Working-Class Women on the Move in British Novels from the 1850S to the 1890S
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REREADING ―MISERY‖: WORKING-CLASS WOMEN ON THE MOVE IN BRITISH NOVELS FROM THE 1850S TO THE 1890S By Sun Jai Kim A DISSERTATION Submitted to Michigan State University in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of English—Doctor of Philosophy 2019 ABSTRACT REREADING ―MISERY‖: WORKING-CLASS WOMEN ON THE MOVE IN BRITISH NOVELS FROM THE 1850S TO THE 1890S By Sun Jai Kim This dissertation rethinks a set of Victorian novels by close reading the loaded term ―misery.‖ I argue that the middle-class novelists under consideration here were self-conscious of their appropriation of the voice of working-class women and tried to give more space and individual voice to the working-class female characters by often shifting in narrative perspectives, i.e., handing over the narrative agency to them. This dissertation closely reads how the novels grapple with the working-class characters‘ desperate situations by introducing the term ―misery,‖ which is a euphemistic expression of the characters‘ scandalous situations. The study will demonstrate how the uses of the term ―misery‖ provide transformative moments for the working- class female characters to stand above the situations. Reinstating the working-class women‘s agency in the mid-to-late Victorian narratives by staging a series of contexts and places where they achieve perverse power over against what the loaded word ―misery‖ defines, this dissertation has an aspiration to draw an alternative history of women‘s literature built around the middle-class depictions of the Victorian working-class women moving outside the sphere of domesticity, which even led to the fictional representations of the lower-middle-class New Woman in the fin-de-siècle. This study‘s perspective reframes the accepted view of considering Victorian female working-class women as an inferior object for the completion of moral virtues of the middle- class domestic women and bourgeois men as Nancy Armstrong famously contended in her works, Desire and Domestic Fiction (1987) and How Novels Think: The Limits of Individualism from 1719-1900 (2005). In this regard, this study importantly refers to Patricia Johnson‘s groundbreaking reassertion of the importance of the industrial novels, where the complex roles of the working-class women in the reform movements are portrayed, in Hidden Hands: Working- Class Women and Victorian Social-Problem Fiction (2001). However, this study attempts to overcome Johnson‘s reading of the working-class women in the industrial novels as victims by strategically delving into the narrative techniques used in the four novels for the purpose of giving agency back to the working-class characters. For the theorization of the narrative techniques observed in the novels of my consideration, I refer to Susan Sniader Lanser‘s Fictions of Authority: Women Writers and Narrative Voice (1992) where she explores the ways in which women writers acquire narrative authority. My dissertation critically revises a line of feminist criticism that defined middle-class female activists and writers‘ exploration in the public space against their antagonism towards the working-class women in the streets as observed in Judith R. Walkowitz‘s City of Dreadful Delight: Narratives of Sexual Danger in Late Victorian London (1992) and Deborah Epstein Nord‘s Walking the Victorian Streets: Women, Representation, and the City (1995). Unlike Walkowitz and Nord who considered the middle-class women as antagonistic or disinterested observers of the life of the working-class women on the streets, my dissertation examines the middle-class authors‘ cultural appropriation of the ideas of working-class women by reading much more complex mixed gestures of sympathetic identification through focalized narration and ironic distance through free indirect discourses. For my mother who gives me strength to carry on iv PREFACE Elinor could no longer witness this torrent of unresisted grief in silence. ‗Exert yourself, dear Marianne,‘ she cried, ‗if you would not kill yourself and all who love you. Think of your mother; think of her misery while you suffer; for her sake you must exert yourself.‘ -Jane Austen, from Sense and Sensibility v TABLE OF CONTENTS 1. INTRODUCTION…………………………………………………………………………..1 2. REREADING RUTH‘S FALL IN RUTH………………………………………………....17 Rereading the Fall……………………………………………………………………..17 Questioning the Origin of Fall………………………………………………………....34 Ruth‘s ―Misery‖………………………………………………………………………..44 3. REREADING ―MISERY‖ IN ADAM BEDE…………………………………..………….53 Introduction…………………………………………………………………………....53 Rethinking Hetty Sorrel……….