AMBIVALENCE, QUEER LOSS, and the VICTORIAN NOVEL a Dissertation Presented to the Faculty of the Graduate S

TURNING IN THE GRAVE: AMBIVALENCE, QUEER LOSS, AND 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 Kaelin Brian Christopher Alexander August 2014 © 2014 Kaelin Brian Christopher Alexander TURNING IN THE GRAVE: AMBIVALENCE, QUEER LOSS, AND THE VICTORIAN NOVEL Kaelin Brian Christopher Alexander, Ph. D. Cornell University 2014 “Turning in the Grave: Ambivalence, Queer Loss, and the Victorian Novel” details how nineteenth-century mourning culture complicated the development of the novel. I contend that Victorian mourning culture—characterized by the display of objects meant to signify both emotional states and social allegiances in response to the death of an individual—challenged authors’ ability to maintain the narrative conventions of the marriage plot. In my reckoning, the marriage plot—for all its ability to organize narrative desires and fictional communities—only ever succeeds alongside the production of a set of queer losses, figured by parents who lose a child, widows and widowers, the heartbroken, and spinsters. Even as Victorian fiction played a role in the idealization of domestic life, figures of queer loss afforded authors an opportunity to adapt modes of plotting, narration, and literary feeling that wrestled against the marriage plot’s end. BIOGRAPHICAL SKETCH Kaelin Alexander lives in Ithaca, New York. iii For all the guys I could have loved and all the guys who could have loved me. iv ACKNOWLEDGMENTS I wish to acknowledge the support of a number of people who made this project possible. First and foremost, I must thank my parents for their commitment to providing me with the freedom and means to pursue an education on my own terms. I also need to express my gratitude to my committee—Ellis Hanson, Elisha Cohn, Harry Shaw, and Amy Villarejo—whose feedback has helped to shape this project, and will continue to influence my thinking as I move onto other work. I would be remiss not to thank the Graduate School for a Sage Fellowship that enabled me to live in Montreal during my fourth year. Similarly, I would like to thank the anonymous benefactor who provided me with a fellowship to attend Dickens Universe. Finally, I wish to thank J. Daniel Elam, whose friendship and collegiality have been the absolute best thing about graduate school. v TABLE OF CONTENTS INTRODUCTION Reading Mourning 1 CHAPTER 1 Turning Mourning: Trollope’s Ambivalent Widows 24 CHAPTER 2 Alone, Together: Singleness and the Community of the Novel 60 CHAPTER 3 Bearing Children: Onerous Attachments in Mary Barton and Dombey and Son 101 CHAPTER 4 Going through the Motions: Heartbroken Narratives and Desire After the End 176 CHAPTER 5 Losers’ History: Darwin, Dinosaurs, and the Erotics of Extinction 217 WORKS CITED 256 INTRODUCTION READING MOURNING Near the beginning of Anne Brontë’s 1848 novel The Tenant of Wildfell Hall, the protagonist and narrator Gilbert Markham—a plucky, earnest, and often presumptuous farmer— finds himself captivated by the appearance of a new neighbor amongst the congregation of his parish church. Turning away from his hymnal, Gilbert finds himself transfixed by the appearance of a “tall, lady-like figure, clad in black” (Brontë 16). He is utterly powerless to turn his gaze away from the mysterious stranger: Her face was towards me, and there was something in it, which, once seen, invited me to look again. Her hair was raven black and disposed in long glossy ringlets, a style of coiffure, rather unusual in those days, but always graceful and becoming; her complexion was clear and pale; her eyes I could not see, for being bent upon her prayer-book they were concealed by their drooping lids and long black lashes, but the brows above were expressive and well defined, the forehead was lofty and intellectual, the nose, a perfect aquiline, and the features in general, unexceptionable—only there was a slight hollowness about the cheeks and eyes, and the lips, though finely formed, were a little too thin, a little too firmly compressed, and had something about them that betokened, I thought, no very soft or amiable temper; and I said in my heart—‘I would rather admire you from this distance, fair lady, than be the partner of your home.’ (The Tenant of Wildfell Hall, 16) 1 Alexander This stranger is Helen Huntingdon, the titular resident of Wildfell Hall. Part of what is most jarring about this scene is its easy juxtaposition between the austerity of the church setting and the nearly lurid, painterly details of Helen’s comportment. Even more striking, however, is the way that the exchange suggests that something about the blackness of Helen’s attire not only presents a pleasing image, but in fact invites and even encourages a distinctly erotic spectatorship. Even as Helen’s mourning signifies her sexual unavailability by suggesting emotional allegiance to her deceased husband through a public display grief, Gilbert’s inquisitive gaze lays bare a spectacular, if uncomfortable truth: in putting on mourning, death becomes Helen; it suits her. Helen is not attractive to Gilbert despite his perception of her as a widow; rather, she is attractive precisely because of how he perceives her as a widow. Indeed, widow’s mourning is not just a set of garments with which Helen clothes her body; rather, mourning is a style of embodiment for her. The black of Helen’s mourning garb bleeds into the “raven black… glossy ringlets” of her hair, as well as her “long black” eyelashes. From Gilbert’s vantage point, Helen’s widowhood is all-consuming: it is simultaneously all he knows about her, and a filter that colors everything he comes to know about her over the course of the novel. Mourning is a habit of dress, but also a form of habitus. Mourning is, ironically enough, a way of life for Helen. Of course, this is only part of the story. In truth, Helen is not a widow at all. Instead, she comes to Gilbert’s rural village in order to escape her abusive, alcoholic, and very much living husband, Arthur Huntingdon. Helen merely adopts the persona of a widow as part of her plan; she puts on mourning as a put-on. Lacking divorce as a viable option, and divested from her own fortune, Helen has no choice but to cut, run, and hope that she will be left alone. Posing as a widow, Helen reckons, will free her and her young son from raising the suspicions of the villagers, and thus grant her the privacy she needs in order to avoid being tracked by Arthur. In 2 Alexander part, then, Tenant is a complex indictment of the corners into which Victorian women were backed under laws of coverture, which stipulated that upon marriage, a woman’s property and legal rights were ceded to her husband1. That Helen’s plan backfires spectacularly, but happily— Helen relents to Gilbert’s advances, and eventually marries him after finally Arthur dies a broken, but forgiven man—tells us a lot about Gilbert’s tenacity and Helen’s need for loving companionship despite the disasters of her first marriage. For better or worse, The Tenant of Wildfell Hall at once exposes the hardships facing women under laws of coverture, and seemingly falls back on the novelistic logic whereby Helen—hardened, but not hardhearted— finds redemption and happiness only by offering her hand to Gilbert. And yet, the remarriage that concludes Tenant is not a form of bowing to rote convention on Brontë’s part so much as it is a knowing act of trust, love, and hope on Helen’s: Helen does not marry Gilbert out of romantic naïveté, but rather because of the lessons she learns through her marriage to Arthur. On the other side of widowhood—“real” widowhood, this time—marriage feels like a fundamentally different matter for Helen, for Gilbert, and indeed for the novel’s readers. And yet, for all the novel’s assured positioning of Helen so that she can remarry in a way that is savvy, volitional, and serves her own needs, the impetus for her relationship with Gilbert—as cited above—hinges on a moment of meaningful ambivalence. In order for Gilbert to take an active interest in Helen, her mourning must utterly fail to signify in any straightforward way. The plot of the novel, meanwhile, needs Helen to get out of mourning (so that she will be available to Gilbert), then back into mourning once the ruse is up (in response to Arthur’s death), and then back out of mourning (to signify her readiness to finally marry Gilbert). This ambivalence stands in marked contrast not only to Helen’s meticulously thought-out plans, but 1 See Talley’s comprehensive introduction to the Broadview edition of Tenant, p. 20. 3 Alexander also to the logics of Victorian mourning culture, upon which those plans depends. Especially because she is patently not an “actual” widow during the passage cited above, the treatment of Helen’s widowhood has a lot to tell us about how mourning practices mattered (or failed to matter) as a social practice in the Victorian era. In the early chapters of the novel, Helen supposes that adopting the guise of a widow will free her from any and all questions. The critical, if unstated assumption on Helen’s part is that wearing mourning bespeaks a widow’s grief, which in turn stands in for her enduring attachment to a husband beyond his death. In this reckoning, the mourning that a Victorian widow wears effectively “stands in” for the absent husband; it covers the widow as the status of marriage would “cover” her as a wife under laws of coverture.

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