Dissertation Final Draft

UC Berkeley UC Berkeley Electronic Theses and Dissertations Title Real Talk: Direct Discourse and the Victorian Novel Permalink https://escholarship.org/uc/item/8j8022qd Author Dumont, Alexandra Irene Publication Date 2018 Peer reviewed|Thesis/dissertation eScholarship.org Powered by the California Digital Library University of California Real Talk: Direct Discourse and the Victorian Novel By Alexandra Irene Dumont A dissertation submitted in partial satisfaction of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy in English in the Graduate Division of the University of California, Berkeley Committee in Charge: Professor Kent Puckett, Chair Professor Grace Lavery Professor James Vernon Summer 2018 Ó Alexandra Irene Dumont, 2018 1 Abstract Real Talk: Direct Discourse and the Victorian Novel by Alexandra Irene Dumont Doctor of Philosophy in English University of California, Berkeley Professor Kent Puckett, Chair This dissertation proceeds from the idea that, although it is everywhere present and routinely discussed, we have nevertheless neglected to talk, thoroughly, about “talk” in the Victorian realist novel. It also proceeds from the idea that we have done this because it is precisely what such novels, and Victorian culture more generally, have taught us to do. Talk, I argue, both as a subject and a mode of novelistic representation, is cast as an other to the novel, one that is simultaneously alien to and containable within the realist text. As a verbal activity, talk suggests an orality that is quotidian and amorphous, a flow of words submerged in the social world that elicits it. This formlessness and sociality render talk an ideal figure for the vast, teeming “life” to which the realist novel refers, and whose heterogeneity is as much a model as a vexation for novelistic form. As a textual formation within the novel, I argue, talk as direct discourse functions as a “real fictional object”: a place in which the language of the novel shifts from a mode of representation to an object thereof, and consequently becomes at once more and less “real.” For authors like Harriet Martineau, George Eliot, and Henry James, such ambiguities provide a means of navigating realism’s competing imperatives of extra-textual reference and aesthetic self-sufficiency. Talk’s minor quality allows it to animate the novel’s rhetoric even as that rhetoric disavows talk as mere chatter, gossip, or report. My focus on talk, then, is a way of getting at a larger and in many ways more elusive subject: Victorian realism and the critical discussions thereof. Though talk as dialect or idiolect has an important place in the critical history of realism, it has not been the defining marker of either the realist mode or the putative formal sophistication of the Victorian novel. I begin my project by considering the primacy accorded by novel theory to free indirect discourse, and suggest that literary criticism’s obsession with this form stems in part from the parallels between free indirect discourse itself and the methodology of those who have theorized it. Conversely, I argue, direct discourse has been read as a mere starting point, from which narrative complexity evolves. Yet it is because, not in spite, of this basic or minor quality that talk is fundamental to the realist novel. I examine the function of these minor forms of talk and direct discourse in the didactic stories and political essays of Harriet Martineau, the aphoristic “parables” and omniscient narration of George Eliot, and the “impressionizing” fictions and all-consuming style of Henry James. I trace the ways that Victorian realism casts talk as a foil for its more totalizing forms, arguing that in centering itself around this vanishing, minor object, realism centers itself around an absence. It is not, then, the presence of the world in the text that makes the realist novel possible, but rather the world’s absence that makes space for the novelistic real. i For my family. ii Table of Contents Acknowledgements iii Introduction 1 I. Harriet Martineau’s Feeble Realism 21 II. George Eliot’s Parables 46 III. Henry James Makes an Impression 70 IV. Coda: Grace Paley and the Life of Talk 92 Bibliography 100 iii Acknowledgements This project would not exist without Kent Puckett. Kent has been my teacher, a mentor through my own teaching, my first and most important reader, and an unflagging source of support when my own energies ebbed. I never talked to him without afterwards feeling invigorated by our conversation and awed by the breadth and vitality of his thought. He makes everyone’s ideas, especially one’s own, feel more exciting, and I cannot imagine my work or my time at Berkeley without him. The existence of this project is also due to the support of the rest of my committee, and I am