1 Formal Education: Early Children's Genres, Gender, and the Realist

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Formal Education: Early Children’s Genres, Gender, and the Realist Novel

Dissertation

Presented in Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements for the Degree Doctor of Philosophy in the Graduate School of The Ohio State University

Cecily Erin Hill, M.A.

Graduate Program in English

The Ohio State University

2015

Dissertation Committee:

Robyn R. Warhol, Advisor

Jill Galvan

Sandra Macpherson

Clare Simmons

Cecily Erin Hill

2015

Abstract

Early children's literature took the forms of complex, distinct genres that, much more than the novels being published contemporaneously with them, were employed in the didactic effect of literary structures. These works, published roughly from 1750-1850, do not assume a simple, one-to-one relationship between fictional worlds and the real world. They are aware of the complexities of representation, and, written and read predominantly by women and girls, they are especially aware of representation's effects on gender. Early children's fiction, I argue, treats literary and social forms alike as structure-at-work in the world, and this treatment had a substantive impact on fiction that shares its interest in the subtleties of gender formation and the disparate treatment of gendered beings in fiction and in fact: the nineteenth-century realist novel. From one perspective, this project is a straightforward, genre-study of early children's fiction and its influence on the Victorian realist novel. I focus on four major genres, selected for their numerousness and their continued though adapted use in fiction, and I think carefully about the bids they made on readers. Rather than teach simple morals, I argue that these works teach people to analyze in culturally- prescribed ways: to see a situation in the world, understand what it means, and react to it accordingly. By emphasizing analysis as a response to structure, this fiction signals the construction of social categories. By adopting and adapting these forms, novelists like Dickens and the Brontës engage children’s fictions’ educational goals and emphasize the degree to which reality is defined by social, material, embodied, and familial forms. Ultimately, I demonstrate that that the didacticism which we have for so long assumed was simple and straightforward is, in fact, a kind of formalism, one that codifies structures of response and embodiment that belie its reputation as pure content. ii

After all, the other story this dissertation tells is that of the Realist novel. It complements arguments like Ian Watt's in The Rise of the Novel, Michael McKeon's in The Origins of the English Novel, 1600-1740, and Nancy Armstrong's in Desire and Domestic Fiction. To these theories of the novel, I add a history of realism (and particularly nineteenth-century realism) that is by and large anti-realist. By demonstrating that the most canonical of Victorian Realist novels—novels like Jane Eyre, Villette, Bleak House, Wuthering Heights, and Middlemarch—rely on children's literary forms in addition to those written for adults, this dissertation demands that historians of the novel take childhood reading as seriously as they take that of adulthood. In place of a history of the novel that emphasizes novel form as it develops from the mid-eighteenth century onward, I offer a genealogy that, while by no means meant to supersede those provided by Watt, McKeon, and Armstrong, nonetheless demonstrates that the nineteenth-century novel, for all its realist impulse, makes strategic and frequent use of literary genres notable for their rejection of realist form.

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Acknowledgments

Of all the things early children’s stories teach, the most important and most consistent is the degree to which we are dependent on and subject to others. In Dorothy Kilner’s The Adventures of a Pincushion, the heroine finds herself wedged under a cabinet and, however much she struggles to get out, she is only able to turn and turn, going nowhere quickly until a servant comes to her aid. Without so many people and organizations, I would still be like that Pincushion—working, but to no avail. This dissertation could not have been completed without generous funding from Indiana University’s Lilly Library, the Children’s Literature Association of North America, Coca-Cola, and numerous units from within The Ohio State University, including Alumni Grants for Graduate Research and Scholarship, the Department of Women’s Studies, and my home Department of English. Nor could it have been completed without the support of many, many people. I am grateful to the people who housed and tolerated me during my numerous research trips: to Philip Dixon for accompanying me to museum after museum full of old children’s things; to Sarah and Jonathan Murphy for making me comfortable in their home and with their family; to my sister Suzanna Hill and Sandy Beall for providing me with a fabulous writing-retreat weekend in Devon. It cannot be fun to listen to someone ramble on and on about the intricacies of libraries and old stories, but these people persevered. When I joined The Ohio State University’s Department of English, I joined a program known for their collegiality and for their liberality toward one another. I am thankful to Kate Novotny Owen and Erica Haugtvedt for reading and commenting on early drafts of Chapter One—and for reading many research applications, conference, and seminar papers over the years. I am grateful to Meghan Burke-Hattaway and Colleen Kennedy for letting me eavesdrop on their iv

projects and learn from their examples. Much of what is good in my work was modeled after theirs. When I count my blessings, I count among them my wonderful committee members. Jill Galvan, Sandra Macpherson, and Clare Simmons carefully responded to and met with me about every chapter draft. They dazzled me with their insights; they helped me think and write more carefully and clearly; and they gave me much of their precious time. Above all, I am thankful for my advisor, Robyn Warhol. Robyn has carefully and attentively commented, not just on my dissertation, but every thing I have sent her for the past five years. She has supported my writing and my research as she has supported me in every aspect of my life: with unflagging enthusiasm and boundless generosity. Last but by no means least, I owe endless thanks to the people who have loved me and sustained me, who believed in me even and especially when I didn’t believe in myself; My dear friend Krista Bryson, with whom I started and am finishing this program, for making me eat and helping me work; my parents, Dan Hill, and Andy and Rosemary Kaiser for their love and constant support; and my husband, Michael Presley. To my mother and Andy I am especially indebted—they have supported me through every stress and no few of the financial crises that seem to be inevitable parts of graduate school. My mother has cooked and cared for me both at her home and in mine. She has eased my stress and soothed my spirit. And as for Michael, he has made it possible for me to go away for long research trips and taken the burden of household responsibilities when I haven’t felt up to it. He has been gracious and uncomplaining when I have been otherwise. He has been a constant reminder that the little things are, in fact, everything.

Vita

2006 ...... B.A. English, University of Southern Mississippi 2009 ...... M.A. English, University of Southern Mississippi 2010 to present ...... Graduate Teaching Associate, Department of English, The Ohio State University

Publications

“Consuming Cultures: The Politics of Food in Toni Morrison’s Tar Baby.” Midwest Quarterly 53.2 (2012): 283-298.

(Review) Newlyn, Lucy. William and Dorothy Wordsworth: ‘All in Each Other.’ Women’s Writing 21.2 (2014): 278-279.

(Review) Solomon, Rakesh H. Albee in Performance. Valley Voices 10.2 (2010): 134- 136.

Fields of Study

Major Field: English

Table of Contents

Abstract ...... ii

Acknowledgments ...... iv

Vita ...... vi

Table of Contents ...... vii

Introduction: Children’s Literary Forms and the Realist Novel ...... 1

Chapter 1: Reading Method, the School Story, and Villette ...... 27

Chapter 2: Useful Things: It Narratives and Novels ...... 87

Chapter 3: Pleasurable Suffering: Harm Narratives and Wuthering Heights ...... 138

Chapter 4: Everyday Life: Family Narratives and the Gender of Reality ...... 192

Endnotes ...... 255

Works Cited ...... 282

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Introduction: Children’s Literary Forms and the Realist Novel

When I was a child, I read and reread fictionalized accounts of Pocahontas, Harriet Tubman, and the Nez Piercé tribe's last stand. I obsessively revisited the works of Edward Eager, Susan Cooper, Mary Norton, Laura Ingalls Wilder, and Madeline L'Engle. Now, volunteering twice a week for my local library's childhood literacy program, I see children similarly fixate on favorite stories. The youngest readers, those limited to vocabulary primers, somehow differentiate between and find favorites among books with titles like Snow Bow, Frog Jog, and Quack Shack— books that equally possess bright images and rhyming words and that lack plot. Slightly older children love Fly Guy, or Elephant and Piggie, or The Pigeon Needs a Bath. Older still gravitate toward The Diary of a Wimpy Kid. One of the great, unexpected, and tangential pleasures of writing this dissertation has been discussing much-loved children's books. After learning about my subject, people inevitably recall their own childhood preferences. My advisor loved Anne of Green Gables and Little Women. An associate dean in my graduate school still rereads The Little House on the Prairie. My own friends, unsurprisingly, read and loved Harry Potter. People remember their childhood books with vividness and surprising clarity; that many continue reread these books indicates their continuing relevance. For most of us, talking about children's books returns us to a comfortable, homey past while simultaneously recalling the novelty of the worlds we visited through stories, including the sense of newness with which we approached our own world. Those of us who are life-long readers, I think, appreciate these books’ ineffable importance. Our sense of their significance recalls Catherine's description of dreams in Wuthering Heights: “I've dreamt in my life dreams that have stayed with me ever after, and changed my ideas: they've gone

through and through me, like wine through water, and altered the color of my mind” (62). Our favorite children’s books resemble these dreams. Stories read again and again move through and through us. They stay with us ever after. It seems like they change our ideas, like they have the potential to alter the color of our minds. But it is difficult to talk about these things. The sense that books have changed us seems intimate and personal. Have they distorted our sense of the world or transformed it? Has the same thing happened to others? Though the study of children's literature has grown since its inception in the 1980s, it still tends to be ghettoized by literary studies disciplines. Scholarly work on children's literature is inevitably lumped together. No matter their disparate fields of interests, conference presentations on fiction, poetry, textbooks, didacticism, and children's biographies (or children's writers' biographies) are lumped into “childhood studies” panels and given an early time slot. At the same time, all kinds of literary scholars retain the sense that individual children's works are significant, if only for the genealogical status. The childhood reading of canonical authors is worth attending to, at least from time to time, as are children's books that have had a perceivable or imagined influence on canonical works. Jerome Beatty believes Ellen, the Teacher influenced Jane Eyre; Lynn Vallone locates Mansfield Park's moral sensibility in Hannah More's work. Sharon Marcus compares the relationship between Great Expectations' Miss Havisham and Estella to doll narratives, while Sarah Gates finds similarities between the novel and Struwwelpeter. By seriously considering the potential for children's genres to have literary influence, these scholars do important and necessary work. Even so, these brief, if interesting, studies fail to fill an important gap, one that scholars of children's literature also neglect. The vast majority of children's literature, especially that published before 1850, is rarely mentioned and hardly looked at. The same titles and authors are repeated, and they are all assumed to fall into one or two simple and overlapping categories: “didactic fiction” and “moral tale.” If we judged only by scholarly work, we would have to assume that early children's fiction was simple

and few and far between, and that, whatever it contributed to its culture, it did so through content rather than form. The few works that receive any critical attention are treated as textual Horatio Algers: they have pulled themselves up by their metaphorical bootstraps, succeeded in rising above the morass of other children's fiction to achieve, if not quality or formal complexity, a measure of influence. To the contrary, this dissertation argues instead that early children's literature matters more for its cumulative effect than for individual influence. Early children's literature was made up of complex, distinct genres that, much more than the novels being published contemporaneously with them, were interested in the didactic effect of literary structures. These works, published roughly from 1750- 1850, do not assume a simple, one-to-one relationship between fictional worlds and the real world. They show awareness of the complexities of representation, and, written and read predominantly by women and girls, they are especially aware of representation's effects on gender. Early children's fiction, I argue, treats literary and social forms alike as structure-at-work in the world, and this treatment had a substantive impact on fiction that shares its interest in the subtleties of gender formation and the disparate treatment of gendered beings in fiction and in fact: the nineteenth-century realist novel. This dissertation tells two stories. On the one hand, it is a straightforward, genre-study of early children's fiction and its influence on the Victorian realist novel. I focus on four major genres, selected for their numerousness and their continued though adapted use in fiction, and I think carefully about the bids they made on readers. Two genres, the school story and the it-narrative, have been previously identified and studied, if limitedly. Two others, the harm narrative and the family narrative, I am identifying myself, though specific instances of these have received some critical attention. I am especially interested in the nuanced and complex ways these genres treat gender, and I argue that this treatment of gender is a large part of what the Victorian Realist novel replicates and renegotiates. Even the very good scholarly work that has attempted to account for eighteenth-century and Romantic children's literature rests too easily on certain, problematic assumptions: that these

books are inherently disciplinary; that they are, all, generically cohesive; that they are generic; that they teach straightforwardly; that we know what they teach, at all. To these assumptions, I counter that early children's literature exposes discipline even while teaching it; that different genres may well have very little in common; that their teachings are surprising, unexpected, anything but typical; that even their most obvious didacticism is mediated and changed by their form; and that scholars have been surprisingly negligent when accounting for large swathes of children's literature. My own sense that didacticism, in fiction or in non-fiction, is formally interesting and relevant owes much to Mitzi Myers who, in her essay “Impeccable Governesses, Rational Dames, and Moral Mothers,” established that early didactic fiction strategically empowered women. Women writers of children's fiction depicted female characters as moral arbiters; moreover, she argues that “late eighteenth-century children's literature [. . .] comprehends an undervalued and almost unrecognized female literary tradition, the more revelatory precisely because it is didactic, because it accepts and emphasizes the instructive and intellectual potential of narrative” (33). Her argument has been taken seriously by later critics, though, as Mary Hilton points out, Myers is guilty of oversimplifying “women writers” into a cohesive, agreeing group: Myers “promotes their feminist qualities at the expense of analyzing the very public interweaving and redefining that women educators were carrying out in a larger arena” (5).i Though not particularly interested in children's books, Hilton herself uses them in a broader discussion of women's educational discourse and their role in the late-eighteenth and early-nineteenth centuries, and she demonstrates that while educational power was the most significant authority allotted women in this period, women “did not all think alike” (6). Like most others who examine generically diverse children's fiction of this time period, Hilton does so in the interest of serving a larger goal, in her case a discussion of educational policy's doctrinal range. Most studies of eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century children's literature are heavily-thematic interpretations engaged with the period's rising

concern with education. In Literature, Education, Romanticism: Reading as Social Practice, 1780-1832, Alan Richardson takes on the considerable task of constructing “links between education, ideology, and power within a society that underwent a profound shift from traditional hierarchical structures of domination to more consensual forms of managing political and social relations” (24-25). Richardson appreciates the complexity of this early fiction and makes sincere moves toward examining it, even going so far as to argue that “however accomplished their illusion of transparency, children's books are (like other literary forms) complexly encoded texts whose formal strategies may reveal as much or more about their ideological import than can their thematic content alone” (111). He complains that “approaches which dwell on the 'radical' and 'progressive' elements of early children's literature tend to minimize or ignore altogether the disciplinary function of the children's books, which has traditionally served as a 'tool or engine constructed to direct and control the development of the child'“ (111-112). Operating from within a Foucaultian conception of discipline, Richardson is himself deeply interested in children's literature's ideological function. Richardson's discussion of Locke's and Rousseau's pedagogies, in which he argues that children's books implicitly connected the blank slate of the child's mind with books' textual possibilities, the child's character with the fictional character, is especially compelling. His vision of a cohesively powerful children's literature is attractive, but his argument is subject to same critique he allots others: willfully or not, by treating all children's genres of this period within one rubric, Richardson, too, minimizes their formal complexity. Though he intends to create a generic and formal analysis, Richardson limits himself to two children's genres—the fairy tale and the moral tale—and demonstrates that both have similar formal features. All “moral” children's fiction, he argues “encourages children to define themselves in terms of their relation to texts” (135); however true this may be, he assumes that this relationship is similar from text to text. Like others, he believes in a cohesiveness that simply doesn't exist on closer inspection. In The Making of the Modern Child: Children's Literature and Childhood in the

Late Eighteenth Century, Andrew O'Malley takes for granted Richardson's claim that early children's books operated with remarkable cohesiveness, though he delves further into the pedagogical goals of early children's books. Unlike Richardson, O'Malley's analysis is entirely content-oriented. He is far more interested in using children's books to uncover truths about eighteenth-century childhood than he is in children's books for their own sake. Though he uses a wider selection of books than Richardson, O'Malley similarly spotlights well-known selections and lumps disparate genres together to study pedagogical reform, chapbooks, class, medicine, educational systems, and gender. O'Malley agrees with Richardson that children's books' disciplinary methods “will produce children capable of governing their own passions and punishing themselves for their infractions” (98). But he also observes that discipline looks different for girls and boys. Discussing Fielding's The Little Female Academy (1749) and Richard Johnson's Juvenile Trials for Robbing Orchards (1772) (both school stories), O'Malley states that, “Fielding's system differs from Johnson's in a decidedly gendered way. Jenny Peace “acts as a mediatory, reestablishing harmony in her circle; Judge Meanwell enforces the law [. . .] Jenny is being trained for the domestic sphere [. . .] Meanwell is being trained for public service” (96). O'Malley's assertion is fascinating, but he doesn't spend much time with it, nor does he extend this analysis into his next chapter, which is purportedly on the “Construction of Gender Roles,” but which spends much of its time pointing out similarities in rational education for boys and girls while acknowledging that “the proper objectives and extent of female education was the subject of much debate of the period” (102).ii These authors do much that my dissertation does not. They are interested in the interactions between children, education, and children's books and the dominant ideologies of their respective periods, and they especially focus on the Enlightenment and Romanticism. They are concerned with the history of educational theory, and they all contextualize books and didacticism within the discourse begun by Locke and Rousseau. With the exception of Hilton, who is more interested in the differences between authors and ideas than she is in ideological

coherence, all of these authors take for granted that beyond any specific content, the 'subject' of moral children's fiction is the child reader itself, whose subjective experience becomes refashioned by the narratives it reads. That is, in addition to representing a moralized world to the child, and beyond even providing the child with an idealized representation of itself, the 'new' children's book sought to reconstruct the child's subjectivity as an ordered, legible, normative, and moralized text in its own right. (Richardson 141)iii Richardson, O'Malley, and critics like them, assume that writers of children's literature took Locke and Rousseau seriously and literally. They believe that children are meant to learn specific morals and ordered ways of being from children's books, and that these morals and orders are themselves predictable. Each of them compellingly demonstrates that, to some extent, writers expected certain to traits to rub off on children—or for children to catch morality from books, like they would a cold. I, too, take this assumption seriously. But I don't take it naively. As Richardson demonstrates, form matters. It matters more seriously once we relieve ourselves of the assumption that early children's fiction consists only of moral tales and fairy tales—both genres that, even hundreds of years later, scholars are able to recognize. Perhaps, as Richardson argues, early children's books aimed at reconstructing children's subjectivity; certainly, they are meant to have some effect on the children who read them. As this dissertation will show, different genres construct the world differently. What is ordered, legible, and normative in a school story may not be so in a harm narrative. If early children's books, as I will demonstrate, “shape” our perception of the world, the shape they give it is surely more fluid, more rounded, more changeable, and less moral than we critics have assumed was possible. Of all the scholarly inquiry into early children's literature, Matthew O. Grenby's The Child Reader, 1700-1840 has without doubt been the most influential on my thinking. As a historian, Grenby sets out to reconstruct the history of the early

child reader and her reading. Where others have relied on anecdotal evidence and the content of children's books themselves, Grenby combines biographical and textual sources with “publication records, subscriptions, inscriptions, and marginalia” to stunning effect: he produces a nuanced account of the child reader that includes her acquisition and reading habits, her class status and location, her age, her emotions, and her gender (24). Grenby agrees with Richardson and O'Malley's assertion that the books aimed to and likely did influence the formation of a middle-class, moral perspective in the nineteenth century. He writes that, given the prevalence of “cross-reading [. . .] children's literature was an important agent of consensus-building in the later eighteenth century” (92).iv Grenby, however, is less certain of what that consensus might look like, given the broad range of texts fitting under the umbrella of “children's literature.” Further, “looking at the actual use of books by eighteenth-century children,” Grenby finds that child “consumers were not cowed by a book's didacticism, but enjoyed their books despite it. Or they subverted it” (286-287). Child readers were driven by enjoyment, and they found enjoyment in texts that have been discredited by a scholarly history that puts these books at odds with good literature. Grenby repeatedly emphasizes that “children did not always understand their books in the same way as adults” (283). He insists that scholars recognize that children probably didn't adopt morals wholesale or naively, and he demonstrates that children were themselves rigorous readers of texts. Relying on biographical narratives and marginal notes, Grenby demonstrates that “most [children] were not cursory readers, preferring to read particular texts over and over again and reading extremely slowly” (251). Children also “précised, extracted and annotated text. They used it interactively, either adding graffiti of various kinds to the page, or, in more approved fashion, engaging in conversation around it” (252). Children read more attentively than scholars have given them credit for; in short, they read with a scholar's seriousness. Moreover, the child reader herself, as Grenby shows, is not predominantly the child reader previously constructed by scholars. Grenby convincingly, exhaustively illustrates a child reader who is “predominantly [. . .]

aged between five and eleven”; rural, based typically in the southern counties of England”; and “from the middle and upper-middle class” (91). Most importantly, from the 1770s onward, she was female (91-92). Grenby argues that The new children's literature—whether books of instruction or delight—was largely powered by female consumers. It might not have been designed specifically for one sex, but the fact that in the 1810s, say, 69 per cent of inscriptions are female and 26 per cent male gives some indication of how lopsided the market had become [. . .] one might even suggest that, for the period from the 1770s to the middle of the nineteenth century, 'children's literature' might more accurately be denoted 'girls' literature.' (60) During the period this study covers, child readers were predominantly girl readers, whether or not the books themselves were written “specifically for one sex.” Girls read broadly of and owned children's books designed for them as well as boys. They read these books carefully and attentively. It is no small wonder, then, that the four children's genres I examine in my own study are explicitly and implicitly concerned with gender. They broach gender at both the level of content and form. They negotiate with femininity, expose the vulnerability of female objects, and assess and value feminine pastimes. I take Grenby's caution gravely. I am not only an adult reader—I am one separated from these books' ideal readers by time and space. My suppositions may well fall somewhat short of reality. And, even were I to find a choice bit of biographical evidence, as Grenby demonstrates time and time again in his study, by highlighting exceptional readers at the expense of every reader, this evidence still falls short of truth. For my own part, while I believe these texts, cumulatively, had a real impact on their girl readers' sense of gender, I do not lay claim to Richardson's and O'Malley's certainty. What I offer instead is a formal genealogy. By locating evidence of these children's literary forms and their treatment of gender in Victorian novels, I demonstrate that these early genres had a lasting, traceable impact—one we may still feel today, as we teach these novels in our classrooms,

watch television and film adaptations of them, and see their plots replicated time and time again in popular literature and culture. After all, the other story this dissertation tells is that of the Realist novel. It complements arguments like Ian Watt's in The Rise of the Novel, Michael McKeon's in The Origins of the English Novel, 1600-1740, and Nancy Armstrong's in Desire and Domestic Fiction. These scholars position the nineteenth-century realist novel as inheriting its dominant traits—and especially its preoccupation with individual consciousness and what Roland Barthes has called “the reality effect”—from eighteenth-century authors like Defoe, Richardson, and (to a lesser extent) Fielding. Watt, who is interested in “realist form,” explains that realism might be defined by the “rejection of traditional plots” (13), characters who are “particular people in particular circumstance” (15), individualize names (21), detailed spaces and places (26), and “the production of what purports to be an authentic account of the actual experiences of individuals” (27). All of these traits spring from a desire to “convey the impression of fidelity to human experience” that was (13), according to Watt, newly and uniquely valued in the eighteenth-century, a product of the rise of “individualism” (61). In contrast, McKeon argues that the realist novel developed out of the generic instabilities of other forms—among them romance, picaresque, allegory, and biography—all of which represented differing ways of interpreting and knowing the world. The realist novel thus comes to encompass these disparate modes; its “realism” is a product of its ability to embrace differing value systems. While agreeing with Watt and McKeon's position that the realist novel ultimately lauds and aims to reproduce a middle-class worldview, Armstrong departs from them with her assertion that the middle-class worldview the novel espouses is that of a woman. “Middle-class authority,” Armstrong argues “rested in large part on the authority novels attributed to women and in this way is designated as specifically female” (4). The novel and the “domestic woman” represented in it “exercised a form of power that appeared to have no political force at all because it seemed forceful only when it was desired. It was the power of domestic surveillance” (19). Like Richardson writing on children's literature, Armstrong

believes that the novel's construction of the individual indoctrinates people into self-surveillance and the nineteenth-century's emergent ideologies. For Armstrong, this ideology allots the middle class power historically given only to the aristocracy by connecting power with morality, value with virtue. By privileging virtuous (and virginal) action over inheritance, the novel invested the middle-class heroine with an authority previously reserved for the ruling class. To these theories of the novel, I add a history of realism (and particularly nineteenth-century realism) that is by and large anti-realist. By demonstrating that the most canonical of Victorian Realist novels—novels like Jane Eyre, Villette, Bleak House, Wuthering Heights, and Middlemarch—rely on children's literary forms in addition to those written for adults, this dissertation demands that historians of the novel take childhood reading as seriously as they take that of adulthood. One might even say that children's genres serve as an alternate route by which anti-realist elements of the eighteenth-century novel eventually flourish in the nineteenth, that its treatment of typological character and violence, for instance, share concerns with Sade and Fielding, or that its emphasis on the common and everyday thrust the georgic poem into realist fiction. In place of a history of the novel that emphasizes novel form as it develops from the mid-eighteenth century onward, I offer a genealogy that, while by no means meant to supersede those provided by Watt, McKeon, and Armstrong, nonetheless demonstrates that the nineteenth-century novel, for all its realist impulse, makes strategic and frequent use of literary genres notable for their rejection of realist form. Early children's fiction is not interested in individuals, relying instead on networks and typology. Nor is it interested in interiority. Of the genres I survey, only one explicitly and concentratedly records characters' thoughts—the object narrative. They rarely attempt “fidelity to human experience,” nor, with the exception of the family narrative, do they attempt the reality effect. Instead, early children's literature attends to worldly forms and order, to repeatable social structures, and to networks. They frequently eschew plot in favor of these other priorities. Whereas others argue that the realist novel, working through competing

impulses, attempts to replicate life and naturalize certain kinds of life, I offer that children's genres highlight life's artificiality, its constructedness. This dissertation illumines the novel's continuing transmutations, and its ultimate incorporation of retrospectively more minor literary forms. Early children's genres—the school story, the it-narrative, the harm narrative, and the family narrative—significantly shaped the novel as we have come to know it. And, importantly, they did so in ways that elided the realist impulse. Rather than replicate the world, early children's didactic fiction, I argue, teaches people to recognize form-as-structure at work in it. The genres metafictionally call attention to form and its operations on individuals, emphasizing literary genres and worldly structures as equally interpretable and open to interpretation. Rather than simple didactic content, early children's books teach social engagement as modifiable, rather than disciplinarian, learned structure. In that this project is formalist, it engages with more recent scholarly work on the novel, such as Alex Woloch's and Caroline Levine's. Woloch, for instance, investigates the realist novel from a Marxist-formalist perspective. He is interested in character, and he argues “that the realist novel is structurally destabilized not by too many details or colors or corners, but by too many people [. . .] the novel gets infused with an awareness of its potential to shift the narrative focus away from an established center, toward minor characters” (19). “Minor characters,” Woloch announces, “are the proletariat of the novel”; the realist novel's proliferating use of them is a reflection of its “intense class-consciousness” (27). I find Woloch's argument compelling and insightful. I admire its ability to account not only for the formal instability of the realist novel but also for the socio-political implications of this form, and I take no real issue with it other than to note that the early children's books I study, too, trade in minorness. They often avoid major characters altogether, preferring instead to link minorness with gender identity—and certain realist novels retain this link. Whereas Woloch treats major and minor characters equally regardless of gender, some of this dissertation’s work demonstrates the difficulty female characters have in overcoming minorness, even when allotted major speaking roles, even when they seem like the only major character in the novel. At

the same time, this dissertation expands the implications of Woloch's argument; for where Woloch thinks of minorness primarily as a signifier of limited (but potentially unlimited) personhood, directed by children's genres, I think of minorness as equally reflective of material detail. Conflating major and minor plot incidents and material signs, I argue, is part of children's literature's and, subsequently, the realist novel's point. Levine, too, is interested in novel form, and she convincingly argues that the realist novel's form is meant to train readers. She positions herself against theorists like D. A. Miller and Catherine Belsey, who she says argue that the nineteenth- century novel's tidy endings make specific types of order and “closure” attractive to its audience, effectively undermining any attempt to question social problems (Levine 2). Levine oversimplifies these theorists not a little. Even D. A. Miller, whose work in The Novel and the Police explicitly argues that the novel institutes policing and depicts its incorporation within the domestic, shows that fictional subjects and real-world subjects constantly surpass the novel’s ability to police. Miller demonstrates that the nineteenth-century novel is concerned with the role of surveillance in modern culture while its form teaches people to expect and submit to that surveillance. He nonetheless acknowledges in his closing chapter that by keeping “open secrets” a character can “conceive of himself as a resistance: a friction in the smooth functioning of social order, a margin to which its far-reaching discourse does not reach” (Miller 207). Narrative subjects, Miller shows, are elusive and constantly on the move. Even fiction that is explicitly disciplinary cannot help but incorporate resistance to that discipline. Novels are hardly tidy entities. In The Serious Pleasures of Suspense: Victorian Realism and Narrative Doubt, Levine likewise asks us to remember that novel endings only seem tidy in hindsight, and she argues that the suspenseful plots and themes in works like Jane Eyre, Great Expectations, and the novels of George Eliot and Henry James, use suspense in an effort to help readers question their preconceived notions, to open up their former ways of knowing. Levine posits that the pleasure of the pause is [...] an excitement about the fact that the

world may defy convention, resist authority, elude familiar representations. [. . .] Suspenseful narratives teach us to take pleasure in the activity of stopping to doubt our most entrenched beliefs, waiting for the world to reveal its surprises, its full unyielding otherness. (Levine 10) Levine believes that the suspenseful plot of Victorian realist fiction poses problems that lead readers to guess a novel's outcome, only to hold that reader in suspense for the next several hundred pages (and in the case of serials, some weeks or months) before delivering an ending that may or may not conform to the reader's guess. In the process of projecting futures, the reader, and especially the Victorian reader, learns to appreciate the essential “otherness of the world”—the most important thing readers learn from the novel is not some ideological investment in a conservative plot but rather the understanding that they cannot with certainty know anything outside themselves. Throughout her argument, Levine is attentive to the ways that suspense is used to undermine preconceived notions of femininity, for instance arguing that Charlotte Brontë's employment of a gender-ambiguous pseudonym and subsequent revelation of her identity “effectively discredited a whole array of assumptions about women's writing” (72). Like children's literature scholars Alan Richards, Andrew O'Malley, and others, Levine treats fiction as a training ground for ideal adult persons. But in Levine's formulation, the realist novel is active rather than passive; rather than replicate the world as it is and inspire replication in turn, the novel acts on people. Narrative fiction, she demonstrates, is goal-oriented; it possesses power over people and has real-world consequences. The didactic methods that make the nineteenth- century novel into powerful educational tools come, I argue, at least in part from early children's stories. Compellingly, as with Levine's depiction of the novel, early children's literature privileges process over outcome; it cares more about the body of the narrative, and what goes on in that body, than they do about beginning or ending. It prioritizes shaping and analysis over teleology, and by doing so it emphasizes that education is ongoing and open, rather than bounded or closed by

plot. Though they don't rely on suspense as a training method, these long-dead children's genres bequeathed the novel their interest in education, things, harm, and family, and the litany of representational methods they used to query these “natural” parts of life. Though Levine's discussion of suspense as a method for teaching readers to “suspend judgment” (2) is interesting, what I find most compelling about Levine's thesis is her approach to narrative. In her more recent article, “Strategic Formalism,” Levine further clarifies the relationship between the literary and the social. While form, at least in literary studies, might be specifically defined as the means by which a text presents its content, or, in terms of narrative, the way the narrator approaches his or her story, Levine's definition of form “refers to shaping patterns, to identifiable interlacings of repetitions and differences, to dense networks of structuring principles and categories” (632). Existing in both literature and the social world, forms are “ways of imposing order, of shaping and structuring experience” (635). Ideological or political forms have an identifiable relationship to literary forms—they are “comparable and overlapping patterns operating on a common plane” (626). The literary-social definition of form provided in “Strategic Formalism” is as useful as Levine's distinction, made in The Serious Pleasures of Suspense, between discipline and training, closure and uncertainty, because both suggest that though there is a relationship between literary form and social preparedness, that relationship itself is not as closed as we have commonly thought it to be. Defined broadly as a repeatable structure, social structures, be they behavioral, actantial, embodied, or gendered, may have something to do with literary genres, and vice versa. Levine owes a debt, as do I, to feminist literary theorists who connect fictional or narrative form and real-life form. Armstrong, for instance, makes this kind of formalist claim when she argues that the realist novel, with its emphasis on the marriage plot and its renegotiation of the sexual contract “no longer aims to make the aggressive female desirable or to reward female desire, but rather to provide women with security in exchange for their submission to a traditional role”

(53). This literary form, Armstrong argues, affects social forms: “this obsession [with sexual purity] demonstrates how the literate classes sought to revise the way in which people talked, wrote, and thought about themselves in relation to others” (56). Eve Kosovsky Sedgwick does something similar in Between Men, when she argues that “the changes in the structure of the continuum of male 'homosocial desire' were tightly, often causally bound up with other more visible changes; that the emerging pattern of male friendship, mentorship, entitlement, rivalry and hetero- and homosexuality was in an intimate and shifting relation to class (181). Sedgwick is writing about the historic occurrence of homosociality, but her opening argument takes on the language of structure and pattern. It suggests that it may be impossible, or at least inadvisable, to try to talk about culture or literature without a discussion of the forms they take, and what those forms represent. Armstrong's and Sedgwick's arguments are powerful and lasting precisely because they connect narrative forms with social forms, narrative structures with relational structures such as the shape of marriage or desire. Practitioners of this narrative approach, one that insists that form is culturally and historically dependent—that our sense of what form means or does is not universal—most often call themselves feminist narratologists. Recent feminist narratology has connected narrative form with gender construction—they acknowledge that texts shape our experiences of social structures, but they also ask what else texts may construct. In so doing, they define gender as learned and affective—a definition that is crucial to my own work in this dissertation. Robyn Warhol's rethinks gender in Having a Good Cry: Effeminate Feelings and Pop-Culture Forms, in which she contemplates the ways that reading's effects are physically inscribed onto a subject's gendered body. Summarizing the work of Donna Harraway, Emily Martin, Ann Balsamo, Susan Bordo, and Judith Butler, Warhol states that “recent feminist theory enables us to see gender not so much as an entity in opposition to sex, but rather as a process, a performance, an effect of cultural patterning that always has some relationship to the subject's 'sex' but never a predictable or a fixed one” (4). To this Warhol adds that, “if gender is performative,

that means affective experiences conforming to 'masculine,' 'feminine,' or 'effeminate' norms of bodily behavior don't express or mime or even imitate gender, they constitute it” (5). Warhol is primarily interested in affect, in bodily responses to narrative forms. As she puts it, a sentimental novel, a 'women's weepy' film, a narrative structured by the marriage plot, a serialized fiction all follow established conventions for inspiring certain feelings at particular junctions of the story. Such popular narrative forms are what I call technologies of affect, providing structures of feeling in the daily lives of their devotees. (7) Gender is thus a responsive cultural patterning that is related to sex without being tied to it. It is performative without being less real for its performance— performative without the negative connotations of mimicry and imitation. It is the result of applied form. For Warhol in this instance, these applied forms are “technologies of affect” and “technologies of feeling.” They are physical and emotional. To her definition, I add that gender is applied interpretation. Gender is not just a response to ways of knowing; it is also the way we know things—the way we understand the world, and interpret our bodily experiences in it, the way we think about morality, and the attention we give to things. Methodology Another way to put all of this is to say that my dissertation attends to the problem of form as a broadly-defined ordering structure, whether that structure is one of behaviors, actions, bodies, interpretations, or families. I aim to subject didactic fiction to a thorough structural analysis; to think about didacticism as itself a kind of formalism, one that codifies structures of response and embodiment that belie its reputation as pure content; and to attempt a kind of revisionist literary history that reconsiders the literary contributions of minor children's genres to the realist novel. Through a combination of archival research and analysis, using the methodologies of feminist narratology and new formalism, I argue that the narrative goals of children's literature have important implications for how we understand

nineteenth-century novels. This dissertation is divided into four chapters. Chapter One focuses on school stories, Chapter Two on it-narratives, Chapter Three on harm narratives, and Chapter Four on family narratives. The chapters share a similar ordering structure and methodology. The first half of each chapter is dedicated to one early children's genre. I survey the genre over roughly a one-hundred year period, from about 1750 to about 1850, and I attend closely to that genre's form. I am interested in narrational style and narrative discourse, in the way narrators discuss the scenes they portray and in the friction between what is said and what is shown. I attend to character and to plot, remembering always that Vladimir Propp's Morphology of the Folktale takes character seriously as a function of story, and that, as Peter Brooks argues, plot “is not a matter of typology or of fixed structures, but rather a structuring operation peculiar to those messages that are developed through temporal succession, the instrumental logic of a specific mode of human understanding” (207). I approach plot, too, with an interest in order and interplay. I ask how these genre's plots impact our understanding of its “message”—though I am also interested in plot as “fixed structure” because, as every chapter will show, these genres rely heavily on repetition. Each early children's genre is defined in part by its use of what Franco Moretti, in his discussion of the “clue” and detective fiction, has called a “device”: a “very small formal unit” that comes to define a genre (77). At a very broad scale, at the scale of genre, these devices are themselves “the repeatable element of literature”—form—that shows the “regularity of the literary field” (87, italics original). Early children's genres are formulaic in that they employ many devices, many markers of their collective belonging—but, as I will show, they are more powerful for their consistency. In the second half of each chapter, I consider the payoff for delving into the minor genres of literary history: a new and better understanding of the realist novel, and how it, too, structures a gendered world. I make a quick survey of a handful of realist novels, showing where and how the impact of each children's genre may be felt over a wide range authors and books. I show the school story acting on Jane

