Cross-Cultural Encounter and the Novel: Nation, Identity, and Genre in Nineteenth- Century British Literature
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CROSS-CULTURAL ENCOUNTER AND THE NOVEL: NATION, IDENTITY, AND GENRE IN NINETEENTH- CENTURY BRITISH LITERATURE DISSERTATION Presented in Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements for the Degree Doctor of Philosophy in the Graduate School of The Ohio State University By Chimi Woo, M.A. * * * * * The Ohio State University 2008 Dissertation Committee: Approved by Professor Clare Simmons, Adviser Professor David Riede ____________________________ Adviser Professor Amanpal Garcha Graduate Program in English ABSTRACT My dissertation considers cross-cultural encounter represented in the nineteenth- century novel by focusing on the relationships between England’s imperial nationalism and the novel. Whereas many postcolonial critics have situated the nineteenth-century novelistic process in the national context of English colonialism and have argued that the novel mainly sustained the hegemonic mode of conceptualization of England’s cultural others, I argue that the story of cross-cultural encounters conceives an alternative vision that counters such a hegemonic conceptualization of English subjectivity and its subordinate otherness. The notion of cross-cultural encounter in my project is differentiated from that of the space of colonial encounter through which the colonizer from the metropolis seeks to assert his superiority and secure his innocence while he is involved with colonial practices. On the contrary, English characters in the texts that I consider experience the sense of guilt, ennui, or uncertainty that is frequently attributed to colonized subjects. Through actual encounter with their cultural others, English characters distance themselves from the dominant cultural order and the imperialist assumptions as to their superiority and engage with other cultures and people. I show how novels suggest the disruption of the claimed cultural hierarchy by addressing the positive alterity of other ii cultures and hybridity that the dynamics of cross-cultural encounter invoke. The individual chapters of my dissertation show that while the English nation confronted various other cultures in the nineteenth century, at the same time the novel was also engaged with such issues as the Irish Question, the Jewish Question, and the Indian Question to conceive a different world order in which the meaning and values of the metropolitan center and its peripheries are reconsidered. In five case studies of different subgenres of the novel such as the Irish national tale, the realist novel, the sensation novel, the Gothic novel, and the early modernist novel, I demonstrate that the nineteenth-century novel engages itself with the shared question of English national identity in its relation to cultural others consistently throughout the various subgenres. iii Dedicated to My Husband Yuhchae Yoon iv ACKNOWLEDGMENTS I express my sincere gratitude to my adviser, Clare Simmons, for her consistent interest in and support for my work. From my first year at Ohio State, Clare encouraged and advised me throughout coursework, the M.A. exam, the candidacy exam and this dissertation with expert guidance and care. She spent many hours reading each chapter of this dissertation and other pieces of writing I produced while in the program, and I am very grateful for her extensive help and time. Her courses on Romantic and Victorian literature and reading with her in individual studies provided an important foundation for this dissertation. I am grateful to David Riede for his encouragement and feedback on each chapter of this dissertation. I also thank Aman Garcha for his time and comment as committee member on this dissertation. I thank other faculty members in the department, especially Phoebe Spinrad, Marlene Longenecker, Roxann Wheeler, Debora Moddelmog and Pranav Jani. I thank Kathleen Griffin for her friendship and her help with paperwork. The writing of this dissertation was supported by fellowships from the department. The Mary Lundie Stewart Vorman Fellowship and departmental dissertation fellowships allowed me time off from teaching to devote myself to writing this dissertation. I want to thank my graduate student peers for their friendship, particularly Danielle Dadras, Ivonne Garcia, Kyoung-min Han, Kristen Hartman, Kyounghye Kwon, Yongwha Lee, Kate Oestreich, and Nancy Yan. I extend many thanks to Pastor Jae K. Chun, Bob Trube of the v Christian Graduate Student Alliance at Ohio State, and the staff of the Korean Student Abroad for their emotional support and prayer. I am thankful to my parents Yong-Kiel Woo and Soun-Nam Lee without whose sacrificing love and faith in my ability I would never haven been here. I thank my parents-in-law Mihn-Siek Yoon and Young-Soun Park for their loving encouragement. I want to thank other members of my family, particularly Ma-Mie Woo and Joy Yoon for their prayer. I thank Hyun-Sung Yoon who has brought a great joy in my life. Above all, I am grateful to my husband and dearest friend, Yuhchae Yoon, whose loving patience, support and faith have been incomparable as always. vi VITA February 27, 1971 ................................................Born – Kimcheon, Korea 1994......................................................................B.A. English Language and Literature, Yonsei University, Seoul, Korea 1997......................................................................M.A. English Language and Literature, Yonsei University, Seoul, Korea 2003 …………………………………………….M.A. English, The Ohio State University 2001 - 2006 .........................................................Graduate Teaching Associate The Ohio State University FIELDS OF STUDY Major Field: English vii TABLE OF CONTENTS pages Abstract............................................................................................................................... ii Dedication.......................................................................................................................... iv Acknowledgment ................................................................................................................ v Vita … ............................................................................................................................... vii List of Figures.................................................................................................................... ix Chapters: 1. Introduction .................................................................................................................. 1 2. The Irish National Tale and the Irish Question in Sydney Owenson’s The Wild Irish Girl and Maria Edgeworth’s The Absentee................................................................ 21 3. “The Balance of Separation and Communication”: Knowing Other Cultures in George Eliot’s Daniel Deronda ............................................................................... 60 4. “I Had Discovered Myself as the Thief”: Imperialism and Sensational National Character in Wilkie Collins’s The Moonstone......................................................... 100 5. “This Vampire Which is amongst Us”: The Nation, Race, and the Gothic in Bram Stoker’s Dracula ..................................................................................................... 134 6. “I Want to See the Real India”: Modernism, Point of View, and Cross-Cultural Friendship in E. M. Forster’s A Passage to India ................................................... 166 viii LIST OF FIGURES Figures pages Figure 1.1 "The Irish Frankenstein," Punch, May 20, 1882........................................... 146 Figure 1.2 "The Irish Vampire," Punch, October 24, 1885 ............................................ 147 ix CHAPTER 1 INTRODUCTION 1.1 The Story of Cross-Cultural Encounter The title character in George Eliot’s last novel Daniel Deronda (1876) challenges “the spoiled child” Gwendolen Harleth, as Book One of the novel puts it, by saying that “I think what we call the dullness of things is a disease in ourselves. Else how could anyone find an intense interest in life? And many do” (395). Eliot’s novel identifies the Jewish people that Daniel meets as those who find “an intense interest in life.” Daniel actually chides Gwendolen for her boredom after he himself has recovered from ennui by being wakened through a new interest in Judaism: Deronda, like his neighbours, had regarded Judaism as a sort of eccentric fossilized form which an accomplished man might dispense with studying, and leave to specialists. But Mirah, with her terrified flight from one parent, and her yearning after the other, had flashed on him the hitherto neglected reality that Judaism was something still throbbing in human lives, still making for them the only conceivable vesture of the world; and in the idling excursion on which he immediately afterwards set out with Sir Hugo he began to look for the outsides of synagogues, and the titles of books about the Jews. This wakening of a new interest—this passing from supposition that we hold the right opinions on a subject we are careless about, to a sudden care for it, and a sense that our opinions were ignorance—is an effectual remedy for ennui, which unhappily cannot be secured on a physician’s prescription; but Deronda had carried it with him, and 1 endured his weeks of lounging all the better. It was on this journey that he first entered a Jewish synagogue. (Emphasis added; 347) This example of an English character that recovers his interest in life and overcomes his boredom after his encounter with an other culture illustrates