deeply grateful to everyone who advised me, formally and informally, over the last several years. Ian Duncan’s generosity, with his thoughts, his time, and his encouragement, is truly unfathomable. I am lucky to have been the recipient of both his kindness and his insight. Cathy Gallagher instantly diagnosed and described even the most byzantine problems in my work. She provided me with masterful, clear-eyed readings, and with the truly energizing terror of sharing my ideas with someone whose work I respect so deeply, and to whom I owe such a profound intellectual debt. Grace Lavery has nothing but a joy to work alongside. She provided me with a model of deeply engaged and beautifully written scholarship, and was always willing to be a hard-ass when I needed one. I could not have asked for a better friend-tor. James Vernon has been generous and thoughtful in his responses to my work, and I only wish we had had more time to work together. I feel fortunate to have been a part of the broader community of Victorianists, which has always provided me with encouragement, insight, inspiration, and strange and terrible dancing. I presented portions of this project at both Dickens Universe and the North American Victorian Studies Association’s annual conferences, and I want to thank everyone there who gave me so much to think about, in relation to both my own work and the work of others. The company of my fellow graduate students has been the greatest reward of my time at Berkeley. Ryan Perry has been my companion through the good, the bad, and the truly absurd moments of graduate school, and I am endlessly grateful for his steadfastness, his wisdom, and his cable television. I knew Sanders Creasy and I would be friends from the day we met, and I told him so. Luckily for me he agreed, and I have been thankful ever since for his loyalty and his kindness, and for the way he helped me see familiar texts with new eyes. Bradford Taylor and his family are so much a part of my life that I forget we in fact met in graduate school. I can’t believe I haven’t know them forever, and I love them as if I had. Jesse Cordes Selbin is my favorite Victorianist of them all, and I am fortunate to have had her as a reader, conference- buddy, and friend. Katie Fleishman was truly the emotional doula for the final part of this project. Without her friendship and her gimlet eye I never would have made it. The people with whom I have happily worked and spent time at Berkeley are too numerous to name here, but I would also like to thank Stephen Best, Dan Blanton, Jeff Blevins, Steven Goldsmith, Jordan Greenwald, Dorothy Hale, Alek Jeziorek, Sarah Jessica Johnson, Jonathan Larner-Lewis, Leila Mansouri, Megan O’Connor, Susan Schweik, Elisa Tamarkin, Michelle Ty, and Wendy Xin for their help, their intelligence, and their company. iv Finally, and most importantly, I want to acknowledge my family: My parents have made my life possible, in every sense of those words, and I can never thank them enough for their myriad forms of love and support. My daughter Iris has given me the great gift of daily reminders of a world outside my work, as well as a bigger, deeper joy than I could ever have imagined. And Terry LaFrazia is, in all ways and in all things, my partner; the person who believed that I could do everything, and loved me when I didn’t do anything. Thank you, T, for your magnificent self. 1 Introduction I. Forms of Talk “With a single drop of ink for a mirror, the Egyptian sorcerer undertakes to reveal to any chance comer the far-reaching visions of the past. This is what I undertake to do for you, reader. With this drop of ink at the end of my pen I will show you the roomy workshop of Mr. Jonathan Burge, carpenter and builder in the village of Hayslope, as it appeared on the eighteenth of June, in the year of our Lord 1799.” - George Eliot, Adam Bede1 The opening lines of Adam Bede describe the work of the novel in essentially visual terms. The drop of ink is a mirror in which “far-reaching visions of the past” appear, and the author produces not a story, but a scene; an image which might be taken in all at once. The novel’s lingering second paragraph, a description of Jonathan Burge’s workshop, is therefore imaginatively condensed, both by the analogy of writing to vision, and by the temporality implied by the “single drop of ink”—the words on the page will be only as many as this finite quantity of liquid can produce. The ensuing lines, which depict Adam and Seth Bede in greater detail, also perform this act of simultaneous expansion and contraction, positing their descriptions as reproductions in language of things that could be taken in instantly by an observer on the scene: “It is clear at a glance that the next workman is Adam’s

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