Eyre, Dickens making use of the it-narrative and the harm narrative, and Jane Austen employing the domestic realism of the family narrative. I then turn to an intense, focused analysis of one realist novel, demonstrating that these children's genres had more than a passing influence, and that their remnants exist more heartily than as referent. School stories, it-narratives, harm narratives, and domestic narratives, I show, are fundamental structuring influences for no lesser novels than Villette, Bleak House, Wuthering Heights, and Middlemarch. Understanding these genres affects our readings of these novels, as I demonstrate; more importantly, understanding them can help us better comprehend the operations of didacticism, material things, harm, and family—items of major impact and of minor detail—on narrative structure more broadly. Children’s Books Researching this dissertation took me took me into the archive: to the British Library, the Victoria and Albert Museum Library, the Osborne Collection held by the Toronto Public Library, the Lady Margaret Hall Library at Oxford University, the Degrummond Children's Collection at the University of Southern Mississippi, the Lilly Library at Indiana University, and to the Ohio State University's Rare Books and Manuscripts. In all, I surveyed more than 500 early children's narratives and, though not all of them made it into this dissertation, many did. The books themselves offer a delightful peek into the past. Designed to be held by children, they are smaller than books published for adults. Most rest neatly in one hand. Some would fit in my palm. Most were clothed in marbled cardboard siding with leather bindings. Most of those that had been published as cheap paper tracts were bound up with others, though some few remained unbound and were extremely delicate. Conversely, a few rare specimens were clearly designed for children of wealthy parents: these had fancy leather bindings and covers, with gilt engravings and color pictures. The less expensive books, however, rarely lacked ornamentation. Children inscribed their books with names and dates. Sometimes multiple inscriptions showed a book being passed down or regifted (though some children, like children now, just enjoyed writing their names over and over). I most enjoyed books that had been obviously

cherished. Many books bore the wear of children's attention. Their pages were torn and tattered, folded down, pricked with pins, and often colored. Their original black and white engravings now boast green skies and yellow cows. Women's dresses are messily painted in. I found my favorite book of all in the V&A's collection: a crumbling, edition of Ellenor Fenn's Cobwebs to Catch Flies. The cardboard cover had been scrawled on in illegible script, the binding was entirely worn away, the pages were colored in and on, and one picture had been clumsily cut out, though the description remained: “The Boy and his Dog.” But it was inscribed--”To Mrs. E***** F***” replaced with “To Mrs. Edward Frere,” “My Dear, *****” replaced with “My Dear Mary”—the author's copy gifted to her dedicatee. A much loved book. The standard practice, when writing about these early books, is to treat them as though they belong to one group of moral and uplifting literature, and the goal of this dissertation is to demonstrate that this conceit is a large critical oversight. I by no means intend to argue, however, that these books have nothing in common with one another. In fact, their most obvious similarities are the way they treat differences between boys and girls. Though girls and boys may well have some common moral faults they need to overcome—lying, for instance—they are depicted as having essentially different character flaws and traits with relative consistency across the genres. Maria Edgeworth's “The Bracelets” (1796) offers a strong example.v Describing the heroine's “fundamental error,” Edgeworth writes that the father Had insensibly infused into his daughter's mind a portion of that enterprising spirit which he justly deemed essential to the character of her brother [. . .] all small objects and small errors she had been taught to disregard as trifles; and her impatient disposition was perpetually leading her into more material faults; yet her candor in confessing these, she had been suffered to believe, was sufficient reparation and atonement. (304) A girl's failures are enterprising spirit, a disregard for trifles, and the belief that candor is sufficient reparation and atonement for wrongdoing. These are a boy's

virtues. Boys are portrayed with a great deal of rambunctious physicality. The hero of The Fortunate Blue-Coat Boy (a school story, 1770), is caught with his nurse's daughter, “solacing themselves on the stairs” (16). They are prone to drunkenness and frankly outrageous eating habits. In Mary Eliot's “The Greedy Child Cured” (1820), Alfred eats so many plums that he is sick for two days. He then proceeds to drink a pint of cream, fruit and cake, and wild berries, which turn out to be poisonous. Boys are also prone to violent and tyrannical behavior, especially when it comes to animals. Whereas girls are often reminded that animals can feel pain and grief, and thus should be treated with kindness and respect, a girl behaving with actual cruelty to an animal is exceedingly rare—the only notable exception to this rule occurs in Mary Wollstonecraft's Original Stories (1788), in which the girls torment some insects. Much more often, girls learn from watching boys mistreat their animals: in Original Stories, the girls see a boy shoot and maim a bird out of malice (5), and in The Governess (1749), Jenny Peace's kitten is tortured to death by a group of boys (30). This concern is echoed in boys' school stories. In Fenn's School Dialogues, Master Savage is critiqued for throwing stones at a goose (45). In The Silver Penny, one boy is depicted robbing bird nests and harming the nestlings (1786, anon.). In contrast, girls are prone to vices that incline them to rise above others— covetousness, personal vanity, and a passion that is so disruptive, it leads to fights which “[represent] the breakdown of social order” (Pickering, Moral Instruction 42). Covetousness, especially the desire for more in the way of material goods, might well be called the first vice established in children's novels. In The Governess, the girls' coveting an apple leads to the story's action. Fielding describes “one apple something larger than the rest, on which the whole company immediately placed their desiring eyes (14). Later, this desire for the largest, best, and most beautiful, is echoed in the character of Nancy Spruce, who cares only for “dress and finery [. . .] fine coats, ribbons, and laced caps” and who weeps when others are better dressed than she is (112).vi This trait, which places excessive importance on things and their

appearance, is one that goes hand-in-hand with personal vanity—and it is often presented as a joke. Vain girls are almost inevitably plain and, unaware of their plainness, make themselves pitiable, laughable burdens to those around them. Finally, girls are passionate, angry, and, whereas a boy might become angry with another boy for good reason, girls are angry at everything. In Mary Wollstonecraft's Original Stories, anger is one of the only problems addressed in multiple chapters. Describing “The History of Jane Fretful,” Wollstonecraft writes anger soon distorted her regular features, and gave a forbidding fierceness to her eyes. But if for a moment she looked pleased, she still resembled a heap of combustible matter, to which an accidental spark might set fire [. . .] And if she ever did a good, or a humane action, her ridiculous anger soon rendered it an intolerable burden, if it did not entirely cancel it. (30) Here, Mrs. Mason teaches through analysis of a typological character. Jane's temper, her defining feature, is legible in her distorted and forbidding facial features. What is more, this legibility is permanent. Even when happy, Jane looks as though she could burn up. Her anger taints her every redeeming quality or act. Unlike other character traits, or types, which are often multifaceted, anger overwrites every other component of a girl. Boys are rambunctious, greedy, and tyrannical. Girls are covetous, vain, and angry. These faults are typical of characters in early children's genres, and they are faults I will return to over the course of this dissertation. For all these books’ consistency, however, it is worth noting their simultaneous inconsistency. One could only call this treatment of gendered character consistent over a very large range or over a very small and non-random sample. All the genres treat these faults; but they all also treat other characteristics, and other topics entirely. There is no guarantee that any individual book will contain any of these depictions and books that treat all of them are few and far between. The genres themselves are more internally consistent. They share many attributes, qualities, devices, motifs, and themes that hold them together in a way that this treatment of gendered character does not. To

these attributes I now turn. In Chapter One, I discuss the early girls' school story. Of all the genres I study, this is perhaps the most recognizable one. Victorianists, after all, read and teach Tom Brown's School Days (1857); millions of people worldwide have read J.K. Rowling's Harry Potter series. And yet, whereas the early boys' school story originates many elements of these later and more popular novels, the early girls' school story is in effect an entirely different genre. Early girls' school stories, I argue, depict the wide range of girls' educational experiences, from the traditional story set at school to stories featuring the interactions between young girls and their governesses. The genre, I show, possesses a great deal of variety: there are fictional schoolroom novels, stories that blend fiction with fact and operate like a textbook, stories that use going to school as the framework for an advice manual, and epistolary stories, written as letters between mothers and daughters. This wide- ranging genre nonetheless maintains a cohesive core. I argue that early girls' school stories are essentially sympathetic to its girl characters and girl readers and that the genre aims to help girls negotiate an oppressive social structure by teaching adaptive techniques. It provides girls with historically- and materially-driven methods for evaluating and interacting with others, and this aim, including the genre's emphasis on method, evaluation, history, and materiality, are emphasized by its attention to classification and structure. Worldly forms, the genre shows, are themselves interpretable. I then turn to the realist novel, providing short readings of Mansfield Park, Bleak House, and Jane Eyre, before settling into an extended analysis of Charlotte Bronte's Villette, a novel that takes governesses, teachers, and schoolgirls as its primary focus. Here, I argue that Villette teaches by borrowing the school story’s emphasis on type and contrast, order and rationality, and it explicates on orders and classes of women. The novel queries what it means to be the kind of good reader and interpreter perpetuated by the school story model, and instead of teaching about the world generally, defines and delineates the hard and narrow world of the Victorian single woman. In Chapter Two, I focus on the children's it-narrative, a genre which is related

to the eighteenth-century object narrative, a genre published for adults, and which has been passed down to us in the form of live-doll stories like A.A. Milne's Winnie- the-Pooh. A clear departure from the adult object narrative, the children's it- narrative turns the adult genre's propensity for satire to didactic sincerity. Though some it-narratives are written for boys and girls separately, most are written for a joint audience. These stories nonetheless articulate gender expectations and behaviors through their interest in the varying amounts of power allotted to boys and girls as they grow into men and women. Children's it-narratives, I demonstrate, are explicitly interested in supporting white, masculine, heteronormative authority, but they also understand that this power is the product of narrative attention. The genre maintains a subversive potential in the friction between the object's moral teachings, the object's attention to and treatment of itself, and the object's acknowledgment that discourse fails to account for the real. It-narratives reveal the limitations of form, and the genre calls into question gendered discursive hierarchies. Following my analysis of the it-narrative, I interpret narrative objects in David Copperfield and Great Expectations, and offer an account of the small amount of criticism that has attended to object narration in the Victorian novel. My primary argument spotlights Charles Dickens's Bleak House, and especially narrows in on Esther Summerson's narration. Here, I argue that Esther's narrative techniques mirror those created by the children's it-narrative and similarly illumine the problems of form and genre with which the it-narrative concerns itself. Dickens, I state, probes the relationship between power and discourse and, through Esther, ultimately reveals the material damage caused by even the most faithful and caring depictions of reality. Whereas in Chapters One and Two I analyze two genres that have been critically acknowledged if little-enough studied, with Chapter Three I turn to genres that critics have entirely failed to recognize, and I begin with what I call the “harm narrative.” The harm narrative, I assert, has been confused with the moral tale, ostensibly because both try to remedy bad behavior in children by showing consequences; however, the harm narrative uses injury and abuse for pleasurable or

entertaining ends. Though the harm narrative might be broken down into two other categories—the gratuitous harm narrative, which dispense with moral framework, and the cautionary harm narrative, which contains some moral anecdote or element of didacticism—the harm narrative in all its facets is characterized by its portrayal of excessive physical violence to children. It dispenses with other children's genres interest in replicating and revealing the world's complexity. Instead, the harm narrative divides the world up simply into lucky and unlucky, harmers and harmed. Though from one perspective the genre might be said to promote a conservative value system that rewards masculinity and aggression, it undermines this system by exposing the injuries it causes in all of their excess. Harm narratives ultimately aim to leave readers in a state of discomfort over the vulnerability of children, especially girl children. They expose and condemn the world as it is. I then move to the realist novel, showing that individual harm narratives, though unrecognized as part of a larger genre, have been credited with a broad influence on novels like Jane Eyre and The Mill on the Floss. In fact, given the realist novel's moral investments, child harm appears frequently within its pages. Only Emily Bronte's profoundly-discomfiting Wuthering Heights, however, replicates and adapts child harm narratives so thoroughly as to include their sense of enjoyment in harm. Like the children's genre it repurposes, Wuthering Heights exposes the violence with which mid-Victorian social structures treat people, especially girls and women. But the novel pushes the implications of the harm narrative further, finally taking it to task by showing that the pleasure cultivated by harm narratives, especially in the more cautionary narratives, encourages a vengeance-based morality rather than one based on discipline or love. Finally, in Chapter Four I turn to the children's family narrative, an unacknowledged genre that has much in common with the later, nineteenth-century domestic novel because, as I demonstrate, it is the forbearer of this genre. The genre begins with Anna Laetitia Barbauld's everyday didactic narratives, Evenings at Home, Early Lessons, and even sections of Hymns in Prose. The genre adopts and repurposes the eighteenth-century georgic's narrative stance, attention to detail,

and additive structure—even at times referencing georgic poems and authors—to the familial sphere and home spaces. With an emphasis on the interpenatrability of public and private spheres, the family narrative's attention is primarily allotted to girls and women, to the spaces they occupy, and to the work they do within the home. Family narratives privilege familial and communal structures over individuals, even going so far as to deny the reader a protagonist. Finally, family narratives are characterized by expansive and meandering plots that emphasize the connections between things and people and, more importantly, treat all events with a profound equilibrium. War, death, and marriage are treated with the same attention given to everyday conversations and taking care of small children. The genre thus subtly critiques discursive and real-world attention to major events over minor ones. The effect of this plot treatment combined with the genre's use of detail both privileges the work of girls and women while acknowledging and conditioning girls for tedium. Adaptation of the family narrative to the realist novel can, I demonstrate in the second section, be traced as early as Jane Austen, but is more clearly seen in Harriet Martineau’s Deerbrook. Finally, I train my eye on George Eliot's Middlemarch which, while at times critiquing the family narrative's treatment of girls and women, adopts the genre's techniques first as she uses the “web”—a domestic item—as the organizing principle for her narration, and then more profoundly in a critique of both Dorothea and modern feminism. Echoing the family narrative's dissolution of the major and minor, Eliot critiques Dorothea's masculine egotism—her desire to do something great. Eliot demonstrates that greatness comes from minor undertakings rather than great acts, and in doing so she subverts the notion that we should value majorness at all. When, at the end of the novel, Dorothea retreats into the home and into small acts of goodness, she goes the way of all characters. She fades into the background as all characters and people must, when we turn from them.

Chapter 1: Reading Method, the School Story, and Villette

The first early girls’ school story is also the first children’s novel. Published by Sarah Fielding in 1749, The Governess follows the lives of nine schoolgirls for nine days. It opens by introducing Mrs. Teachum, a “gentlewoman [. . .] the widow of a clergyman, with whom she had lived nine years in all the harmony and concord which forms the satisfactory happiness in the married state” (9). Fielding summarizes Mr. Teachum’s death, his wife’s grief, and her pursuit of a livelihood through “the education of children”(10). The Governess’s action begins “on a fine summer’s evening when the school-hours were at an end”; despite the fineness of the hour, the schoolgirls, Nanny Spruce, Sukey Jennett, Betty Ford, Dolly Friendly, Henny Fret, Lucy Sly, Polly Suckling, and Patty Lockit, come to blows over some apples. Jenny Peace, the eldest, tries to calm them to no avail. The beginning is exciting, to be sure, but this early scene is the apex of the novel’s action. The following days are given over to character descriptions and biographies, embedded fairy tales and stories, and school day occurrences: descriptions of morning reading, dialogues between schoolgirls, writing with the writing-master, conversations between Jenny and the governess, a trip to church, a visit from some acquaintances, walks in the garden, and a country walk to a dairy house. It ends when Miss Jenny leaves school, as all schoolgirls must when they are grown. The Governess is, appropriately, a quintessential early girls’ school story. It opens with a description of a governess, and it privileges dialogue and exposition over character, especially individual character. Though Jenny Peace is privileged a bit by the text, this is a privilege conferred on her by age and maturity rather than by access to her inner thoughts and feelings. The novel features, instead of a single protagonist, a number of schoolgirl characters who develop over the course of the

novel. The Governess uses typological names and emphasizes the consistent use of time—each day is demarcated and labeled within the text. We are given to understand, too, that each day proceeds with a uniform regularity. It employs markers like embedded narratives and country outings that continue to be used by the genre over the next hundred years. Obviously, The Governess is a story about girls’ schooling. Unlike boys’ school stories—a separate and unique genre that is specifically concerned with boys’ experiences in public schools—early girls’ school stories can take place in a number of locales and between numbers of people. Girls’ schooling could occur in a school, a village schoolroom, or a schoolroom in a grand home. Educators could be formal governesses, teachers, or aunts. Early girls’ school stories reflect these experiences and, within this range, encompass further variations: some are purely fictional, direct narratives depicting school or schoolroom life; others blend fiction with fact, using a school or schoolroom to frame what is in fact a textbook; some use the occasion of going to school as the motivation for an advice manual, a series of letters from a mother to her daughter; still more use the school as only the barest frame for an anthology of stories and tales. Despite its inherent variety, one common thread binds the genre together. Above all, the early girls’ school story is sympathetic to girl characters and girl readers. While, with other children’s genres, it teaches feminine virtues, the genre is nonetheless committed to improving the lives of girls and young women. Its ambitions are no less lofty than helping them negotiate an oppressive social structure by teaching them to adapt to it. Most notably, even from their beginnings, girls’ school stories teach feminine traits as a method—what I would call a navigational form—for engaging the world. Placidity, self-effacement, and self-discipline, the genre demonstrates, are important behaviors for managing in a society essentially at odds with girls and women. As Fielding’s Jenny Peace emphasizes, when interpreting the history of Mignon and the cruel giant Barbarico to her fellow students, “particularly remember, that the good little Mignon, in the moment he was patiently submitting to his sufferings, found a method of relieving himself from them, and of overcoming a barbarous monster [. . .]

make the application to yourselves” (Fielding 52). Fielding’s reading method, given here in the voice of Jenny Peace and with the approval of her governess, is replicated time and time again in eighteenth- and nineteenth-century school stories. Occasionally used in boys’ school stories, it is nonetheless a more common, almost a constant feature of the early school story for girls. These lessons help girls learn to read for general method, and then to apply that method in their own lives. Fielding’s language is of note here, too, as it teaches girls specifically to use method as “relief,” as a way of overcoming barbarous monsters and the general cruelties of life. As The Governess demonstrates, despite its reputation for harsh and boring didacticism, the genre rarely scolds or imposes unreasonable morals; instead it provides girls with methods for evaluating and interacting with others, and these methods assume a historical and material rather than providential determination. Femininity, itself, is a form girls learn to adapt and negotiate for their social circumstance. These interests, including the genre’s emphasis n method, evaluation, history, and materiality, come together in its overwhelming attention to classifying and structuring worldly orders. What makes the early girls’ school story unique among didactic genres (even among school stories) is its continued emphasis on the interpretability of worldly forms and structures, of people, objects, and their interactions. Much more frequently than in boys’ school stories, girls’ school stories continuously demand that even their diegetical worlds be interpreted by the students inhabiting it, a lesson that is meant to translate back to the reader, encouraging her to interpret her world in turn. When, in The Governess, the girls realize that Lord and Lady X “have hitherto lived on in the most jarring, disputing manner, and took no care to conceal their quarrels from the world; but at last they have agreed to part by consent,” they are meant to understand that this marriage fails because both parties mistreat each other; moreover, they are to learn that “grandeur and happiness do not always go together” (131). Other school stories help girls interpret objects in the world—an entire evening of Richard Johnson’s The Little Female Orators (1773) is given over to a humorous story about how to understand that common ladies’ accessory, the fan,

and its unfurlings [. . .] flirts and vibrations, as also graduate and deliberate openings” (38-9). As these stories make clear, the material stuff of the world—the worms and plants, people themselves, and their interactions—are open to interpretation. School stories do more than encourage readers to look at stories and apply them to real life: they take for granted that the world itself is ordered, and thus interpretable and knowable—and this is particularly true of the early girls’ school story, which attempts to help girls negotiate an often hostile social structure. The early girls’ school story’s emphasis on reading the material world, on taking reading methods and applying them outward, is reflected in its precise, detailed, and numerous accounts of types and classifications, of worldly orders that it believes are inseparable from mental ones. That school story authors held this belief dear is at times made explicit in the text. Indeed, more than any other children’s genre, the early girls’ school story is rife with metacommentary and extra- textual matter concerned with didacticism and with the connection between worldly order and mental order. The Polite Reasoner: In Letters Addressed to a Young Lady in Boarding School (1787), a conduct manual making use of a boarding school frame, for instance, declares that its aim is to teach girls “the great art of thinking for themselves” (viii). For its author Mary Weightman, “the mind resembles a garden, and requires cultivation, without which it is overrun with weeds” (13). Weightman cites the intricacy of a sparrow’s nest, and the appearance of reason in dogs and spiders to point out the regularity of nature—its orderliness and its form—arguing that by observing and appreciating this order, we, too, can be ordered. It’s an interesting assertion: that so we observe, so we might become. This observation is repeated time and time again in the genre, whether the book is specifically instructional, using embedded narratives to teach textbook-like knowledge, or the book is more interested in entertaining, focusing on plot and embedded stories. In The Amiable Tutoress (1801), the teacher “pointed out the beauties of nature; led [her students] to admire, and from admiring, to enquire the properties of plants and animals” (9). In Ann Murry’s Sequel to Mentoria (1799), the goal is to “impress the Juvenile Reader with a just conception of the regular order of

the Universe, and the collateral dependence of every atom of which it is composed” (vi). Some teachers instruct in the classification of plants (Utility, or Sketches of Domestic Education, anon. 1815); others about the ability of monkeys to demonstrate “military order” and how to classify religions (Morning Conversations of a Governess and Her Pupils, Mary Ann Craig 1830 42-56). Early girls’ school stories expend much of their didacticism teaching just this thing: order. Coming from an empirical philosophy that imagines the world as knowable, school stories assume that a just knowledge of the world can help a girl or woman operate in it. These are not merely boring didactic interludes in otherwise fictional stories. They are gorgeous translations of the period’s scientific thinking, which took the place of formal education for girls. Even later and more entertaining girls’ school stories retain the vestiges of this educational background. In Emma Jane Worboise’s Grace Hamilton’s School Days (1856), an extremely good girl and prodigy is described as one who had “deeply considered” “geology, conchology, vegetable physiology, and many other ologies [. . .] and still she remained working away assiduously at the classics, mathematics, science, and history, both ancient and modern” (211). Though a bit tongue-in-cheek about the girl’s dedicated studies, the book nonetheless takes these subjects seriously as necessary educational content—all the girls learn them. The connection between the movement of the spheres and atoms, the military behavior of monkeys, and the social behavior of people might seem odd to our minds, but it is one the school story is explicitly interested in. As Emily, in Ann Taylor’s Sketches from a Youthful Circle (1834) explains, “if there were no such thing as order, what would the world be? How would the earth, and the sun, and the planets, keep in their places? We would all be destroyed!” (35). Upon being told this was not the order she was supposed to be addressing, Emily merely reaffirms “the uncomfortableness and vexation that habitual disorder bring with it” (36). For the girls’ school story and its impressionable young readers, order keeps all from being destroyed; it can also help ease one’s pains in life. This relationship between worldly order and personal behavior is one of the most interesting insights the early girls’ school story has to offer about didacticism,

and about its own didacticism in particular, for the school story is itself ordered in the manner it means to teach. Aside from moral lessons, reading instruction, and practical life lessons, the early girls’ school story’s philosophical attention to order is replicated in its own highly-ordered form. Through the act of reading, the girl reader learns another kind of order—that presented in the genre—which is itself interested in helping girls make their way in the world. In this chapter, I first and foremost argue that, despite the outstanding variety among early girls’ school stories, the stories themselves have much in common. In content, they maintain an interest in allegory and interpretation, feminine virtue and vice, that is symptomatic of the genre’s formal and thematic obsession with order and method. Whereas critical studies of school stories have argued that the genre aims to reduce the fantasy and literary stories it incorporates into allegorical, moral tales, and that the school stories themselves can be reduced to easy, moralistic allegories, I assert that the early girls’ school story, both in its infancy and as it matures into the nineteenth century, aims to help young girls learn to negotiate the world as a complex system of social structures. An outgrowth of conduct literature, its goal is to help girls conduct themselves and, while at times this interest manifests itself as straightforward moral story or advice, even this manipulation is a product of the genre’s tendency to see the world as specifically, though not always simply, ordered. Thus, while the girls’ school story’s content helps the girl learn to recognize social structures and respond to them accordingly, the school story’s form uses contrast to undermine traditional allegorical typologies, emphasizing the degree to which the world is nuanced; it uses embedded stories and instruction to emphasize the differences between a woman’s desires and what is possible to her; it uses repeated motifs to prepare girls for the unjust and the tragic; and it uses its division and discussion of time to help women manage hers to her best benefit. Early girls’ school stories help girls to recognize the order of the world. Their sympathetic treatment of girls’ position in the social structure underscores order as order—as a structure that can be navigated. Ultimately, the early girls’ school story is concerned with helping its readers

negotiate a real world—one that is often tragic, difficult, and dull, and one in which good is not always readily and immediately recognizable from bad. This interest in the specificity of women’s and girls’ lives transfers readily into the realist novel, and most recognizably into those realist novels that are concerned with all sides of girls’ schooling—their school experiences and their experiences teaching—as well those female bildungsromans concerned with the minutiae of girls’ personal development. In the following pages, I will first survey the small amount of scholarship dedicated to the school story, especially taking issue with the idea that school stories work because of reader identification with the protagonist. School stories are not allegories with straightforward morals: they portray the world’s complex morality and ask girls to respond to that world dynamically. Focusing in on the early girls’ school story, I will argue that the genre’s form mirrors its thematic obsession with order. Through its use of surprisingly complex typological characters, its portrayal of multiple possible protagonists, its representation of time, its use of narrative frames and embedded narratives, and its deployment of consistent markers that predicate schooling on loss, the early girls’ school story offers its child readers a method for encountering the world in all its structural complexity and specificity. I will turn to an extended discussion of the school story and the nineteenth-century realist novels Mansfield Park, Bleak House, and Jane Eyre, before focusing on Charlotte Brontë’s Villette, in which I argue that Brontë draws on the early girls’ school stories’ generic and thematic convention as a methodological approach to women’s lives—to Lucy’s life and her position in the social structure. Interpreting the Girls’ School Story Though of all children’s genres the school story might be said to have received the greatest amount of critical attention, the early girls’ school story has been consistently misaligned with the boys’ school story or overlooked in favor of later and more familiar works.vii With minor exceptions, those who study the early girls’ school story overwhelmingly tend to focus on individual books and authors such as Sarah Fielding,viii Mary Wollstonecraft,ix and Mary Lamb.x Many scholars examine these writers’ works as a body specific to her, rather than as part of a

generic tradition;xi some study them in the context of other genres altogether.xii Scholars have not effectively attempted to come to grips with these diverse works as belonging to a cohesive genre, nor have they attempted to consider the genre as it changes over time. Those who do include Samuel Pickering, who takes on the school story in a chapter of his work Moral Instruction and Fiction for Children, 1749-1820, and Beverly Lyon Clark, who makes it the subject of her book Regendering the School Story: Sassy Sissies and Tattling Tomboys. Clark and Pickering focus on the school story’s content and they limit their examinations to traditional texts, those that Clark describes as “a story set at school, generally at the secondary level [. . .] often—though not always—addressed to children [. . .] often written from the perspective of the child” (3). Their works come to a similar conclusion. School stories, as Pickering puts it, “usually were written for boys or girls but not both” (35). Though Pickering recognizes that the differences between girls’ and boys’ school stories are significant, he is more interested in discussing them as a single entity. His major reflection on their differences is simply the observation that boys’ school stories depict and approve of fighting, especially when “middle-class boys thrashed aristocrats” (35), whereas “in books for girls struggles rarely occurred between individuals” (41). Clark, too, is interested in how boys’ and girls’ school stories teach different traits to their respective audiences, and especially in how crossgendered authors trouble the gendered stereotypes and morals promoted by school stories. For example, Clark argues that women authors are more likely than men to undermine “the schoolboy code against talebearing” (Regendering 2). Clark’s thesis is based on the close reading of a few individual works per chapter, and some of her assertions don’t bear out in a larger genre analysis. Schoolgirls, I find, are as likely to follow the injunction against talebearing as their male counterparts.xiii The very ambitiousness of Clark’s account creates room for inaccuracies. Covering works for both genders over more than two-hundred years, she cannot help but gloss over some components of the school story, and the early girls’ school story in particular gets short shrift. Clark’s most interesting assertion, by far, is the idea that “school stories

lend themselves to didacticism because they are about schooling. They thematize their own textuality—or rather their own moral purpose. Schooling is, in part, a metaphor for the effect that the book is supposed to have” (7).xiv Clark isn’t arguing that school stories are simple. She points out that the genre relies on metaphor, notes that it is highly figural, and asserts that the it encourages children to think of story as both highly applicable to and reflective of the world. She does, however, assume that genre effects an ontological collapse—an undisturbed identification— between the child reader and the story’s main character, and this is troubling assertion to make about a genre with precious few protagonists. The notion that readers get clear and strict moral guidelines from these books is a consequence of this assumption, rather than a fact about the reading process. True enough, whether they are set in a school or show the schooling process, early girls’ school stories are all concerned with depicting schooling-in-action and, because they are expressly didactic, with schooling their girl reader. This two-fold interest has significant implications for the genre’s form. Though early girls’ school stories are incredibly varied, and though the genre develops over the course of the century this study is concerned with, these books have an identifiable, established form that is essentially interested in modeling for its girl readers how they ought to act in the world. But this model is an interpretive stance rather than a strict formula. The genre models the order it believes exists in the world, and, despite the assertions of critical readers who look only for a simple moral, encourages girls to take on the world in all its complexity. Through its use of typology, through its treatment of time, through its mode of address, through frames and embedded narratives, and by including plot motifs that trouble conventional happy endings, the early girls’ school story encourages girls to “read” both its text and the world for nuance. It wants girls to address the movement of things as small as atoms, in addition to the movements of the spheres, as models for reading society. Typology Perhaps the greatest stumbling block to critics keen on studying the early girls’ school story is the genre’s heavy-handed use of typological characters—

characters that can be organized and identified by individual and common traits—a fact which leads them to assume that the characters are straightforward and flat and to assume that the stories themselves are allegorical. Patrick Fleming, for instance, asserts that the moral tale—a grouping to which he believes all early children’s literature, including The Governess, belongs—used allegory as “the structure for a simple moral tale” (3). Pickering, too, asserts that “allegory and the first school stories were closely related, using some of the same instructional devices and often teaching similar lessons” (31). For Pickering even more than for Fleming, the relationship between school story and allegory is largely derived from the stories’ use of typological characters and the assumption that this educational tool is handed down from Bunyan’s Pilgrim’s Progress (“School Stories” 50). But of course, the typological character has links to genres other than the allegory, specifically Restoration Comedies like William Wycherly’s The Country Wife (1675). Satires like this one teach too, but they teach about social hypocrisy and social custom rather than religious moral. It is true enough that school stories deal in typology and that this typology has some relation to the primarily negative virtues children’s fiction aims to teach girls. Girls may be good, as Jenny Peace (The Governess) or Miss Worthy (School Occurrences 1782) are. They may be pert as the aptly named Miss Pert (School Occurrences), Lucy Sly (Original Stories 1788), and Mary Hawker (Lessons Worth Learning for Girls 1851) are. They may be angry, like Jane Fretful (Original Stories), or snobbish, like Clara Haughty (Moral and Instructive Tales 1785). These names signal a loose adherence to typology defined as “classification, esp. of human products, behavior, characteristics, etc., according to type” (OED “typology”). They also have a tonal resonance with the kinds of names given to Restoration Comedy characters. The Country Wife, for example, features characters like My Lady Fidget, Mrs. Dainty Fidget, and Mrs. Squeamish, in addition to the more notorious Mr. Horner and Margery Pinchwife. These names bypass allegorical connotations by naming characters wittily, and for mundane character flaws. Moreover, while schoolgirls may have a specific character flaw, the stories themselves are at pains to

demonstrate both that the flaw is not innate, and that it is not all encompassing. For instance, in The Young Misses’ Magazine (1759), typological characters included Mrs. Affable (Governess), Lady Sensible, Lady Witty, Lady Trifle, and Lady Tempest. Others, including Lady Mary, Lady Charlotte, and Miss Molly are not so easy to categorize. In fact, early girls’ school stories often build upon and/or renegotiate these classifications, and in doing so they rely upon an earlier definition of typology—one concerned with reading method and based in medieval interpretations of the Bible. Defined by the OED as “the study of symbolic representation, especially of the origin and meaning of Scriptural types” (“typology”), typology’s various definitions have been documented by Peter W. Martens in his essay “Revisiting the Allegory/Typology Distinction.” Martens notes that typology has also been described as “the research of the correspondences between the events, the institutions, and the persons of the Old Testament and those of the New Testament” (J. Daniélou, qutd in Martens 286); “the interpreting of an event belonging to the present or the recent past as the fulfillment of a similar situation recorded or prophesied in scripture” (R.P.C. Hanson, qutd. in Martens 289); and “the horizontal manner of interpretation, since it transports the historical events of the past into the present and future” (W.A. Biernert, qutd. in Martens 290). Though Martens hopes to reconcile the traditional split between allegorical type and typology, what his research makes clear is that there is an important distinction between the two—one (allegory) is the realm of the lofty, moral, spiritual, the other (typology) is the realm of the historical.xv Whereas allegory is vertical, elevating people objects and giving them new meaning, typology is horizontal and temporal, existing in and across time. One exists to draw out moral meaning; the other helps people to understand the events of this world. In short, typology is a historically-situated, material-bound method for understanding the present and predicting the future, based on a reading of past events. Contrary to popular belief and as Suzy Anger has revealed in Victorian Interpretation, the Victorians were deeply concerned with hermeneutics and approached interpretive problems with remarkable sophistication. They

renegotiated interpretations of the Bible as well as understood that the world itself requires interpretation (Anger 11). Though according to Anger Victorian thinkers eventually departed from typological readings, the early girls’ school story prefigures Victorian interpretive efforts by emphasizing material and subjective considerations in their typologies. School stories encourage dynamic interpretation offers new and constantly revised understanding over fixed meaning. For all their morality, early girls’ school stories, with their interest in the material world, might be much better said to have something to do with realism, which privileges fullness of character over typological, unevolving traits. Despite the fact that the genre uses typological names, and despite the fact that it cares little for seeming real, the early girls’ school stories’ interest in cause and effect, in history and biography, and in individuating social structures mirrors realism’s interest in depth. Characters with typological names, in this genre, are more useful for their ability to illuminate our world than they are for their ability to illustrate straightforward moral truths. Even stories as early as Beaumont’s (The Young Misses Magazine, 1759) disrupt straightforward typological classifications. While I would not go so far as to say that these characters are fully fleshed out, neither would I state that they are the flat characters described by Pickering, who argues that in school stories “although not all were allegorical, characters were flat instructional devices” (54 Moral Instruction). The goal here is to display a variety of attributes, any number of which the child reader may identify with or, alternately, condemn— that this is the case is made more readily apparent by the fact that few early girls’ school stories have one protagonist, preferring instead to provide several models for emulation. In the case of The Young Misses’ Magazine, it is easy to imagine that Lady Sensible is the good character with whom we ought to identify, and that Lady Witty, Lady Trifle, and Lady Tempest all display “bad” characteristics in contrast to her. In fact, their characteristics all stand in contrast to each other: Lady Witty may be less perfect than Lady Sensible, but she is more sensible than Lady Trifle, who cares only for dolls. Though she can be a bit petulant, Lady Trifle is less likely to rage than Lady Tempest.

Indeed, Lady Witty’s worst attribute is not her “wit”, but rather her tendency to misread (and by misreading, here, I mean reading for typological classification)— she is entirely focused on surface, and this is what leads her to create a witty persona to begin with. Lady Witty is horrified to hear a beautiful woman called a “statue, and automaton [with] no soul” (6). When she questions this assertion, Lady Witty is told that “fools were called statues or automatons because, as an automaton is a machine that can walk, play on the flute, and do several other things, though it be nothing but a statue made of a bit of wood, and has neither soul, thought, or reason; so fools speak, walk, and do every thing without thinking, just like a piece of clock-work” (7). Lady Witty is astute enough to understand that what is being critiqued here is a woman’s surface—she has accomplishments, but no understanding. And so, Lady Witty relinquishes playing with dolls and focuses on learning, or developing her intellect. In her anxiety to demonstrate that she is more than surface accomplishment, however, Lady Witty begins to rely on surface again. She is forever spouting off facts, and explaining to others what she knows. Witty’s flaw —an overabundance of wit—may indeed adhere to the classification imperative, but Beaumont’s depiction of it, through Witty’s description of her earlier encounter, betrays some tension. Witty has a backstory, an embedded narrative, and motivation. Lady Witty’s concern demonstrates that she has some soul—she is a flat character striving for depth and to realism. If we consider Lady Witty and characters like her from within Forster’s model of flat and round characters, we might say of her that she is “ready for an extended life” (39). Despite her typological name, like one of Jane Austen’s perfectly soulful minor characters Lady Witty is capable of complexity and perhaps even, in the way of “round” characters, “capable of surprising” (41). This is typical of school story characters, who, though they may be named for a character trait, are not limited to only one. Fielding’s Jenny Peace has not always been peaceful, nor is Dorothy Kilner’s Miss Mary Right (The Village School, 1784) always right—indeed, she is prone to gossiping with other girls while the teacher is talking. Most importantly, Lady Witty’s history indicates something to us of her future. Because we can see that to some extent Lady Witty’s attempt to

escape flatness has failed (in her extremism, she is as flat in her wit as the automaton lady was in her superficiality) we can also predict that she will similarly become an object of fun to those around her—a prediction that comes true in the subsequent pages. Other school stories defy the stringent character typologies by invoking vague descriptions—Ellenor Fenn’s Miss Sprightly, a main character in both her The Fairy Spectator (1789) and School Occurrences (1790) is named for her animation, or perhaps her childishness. This name defies a character judgment—she is neither perfectly good, nor imperfectly bad, but somewhere in between, attempting to navigate between these poles. Though School Occurrences certainly includes some typological characters—Mrs. Teachwell, Miss Honest and Miss Pert, among others— most of these figures are relatively minor. Still, Fenn provides with more than one focus for narrative interest. Little Miss Pert occupies the same amount of narrative space as Sprightly—in another kind of novel, we might call her the antagonist—and even she is more full than her name and ultimate treatment (she is kicked out of school) would imply. Like many bad schoolgirls, the text makes clear that Miss Pert is the product of unfortunate circumstance—a poorly educated orphan, she, like Lady Witty, is prone to misreading. Her greatest crime is mistaking an object of sympathy for an object of satire—laughing over the misadventures of Lord and Lady Simpleton and their child. Despite her laughter, Pert sees these people clearly and the text uses her astute observations as a means of critiquing the (seemingly) common practice of raising children by spoiling them. When Pert satirizes Louisa Simpleton’s “want of appetite” explaining that she “could get down only five sponge biscuits and one bit of christening cake all morning,” for instance, she imitates a conduct book railing against parents who spoil their children’s appetites by giving them rich food (Fenn, School Occurrences 14). Just as Miss Pert, one of the story’s worst characters, is not without her positive attributes, so is Miss Sprightly not without her negative ones. Fenn emphasizes that she wishes to defy typological-classification when, at the end of School Occurrences she straightforwardly acknowledges, “she must not be viewed

as a perfect model. No! she is a frail mortal. [. . .] I draw variety of characters; do you imitate the Bee, which extracts honey from both flowers and weeds; collect from each what in each is commendable, ‘till you become as amiable as you are wished to be (Fenn, School Occurrences 108-109). Sprightly, like most characters in these early school novels, is a girl striving for goodness, and negotiating moral gray areas. Or, as Fenn emphasizes, perfect amiableness, or perfect goodness, is the sum total of many people’s qualities, not something possessed by any one person. This reading method, one which encourages readers to pick and choose based on character traits and their histories, undermines the idea that these stories are meant to be read allegorically as in the manner of Pilgrim’s Progress, in which there is only one character, one path with whom we are (ideally) meant to identify. It is nonetheless typical of children’s literature’s form. As children’s literature scholar Maria Nikolajeva argues, the kind of one-to-one identification we expect out of child readers is a fallacy—an “identification fallacy.” In fact, children’s books by definition avoid having children with one character, be that character extremely bad (who wants to think of herself as bad?) or extremely good (what is the use of didacticism if the child is already perfect?). This argument is borne out in early girls’ school stories, which regularly refuse to provide a single protagonist for readers to identify with. The earliest stories, of course, allot similar amounts of narrative attention to a wide assortment of characters. Even as the stories develop into the nineteenth century in which literary critics might expect a more traditional bildungsroman, the overwhelming tendency is to provide at least two protagonists for girls to work with. Edgeworth’s “The Bracelets” (1801) features Cecilia and Leonora and The Boarding School (anon. 1823) features Jane and Elizabeth Adair. Though there are one or two anomalies, such as Mrs. Hofland’s Ellen, the Teacher (1819), which tells the story of orphan Ellen’s mistreatment at a girls’ school, not until after the 1847 publication of Jane Eyre does the single-protagonist become a common feature. Perhaps we shouldn’t be surprised that such explicitly didactic texts subvert this conventional understanding of child-reader identification. Nikolajeva asserts

that, “perhaps more than any other critical stance, identification fallacy reveals a striking inconsistency between children’s literature research and literacy education. The conviction that young readers must adopt the subject position of a literary character is [. . .] totally ungrounded and in fact prevents the development of mature reading” (188). If Nikolajeva is to be believed, the major difference between children’s literature research and the actual findings of literacy education is that children’s literature research—the kind of research that assumes moral virtues are learned straightforwardly in children’s stories—also assumes that children read in a manner that encourages immature reading. “Mature reading” is reading that negotiates literary form, moves between subject positions, and learns to adopt the role of the “narratee” or “implied reader” (Nikolajeva 190). This is the type of reading girls’ school stories encourage—one which fails to identify with one character and instead encourages girls to read for contrast. Early girls’ school stories are often explicit about the need to learn from comparison rather than full-on identification. That is, this pedagogical tool is part of its self-evident content as well as its form. In Elizabeth Sandham’s The School- Fellows (1818), Julia, who needs modification, learns to listen to her teacher only when, “for the first time Julia began to draw a comparison between her favourite Miss Parsons and these new instructors. She could not tell why she should love the former, except for the violent attachment which that lady professed for her; yet in many instances which she recollected, Miss Parsons appeared to love herself better than her pupil” (179). Significantly, Julia compares past experiences and events to metaphorically read between the lines. By comparing one person to another, she learns to differentiate between stated motive and actions, open surface and hidden depths—that which is spoken, and that which remains unarticulated. Girls learn, too, by comparing themselves and their companions to various characters in stories. In Morning Conversations Between a Governess and Her Pupils, one girl notes, “while you were telling us the story, I could not help comparing Elizabeth to John de Groat: she is always the peacemaker in our disputes” (117), and in The Young Misses Magazine, the girls students compare themselves to Adam and Eve, Cane and Abel,

and Beauty and the Beast, in each instance drawing connections between all the characters, instead of relying only on the good or bad ones. Learning though comparison thus helps girls negotiate between different kinds of people and their relative virtues, while constantly reminding them that most people exist on a sliding scale of good and bad qualities, not all of which they have control over. It also helps them learn to make connections between story and life.xvi Time The early girls’ school story’s treatment of temporality—its treatment of time both in content and in form—distinguishes it both from other types of didactic fiction and from the boys’ school story. Whereas the early boys’ school story embraces a linear temporality (one that pushes the boy in to the public world as he ages) in early girls’ school stories, time is repetitive. The same thing happens day in, and day out. Indeed, one might go so far as to say that this is Kristevan women’s time at its finest: “a specific measure that retains repetition and eternity (16). One that encompasses “cycles, gestation, and eternal recurrence” as well as the “infinite” massiveness of time from which we cannot escape (16). In early stories, much of the plot (what plot there is) is time itself. Rather than move through a story by the action of the tale, we move by day or week as in The Governess, which is subdivided by day. In Ann Murray’s Mentoria (1778), even the little semblance of plot offered in The Governess is lost—instead we move through time on conversation alone, with each dialogue given a day of the week. On the second Friday, the book neatly ends with a lecture on fortitude and no other explanation. One can easily imagine Mentoria, Lady Louisa and Lady Mary continuing such dialogues on until the end of time—or at least until one of them grows up. And to some extent, this is what happens. The two sequels to Mentoria, A Sequel to Mentoria (1799) and Mentorian Lectures (1808) pick up neatly where the others left off. Nothing is missing. Similarly, in The Little Female Orators, actions are repeated on a weekly basis. Indeed, we lose all sense of the story by the end of the book—it seems that we need nothing but the embedded narratives: each girls’ moral tale, told on a Saturday evening.

At the same time, early girls’ school stories emphasize a disciplining regularity of time similar to that Foucault describes when writing about the Gobelins School: a “technique for taking charge of the time of individual existences; for regulating the relations of time, bodies, forces” (157). Girls’ school stories certainly utilize time in this disciplinary method, as they encourage girls to divide up their time in a way that makes them most productive. These works also emphasize the potential for this regularity to provide girls some relief from time’s burden—the uniquely middle- to upper-class female burden of too much time. On the first night of The Little Female Orators, Deborah Grace states, “The best Method I can propose for the filling up those empty Spaces of Time, which are tedious and burdensome to idle People [. . .] is to apply ourselves to the Acquisition of useful Knowledge” (5). She even goes so far as to quote Locke, stating that “he intimates, that Time appears longer or shorter in Proportion to the number of Objects we think on” (6-7). Ultimately, Deborah concludes, “consider how we may extend Life beyond its natural Dimensions, by applying ourselves diligently to the pursuits of Knowledge” (12). In this beautiful elaboration on the period’s best philosophical thinking, Deborah is essentially suggesting that we extend our lives with more thought: she gives a practical and elegant motivation for the type of industry recommended by school tales and accounted for by their form. Indeed, though the division of tales into days and weeks and into dialogues may well work to emphasize the circularity of the time women work with, these divisions also make use of the popular dictum, to use one’s time wisely. Each moment, each snippet of conversation, is made legible. Whether we read The Governess, or The Little Female Orators, or (especially) works like Murry’s Mentoria, we cannot help but see time be orderly allotted. And, as we read with the books, our time is, too, accounted for: we fill up our days with geography, history, and botany in the same manner as the fictional student. Ann Murray’s Mentoria makes this desire to control time explicit. Mentoria’s opening lecture is about the importance of disciplining time. Mentoria states that “there is scarcely any thing of more importance [. . .] than habitual INDUSTRY. So clearly am I convinced of the

advantages which arise from the practice of this virtue, that in the prosecution of my present plan, I attend to allot some employ to every hour of the day, and shall endeavour to blend instruction with amusement” (1-2). Both the form and content of the book work to back up this opening statement. At the level of content, Mentoria works to “blend instruction with amusement” by interspersing tales with instruction in geometry, and also by using story as a means for instruction. At the level of form, the book’s emphasis on instructive dialogue—with nearly no other kind of interaction—limits the reader to the industrious and judicious use of her own time. Young lady readers will waste no energy on minor details; each hour with Mentoria is an hour marked out for industry. In its circular movement from day to day, week to week, the book models how certain hours ought to be spent on history, others on church, geography, elocution, politeness, etc. This is not to say that boys aren’t instructed to similarly make good use of their time—Ellenor Fenn’s Master Sprightly acknowledges that he “was never suffered to be unemployed” (School Dialogues for Boys 1783-84 58)—but such passages are infrequent occurrences rather than the norm. Sprightly’s statement demonstrates an additional key difference between writing for the two genders. While boys’ stories might communicate the importance of keeping oneself busy, girls’ stories much more regularly emphasize time as a formal component of one’s life that needs to be structured. Perhaps this, too, is a product of a key division between boys’ and girls’ school stories and boys’ and girls’ schools. Boys’ schools, both real and fictional, are “little worlds” preparing them to enter the public world, and thus their stories make use of an implied, linear trajectory. Girls, however, may well graduate from school, but they are destined to repeat the experience as a mother or, for those less fortunate, a governess. For people whose lives are meant to be a repetitive one-more-time-but-with-a-difference, the adequate division of time serves a more important function: it marks its passing. To delineate time carefully is to give it meaning and order; rather than emphasize its circularity, it keeps time, with its endlessness, from “appearing burdensome [. . .] even in the depths of winter” (Murry, A Sequel to Mentoria 102). By instilling industriousness in girls and

teaching them to order and regulate their time, girls’ school stories help them navigate what might otherwise, and worryingly, become a formless, burdensome existence. They sympathetically treat the burdening combination of too much time, with too little meaningful occupation, and prepare girls in temporal method. Mode of Address Most twenty-first century readers—and especially those invested in nineteenth-century or even modern stylistics-expect to encounter a recognizable narrator, whether that narrator is an omniscient, third person (extradiegetic, heterodiegetic) narrator, or a first-person (intradiegetic, homodiegetic) narrator. The school story, especially in its first 75 years, defies this formal feature. Though The Governess begins with an omniscient-narratorial style—”It was on a fine summer’s evening when the school-hours were at an end”—Fielding does not maintain this narrator consistently throughout the book (13). Instead, she modulates between an omniscient plural narrator who might be a schoolgirl discussing “all of our company” and an adult, single author who metatextually demonstrates her control over the novel: “as I delight in giving my little readers every pleasure that is in my power” (25). Sometimes the narrator engages in reporting conversation with various “she saids”; at other times, it is offered in a kind of dramatic dialogue. At times, fairy tales and autobiographies are embedded within the story’s action. At others, they are simply introduced through chapter subheadings: “the Life of Miss Jenny Peace,” etc. While the range of presentational modes is perhaps more varied in The Governess than it is in other early girls’ school stories, its use of “familiar format” dialogue as a means of presenting information and its use of the confessional model as a means of allowing its characters unmediated voices are typical of how this genre’s didacticism works. The early girls’ school story features the use of familiar format dialogue most prominently. Perhaps because real-life eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century girls did not have the benefit of formal schooling, the early girls’ school story has a double burden. In addition to depicting the world of the school and easy morals taught by boys’ school stories, early girls’ school stories need to impart information.

