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The Split Subject of Narration in Elizabeth THE SPLIT SUBJECT OF NARRATION IN ELIZABETH GASKELL’S FIRST-PERSON FICTION by Anna Koustinoudi A dissertation submitted to the Department of English Literature and Culture, School of English, Faculty of Philosophy, Aristotle University of Thessaloniki, Greece In fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy 2009 Anna Koustinoudi The Split Subject of Narration in Elizabeth Gaskell’s First-Person Fiction Doctoral Dissertation submitted to the Department of English Language and Literature, Aristotle University of Thessaloniki Dissertation Committee: Prof. Ruth Parkin-Gounelas, Adviser Prof. Ekaterini Douka-Kabitoglou, Co-Adviser Prof. Karin Boklund-Lagopoulou, Co-Adviser Assist. Prof. Katerina Kitsi-Mitakou, Examiner Assist. Prof. Effie Yiannopoulou, Examiner Assoc. Prof. Domna Pastourmatzi, Examiner Assoc. Prof. Youli Theodosiadou, Examiner Date of oral defense: 6th February 2009 i Acknowledgements This dissertation has been long in the making and would have never reached completion had it not been for the support, encouragement and generosity – material, emotional and intellectual – of a number of people, who have stood by me all these years. The debts I owe are many and I am grateful that the time has finally come when I can acknowledge them. It is to my supervisor, Dr. Ruth Parkin-Gounelas, that I owe the greatest debt. With her I have experienced not only top standards of academic supervision, but also what I see as an empowering role model of scholarly excellence and commitment, hard work and perseverance. I am hugely indebted to her for her meticulous reading of my work, her critical and intellectual rigor, her theoretical guidance, her unfailing interest in and enthusiasm about my project. Dr. Parkin-Gounelas has inspired and challenged me critically and intellectually in ways that have made me, I believe, a better person, teacher and scholar. I shall always be grateful to her for this. I am also deeply grateful to my co-advisor, Dr. Ekaterini Douka-Kabitoglou, for her emotional support, her thorough reading of my work, her insightful comments and enthusiasm for this project as well as for her useful critical and practical advice. Deep thanks are also due to my other co-advisor, Dr. Karin Boklund-Lagopoulou, for carefully reading and commenting on this thesis with genuine interest and insight and for her on-going encouragement and optimistic spirit. I would also like to express my gratitude to the members of my examining committee, Dr. Katerina Kitsi-Mitakou, Dr. Effie Yiannopoulou, Dr. Domna Pastourmatzi and Dr. Youli Theodosiadou for taking the time to read the dissertation and for their insightful questions and constructive criticism. Finally, I would also like to acknowledge a twenty-year-old debt to Jina Politi, Professor Emeritus at Aristotle University, whose inspirational teaching, writing and passion for texts incited my own interest in literature during both my undergraduate and post-graduate years. ii A number of colleagues and friends have provided me with support throughout the long process of working on this project. I am deeply grateful to Professor Nancy Weyant, Coordinator of Reference Studies in the Humanities at Harvey A. Andruss Library of Bloomsburg University Pennsylvania, not only for her two excellent Gaskell Bibliographies (and their constantly updated web supplements), but above all, for her generous emotional and bibliographical support, her interest in my work as well as for having personally kept me up to date with the latest publications in the field of Gaskell studies. It is thanks to Nancy that I have always been provided with material that I could not have easily laid my hands on otherwise. My colleagues and friends Maria Vara and Despina-Alexandra Constantinidou have also been a source of intellectual stimulation, emotional support and encouragement, so I thank them both for helping me to cope with the pressures and demands of this project. I am also indebted to the headmaster, Dr. Anastasios Tokmakidis, and to my colleagues at the Intercultural Junior High School of Evosmos in Thessaloniki not only for their support and encouragement during the final stages of my dissertation, but, above all, for their willingness to undertake extra work-loads to relieve me of extra-curricular responsibilities that demand considerable time and effort in a period when concentrated time was the one thing sorely needed. I would also like to thank the English Department of Aristotle University for funding two of my conference trips abroad, as well as for giving me the chance to teach a number of literary courses to undergraduate students, which was a rewarding and stimulating experience. My family has been my principal source of physical, intellectual and emotional strength all these years. It is they who have so generously provided me with the love, care, practical help and domestic stability vital for my well-being as well as for my intellectual creativity. To