……………………………………………………….60 Rethinking Dinah Morris………………………………………………………………79 Rethinking Infanticide………………………………………………………………....91 4. REREADING ―MISERY‖ AND ―MADNESS‖ IN LADY AUDLEY’S SECRET…………96 Introduction……………………………………………………………………………96 ―Misery‖ and Empowerment………………………………………………………....104 ―Madness‖ and Storytelling………………………………………………………..…122 Conclusion……………………………………………………………………………133 5. TESS‘S ―MISERY‖ AND A MARK OF INDIVIDUALITY IN TESS OF THE D’URBERVILLES…………………………………………………………………….…134 Introduction………………………………………………………………………….134 Tess‘s ―Misery‖……………………………………………………………………....142 Angel‘s ―Misery‖………………………………………………………………….…157 Conclusion……………………………………………………………………………165 6. CODA……………………………………………………………………………………..167 BIBLIOGRAPHY……………………………………………………………………………170 vi 1. INTRODUCTION This dissertation centers the working-class female characters in Victorian literary history. By exploring the narrative structures through which the agency of the fictional working-class women is authorized in mid-to-late Victorian novels, this study makes an intervention in the dominant literary history built around the cultural hegemony of the middle-class men and domestic woman. This dissertation examines the ways in which the working-class female characters represented in mid-to-late Victorian novels complicate the Victorian ideology of individualism built around the modern middle class men‘s self-discipline and the domestic women‘s forbearance and self-containment. In particular, my interest lies in thinking about how the middle-class authors in set of canonical works imagine working-class female characters starting to explore their bodies‘ extra capabilities including laboring stamina, mobility, and sexuality when they are deprived of their virginity, which would give them the opportunity to pursue the commonly desirable objects among Victorian bourgeois individuals such as a healthy family and reproduction based on it. They often escape the collapse of or the alienation from their family in pursuit of a new dwelling and economic independence. One might think that the middle-class authors are depicting immoral scenes and the consequences of that immorality. However, I contend that these novelists are deploying a fantasy of the achievements of working- class female characters to explore the possibility for economic independence, sexual autonomy, and alternative domestic lives. I argue that, while the middle-class Victorian novelists appropriated the voices of the working-class women, they were still self-conscious of their appropriative gestures and tried to give more space and individual voices to the working-class female characters by often backing out of the explicit articulation of particularities or handing over the narrative agency to them. 1 It is my contention that this narrative transfer happens around the introduction of the term ―misery‖ in the four novels under my consideration: Elizabeth Gaskell‘s Ruth (1853), George Eliot‘s Adam Bede (1859), Mary Elizabeth Braddon‘s Lady Audley’s Secret (1862), and Thomas Hardy‘s Tess of the d’Urbervilles: A Pure Woman Faithfully Presented (1892). I explore how the middle-class novelists use the term ―misery‖ to at first present the working-class women as suffering moral consequences for their immoral behaviors and resignifies the term in unconventional ways that the following chapters unpack. I notice how the term ―misery‖ allows the middle-class Victorian novelists to euphemistically articulate indescribable misfortunes that befall the working-class female characters while its use in the narratives often creates a series of transformative moments for the female characters in each of the novels. At the same time, the degree of agency that the female characters have over their misery gradually increases throughout the narrative of my dissertation. I contend that, in the four novels under my consideration, the term ―misery‖ signifies the heroines‘ sexual fall, pregnancy out of marriage, being discarded by men, the difficulties of single motherhood, and the sense of extreme isolation. The connotations of the term often extend to include their lack of mothering competence and unavoidable mistreatment or desertion of their babies. While the word ―misery‖ has mainly served to create sentimental effects in Jane Austen‘s novels by being associated with the heroines‘ pain of broken heart in an earlier moment of the novels as in Sense and Sensibility (1811) and Persuasion (1817), the term begins to denote far more serious infelicities yet paradoxically produces perverse empowering effects in the four novels under my consideration. If Jane Austen‘s narrative use of the term ―misery‖ primarily serves to articulate gentle women‘s agony over their broken heart, the use of the same word in the four novels under my consideration mediates a deeper level of catastrophe and equivalent emotional distress. I notice how the word‘s 2 connotations become more catastrophic and transformative as