A girls’ school story is not mere entertainment—or even useful entertainment—it is also part textbook. “Familiar format”—books written as conversations help accomplish this didactic goal.xvii Some of these books, including The Young Misses Magazine and Mentoria dispense with narration altogether. Rejecting the growing use of what is called “literary realism,” these authors offer guidelines and insight into a vast number of subjects through the use of dialogue alone. That is, rather than attempt to make Mentoria appear close to life or to “convey the impression of fidelity to human experience,” Murry opts to employ a more direct narrative form. Her dialogues concerning a range of topics are offered to the reader as direct transcripts of a day in the schoolroom or parlor, in which Mentoria instructs while her students question and take part in discussions. The book is driven through transcribed conversation rather than plot—though it does not give up plot altogether. As in The Young Misses Magazine, typical schoolroom events—visitors and tea—move discussion forward. Stories like Mentoria and The Young Misses Magazine are the most obviously different from the early boys’ school story, which also occasionally uses familiar format dialogue. Where boys’ school stories primarily use this form to report the students’ conversation, girls’ school stories use dialogue to report information. The convention places primary importance on the governess as a fount of information— she tells stories, reports scientific observations, and helps her students understand the nuances of history. Discussing “Politeness and Civility,” for instance Mentoria reports: Lady Mary: I am afraid, my dear Mentoria, we shall be very uncomfortable without you; and be at a loss, how to entertain our guests. Mentoria: To obviate this objection, I shall lay down a few rules, to regulate your conduct on this and future occasions. Refinement in manners in is the only quality that can distinguish you from the lower class of people; as sincerity, benevolence, and virtue, are not confined to any particular fashion in life. (38)

Similarly, discussing jealousy, The Young Misses Magazine posits: Lady Charlotte: Well then, I will tell you, I am as jealous as Cain of my eldest sister. Papa and mamma love her better than me; and that puts me into such a passion, that sometimes I could kill her, if I durst. Mrs. Affable: But, my dear, is it not your own fault that they love your sister more than you? (36) Working completely outside of the narratorial form or style we are used to reading, Mentoria and Young Misses Magazine model at the extreme what is prevalent in even those many school stories that use a primarily omniscient narrator to relate the action of the story: conversational education. As late as Ann Taylor’s Sketches from a Youthful Circle (1834), dramatic dialogue was being used intermittently within texts when governesses, or even students, would go into what I would call an educational mode—relating information rather than action. Moving between question and response, statement and clarification, this dialogue entertains and instructs. It is at times funny, and it is always concerned with presenting nuanced perspectives and detailed accounts of the world. Moreover, those stories with omniscient narrators who managed to fold such information into conversation still make use of the familiar format model. Almost antithetically to the nineteenth-century novel’s stereotype, in which the omniscient narrator suspends the action of the story in order to teach or reflect, in the girls’ school story conversation slows the narrative’s action. Whereas the narrator is used to move the action along, the governess’s conversation with her students is painstakingly recorded. Such moments are often fully didactic, reflecting the eighteenth- and nineteenth-century belief, according to Michelle Cohen, that educational conversation, especially for girls, was “more important as a means for training the mind and developing critical thinking than was the rote-based formal learning and recitation that was norm in boys’ schools” (104). In Grace Hamilton’s Schooldays (1856), for instance, Mrs. Oliphant rebukes Grace for her romantic imagination: “never suffer the addresses of a lover who would involve you in secrecy. I own there are cases where parents act in a very unnatural and unjustifiable manner; but these are rare: still when they do occur, it is

far wiser, better, and happier to submit to the will of the parent and unconditionally obey” (297). Mrs. Oliphant’s lecture goes on for some time longer. The lecture is certainly a testament to the seriousness of Grace’s overactive imagination, a notable pause in a book that is otherwise more concerned with daily goings-on. Such pauses privilege the instructor’s voice and teach the student-reader to reason more properly. Especially as the genre ages into the twentieth century and begins to privilege the thoughts and actions of children, these moments demonstrate the governess’s authority as well as her student’s need for her knowledge and reflections. Significantly, while the early girls’ school story privileges the governess’s authoritative voice, it does not do so to the total exclusion of its child characters or audience. Girls are expected to question and ask for further explanation. This is, after all, conversation, a didactic form that requires give and take from all parties participating in it, and early girls’ school stories provide plenty of space for the child’s inquisitive voice. In fact, some of the most popular early girls’ school stories, The Governess and Mrs. Leicester’s School afford this voice so much authority that they are largely made up of girls’ autobiographical narratives. While I address this formal feature more fully in my discussion of embedded narratives, it is worth noting here that school stories like these continue the leveling work of conversation. Here, though the governess may have authority, each schoolgirl’s voice is positioned equal to her fellow autobiographers. Placed in a kind of dialogue with one another by their distribution in the text, this style of storytelling accords even minor characters a chance to voice their experiences. Narrative Frames The genre’s use of frames and embedded narration works hand-in-hand with the early girls’ school story’s specific narratorial style. Virtually all early girls’ school stories are to a greater or lesser extent also frame narratives—even those later school stories which rely more heavily on their own plot than earlier works teach through embedded narrative. Within this genre, however, the frame is virtually always predetermined: the diegetic level of the school story provides space for

didactic, autobiographical, or entertaining narratives. To put this in terms of Genette’s theory of narrative discourse, which places a narrator and a narratee on the same diegetic level, much of the early girls’ school stories’ action, is, in fact, narratorial action. xviiiGovernesses and girls are continually telling each other stories. Much of its content occurs at the metadiegetic level—a level below the actual storyworld of the work, though sometimes including events that happened in that storyworld’s past. What is more, as Geoffrey Summerfield notes, eighteenth-century children’s literature, as a general rule, negotiated the pull between fantasy and reason. Embedded narratives concerning a wide range of subjects, from fairy tale to autobiography, helped school stories achieve that generic goal. This formal element of the early girls’ school story is one of its most obvious markers, and its significance has been recognized by a few scholars. In his discussion of The Governess, Fleming argues that the relationship between frame and embedded narration is the story’s “primary” narrative trait (469). He asserts that “the relationship between the frame story and the embedded tales trains the reader in practice of interpretation [. . .] with either Mrs. Teachum or Jenny leading the girls toward the correct interpretation” (472). Fleming is certainly correct to point out that this interpretive training is one of the goals of embedded narration, though he is mistaken to think that it is its only purpose, or to think that this interpretive model is consistent across school stories, much less across all “moral tales,” which is his main argument. As Anne Chandler has realized about Mary Wollstonecraft’s Original Stories from Real Life, embedded narration may also be used to “view both the object at hand and its placement within a schematic [. . .] Original Stories is invested less in the exhibit of a single sensibility than in the underpinnings of sensibility—models of being and knowing, models of consciousness” (327). In other words, embedded narratives must be understood in terms of whatever intradiegetic interpretation is attributed them, as well as their placement within the entire work. By teaching through comparative narratives, Original Stories demonstrates “models of being and knowing”—not one model. I would take Chandler’s argument one step further, to say that, while Wollstonecraft

uses this method, it is not original to her. Not only would mature girl readers be capable of comprehending this formal element of the school story, the genre actually teaches them to read with a comparative method that takes into account nuance, surface, and depth. Using contrast between the frame narrative and embedded narrations, school stories can actually undermine the straightforward morals taught in the intradiegetic level through the interpretation of fairy tales and other stories. In her discussion of Original Stories, Chandler demonstrates that some of the “lessons” taught about animals—that they don’t feel as people do, for instance—are undermined by later stories, in which animals have emotional responses similar to people’s. Something similar happens in The Governess. While relating her autobiographical narrative, Jenny Peace discusses her relationship with her brother, noting that “when my brother was carried abroad, and I was left at home, that HE [sic] was pleased, made me full amends for the loss of any diversion” (29). Jenny’s feelings are irreproachable, appropriate: by fully supporting her brother’s travels, she acknowledges his need for a worldly education, though it is at a cost to her. By drawing attention to the supremacy of his pleasure, and her own “loss of diversion,” Jenny highlights the disparity between their educations and resulting happiness. Jenny’s complacent retirement within the home is undermined, however, in the embedded fairy tale Jenny tells directly after. Mirroring Jenny’s own experience, the heroine remains at home while the hero, Fidus, is taken away on an adventure. While the heroine still “kept herself retired and pent up within her own apartment,” in this version, Jenny torments the young man (47). Rather than leave willingly, he is kidnapped by a giant who expressly wishes to torture him. Fidus is eventually driven to lament that his “only comfort was the hope of a speedy end to his miserable life”—a far cry, indeed, from an educational tour of the continent (39). In both examples, the friction between the frame narrative and the embedded tales demonstrates the disparity between ideal moral action and lived experience. One might think of these contrasts as a narrative space that allows for more interpretive possibilities than those laid out straightforwardly in the frame. Here, the narrative

models a method for interacting in the world that acknowledges its messiness—to be virtuous might be only to act in the approved manner, regardless of how one feels. As the early girls’ school story progresses into the nineteenth century, the occasional marriage plot even occurs in embedded narratives. Stories of hidden desire and love, of course, were always a part of the genre. The fairy tales and myths embedded in very early girls’ school stories contain compelling love plots. “The Story of the Cruel Giant Barbarico” (The Governess) contains a minor marriage plot, and The Young Misses Magazine’s retelling of “Theseus and the Minotaur” and “Beauty and the Beast” contain love- and marriage-plots as well. Later stories, like The Boarding School (1827), The Village School (1837), and Laneton Parsonage (1847) actually feature characters getting married as side stories and embedded narratives, though some of these marriage plots are tragically aborted.xix Among the many marriage plots that occur in Grace Hamilton’s Schooldays, one goes so far as to include a secret engagement. With the possible exception of those few novels that begin with school stories and then progress to include much of the students’ later lives, these marriage plots notably exist only as embedded narratives and occasional afterthought—occurring at the very end of the story to lift some student or governess out of penury. Existing in the margins of the school story, marriage and love plots survive only as educational example and as logical end. While embedded narratives are often stories—fairy, historical, biblical, or otherwise—told from one character to another, another common type is the autobiographical or biographical narrative. From the very beginning a part of the school story, autobiographical embedded narratives are told by each of the girls in The Governess. From Jenny Peace to little Polly Suckling, each girl tells her story in order to entertain her peers and “to amend the future part of anyone’s life, [from] the recollecting and confessing the faults of the past” (25). The narratives are explicitly confessional in nature, and critics from Arlene Fish Wilner and Judith Burdan to Fleming have argued that these stories perform the singular function of teaching moral virtue. They would agree with Mika Suzuki when she argues that the

autobiographical narratives, like the other narratives in The Governess encourage girls and women to use their friendships as a means for “amending their own faults” (328). All would argue that the narratives are a means for “controlling female character” (Burdan). Though the stories do show the girl’s former faults and their movement toward virtue, Charles and Mary Lamb pick up on the real heart of them in Mrs. Leicester’s School (1809), a work which, like many school stories, mimics The Governess’s form in being made up primarily of autobiographical narratives. Joseph Reihl calls them “sweetly-sad tales of little orphans, or neglected (though not badly mistreated) children of the middle class,” but these autobiographies are often about very real and traumatic loss (138). Elizabeth Villiers learns to spell on her mother’s grave, and Ann Withers learns to her horror that she is a changeling. Her parents are not her own, and her narrative reflects her attempt to deal with the loss entailed by that realization. One child is mistreated by her aunt and uncle, and another recounts her family’s loss of property and descent into penury. All in all, these stories account for girls’ vulnerability; they show how much of their lives is dependent upon their parents’ presence in them, by their class status, and by the good will of those around them. Whereas conventional wisdom about genre—arguments like Flemings— believe that the it teaches strict and rigid moral systems, as in this example the early girls’ school story accounts for real hardship in girls’ lives. By teaching self-control and feminine adaption, the school story helps girls navigate unpredictable and dependent lives. In a similar manner, the autobiographical tales in The Governess frequently show the degree to which girls are not responsible for their own faults—even negative personality traits, they show, are the result of social ills already in place. Some are neglected by their parents, while others are spoiled. Some girls lose their immediate family entirely, as is the case of Miss Patty Locket, who is given to her grandmother and who misses her parents, siblings, and happy life with them. Even Jenny Peace has lost her family—her mother is dead, and she is only in school because her aunt was “obliged to go to Jamaica,” taking the rest of the family with her (32). These stories demonstrate that all girls are subject to the social structures

in place around them—whether those structures are familiar or scholastic—and that to a large degree their personality is more dependent on those structures than on individual action. As these autobiographical narratives demonstrate, girls are subject to structural inequities of many sorts, and goodness can only help them manage their lives within them. This attention to context and background is replicated time and time again in the school story; it models the interpretive stance that the genre hopes a good reader will adopt. Even those school stories that do not contain autobiographical narratives dwell on the schoolgirls’ biographies, using them as a way to account for their behavior, as is evident in the example of Edgeworth’s “The Bracelets,” in which one girls’ masculine sensibility is attributed to the death of her mother and her father’s poor replacement of her. This is so prevalent in the genre that it is even used by Charlotte Brontë in Jane Eyre in the early scenes depicting Jane with the Reed family. Much of her anger is attributable to their mistreatment of her. The embedded narratives in early girls’ school stories are made up of fictional, historical, and biblical tales, real-life anecdotes, and autobiographical narratives. Additionally, school stories frequently include embedded information, much of which I have already outlined in my discussion of the genre’s thematic interest in order. This information, while not necessarily narrative in nature, is nonetheless capable of informing readings of the larger story. As Chronicles of a Schoolroom (1830) records, teaching natural history through the “glass-hives of busy bees” and botany “from the wild flowers [the children] gathered in our sunny lanes, as well as the rare specimens cultivated in my green-house,” helps girls to recognize the world as specifically ordered. Using Linnaean taxonomy, girl readers and students learn to recognize the general type from the highly specific, and to move from broad categories to the highly individual. It teaches them to recognize differences and similarities within classes. Finally, while some few school stories like Mrs. Leicester’s School invest in one specific type of embedded narrative or information, it is far more common for early girls’ school stories to make use of multiple types. The complex interplay of

these embedded narratives and information to a large degree drives the interest in the genre. Because the early girls’ school story uses fairly consistent type characters and motifs, the largest changes from story to story occur because of the narratives and information buried in them. In fact, one might go so far as to call these stories non-parodic narrative collage, a term used “to denote a text constructed wholly or partly from fragments of other texts or parodically re-employing linguistic or literary usages from other times or cultures” (369 “Narrative Structure”). For the early girls’ school story, however, the point is less about parodying other literary, educational, or cultural works or forms. Rather, their goal is to expose girls to alternative ways of knowing in the hopes of raising their cultural and moral acuity, as well as their interpretive flexibility. Motifs and Devices What ultimately makes the early girls’ school story so distinct a genre, something separate from though bearing a relationship to the early boys’ school story and early children’s literature, is a cluster of characteristic motifs. Though these are admittedly a large part of the genre’s content, the fact that they become recognizable patterns existing within the genre and developing over the course of a century also indicates that these components are formal. Defined as “the concrete realisation of a fixed abstract idea,” motifs “retain their paradigmatic identity across a wide variety of participants, actions, and settings” (“Motif” 322). Early girls’ school stories might be seen to respond to a paradigmatic “Ideal School Story”—a recognizable form that is in fact the accumulation of the concrete examples in each individual texts. Or, as Shklovsky articulates, “a work of art is perceived against a background of and by association with other works of art. The form of a work of art is determined by its relationship with other preexisting forms” (20). For Shklovsky, the idea that artistic form is perceivable in a single work’s relationship to other works is especially relevant to the novel, in which it is difficult to separate content from form, story from discourse. This is also true of early children’s literature more generally—as it, like the novel, privileges the content of the story over its shaping. Despite the range for differentiation within the early girls’ school story genre,

the overwhelming majority of these works make use of a set selection of motifs. Many of the motifs, such as the good governess, the lunch party, the reversal of fortune, and the reluctant goodbye, are set in place from the very beginning of the genre’s development. Others, such as the hidden books and the marriage, develop between 1749-1850. All of them are a response to the cultural and material pressures placed upon girls and women. Like the mode of address, embedded narratives, typological characters, and comparative readings, these motifs help prepare readers to respond to the world itself, to social forces that impose a negative structure on girls’ and women’s lives. The good governess is without doubt the most prevalent and consistent of all early girls’ school story motifs. Her presence validates the school itself, as well as the propriety of the information being transmitted to the girl reader. The Governess opens with a description of Mrs. Teachum, a “gentlewoman” possessing “Christian fortitude,” and who is “proper on all occasions” (9-10). Her teaching is of the best kind, and she is depicted as “instructing those committed to her care in reading, writing, working, and in all proper forms of behaviour” (9). Similarly, the teacher in Moral and Instructive Tales is a woman whose “education had been liberal” with a “natural partiality for children” (6); Original Stories’ Mrs. Mason is “a woman of tenderness and discernment, a near relation, who was induced to take on herself the important charge through motives of compassion” (vii); the titular character of The Good Governess is a woman who had been “necessitated to exert those talents she possessed both from nature and education, in the instruction of a stated number of pupils, whom she considered her children” (2); and the governess in The Pastor’s Family (1831) “had endeavoured to act upon the oft-professed, though too seldom practiced, principle of uniting the comforts and reasonable indulges of home with the advantages of school” (6). The placement in the text, too, is consistent. Always occurring at the beginning of the school story proper (and more often than not on the first page of the text), the motif establishes the governess’s authority over the school and over the reader. Though poor educators exist in girls’ school stories, these instances are so

extremely rare that they almost prove the rule. Kilner’s Anecdotes of a Boarding School (1783), an almost parodic, inverse account of the school story, features corrupt underteachers, as does The Rebellious Schoolgirl (Mary Hughes 1821). Ellen, the Teacher and a small number of school stories that seem to be written for more adult readers, such as Fatherless Fanny (1811), feature governesses more concerned with the bottom-line than their students, a fault that makes way for the poor treatment of their charges; and in an odd sub-genre of the early girls’ school story, the anti-Catholic school story, Catholic governesses and teachers are shown to be unprincipled, if not downright immoral.xx The remainder of the 75+ early girls’ school stories published between 1749 and 1850 are remarkably consistent. All of these stories establish the absolute authority of the governess and of any teachers working under her, within the school. Whether they are good and blameless or incompetent and unprincipled, students are entirely subject to these fictional women. This authority is not, however, without a cost. Neither good nor bad governesses are created from nothing, and, as the stories all demonstrate, women take on these roles because they have experienced either financial or marital loss. Most frequently, they have experienced both. Mrs. Teachum’s misfortune—losing her husband, children, and financial support—is mirrored in that of the teacher in Moral and Instructive Tales. Even those educators who do so out of the goodness of their hearts, like Original Tales’ Mrs. Mason are able to do so because, having lost their spouses, they have no other family obligations. This motif—the reversal of fortune--is attendant upon virtually all school novels in one way or another. If it is not directly alluded to in its description of the governess, who is obliged to earn her own money despite being a good woman of a good family, it is inherent in the very idea of governessing. In later school stories, those that are more concerned with the development of a minority of girls than they are with depicting the whole, the reversal of fortune often occurs to the girls themselves, necessitating that they take up employment. Perhaps reflecting the concerns of the times as they were memorably addressed in Mary Poovey’s Uneven

Developments, these later novels are also much more concerned with the plight of the governess. The reversal of fortune is not always met with cheerful hardiness. For instance, in The Boarding School (anon. 1823), Elizabeth Adair announces that “it is useless attending either to plants or flowers now: I must give up all my favourite pursuits” upon finding that she must turn to teaching (1). This motif reflects the precarious lives of women and girls who are dependent upon male relatives for their social positions and support. In later stories (those written after 1785) in which schoolgirls become governess, this motif also indicates a kind of circularity in women’s lives. Those girls who don’t become governesses, of course, are presumed to become good mothers who teach. As the motif demonstrates, one may be forced to take up this occupation whether one is attentive to one’s studies or not. In Moral and Instructive Tales, a rich girl ends up the poor governess to a woman whom she neglected while in school, and in Mrs. Barnard’s The Schoolfellows (1845) Bridget’s family loses her fortune, and she is forced to rely for her living on an education she has in name only. A girl doesn’t need to be neglectful and inattentive to wind up a governess—misfortune strikes even the best of schoolgirls. In School for Sisters and Ellen, the Teacher, as in numerous other texts, a good education helps girls deal with the worst of misfortunes: Ellen even ends up in the workhouse at one point. Education cannot, however, save girls’ from these twists of fate. Not all early girls’ school story motifs are predicated on loss and misfortune. Many are concerned with the life of the schoolgirls and their happy experiences. One extremely common motif is the school holiday. Whereas boys’ stories depict their characters making independent use of their spare time, early girls’ school stories celebrate a day off of schooling with group excursions into the countryside and picnics. These are educational, fun experiences of the outside, public world that are allowed only under the governess’s watchful eye. Idyllic lunch parties are the holiday of choice in these works. The School-Fellows, much like The Governess, depicts “all the young people, whose white dresses vied with the snowy fleeces of the farmer’s sheep” and “tables [. . .] spread on the green before the house, on which

were placed cups and saucers, brown bread and butter, with the home-made cakes of the farmer’s wife” (197). Sketches from a Youthful Circle similarly depicts a holiday walk in the countryside. These scenes of young girls eating wholesome treats in the countryside are almost pastoral. The cups and saucers, and tables on the green transport the necessary home objects into an outdoor setting, while maintaining the isolated structure enabled by the school itself. School-party scenes have their mirror in stories more concerned with girls’ schooling at home. In Original Stories, for instance, the girls take walks into the countryside with their aunt on a more regular basis. By emphasizing the variability of girls’ and women’s lives, by showing their potential ruin as well as happiness, and by demonstrating the degree to which material comfort depends on other people as well as chance, these simple motifs ultimately reinforce the early girls’ school stories narrative goal to train girls into a flexible interpretive stance rather than a rigid hierarchical outlook on life.xxi They assert that though life may include brief interludes of happiness—summer picnics and walks—enjoyment of these depends on the capacity time management. Simple pleasures are a reward for those with some time to spare. Moreover, by predicating themselves on very great losses, especially the teacher’s loss of husband, fortune, and/or family, the early girls’ school story affirms the value of sound learning and elasticity—the ability to spring back from misfortune. To rebuild one’s life, the school story shows, one must be capable of reading the world around her and reacting to it dynamically. The School Story and the Nineteenth-Century Novel As the nineteenth century wore on and the early girls’ school story continued to develop, it began to be adapted for adult readers. This adaptation occurred most obviously as the girls’ school story genre was remade into what Susan Sniader Lanser called the governess novel in her reading of Charlotte Brontë’s Jane Eyre. Governess novels included Mary Martha Sherwood’s Caroline Mordaunt, as well as such popular works as Fatherless Fanny. These novels play off the popular themes and forms of traditional school stories, adapting for them for an adult audience.

Elsewhere, girls’ school stories take on a more salacious mode: pornography. Girls’ schools feature widely in this genre, showing up in everything from the Marquis de Sade’s Justine to the faux-eighteenth century, anonymous nineteenth-century text, The Lustful Turk. In a more subtle manner, the early girls’ school story began to take on a vibrant formal and thematic life as it was transmigrated into the realist novel. Writers as prominent and widely read as Jane Austen, Charles Dickens, and Charlotte Brontë used the girls’ school story form in many of their novels, including Mansfield Park, Bleak House, and Jane Eyre. Jane Austen’s Mansfield Park, a subtle adaptation of the early girls’ school story, makes use of the genre’s formal components, including character systems, the mediation of bad behavior, good governesses, and didactic conversation. Austen’s depiction of Mansfield Park’s female characters, especially Mary Crawford and Fanny Price, mirrors the early girls’ school story’s troubling of simple character typologies as well its assumption that education and life circumstance, rather than internal corruption, is responsible for a woman’s character. Mary Crawford, frequently understood as the novel’s villain, has been subjected to bad schooling. Her indecorous behavior is sourced to her education, which is made up of harp playing, French, and the bad example of her aunt and uncle—”bad school for matrimony” (44). In contrast to Fanny, whose ladylike silence appears virtuous in the eyes of men like Edmund and Henry Crawford, Mary’s improper education is exhibited most fully in her conversation, including her satirical stance on marriage, and her critique of the clergy. These are presented in full. In the same way that the early girls’ school story attempts to mediate bad behavior through textual explanation and the governess’s interpretation of that behavior, Mary’s parodies and jests are consistently regulated by the interposition of some sort of criticism, either by Edmund, Fanny, or the narrator. Where Mary Crawford acts the part of a bad student, offering Austen an opportunity to play out the actions and thoughts of a woman with little respect for social institutions, Fanny Price represents the good-student turned righteous governess. As with the good teachers of girls’ school fiction, Fanny extends her

moral influence over those in her close proximity. In the same way that Mary’s feelings of remorse indicate her complexity of character, Fanny’s character is complicated by her lack of real authority. Unlike the Teachwells and Teachums who demonstrate real power over their students, Fanny, a dependent, is at the mercy of the Bertrams. Like Mary, she has to struggle for autonomy; whereas Mary finds her salvation in self-expression, what little power Fanny has resides in her moral superiority, a trait that is indebted to her education. Indeed, Fanny’s education is by far the superior of any other woman in Mansfield Park. Like Lynne Vallone, Jane Nardin asserts that Fanny Price’s education “conforms closely to the model advocated in [Hannah More’s] Strictures” which advocates “[training] of the character as well as the intellect” through religious study (16-17). Of perhaps more import to this study, Fanny follows Ann Murry’s recommendations in Mentoria, a text Austen had certainly read and which she gifted to her niece (Gilson 433). For example, Mentoria asserts about her intelligence and moral steadfastness to “industry and observation. I have read a great deal, and was always desirous to keep company with persons older than myself” (Murry 81). Despite Fanny’s ignorance of French (Austen 17), and her initial lack of schooling in geography and history (Austen 19), throughout the novel Fanny exhibits “a fondness for reading, which properly directed, must be an education in itself” (Austen 22). This pastime—the true key to a sound education—helps Fanny develop a keen sense of moral virtue which is beneficial as she attempts to assume the role of teacher. Fanny’s reading, too, subscribes to the “proper” reading laid out for young ladies: “biography and poetry” (Austen 370). Like many works of didactic fiction, she quotes William Cowper (Austen 53) and recommends Oliver Goldsmith to her sister (Austen 388). Though she may read the occasional novel, like The Vicar of Wakefield, Fanny is hardly a voracious fan of gothic literature. She prefers historical fact and poetical high art over narrative fancy. Fanny’s liminality—her existence at the margins of her little society—is rendered all the more stark by a personal moral authority comparable to a good governess that places her at odds with every other inhabitant of Mansfield Park.

Poovey points out that “Fanny Price is outwardly everything a textbook Proper Lady should be; she is independent, self-effacing, and apparently free of impermissible desires” (212). Vallone, too, asserts that Fanny’s role as moral authority is a governess-like role; she teaches the characters of the novel even as she teaches her readers how to behave appropriately (102). Fanny develops into the moral equivalent of Mentoria or Mrs. Teachwell, whose watchful eye guards the texts from associations with the immoral. She also develops into an actual teacher, dispensing her wisdom and moral advice when she feels it appropriate. Like Mentoria, Fanny uses discussion in order to expound upon her beliefs. When speaking to Mary Crawford, Fanny notes: In some countries we know the tree that sheds its leaf is the variety, but that does not make it less amazing, that the same soil and the same sun should nurture plants differing in the first rule of their existence. You will think me rhapsodizing; but when I am out of doors [. . .] I am very apt to get into this sort of wondering strain. (Austen 194) Her reference to “some countries” could be a generalization of the geography lessons books like Mentoria offer young girls, which consist of dividing the world into arid, frigid, and temperate zones, and describe the type of plant and animal life located in each (Murry 77-97). Additionally, Fanny’s speech speaks to her awareness of the difference between herself and her cousins. Working as a metaphor for education, Fanny expresses wonder that first cousins brought up in the same household may still become drastically different women, a difference created in a large part to differences of class. Aware of her subordination to her cousins, Fanny rarely speaks so eloquently or so much when with them, and is only able to speak in the passage because of their absence. Whereas some writers make use of schooling form, others make use of the traditional school itself. More often than not, these school scenes are a small part of a larger bildungsroman, and this is especially true of Charles Dickens’s novels, many of which feature traditional school episodes. Perhaps the most familiar of these

concern boys’ schools—David Copperfield comes to mind—but Dickens is interested in girls’ school stories as well. In Bleak House Esther’s experience at Greenleaf School forms a small portion of her memoirs. Relying more on allusions to typical early girls’ school story components rather than delving into them, this episode nonetheless establishes Esther’s adult character. Esther provides only the bare bones of a school story, and in doing so she relies on the type established in children’s fiction before Bleak House. She relies on school story time, and all that it signifies, when discussing her experiences at Greenleaf School. Esther recalls “I was so adapted to the routine before long, that I seemed to have been there a great while [. . .] Nothing could be more precise, exact, and orderly, than Greenleaf. There was a time for everything all round the dial of the clock, and everything was done at its appointed moment” (39). Esther’s discussion of routine, exact orderliness, in which every hour is filled, directly refers to the school story’s use of time: its formal attention to the day-to-day, and its thematic imperative to fill one’s time wisely. School story time is repetitive and exact. It marches forward simply by virtue of its fullness, and not by virtue of plot and action, and through this repetitiveness it emphasizes the circularity and redundancy inherent in women’s lives. Esther’s school time does much the same thing. By noting that there is a time for everything, Esther gives us to understand that everything proper is being done. The reference also allows her to gloss over the intervening “six quiet years,” which are marked only by her orderly biannual letter to Mr. Kenge (40). Esther’s description of her schooling also uses the school story’s emphasis on women’s lives themselves as circular. In these lives, women are first taught and then they teach. They are schooled in how to school, and this is just what Esther undertakes. She notes that “it was understood that I would have to depend, by-and- by, on my qualifications as a governess; and I was not only instructed in everything that was taught at Greenleaf, but was very soon engaged in helping to instruct others” (39). Like so many other girls in girls’ school stories, Esther experiences education at both the instructional and meta-instructional level. More importantly,

she does so because she has experienced the common plot motif, the reversal of fortune. On the surface level, her aunt’s death has placed her in a financial position in which she will certainly need to teach. Given her aunt’s cruelty toward her, we might alternatively say that Esther’s particular reversal has an upward trajectory— her life in fact gets better, rather than worse—but we can’t appreciate this Dickensian irony if we don’t first know the type. Finally, Esther makes use of one of the most common and most simple of girls’ school story motifs—the ultimate leave taking. Esther’s recollection establishes her as a good, domestic, and feminine woman for, though we know little of her education during her six-year stay at Greenleaf School, we know much of her goodbyes. Esther recalls virtually everyone, from the children, to the “ugly lame old gardener,” and the “proudest people in all that country” wishing her well and lamenting their loss (41). Esther’s recollection “when they all surrounded me with their parting presents, and clung to me weeping, and cried “What shall we do when dear, dear Esther’s gone” ensures that we know she will be missed—that she is a good teacher herself, and a model older girl (41). Like Jenny Peace, who leaves Mrs. Teachum’s academy to sad goodbyes and tears, we can be sure that Esther has graduated to, if not perfection, then full domestic femininity. No one has done more for the early girls’ school story, however, than Charlotte Brontë, who makes use of the genre in her two most canonical novels: Jane Eyre and Villette. I have argued elsewhere that in Jane Eyre Brontë depicts her protagonist in the full range of options available within the girls’ school story genre: first, as a child at school; second, as an underteacher in the same school; third, as a governess to a young girl in a home; and finally as the teacher of a village school. In her recollections, Jane Eyre expends most of her energy on the site we are most familiar with in terms of school: her experience in a traditional (though terrible) girls’ school. Descriptions of this educational site adhere to the girls’ school story form. In the girls’ school, Brontë makes primary use of character typologies, timeliness, and reversals of fortune Though Brontë’s depiction of Lowood School is typically considered

autobiographical, Jane Eyre’s experience of it is mediated through the early girls’ school story form. Miss Temple is an almost extreme form of good governess. Though she is more complexly depicted than the children’s genre allows for, she is just and kind. Aside from Mr. Brocklehurst, she possesses ultimate authority within the school, and she uses that oversight to kindly correct her students’ faults. Helen Burns is similarly a model of absolute, if imperfect, goodness. She is more highly attuned to religious feeling than other girls, and to that extent she is better than them. But, like the girls of the girls’ school story, Helen has her minor faults. She is forgetful and at times unclean. Jane herself, with her irreligion and her anger might justly be thought of as a bad child who is anxious to amend her faults, which are explained by her unfortunate upbringing. In matters of time, too, Jane’s experience at Lowood School adheres to the genre’s conventions. Jane and her fellow students are subject to a repetitive temporal order that is drilled into them by the bell, and that is recalled by the watch Miss Temple always wears. Brontë is at pains to make clear that the happy facade put on by most school stories is just that—an unreality that smooths over girls’ and women’s tragic losses by offering them a kind of authority. As I argued in my master’s thesis, Jane makes clear the degree to which women’s didactic authority is only a token. In fact, they are always subject to the man who holds the purse, as Miss Temple is to Mr. Brocklehurst, who lectures her on how to teach, and as Jane later is to Mr. Rochester. Like Esther’s departure from Greenleaf, Jane’s departure from Lowood is swift, but where Esther’s story deviates from the educational trajectory provided by the school story (at least for some time), Jane only moves on to become another kind of educator, this time, a governess on an estate. If this were a different type of dissertation—one that attended only to the fluctuations of school story—I would more fully argue that Jane Eyre had an appreciable impact on the girls’ school story genre. Certainly, the genre changed rapidly after 1848, becoming more focused on an individual girl’s psychology and her experience growing up. The girls’ school story became, in short, more like the bildungsroman that Jane Eyre is, and more like a Tom Brown public school genre,

though because of Brontë it still retained kernels of the early girls’ school story. At any rate one might fairly argue that Jane Eyre is the pinnacle of the early girls’ school story as a genre. It is almost certainly responsible for the genre’s continued presence in the everyday popular culture of the late-twentieth and early-twentieth centuries, as it is replicated time and time again for our viewing pleasure, in film and television adaptations. Jane Eyre’s influence is felt elsewhere as well, in the school stories that rely on this earlier form rather than the girls’ school stories that came after its publication: in adult novels like Kazuo Ishiguro’s Never Let Me Go, and children’s literature like Roald Dahl’s Matilda and MaryRose Wood’s Incorrigible Children of Ashton Place series. Jane Eyre is not, however, Brontë’s most direct adaptation of the early girls’ school story. For that, we must turn to Villette. Villette Villette’s primary interest is in the life of an unfortunate school-girl: Lucy Snowe, who, from attending school herself, lives out the harsh, circular experience of women’s time. Throughout the majority of the novel she is confined to one school, then another. The unfortunate schoolgirl—the governess whose loss is implicit, Lucy’s life is consumed by the financial and emotional depravations that must come to a woman of her time, left to support herself. Mary Poovey, in her seminal discussion of the governess in the mid-nineteenth century, has forcefully demonstrated that these women’s lives were hard ones, given to penury and difficult labor, as well as an ambivalent and stressful social position and Villette is explicitly concerned with this plight (Uneven Developments 126-163). In both Jane Eyre and Villette, Brontë filters her concerns about women’s social position through the medium of the early girls’ school story. In Villette, she makes use of its motifs, its typology and method, its concern for order, its temporality, and its embedded narratives; by doing so, she explodes the myth of the good and happy governess and makes room for new female types. From the first, Villette is very much a school story—it is a story set primarily at school which makes use of school story plots; at its heart, it concerns itself with Lucy Snowe’s educational experiences, and it self- consciously contributes to our readerly educations. Whereas the early girls’ school

story uses such formal traits as its treatment of typological characters, its temporality, and its motifs to instill in girls a sense of life’s order, Villette takes a slightly different tactic. Invested in the plight of the single woman, in the governess, Villette makes the school story’s reversal of fortune its primary plot driver. Sympathy for women turns into a sympathetic examination the hardship attendant on conformity and compromise. At the same time, Villette borrows the school stories educative method, teaching through type and contrast, order and rationality, Villette concerns itself with orders and classes of women. Instead of taking us through the painstaking minutiae of day-to-day schoolroom life in order to teach us about the world generally, it takes through us the paces of Lucy Snowe’s hard life, using comparison and comparative method to teach us what it means to be a single woman alone in the Victorian world, and using school story cues to help readers interpret like Lucy does—through genre. Scholarly work investigating Villette’s form has primarily taken on Lucy Snowe’s narrative technique, commonly agreeing that she is an unreliable and recalcitrant narrator. Since Gilbert and Gubar queried “Why would Brontë choose a narrator who purposefully tries to evade the issues or mislead the reader?” answering their question has been the critical mode for examining the novel (418). These readings engage the differences between the novel’s story and its discourse— the plot and the way the story is told—focusing on Lucy’s narrative elisions and glossings, her refusal to tell the story in the order that it happens, and her tendency to leave things out. Scholars have approached the novel through analyses of the relationship between Villette’s reader and narrator. Marie C. Hennedy, for instance, argues that Villette was written for the twentieth-century feminist “collaborating” reader—an “ideal live reader” (3). Though she acknowledges that a narrative discourse necessitates “multiple levels” of author/reader relationships (3), Hennedy is more interested in the hidden, newly unlocked (but, to her mind, correct) meanings of the novel uncovered by Brontë’s constructed ideal reader. Also reading for the relationship between narrator and reader, Gregory S. O’Dea emphasizes the “sympathetic relationship” Brontë creates between Lucy and her reader, in which