my mother-in-law, my more than mother, Zografia, and to my father-in-law, iii Thanasis, I owe the hugest debt for it is they who took upon themselves the difficult task of taking care of my demanding household. My own parents, Chrysanthi and Stelios, have also been supportive and readily available to me and my family throughout and I thank them for everything they have done for us. My sister-in-law, Matina, and her family have been another comforting presence for me and I am indebted to them for many things, big and small, but, above all, for their life (and spirit)-sustaining sense of humour, practical advice and for imbuing me with their positive life attitude. Finally, this project would never have been completed had it not been for the catalytic presence in my life of my two most beloved and precious ones, my husband Yiannis and our son Thanasis, both of whom have been a permanent source of physical and intellectual strength. To these two I am indebted in ways that words cannot describe; suffice it to say that it is to Yiannis and Thanasis that I owe everything, for it is thanks to their steadfast support, tender love and affection and genuine commitment to what gradually became a common aim for all three of us, that this project finally reached its final stage. The least I can do to express my love and gratitude is to dedicate this project to them with my deepest thanks, so I will follow Gaskell in acknowledging the greatest debt I shall ever incur: This dissertation is wholeheartedly dedicated to my dearest husband Yiannis and our beloved son Thanasis “by her who best knows [their] value.” iv Abstract My dissertation approaches a number of Elizabeth Gaskell’s first-person works, namely, Cranford, (1853) Cousin Phillis, (1863) “Six Weeks at Heppenheim”, (1862) “The Poor Clare” (1856) and “The Grey Woman”, (1861) through a post-modern perspective employing such theoretical frameworks as psychoanalytic theory, narratology and gender theory. It attempts to explore the problematics of Victorian subjectivity from a post-modern, to be more precise, from a Lacanian perspective. All along, I assume that the narrative subjectivity which emerges from Gaskell’s texts, both as a narrating and narrated one, is split, divided and fluid rather than concrete, autonomous and whole, despite clinging to illusions of autonomy and fantasies of wholeness. This is the result of the narrating subject’s misrecognition of its own subjectivity which occurs as part of the continuation or re-enactment of the prototypical encounter between the “I” and its mirror image (Which, again, is one of misrecognition and imaginary wholeness) as experienced in infancy during what Jacques Lacan has theorized as the Mirror Stage. I see it emerging, moreover, as a process in the form of a series of subject positions, imaginary identifications and psychic investments which are discursively, and hence ideologically produced by the symbolic system, rather than as an essence or stable ontological entity or substance. Although over the last two decades Elizabeth Gaskell has been established as one of the major, female, authorial figures as representative of what has come to be known as classic realism of nineteenth-century, she has seldom (if at all) been read as a writer of self-conscious fiction in the ways that some of her more acclaimed cohorts (as, for instance, Charlotte Brontë and George Eliot) have and this is what this thesis will partly attempt to do. Despite their realistic frame of reference and mode of writing, which is generally informed by a belief in a world of consistent subjects as the origin of meaning, knowledge and action, the result of the dominant ideology of their time which is the post-Enlightment epoch of empiricism and v industrial capitalism, Gaskell’s first-person texts subtly, but firmly subvert such certainties in ways that point to the instability of the speaking subject itself. Hence, her narrators’ splitting ambivalence is to be traced – as a branch of contemporary criticism has consistently attempted to do as regards her better known industrial fiction – even in the most realistically rendered of her narratives, thus giving credit to post-modern interpretations of subject formation. According to them, subjectivity is discursively constructed and dispersed across the range of discourses (cultural, political and economic) in which the “concrete” individual participates. Moreover, this project is intent upon embracing the view that since the narrating subject is constructed in the realm of the symbolic order, which is also the realm of discourse, mediation and ideology, then it is also discursively constructed in ideology itself, which in a seemingly “natural” way interpellates it also as a gendered, class-conscious and race-conscious subject, thus forcing it, through subtle coercion, to assume a predetermined set of seemingly fixed positions in a reality which is but a series of inter-subjective positions, repetitive role playing and masquerading.
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