionalism has demonstrated, the prevalence of the career in nineteenth century fiction stems from the Victorian fascination with autobiographies of “great men” 1 – Mill, Carlyle, Darwin, Smiles, Trollope – whose lives reflect the arc of a calling of some sort, whether in literature, science, or industry, autobiographies in which it is the successful completion of a calling, and not the mere fact of existence, that makes a life worthy of remembrance, not “knowing oneself” – to paraphrase Thomas Carlyle – but knowing what “one can 1 See especially the work of Alan Mintz, George Eliot and the Novel of Vocation (Cambridge: Harvard UP, 1978), 21-53. 1 work at.” Carlyle’s view in Sartor Resartus that “a certain inarticulate self- consciousness dwells dimly in us…which only our works can render articulate decisively discernable,” that “our works are the mirror wherein the spirit first sees its natural lineaments” (129), reflects the opinions of a secular age that saw the greatness of life as commensurate with producing works of lasting value and believed that this process wasn’t necessarily a matter of rational free-will, but the fostering of a subconscious growth in which each of the individual parts contains the seeds of a meaningful and unified whole. To join this growth with purposeful work, to direct it towards a some worthy goal: these were the ambitions of an era whose highest ideal was working for the betterment of society, and whose narratives of professional upward mobility, to quote Nicholas Dames, “demonstrate the emergence of a discrete form of individual life-plan, a ‘making one’s own way’ that is bound by new imperatives and new difficulties” (247). The idea of the career in the nineteenth century derives from the Protestant notion of the calling, in which an individual expresses his devotion to God by discovering the true nature of his calling, but it loses its religious connotation among the nineteenth century professional class, for whom the calling was largely a secular affair. 2 By the mid-nineteenth century, the career had become aligned with a demand for originality in the secular fields of art, literature, and industry, as a host of new occupations opened up for members of the expanding British middle-class: these were the result of the increased living standards and technological innovations of the industrial revolution and they made the prospect of discovering the particular employment for which one’s nature was suited a more daunting and challenging task than had been the case in earlier centuries. More often than not, pursuing a career in the nineteenth 2 For the religious foundations of the calling, see Max Weber The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism (London: Routledge, 1992), 79-91. 2 century entailed a dynamic break with the customs and traditions of the past; as Burton Bledstein has noted, “the new type of professional man, personally struggled to create his career, he did not inherit it. He rejected the social forms and the public conviviality associated with the shallow intellect of the older learned professions” (177). Calculating, shrewd, competitive, and ambitious, the nineteenth century professional reflected the changes that working life in Britain had undergone between the eighteenth and the nineteenth centuries, as the nation evolved from a semi-feudal aristocracy, in which the majority of wealth was concentrated in private holdings of land, into a nation of jobholders, in which traditional forms of economic relationship were replaced by the growth of private industry. It’s against this backdrop that the development of the modern career takes center stage; in the latter half of the nineteenth century, changes in the social and economic order, a process that sociologists call “professionalization,”
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