“discord” finally gives way to “harmony.” Others have specifically taken on Villette’s relationship to genres other than the realist bildungsroman. Concerning herself with narrator reliability, Elizabeth Preston argues that “the dynamics between Villette’s story and discourse, the interchange between fictional and cultural texts, and the various forms and functions of narratorial character traits all suggest that Brontë values heterosexual love as much as she does discursive authority” and Preston pays particular attention to Lucy’s use of prolepsis throughout the novel. Warhol, too, approaches the novel from a feminist narratological perspective. Using the difference between the narrating-I and the seeing-I as a means to account for the gothic features of both Villette and Jane Eyre, Warhol explains these elements of Brontë’s works by arguing that the narrating-I is writing a realist novel, the seeing-I is experiencing gothic terror; further, Brontë’s method is part of an “activism” engaged in “exposing and complicating oppressive binary categories within culture” as signified, in this case, by the dismantling of binary genres (“Double Gender” 864). Both are concerned with Lucy’s apparent refusal to straightforwardly narrate and with her gender politics, and both are interested in considering Villette’s relationship to novel discourse—romance and gothic genres, respectively. Some few others have considered Villette’s relationship with the confessional model. Allen O’Rourke places the novel in the midst of a discourse that, taking Rousseau’s Confessions as its source, seeks to outwit the reader. More recently, Gretchen Braun has argued that Lucy’s confession uses breaks and silences to indicate trauma and loss rather than to undermine the reader’s judgment of her. Braun’s argument fits in well with my own analysis of autobiographical confession and the school story, as these confessions, too, seek to expose the trauma of girlhood and structural inequality. Perhaps formalist and generic studies’ most obvious failure in their attempt to account for Villette is that, despite being commonly thought of as a realistic school novel, no one has considered it in terms of the school story genre. Those few readings like Caroline Franklin’s that mention Villette in relationship to school do so only as an aside, considering it with Jane Eyre a kind of “Ur” text, descended from

nothing. Other critics, like Margret Buchanan and Marianne Thormahlen link Villette to the Brontë sisters’ real-life educational experiences rather than educational forms or genres. As the following pages will demonstrate, however, Villette is both in form and content a school story, and considering it within the context of the early girls’ school story might even go so far as to answer Gilbert and Gubar’s primary question—”why does Brontë choose a voyeur to narrate a fictional biography when this means the narrator insists on telling the tale as if some other, more attractive woman were the central character?” School Occurrences That Villette is in some measure a school story is easily established by its setting: the vast majority of the novel occurs in a girls’ school, and it makes use of the early girls’ school story’s generic norms. Nowhere is this more obvious than in its use of the genre’s familiar, repeated motifs, specifically the reversal of fortune, the good governess, school lessons, feasts and outings, inset tales, and even in its treatment of marriage and romance. Lucy Snowe quickly establishes that there are at least two good governesses in this novel. As in most school stories, her tale of school life only occurs after the validity of the school has been established. Madame Beck is “merely a motherly, dumpy little woman, in a large shawl, a wrapping-gown, and a clean, trim night-cap” (72), and though Lucy critiques Madam Beck’s “Catholic” propensity toward spying and surveillance, she still acknowledges that nothing could be better than all her arrangements for the physical well being of her scholars. No minds were overtasked; the lessons were well distributed and made incomparably easy to the learner; there was a liberty of amusement, and a provision for exercise which kept the girls healthy; the food was abundant and good [. . .] many an austere English school-mistress would do vastly well to imitate it. (81) Lucy allows that Madame Beck is an effective and good administrator of a girls’ school. She is motherly (at least in affect), and she provides for her students above and beyond the call of duty. With her refusal to overtax her students’ minds and her concern for girls’ well-being, Madame Beck’s school sounds almost idyllic (at least

for the students) and Madame Beck herself receives what, coming from Lucy, is truly high praise: she is “rational” (72). The novel has another good governess in Lucy herself. Though Lucy is hardly a character given to self-love, and certainly not to self-praise, she nonetheless indicates the she is and has always been a capable teacher. Before Lucy ever enters a school, her interactions with little Polly Home indicate that she is attentive to those in her charge. When Polly is upset that her father has left, Lucy recalls “I had some thoughts of consoling her, and of improving the occasion by inculcating some of those maxims of philosophy whereof I had ever a tolerable stock ready for application” (30). Lucy may be poking fun at herself, acknowledging her inadequacy in the face of Polly’s grief. At the same time she establishes that she had the urge to console through instruction even as a young girl herself. Once in a school, Lucy establishes herself as an authority on her first day in the English classroom. Her initial forays into teaching are, admittedly harsh: she does throw one student in a closet. Nonetheless, her students eventually come to like and respect her—some even go so far as to give her flowers. Most importantly, Lucy has that absolute necessary prerequisite for good teaching: she is a genteel woman fallen on hard times. Educated herself, and of a class that doesn’t typically expect its women to work, Lucy loses both family and fortune early in the novel. She remembers “Thus, there remained no possibility of dependence on others; to myself alone I could look” (40). Lucy’s hard financial fall and her subsequent need to work, ideally in a school, recalls the early girls’ school story’s circular treatment of women’s lives—she has moved from school as a student into school again, this time as a teacher, with very little life experience in between. And Lucy, when she imagines her life, dreams only of increasing her independence through school and schooling: “When I shall have saved one thousand francs, I will [. . .] begin with taking day-pupils, and so work my way upwards”(400). Lucy dreams not of marriage, but of a pensionnat like Madame Beck’s; she dreams of the authority and independence given to women owners of schools. Lucy’s life itself revolves around the familiar occurrences of day-to-day life in

a fictional girls’ school—she depicts lessons, feasts, and outings, and even alludes to the kind of embedded narratives one expects out of a typical early girls’ school story. Lessons undergo some small change in their translation from moral and instructive lessons for girls, written from an omniscient perspective, to moral and instructive lessons for adults, written by Lucy. Limited to Lucy’s autobiographical, retrospective narrating-I, we are only able to learn as she does through her perspective. This is not to say, however, that we readers are not instructed. In her first school-lesson— the one she actually gives—Lucy notes “I shall never forget that first lesson, nor all the under-current of life and character it opened up to me. Then first did I began rightly to see the wide difference that lies between the novelist’s and poets ideal ‘jeune fille,’ and the said ‘jeune fille’ as she really is” (87). This lesson—a lesson in contrast between how young girls should be and how they are, is one Lucy first teaches us and then demonstrates, by describing in some detail her experience of the realist “jeune fille.” These girls are rude and undisciplined, and must be humiliated and stuffed into closets as punishment. Lucy describes many other lessons in the novel, including those she undertakes herself under the instruction of M. Paul, who teaches her arithmetic and assigns her essays (389). Madame Beck’s school, like that in Fielding’s The Governess, is not without elements of fun. In addition to the fete and play celebrating Madame Beck’s birthday, Villette includes a detailed description of an outing: “breakfast in the country” (421). All wearing “the clean fresh print dress, and the light straw bonnet” the girls and their teachers are the picture of pastoral beauty. As in the early girls’ school stories, the breakfast moves the trappings of the kitchen and the dining room to the field—they are provided with “coffee and chocolate [. . .] cream and new-laid eggs” as well as bread and butter. After dining outside the farmhouse, the girls play in the meadows (423). Here, too, is a reference to the educational habits of the early girls’ school story: one of many allusions to the inset tales that make up part of girls’ educations, and which M. Paul is throughout the novel responsible for. Lucy describes “He began to tell us a story. Well could he narrate: in such a diction simple in is strength, and

strong in its simplicity” (422). M. Paul’s tales are meant to be instructive and entertaining—the imperative of such tales in school stories. Compared to the saints’ biographies read at the end of the day and which horrify Lucy, M. Paul’s would flash through our conventual darkness a reflex of a brighter world, show us a glimpse of the current literature of the day, read us passages from some enchanting tale, or the latest witty feuilleton which had awakened laughter in the saloons of Paris; taking care always to expunge, with the severest hand, whether from tragedy, melodrama, or essay, whatever passage, phrase, or word could be deemed unsuited to an audience of ‘juenes filles.’ (364) M. Paul’s reading does the work of a good girls’ school story. As Ellenor Fenn’s Mrs. Teachwell excerpts suitable passages from The Castle of Otranto, M. Paul excerpts suitable passages from other works, relating enchanting stories, and helping girls understand and imagine the world outside the confines of their school. At the same time, Lucy acknowledges that much of what M. Paul tells them is strictly revised and edited—perhaps too strictly, for Lucy also makes clear throughout the novel that M. Paul’s views of feminine behavior (and especially her behavior) are tyrannical. In itself, editing out portions of works published for adults is standard school story fare. At the same time, M. Paul’s editing enacts a gender dynamic that the school story does not. As a man, he is an intruder into the evening circle, and it is notable that his strict revisions result in strict moral teachings. By relying on girls’ school story motifs, Brontë places Villette within an unexpected historical and genetic tradition—that of early children’s literature. Given that Brontë herself was an educator, this should not be surprising, and scholars have made some small connections between Brontë’s works and the early girls’ school story genre. Inga Stina Ewbank has asserted that Jane Eyre might well have been inspired by works like Ellen, the Teacher,xxii while Susan Sniader Lanser has argued that it derived from governess novels like Sherwood’s Caroline Mordaunt. Sherwood was familiar with the early girls’ school story genre, as she edited and re-issued The Governess in the nineteenth century. Kirstin Hanley

connects Jane Eyre with Wollstonecraft’s Original Stories. That these kinds of connections have not been made with Villette may well be because the novel, rather than merely replicating the school story’s motifs, also uses the genre’s form to test its veracity to life, and to expand its educational potential. As I will discuss in the coming pages, through her use of typological character and comparison, embedded narratives, and time, Brontë forces her readers to come to terms with a more realist depiction of the world and its treatment of women. She uses the early girls’ school story’s form to grapple with its dark underside—its treatment of the loss, unfairness, and boredom that try women. Comparing Characters: Typology and Method In Villette, as in early school stories, names mean: they are educational, serving to help the reader identify character types and emphasizing the power of a name. In the same way that early girls’ school stories work to undermine the strict adherence of character type to character name, Villette emphasizes the degree to which living up to one’s name, or dominant personality trait, can be a product of social situation and education rather than innate quality. Moreover, by emphasizing the distance between typological name and real character, and by depicting typological characters in familiar structural relationships to each other, Villette invites us to learn through comparative analysis. By placing readers in closest proximity to Lucy Snowe, the novel undermines any urge to identify with those characters who behave either well or badly and get their happy endings. Lucy Snowe is the most obviously typological name in this novel, and it is also without doubt the most troubled one. Lynn Hamilton has argued that Lucy’s name “suggests the passage of a long, barren interval between the events of the novel and recording of them” (72) as well as that Snowe signals Lucy’s “cold, reserved, monochromatic” exterior (76). Certainly, there is much in this novel to suggest that, at the surface level, Lucy is cold and chilly—rational in the most ideal school story manner, rather than imaginative. Lucy herself states early on “I, Lucy Snowe, plead guiltless of that curse, an overheated and discursive imagination” (15), and others persist in seeing her as steady and, to some degree, lifeless. Nearly

everyone likens Lucy to an established governess type: Madame Beck thinks Lucy “learned and blue”; Miss Fanshawe calls her “caustic, ironic, cynical” (her view of governesses); and Mr. Home believes she is “a model teacher [. . .] the pink and pattern of governess-correctness”; only M. Paul thinks she is “adventurous, indocile, and audacious” (334). Others’ perception of Lucy are colored by her occupation as a school teacher, and by their perception of what a governess should be—a perception itself informed by school story patterns. In addition to being renamed “Old Crusty” and “Old Diogenes” by Ginevra, she is at other times called “Mother Wisdom” and “Madame Minerva Gravity,” typological titles reminiscent of Mrs. Teachwells and Mentorias (98, 334). Much as early girls’ school stories emphasize the social processes that go into creating a “type” character, and especially a negative type, Lucy is at pains throughout her autobiography to remind us that her snowiness is the result of circumstances—she has passion, but must hide it. Here, Villette exposes the hardship of personal sacrifice that is only latent in the children’s genre, and examines the real cost of social conformity, even when conforming is strategic. This frank acknowledgment that Lucy’s type, even if it is a governess-type, is the result of severe and unfortunate loss is perhaps one of the novel’s most important lessons. Villette expands on the loss that is already a major theme of the girls’ school story, while further interrogating the degree to which “good teachers” are content ones. Lucy writes, “I had feelings: passive as I lived, little as I spoke, cold as I looked, when I thought of past days, I could feel. About the present, it was better to be stoical; about the future—such a future as mine — to be dead. And in catalepsy and a dead trance, I studiously held the quick of my nature” (120). For Lucy, to make it in the world requires that she live “in catalepsy” and “dead trance.” It requires that she hold all feelings in abeyance, both because the future will not bear scrutiny and because her present situation is more tolerable if she remains passive to it. Thus, Lucy’s stoicism and cynicism are in large part a reflection of need to protect herself. Lucy is clear, too, about the degree to which these self-denying “struggles with natural character, the strong native bent of the heart” are a product of her

rationality and a response to the need to maintain a steady, good surface-character. They “give the actions, the conduct, that turn which Reason approves, and which Feeling, perhaps, too often opposes: they certainly make a difference in the general tenor of a life, and enable it to be better regulated, more equable, quieter on the surface, and it is on the surface only the common gaze will fall” (200). Here, Lucy momentarily illuminates the early girls’ school story’s problem both in content and form. By teaching rationality, reason, regulation, and equability, these stories perhaps teach the necessary skills for survival in the social world—but they do so at a real cost to women, especially those so as unfortunate as Lucy. To be a model governess or a conventional woman is often to wholeheartedly deny one’s real nature. In return, you are graced with equability and peace, if not happiness. Not all characters are as straightforwardly typological as Lucy Snowe. As a whole, Villette tends toward the loose typological indicators common to nineteenth- century novels. These names are less direct than “Miss Pert” is, but they nonetheless signal important character information, especially information about the character’s behavior or moral traits. Most significantly, Brontë’s portrayal of the characters recalls the early girls’ school story’s form. The characters, especially Paulina and Ginevra stand in contrast to Lucy and to each other. This juxtaposition is educative, and work to illuminate Lucy’s social position. Lucy opens her narration describing Louisa and Graham Bretton: two good characters whose names clue us into their near-ideal “Britishness.” For Lucy, the Brettons signal the best of middle-class Englishness—they are homey, committed to their domestic, familial life, and hard working. Though Lucy later acknowledges “I have been told since, that Dr. Bretton [the grown up Graham] was not so nearly perfect as I thought him: that his actual character lacked the depth, height, compass, and endurance it possessed in my creed” (275). For Lucy as a child and as an adult, living in a foreign city, Dr. Bretton is the picture of perfect Englishness, and she describes him as such throughout the novel. To Lucy, he is a man possessed of good public character, kind, considerate, and authoritative; he is an English man, through and through. Importantly, though Lucy and the Brettons begin the novel in similar

social situations, their, and particularly his, social position and power stands in stark contrast to hers, and this is true even at the level of surface. Lucy and others are prone to credit John Graham Bretton with too much character—character with depth, height, compass—those who encounter Lucy imagine her with too little. The novel also emphasizes a major problem with Dr. Bretton’s characterization of others—showing that it is often faulty, guilty of putting women in too-tiny corners. Whereas Ginevra complains “he thinks I am perfect: furnished with all sorts of sterling qualities and solid virtues, such as I never had, nor intend to have” (100), Lucy acknowledges “he wanted always to give me a role not mine” (352). A major component of Dr. Bretton’s character, and his British type, is imposing an uncomfortable order on imperfect women. He would deny as much as possible that their imperfections might even exist. It should not be surprising that Dr. Bretton ultimately marries a woman whose domestic virtues are as perfect as his own. Little Polly Home, who later becomes Paulina Mary Home de Bassompierre, is the pinnacle of a beautiful, domestic young woman. She has all the negative virtues necessary for a good woman: she is routinely kind and polite, unselfish. Never guilty of passion, Paulina places other’s feelings before her own. She is elegant and near perfect—much like the perfect dolly her diminutive rhymes with. Lucy describes her as “a neat, completely-fashioned little figure, light slight and straight [. . .]she looked a mere doll” and Ginevra later calls her a “conceited doll” (11, 299). Moreover, Lucy acknowledges that Polly’s “was a one-idea’d nature; betraying that monomaniac tendency”; put simply, Polly makes an idol of only one man in her life at a time, and expends all her efforts making him comfortable (15). Making herself at home wherever she is as a child, and later creating a perfect home first for her father and then her husband, Polly signals “Home” both in name and action. Paulina de Bassompierre, though more elegantly European than little Polly Home was, remains the center of her father’s life as her surname, reminiscent of “bosom” and “pere,” indicates. Lucy’s many descriptions of Polly, whether or not they liken her to a doll, are not by any means meant to be a critique. Polly is one of very few people in the

novel to receive the accolade “I liked her”—high praise from Lucy Snowe, indeed (411). Though Polly may have a monomaniacal need to serve and love the men in her life, Lucy “knew, or guessed, by what a good and strong root her graces held to the firm soil of reality” (348). A paragon of domestic womanliness, Polly is characterized by her ideal and strong love. Whereas Polly is a paragon of moral selflessness and domestic grace, Ginevra is guilty of those cardinal girlish sins—selfishness, covetousness, and vanity. She cares little for perfection. Hamilton rightly notes that Ginevra’s first name, given to her after her aunt, signal “vanity, idleness, and frivolity” (72). “Fanshawe,” a surname that alludes to women’s accessories, fans and shawls, similarly alludes to Ginevra’s material shallowness, her ultimate concern for surface appearance and possessions—a typical schoolgirl vice. Indeed, Lucy notes that the “one thing about her that seemed strong and durable enough [. . .] was—her selfishness” (93). If Paulina is meant to symbolize all that is good about English women, Ginevra might signal all that is, at least, doubtable. Ginevra’s robust, perfect, almost angelically fair appearance belies her coquettish character. Rather than bend to the world, Ginevra consistently demands that it and others bow to her. As in the school story, the interaction between Ginevra and Paulina, two young women of very different character, is an educational model. Ginevra and Paulina model different kinds of schoolgirls, or different types of femininity. But the contrast between them is more redolent of the school story than even their types are. In physical appearance and character, Ginevra and Paulina stand in stark contrast to each other, and this contrast, with its didactic potential, is made explicit throughout the novel. Lucy encourages comparisons between the two young women—she even sets up occasions for the reader to compare them, such as the Bassompierres’ dinner party. Indeed, Lucy indicates that Paulina’s goodness and beauty can best be understood as deviating from Ginevra’s. Lucy depicts Paulina “Not with the beauty that strikes the eye [. . .] not with the plump, and pink, and flaxen attributes of her blond cousin” (306). When describing Paulina’s graceful good manners, Lucy states “Had Ginevra Fanshawe been my companion in that

morning-room, she would not have suffered me to muse and listen undisturbed” (321). As a proper woman, Paulina’s virtues are negative virtues—quiet and discipline that are hard to describe saving in contrast to something else. Her beauty is a negative foil to the beauty standard. Throughout the novel, Lucy establishes that whereas Ginevra “boasted the advantage in material charms [. . .] the latter shone pre-eminent for attractions more subtle and spiritual” (346). Acting as foils to each other, Ginevra and Paulina demonstrate the range between materiality and spirituality. These differences, however, do not necessarily bear out in the way the two women’s lives are plotted over the course of the novel. Both women engage in marriage plots of the type commonly found in school stories. These are marriage plots that deny marriage plots—entertaining, semi-romantic episodes that are never meant to be the full thrust of the narrative. As in school stories, Villette’s marriage plots are something that happen at a distance, to the novel’s minor characters rather than to its narrator, and they are doubly filtered through hearsay and fiction. (Even Lucy’s romance with M. Paul, occurring toward the end of the novel, is something she deduces from the behavior of those around her rather than experiences herself). All romance plots in this novel are filtered through practical Lucy. We don’t have the privilege of witnessing Dr. Bretton propose to Paulina, nor do we experience firsthand the excitement of Ginevra’s elopement. These plots, too, have a didactic purpose, as they work to even the playing field between the two contrasting cousins. Though Paulina’s ending is happiest by contemporary standards, both women end up happy. About Paulina, Lucy sums “Bright, too, was the destiny of his sweet wife. She kept her husband’s love, she aided in his progress—of his happiness she was the corner stone” (482). As for Ginevra, “In some shape, from some quarter or other, she was pretty sure to obtain her will, and so she got on—fighting the battle of life by proxy, and on the whole, suffering as little as any human being I have ever known” (526). Whereas Paulina is her husband’s successful and beloved helpmeet, Ginevra, selfish as always, lays responsibility at others’ doors and suffers very little, especially when one considers the fate she might have met as an unrespectable

woman. This relatively similar narrative treatment of the women is a significant departure from the early girls’ school story, which never obviously rewards misbehaving girls, even when it does sympathize with them. The effect of this change is to highlight the starker contrast between them and Lucy Snow. Whereas these women’s good fortune helps them achieve material success, Lucy must continue to work for her living. Despite Lucy’s refusal to act as a “bright lady’s shadow,” a phrase that brings to mind the contrast between her, Ginevra, and Paulina, she nonetheless instructs us to read her life in opposition to those of other women. Indeed, Lucy demonstrates that it is possible to evaluate possible futures based on these readings and stark comparisons. Before Paulina tells Lucy of Dr. Bretton’s proposal, she states that “life [. . .] is said to be full of pain to some: I have read biographies where the wayfarer seemed to journey on from suffering to suffering: where Hope flew before him fast [. . .] I have read of those who sowed in tears, and whose harvest, so far from being reaped in joy, perished by untimely blight, or was borne off by sudden whirl-wind; and, alas! Some of these met the winter with empty garners, and died of utter want in the darkest and coldest of the year” (416). Paulina is noting the utter disparity with which life has treated her and treated others. She observes that her goodness and happiness is based on her good fortune and social circumstance, and guesses that, given her life trajectory, she will continue to be blessed and happy. To this, Lucy responds “I thought over your life just as you have yourself thought it over; I have made comparisons like those to which you adverted. We know not the future, but the past has been propitious” (417). Lucy reads in Paulina’s life, as in Ginevra’s (though to a lesser degree) “promise, plan, harmony” (414). For Lucy, the key to understanding a person’s role in life is both to “think over it” and to “make comparisons.” Most importantly, and recalling the adaptation of medieval typology used by school stories, Lucy predicts the future through her understanding of the past: a fortunate past tells much about the future, at least in part because the past determines future social circumstances. Lucy’s belief in worldly order, a belief coinciding with the school story’s

primary thematic concern, is reflected in the belief that she can “read” the world based on her knowledge of the past. For Lucy, this worldly legibility is part of her wholehearted belief in God’s plan. Discussing Paulina and Dr. Bretton, she argues Some lives are thus blessed: it is God’s will: it is the attesting trace and lingering evidence of Eden. Other lives run from the first another course. Other travelers encounter weather fitful and gusty, wild and variable—breast adverse winds, are belated and overtaken by the early closing winter night. Neither can this happen without the sanction of God; and I know that, amidst His boundless works, is somewhere stored the secret of this last fate’s justice. (418) In Lucy’s mind, the division of people into distinct orders—those blessed and those whose lives are fitful and gusty—is part of “God’s will.” By attending to these orders, watching their patterns, she is able not only to predict future lives. She is also able to read the “trace and lingering evidence of Eden,” and she suggests that practice in this reading method might help one interpret the “secret” justice of those who are not as fortunate as Paulina, or for that matter Ginevra. Still, though it is God’s plan Lucy is reading, the signs of this plan are themselves highly material—money, family, and position. God’s plan or not, it remains clear that material circumstances are the great predictor of worldly success and/or happiness. As both Lucy and Paulina note, however, such happiness “is not so for all” (485). The biographies Paulina describes may as well be Lucy’s up to this point in the novel, as her emplotted life is also full of blight and cold. They are the stories of people who, though they work hard only move on from “suffering to suffering.” It may be as hard for readers to identify with Paulina’s good fortune as it is with Lucy’s hardship and, after all, it would be against the school story model to encourage any such singular identification. This movement between good fortune and bad fortune, the comparative method utilized most by school stories, is one means by which Villette exposes its readers to the experience of hardship, and forces them to acknowledge the social gradations even among women of the same class. Rather than straightforwardly emotionally identify, readers are meant to learn.

Villette’s use of time, too, models itself after the school story—emphasizing its lesson that one’s productivity may help make life more bearable as well as noting the places this lesson fails her. Though her life is trying before she reaches Villette, once Lucy establishes herself in school, she notes that her “time was now well and profitably filled up. What with teaching others and studying closely myself, I had hardly a spare moment. It was pleasant. I felt I was getting on; not lying the stagnant prey of mould and rust, but polishing my faculties and whetting them to a keen edge with constant use” (90). Here Lucy pays homage to the school story’s methodical approach to time—its formal and thematic interest in filling time up, and its belief that keeping oneself busy helps one be happy. Sadly, a major portion of Lucy’s narrative is given to undermining this notion: at various times in the novel she experiences a depression that no amount of business can deter. At these moments, she describes herself as one of “those who live in retirement, whose lives have fallen amid the seclusion of schools or of other walled-in and guarded dwellings,” as a prisoner, “stagnant in his cell” (295). At one point, Lucy even seems to be directly mocking school story recommendations, when she writes “I tried different expedients to sustain and fill existence: I commenced an elaborate piece of lace- work, I studied German pretty hard, I undertook a course of regular reading of the driest and thickest books in the library; in all my efforts I was as orthodox as I knew how to be” (297). Lucy’s emphasis on the elaborate lace-work, the dry, thick books, point us back to the tedium of an existence that is bound up in minor, time- consuming workings. That Lucy’s attempts at “orthodoxy,” to keep herself busy, fail miserably is certainly a critique of schooling. These allusions and critiques of school story methods are by no means Lucy’s only use of school-like time, however. I have argued that, in the school story, the practical attention to the minutiae of dialogue, and the excessive attention to most minor of events has the effect of forcing readers to undertake the educational norms of the school story as they read it. The attention to days and times, and the high amount of simple reporting help readers experience order, timeliness, and structure. Similarly, Lucy’s highly-detailed and voyeuristic narration forces her readers to

experience structure, order, and time from her perspective. Lucy’s position as voyeur has been consistently attended to since Gilbert and Gubar, resulting in a wide variety of interpretations that primarily deal with her stance as a feminist critic of dominant cultural norms. Elisha Cohn examines Lucy’s tendency to stand back and describe her surroundings rather than engage with them, as well as her occasional trance-like states, arguing that these are at odds with the Victorian novel’s “cultivation of individual consciousness and its alliance with moral perfectionism” (845). Cohn’s argument, which supports a kind of aesthetic detachment, is at odds with Amanda Anderson’s reading of these “powers of distance,” as a bid for cultural agency. Read in the light of the school story one might also affirm that Lucy’s voyeuristic attention to other people’s experiences, when compared with her own, is specifically meant to be didactic. By turning her focus outward throughout the novel, especially in the degree of attention she gives to Paulina and Ginevra and their similarities and differences, Lucy provides alternate methods for dealing with social structure—Polly’s perfect femininity and Ginevra’s refusal to care about impropriety—while alluding to the degree to which she is cut off from these methods. Lucy’s painstaking attention to dialogues from which she is often excluded, too numerous in this novel to specify, as well as her minute recording of those in which she does particulate replicate for us—in real time—her experience of a social life that habitually excludes her. It is not atypical in this novel to find pages of uninterrupted dialogue. Polly’s discussion of marriage with her father, for instance, contains seventy-four lines of dialogue with only an occasional description of tone or movement. Lucy shows the social world in painstaking detail, and she expects us to learn from it: Polly’s and her father’s discussion might well be a model for a feminine approach to marital issues, as Polly affirms her love and obedience to her father while persuading him to do just as she likes. Perhaps more importantly, Lucy’s minute attention to time at its most tedious forces her readers to through the paces of her lonesome existence. We experience each moment of conversation from which Lucy is excluded. Moreover, whereas Lucy

passes over the loss and traumas of her earlier life—trials that would make good and sentimental narrative—she focuses in on periods of boredom, describing them in nuanced prose. These trials occur more than once over the course of the novel, though perhaps the most memorable is that of the “long vacation.” Like the teacher in Mrs. Leicester’s School (one story Brontë explicitly refers to in her letters) who is “confined to Amwell” during the vacation and left with too much time on her hands, Lucy remains at the school with only a disabled student as company. While the vacation ends in her illness and despaired trip to a Catholic church, Lucy makes clear that the five-week period beforehand is notable only for its lack of anything narratable. Instead, Lucy describes the “long,” period as one in which “my heart almost died within me [. . .] when I had full leisure to look on life as life must be looked on by such as me, I found it but a hopeless desert: tawny sands, with no green field, no palm-tree, no well in view” (172-3). For Lucy, to be left alone is to be left almost on the rack. She is tortured by her isolation and loneliness. More importantly, she perceives that this “vast and void” period is only a small portion of a life that lacks spiritual or emotional sustenance throughout (172). Her image of endless tawny sands betrays her sense of life’s monotony. This and other similar passages, such as her later response to being temporarily dropped by the Brettons that compares her life to that of a “hermit” or a caged animal, act as pauses and delays in Lucy’s narrative (295-296). They force us to stop with her, to pause as she does, before we are allowed to return to the novel’s plot. Like passages in girls’ school stories, in which governesses’ conversation slows the plot by expounding on a given topic, these sections, in which Lucy talks to us, are edifying: they teach the pain of isolation and boredom. Finally, in addition to making reference to the embedded narratives common to early girls’ school stories, Villette contains a number of actual embedded narratives—narratives that demand we read them in the school story method, with an attention to the relationship between the embedded narrative and the frame narratives, looking for parallels and incongruities in the two, and including any interpretation frame characters might offer them. Like most novels, Villette abounds

in minor embedded narratives: the story of the nun and the Jesuit pamphlet, among others. The most prominent embedded narratives are those that directly reflect on Lucy or which she reflects on and interprets—the story told by a series of paintings and the titled tale, “The Priest’s Pupil.” The first, an inset narrative told through Lucy’s description and interpretation of paintings, teaches us to evaluate the typical stages of a woman’s life. Lucy describes a young girl “coming out of a church-door, a missal in her hand, her dress very prim, her eyes cast down”; then, a married woman “with a long white veil”; next, a new mother “hanging disconsolate over a clayey and puffy baby”; and, finally, a widow and daughter “studiously surveying an elegant French monument, set up in a corner of some Père la Chaise” (225-6). Virtuous childhood, marriage, motherhood, and then widowhood, these paintings are universalizing, claiming to plot the ideal life of any woman. But, to Lucy Snowe, these paintings “are too hideous” (228). Lucy interprets these womanly types as “insincere, ill-humoured, bloodless, brainless nonentities” (226). Lucy’s stance toward the paintings is strong and to some degree unexpected; she may well be over-reading minor details. The contrast between this plot and her own life may go some way toward explaining her reaction—Lucy critiques here not the individual women, but their typicality. She spurns, and teaches her readers to spurn, their normalizing impulse. “The Priest’s Tale” similarly models an ideal femininity and romance that Lucy teaches readers to reject. The story follows M. Paul and his young fiancée as they are forced to part. After Justine Marie dies in a convent, M. Paul takes care of her now fallen-on-hard times parents, even caring for her evil grandmother. The story, repeated in full by Lucy, is meant to be a touching one—one that models virtuous love and obedience to parents, but Lucy again reinterprets it, calling it “a little romantic narrative” that she would have preferred without so much “French, Rousseau-like sentimentalizing and wire-drawing” (434). Lucy rebels against the priest’s sentimental and romantic descriptions of Justine Marie especially, observing instead that she was sickly-looking, weak in body and in spirit, and hardly a romantic heroine. Rather than sympathize with the star-crossed lovers, Lucy

encourages her readers to trace the “poet-fancy” to its proper source—those who would manipulate M. Paul into providing for them (441). “The Priest’s Pupil,” combined with Lucy’s interpretation, however, does not merely teach readers to eschew romantic conventions. Read against the grain of Lucy’s life story, this narrative, like the paintings before it, exposes “lack” in her womanly experience. It posits M. Paul as the perfect object of romance—one willing to sacrifice all for the woman he loves and to support her family after her death. Given that she has experienced no similar amount of support in her life, it is no wonder that Lucy considers the tale romantic nonsense. Lucy’s narrative both begins and ends with shipwrecks, neither of which we are permitted to witness. Instead, we are left to consider the in-between: the stormy life of a woman who has no one to whom to turn or complain. This woman is a governess. Independent, she earns her own way in the world making use of her own rational mind. Villette is intensely concerned with the early girls’ school story genre—with its form and interests, its morals and its lessons. Like the school story, the novel explores the possibilities for interacting with a social structure, playing off of the school story’s interest in order and ordering, comparisons and contrasts, to establish hierarchies of privilege among women, and in doing so it explodes the myth of the happy governess perpetuated by the stories. At the end of her narrative, Lucy stops: “Here pause: pause at once. There is enough said. Trouble no quiet, kind heart; leave sunny imagination s hope. Let it be theirs to conceive the delight of joy born again fresh out of great terror, the rapture of rescue from peril, the wondrous reprieve from dread, the fruition of return. Let them picture union and a happy succeeding life” (546). Though Lucy gives out that she intends to “let sunny imaginations hope,” good readers cannot—especially those good readers who have been trained by the early girls’ school story. Here, Lucy relies on school story training: reader’s understanding of repetition, their ability to comprehend typology, both as a characteristic order and as a method for interpreting the present and future by the past. Working in correspondence with Lucy’s earlier discussion of her life as shipwrecked, the conclusion frames the bulk of Villette, and it reflects the girls

school story’s circular temporality. We are back where we began—or Lucy is. And Lucy has been too clear about her position in the order of things. Readers who use her own method—interpreting the future against the evidence of the past—will be forced to recall her beginning: “there must have been a wreck at last [. . .] In fine, the ship was lost, the crew perished” (39). A well-trained rational mind like her own, one void of imagination, cannot help but see M. Paul’s tragic end, and cannot help but adapt to this new blow. This is hard rationality, one that demonstrates as vehemently as any example in the novel that adapting oneself to existing social structures may well be painful and difficult. Still, it demonstrates the necessity of doing so as playing the system properly can bring some more minor rewards—the “justice” in the hard life Lucy knows she can find, if only she looks thoroughly, For Lucy, this ultimate justice is significant: a school, an income, independence—a little money, and a room of her own.

Chapter 2: Useful Things: It Narratives and Novels

Whereas the early school story was a genre created and developed specifically for children, the children's it-narrative was from its inception an offshoot of another minor eighteenth-century genre, the object narrative. The first children’s it-narrative of its kind, The Adventures of a Pincushion (1780) makes no bones about its departure from adult models. In her introduction to the work, author Mary Ann Kilner argues that “To exhibit their superiors in a ridiculous view, is not the proper method to engage the youthful mind to respect. To represent their equals as the objects of contemptuous mirth is by no means favorable to the interest of good nature” (vii-viii). Kilner refers to the dominantly satirical mode of adult object narratives, which were designed to amuse and were often lewd. Conversely, the Pincushion’s narration would be didactic and sincere. The shift in audience also signals a significant shift in content; instead of spotlight others’ flaws, this narrative would, ideally, train the child mind to “respect” and the child’s nature into goodness. Kilner’s it-narrative precipitates the movement from the eighteenth century's satire to the nineteenth century's sincere didacticism. Though both attitudes are educational, they differ in their treatment of their subject matter and their readers. Whereas satire positions the narrator and the narratee as equal—both in communication and in their relative moral superiority to the subject matter— didacticism positions the narrator above both its subject matter and its reader. The sincere, didactic narrator teaches not through negative, humorous example, but through explication that we are expected to accept as an approximate imitation of the real. Despite this considerable shift, children's it-narratives have much in common with the adult object narrative. Mark Blackwell, in his introduction to the edited

collection The Secret Life of Things—probably the most comprehensive scholarly account of early object narratives—defines them generally as “an odd subgenre of the novel, a type of prose fiction in which inanimate objects [. . .] or animals [. . .] serve as central characters. Sometimes these characters enjoy a consciousness—and thus a perspective—of their own; sometimes they are merely narrative hubs around which other people's stories cumulate” (10). This is a generous definition, making space from everything from a peg-top's memoirs to the circulation of objects in A Sentimental Journey. Others make a fair case for narrower delineations. Christopher Flint points out that object narratives might well be defined by their interest in “how the circulation of things related to narrative practice in an age of mechanical reproduction” (162). He argues that these objects are made things, and that the object's “authority [. . .] is complicated by the very extemporaneous nature of its experience. It-narratives are invariably picaresque; shifts in plot, subject, and locale, emphasize the rapid changes of ownership that dictate the object's market value” (162). In contrast, Liz Bellamy rightly reasons that many early object narrators are not manufactured goods at all: they are plants and animals. She poses a couple of useful guidelines for thinking about it-narratives as a genre, considerably expanding Flint's argument: “one or both of two definitive components. The first is a narrator that, whether animal, vegetable, or manufactured object, lacks independent agency” and “the transference of the narrator or protagonist between otherwise unconnected characters” (121).xxiii An argument could be made that, following Blackwell's definition, there are many children's “object narratives” which are not narrated by objects at all. In stories like Mary Martha Sherwood's The Cloak (1836), the cloak acts as a locus around which the larger story of a family revolves, and it teaches a moral object lesson. Formally, however, these stories are a far cry from it-narrated works like The Adventures of a Pincushion. They are told from a variety of narrative perspectives (The Cloak uses an omniscient narrator) and they are rarely picaresque—they aren't even consistently didactic. Thematically, too, they are far more variable than stories told by objects. A combination of Flint's and Bellamy's definitions makes a good

starting place for thinking about children's object narratives. Following Flint's definition, children's it-narratives are told by an object and use circulation as the dominant plot-driver, but they are not always centered on manufactured goods. A great many of them are told by animals who have varying degrees of agency. To this, I would add that children's it-narrators are always sincere and didactic; they always involve child characters and privilege the child world over the adult; and their interest in the it-narrator’s “I” is also an interest that privileges harsh reality over fantasy. Though this statement may seem counterintuitive in a chapter discussing fictional-autobiographical accounts written by things and animals, children's it- narratives maintain a focused interest in the experience of the object. This is not to say that the it-narrative believes itself a naive translation of a real object's life, but rather to argue that the object narrative makes an effort to imagine what that object's material circumstance might be like. The genre grants the object interiority and subjectivity, and it is interested in the class- and gender- attributes that make people like the objects they read about. Children's it-narratives, like the other genres examined in this dissertation, are meant to help form gendered expectations and behaviors. These are often explicitly didactic, moral stories, which openly teach children right from wrong, and coach them on proper standards of behavior. It-narratives are nonetheless complex, and they teach far more than straightforward, easy morals. There is substantial discord between the “life” of the narrating object and the examples the object directs our attention towards. Through this discord, object narratives teach lessons about negotiating worldly power structures. It-narratives written for boys and girls are not as easily separated as school stories and harm narratives are. Though some it-narratives are obviously written for specifically-gendered audiences, many others express no clear preference for any gender. Rather, object narratives are interested in varying amounts of power allotted to boys and girls as they grow into men and women, and their structures and themes reflect that interest. It is the nature of objects to be passive—no matter how good or bad they are, objects are unable to purposely influence the world outside themselves. They report, passively and

without agency and it-narratives structure passivity as feminine. In the following chapter, I will tease out these structures. Beginning with a more thorough critical overview of the object narratives written for adults and children, I will then turn to the children's object narrative itself. Here, I argue that while children’s object narratives are explicitly interested in supporting, white, masculine, heteronormative authority—teaching “Respect”—they also understand this power as a product of narrative or discursive attention. The genre’s subversive potential lies in the friction between the object’s moral teachings, the object’s frank attention to and treatment of itself and its subject matter, and the object’s frank attention to the failure of discourse to fully account for the real. By pointing out the difference between the object’s material reality and the limits of form, children’s object narratives call into question the gendered hierarchies they teach. Another way to say this is to argue that the children's it-narrative understands power as a matter of narratorial attention, and that this attention itself is gendered. The genre thinks carefully about the implications of minorness, and they are concerned with the way masculinity and femininity shape narrative obscurity. The object's treatment of himself, herself, or itself, as well as its subject matter, becomes a matter of gendered form. Following my treatment of children’s object narratives, I highlight the most significant borrower of this form—Charles Dickens. After a brief analysis of the narrative objects in David Copperfield (1849-1850) and Great Expectations (1860-1861), I will then turn to what I believe is the most often read nineteenth- century object narrative: Bleak House (1852-1853). Ultimately, I will argue that by endowing Esther’s narrative with the hallmarks of children’s object narration, Dickens illuminates the problems of form and genre that the it-narrative takes on. He probes the relationship between power and discourse, and, through Esther, shows the harm caused by even the most faithful and caring depictions of reality. Ultimately, by probing and exacerbating the it narrative’s depiction of minorness and objecthood, Bleak House demonstrates that the self-determination we so often associate with the bildungsroman is a product of gendered discourse. Described in the fourth volume of British It-Narratives, 1750-1830 as works

that “smack of the leftover” and a “warning [. . .] that the fate of all things is the indiscriminate pile” (xii), it-narratives for children have received relatively little critical attention. Only Lynn Festa devotes the genre an entire essay. In her discussion of the differences between it-narratives for adults and those for children, Festa sums up eighteenth-century, adult object narratives as those that emphasize satire, in which the things “have better morals than their owners” (311) and strip owners of “wealth and privilege, thus leveling the moral playing field” (312). They conclude with a “reminder of their status as print commodities or with the eclipse of the object itself” (313). In contrast early children's object narratives encourage “kinship” between the reader's “education and that of the object or animal,” a “parallel [. . .] not meant to produce meditation on death, but on the way one lives and learns” (314). So far, so accurate—at least in part. Festa's account demonstrates that there are real differences in the goals and content of adults' and children's object narratives, but I hesitate to assume that, because written for children, these stories are any less bleak. While there is some conflation of the child and object/animal, the idea that this is simply a kinship reflecting educational process is problematized by the fact that neither children nor objects in these accounts are consistently depicted as learning anything. Didactic narration doesn’t correlate to didactic action within the story. Attempts at consistency are undermined by their picaresque nature; by and large objects do not stay with individual children long enough to see them learn and change. Festa's argument is colored by her belief that “these later tales tender a kinder, gentler version of the world, one that fosters a child's communion with his or her beloved possession” (309). But an emphasis on sincerity and a turn away from the adult world is not necessarily a full relinquishing of its harshness. Perhaps those objects that celebrate the power of masculine normativity are, ultimately, happier—but even those trouble the object's fate in that world.xxiv More often, the discussion of children's it-narratives comes as a query at the end of an essay, something meant to generate more discussion but rarely involving an answer. Virtually all this scholarship notes the change from satire to sincerity,

and moves from there to a brief insight into the difference between object narratives for children and those for adults. Markman Ellis believes that children's object narratives are failures of it-narration, asserting that the “texts no more try to think and feel like a dog or a pony than they do a wooden toy or pincushion” (211)—an assertion that is echoed by Festa when she states that these stories “ask us to think as if things and animals were people” (321). Others interpret the changes more positively. Mark Blackwell notes that Mary Ann Kilner’s Memoirs of a Peg-Top (1788)”represents an advance in the generic consciousness of the it-narrative” not seen in those written for adults (211) As Bellamy notes, though, the seemingly straightforward morals of these tales are potentially undermined by its form, the juxtaposition of plot and discourse: “the peg top provides an edifying lecture on the importance of always telling the truth, but the narrative draws attention to the incongruity of this lesson being placed in the mouth of a wooden toy” (131). Bellamy closes with the assertion that “this evocation of a disordered and uncontrollable universe, devoid of structures of closure and ideological containment, perhaps reflects an image of the world peculiarly appropriate for children, yet has the subversive potential that may undermine the didactic aspirations of these authors” (133). Essentially, Bellamy ends with an untested statement—a consideration for further research. While her discussion of children's it-narratives is perhaps the least conclusive of all those that even deign to mention the genre, I find it the most fruitful. Where Festa sees order, kindness, and gentleness, Bellamy more accurately finds disorder—a depiction of the inanimate and passive in a universe it can't control. As she rightly notes, this disorder, this depiction of the world as lacking structure, has a “subversive potential.” These stories are far more moral than school stories are, but they nonetheless trouble the morals they teach. Bellamy draws our attention to the disorderly world depicted by the children's object narrative—but this does not mean that the texts themselves are disordered. Much the opposite, children's object narratives are carefully formed. Their structure is more consistent and predictable than those of other children's genres, including that of the school story. Ranging from ten to two-hundred or more

pages, children's object narratives are characterized by their limited narration— they are stories are told by a narrating-I that is an object or animal. This narrating-I is most often enfolded within an omniscient narration or introduction, but one that, as I shall demonstrate, is meant to emphasize the realism of the text in contrast to the anti-realism of those written for adults. They are far more moral than either those object narratives written for adults or the many other genres of fiction written for children—in this genre we may find our true “moral tale.” Even these moral tales, however, are not simple. In the friction between the “life” of the narrating object and the gendered moral examples that the object provides, lessons in negotiating power structures surface. This is a much smaller genre than the girls’ school story. Instead of 140 examples, I have only found 35. They are small books in terms of size, usually shorter than 150 pages, and usually illustrated with woodcuts. Though they often depict a wide range of classes, they frequently focus on the middle and upper classes, taking just brief forays into more impoverished lives. Later doll narratives, especially, seem to be written for wealthier girls, and some are bound in still- lustrous red and green leather and embossed in gilt. They are less easy to divide between genders than school stories are. Certainly, there are some hims and hers (and these do have specific gender lessons to teach), but more often these stories are told by its. Whether hims, hers, or its, children's object narrators are interested in discourse's potential to mediate and stratify power systems, especially as those systems rely on gender expectations. It is not a coincidence that, as Aileen Douglas argues, in adult object narratives, objects have a gender relationship with women— that “women, especially the daughters of tradesmen, are particularly likely to become objects in circulation,” either by being married advantageously or by quite literally becoming prostitutes (152).xxv Douglas notes that in its passivity and its fair use, the object is like a prostitute, and even male objects like little lapdogs are gendered female. In some agreement with Aileen Douglas's assertion, I argue that the children's object narrative, no matter what gender perspective it narrates from, is essentially interested in troubling the privileged position of masculine

normativity. The object-narrative's interest in discourse, hailing from the adult object-narratives it adapts, is also interested in the way female subjects are made into objects fit for male use: it examines the limits of narrativity to interrogate and disrupt this discourse. Through embedded I-narration, parallels in emplotment, motifs that include explicit comparisons between objects and people and the particular attention to the embodied experience of things, the children's object narrative exposes the degree to which normalizing discourses expose powerless things to the discomfort of appropriation and pain. Gender Differences The emphasis of this chapter is on the way children’s it-narratives similarly treat gendered experiences with discursive and social power, and it is worth noting that this treatment is exacerbated and condensed in gender-specific narratives. When categorizing these, I considered first the gender of the narrator—sometimes it was very clearly designated as a him or her. Even gender-neutral narrators— “its”—more often than not appealed to a girls or boys as ideal readers, not both. These narratives feature only boys or girls, in an attempt to appeal to that gender- specific audience. Some may include a token member of the opposite sex as an example for how boys and girls, men and women, should interact. What these gendered texts make clear is the relationship between ideal-reader and object. To put it in Bill Brown's terms, these object narratives demonstrate “the slippage between having (possessing a particular object) and being (the identification of one's self with that object” (13).xxvi Like the modern subjects Brown identifies, the child reader and the child characters of gendered it-narratives are placed in a relationship with their objects. Whipping tops, peg tops, and marbles act as proxy for their boy owners in betting games. Pincushions, pins, and thimbles enable girls to do their work. These obviously gendered texts may have been the more popular ones. The Adventures of a Pincushion seems to have been a perennial favorite, and it was explicitly written for girls.xxvii Similarly, The Memoirs of a Peg-Top, written for boys, is one of the most frequently referenced both in current scholarship and in child readers.

He-objects are fairly easy to pin down, and, like other children's genres, teach accepted masculine behaviors. Like school stories, object-narratives written for boys depict and approve of a certain measure of boyish violence—fights and whippings are common, as are plum cakes. Object-narratives for boys are inevitably either toys or animals. Both are characterized by their mobility—even the toys are mobile toys such as marbles and tops—and by a yearning toward authority that I characterize here as masculine. Masculine animal narratives run a wide range. Some, such as The Dog of Knowledge; Or, Memoirs of Bob the Spotted Terrier (1801) center on an exclusive male community—male dogs, men, and boys, and masculine adventures such as time in the navy, and even impressment. Others, like Jonathan Greaves’s The Philosophic Mouse (1815) and Arabella Agus’s The Adventures of a Donkey (1815) are educational though entertaining treatises written from a fictional account, the mouse focusing on scientific advancements and the donkey interested in animal rights. One can easily imagine girls reading any of these works and enjoying them, and though they predominately feature men and boys—in the case of Jemmy Donkey, specifically criticizing men's tyrannical treatment of the animals under them—they have educational or entertainment value for girls as well. As with adult object narratives, all children's it-narratives are outward- focused picaresques. They gain their didactic and observational powers by intruding into the world around them, secretly reporting what they see and hear. This passive reporting, which I argue is gendered feminine, rarely involves the narrator’s intrusions without real apology. In addition to their emphasis on the lives of men and boys, what characterizes masculine texts as such is the authority from which the objects speak, authority that is unusual in these narratives. These objects are well assured of their discursive authority—they invite attention, rather than push it from them. In The Philosophic Mouse (written as an epistolary novel from Longtail to Shortail), Longtail Mouse counters any apology for intruding into the text with an obvious brag: “pardon me for intruding so many of my own observations; but I have such a knack of philosophizing” (17). What is more, he closes by “recommending the perusal of this long letter, not once, not twice, or even a dozen times” (127). What

makes this masculine narration unique is its failure to apologize—the mouse is interested in his opinions and his own moral philosophy. He has a talent that he is proud of, and he suggests that we read his letter many, many times.xxviii He-narratives told by toys are more obviously male-oriented, and are characterized by an explicit reinforcement of gender binaries and a celebration of the boys' desire to win, to beat, to lord it over others. The two most famous of these he-narratives, The Adventures of a Whipping Top (1787) and The Memoirs of a Peg- Top explicitly deride girls who venture into boyishness by playing with them. The Whipping Top includes an injunction against girl readers/players “I must [. . .] make a few remarks on those ladies who go under the name of Tom-Boys. Nothing vexes me more than seeing girls trundle hoops, playing at hopscotch, and fighting with the boys” (125). The Peg Top includes a poem: “Go take up your doll, to your baby- house go / And their your attention much ether bestow! / Leave the Peg-Top behind, and behave like a miss” (91). It continues in this vein for seventeen lines. Now, Bonnie Blackwell has read the Peg Top as a penis, his memoir one that teaches young boys when and where to masturbate, and humiliating young girls who venture outside of gender norms. There is something to this reading, especially as it emphasizes the sexual double standard and the reinforcement of gender binaries. My own first reading of the Whipping Top includes notes like “practically pornographic in every way” with reference to its explicit comparison of itself to the male child: “like little boys anticipating the pleasures of manhood, I was reflecting on the joy of coming into life: and like them, not dreaming of the crosses and troubles I should be exposed to, never thought the pleasure my master received from me, would be in the lashes I received from him” (116). The fact that both of these stories feature boys' schools undoubtedly reinforces a reading of the texts that refers to the male sexuality. Still, though literary figures, these are not just metaphorical pegs and whips—they are real properties of the boys' toys, not just extensions of the boys themselves. And though literary analysis, of course, inevitably involves allegoresis, to allegorize an object into something else ignores the material specificity of the thing at hand, the specific issues that thing is

illuminating. Read more attentively, these stories reinforce the imperative of masculine desire, whether or not that desire is sexual. In learning to gratify his master's pleasure at the expense of himself, the whipping top could be a lower class man, a younger boy, or a girl. These stories emphasize that any use that pleases young men of a certain class is fair use—the whipping top is whipped; the peg top has his peg ripped out; the marble finds himself cracked. It is no wonder that these stories revolve around the joys of competitive games and winning. Each includes several blow-by-blow accounts of domination on the battlefield, and the pleasures of the victor. Though they have many essentials in common with masculine object narratives, feminine objects stand in contrast to them. Examining The Adventures of a Pincushion, the first and most significant object narrative for children, and the object narrative to which The Memoirs of a Peg-Top was written as counterpoint,xxix offers the clearest example. What stands out in this comparison is the level of didacticism in each text. The Pincushion narrator describes no games—she describes very little fun. Instead, she focuses on domestic work, and includes far more inset narratives, poems, and lesson. These, however, are very rarely delivered from the Pincushion's personal perspective—rather, they are transcriptions of what occurs in the daily interactions between girls and their caregivers. Female object narratives like the Pincushion’s emphasize more than moral goodness—they emphasize usefulness. With the major exception of the doll narratives written in the nineteenth century (and even these engage the girl child's preparation for life as a mother), female object narrators are never toys. They are useful objects associated with women and their daily lives—pincushion, thimble, and pins—and their descriptions inevitably detail the ways they assist women in their domestic tasks. Feminine object narrators, like good feminine girls, shun attention: rather than write a narrative that, however, observational, celebrates the observing-self, these feminine narrators apologize for any intrusions they make into the text. The Pincushion states that it is her goal to “Tell you what I saw and heard” (15) and the vast majority of her text adheres to this guideline, focusing outward. For the most

part, she instructs her readers to imagine her own situations without dwelling on them, “such as her taking me out of my pocket during the tie of dressing, and restoring me to that place of confinement when she had concluded” (54). In a later example, the narrator of The Silver Thimble (1799) “[passes] over the interesting circumstances of my birth and [hastens]” to the first young lady she has the pleasure of knowing (4). Mrs. Pin of Emma Stirling’s The History of a Pin (1862) speaks only “after a proper degree of modest hesitation” (11). Any deviation from this model is made up for with at true apology: “I hope I shall be pardoned for my digression,” the Pincushion writes, after an extended sequence detailing her confinement and unhappiness. Feminine object narration is outward-looking. It speaks only of itself with modest hesitation, and operates on the assumption that other people's stories are more interesting than her own. Indeed, to some extent feminine objects imply that good female subjects should not have interesting stories. It is surely not a coincidence that the Pincushion's one foray into indulgent self-reflection occurs after a period of “dismal confinement” (58). The Pincushion recalls “thought I, it is very hard that a Pincushion, so new, so clean, and so beautiful, that might have a thousand opportunities of seeing the different manners of mankind, should be thus secluded from company and condemned by the playful freaks of an insignificant kitten thus to pass away its days in obscurity” (58). The Pincushion allows herself to recall the situation because she thinks it of particular import to the girl reader: although I fretted and fumed every day at my unfortunate condition, I never found it was at all improved by it, or that my ill-humor in the least degree made me happier, or assisted my escape. When I determined to submit quietly, I was happy as a Pincushion in such a state of retirement could be. But when in a cross fit I tried to roll myself from under the bookcase, I found the attempt was impossible to accomplish, and I hurt my sides against the foot of it. (59) This is a model femininity indeed—one that demonstrates patience through the trials of obscurity and seclusion, and ultimately learns to see the benefit of

“submitting quietly”. Here, the Pincushion models the passivity desirable in girls; rather than try to escape quiet, domestic solitude—an impossible endeavor that only results in increasing pain—the Pincushion accepts her life as it is and is ultimately relieved from it. Bonnie Blackwell rightly draws attention to the parallel between the Pincushion and the young girl, arguing that “beautiful young women are plainly meant to identify with the trapped pincushion and to see their social isolation as a beneficial imposition to keep them safe” (281). She moves on to interpret the rescued, but scuffed pincushion as a kind of old maid—aged but safe, secure, pure, and “salvageable” (282). These are “good” morals for “good” girls, undoubtedly. Still, I argue that the Pincushion is doing a bit more here than offering up simple platitudes. Importantly, she acknowledges the pain and discomfort of social isolation and domesticity—in a narrative that rarely focuses on the Pincushion’s personal feelings, it's notable that she elaborates upon her unhappiness. It's significant, too, that though the Pincushion is ultimately rescued, she is no longer fit for the higher social sphere to which she had been accustomed. Formally speaking, the narrative trajectory is directly in conflict with the Pincushion’s moral axiom, and in the most simple terms: plot. Though she emphasizes that the only path to happiness is acceptance, her plot continues in a downward trajectory to unhappiness for the rest of the narrative. The Pincushion’s situation becomes worse and worse, until she is ultimately thrown out into the yard, where she presumably ends her days. Despite her good behavior, the Pincushion is eventually discarded. In her good, pattern-perfect objecthood, she is infinitely replaceable, and holds no value in and of herself. Her mediating platitudes—morals that help girls deal with pain—is perhaps not the feminist argument we readers want to see. But her emphasis on these platitudes' failure allows for an alternative reading: one that sympathizes with the pointlessness of women's sacrifices.xxx In sum, masculine object narratives, while reinforcing the imperative of little boys’ pleasure, naturalize discursive attention to the male self while creating a community that excludes women and girls. Feminine object narratives naturalize

the prioritizing of others’ pleasures and lives and emphasize the importance of usefulness. At the same time, they expose to degree to which the moral platitudes they teach are useless. And then, of course, there are many its: stories with he- she- or it-narrators that seem to address boys and girls equally. These narratives like both the more determinedly masculine or feminine narrated texts, are interested in gendered social structures, which value white, masculine privilege over any other subject experiences. As the following pages will demonstrate all children’s it- narratives share formal elements, including framing devices and paratexts, peculiar and metafictional modes of address, disparate emplotments, and attention to the particularized experience of embodied beings. These elements all address and, like the Pincushion, undermine this experiential structure. Omniscient Introductions Children's object narratives are marked as such by their paratexts—on their title pages, they are inevitably biographies, time and time again described as a story “told by itself.” And yet, the object at hand is almost never the first thing we encounter upon delving into the work. The object's tale is instead ensconced within an elaborate paratextual structure, including formal introductions and prefaces and, less formally, omniscient narrators that create yet another barrier between the object and reader. Virtually all these works include introductions that are concerned with the morality and realism of these fictions—in addition to the Pincushion's and Peg Top's emphasis on sincerity and good example, these introductions remind the reader that for instance a “Silver Three-Pence addressing you, is just in the same manner as when, in Aesop's Fables, you find Beasts, Birds, and Trees speak, which, you know, is impossible; but they make believe to speak, and by so doing sometimes tell you things which may make a great impression on you” (Mr. Truelove, The Adventures of a Silver Three-Pence, 1800, 6).xxxi Undoubtedly, the guiding impulse of these introductions and prefaces is to establish the following work as a moral tale. By comparing themselves to Aesop, their objects to his birds and beasts, they establish an interpretive model for the young reader. In doing so, they also establish their object’s authority; by appealing to an established genre, they make a claim to

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ethos. Though perhaps lacking the broader perspective of the author or the omniscient narrator, the object has things to tell and impressions to make on the reader—impressions that are approved of and manipulated by the larger forces at work in the volume.xxxii The object is thus always removed from the reader, and more often than not it is twice removed. Objects almost never introduce themselves. Instead, they are bracketed off by an omniscient narrator, some voice whose perspective with regard to the text is god-like. This unlimited perspective is inevitably in contrast with the object's limited one, and is also conflict with the adult object narratives these stories are modeled after. In adult narratives, the object itself is often of supernatural origin and is thus less limited in terms of what it can and cannot see or say—some have even been likened to the omniscient narrator.xxxiii For children’s object narratives, the thing itself is explicitly not of supernatural or omniscient origin. If the prefatory material establishes that the object has a necessary story to tell, the omniscient narrator reminds of that story's limits. The Adventures of a Pincushion begins with a description of Mrs. Airy's interactions with her daughters—only on page fourteen do the girls “[solicit] their Mamma for a bit of silk to make a Pincushion [. . .] which, gentle reader, when it was finished, was the identical Pincushion whose adventures form the subject of this volume.” The Memoirs of a Whipping Top begins “The Adventurous whipping Tom! Aye, the adventurous whipping Tom,” says Toby Blunder, as he read the title page of this book: I have seen enough, and I may so felt enough of him at school, so I will have nothing to do with him” (1). The early narrators of these volumes, like the editorial bodies who introduce The Memoir of a Peg Top and The Philosophic Mouse stand in a privileged position to the object narrators these texts eventually focus on. They peer not only into the minds and motivations of the characters inhabiting their pages, but they appear to look out onto the reader as well, directly addressing the “gentle” girls who pick up the book, in the Pincushion's case, or seeming to describe a misreading boy handling the very volume the child reader of the Whipping Top holds in his hands. These omniscient narrators and editorial bodies perform an important

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function for the child's it-narrative. Like an establishing shot in film, the omniscient narrator places the object within the larger social world; though we may focus in on it, and even learn to see from its perspective, there is no doubt left in mind that the object's position is extremely limited, even minuscule. There is a peculiar redundancy here—these texts with omniscient narrators do not need the object to make their stories possible—an omniscient narrator can follow a series of characters as well as an object can, if not better. By combining the two forms of narration and then by drawing attention to the object’s limitations, however, the children's object narrative begins to make an argument about the nature of passivity and discourse. It places a higher value on the object's limited perspective, and perhaps demonstrates a kind of desire to experience the objects material limitations as well. This is no less true of those few children's object narratives that, recalling those written for adults, use a found or dictated manuscript as their opening device. The opening girl-narrator of Emma Stirling’s The History of a Pin describes being “startled by a sort of squeaking noise” that turns out to be the tiny voice of our narrating Pin (10). The Pin may have a compelling story to tell, but the opening pages establish the limitations of that story—a small, domestic story told by a small, domestic, moveable object. Unlike Tobias Smollet’s atom, in The History and Adventures of an Atom (1769), whose supernatural vision transcends its stature, the Pin is bound by the realities of its material. This is an odd sort of realism, to be sure; while it requires us to suspend our disbelief in part, it works to make these objects’ voices believable. Similarly, The Pincushion encounters a pen to whom she dictates her story and, as Mark Blackwell points out “the serendipitous placement of the peg top on a writing desk” is what makes his narrative possible (211). Ultimately, this dual emphasis on material, realistic limitations and the subordination of objects betrays the it-narrative’s interest in the counter structural powers of discourse—it establishes a contrapuntal relationship between the possible and the impossible, the real and the ideal. Mode of Address

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Bracketed within the paratexts and omniscient introductions are the it- narratives themselves and, if omniscient narration serves to provide a sense of that narrative’s limited scope, distancing us from our object narrators, the object tries to encourage our sense of proximity to it. These it-narrators are characterized alternately by their endearing and conversational tone, their explicit admission of their inanimacy, and their metafictional awareness. Children’s object narrators are familiar. The Adventures of a Silver Penny begins its biography with a straightforward address “My sweet, pretty, little readers, as I now find I am left to tell my own tale, that is, the history of all my adventures, I must beg leave first to acquaint you with one thing” (17). The narrators beg permission to instruct and moralize and when they do so they treat their child readers with some kindness. By using terms of endearment, the Silver Penny attempts to create a bond with its audience. This affectionate treatment of good children (and the texts presume a good child reader) is mirrored in it-narratives' treatment of the good children in their texts. The Doll narrator of Mary Mister’s The Adventures of a Doll (1816), recalls of her time in the shop “I was delighted with this little girl: the more so, as one of our young people who waited in the shop, remarked the great resemblance between her face and mine. Had I possessed the power, I would have thrown my waxen arms around her neck, and never more have left her” (4).xxxiv Here, bonds of affection break down the power hierarchy implied in narration. The object does not have the power of the omniscient narrator—its bids for the reader's affection are also bids for the reader's engagement. The vast majority of good object-narrators, which work in the tradition of the Pincushion's feminine narration, appreciate the tendentiousness of their personal claims on the reader. Children's object narrators walk a fine line between humility and expertise—on the one hand, they are meticulously attentive to their limitations, and on the other, they demonstrate a capacious understanding of their form. Negotiating these boundaries results in explicit discussions of the object’s inanimacy as well as a metafictional engagement with the larger genre. Unlike the object narrators of adult it-narratives, these it-narrators strictly adhere to their

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material limitations. When the Pincushion’s “Ladies now all retired to dinner” she confesses herself “ignorant of what passed there, as I Was left upon a piece of embroidery, which my mistress was covering with a piece of white paper to keep it clean: and she did not fetch me till after tea” (40). Something similar happens in virtually all children's it narratives—the narrator of The History of a Banbury Cake (1820) is left in a trunk while his child-owners are given a tour of Oxford, and the Philosophic Mouse has his ruminations interrupted when he is given a high from nitrous oxide. In these moments, stories that have predominately focused outward are interrupted—the children the object follows and the conversations it reports are halted, and the object is left still and alone until it is fetched. The gaps in the stories of these children's lives—and this is especially true of those children to whom the object returns in the course of its tale—are filled in sparsely through hearsay, if they are filled in at all. And while they accept these limitations, the objects narrating these tales draw our attention to what is delimited. The Pincushion finds herself “ignorant of what passed there.” The History of a Pin’s (1798) protagonist is placed in a chest, “heard the top of my prison close” and “became stupefied; how long I remained in that state is impossible for me to now say”; when it is finally removed, its owner has died, its circumstances completely changed (36). They do not merely pass over or draw our attention away from the gap, the way an omniscient narrator might: they acknowledge their failures of narration, their lack of knowledge, their ignorance and “lethargy”, and their inability to explain events or sketch people and characters more fully (The History of a Pin 36). At the same time, children's it-narrators draw our attention to the artificiality of their discourse. This is more than simply acknowledging, as the Peg Top does, that his ability to write and communicate with other inanimate objects are “talents being entirely inconsistent with truth and reality, but may be allowed to exist by the force of imagination” (11). The artificiality here is not just the impossibility of a thing speaking. Indeed, as the Banbury Cake points out, though “it will be thought very odd [. . .] by each little boy and girl [. . .] that a Banbury Cake should be able to write (as it were) its own life; but as they advance in years, they

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will find that many strange things happen every day” (The History of a Banbury Cake i). A cake writing its memoirs, a doll telling its own history; these are oddities, to be sure, but are in fact no more rare than the “many strange things” that occur day in and day out. Given that all fictional accounts, be they first-person histories or tales told by omniscient narrators, are indeed merely things speaking to humans, worlds that are activated by imaginative acts, the Banbury Cake telling its story no very unusual thing at all. What is more pressing to these it-narrators is the need to acknowledge the generic constraints—the forms and normative structures—that they work within. As early as The Memoirs of a Peg Top, published only 8 years after The Adventures of a Pincushion, metatextual gestures become a necessary formal component. The Peg Top recalls having “heard that a Pincushion, a Dog, a Halfpenny, and a Bank Note have each write a history of their adventures” (9-10). The narrator of Eliza Fenwick’s The Life of Carlo, the Famous Dog (1806) writes after “having heard much talk of Felissa, or the Life and Opinions of a Kitten of Sentiment” (1). The Doll recounting her life in Domestic Scenes; Or the Adventures of a Doll (1817) argues that “A Pin, has related its adventures for the amusement of the rising generations; the memoirs of a Mouse have long held a distinguished place in the juvenile library; and even a Whipping Top, has contributed, a recital of its misfortunes” (3). Finally, the narrator of The History of a Tame Robin (1817) recounts that he learned to write while living in a schoolroom, where he “heard the 'Life of Carlo' read by one of the pupils” (1). Mark Blackwell notes that the Peg Top's metatextual references are an important innovation in the history of object narratives, and argues that “the allusion to precursor texts [. . .] is offered ironically by a writer who understands that acknowledging one's participation in a tradition of it-narration have themselves become conventional hallmarks of the genre” (211). But he does not consider that it is specifically children's it-narratives following the Peg Top that use the explicit metatextual references, nor does he keep in mind that these texts are predominately sincere. This referential technique is certainly a hallmark of the children's genre, but they aren't just gestures; they are tacit acknowledgments of the narrative's

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fictionality and constructedness. Indeed, even those few texts that don't explicitly reference other it-narratives (and it is worth noting, here, that the dominant tendency is to reference other children's narratives) still more obliquely reference the genre acknowledging, like the Thimble, what “is usual with those who become their own historians” (3). Ultimately, these metatextual references signal the narrator’s awareness of its place within a larger discursive structure, and a very limited place at that. A subgenre derivative of another subgenre of the novel, the children’s it-narrative acknowledges the restrictions of its form. It fits tightly within a number of fixed parameters, making sure that it bends to the requirements both of it-narration and children’s fiction. Emplotment and Embedded Narratives What these objects narrate is as important as how they narrate, and their subject matter is no less formally influenced. At their heart, children's it-narratives demonstrate a consistent interest in the relationship between morality and social status, and this interest is reflected in their depiction of good and bad children, their inclusion of moral lectures, and their depiction of and movement through various classes. What is more, object narrators undermine and/or enforce these traits through comparison of children and objects, and through the friction created by comparing their own trajectories with that of the children they depict. I have mentioned already that children's object narratives, much more than adult's object narratives and, in fact, much more than the other children's genres included in this study, are moral tales.xxxv Crystal Lake notes, about adult object narratives that they “rarely depict fully realized people [. . .] it-narratives expose the conflicts between things and fictional characters rather than conflicts between things and individuals” (190). This is no less true of the children's it-narrative—the children depicted in them, though rarely typological in name, conform to good and bad types. Children are often straightforwardly good and straightforwardly bad—and rarely anything in between. But whereas Lake argues that adult abject narratives emphasize “the failure of things to penetrate fictional tropes,” these children's narratives emphasize the failure of fictional tropes to account for lived reality (190). They do so by

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emphasizing the futility of adherence to tropological strictures, and by undermining the sense that future outcomes are determined by adherence to simple plots. By emphasizing the object’s interiority they expose the degree to which interiority defies surface-level attributes. At the same time, they show that “goodness” doesn’t always earn its just reward. To some extent, children's object narratives are overtly didactic. Their lessons are included as reported conversations or, as in my prior example of the Pincushion's painful confinement, as lessons the object learns over the course of its existence. Unlike school stories, it-narratives are not textbooks. Discussing the importance of geography, The Adventures of a Pincushion’s Lady Stanley states that “you should always endeavor to read; but those things which relate to the island in which you live, have a particular claim in your remembrance” (54). There is a lesson here about the importance of reading history and geography, but it is not reinforced by a lecture on geography or British history. And even this lesson, as it is about learning, is a bit unusual. Most lessons are about temperament and morality, and are drawn from the object's observations. For example, the Doll narrator of Mister’s The Adventures of a Doll states, “experience has convinced me, that young ladies, as well as dolls, will always attract more praise by a retiring sweetness and modesty, than by all the glare of dress and beauty” (3). The Silver Penny discusses the cruelty of slavery with less overt authority, simply providing an example and then requesting, “only think what a sad thing it must be, to be condemned for life to work underground” (The Silver Penny 10). Most often, lessons derive from formulaic textual examples, and the morals are the obvious results of direct comparisons between characters and their actions. As with many of the backstories and lessons narrated by these objects, we are to understand that the knowledge comes not from omniscience, but rather from long- lasting, careful attention to people, their actions, and their consequences. The Silver Thimble, for example, describes “how supremely happy were the sensations of Patty Primrose, compared to those of Miss Smallwit! The former went home serenely please from having acted consistent with the dictates of integrity and the latter

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embarrassed beyond description” (92). Again, the Thimble's statement is based on her observation of Miss Smallwit's horror at having her thievery exposed. It's less that the Thimble intuits the character's thoughts and emotions than that she bases them upon a limited and strict moral comprehension. If Miss Smallwit is caught stealing, then she must feel horrible about it. The object learns from a long life that spans many different childhoods, and sometimes generations—but its lessons are predicted on a simple understanding of character. In Mister’s The Adventures of a Doll, the narrator observes “never were two little girls so unlike as [. . .] Miss Grant, tawdry in her dress, affected in her manner, servile to her superiors, and insolent to those beneath her, was a mixture of envy, pride, and meanness; whilst Miss Clarkson, content with her own simple attire, was all sweetness and gentleness” (132). The Doll narrator quite obviously conflates surface attributes with interior states, and its lessons are simple ones that could be learned from any standard conduct book written for women and girls. The Thimble and the Doll equally base their conclusions not on interiority, but on surface observation of social forms. As the object moves through good and bad children it classifies them according to their actions and their exterior features—their affects. In the process, it breaks downs the divisions between children that come as the result of class status. Like adult object narratives, children's it-narrators circulate among all walks of life. In doing so, their experiences undermine one of their predominant assumptions— that lower people are also and inevitably lesser people. As the Thimble recalls In the humble habitation of Dame Primrose, I might have found some degree of that tranquility and happiness which awaited me during my short residence at Poplar-Hall—I should have beheld content under the garb of poverty, and goodness of heart conspicuous without learning; for, in the lowly Patty, uncultured by education, I should have witnessed the virtues of my former mistress, and the similarity of their dispositions. (The Silver Thimble 93) As the Thimble, discussing her hypothetical stay with the Primrose family points out, there may well be little difference between the lowly servant and the highborn

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mistress, if their dispositions are both virtuous. But again, this truth is determined by observation—Patty Primrose is a neat and humble dresser, and her actions (her willingness to give up the thimble to its rightful owner) help the Thimble figure out how to classify her. It's important to observe, however, that this is no nuanced classification. They are “like” and “unlike” and the Thimble's opinion is made based on only one evening with the family, one or two interactions with Patty. There is no need to get to the heart of the matter, because, like objects these children are all exteriority—that which is easily observable and classifiable.xxxvi These characteristics seem simple. With their unambiguous approach to virtue and their emphasis on outward quality as indicative of it, children’s it- narratives seem to unflinchingly embrace the flatness and stereotypicality associated with the moral tale. The children's object narrative is not merely a genre dedicated to adhering and disseminating moral types, however. Though the object narrative is predominately focused outward, recording people, the narrative thread and consequently much of the narrative interest relies on the object itself. Over the course of the story, the object or animal is transferred from person to person, family to family, and in the process it samples and offers to the reader a range of class positions—from the lowest and most criminal, to the honest poor, to various degrees of wealth, the object moves and observes. In this, its passive and enforced movement between social spheres and its ultimate inability to control what social sphere it ends up in, the object mirrors the experience of the woman passed between men, or more specifically the experience of the girl as she ages and passes from daughter to wife. This is not merely to restate Aileen Douglas's argument about the tendency of women to become objects-for-sale because the children's object narrative, which operates in a gift-economy as often as a commercial one, is less concerned with commercial transaction than it is with passivity and social roles. The moral structure of these object narratives, like other children's stories which enforce passive virtues in girls, emphasizes that moral girls, not immoral ones are most likely to end as objects. Or perhaps it would be better to say that the children's object narrative emphasizes the degree to which, for women, chance and luck rather

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than any tropological virtue determine outcome far more than virtue and propriety. This is not true of he-narratives or of it-narrative's depictions of boys—who, in their more active roles as competitors or simply as people in the social sphere have considerably more autonomy. In the Life of Carlo (1806), for instance, Carlo's early owner, Henry Nevil is Sir Henry by the end of the novel. Whereas good boys, through their industriousness and self-determination, almost always continue at an upward social trajectory over the course of a story, objects and girls have two possible outcomes. Festa notes that in object narratives for children, “property is restored to its 'rightful' owner” (309). This is the case of many object narratives—The Life of Carlo is one such instance, as is The Adventures of a Silver Three-Pence (1800). Girls and the objects associated with them are not always so lucky. Even good objects cannot always be saved. The Doll narrator of Domestic Scenes: Or the Adventures of a Doll (1817) acknowledges that she will likely be given “as a burnt offering to that Moloch, which presides over the fire place of the kitchen” (147). The best example of this problematic treatment, however, is also the most famous object narrative: the Pincushion, which I have already discussed as being discarded. It is notable that the Pincushion firmly adheres to the morals she professes—once she learns the importance of patience and fortitude, she passively enacts them. But the pincushion sinks lower and lower in class status until, “in the poultry yard” she is “shook [. . .] out with the crumbs” by a maid (105). “After her departure, the Pincushion recalls, “I was pecked at alternately by almost all the fowls, till at last I was washed by a bantam hen, under a little tub, where I have lain ere since. My last unfortunate adventure has so dirtied my outside, that I should not now be known” (105). Not unlike the virtuous cottage girl depicted earlier in the Pincushion's narrative, who though perfectly capable is destined to rise or fall only by the industry of others, the Pincushion's personal virtues—her inanimacy and outward features that make her desirable—also place her in the power of others. Scarred and dirtied, the experiences of her life are written on her body. They are externalized and readable, and they make her so unlike herself that she could not be recognized. This is alternate fate than the one she imagines for her characters or for

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herself, but, with its placement at the end of her narrative, it is the book's most memorable one. Its sadness points to passivity's failures. Generic Devices As the children's object narrative's approach to closure indicates, the rebellion against social norms that favor white (wealthy) male activity and female passivity is by no means full. Objects by their very nature conform to the material facts of the world. Instead of open rebellion or, indeed, any clear rebellion, they simply point to the existence of structures that favor some individuals over others. Their structural position enables any subversion they achieve. By pointing out the fictional discourse and generic norms they adhere to, objects implicate discursive structures in the creation of harmful gender norms. They do something similar with their portrayal of harm itself. The object draws attention to the similarity between itself and subject others, especially feminine subject others. Because girls, like objects, are depicted as all surface, it would be easy to assume that subjectification to material reality does not harm them. But the object narrators of children's works consistently prove otherwise.xxxvii While they seem to uphold gender norms in which everyone is meant to bow to the man or boy with the highest class status and purse, they undermine this prescription by showing the amount of pain objects feel.xxxviii Being useful is not ever all pleasure; the price of objectification is written on the objects’ bodies. Rather than try to account for the individuality of pain and others' inability to understand, by assuming that the materiality of an object like the materiality of people opens them up to potential bodily harm, object narratives in fact demonstrate the universality of harm and decay. To be made into something else may be necessary—may be—but too often it is not, and always the expense is paid by the conforming body.xxxix This is true of object narratives for boys as well as those for girls and both genders. The Peg Top's experience of pain comes when his boy owner schemes “to extract my peg and insert in another top”(45); the experience is an “agony” (The Memoirs of a Peg Top 46). Doll narrators are burned and their heads are bashed in when used as hammers (Domestic Scenes and The Adventures of a Doll). Mrs. Pin

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Recalls “I underwent a variety of horrible processes, of burning, cutting &c. [. . .] My tortures, however, must have been excruciating, and this part of my history is too painful to be dwelt upon” (The History of a Pin 12). The Banbury Cake, as a very good cake, rightly fears that “I should have fallen prey to the sharp white teeth of Tommy's little cousin” and ends the narrative acknowledging that he will soon be eaten (The History of a Banbury Cake 11). Much of this may be fair use—the cake hardly complains about his fate, though the dolls often do—but the trials of transformation, whether from one object to another or into an older, more careworn version of oneself are always met with deserved trepidation. The sense of harm— the sadness and pain caused by simply being things for others' use—is never underestimated in the object narrative. The narrative's acknowledgment of it points to the hidden interiority of useful objects and beings. Though, as Mark Blackwell points out, objects and animals were conflated into it-narratives by contemporary eighteenth- and nineteenth-century readers, I think the factual difference of these two types matters when dealing with harm and pain (“Introduction” 10). Whereas objects acknowledge that fair or unfair use is the consequence of their existence, animal narrators are clearly lambasting those who treat them cruelly. The narrator of The Life of a Horse, for example, recalls “I was forced, though suffering pain at every step, to bear the pressure of the galling collar. Often when I had lain down at night, almost dead with fatigue, the sound of my driver's voice has forced me to rise, and I have been led from the warm stable to gratify the whim [. . .] I suffered terribly” (54-55). When the narrator of E. Smyth’s 1809 The History of Tabby, a Favorite Cat (a feminine and vain animal) has her teeth broken by some young boys, she recalls “it is impossible to describe the torture I then endured [. . .] what a mutilated, helpless creature have I been ever since” (60- 61). These are clear, direct indictments of the men's (not man's) callousness toward the suffering of others and their absolute assumption that they live to be served. Placed in the mouths of animals, these statements make explicit the implicit project of object narratives for children—mediating masculine power, and therapeutically acknowledging the pain that comes with powerlessness, whether that

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powerlessness is the result of discursive structures that prevent acknowledgement of one's differences and desires, or the real and physical consequences of bowing to others' needs. As object narratives show, girls, good objects, and animals alike are subject to a society that is inimical and hostile to them, one which privileges a select male few. Their position within the social structure is defined by their material form: objects by their inanimacy, animals by their genus and species, and girls by their sexual organs. Atomic and genetic makeup turns things, animals, and people into potential possessions, and it goes without saying that this state isn’t natural. It is one specifically codified within the legal structure of this period, which turned people into objects. At the extreme, slavery was legal in Britain during the majority of this period, until the 1833 Slavery Abolition Act—people were literally treated like objects which could be bought, sold, and traded and, as I have already indicated, some object narratives make explicit reference to this. Though to less extreme a degree, British common law held that married women subsumed into their husbands by coverture, which, as Mary Poovey sums up in Uneven Developments, “dictated that married women were legally represented or ‘covered’ by their husbands because the interests of husband and wife were assumed to be the same; as a consequence, married women were not ‘bound’ as individual subjects by contracts, debts, or some criminal law” (52). To be covered by one’s husband was to lose one’s individual rights and property to him, to have one’s subjecthood bound to and subjugated to another. As Poovey and Marlene Tromp, in The Private Rod, have demonstrated, one of the consequences of this law was the proliferation of unacknowledged domestic violence throughout all classes, though it was especially ignored in the middle and upper classes. Surely it is not a coincidence that, by the mid-nineteenth century most it-narratives for girls featured female dolls; nor is it a coincidence that, in her much later 1878 essay “Wife-Torture in England,” Frances Power Cobbe describes disturbing spousal abuse cases: a man who “poured out vitriol deliberately, and threw it in his wife’s face”; another who “jumped on the face of his wife [. . .] with a

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pair of boots studded with hobnails”; one husband, who “after vainly attempting to force [his wife] into the oven, tore off her night-dress and turned her round before the fire ‘like a good piece of beef,’ while the children stood on the stairs listening to their mother’s agonized screams”; and yet another who “threw a burning paraffin lamp at his wife, and stood quietly watching her enveloped in flames” (74). Cobbe description literalizes the it-narrative’s implicit connection between feminine subject and women. The explicitly recall dolls’ experiences of being burned and bashed, the Pin’s experience of burning and cutting, even the Banbury Cake’s fear of being eaten. As Tromp argues, women in the Victorian period are treated as material things. Not only does women’s “flesh [have] a price, and not only for the sake of the income she provided her family,” they are treated in this manner because of the law (24). The position of the object within its narrative mirrors the legal structure; the object is feminized because of this relationship. The it narrative takes an ameliorative approach to negotiating the social structure, but the genre also teaches the harm implicit in being a thing. Dickens’s Objects Though my own study of the children's it-narrative stops at about 1860, the genre blossoms (and changes) at the end of the century and lives on into the twentieth and twenty-first. Novels like Anna Sewell's Black Beauty (1877) are read and reread to this day, and more recent works such as Richard Adam's Watership Down (1972) have become classics in their own right. Beloved children's series like Winnie-the-Pooh (1926), too, might well be traced back to the talking, writing object narrators of early children's fiction. Its influence is undoubtedly significant in terms of children’s fiction, but the children's it-narrative has a less broad reach into the nineteenth-century realist novel than does the school story, the harm narrative, or the domestic narrative. We might see the it-narrative surfacing in numerous comparisons of women and dolls. In Villette (1853), for instance Polly is called a “mere doll” (11), a “conceited doll” (299), and is described as having a “doll-pocket” and a “doll-skirt” (11), or when Lady Audley, of Lady Audley's Secret (1862) is described as a “wax doll” (56). The relationship between femininity and dollishness,

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in particular, is unsurprising; as Sharon Marcus has thoroughly demonstrated, it is almost ubiquitous in nineteenth-century British culture, though for her this relationship is tropological rather than formal. But the children's it-narrative's influence is not limited to a comparison between one gender and a subset of the genre. In fact, while children’s object narratives may have their broadest life as a cultural referent, they have made their principal impact on and through one Victorian novelist: Charles Dickens. The relationship between Dickens's novels and the it-narrative has not gone unnoticed. Virtually all of the few people who think about nineteenth century literature and object narratives have noticed the congruities between the minor genre and Dickens’s canonical novels. What is surprising is that those who do think about the genre and Dickens focus solely on the way his characters are like objects, rather the way his novels are formally influenced. Nor do they differentiate between children’s it narrative and those written for adults, despite the fact that Dickens actually knew a writer of the genre—Hans Christian Anderson who wrote many stories about objects, and whose short tale “The Teapot” (1863) subscribes to many of the genre’s formal elements quite neatly. Elaine Freedgood, for instance, in a larger argument about the relationship between object narratives and the culturally “dispossessed” (84),xl sees a connection between the object narrator and Dickens's Silas Wegg of Our Mutual Friend. Sharon Marcus, compares the relationship between Miss Havisham and Estella, of Great Expectations, to the homoerotic play depicted in doll narratives. Both of these critics are more interested in the circulating object and what it can teach us about Victorian culture than they are in the way that object's narrative style or generic markers translate into Dickens's novels. Indeed, Marcus is so much more interested in the dynamics of play as depicted in these stories and novels that she doesn't limit herself to it-narrated works. Leah Price's analysis of book-narrated stories (for both adults and children) comes much closer to my own interest in object narration. Price illuminates the relationship between the book-narrated it-narrative and the bildungsroman, noting that “what it-narrator and bildungsroman protagonist have in common is not just

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weakness but more specifically vulnerability to being moved” (127). What is more, she theorizes that one Dickens narrator, at least, finds himself in danger of becoming an object: “what assimilates David [Copperfield] to an object,” she contends, “is their common state of being written upon” (126). Price rightly dwells on the affinity between the two genres, noting that “thematically, both give voice to the voiceless” (128). Dickens especially “extends the eighteenth-century humanitarian project implicit in a genre that made the snuffboxes speak” (128). However, Price believes the two genres (the bildungsroman and the it narrative) are formally at odds, “one centered on a human being through whose hands texts pass, the other on a book that passes through characters' hands” (128). Both of these arguments make sense in the larger context of Price's own project: the history of book use in Victorian Britain. Broadening the range of analysis from book-narratives primarily for adults to it-narratives for children changes the thematic and formal implications of the genre's impact.xli For all that by giving voice to the voiceless Dickens's bildungsromans may share a liberatory interest with the object narrative, they share a more clear kinship with the children's it-narrative's investment in gender normativity and with exposing the hardship inherent in subservience. At the level of form, they, too, expose the narrative limitations of materiality—what objects cannot know. The eponymous narrator of David Copperfield and Great Expectations’ Pip have much in common with the object narrator—and the masculine object narrator at that. Most obviously, both are I-narrated; both experience a range of social classes over the course of their narratives (they circulate); both, too, are compared to objects. Price has called attention to the way David Copperfield's emotions, like a book, are able to be read by those around him. Whereas David's relationship to book-narrators is a matter of critical interpretation, Pip himself calls attention to his similarity to pigs. The second page of the book identifies him as a potential edible commodity, as the thief we come to know as Magwitch observes his “fat cheeks” and postulates “Darn Me if I couldn't eat 'em” (4). Instead (or in lieu) of himself, Pip feeds Magwitch a pork pie, establishing his relationship to pork by proxy, and

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preparing his audience for the more explicit comparison that occurs shortly thereafter. First “A boy with Somebody-else's pork pie,” Pip is even more uncomfortably conflated with the edible commodity in the following chapter (17). Sitting at Christmas Eve dinner, Pip finds himself both eating pork and being taught to read its story. After declaring that “many a moral for the young [. . .] might be deduced from that text,” Mr. Wopsle goes on to declare that “The gluttony of Swine is put before us, as an example to the young [. . .] What is detestable in a pig, is more detestable in a boy” (27). Though Wopsle's character is rendered harshly by Dickens, the detestable attribute at hand—a favorite moral failing for boys—is one that Pip is ultimately guilty of, at least in an abstract form. Though Pip can't be said to be guilty of overeating (at least not in this scene), his continuous desire for more eventually undermines him. This gluttony—greed for more money or higher social stature, and, indeed, at times food itself—is ultimately Pip's undoing. Surely it is no coincidence that Pip's friend and companion Herbert objects to his name because “it sounds so like a moral boy out of the spelling-book, who was so lazy that he fell into a pond, or so fat that he couldn't see out of his eyes, or so avaricious that he locked up his cake till the mice ate it, or so determined to go a birds’-nesting that he got himself eaten by bears who lived handy in the neighborhood” (178). Pip's narrative trajectory is very like that of a child in a moral tale, as much as it is like that of the pig he is compared to. Like any moral character with a flaw, Pip is not destined for happiness; his greed and his laziness come full circle when he is stripped of the luxuries he enjoys for most of the book, and by the end of the novel he is without a mysterious fortune or a happy ending. Like the pig he eats in the novel's beginning (and this is by no means the only pig we encounter in the novel), Pip's future is pre-determined by his place within a larger system and by his moral failings. Fortunately for Pip, his affinity with pigs does not extend to butchering—but his plot ultimately takes the downward turn we expect for him. For all of this, neither David nor Pip are the best examples of Dickens's

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children’s object-narration. For all Pip’s relationship to the protagonists of moral tales, the object he most resembles was the focus of an adult it-narrative—The Life and Adventures of Toby, the Sapient Pig (1817), which was based on a real pig. Toby, like Pip, describes his tutor as “bringing me up by hand” (12). As fictional autobiographers, both Pip and David's stories are primarily focused on their own experience—their emotions, thoughts, and feelings. They encounter a wide range of individuals, but these encounters are framed primarily by their impact on the narrating self. Our interest may be piqued by Magwitch and Miss Havisham in Great Expectations, or by Wilkins Micawber and James Steerforth in David Copperfield, but we know them only through their impact on Pip and David. What is more, though both circulate through various groups of people and classes, they often do so out of their own volition. David and Pip, for all their position as underprivileged children, gain autonomy as they grow older. Though David, for instance, is initially sent to boarding school and then to work in a factory at his stepfather's bidding, he retains enough self-direction to run away from the factory and to start a new life with Betsey Trotwood. In a similar manner, though much in Pip's life is out of his control, by the end of Great Expectations he is able to make a life for himself as an industrious middle-class man. If they begin their lives as something similar to objects, by virtue of their masculinity Pip and David eventually achieve something like self-determination. This is especially true of David who becomes, like Dickens, a successful self-made man. Bleak House Though Dickens's disadvantaged child-narrators Pip and David certainly have something in common with the object autobiographers that are the center of children's it-narratives, I will demonstrate in the remainder of this chapter that Bleak House is, in fact, Dickens's most perfect it-narrative. That this novel may be an object narrative is first signaled by a title that refers to both a place and a material entity—a house. Our object narrator is not, ultimately, the house, but is rather a being residing in it—Esther Summerson. Through her relationship to the omniscient narrator, her mode of address, her emphasis on her own materiality and material

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limitations, her emplotment, her use of embedded narratives, and through her own circulation, Esther makes clear the degree to which she is only a narrating object, not even the subject of her own tale. Esther's narrative doesn't just adhere to the bare bones of the object narrative’s generic conventions more generally. It adheres in the strictest sense to those written for younger readers. Like her narrating models, Esther is a sincere narrator concerned with the limits of her narration. The narrative itself is predominately concerned with her coming of age and that of others—young people, who are only on the verge of becoming adults in their own right. Despite Esther’s narration’s formal similarity to children’s it narratives, and despite all the attention that has been paid to object-characters in Dickens, no one has thought to liken Esther to an object, her narration to object narration. This is probably due to our sense of her fullness, her position as the closest thing to a protagonist in a novel that seems to have none. Objects are associated with flatness, flatness with minorness. But Dickens’s Bleak House makes readily apparent that gender, as much as narrative attention, plays a role in the fictional construction of subjecthood. When, in The One Vs. the Many, Alex Woloch compares major characters to members of the ruling classes he neglects to take into account the gender dynamics of narrative attention. If anything, however, Bleak House exacerbates the gender markers of a children's it-narrative, and this exacerbation explores the limits of gendered narration and gendered subjectivity, probing at what cannot be told by model female narrators and revealing the failures of narrative to account for oppressed subjects, even when those subjects appear to be major characters. As a narrating object adhering to the generic tropes of the children's it-narrative, Esther demonstrates her awareness of writing as an authoritative and even authoritarian act. She draws attention to the extent to which characters, like people, are circumscribed by narrative conventions, and the corresponding extent to which narration may delimit readerly perceptions of real, live people. Bleak House, like children’s it narratives, draws attention to the narrator’s circumscription within the narrative and to the failures of generic structures to account for interiority, even in

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major characters. As Esther demonstrates, the failures of it-narration are widely applicable to the failures of narrative: the structures they impose on reality are harmful and false, causing pain to those who do not or cannot fit within them. Esther, like the it narrators before her, remains a narrating object, able to circumscribe others through her narration, but unable to manipulate the tangible world. Unlike Dickens’s male characters, Esther’s it-narrative never graduates to bildungsroman. She doesn’t achieve anything like self-determination—even her happy ending is a product of others’ machinations and not her own will. Despite the intricacy of her narration, she never overcomes her minorness. Of the scholars focused on Bleak House's dual narration, no few have fixated specifically on Esther's as the more problematic and thus more critically interesting of the two. Writing in 1987, Joseph Sawicki points out that “Existing criticism of the novel contains many treatments of Esther's character, much of it negative, and some of it apologetic, seeking to make the best out of what is perceived as a failure of characterization” (211). Since Sawicki's essay, which argues that Esther's “rhetoric as narrator problematizes [prior interpretations] by pointing to her exercise of a more prominent and powerful role in the telling of her part of the novel,” others have followed suit in considering the strengths rather than the weaknesses of Esther's writing style (209). Alison Case, for instance, asserts that what irritation critics feel for Esther's discourse is the result of the “tradition of feminine narration” that Dickens makes use of in writing her character—a tradition that has established feminine narration as artless (132). Esther Summerson is a prime example for Case, because she “[effaces] her potential for either self-consciousness about the shape and trajectory of her narrative or authoritative moral judgment about its content— her potential, in other words, as a plotter or preacher” (128).xlii In contrast to Case's argument, Timothy Peltason claims that Bleak House emphasizes the “counter- drama of Esther's growing self-assertion” over the course of the text, and its relationship to the larger thematic issue “of discovering the personal will” (672). Peltason’s well-known argument hinges on the idea that Esther, though unable to articulate her own erotic desires, nonetheless transfers them easily from Woodcourt

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(whom she loves) to John Jarndyce (whom she looks upon as a father figure). Peltason measures this growing assertion in Esther’s “regret that her relationship with Jarndyce has not changed its character” after their engagement, despite the fact that Esther attributes her discomfort to a sense of her own inadequate behavior (687). Peltason assumes that he understands the source of Esther’s confusion better than she does, and he reads the end of the novel as the admittedly “muted” “triumph” of her personal will, despite the fact that Esther’s happiness is the result of being treated as a gift object (687). Still other critics have reconsidered Esther in terms of Mary Poovey's work in Uneven Developments (1988), which asserts that “representations of gender constituted one of the sites on which ideological systems were simultaneously constructed and contested” (2). Thus, where Donna Budd argues that “while the novel ideologically subscribes to the dominance of male authority in language and literature [. . .] it exposes a lacking, a failure that drives the need to appropriate women's voice” (219), Lynette Felber maintains that Esther “subverts” the teleological, “linear progression” of masculine narratives (14). Closest to my own argument is Eleanor Salotto, who states that Esther's narrative is a duplicitous one in that it redeploys masculine modes of discourse, calling attention to the production of women in that discourse [. . .] Esther's writing sheds much light on the text's obsessive focus on writing and copying; she produces copy. [. . .] but in doing so she engenders blots that preclude a unidimensional reading of her. (333) Salotto, however, is primarily concerned with Esther's performativity in writing; like Case, she assumes that Esther dons a mask of femininity in order to please her readers, and that Esther's character as she portrays herself is “false” (335). While Esther may well “subvert” masculine discourse, teleological narratives, or male authority in language and literature, as Salotto argues, I am perturbed by the value- laden categorization of femininity as a kind of false front Esther can take on and put off at will. Assertions like Salotto's and Case's assume that there is another story, a

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story that is somehow more “true,” “real,” or “powerful” than the one Esther provides. If we read Esther, as I do, through the history of object-narration, we might come to problematize the notion that feminine structures are duplicitous structures, unable to illuminate “reality.” Esther’s feminine discourse serves to point to problematic social and discursive structures. It is not just that, like Judith Butler in Gender Trouble and Robyn Warhol in Having a Good Cry, I think of femininity as more than just performance. Bleak House, like children’s it-narratives and like other children’s genres, calls into question the idea that any story is a faithful depiction of reality in part by exposing masculinity’s and omniscience’s inability to account for the minor and the real any more than a delicate lady narrator. That Esther is particularly aware of the potential failures of realism to represent actual reality is made evident by her portrayal of writing, and especially by her portrayal of the way writing can harm others. In the tradition of children's object narratives, Esther pushes back against the problem of fiction that Alex Woloch describes: “all characters are potentially overdelimited within the fictional world (13). Focusing on the democratic impulses of the nineteenth-century novel, Woloch describes its treatment of minor characters as specifically related to the presence of an omniscient narrator who chooses his or subject and lifts that subject to narrative prominence. In contrast, Esther as a good narrating object focuses outward. By painstakingly writing a narrative that is more concerned with reflecting the world outside her, she deprives Bleak House of its protagonist, though she is its major character. At the same time, Esther is intimately tied to the many characters she is obliged to portray, and as a result must know the failures of her representations. Her loved ones become, at best, partial persons; at worst, they are caricatures. In drawing attention to delimitations and inflections Esther emphasizes fiction's failure to adequately capture or structure a life. Most autobiographical novels—novels with extradiegetic homodiegetic narrators—begin with the autobiographical speaking subject. David Copperfield begins “I am born” (14); Great Expectations with “My father's family name being Pirrip, and my Christian name Philip, my infant tongue could make of both names

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nothing longer or more explicit than Pip” (13). Both statements introduce us immediately to the author and subject of our text, as well as to the narrative's goal: to tell the story of a life. Thus these novels take on a different form than children's object narratives, which use omniscient opening frames as a means to introduce the it-narrator and call attention to that narrator's limits. Unlike David Copperfield and Great Expectations, Bleak House, with its innovative, dual-narrated form, opens in a manner similar to that of a children’s it- narrative. This novel may include a personal and autobiographical narrative, but its beginnings do not announce it as such. Instead, we begin with London. Michaelmas Term lately over, and the Lord Chancellor sitting in Lincoln's Inn Hall. Implacable November weather. As much mud in the streets, as if the waters had but newly retired from the face of the earth, and so it would not be wonderful to meet a Megalosaurus forty feet long or so, waddling like an elephantine lizard up Holborn Hill. Smoke lowering down from chimney-pots, making a soft black drizzle, with flakes of soot in it as big as full-grown snow-flakes—gone into mourning, one might imagine, for the death of the sun. (13) As in object narratives, the omniscient introduction establishes for us a little world: London in poor weather; London filthy, muddy, and smoky. More than clue us into the locale and season the novel begins in, these lines reveal the narrator's range, which is magnificent in scope. The narrator is able to dwell on such daily irritations as November weather and mud, while maintaining intimate knowledge of the primeval past, which he understands, is intertwined with modern London. Imagining the “death of the sun,” the narrator turns both to a murky past and a potential future. This narrator misses nothing. He is as capable of seeing into the human heart as he is of seeing the reality of Victorian London, and he is fully capable of depicting either of them. And yet, he almost entirely misses Esther, who comes into his narrative very late, and then only in association with Mr. George's shooting gallery. Her role is limited and minuscule compared to the hundreds of pages he dedicates

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to her world more largely. Surely this is our first indication, both of Esther's narrative limits (for all her acuity, she is not able to layer the past and future onto the present) and of the omniscient narrator's fallibility. He cannot, or chooses not to, pay more attention to her. Esther's narrative, coming to us in chapter three, is both a contrast and a relief, as it poses her intelligible and familiar voice against the high- handedness of the all-knowing “I.” In the same manner as is witnessed in the children's it-narratives, the dual narration of Bleak House privileges the singular- limited I—the narrating object and her voice—by the sheer fact of its being unnecessary. Surely, the omniscient narrator could follow her story if he wanted to; that he chooses not to, or that Esther is able to tell what that narrator cannot, indicates something about the nature of story, especially as those stories are gendered. Where, it seems to ask, does a quiet, feminine woman find a place in the world of commercial London and the Chancery? This novel makes her absence from them obvious. The biggest problem with the assertion that Esther is an object narrator is, of course, the unavoidable fact that she is a fictional person. This roadblock is undermined by her relationship to objects and her outwardly focused narrative in which she serves as the organizing object. Whereas children's it-narrators straightforwardly acknowledge that they are inanimate, and even their metafictional references point to a lineage of objects, Esther is explicitly animate. More—she is busy and bustling throughout the novel. But that business belies her object-hood. As though to clue us into her narrative lineage, Esther continually associates herself with objects. As a child, like an object able to speak only to other objects, she communicates mainly with her doll. As an adult she comes to be signified in the text by her bundles of housekeeping keys. These objects act as metonymies for her. They are things that signify Esther’s presence and Esther’s limits, first as a child treated like an unfeeling and unwanted thing by the adults around her, and then as the possession of a house. What is more, Esther's story appropriately focuses outward. Her attention both as narrator and housekeeper is always on others. Her role in Bleak House as in

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Bleak House is facilitating—in the novel she facilitates our understanding of the narrative; in the home, she toils away for Richard, Ada, and John Jarndyce. The housekeeping keys thus serve as a constant reminder of her role in the narrative, reminding both her and us of her place within the larger structure of her world. Whenever Esther threatens to give way to introspection or emotion, those keys come out to remind us of her real facilitative function as well as to cue us in to a full interiority that, object-like, she fails to express at the level of surface. The keys may signify a potentially rich psychological terrain, but they also indicate the narrative’s failure to account for that terrain. Distressed because Allen Woodcourt is leaving London, she recalls instead that she “jingled my housekeeping keys a good deal, one way and another” (280). When Jarndyce proposes to her Esther recalls “I rang my housekeeping keys and gave them a kiss before I laid them down in their basket again” (692). That Esther is Bleak House's is organizing object is indicated, too, by the threat, ongoing in the second half of the novel, that its concerns will overtake any other in her life. It is notable that her engagement to John Jarndyce is never discussed as such. Rather, she engages to become “the mistress of Bleak House” (692, 694, 943). Esther works well as an object narrator because she so thoroughly focuses on other people's stories. Her primary topics for discussion are her own observations of a number of people, primarily Richard, Ada, Caddy Jellyby, and Jarndyce. Moving amongst them and amongst others, Esther is the narrative tool by which a variety of embedded stories are presented to the reader. Through Esther's recordings, we learn of Bleak House's history, of Mrs. Jellyby's imperial philanthropy, of Caddy's escape from her mother's household and marriage, of Mrs. Fleet's sad life, and of course of Richard and Ada's romance. In the process, we also experience a range of characters—Esther moves among social classes with as much facility as any object could, encountering everyone from the homeless sweeper (Joe) to the aristocracy (Sir Leicester Dedlock himself). Like the it-narrators of children's fiction, she is sympathetic to the plight of the poor in general, and emphasizes the degree to which they are capable of virtues like anyone else. After visiting two poor

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women near Bleak House, for instance, she finds herself touched to “to see what they could be to one another; to see how they felt for one another; how the heart of each to each was softened by the hard trials of their lives. I think the best side of such people is almost hidden from us” (135). The two women's affection for each other is one of their main virtues, and it reflects the relationship between Ada and Esther. This parallel reinforces the idea that goodness is a product of moral action rather than birth—yet another shared emphasis of the children’s it-narrative and Bleak House. Esther's narrative, positioned as a counterpoint to that of the omniscient narrator, begins with an address typical of an object. This opening gambit positions her as a limited and embodied narrator: “I have a great deal of difficulty in beginning to write my portion of these pages, for I know I am not clever. I always knew that. I can remember, when I was a very little girl indeed, I used to say to my doll, when we were alone together, 'Now, Dolly, I am not clever, you know very well, and you must be patient with me, like a dear!' “(27). Esther’s “I” positions her in closer proximity to her readers. She is a person like them. The humble assertion that she is “not clever,” repeated immediately thereafter in Esther’s remembered conversation with her childhood doll, is conversational and perhaps meant to be endearing. She speaks directly to her reader, and while doing so she compares that reader to an object—a doll. Rather than fully undermining or artfully covering up her narrative authority, by acknowledging her own limitations Esther aligns herself with the similarly limited object narrators who come before her, as well as mimics their colloquial and casual style. At the same time, she reminds readers of our own potential objecthood, our own potential to be treated as objects. Esther retains this familiar and conversational style throughout the remainder of her narrative, making bids for readerly attention and even affection through her candid acknowledgment of the difficulty of writing. These inevitably remind us not just of her limitations, but also of her humanity. Esther is hoping for a specific effect on her reader, which she makes clear as she closes her narrative. When she reaches its end, she tells us “I, and the unknown friend to whom I write,

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will part for ever. Not without much dear remembrance on my side. Not without some, I hope, on his or hers” (985). Though unknown and unidentified to Esther, her reader has become her “friend” and the subject of her dear remembrance. What is more, Esther's goal is the reciprocity of her own feelings. She aspires to a similar affectionate recollection once her narrative is finished. Like the object narrators that came before her, Esther retains a metafictional awareness both of her narrative's lineage and of its material limitations. Esther does not refer explicitly to object narratives, it is true, over the course of her tale. She does, however, refer to other children's narrators and narrative centers—Mrs. Shipton, Mother Hubbard, and Dame Trot (121). Thus, perhaps more appropriately for an it-narrator who is ultimately nevertheless human, she refers back to the human narrative locus of a number of children's stories. These references may be lost in more modern readings of Bleak House. We, of course, know of Old Mother Hubbard who went to her cupboard and gave her poor dog a bone, and we might also know of Dame Trot's adventure's with her comical cat. But in the nineteenth century, these figures were also the supposed tellers of fairy tales, as in Mother Hubbard's Fairy Tales (1860?), which features Cinderella and Little Red Riding Hood, among other stories. Mrs. Shipton, though practically unknown now, is thought to be the original source for such fairy tale tellers as Mother Goose and Madame Bunch. xliiiNaturally, in addition to writing the narrative we read, Esther is a teller of fairy tales who imagines that her life is at times like one. In addition to telling the Jellyby children little Red Riding Hood (56) and Puss in Boots (58) among other unspecified tales, Esther takes care to tell us that she was “brought up [. . .] like some of the princesses in fairy stories [. . .] by [her] godmother” (28). Mr. Boythorn's home at Chesney Wold is compared to one that might have been made by a “good fairy” (571). By positioning herself as one a teller of fairy tales, she acknowledges her place in a tradition of female oral narrators, recalling a fictional lineage in the same way that it narrators recall theirs. This is not to say, however, that she sets herself up as an expert narrator or is ever disingenuous about her narrative's limits, or

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about her own limitations. Much the opposite, Esther's humility, including her frank admission that she is not clever, preemptively points out to us any flaws her narrative may contain. Like the Pincushion who aims to “Tell you what I saw and heard,” Esther's main strength is that she “had always a rather noticing way—not a quick way, O no!—a silent way of noticing what passed before me, and thinking I should like to understand it better” (28). Esther's narrative may be limited by her understanding and experience, especially insofar as that experience, unlike that of the omniscient narrator, is limited to the domestic sphere and domestic undertakings. Still, for a narrative that focuses outward, her “noticing way” comes in handy. Esther is frank with her readers when she finds herself getting in the way, She acknowledges, for instance, when her concern for Caddy's welfare and her own relationship with Jarndyce prevents her from realizing that Ada is and has for some time been unhappy—indeed, it prevents her from realizing that Ada has gotten married. Thus, Esther's confidences as to her narrative limitations mirror that of object narratives. As a person, Esther may not fall prey to being put in pockets or shut up in drawers, but she can be shut up in the domestic sphere or overtaken by feminine concerns like nursing and marriage, and the natural limits of her attention can prevent her from seeing and telling everything. The most telling and interesting similarity between Esther's narration and children's it-narration is certainly the way she recalls the most gendered depictions of object narratives. Esther is not just an object. Like a pin or a pincushion, she is a feminine object that is useful to others rather than acting for herself. Though Esther's narrative is largely focused outward—on Richard, Ada, Jarndyce, and Caddy Jellyby, among others—when she does focus on herself, she is most often describing work on their behalf, such as taking care of the household chores, or of smoothing the way for Caddy's marriage. Like the object narratives she draws upon, her life is made up of household business. This is especially noticeable in Esther's own emphasis on her usefulness. Good feminine objects, unlike boys' toys, are invariably useful, and Esther is no exception. She goes so far as to make usefulness her creed. As a child, Esther determines that “I [. . .] would strive as I grew up to be industrious,

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contented and kindhearted, and to do some good to some one, and win some love to myself if I could” (31). Esther's desire to be “industrious” and of good to others is a desire for usefulness; it is one she maintains throughout the remainder of the text, and it is what she reminds herself of when she feels she is failing in her duty. When Jarndyce proposes to her she recalls that “my thought was how could I ever be busy enough, how could I ever be good enough, how in my little way could I ever hope to be forgetful enough of myself, devoted enough to him, and useful enough to others” (686). As Esther points out here, to be useful to others is not merely being busy and good. It involves being forgetful of oneself, and this includes one's interiority— private desires, reactions, and feelings. Esther's attention to duty makes obvious what the children's it-narrative implies about feminine usefulness—that by emphasizing her role as a facilitator who ignores interiority in favor of others, it turns women into objects. Esther is so interested in maintaining her outward focus that she even apologizes for those times when her own interests intrude on her narration. Like the feminine objects that, though they sometimes discuss themselves and their opinions, assume that the reader wants to be focused elsewhere, Esther chastises herself for her intrusions. Esther laments “I don't know how it is, I seem to be always writing about myself. I mean all the time to write about other people, and I try to think about myself as little as possible, and I am sure, when I find myself coming into the story again, I am really vexed” (137). Though she acknowledges that she must “have really something to do with” the story and therefore “can't be kept out,” this is less an admission of her own importance than it is an excuse for any focus on her own interior state (137). It certainly must be difficult to write a first- person narrative of events with which one is concerned and also keep oneself out of the text—but this is just what Esther strives to do. Always, she tries to write about others. Even in her thoughts, she tries to keep herself focused outwardly and her appearance in the story is troublesome to her. The need to focus on the lives and opinions of others even goes so far as to undermine any she might try to form on her own. For instance, Esther strives to

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dispassionately record the real actions of Harold Skimpole (the “Child”), Mr. Turveydrop (the Model of Deportment), and even Richard. Her aim is never expressly to judge these characters—or, at least, when her own judgment might be expressed, she does her best to defer to others. At those rare moments that she does express an opinion on someone's unsavoriness of character, Esther acknowledges that that opinion might be flawed by her limited knowledge. Discussing Richard's lack of resolve, for instance she states that “I write down these opinions, not because I believe that this or any other thing was so, because I thought so; but only because I did think so, and I want to be quite candid about all I thought and did” (265). This kind of metatextual acknowledgment of her own interests and opinions, their limitations, and her interest and motives in writing about them surpasses even that of feminine object narratives. The Pincushion is allowed to express an opinion and hold it to be true, though she may apologize for her intrusion and narrative delay. Esther, however, “wants to be quite candid” and part of that candidness is acknowledging her rhetorical stance. This difference exacerbates the it-narrative’s interest in narrative’s limits, its inability to depict things or people clearly. Finally, Esther's outward focus is characterized most clearly in her near- absolute failure to tell us about herself. This failure circumvents her from becoming the novel’s protagonist. We are to take her actions and routines as a matter of course. In the same way that good feminine objects leave us to imagine the makeup of their days—being removed from pockets and placed on tables and in drawers— we are to imagine Esther busying herself with her household work, investing in a routine and sticking to it. Much of what we learn about Esther's life we learn while she transcribes others' conversation, as when Ada tells Jarndyce about their interactions with the Jellyby children: “Esther nursed then, coaxed then to sleep, washed and dressed them, told them stories, kept them quiet, bought them keepsakes” (86). While Esther has reported some of this to us, her most generous action—buying Peepy a gift with her limited cash—is something we have to learn secondhand. They place more value on other’s plots than they do on their own repetitive household chores and actions. The feminine it-narrative provides a model

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for Esther, one that focuses outward at the expense of recounting the day-to-day activities of one’s own life. It models a self-effacing perception that Esther takes on as well. Moreover, Esther, like the objects before her, implies something unfortunate about the narratability of everyday life. By failing to account for routine and domestic tasks, they imply that they aren’t worth recounting. Despite their position within households, they do not privilege domestic narratives, nor do they privilege their own narratives. Even Esther’s romance is subsumed to the sense that model femininity never tells of itself. Nowhere is this more obvious than in the story of Esther's romantic relationship with Mr. Woodcourt. Esther doesn't shy away from romance more generally; she is more than happy to tell the full and complete narrative of Ada and Richard's courtship and eventual marriage from their first meeting to its dissolution in Richard's death. Of Esther's potential relationship we learn comparatively little. It is only on her second mention of him that we even learn her future husband's name. Esther's fondness for Mr. Woodcourt is almost never spoken of, nor is his attention to her. When she is unhappy that he is leaving for India, she only tells us that “I was wakeful and rather low-spirited. I don't know why. At least I don't think I know why. At least, perhaps I do, but I don't think it matters” (274). Any happiness that he has given her flowers is expressed through Ada who asks, happily “Do they look like that sort of thing? [. . .] O, yes, indeed they do” (280). This courtship—to my mind the most important in the novel—is given to us only in a few lines here and there, scattered at the end of chapters after the important narrative work is finished. We are told, simply and straightforwardly, that it doesn't matter. We only find out for certain that Mr. Woodcourt may have loved Esther, and even then it is a diminutive “little secret I have thus far tried to keep” (570). The fact that this is a secret fits in well with the feminine modesty Esther's narrative embodies more generally. Equally, by keeping this secret Esther manages her narrative focus; rather than distract from Ada and Richard, Esther chooses to withhold her own story. Esther's desire to put other's narratives first, to tell what she observes rather than what she feels, and to privilege exteriority to interiority is repeated time and

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time again in the narrative. Esther does not so much try to hide her own perspective as indicate its lack of bearing on the larger issue at hand. When looking for her mother with Mr. Bucket, Esther focuses on the action of the chase, including the important clues and actions that ultimately lead to her to her mother's body without much introspection. Esther simply tells us that “I will not dwell on the suspense and anxiety with which I reflected all this time” (901); to be sure Esther has emotions, but other than this one mention of them she focuses her narrative outwardly. In a similar way, after her mother's death she devotes only a sentence to her own grief, noting instead that “I have already said so much of myself, and so much still remains, that I will not dwell upon my sorrow [. . .] I proceed to other pages of my narrative” (917). In contrast, Richard's death and Ada's recovery after span several pages. This attention to others' woes over her own makes Esther both a good object and a good woman while simultaneously circumventing the problems of fullness as articulated by Woloch. According to Woloch, the “character system [is] a distribute field of attention,” one in which the protagonist gains at the expense of minor characters (17). While minor characters shed light on the protagonist’s fullness, the novel is “destabilized” by the sense that minor characters “too should have a case” (21). Woloch argues that the novel’s “sense of the potential to shift narrative attention is intertwined with a specific notion of human right” (21). By giving others’ stories precedence, Esther fulfills her role in tying together the narrative and she fulfills her domestic duty. She also bows to the sense that other characters, other humans, have the right to narrative attention, but by doing so Esther transforms herself into the minor character of her own novel. Her gendered narrative stance is a more equitable narrative stance, but it comes at the cost of her significant circumscription. By using the children’s it narrative’s formal representation of femininity, Dickens undermines what Woloch takes to be the novel’s main problem, while additionally exposing the degree to which masculine narrative norms inform that problem. There are only two major exceptions to Esther's general rule—to consider

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others before herself in all things, and to make her narrative reflect that priority— and they both reinforce rather than undermine Esther's objecthood. The first is her record of her own pain. It is important that this record is almost without fail a record of physical pain rather than mental or emotional pain. After all, these moments are reflections of the children's it-narratives’ depiction of passivity’s price and the physical harm inflicted on them by others. Notably, all of Esther’s pains are inflicted by children. The first time Esther mentions any harm to her person is when recalling her interactions with the Pardiggle children. Esther remembers “They all pinched me at once, and in a dreadfully expert way: screwing up such little pieces of my arms that I could hardly forbear crying out. Felix, at the same time, stamped upon my toes” (129). Poor Esther. Though these children may have reasons for being so badly behaved—she admits that they are “unnaturally constrained”—they nonetheless treat her as though she were something incapable of feeling properly or responding to their abuse (129). They treat her, in short, like a pincushion, a peg top, or a doll. She is relieved when they come to the end of their walk, but like any useful or enjoyable children's toy, she remains silent about their misbehavior, reporting to her reader but not complaining to a person inhabiting her world. Only Esther’s body could tell the story of it to any observant onlooker. Esther's illness is by far the most prominent example of physical harm in the novel. Taken ill after she helps both the homeless child Joe and her maid Charley in their own sicknesses, Esther recalls the period as the most painful of her existence. Describing the actual feelings of sickness, she records “that worse time when, strung together somewhere in great black space, there was a flaming necklace, or ring, or starry circle at some kind, of which I was one of the beads! [. . .] when it was such an inexplicable agony and misery to be part of the dreadful thing (556). Depicting herself into a bead that is part of a necklace or ring, she metaphorizes her experience in the larger world of the text as an object in a system of objects. Notably, this experience is an “agony” and a “misery” to her; the thing itself is “dreadful.” This period of illness is Esther's longest period of introspection. In a manner similar to an objects’ account of its shaping and reshaping, Esther attends to this

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part of her narrative. And like the object that is worn out from constant use or that is changed entirely from one thing to another, Esther's illness metamorphoses her. Its effects are written on her body. This harm isn't just the harm of a passing moment. It is physical and potentially permanent—Esther’s face is marred, like a doll with her whose head has been stuck in the fire. She describes her “altered self” (561) as “very much changed—O very, very much. At first, my face was so strange to me, that I think I should have put my hands before it and started back, but for the encouragement I have mentioned” (572). This physical alteration is traumatic for Esther, as her repeated “verys” and her desire to hide from herself indicates. She is startled by the degree of the change and, though she tries not to dwell upon her misfortune, every meeting with an old friend or acquaintance for the reminder of the novel calls up again her feelings of insecurity. What is more, if physical harm is a characteristic of the children's object narrative, so is the emphasis that this harm is not necessarily deserved. Often it comes as the result of being a good object. A good pincushion eventually becomes shabby and pricked; a pin loses its edge; a doll is worn out with childish play. Esther comes to this harm by acting like a good and caring woman—doing just that which she is meant to do by taking care of others and being useful. The degree of harm she undergoes is an acknowledgment of how difficult it is to be a good woman or object. It also ultimately undermines the idea that such sacrifices are necessary, productive, or useful. Despite Esther's help, Jo (the source of illness) ultimately dies, and though his death comes a little later than it perhaps would have without her help, this extension only prolongs his suffering. The last significant departure from Esther’s extrospective narrative practice occurs when Mr. Woodcourt proposes to her, a scene that lasts several pages without the intrusion of an Ada, Richard, Jarndyce, or Caddy. In this scene Esther is straightforward about her emotions, and she records them with the detail she usually only allots to others' lives. In many senses, it might seem like this scene undermines my argument about Esther's refusal to focus on herself. But the scene in fact secures Esther's position as an object of circulation. By showing her absolute inability toward self-determination—she is incapable of saying yes to Woodcourt,

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however much she may want to—the scene affirms the narrative pattern that has controlled Esther's life. From her childhood, Esther has been an object for exchange, at the cost of her own free will. When Jarndyce moves her to school he “offers to place her at a first-rate establishment” on the condition that she will never “remove herself from the establishment in question without his knowledge and concurrence” (35). The terminology here is telling: she is to be “placed” like a thing, and she is never to move without permission. Esther never does leave that establishment until Jarndyce assigns her a new position as Ada's companion and his housekeeper. It is true that the novel ends well for Esther with her happy marriage to Woodcourt, but this by no means occurs at her own volition. Instead Jarndyce gives the new, smaller bleak house “its little mistress” (965). He tells Woodcourt, “Take from me, a willing gift, the best wife that ever a man had” (966). That she is an object in a gift economy rather than one up for sale is of little consequence here compared to the fact that she is something given and taken. Esther may circulate less often than object-narrators do, but that she does so by the whims and wills of others mimics these prior narratives entirely, and this is not limited to the end of the narrative, in which Esther maries Woodcourt. Throughout the novel, Esther moves from home to school, from school to Bleak House, and from Bleak House to London and elsewhere at other’s whims. What Esther may feel at being bartered and traded is left to our own devising. She hints at gratitude—certainly she is happy to marry Woodcourt—but she never makes these connections explicit. Indeed, she never seems to voice a response to Jarndyce's handling of her at all. Perhaps her first experience of this recurring action is the best example: “What the destitute subject of the offer tried to say, I need not repeat. What she did say, I could more easily tell, if it were worth the telling. What she felt, and will feel to her dying hour, I could never relate” (35). Esther passively moves from person to person and place to place—feeling something, but more often recording nothing of those feelings. They, like so much of Esther's story are not “worth the telling.” What does all this mean for our understanding of Dickens's Bleak House? I want to suggest that Esther's attention to her own storytelling and its limitations, as

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well as her narrative's more general nuancing of the woman-object relationship problematized in children's it-narratives, ultimately results in a novel that is as concerned with the problems of minorness as it is with the way formal and generic imitation narrows and circumscribes the stories told by novels. Esther, like Dickens behind her, examines the likeness between discursive structures and social structures by making evident the degree to which her self-determination is defined by previous genres—ones that pose a model femininity that is evident both in discursive structures and social structures that demand feminine submission and usefulness. One relatively minor character, Caddy Jellyby, serves as a final, apt example of this discomfort. It is early in Bleak House when Esther depicts her first impressions of Caddy: “But what principally struck us was a jaded, and unhealthy- looking, though by no means plain girl, at the writing-table, who sat biting the feather of her pen, and staring at us. I suppose nobody ever was in such a state of ink” (53). The image must be as striking to the reader as it is to Esther and Ada. Here, at the beginning of Esther's narrative, is a most unbecoming image of a writing woman. Her life taken over by the signs of the written word, Caddy's occupation is signified by her writing-table, by her pen, and by the ink stains that cover her. Esther later describes Caddy “dipping her inky middle finger in the egg-cup, which contained vinegar, and smearing it over the ink stains on her face” (60), and when Esther takes her leave of the Jellybys, she finds Mrs. Jellyby “by that time perseveringly dictating to Caddy, and Caddy was fast relapsing into the inky condition in which we had found her” (79). Caddy is markedly a woman whose life has been negatively altered by the written word. Writing narrows Caddy’s life, keeping her confined to the drawing room of an intolerably messy house. Here is a moving depiction of the power of writing, indeed. But were Caddy only a portrayal of a writing woman, she would nonetheless be a poor one. More a servant to her mother than an original thinker, Caddy undertakes all the drudgery of writing and receives none of its reward. Rather, in her “state of ink” Caddy is a woman whose life has been doubly written over—first by her mother's demands and now by Esther's narration. Caddy's “fast

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relapsing into the inky condition” is a return to the daily grind, but it is more importantly an almost metafictional return to text. Caddy is an embodiment in the text of Esther's problem with text. Her circumscribed life is a testament to writing's iniquities, and Esther's inability to thoroughly depict this person whom she cares about, to remain focused on her, highlights narrative's inability to account for the totality of character's lives. This depiction of Caddy as circumscribed by writing and as a kind of inky-book object highlights the problems of type and surface with which the children’s it narrative is concerned. Children's it-narratives are never about the objects themselves—but they are never fully about depicting the people in them, either. Rather, they are concerned with teaching a very simple, almost laughably predictable lesson: the importance of conforming to power structures that benefit wealthy men. At the same time, by depicting people only as types and by focusing on surface and appearance rather than interiority, they give voice to this lesson's problematic nature. What they teach is that “to be in a state of ink” is to be incapable of living fully, or being rendered fully; it is mere servitude. And this is what Bleak House teaches, too.

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Chapter 3: Pleasurable Suffering: Harm Narratives and Wuthering Heights In “The Benighted Child,” a selection from Elizabeth Sommerville's The Village Maid (1801), an adoptee named Charlotte is left at home alone for the night. Frightened, Charlotte brings her favorite hen into the house with her, and, a little later, takes a walk “in hopes of meeting some of her young friends” (6). “This,” Somerville tells us, “was a very wrong step, for her godmother had desired her not to go out, particularly at dusk” (6). It's an eventful walk. Snow begins to fall, the hen (Charlotte’s constant companion) runs away, and Charlotte is soon lost in the storm. This story could easily turn out badly, but it doesn't. Cold, lost, and fearful for her hen, Charlotte quickly repents of her disobedience. She finds shelter in a shed and is trying to sleep when she hears someone breathing—”perhaps some thief or murderer” who turns out to be a foal (Sommerville 9). The next morning Charlotte is damp and uncomfortable, but alive. Joan the hen is brought home safely and Charlotte is scolded. Readers are left with the reassurance that Charlotte has learned her lesson, and that she won't wander from home after dark. “The Benighted Child” has all the characteristics of a classic cautionary tale. The narrative's trajectory establishes and affirms a clear order to the world, one in which the good are rewarded and the bad are punished, and in which punishments themselves are reasonable and causally related to the misdeed. As defined by Maria Tatar in the context of fairy tales, the term “cautionary tale” is a generic marker, serving to describe a story which “[enunciates] a prohibition, [stages] its violation, and [puts] on display the punishment of the violator” (Off With Their Heads 25). It is the story of a child disobeying a clear warning (“do not go out”) from an elder, which is quickly followed by a conflict in which the child's safety and well being is in some way threatened. The child repents of her misdeed, and is then delivered to safety. At the end of the story the child is intact, bodily and mentally. Indeed, she is better than

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before, as she more fully understands how the world works. She has learned a moral, she is more moral, and her narrated experience helps the reading child learn, too. “Imprudence” from The Little Scholar's Mirror (anon., 1812) is something altogether different. In this story, Julia comes home from school after an absence of three years. The children spend the evening playing games and Julia, who is good at games, wins everything. When it comes to hide and seek, all of the children assert their expertise, including Julia, who says “you will have trouble enough to find me, I assure you, so prepare for a long hunt” before running off. The seekers begin to search for her: “the children, tumbling and weeping, ran over the apartments, calling for Julia” (“Imprudence” 75-76). Julia is well and truly lost—they are unable to find her. In the following months, her parents die, “unable to longer resist the sorrow that the melancholy fate of their only child had occasioned them” (“Imprudence” 76). Years pass, and then one Christmas a child remembers a “large chest” they had never examined (“Imprudence” 76). When “the chest was at length opened” [. . .] the skeleton of a human body was discovered” (“Imprudence” 77). The skeleton, of course, is Julia. “Imprudence” fails to fit into any previously defined children’s genre. Not only does it lack a clear prohibition or violation, the story is also devoid of the explicit didacticism employed by moral or cautionary tales. The metacommentary commonly used by omniscient narrators or parent-narrators never appears here, and its absence guides readers to look for what Sharon Marcus calls “surface” only: “what texts present on their surface but critics have failed to notice” (75). This process, which Marcus labels “just reading,” “strives to be adequate to a text conceived as complex and ample rather than as diminished by, or reduced to, what it has had to repress”; it “ “accounts for what is in the text without construing presence as absence or affirmation as negation”; and it “ recognizes that interpretation is inevitable” (75). My own version of “just reading,” the kind of reading tales like “Imprudence” beg for, also assumes that absence should not be construed as presence. In the context of a literary field that uses didacticism

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explicitly and almost constantly, I take the lack of omniscient or parental metacommentary as a bold, anti-didactic move—at least in this chapter. Plenty of scholars have argued that children’s books didactically browbeat young readers, and girls specifically, into uniformly moral readings.xliv But lack of explicit didacticism paves the way for a multiplicity of readings and it is difficult to assume that children read in any one way, at all. Works like “Imprudence,” leave moral making and interpretation to the reader. No moral is impressed upon the child by an instructional narrator, nor is there a kind of plot-logic to the story—Julia doesn’t seem to be in any danger until she is lost; the box doesn’t appear until the very end. It could be argued that the threat here is extremely naturalized, appearing only in the story’s implication that the natural world is itself out to enforce rigid decorum on young women who dare to brag and win. Even so, the only instructions the author provides for how to interpret this text redirect this kind of reading. Julia, after all, lacks prudence—by closing herself up into a box, she demonstrates an incautiousness, rashness, and general lack of foresight that lead to her untimely death. Indeed, a five-sentence review of The Little Scholar’s Mirror, appearing in The Gentleman’s Magazine, endorses this reading: “The Tale on ‘Imprudence’ may caution the giddy to restrain themselves in their hours of sport” (394). And if the moral of this tale is to think and not hide oneself in chests, even this lesson is undermined by an embedded narrative about how hiding in a chest helped save someone’s life. At best, the story sends extremely mixed messages about potential danger: hiding in a chest may kill you, but it may also save you. Any moral reading of this story requires effort and teasing out, especially given its horror. Julia’s death is tragic and ugly, and potentially frightening to ambitious hide-and-seekers. It suggests a kind of haphazardness about the world, indicating that children are not safe even in their own homes, and reveals that harm and death can happen to anyone, regardless of her relative state of goodness. The story is also enjoyable. Reading “Imprudence” for the first time after sifting through a host of moral, wholesome stories, I experienced a jolt of pleasure. Gory and

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somewhat thrilling (the story's accompanying illustration is of a skeleton coming out of a box), “Imprudence” is entertaining in a way that many early children's stories are not. With its air of mystery and its skeleton hiding in chest, the story has something in common with the Gothic novels enjoyed by adults during this period. Its depiction of the female, harmed body as a source of entertainment is comparable to depictions of harmed and violated bodies in eighteenth century novels like Pamela (1740), in which the heroine’s body is constantly battered as she defends her virtue. It appeals to the same kind of enjoyment that readers found from Henry Fielding’s anti-Pamela, Joseph Andrews (1742). According to Simon Dickie, author of Cruelty and Laughter: Forgotten Comic Literature and the Unsentimental Eighteenth Century, “to a vast majority of its initial readers, Joseph Andrews was farcical and irreligious. Many simply ignored its claims to moral or literary seriousness, delighting in its comic brawls, beatings, and bawdy incidents at coaching inns” (157).xlv “Imprudence” may not be farcical or bawdy, but it appeals to a similar treatment of bodily harm as entertaining subject matter. Like Joseph Andrews, “Imprudence” rewrites the sentimental by relieving the story of its moral import. As it turns out, “Imprudence” is one of many children’s stories that seek to entertain more than they seek to instruct. Although “entertainment” is a subjective category, I use the term here to denote a formal quality that school stories, object narratives, and (as I will demonstrate in my fourth chapter) family narratives largely lack. In part defined by their plotless depiction of the day-to-day (in the case of school stories and domestic narratives) and by protagonist’s inability to act (in the case of object narratives), these genres want the sequential, causally-related action provided by the harm narrative. In harm narratives, something happens, and something else occurs as a result. There is a plot. A reader cannot simply dip into the story here and there; instead, he or she is provided an impetus to keep reading. Eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century children's books are full of what I call harm narratives—narratives that depict often-gratuitous violence against young children, narratives that exploit the violence already inherent in eighteenth-century novels. After all, as Dickie declares in a bold but ultimately well-evidenced opening

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gambit, “eighteenth-century Britons—or a high proportion of them—openly delighted in the miseries of others. Women as well as men laughed at cripples and hunchbacks. They tormented lunatics and led blind men into walls” (1). Children’s harm narratives take part in this tradition, making bids for child delight by depicting harmed others. By addressing harm narratives to children and directing harm at child characters, however, children’s books also implicate social structures that allow vulnerable people to be harmed in defense of virtue or for brief failures of morality. They undermine the sense, prevalent in the eighteenth century, that “social hierarchies were part of God’s plan, and those less favored were habitual figures of fun” (Dickie 1). Though this is not a previously defined category in the way that school stories or it-narratives are, harm narratives follow a clear set of formal and generic conventions. Harm narratives sometimes look like cautionary tales, in the way that “Imprudence” resembles one at first. Sometimes they look like school stories or family narratives. Indeed, harm narratives are malleable. They can easily be grafted into and onto larger narrative conventions and broader genres without significantly disrupting any of them, and while maintaining their own generic integrity. Harm narratives are generically indicated in part by their proximities to other stories: they are almost always part of collections or are embedded narratives in larger works. Formally speaking, harm narratives are written from a third-person omniscient perspective that is often sympathetic to and engages with the reader, but not the child character; they establish a hierarchical moral relationship with the reader; and they rely on predictable plot lines that, importantly, always exceed rationality. If there is a crime, moral or otherwise, the punishment is always wildly disproportionate—though, at the same time, harm narratives avoid the reader- character identification that would make these stories difficult to enjoy. Finally, harm narratives have some relationship with the cautionary tale, as Tatar defines it, in that many cautionary tales incorporate the formal and tropological elements of the harm narrative. Not all harm narratives are cautionary tales and, I would go so far as to argue that “cautionary harm narratives” are more about “harm” than they

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are “caution.” Like other works of children's fiction, harm narratives treat boys and girls differently, though here the differences are matters of plot more than they are the matters of formal address that this dissertation has addressed in other chapters. In this genre, boys and girls feature widely in mixed groups. Not only is it easy to imagine boys and girls reading all of these works, as The Gentleman’s Magazine review indicates, works like The Young Scholar’s Mirror were explicitly recommended for young people, regardless of gender. All children provide a potential audience for harm narratives and, as harm narratives make clear, all children have the potential to be harmed, in fiction and in fact. This is not to say, however, that harm narratives treat boys and girls equally. In the same way that boys and girls are depicted as prone to different vices, those boys and girls come to different ends. What Marcus calls “the form of the plot”—simply, the form created by repeated but often-unobserved plot structures—emphasizes that girls are far more vulnerable than boys (82). In fact, they are vulnerable to boys, often becoming unwitting victims to their brothers’ machinations. Thus, while it is impossible to argue for any one standard “reading” of a text for either gender, these texts do suggest an unfortunately gendered world-logic that may well be absorbed by boy and girls readers. Whereas boys might learn that their chances for being personally injured by their bad behavior are relatively low, girls may well observe that the same world is much more hostile to them. This could well injure girls—by observing their own vulnerability, girl readers could circumscribe their own behavior more thoroughly. They could lead less full lives in a culture that already conspired to limit their possibilities. At the same time, these books serve another purpose: preparing girl readers in an admittedly harsh way for their lives at home and in public. Forewarned is, after all, forearmed. In the following pages, I will first establish how harm narratives use injury and abuse for pleasurable or entertaining ends, before delving into how excessive harm separates this from other genres. After delineating the formal characteristics of the harm narrative, I will trace the divisions within the genre, discussing first

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harm narratives that employ the characteristics of the cautionary tale to less-than- moral ends. I will then turn to what I call gratuitous harm narratives, which often dispense with moral framework altogether. As I will demonstrate, whereas other children’s narratives work to establish and mimic the world’s complex formal orders, harm narratives divide the world up simply into lucky and unlucky, harmers and harmed. In one sense, harm narratives promote a conservative value system that rewards masculinity and aggression, while simultaneously undermining it by revealing the injuries it causes. I argue that by portraying graphic harm in real- world settings, harm narratives aim to leave all readers in a state of profound discomfort over the vulnerability of children; to girls and women, however, they also expose and condemn the world as it is, the social structures other genres only seek to ameliorate. Addressing Harm and Children With a few notable exceptions violence and harm in early children's literature—that is, literature written explicitly for children—has been widely acknowledged but rarely interrogated. More often than not, critics like Colin McGeorgexlvi acknowledge the presence of violence in such texts as Mary Martha Sherwood’s The History of the Fairchild Family (1822), a work notorious for describing a corpse hanging from a gibbet and the fictional father’s use of it as a teaching tool. As in McGeorge’s argument, violent depictions are attributed to eighteenth- and nineteenth-century cultural norms.xlvii Scholarshipxlviii interrogating early children's fiction that is expressly about harm to children is even more rare. Some few such as Michelle Abate and Nicholas Tucker argue that violent fairy tales and lullabies (respectively) reflect parents’ understandable frustrations and exhaustion with very young children—eighteenth- and nineteenth-century versions of Adam Mansbach’s Go the Fuck to Sleep (2012) and You Have to Fucking Eat (2014). This criticism is often interested, as Jackie Stallcup and Jack Zipes are,xlix in thinking about how early children's fiction reinforces social codes. Stallcup and Zipes, for instance, describe some of the horrors that awaited children in these early works, but they are more interested in exposing ideology's investment in children's

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fiction (and vice versa) than they are in interrogating harm itself.l There are some rare studies of harm in children’s fiction. Referring to later Victorian works, Gillian Brown points out that a number of violent and/or harmful depictions of children occur in sentimental narratives. And, in a catalogue for the exhibition “Children's Books Published by William Darton and His Sons,” Linda David connects Darton's Chapter of Accidents series with the European Monthly Magazine's accident reports: each contains summaries of recent deaths (23).li In sum, when critics write about harm in children’s fiction, they are usually writing about violence that happens around children rather than to them. When they discuss harm to children, they are overwhelming interested in Struwwelpeter, Heinreich Hoffman's famous and funny series of rhyming, cautionary tales which were translated into English in 1848 and became an immediate hit, though some ⁠ scholars move on to look at the twentieth-century writer and illustrator Edward Gorey.lii When looking at these studies, what becomes clear is that “harm” is both myriad and vague. No one seems to be using a consistent definition of what harm is and, consequently, how it is portrayed. The most helpful and articulate definition of harm comes, not from literary studies on children’s literature, but from Sandra Macpherson’s work on the eighteenth-century realist novel: Harm’s Way: Tragic Responsibility and Novel Form. Macpherson is interested in strict liability, and she argues that “the realist novel is a project of blame not exculpation” (13). As I will return to in the following pages, children’s harm narratives share the realist novel’s emphasis on personal responsibility and liability, though by consistently letting harmers off the hook they question liability’s usefulness. Macpherson’s catalog of potential “harms” is meticulous. There are “harms that would seem to be accidental” (as “murder” is in Defoe’s Journal of a Plague Year) (25); “risks of harm peculiar to women on the marriage market” (26)”;involuntary harms” (29); “harms incurred by employees” (31); “harms conducted with the ‘force of arms’” (34); and “unintentional, remote, and third-party harms as well as harms to strangers” (35).

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All of these occur in Macpherson’s first chapter, but they cover the range of harms present in children’s books, too. For my part, and for the purposes of this chapter, I define harm as bodily injury to or the death of a child character. Though this harm may be the result of violence, it doesn’t have to be. As Macpherson points out, it is as often the result of accident or neglect, misfortune or chance, or biology. Harm can be mental or psychic, of course, but this genre’s focus is on the body and the types of damages it can and can’t sustain. In this children’s genre, harm exposes the vulnerability of differently-gendered bodies and rewards masculine aggression. Disproportionate Harm Disproportionate harm is the harm narrative’s primary identifying feature, and it is this feature that most distinguishes the genre from moral or cautionary tales like The Village Maid. Even in narratives with ostensibly clear morals, moments of harm and punishment occupy the narrative’s attention and become the tale’s focal point. Take, for instance, “The Consequences of Fear of Cats” in Stories by a Mother (1818, anon.). Emmeline's main fault is simply a fear of animals. But, when she runs away from a cat, she ends up running into a hedge where “she was sadly hurt: her face, hands, and arms were covered with blood; her muslin frock was quite in rags and strips; her petticoat also torn to pieces; her tippet and white bonnet entirely destroyed” (80). Emmeline is not merely mangled and bleeding. Her clothes are irreparably damaged, hanging off of her in a scene that evokes rape. This is not the worst of the harm. When told to look at herself Emmeline finds she cannot: “her eyes were quite closed with the thorns and brambles which had scratched them, and she could not open them” (81). Emmeline's is a silly and harmless fault—one that certainly does not warrant her blinding. And yet, the narrative is intensely interested in the scene of Emmeline's harm. It details her fear and her pain, and then itemizes her damaged clothing and injured parts: muslin frock, petticoat, tippet, bonnet; face, hands, arms, and eyes. This is less a story about fear of cats than, as the title indicates, particular consequences. Other collections are interested in portraying beatings, among other hyperbolic ills. In Dorothy Kilner's Histories of a Great Many Little Boys and Girls

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(1794), one girl breaks a broom when sweeping and is shaken “a great deal and put [. . .] into a corner” (12-13); when Tommy cries and protests getting bathed and dressed, his father “began to beat him whilst he was naked, and said, I shall beat you all the time you are without your clothes [. . .] He had a great rod in his hand, which hurt him sadly” (13-14); Mary Ann Selfish is forced to “live among the hogs” (45)— literally. Finally, Miss Sally Trip tells a fib, and, in response, her mother “whipped her very hard, indeed, and turned her out of the house [.. . .] and she made her stay out in the cold all the day, without any body taking notice of her, or giving any victuals to eat, or any thing to drink” (31-32). In another short story, when Charles expresses interest in how Jack Jones, a character in an embedded narrative, was hurt, he is told that, upon seeing him being mean to a cat, Jack’s father “tied [him] to a rolling stone, and then took the horsewhip and beat him as he had done the cat, and asked how he liked to be served so” (34); later, when Jack plucks some feathers out of a chicken, his father pulls out his hair and ties him up for a long time so he can't move (35-6). There is an educative logic to these stories; certainly, it is no coincidence that a girl afraid of cats is scratched by briars or that a boy who is mean to cats is beaten like one. Harm narratives make frequent gestures toward evenhandedness and use ironic logic (selfish children are made to live with hogs, cruel children are cruelly treated), but the essential point here is the frequency with which children are beaten, disowned, whipped, frozen, starved, and, frankly, abused . Much more than ironic logic, which comes and goes in these narratives, excess itself is the harm narrative’s identifying trope, with minor faults and individual actions resulting in major injuries and repeated beatings. Whereas moral and cautionary tales emphasize education and reform, these children are not given the opportunity to learn and repair their actions (at least within the scope of what is being narrated) before severe harm comes to them. The tales emphasize the ways and means by which children may suffer more than the ways they might improve. While surely meant to frighten, this harm is also enjoyable, as Charles’s example indicates: his father tells him about Jack because Charles asks and he continues the story because Charles expresses continued interest.

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Pleasure and Entertainment: All in Good Fun Some research has indicated that children are less frightened than adults are about the possibility of harm, and that children are explicitly interested in and indeed entertained by narrative harm. According to Diana Gainer, the majority of children's nursery and playground rhymes feature violence—and these are the often children's favorites. Or, as Evelyn Goodenough Pitcher Points out, “War and death, hurt and misfortune, various kinds of injury are alluring in that they present themes emotionally meaningful to children to which they seem to respond with more enthusiasm than to a fact-setting story” (288). As Pitcher learned, children like to tell these stories as well as listen to them (289). Discussing the Victorian period, Warren Wooden has shown that gory and horrific Foxe’s Book of Martyrs 1563) was commonly read by children; moreover, they enjoyed it.liii Wooden cites Rev. John Milner recalling “Foxe’s martyrs are among our earliest recollections, and their stirring incidents riveted our eyes to their pages in our earliest childhood” (147). In a felicitous fictional correspondence, David Copperfield recalls reading the book repeatedly during his childhood: “I was chiefly edified, I am afraid, by the pictures, which were numerous, and represented all kinds of dismal horrors” (146). While not specifically harm narratives written for children, these examples attest to children’s enduring interest in violence and injury. No lesser person than Freud has addressed the pleasures of witnessing harm in his essay “A Child is Being Beaten” (1919). Observing that many of his patients indulged in the fantasy that another child was being beaten, Freud locates the fantasy in children’s witnessing of other people being beaten is school, and in their own sense of powerlessness in their pre-school years (179). Compellingly, Freud argues that witnessing actual beatings gives way to witnessing literary beatings in novels like Uncle Tom’s Cabin: the child began to compete with these works of fiction by producing his own phantasies and by constructing a wealth of situations and institutions in which children were being beaten or punished and disciplined in some other way because of their naughtiness and bad

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behavior. (180) For Freud, watching and reading about violence leads to a desire to outdo, to imaginatively indulge in violence toward masturbatory ends. His argument aligns with common perceptions of onanistic sexual pleasure during the period, which according to Eve Sedgwick in “Jane Austen and the Masturbating Girl,” was considered perverse and was itself remedied by harmful discipline (825).liv Not all pleasure in harm need be explicitly sexual, however. As Sharon Marcus explains in her analysis of women’s fashion plates and girl’s doll stories, these media and pornography “[represent] and [inspire] the erotic affects of fascination, excitement, transgression, absorption, disgust, and shame” (114). Marcus herself is using Barthes’ definition of the erotic here to delineate “intensity, obsessiveness, theatricality, and pleasure [. . .][located] not in sexual acts but in practices of classifying, ritualization, and image-making” (114). Pleasure, thus, may come from the harm narratives intense portrayal of child harm, obsessive repetition of harm, its theatrical descriptions of torn clothes and skin, as well its desire to classify children into camps of good and bad, injured and uninjured, lucky and unlucky, girl and boy. While some children may have experienced sexual or erotic pleasure from reading harm narratives, assuming that even these pleasures are the only accessible ones precludes a vast range of readings and interests. Entertainment and enjoyment may well come from amusement and suspense as it does from pleasure. As Maria Tatar points out in her essay “‘Violent Delights’ in Children’s Literature,” “to understand violence’s hold on the child’s imagination, it is important to distinguish between burlesque violence, which depends for its effect on distortion and exaggeration, and retaliatory violence, which turns on the notion of physical punishment. Children often respond with undisguised glee to both” (72). Children’s harm narratives, of course, make use of both these types of violence. As Tatar puts it, however, enjoyment may come from the “staging of surreal excess” or lack of self- restraint in adults as much as violence itself (72).lv Ultimately, though it might be argued that even some of the most

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gratuitously violent narratives use violence to teach the virtues of perseverance, the fact remains that early children's narratives consistently manage to teach this quality without this degree of graphic violence against children. That harm narratives are used as plot devices within other genres, such as school stories, indicates, to me, that the pleasure of horror and suspense used in narratives like “Imprudence” remains a fixture in the form. This is not to say that suspense is incapable of education. As Caroline Levine has sensibly argued, suspense acts a tool for helping people open themselves to alternate realities. By guessing the ending of a narrative, and often getting it wrong, people learn to accept their own limitations, especially as concerns the intellectual life and the lives of others, according to Levine. Still, the formula these harm narratives rely on limits this kind of learning through suspense: rather than open us to a host of possibilities, anyone familiar with these harm narratives must understand that, at any given time, there are only two or three possible conclusions. Will the child be harmed again, or will it stop? Will the child die or live? Whereas cautionary tales drive the plot by forbidding something and then portraying the child ignoring this instruction—the reader can easily guess who will be punished—in many harm narratives entertainment comes only from acts of harm or punishment. Still, that there are questions to be answered tells us much about the entertainment-value inherent in the genre: even the most simple acts of suspense indicate the presence of plot. Rather than an essay on the movement of the spheres or a moral lecture on the virtues of charity, harm narratives indulge in story. Harm Narratives and Fairy Tales The early genre (and its attendant criticism) that comes closest to combining the kind of harm and entertainment employed by the children’s harm narratives—in which harm is part reading’s pleasure rather than its cost—are fairy tales like those written by the Grimms. These fairy tales are very like harm narratives directed at children, and their violence is a significant part of their appeal.lvi As Maria Tatar has pointed out in The Hard Facts of the Grimms' Fairy Tales and Off With Their Heads!, these early popular collections are not only full of violence, they actually exacerbate

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the violence found in the original, oral tales.lvii By amplifying the violence in the original folktales and by adding explicit morals to their stories, the Grimms' fairy tales, according to Tatar, “masquerade as educational tales but are in reality sadistic stories aimed at controlling behavior” (Off With Their Heads 32). Interestingly, Tatar demonstrates that morals, in the form of rhyming couplets, were added by the Grimms as they attempted to make adult stories more appropriate for children. The didacticism is unambiguous and easy to identify—the moral of the story appears, labeled “moral” at the end of each tale. Tatar draws comparisons between the violence depicted in early children's books like Dorothy Kilner's The Village School (1795) and fairy tales, though she largely focuses on the later, nineteenth-century stories like Heinrich Hoffman’s Struwwelpeter. At the same time, Tatar indicates an important distinction between the two genres: fairy tales place violence in another realm and thus avoid the implication that child readers are as vulnerable as the abused fairytale characters. The Grimms, Tatar explains, “were careful to eliminate violence whenever it appeared in too realistic a setting” (Hard Facts 20).lviii Children are excited by fairytales, Tatar asserts, because they identify with trial and tribulation—not because they believe that fairy tale characters are real or because they feel like the characters are in material aspects similar to them (Hard Facts 21). However, placing harm in the realm of fantasy significantly distinguishes fairytales from realist children’s harm narratives, which portray harm to children who are more similar to the children reader. I would argue that realistic harm narratives, thus, have to walk a fine balance between encouraging and discouraging reader identification. Too little identification, and the reader might not learn; too much, and the reader may experience too much discomfort to continue. Like harm narratives, fairytales exploit harm and punishment for fun and entertainment value.lix Certainly, children might get much of the same entertainment from a fairytale and a harm narrative—they undoubtedly have in common an interest in violation and punishment. While this genre has something in common with the children’s harm narrative, however, its depiction of violence is by

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no means either the only or most direct source in terms of literary or folk history. The English ballad commonly known as “The Babes in the Wood,” originally titled “The Children in the Wood,” tells the story of two good orphaned children who are murdered by their uncle. The ballad depicts greed and bodily harm to children for entertainment, rather than educational, value and, according to Maureen McLane, was “first registered with the Stationer’s Company in London October 15, 1595” and has a long history of revision and republication from that date well into the nineteenth century (135). Randolph Caldecott even issued an elaborate, full-color illustrated children’s version in 1880. Unlike the Grimms' fairytales and “The Babes in the Wood,” which were revised from adult folk media, the children's harm narratives I study were explicitly and originally written for children. They feature “real” seeming children in real- world situations, a contextual difference that moves the narrative thrust from a hero overcoming oppression to, simply, children being hurt and oppressed. As such, harm narratives must go out of their way to minimize threats to the reader. They do this, in large part, by employing an omniscient narrator who discourages one-to-one identification. More than lay out moral dictates for young girls and boys (though they do undertake this to some extent), the formal elements of children's harm narratives—their placement in collections and embedded in narratives, their narrative tropes and types, the narrator's perspective and their relationship to the reader—all work to warn children of the potential for random violence in the world while simultaneously encouraging a world-view that enjoys and thus perpetuates representations of violence. By glossing over the painful elements of harm (the body’s sensations and the victims thoughts and feelings) harm narratives indulge in violence-as-entertainment, but they also expose the existence of harm within the domestic sphere. The Form of Harm Narratives The two subtypes of harm narratives—one involving cautionary harm and one involving gratuitous harm—have in common a few, distinct and identifiable formal elements. They share an omniscient narrative perspective, a confidential

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tone toward the reader, the common trope of laying ultimate blame at the feet of parents, rather than children, and a paratextual location as they invariably exist in collections or as embedded narratives. With very few, if any, exceptions, harm narratives are characterized by their extradiagetic, heterodiegetic narration. Most often, these stories are told by an unknown narratorial voice, though occasionally, as in Dorothy Kilner's Histories of a Great Many Boys and Girls, harm narratives are embedded stories, told by a mother, perhaps to her young daughter. All narrators tend to have a god-like omniscience (closely following novelistic convention of the period), which they demonstrate, especially in longer stories and novels, by introducing the protagonist at length and by setting up a world for the story. “Flora: Or, the Deserted Child,” (Emily Taylor, 1820) for example begins “Near a pleasant village in the county of Surrey lived a widow lady”—not with Flora at all. Significantly, these narrators very rarely use their omniscience to access the mind of the harmed protagonist. Returning to the examples used at the beginning of this chapter, whereas “The Benighted Child” does give access to the protagonist's mind, demonstrating her thought process for the young, learning reader, in “Imprudence” we never access the harmed child's thoughts. This is an important distinction between harm narratives and true cautionary or moral tales, and harm narratives and it-narratives. For a story that aims to teach through rationality and reason, access to the character's thoughts—her regret, her desire to improve—humanizes her and demonstrates what a reasonable reaction might look like. Moral and cautionary tales have this in common with it-narratives like The Adventures of a Pincushion, which directly espouse some kind of lesson. Whereas the it-narrative uses first- person (extra- or intra-diegetic, autodiegetic) narration to humanize the object, to give thoughts and feelings to things, the harm narrative's detached narration thingifies the child. We might witness his or her distress, but the style of narration discourages us from imagining ourselves in the child's shoes. We might guess at his or her pain, but the narrative doesn't require that we do so by explaining it in detail. It allows us to gloss over the fictional child's distress by stating that harm has

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occurred without providing an excess of detail. For all that harm preoccupies these narratives, the stories themselves are often short, enabling a kind of perfunctory labeling of harm as such without encouraging readers to imagine the child’s state of mind by providing access to it. By operating in this manner, the harm narrative positions the child reader (and adult reader, for that matter) in the position of onlooker. We are closer to the harmer than we are to the harmed child, because we, at least for the moment, are in a position of safety. The harm narrative trades on this important distinction for, if the child reader were truly distressed by a story, he or she might not be inclined to read another one. Instead, the reader is amused and excited by the protagonist's mishaps. The exceptions to this formal component are notable. Out of the fifty harm narratives I’ve encountered, only two explicitly adopt many of the harm narrative’s conventions while encouraging empathy with the harmed child: Ellen, the Teacher and Harriet Martineau’s The Crofton Boys (1844).lx While adopting much of the harm narrative's model (especially the inclusion of gratuitous harm to little moral end), these stories exact a degree of pity from the reader through their use of free indirect discourse. Unlike like standard harm narratives, these give us access to the thoughts and feelings of the child characters. They are distinctive because we are given access to their feelings and sensations, their mortification and their pain. Ellen's good faith and high morals under persecution are memorable, as is Hugh Crofton's wish for death after losing his leg. Both of these evoke highly-individualized pity for the protagonist rather than fear, anxiety rather than enjoyment. And both have been credited with inspiring canonical Victorian novels—Ellen, the Teacher, Jane Eyre, and The Crofton Boys, The Mill on the Floss (1860).lxi That the child reader is meant to be fundamentally separated from the harmed child character is emphasized by the occasional narratorial bid for collaboration. Omniscient narrators are often attributed familial titles: many of the books use familial ties in their titles, as in Stories By a Mother (1818). These motherly omniscient harm narrators reach out of the text, addressing the implied reader (or, occasionally, addressing a textual narratee that aligns closely with the

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implied reader). In “The Consequences of Fear of Cats” the young mother makes an explicitly didactic bid to her addressee: “at length she was so entangled, she could move no longer, and something pulled her down to the ground: and what do you think all this was? Why, not a cat, but a thick bramble hedge” (79). In moments like this one, the narrator places the child listener or reader in a position of knowledge. Like the narrator, the child narratee recognizes that a fear of cats is a silly thing. Similarly, in “Beauty but Skin Deep” (1831) the narrator sides with the child reader by poking fun at the harmed character: “I cannot tell you how often she was laughed at for this folly” (1). Presuming that the child narratee would never be so stupid as to fall prey to vanity, the narrator gives the reader room to laugh at the protagonist, decreasing any likelihood of sympathy between reader and character. The confiding omniscient narrator is in effect a distancing device, a use that departs from the narratorial model Robyn Warhol proposes in Gendered Interventions: Narrative Discourse in the Victorian Novel, in which engaging narrators reach out of the text in order to convince and convert their readers while winning sympathy for their characters. I am not here disagreeing with Warhol’s reading of engaging narration, as she relies on a specific historical and cultural context for her interpretation. The child reader of a harm narrative necessitates a different contextual understanding. Sympathy may be garnered in these narratives, but it is directed toward the morally right adult narrator rather than the character-victim. These poor characters—the vain girl in “Beauty but Skin Deep” is burned and horribly maimed—are doubly victimized by the narrative. They are laughed at for their flaws (demonstrating, too, that we hardly need the harm that comes later), and then they are brutalized for them. And this brutality runs throughout the harm narrative genre, encouraging readers to enjoy the harm characters suffering, and encouraging distance from them. One of the oddities of the genre is that, while on the one hand it abuses child characters for their faults, on the other it frequently relieves them of any real blame, placing it instead at the feet of their incompetent parents. In Mary Elliott's Industry and Idleness (1812), idle Kate loses everything and starves—but the fault is surely

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not hers. Even the book places blame primarily on the parents for spoiling her and encouraging her idleness. Similarly, in Mary Martha Sherwood’s Dangerous Sport (1815), Robert's main flaws are gullibility and a lack of moral firmness, which lead him to shoot someone, but these are the consequence of a dead mother and absent father. And in W. F. Sullivan’s The Young Truants (1817), boy and girl protagonists go wrong because they have an overly doting father and an idiot of a mother. Brown notes in her discussion of the overly good girls who are harmed and even die in sentimental narratives, that “they maintain and manifest their virtues absolutely independently of their parents” (82). Given the lack of capable parenting in these narratives, the real wonder is that children end up with any virtues, not that they have faults. Surely this is an educational tool, used to scare parents into being more attentive to their own children or, as I argued in the school stories, encouraging children to think about systematic failures as opposed to individual ones.lxii At the same time, assigning blame for moral mismanagement to mothers and fathers rather than children only increases the brutality of the texts when they then whip and burn, drown and shoot child characters who are, it seems, innocent of everything but being born. Their flaws are not their fault. But, the texts harm them anyway, thus inscribing a worldly-logic that rewards the aggressive and the negligent while punishing the innocent, further severing harm from education.lxiii Finally, harm narratives rarely stand alone. With the exception of Mary Martha Sherwood's tales, which were published cheaply and individually,lxiv most harm narratives come as part of a collection or anthology, rarely but sometimes titled something indicative of what lies inside—”cautionary tales “ or “moral tales,” or, in the case of the Darton books referenced above “Unusual Accidents.” Frequently, however, harm narratives are more innocuously titled, making them extremely difficult to locate or identify in archives and library catalogues. With titles like A Present for a Little Boy (1799), A Present for a Little Girl (1797), and A Holyday Present (D. Kilner 1788), harm narratives are often wrapped up in sweet, saccharine-titled packages. They are just the books a well-meaning adult would buy for a child relative or friend.

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Often they are presented, as in A Present for a Little Boy (1799) as a series of unrelated narratives. While in some cases harm narratives are anthologized together, in others they are combined with other types of stories—true moral tales, object narratives, and histories, for example. Amusingly, it seems like these harm narratives are used to entice child readers. They are often presented at the beginning of mixed collections, as in the case of Mary Elliott's Original Tales, for the Holidays (1830). In the first story, “Village Events; Or, the Danger of Fire-Works,” Frank is left alone too frequently and falls prey to a mischievous boy. His little sister is injured and nearly kidnapped, and Frank himself eventually dies while handling fireworks. As is usually the case in narratives like this, the truly bad boy gets off without a scratch. The remainder of Original Tales is made up of actual moral tales, in which a child reforms from bad habits without the need for violence, or in which good people demonstrate their goodness. Compared to the first story, these are almost unredeemably boring, with little action and much exposition. By contrast, in A Present for a Little Boy (anon. 1798) we are treated to series of stories about children being stung by bees and wasps, falling down wells, and getting caught in windmills. Though not all of the stories in the collection are harm narratives, there are enough to keep the reader guessing and engaged, predicting which child will come to a gruesome end, and why, and how, at the beginning of every story. Harm narratives also come grafted onto and embedded into larger narratives the likes of which I have examined in previous chapters: school stories and it narratives and in the broader range of genres available to children in this period. Harm narratives are not necessary to these other genres, but they can make the texts more entertaining. In The Young Liar (W. F. Sullivan 1817), a work that is primarily a school story, a spoiled child who nonetheless has “many good qualities” (9) gets into debt and lies at school—poor behavior, to be sure, but by no means uncommon in the school story genre. His punishment is exorbitant: “the doctor ordered him stripped, and prepared for punishment [. . .] the servant-man entered with a new birch-broom, which the doctor opened, and gave a sprig to every boy in the school; the culprit was now fastened to a desk, and each young gentleman advanced in

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rotation, and inflicted a stripe” [. . .] till the number was unsparingly bestowed from the shoulders to the hams” (43- 44). This episode is almost Sadeian in the disproportionality of the punishment , with its lingering attention to detail, its emphasis on enumeration, and its reduction of the boy's body to bits and pieces, shoulders and hams.lxv Later, the boy is killed in a duel after slandering his former schoolmates. lxvi Embedded harm narratives, most often presented as educational or entertaining tales, are so frequently present in other genres that they are practically ubiquitous. In Mary Hughes’s The Rebellious Schoolgirl (1821), a girl breaks an arm after jumping out a window. She nearly dies, though her intentions were good. Dorothy Kilner's The Village School (1784) is rife with descriptions of children being punished—some despite not having done anything. In Harriet Martineau's The Crofton Boys, the boy protagonist loses a leg through no fault of his own. The prevalence of harm narratives suggests something about child life in this period—it emphasizes the vulnerability of children, to those around them, to the haphazardness of life, and even to the miseducation of their parents. By presenting these stories in compiled editions and collections, and as portions of larger narratives, moreover, authors and editors normalize the kind of harm and violence portrayed in these texts as well as its abundance. They aren't offered as anomalies but rather as part of the mundane and everyday. Though harm narratives are entertaining, they are rarely given more narrative importance than a trip to an art gallery or the description of a holiday. Still, these incidents momentarily drive otherwise staid narratives forward, increasing their readability by providing action and plot, and mitigating some of the didacticism inherent in early eighteenth- and early-nineteenth century narratives. Excessive harm, omniscient and collaborative narration, parental blame and paratextual location are characteristics of harm narratives that treat boys and girls equally. Assuming a cross-gendered audience, the “you” addressed by a narrator could be male of female, single or many. For all these formally-consistent approached to gender differences, however, harm narratives do not treat boys and girls equally. Instead, they use the form of the plot

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to expose differences between the two that are neither biological nor affective— rather, these differences lie in cultural treatment. Cautionary Harm Narratives and Gendered Injury A significant portion of what I am calling harm narratives have been mislabeled as “moral” or cautionary” because they contain a real and clear element of didacticism, warning children not to engage in any number of behaviors or self indulgences. A major portion of my argument in this chapter, however, is that when critics use terms like “cautionary” and “moral tale” they are misapplying a generic title and consequently missing the harm narrative’s more prominent formal and generic components, not the least of which is the excessive display of child harm. To reiterate, in even the most didactic of these harm narratives, portrayed harm exceeds the rationality called for by moral and cautionary tales. If we must think of these tales as cautionary, a better term is certainly “cautionary harm narratives” which keeping these tales under the rubric of harm while acknowledging their educative thrust.lxvii In contrast to straightforwardly moral tales and even the cautionary tales described by Tatar in this chapter’s opening section, many cautionary harm tales often operate through threat, scaring children out of misbehavior through negative examples rather than providing a clear moral or by encouraging rationality. Characters are not guaranteed to learn from, or even live through, their mistakes, another trait of these two genres. Most significantly, cautionary harm narratives treat girls and boys differently. Girls are always punished for their own crimes; often, they are also punished for boys’ crimes while the perpetrators get off scot-free. In this, cautionary harm narratives portray an imbalance that might be said to be immoral, and this trait fundamentally separates them from the cautionary or moral tales we are more used to seeing. Cautionary harm narratives are less moral than they are about harm—they are interested in how harm happens to people, and who is at fault for harm. And while they might well try to teach children how to behave by instilling fear in them, if we fail to think carefully about what kinds of harm the texts regularly portray, how they portray harm, and how they teach what—in short, if we are inattentive to their

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form—it is all too easy to pass over the way they formally inscribe life expectations for girls and boys through typology and repetition. The most significant difference between cautionary harm narratives and cautionary or moral tales broadly construed is that these harm narratives use injury to differentiate between boys and girls. Harm itself is subject to gendering, and this is the result of both typological labeling and plot forms. As is common in early children's literature, fictional child characters are endowed with moral faults that were perceived as typical of boys and girls—and notably, these faults are divided up along gender lines. Boys are often “saucy” and “daring” with “no shame, and very little sense” (Sherwood, Dangerous Sport 6). Like Philip in Mary Elliott's “Self-Will” (1810), they are frequently headstrong tyrants. They are prone to violence— especially toward animals—and they are greedy, especially when it comes to food. These are not qualities their fictional girl counterparts share. While all of these narratives follow a set plot trajectory (set-up, misbehavior, punishment, conclusion), the real difference in their treatment of boys and girls lies less in the way the narratives position faults than in the way they portray punishment. While the range of punishments varies, victims rarely do. Whereas girls are directly punished for their misdemeanors, like characters in a Fielding novel, boys are rarely directly punished for their crimes (though they may be punished for someone else’s). They almost never suffer more than a stomachache. As in Mary Elliott’s The Greedy Child Cured (1820), boys frequently eat themselves sick, but not too sick. They always live. And boy perpetrators are almost never on the receiving end of harm in the way girls are. Although in some rare cases they undergo the harm girls do, even these are most often mitigated by a remove—a boy may be harmed for his actions, but only in an embedded narrative, a story told to another fictional boy. Rather, harm is meted out to someone else—a sister, a male friend or cousin—and while the guilty boy must suffer from conscience, he rarely is physically harmed himself. In Mary Martha Sherwood's The Hedge of Thorns (1819), for instance, a boy's curiosity about what is on the other side of the hedge results in his sister's injury. She is “scratched deeply” and left bleeding; in fact, she nearly dies (26).

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Similarly, in The Effects of Disobedience (anon. 1847), George steals and then decides to roast an apple: he and his little sister Mary are burned in the fire. But whereas George heals, Mary is far more severely injured: her pain seems to be ongoing, as, by the end of the story, she is still unwell with no good health in sight.lxviii Boys shoot other childrenlxix and they put them at risk of smallpox.lxx Their crimes are truly severe—they put other people's lives at risk time after time, but never suffer anything more significant than guilt themselves. It might well be possible to think about boys and their guilt within the framework Macpherson provides in Harm's Way. There, she argues that the novel teases apart how thing liability evolved to take account of injuries to persons by things: but also made persons responsible for the actions of things and did so by turning them into things [. . .] this is a model of liability in which the usual criteria for blameworthiness—intentionality, malice, forethought, foresight—are rendered superfluous. (15) Macpherson also describes Henry Fielding’s novel Joseph Andrews as” a comic revision of novel form [that is] one and the same as an attack on realism’s tragic—its feminist—logic of strict liability” (101). In Fielding novels “there is not harm and there are no accidents”; because people don’t get hurt, works like Joseph Andrews are generically comic (Macpherson 98).They avoid placing blame on people and, indeed, fault blamers. “The only harm men suffer in a Fielding novel,” Macpherson notes, “is the harm of being called guilty when they are innocent (111). Like a Fielding novel, guilty boys often go unharmed, except for their guilt. Unlike a Fielding novel, accused boys are never portrayed as innocent. Harm narratives might be said to negotiate the implications of both comic and tragic genres by letting some characters off the hook while portraying harm to others. The genre doesn’t quite engage in strict liability, which Macpherson describes as “tragic—and therefore ethical [. . .] profoundly indifferent to the possibility and the practice of recognition,” precisely because these works do seem to be premised on the idea that the young boys should have recognized their ethical

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responsibility to others (Macpherson 18). It is true that “one is obliged to another whether or not she likes her, whether or not she knows her, whether or not she acknowledges her” (Macpherson 21), but to some extent it might be true to argue that these works of children's literature—where boys are concerned—are reacting to the novel as Macpherson reads it by at once acknowledging that boys’ vulnerabilities are different and not as severe as girls’ and by forcing boys to recognize their obligations. In the eyes of children's book writers and teachers, at least, recognition matters, or teaching boys to recognize matters. Boys who recognize their responsibilities may, in the end, be better husbands and fathers. They may be less likely to shoot innocent bystanders or push their sisters off cliffs. There is one main exemption to the general rule that boys will not suffer for their faults: boys are whipped and beaten by others as punishment, while girls often avoid this kind of punishment. The spankings—especially when operating under educational theories that would avoid physically harming the child as punishment— are as invariably excessive as the rest of the harm featured in these narratives. These works fall somewhat outside the realm of the standard cautionary tale, however, in that they don't reinforce notions of natural consequence. Spankings are inherently artificial—they punish the child when the world has not punished him enough, and they reinforce rules through direct threat rather than rational. Thus, spankings and beatings in these tales might be said to be gratuitous. They are unnecessary in terms of the stories' didactic methods. The tales immediately bring to mind Freud’s assertions in “A Child is being Beaten” regarding beating fantasies as sexual pleasures, but again there are pleasurable means of response to these stories that are not necessarily sexual. They work to evoke fear, pleasure, and relief in the child reader: fear that he might be spanked, the pleasure felt in the narrative by the spanker, and relief that he is not at the present being spanked. If we were following the logic of a cautionary tale or of a narrative subscribing to Rousseau's model of education, we would expect narratives to show children the consequences of their actions. But even when boys put themselves in harm's way, they rarely suffer consequences. If anything, these texts teach that

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while boys may be susceptible to harm from other boys, avoiding misbehavior has little to do with keeping boys safe from harm. Given their dual audience of boys and girls, these texts have loaded implications. On the one hand, it might well be argued that the texts unveil boys’ relative power in their social structure and aim to impress upon them a sense of responsibility. Bad boys, by reading these texts, might realize how vulnerable others are, especially girls, and reform. At the same time, girls are not the only victims in these novels. As often as not, the injured party is another boy—a cousin, a friend, or a passing stranger. The consistency with which male aggressors evade harm reinforces the idea that it is better to be aggressive than to be a victim, better to be a bad boy than a good or bad girl—or, for that matter, a good boy. “Good” children are portrayed as powerless against male aggression, and this is especially true of girls, for whom aggression is not portrayed as an option. Even girls who try to reason with their brothers are subject to their harmful influence. In stark contrast to this model, girls are invariably the victims of their own faults (in addition to those of others). Faults that don't result in physical harm are, it seems, quite rare. Girls are less prone to physical violence, violent play, and greed than boys are—though passionate, they are not tyrants. As the narrator of “Greediness Cured” tells us (in Stories by a Mother), “Little Girls, I am happy to say, are very seldom greedy; for as they are more delicate than boys, they ought to be less like pigs” (17). But girls are by no means faultless. Solomon Lovechild’s Sketches of Little Girls (1840?) lists the common types in its subtitle: “good-natured,” “thoughtless,” “vain,” slovenly,” “forward,” “snappish,” and “awkward.” Even girls with relatively minor flaws, such as preferring fun to study (surely understandable in a child) are severely punished. In The History of Little Fanny (1810), an expensive, full-color paper doll and narrative poem, Fanny embodies many girlish flaws. She is idle, a slave to amusement, and vain. She pouts and disagrees with her mother—and by the third stanza, she's a poor, hungry beggar girl. It would be logical to think that Fanny's fall is related to her faults, but it isn't. As it turns out, Fanny is taken outside by a maid, and then kidnapped by a beggar

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who steals her clothes. Not quite a runaway, Fanny is victimized by the adults around her—not the least by her mother, who hired such an untrustworthy maid. However, Fanny's learned industriousness (she works selling fish and bread) does bring her some good—she is returned home. This story enforces that positive virtues can help one overcome the misfortunes that life metes out to us—but by refusing to link Fanny's fall to her misbehavior and by placing blame on adults, the author of this Little Fanny emphasizes the arbitrariness of fate. Most frequently of all, girls are vain. Time and time again, girls are treated to harm as result of their vanity. In Mary Elliott's “Beauty But Skin Deep” (collected in Amusement for Little Girls' Leisure Hours, among other anthologies), vain little Ellen goes to a party where her clothes are torn during a game of blind man's bluff, much to her chagrin. In a fully moral or cautionary tale, this would perhaps be the end of her embarrassments. But when Ellen tries to look at herself in a mirror on the mantle she catches fire.lxxi Burned and permanently scarred, Ellen does live to learn from her mistakes and grow. Similarly, in The Entertaining History of Patty Proud (anon. 1812), Patty is brutally deformed because her mother makes her “wear a steel shape to make her look genteel” (14). The steel shape is so tight that it makes Patty into a hunchback—but isn't this her mother's fault, rather than hers? Patty is made fun of for her pride, but this fault is instilled in her by a parent. Girls experience physical harm for their faults: they are burned and bent, kidnapped and starved. They also undergo something akin to rape with an unsettling frequency. In Samuel Archer’s “The Story of Miss Biddy Johnson” (1795, in The New Lilliputian Magazine) Biddy, a prideful girl, goes into town alone and is kidnapped by thieves who then “stript off all her clothes and were going to kill her” (12). Biddy, like girls in books fit for children, is saved in the nick of time by Tommy Trusty, who offers Biddy some clothing. Similarly, in The Adventure of the Little Girl in the Wood (anon. 1808), the little girl is presented “without shoes or stockings, or any covering on her head, and stript of all her clothes, except her very undergarment” (10). The narrative lingers on this little girl, describing her tears, her demeanor, and her surprising beauty. The girl narrates her tale, describing how she

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fell asleep in the woods after running away from school and awakened only to find herself being systematically stripped by a group of (male) thieves. These stories are clear echoes of the attempted rapes repeated time and time again in eighteenth- century novels for adults. In Samuel Richardson’s Pamela, for instance, Pamela recalls “I pulled off my Stays, and my Stockens, and my Gown, all to an Under- petticoat” when “O dreadful! Out rush’d my Master, in a rich silk and silver Morning Gown” (63). Little girls, like Pamela are treated as objects for voyeuristic pleasure. In contrast, in the 1812 Adventures of Little Thomas Dellow (Anon. 1812) Thomas is kidnapped while playing outside. Notably, no real harm comes to Thomas—he is returned home happy and in good health. His kidnapper is merely some poor, mentally-ill woman. This different treatment of the two genders emphasizes the degree to which female bodies are more vulnerable than male bodies. The stories work hard to keep these from becoming explicitly sexual assault narratives. In each of these cases, we are explicitly told that no physical harm comes to the girls, and, in the case of The Little Girl in the Wood, we are given to understand that the thieves intend to sell the girl's garments. Still, whereas being stripped down for a whipping is predominantly reserved for boys, being stripped and nearly “killed” or similarly violated by strangers is the girl's lot. And while the girls may have their faults, this stripping clearly happens because the girls are outside in the world. Their stripping is made public in a way that a boy's beating is not; girls’ bodies are exposed to strangers, as well as to the reader, and this is an important difference in the way these two strippings are treated. In the more rare instances of boys' being stripped at school, the body is exposed only to familiar eyes, and the focus remains primarily on the whipping—on the brutality of didacticism rather than the male form.. In contrast, in the case of girl characters, the reader experiences the surprise and the interest of the unfamiliar viewer. The emphasis remains on the female body on display to hostile strangers. The logic in these tales is more disturbing than surprising to any student of nineteenth-century literature. Still, it is worth reiterating that, taken as a whole, harm narratives affirm and expose a worldly-rationale that punishes feminine faults

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while taking an ameliorative stance toward masculine ones. Bad behavior in boys might be punished, but often isn’t; bad behavior in girls is always punished, and often so is good. Immoral Tales As we have seen, cautionary harm narratives dole out punishment in response to child's crime or vice. Girls are punished, severely, while boys rarely are harmed themselves. More often than not, punishments are outrageously disproportionate to the crime, and frequently only tangentially related. Vice, these narratives teach us, doesn't pay. But they also teach another lesson: that often the person who pays for vice is not the guilty party. After all, Emmeline (a silly girl) and The Hedge of Thorns' guiltless little sister are scratched and injured. Equally, Ellen (a vain girl) and little Mary (her brother's victim) are burned. In this disproportionality and tangentiality, cautionary tales embrace a kind of amorality that makes them kin to the more purely harm narratives that will be the subject of the remainder of this chapter. Harm narratives are not limited to overdone, overblown cautionary tales. The genre also includes what I would call immoral or amoral tales: these tales use harm more explicitly as entertainment. Rather than teach something through overblown harm, these tales settle for depicting harm to children who are defined by their unluckiness. Orphans, beggars, and kidnaping victims, these children are one type—unfortunate. Given that this harm is invariably inflicted upon children, these tales move so far from teaching morals that they might be said to do the opposite by profiting from the reader's pleasure in witnessing violence to children. Like cautionary tales, these texts have set goals and even type characters, but they are a bit less formulaic in the telling. Indeed, they aren't very different from the kinds of narrative techniques relied upon by the 1990s sensation-series, Goosebumps—episodic stories, but those which always result in some kind of violence or harm. As Heider Mesmer argues about Goosebumps, “Stine promotes gratuitous, ritualistic violence to set forth a random and irrational reality. Other authors use violence symbolically to convey larger messages” (110). We might think

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of symbolic violence as that which, however haphazardly, operates in cautionary harm narratives. The two strands of the harm narrative—cautionary and amoral— correspond in their lack of a “causal relationship between events, no linkage of character's actions to the conclusions, and ultimately no hope” (Mesmer 112). In other words, as in the gratuitously violent 90s fiction that worried parents and teachers, early, violent children's fiction failed to link morality with good or bad conclusions. Such stories defy the logic of both the mid-twentieth century Hays Code and eighteenth-century Samuel Richardson’s recommendations for moral fictions: that good characters are rewarded, while bad characters are punished. In Goosebumps and early children's fiction, the “reader experiences chaos” (Mesmer 113). But whereas in this twentieth-century series “the lack of a logical pattern leads the reader to believe that humans have no role in perpetuating or stopping violence” (Mesmer113), early children's harm narratives emphasize the human role in perpetuating violence. While they do make nods to the perpetual, chaotic risk inherent in just living in the world, harm narratives also acknowledge that people, children and adults alike, inflict violence on each other for no real reason. For every child nearly run down by a horse (as in Kilner’s The Memoirs of a Pincushion) another is neglected by her family (As in the Lambs’ Mrs. Leicester's School). More frequently than in cautionary harm tales, gratuitous harm narratives tend to be portions of larger stories. Whereas cautionary harm tales follow a standard, if inflated, narrative arc, gratuitous harm narratives, like “Imprudence,” cited at the beginning of this chapter, work in an upward trajectory before flatlining. Essentially, we are presented with the picture of childish innocence; then, someone or something begins to harm the child; this harm is excessive, causing pity and perhaps horror; finally, the narrative cuts off with the child's death or excessive harm. In some larger narratives, in which the harm narrative is part of a more comprehensive story, we might learn about how the child overcame his or her injury, but this is rare. Most frequently, these narratives contain little denouement. While gratuitous harm narratives share with cautionary harm narratives

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formal elements like narrative perspective and relationship to the reader, they don't rely on typological personal faults. Instead, these narratives stick to one consistent type: harmed children are, while perhaps endowed with some childish flaws, essentially good. By treating these children more realistically, normalizing their minor imperfections and not dwelling on them, these texts compound our sense of grievance when the child is mistreated or harmed. Boys and girls are treated equally in this regard. Harriet Martineau's The Crofton Boys repeatedly depicts little boys being physically tormented at school before involving her Hugh Crofton in an accident. After his leg is injured during a snowball fight and then amputated, Hugh is devastated. At one point, he even confesses that he would rather have died. While this narrative continues on—ostensibly to emphasize Hugh's endurance throughout his recovery—Martineau expounds upon Hugh's continued suffering, including his humiliating limp and his inability to take part in everyday activities. Similarly, the protagonist of Ellen, the Teacher is repeatedly harmed despite her breathtaking goodness. Abused and humiliated throughout much of the book, the narrative culminates when “Miss Collinson sprang from her seat, and laying her hand on the thick clustering ringlets that hung on Ellen's forehead, she dragged her by the hair into a closet at the far end of a long passage, repeatedly striking her with the utmost violence” (87). Afraid to lose her position, Ellen covers up the beating and later is sent to the workhouse for her pains. While again ostensibly lauding them, the narrative makes Ellen's virtues a stick with which to beat her. Rising above those who wish to harm her only makes Ellen more vulnerable to them. Types: The Unlucky Ones Whereas cautionary harm narratives leave some chance as to whom will get hurt, especially if the protagonist is male, gratuitous harm narratives emphasize that chance itself decides who is harmed. The hurt child is consistently one type of child: an unlucky child. In some cases, as in The Crofton Boys, the unlucky child is a hapless young man of good family, who tends to be blamed for things that are not his fault. In Mary Elliott’s 1819 The Wax-Taper: Or, the Effects of Bad Habits (another deceptively-named tale), for example, the narrative begins with Esther, who is a

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typically rotten child and who, as typically, reforms over the course of the story. Esther has some mishaps—she ruins a doll's dress and loses a bird when it flies away—but all of the harm in this narrative comes at the end. There, Esther's little sister watches her pretend to seal a letter and, a few minutes later, actually lights a match and burns herself, terribly. She is only saved by Esther's “strong presence of mind” (38). Afterward, Esther feels guilty, believing that she had taught her little sister a bad habit. But here's the thing: at this point in the narrative Esther is fully reformed. She hasn't done anything wrong, anything explicitly or implicitly forbidden in her childish play. The harm to her sister is gratuitous because it happens by chance. And this reading is backed up by yet another embedded narrative about a boy who eats rat poison which had (unluckily) been placed in a candy jar—a bizarre place to put rat poison, to be sure. Of course, he dies painfully. These narratives remove morality from the equation, emphasizing the haphazardness of chance and the vulnerability of children while providing narrative excitement for the child reader. As often, as in Ellen, the Teacher, “Flora: Or the Deserted Child,” or the many iterations of orphan children stories, the unlucky child is one, perhaps originally of good circumstance, who is for some reason or another without his or her parents. These orphaned children surely exist to call up some sympathy for the reader. As Margot Hillel notes, poetry about orphans was often used in the Victorian period “as a means to construct a particular image and to personalize the poor” (147). It's true that many orphan narratives aim to create sympathy for the orphaned child, and that many of these narratives end quite happily. Still, the fact remains that these orphan narratives dwell on the children’s destitution—their lack of clothes, their hard histories. In “The Little Adventurer” (1820, in Mary Elliott’s Something New From Aunt Mary) poor, honest William is the victim of a dead mother and an intemperate father. He nearly starves to death looking for work to support himself, and finds work on a ship only to be brutally treated by his captain, at one point being beaten with “a piece of thick rope [. . .] till the blood ran down his back” (44). As in “The Little Adventurer,” these stories dwell on the physical and narrative

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manifestations of harm occurring to children. In one instance orphans are luckier than others—they tend to have their fortunes reversed at one point or another. Though orphan narratives tend to end happily, moving from the initial tale of woe and harm to the foundling narrative we are so familiar with, thanks to Henry Fielding, the string that ties these tales together, and ties them to the broader harm narrative genre, is to some extent a matter of identity. In gratuitous harm narratives, children are invariably orphans, beggars, and kidnapped children. They are identified by the harm that has affected them, and it is only when their identity shifts to a more privileged state (say, for instance they are adopted or find their parents) that the harm ceases. Often this is signaled quite literally through a name change. In contrast, being orphaned is at times an event that sets off a spiral of bad luck, changing a fortunate child into an abused beggar. Ultimately, cautionary harm narratives and gratuitous harm narratives alike work to depict the extent to which neglect and misfortune impact child lives. But for the child reader, at least, there is little consistent moral lesson presented by them. In a gratuitous harm narrative, what is perhaps cause for excitement and plot development in a story is never transformed into something greater or more than the sum of its parts. In a cautionary harm narrative, the consistency with which male and female characters are treated undermines the idea that “goodness” results in happiness or bodily wholeness. If they teach anything, these harm narratives emphasize life's precariousness, especially exposing the extremes of feminine and female vulnerability—good children, including those boys who act with feminine compliancy and willingness rather than masculine assertion and aggressiveness, are more vulnerable to harm than are boys who will be boys. With their recursive cycles of harm mounted upon harm, harm narratives expose how one misfortune can become many. Children’s Harm Narratives and the Victorian Novel One need not look hard to find Victorian realist novels making use of the child harm narrative. In fact, despite being the only unnamed of the genres I’ve

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discussed so far, it is nonetheless easy to find these narratives being credited for their broader influenced, as Ellen, the Teacher is for Jane Eyre, and The Crofton Boys is for The Mill on the Floss. Combined with the Victorian novelists’ moral sensibilities and the real problem of abused children, it is no surprise that novels, like children's books, make use of a form that exposes child harm while improving the readability of otherwise uneventful narratives. Given that Dickens is attuned to the trials of children (especially considering his own childhood), it should come as no surprise to note that his books, too, have been compared to specific harm narratives. Richard Stein has compared Oliver Twist with “The Stolen Child,” arguing that “even when the story ends happily we recognize how close it came to not ending at all. [. . .] all these versions of the abduction plot, even in their most fabulous or didactic forms, for they stubbornly resist their own resolutions and close with a mixture of reassurance and lingering dread” (148). While Stein emphasizes these stories’ happy endings, his argument holds true for most, if not all harm narratives: that, whether the ending is happy or not, the conclusion itself matters less than the body of the book. Harm narratives, as Stein indicates, are less about conclusion than they are about middles. Like Stein, Sarah Gates has attributed characteristics of a Dickens novel to a specific children's work. In her analysis of Struwwelpeter and Great Expectations, Gates is right to question Margaret Cardwell and Robert Douglas-Fairhurst’s decision to attribute Pip and Herbert's conversation about his name to Mavor's The English Spelling Book;lxxii but she too argues that Dickens's novel was obviously reflective of and interacting with one harmful children's text—and a rather late one at that. Gates posits that Great Expectations embraces Struwwelpeter's “ambivalence” and “instability”—especially in the assurance that one will and can grow into a good young man. As I have demonstrated, violent early children's fiction consistently emphasizes these issues, preferring to highlight the world's lack of reassuring predictability (281). Indeed, this is the very point of my argument: that while it might be possible to point to individual authors and texts and representative or especially influential, we don't need these individuals. The sum of

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harm (or school, or object, or family) narratives is greater and more consistent than any individual part. The fact is that many of Dickens's child protagonists could be attributed to any number of these harm narratives. Little Nell could remind one of Little Lucylxxiii—or any other number of child protagonists who die good Christian deaths. David Copperfield, with his terrible parents, could be almost any poor, mistreated boy character. In Our Mutual Friend (1864-65), Gaffer's care to prevent Liz and Charley from setting themselves “afire or [falling] out of window” echoes the children's books as they describe how children might come to harm (28). The same goes for many characters brought to life by Victorian novelists. Though Ellen, the Teacher is credited with inspiring Jane Eyre with its graphic depiction of a bad children's school, the novel's opening chapters, which depict Jane being bludgeoned with a book by John Reed, or left frightened in the Red Room, or being sadly mistreated in general recall harm the narrative's formal dictum that harm be compounded. Helen Burns's later death and practical martyrdom recalls those of Lucy and Henry in Sherwood’s bestselling books, and even adult Bertha's fiery end mimics the end of too many girl children who are vain, spoiled, badly behaved. And although The Crofton Boys’ influence on The Mill on the Floss is supposedly limited to Eliot's depiction of lame Philip Wakem, here, too, the influence of children's harm narratives is profound. Though we might see the genre's influence throughout the novel, especially in its portrayal of Maggie and Tom, nowhere are its conventions more obvious than in the novel's final quarter in which Maggie, “Borne Along By the Tide” appears to have done wrong when in fact she has been the victim of circumstance. Maggie's punishment is not immediate, but like so many other female characters, she is ultimately harmed less for her own sins (Eliot is obviously in sympathy with her) than she is for those of others. Stephen's betrayal (letting the boat be taken by the tide) and Tom's cruelty ultimately and tangentially end in her death by drowning along with her brother. Though by drowning Tom is punished, too, for his treatment of Maggie, Stephen is a prime example of a man seldom receiving punishment for his moral crimes.

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Like the children's harm narratives before them, many Victorian novels call out the adults who neglect children, causing them misery. Jane Eyre declares to Mrs. Reed I shall remember how you thrust me back—roughly and violently thrust me back—into the red-room, and locked me up there, to my dying day, though I was in agony [. . .] and that punishment you made me suffer because your wicked boy struck me—knocked me down for nothing. I will tell anybody who asks me questions this exact tale. People think you a good woman, but you are bad, hard-hearted. You are deceitful!” (Brontë 39). Similarly, these narratives tell an “exact tale” time and time again to anyone who will listen—a tale of cruelty, neglect, and compounded miseries. Such novels take up some of the unusual didactic goals of the children's harm narrative. They expose children's vulnerabilities and guardians' cruelties to the adult reader, and they use pain as a plot device. They reinscribe the messiness of the world, and its moral chaos, in which children like Little Nell, Helen, and Maggie die while others live. But, with all their moralizing, their emphasis on the child's perspective, and their demands for reader empathy, these novels leave out a key component of the early harm narrative—that of fun. Or, at least, that of enjoyment. We are meant to feel sorry for Jane Eyre and Maggie Tulliver, not to take pleasure in their pain. Too often to be a direct match, realist novels heighten the morality of a genre concerned primarily with portraying harm. It is worth noting, at this point, one other arena in which children’s harm narrative’s influence may be measured, though it is a remove from the realist novel. In her 1859 narrative poem, Goblin Market, Christina Rossetti’s description of innocent Lizzie’s beating and stripping by the goblin men is unmistakably reminiscent of Emmeline’s “muslin frock [. . .] in rags and strips; her petticoat also torn to pieces” (Stories by a Mother 1818), Biddy Johnson, who is “stript of all her clothes” in The New Lilliputian Magazine” (12) and the girl of The Adventures of the Little Girl in the Wood who is “without shoes or stockings, or any covering on her

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head, and stript of all her clothes” (10). Lizzie’s injury and stripping mirror the itemized and particular details employed by these works, as well as their implications of sexual violation. Rossetti writes: One called her proud, Cross-grained, uncivil; Their tones waxed loud, Their looks were vile. Lashing their tails They trod and hustled her, Elbowed and jostled her, Clawed with their nails, Barking, mewing, hissing mocking, Tore her gown and soiled her stocking, Twitched her hair out by the roots, Stamped upon her tender feet, Held her hands and squeezed their fruits Against her mouth to make her eat. (394-407). While it may well be unexceptional for Lizzie to be harmed because someone else acted badly, Lizzie’s punishment is unusual because it is the result of another girl’s misdeed. The goblins, of course, have their own reasons for punishing her, and these are more in line with feminine failures: whether she really is or is not, they believe her “proud, cross-grained [and] uncivil.” The punishment for acting outside of gender norms is to be repeatedly subject to additive injury. One harm is not enough. Lizzie must be trod and hustled, elbowed and jostled. Rossetti’s formal repetition of “and” itself mimics the excessive nature of injury in children’s harm narratives. While it is not by any means new to read this scene as one of rape, Lizzie’s torn gown and soiled stockings place her in a different historical context than is usual. Lizzie’s injury and stripping mirror the itemized and particular details employed by these works, as well as their implications of sexual violation. Her violation—and especially her stripping—recalls children’s stories that similarly warn against

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strange men in the wood. Considering the poem within the generic trajectory of the harm narrative and the children’s tale, which the Rossetti so obviously takes as a model, pushes Goblin Market into the realm of amoral absurdity rather than Christian allegory. Wuthering Heights and Harm Thrilling, entertaining depictions of chaos, danger, and harm (especially to children) may not be in abundance among the Victorian novels that have survived popularly into the twenty-first century, but they aren't entirely absent, either. Emily Brontë's novel, Wuthering Heights makes much of the child harm narrative's conventions. On the one hand, Wuthering Heights is by no means a Fieldingesque romp like Joseph Andrews, in which harm is present but laughable and entertaining, not taken seriously. On the other, though Brontë never flinches from depicting hurt child bodies, Wuthering Heights possesses an entertaining quality that is perhaps the reason the novel was considered, if anything, even more scandalous and disturbing than Jane Eyre upon its publication. To twenty-first century scholars of the novel, it may seem counterintuitive to imagine that any initial discomfort with the novel should be attributed to its relationship to early children's books. Nonetheless, Wuthering Heights's fails to be cautionary. It fails to provide readers a moral framework, and it shows the world at its worst, a fact that contemporary reviewers of the novel acknowledged immediately: one complained that “There is not in the entire dramatis personae a single character which is not utterly hateful or thoroughly detestable” (Atlas 283), while another argued that “it is the providence of the artist to modify and in some cases refine what he beholds in the ordinary world” (Examiner 287). Wuthering Heights insists on dividing its world up into harm and harmed, lucky and unlucky, and it formally reflects children's harm narratives. Like them, Wuthering Heights relies on a detached and uncannily (given that it is actually told in first-person) knowing narrator, a hierarchical, modeled and moral relationship with the reader, predictable plot, and excessive punishment for its effect. With the possible exception of Heathcliff as he ages, those harmed in this text are inevitably

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children or young adults and, indeed, as Marille Seichepine points out, we might well think of Brontë's characters, even when grown, as children (because they never mature). Though Wuthering Heights eschews conventional morality even while depicting it, Brontë’s novel uses these conventions to great effect. Adapting and embracing the lessons taught by children's harm narratives, Wuthering Heights pushes on their boundaries and limitations. Finally, it demonstrates that the “chaos” taught and feared by children's harm narratives is in fact not chaos at all. Though one may luckily or unluckily be born into the right or wrong family, luckily or unluckily encounter a sweet or vicious dog, all are subject to a social order that is both predicated on and delights in violence. By moving child harm into the adult sphere—both by directing the novel to an adult audience, and by following child characters—Wuthering Heights reveals the extent to which conventional innocence and goodness expose vulnerable people to depredation and harm. Moving beyond hyperbolic depictions of violence and harm in the world, Wuthering Heights exposes the violence inherent in children’s harm narratives while making use of its forms. Though, as Joseph Carroll points out, Wuthering Heights has “[proven] exceptionally elusive to interpretation,” offering as it does differing takes on “human nature” in its first and second halves, scholars have nonetheless agreed that examining violence is a fruitful mode for analyzing the text (241-2). Perhaps Alexandra Lewis puts it best in her formal analysis of trauma: “Wuthering Heights is a novel steeped in violence and emotional abuse, stunned memory, and the prolonged agonies of aftermath. [. . .] each of Brontë's characters and narrators shown to experience (and, in Heathcliff's case, willfully to generate) varying forms of shock and terror which lead, in a number of instances, to traumatic injury apparently beyond the bounds of repair” (36).lxxiv The sheer abundance of violence in this novel has, I think, offered firm analytical ground for critics to stand on. Even so, those who have studied violence in Wuthering Heights have focused on only one or two violent models that lie within a larger spectrum of harm. Most often, critics consider Heathcliff the locus of violence and their object for study, leading to analyses of the colonial Other within the English world of Wuthering Heights and of

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domestic violence in the Heights and Grange households. For instance, Tabish Khair argues that Heathcliff figures as a colonial terrorist in the novel, while Ian Ward points out that Emily Brontë explores in Heathcliff the potential for a literally dark (in skin-tone) and insurgent violence. The violent relationship between Heathcliff and his many women has been seen, too, as a critique of domestic violence and coverture laws in the 1830s and 1840s, and as a replication of problematic gender dynamics more generally. Both Lisa Surridge and Judith Pike assert that much of the violence in Wuthering Heights is in fact domestic violence against women, both of them making much of Heathcliff's promise to “keep strictly within the limits of the law” regarding his treatment of Isabella (Brontë 119). More broadly, Patricia Yeager has taken the novel's “struggle between genders” as indicative of Brontë's “anxieties about male authority and authorship” (224). However, readings that compare Heathcliff to a violent colonial subject take on only one component if this text’s proliferating physical violence; similarly, readings like Surridge, Pike’s, and Yeager’s ignore the other types of violence that infiltrate the text, such as child and animal abuse. Perhaps the strongest reading of this type is Laura Berry's analysis of Wuthering Heights and The Tenant of Wildfell Hall, in which she takes “sadomasochistic” conjugal violence and custodial violence together as “less a critique of gender relations than as a discourse on 'relations' more generally” (43). Compellingly, Berry moves the focus from violence between Wuthering Heights's adults to “a decided emphasis on childhood” in which both women and children are seen as equivalent dependents and treated as such (32). The novel, in this formulation, is a testing ground for methods of child rearing, countering Heathcliff's brutality with Nelly's coercive “disciplinary tactics” (40) that ultimately endorse state intervention into the care and keeping of children. In some agreement with Berry—and in another essay pairing Anne and Emily Brontë's novels—Naomi Jacobs opposes “the Victorian ideal of the home as refuge” against the “unpleasant and often violent domestic reality” portrayed by the books, expanding her categories of victims to include “landless men,” as well as women and children

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(217). Both Berry and Jacobs explain that Wuthering Heights exposes what the novel's children comprehend quite young: “that social power legitimizes violence” (227). Berry and Jacobs, like those who examine terrorist and domestic violence before them, posit that with some degree of accuracy, Wuthering Heights reflects the real state of Victorian childhood—a state that for many involved relentless and extreme violence. As summed up by Jacqueline Benerjee: these were the children who toiled still longer hours in the open, engaging in such backbreaking labour as digging up turnips in muddy fields; or spent their days cut off from light in factories, pits, and up sooty chimneys. [. . .] Such children were no older than their peers in school: in fact, boys were accepted for training a chimney sweeps from the age of six, and occasionally even younger. Still less fortunate, if that is possible, were those admitted (or removed?) to workhouses and orphanages, for many of them died. (86) Compared with these children, Heathcliff and the Earnshaw and Linton family children may appear well off. But, as Benerjee points out, “Possibilities of suffering attended almost every aspect of childhood experience at every social level” (86). To be a child in this period often, though not always, was to suffer. If this were mere accepted fact, however, it seem unlikely that Wuthering Heights would have received the response it did. Reviewers complained of being “shocked, disgusted, almost sickened by details of cruelty, inhumanity, and the most diabolical hate and vengeance” (Britannia qtd. In Ward 529). At the same time, some “strongly recommended all our readers who love novelty to get this story, for we can promise them that they have never read anything like it before” (Douglas Jerrold’s Weekly Newspaper 285). I argue that Wuthering Heights is radical and unsettling less because it depicts of violence than because of its particular method of doing so. Wuthering Heights shows harm at its excessive worst, and, more salaciously, openly takes pleasure in that harm, turning it from moral into entertainment. Like a Sadeian novel, and the children's books that both pre-date and follow them,

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Wuthering Heights turns morality on its head. Accumulating Harm Wuthering Heights is an accumulation of harm stories. Children's harm narratives are generically identifiable in part because they rarely occur alone. The presence of one child being harmed acts as a cue to look for others; a narrative about one harmed child acts a formal clue for how to read and interpret the other stories that will inevitably be bound up with it. In the same way, Wuthering Heights is characterized by the many, different but intertwined harm narratives that it portrays. Very often, the sheer amount of harm and violence in this novel is neglected in critical readings of it, simply because people persist in focusing on one character as the ur-perpetrator. Ian Ward is right to note that “criticism of Emily Brontë's novel tends to see the root of all evil in the seemingly demonic Heathcliff. But in fact, violence is pervasive. It saturates the novel”—though Ward, too, ends up focusing on why Heathcliff is exceptional, finally arguing that he is “terrific because he threatens to devastate the familial commonwealth into which he has been invited” (528-9). Samantha Przybylowicz also notes that “many scholars point fingers at Heathcliff as being the ultimate 'villain' of the story” before continuing on to argue that many characters might be treated as such (6). Looking at this novel as part of the children's harm narrative's longer history, I, too, find myself asking, “Why always Heathcliff?” Because, of course, given the generic history of the harm narrative, any such focus is a bit misguided. Indeed, Wuthering Heights is at pains to show us not just Heathcliff harming others, but Heathcliff being harmed. If Heathcliff physically hurts eight other characters (by my count), he, in turn, is physically harmed or severely neglected by at least seven. It may well be hard to know where fault lies, if not in the faulty parentage that begins Nelly's tale. No fewer than ten of the novel's characters, its main cast entirely, are seriously harmed throughout the novel's course. At any given point of any given scene, someone is being hurt, either on or off-stage. Moreover, Brontë entirely prefers to show harm rather than indicate that it is happening, elsewhere. Thus, this is not simply a novel explaining how one person comes to hurt

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many others. Instead, it is a narrative of accumulated, multiplied neglect and suffering, especially if we consider harm in the way that children's books do: as both physical violence or the neglect that eventually leads to harm in one way or another. Wuthering Heights, if read this way, is the story of how Heathcliff is hurt and/or neglected his parents, by Mr. Earnshaw, Hindley and his wife, Nelly, the Lintons, and Catherine; how Hindley is hurt by his father and Heathcliff; how Catherine is harmed by her father, Hindley and his wife, Nelly, and Edgar Linton; how Edgar is neglected by his parents and harmed by Catharine; how Isabella is neglected by his parents and hurt by Edgar and Heathcliff; how Hareton is hurt by Hindley, Heathcliff, Cathy, and Linton; how Cathy is hurt by Edgar, Nelly, Heathcliff, Zillah, and Linton; how Linton is neglected by Isabella and hurt by Heathcliff; and how Nelly is hurt and neglected by virtually everyone else. Deconstructed in this way, it is more than difficult to read the novel as the story of one man's violence. Instead, it must be understood as narrative about accumulated human suffering, and about how education and mismanagement of children harms them physically in the present, and sets them up for a lifetime of misery. Instead of a straight, linear causation-based plot, one motivated by a villain, Wuthering Heights operates through a nodal, radiating violence, one branching continuously outward. Perhaps the largest discrepancy between the children's harm narrative and Wuthering Heights is that, where harm narratives typically use an omniscient narrator, Wuthering Heights obviously makes use of numerous of intradiegetic narrators.lxxv Indeed, some scholars have argued that this multi-voiced narrative works to deconstruct the power of the omniscient narrator. Jacobs posits that “we approach a horrific reality only after passing through and then discarding the perceptual structures of a narrator—significantly a male narrator—who represents the public world” (217), while Emily Rena-Dozier asserts that the novel “makes its central concern an illustration of narratorial failure and narrative inadequacy” (757). For both of these critics, Wuthering Heights's narration is a battleground of gender politics that is predicated on the “masculine,” gothic structure of the frame narrative. Even so, by using a polyphony of voices and by filtering the tale through

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narrational layers, with Lockwood reporting what Nelly tells him, and Nelly reporting what others have told her, Brontë achieves, if not omniscience, the effect of narrative detachment on which harm narratives also rely. Children's harm narratives, as I have demonstrated, are almost invariably embedded within a larger framework. We begin these stories with family histories and context rather than an introduction to the soon-to-be-harmed child. In a similar way, Wuthering Heights's frame narrative conveniently prioritizes other interests: first, Lockwood's new neighborhood, then his interest in the family at Wuthering Heights, then his nightmares and wretched treatment by Heathcliff. Only after Lockwood is safely ensconced in his study and then bed, are we allowed to access the primary narrative, and then only for Lockwood's entertainment. Moreover, by working within various and multi-layered voices, Brontë elegantly accounts for the narrative gaps that characterize the children's harm narrative. With the major exception of Isabella Linton/Heathcliff's letter to Nelly, for example, which skirts around her own physical abuse until its end, we need not wonder why a supposedly- omniscient narrator totally fails to let us access the mind of the harmed character(s)—we don’t have one.lxxvi While the use of character-narrators is a significant departure from the children’s harm narrative’s omniscient narration, Wuthering Heights mirrors the children’s genre’s portrayal of excessive harm. As with a children's harm narrative, Wuthering Heights moves from instance of abuse to instance of abuse, skipping over the less engaging seasons and years in between. In the beginning of the narrative, for instance, Nelly glosses over much of Heathcliff's and Catherine's formative years, choosing instead to focus on specific instances of the harm and humiliation readers may well assume is implicitly present throughout their childhoods. At one point she moves from Heathcliff's flogging by Hindley and Catherine's tears to “the next summer—the summer of 1778,” in which she lingeringly tells how Catherine and Edgar Linton became engaged—and in which Catherine both pinches Nelly and boxes Edgar's ears (49). Narrative gaps like this are, of course, not uncommon in novels, but the frequency with which this one minutely portrays scenes of harm

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over other, perhaps equally important ones (like the deaths of family members), requires some mediation. Nelly's task, to entertain Lockwood, neatly accounts for them. Ultimately, though this narrative is filtered through Lockwood's perspective, it is impossible to forget that its teller is in fact Nelly Dean, who constantly refers to herself and her own experiences. Nelly, it is widely agreed, is a powerful narrator. Beth Newman, for example argues that the female gaze that powers and narrates this novel is authoritative and potentially destructive, and John Mathison has pointed out that “Nelly Dean is not a mere technical device: we cannot forget as the story progresses that we are hearing it from her rather than the author. She is a minute interpreter. She tells us what events mean, what is right or wrong, what is praiseworthy or despicable or unforgivable behavior. Her morality is a result of her training, experiences, and reading, combined with her native temperament”(106-7). Mathison's point hits especially hard here, when thinking about Wuthering Heights within the context of children's harm narratives, because it draws attention to the didactic nature of Nelly's narration. She may not be an omniscient voice, but she tells stories of harm and morally interprets them for her readers in a manner similar to the mother and father narrators in stories like Kilner's Histories of a Great Many Boys and Girls.lxxvii When Nelly describes harassing Catherine and abetting her self- destruction, she recalls”[Catherine] believed she was dying. That I set down as a speech meant for Edgar's ears. I believed no such thing, so I kept it to myself” (95). Nelly, refusing to relay Catherine's complaints to her husband, may as well be telling the story of the man who cried wolf. Though Nelly is sad when she dies, Nelly’s clear judgment of Catherine makes clear that this is a deserved end. In the same manner that Wuthering Heights uses myriad narrators to achieve a narrative model similar to the omniscience used by children's harm narratives, the novel's layered narratives formally exacerbate the division between reader and harmed character. By including a character-narratee (Lockwood) for the character- narrator (Nelly), Brontë erects a technically unnecessary partition between the implied and real-life reader and her text. This division itself serves a purpose,

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however, as it provides through Lockwood a model for interpreting the Earnshaw and Linton family histories. Significantly, although Lockwood himself is prone to horrific dreams, this model is less one of repulsion and horror than it is one of judgment and pleasure. Despite the fact that Lockwood is ludicrously romantic—at first imagining himself as a good partner for young Cathy—he learns from Nelly's judgments.lxxviii Lockwood goes so far as to make this learning explicit: “I'll extract wholesome medicines from Mrs. Dean's bitter herbs; and firstly, let me beware of the fascination that lurks in Catherine Heathcliff's brilliant eyes. I should be in a curious taking if I surrendered my heart to that young person, and the daughter turned out a second edition of the mother” (Brontë 121). By the end of the novel, we know that Lockwood is wrong—that Cathy is no Catherine, though she shares some of her qualities. Even so, Lockwood's extraction of moral lesson from Nelly's bitter story replicates the didactic process modeled in children's harm narratives, especially those that feature parents telling tales to children. As in those narratives in which a child-narratee learns how not to behave by hearing of another child's punishment, Lockwood realizes that it would be a mistake to marry after hearing about the first Catherine's tumultuous domestic career. That Lockwood learns what to avoid by hearing Nelly's tale is by no means surprising or scandalous, and if that were all his narrative position entailed, perhaps this novel would not have been judged more harshly than others of its period. But Lockwood's learning moments are few and far between—and he is not such a good student, when all is said and done. Additionally and more prominently, Lockwood represents a pleasurable reading model for his audience. Carl Woodring states that Lockwood “shares the reader's wonder at the character's and events,” but I would argue that Lockwood demonstrates a wonder that we are meant to replicate (299). This wonder or sheer enjoyment is problematic because it takes pleasure in harm itself, a fact that both Kara Manning and Rebecca May pick up on when discussing Wuthering Heights within the context of S/M relationships and dissection narratives, respectively.lxxix Not only does Lockwood go to some manipulative lengths to ferret the story out of Nelly, he confesses himself ravenous for it:

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I perceive that people in these regions acquire over people in towns the value that a spider in a dungeon does over a spider in a cottage [. . .] One state resembles setting a hungry man down to a single dish on which he may concentrate his entire appetite, and do it justice; the other, introducing him to a table laid out by French cooks. He can perhaps extract as much enjoyment from the whole, but each part is a mere atom in his regard and remembrance. (Brontë 49) Lockwood finds himself fixated on and yearning for Nelly's tale; it earns from him the kind of pleasure the lone spider can give one utterly abandoned, it gives him the most filling sustenance. Nelly's story satiates even the most bored and dilettantish man. Wuthering Heights also mirrors the generic motifs that signal the revelation or presence of a children's harm narrative, most obviously its assignment of blame to parents and guardian figures. And, like the children's narratives before it, Wuthering Heights and its narrator, Nelly, go out of their way to explicitly assign blame. In the same way Brontë provides an expansive range of harm for readerly entertainment, she too represents a range of bad parental types. It would not be misleading to state that, actually, Wuthering Heights incorporates all fictional types of bad guardianship into its narrative progress. There is old Earnshaw, who in his seemingly good nature befriends and makes a favorite of Heathcliff, yet becomes “an oppressor rather than a friend” to his own children (Brontë 31). After his death, Cathy and Heathcliff are subject to Joseph, who uses religion as a whipping stick, and to Hindley, who is at best negligent but, more often, downright abusive. All the novel's children, it seems, are subject to absent or dead mothers, and the third generation are at first so coddled and spoiled that they become weak and fretful (as with Isabella and Edgar); deceitful (in Cathy's case); or belligerent, needy, and ultimately abusive (in Linton's). Finally, there is Heathcliff, who at one time or another is guardian to all the third generation Earnshaw-Lintons, and he abuses them in the manner that he has been abused, modeling the spread of violence from one generation to another.

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Allowing violence to spread and regenerate is a significant departure from the children's harm narrative, in which those children who are subject to bad parenting are either killed or reformed by the end of the narrative. Allowing corrupted children like Hindley, Catherine, and Heathcliff to live also enables readers to see how those lives fester and continue to wound. Wuthering Heights provides a narrative account for how bad parenting occurs in the first place, and exposes the degree to which abuse more often creates an abusive cycle than it actually kills children. That is, though Wuthering Heights trades in the excessive harm that children's narratives portray, that excess is tinged with a drop or two of realism. Though Catherine, Hindley, Isabella, Edgar, and Heathcliff all eventually die, their lives are not simply truncated, and each has the opportunity to wreak havoc on some other body before they do. Admittedly, Wuthering Heights reinforces conventional cautionary tropes here and there in the novel. Cathy, for instance “had faults to foil her gifts. A propensity to be saucy was one and a perverse will that indulged children invariably acquire” (Brontë 146). Both of these defects serve her poorly when she encounters Heathcliff's household, eventually resulting in her illicit romance with Linton, and then her kidnapping by and abuse at the hands of Heathcliff himself. The fact that Heathcliff lives while all others are dead and buried (and the fact that his ultimate death is a happy one) undermines conventional morality—that is, if we are to read Heathcliff as morally worse than other characters in the novels. Types of Harm Equally important for generic categorization of this novel is who is harmed, and how, and why. Though the novel deals in mental and spiritual harm, as well, it would be safe to say that Wuthering Heights's forte is in gratuitous, physical violence. In my 258-page Norton edition of the novel, I counted 157 instance of represented or directly threatened physical harm—more than one for every other page. As though to heighten our sense of excess here, Brontë doesn't distribute violence evenly throughout the novel. Rather, she compounds instances of harm within paragraphs. We might go six pages without violence, only to have it

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referenced or shown five times over the space of one. This spacing, rather than inure readers to ongoing violent depictions, lulls them into comfort, with descriptions of Lockwood's recuperation, or of Edgar and Catherine's early marital bliss, before undermining any sense of complacency they have achieved. What is more, the violence depicted here grafts neatly onto the generic norms of early children's harm narratives and of early children's literature more generally. This is the case even for internalized, self-inflicted violence, as in the case of Catherine's death. Though my emphasis in this chapter is on harm to people, especially children, Wuthering Heights includes a number of disturbing scenes of animal abuse that echo the school story's lessons. In these texts, boys hurting animals, especially domestic pets, acts as a sign of their domineering and dictatorial nature. This lesson holds true in Wuthering Heights, in which Edgar and Isabella “nearly pulled [their dog] in two between them” (Brontë 38) and in which Heathcliff hangs “Miss Isabella's springer, Fanny, suspended by a handkerchief” (Brontë 101). The number of animal cruelty scenes and the relationship between abusers and their animals is deserving of an entire essay.lxxx Nonetheless, these two instances of animal cruelty create a common bond between Isabella, Edgar, and Heathcliff, all of whom treat people like the animals they brutalize. In each example, Edgar and Isabella (who doesn't protest when Heathcliff hangs her spaniel) are shown as remorseful only after acts of violence, whereas Heathcliff remains unmoved by lesser lives. Whatever their class differences and respective backgrounds, these three share a ruthlessness that corresponds to their shifting positions of power— Edgar and Isabella by virtue of being the highest family in the neighborhood, Heathcliff by virtue of his later, grasping ownership of both the Heights and the Grange. These examples expose Brontë's investment in muddling the power structures (and the implicit critique of them) modeled by children's stories. By putting Heathcliff, Isabella, and Edgar into play with one another, Brontë exposes the admittedly partial degree to which class can trump gender, and vice versa. She adds complexity to the world view propagated by children's harm narratives, while

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dialing up their critique. Harm to people works in much the same way throughout this novel. While continually exposing and trading on violence to children, minors, and other lesser mortals, Brontë ensures that boys and girls are harmed differently in ways that mirror children's harm narratives. As in children's harm narratives, boys (and men) promote gun violence and are subject to it. Nelly feels so threatened by Hindley's drunken escapades that she “[takes] the shot out of the master's fowling piece” (Brontë 57); later, Hindley is so tempted to shoot Heathcliff that he bids Isabella to “be so good as to turn your lock, and draw your bolt—don't omit it!” (Brontë 109). In turn, Hareton's injury when “his gun burst while out on the hills by himself” ultimately helps him make amends with Cathy (Brontë 238). Boys are also exposed to beatings and floggings—especially Heathcliff who, as a child, is continually threatened with them. Even early in the book, Heathcliff threatens to tell Mr. Earnshaw “of the three thrashings you've [Hindley] given me this week, and show him my arm, which is black to the shoulder”; shortly thereafter Hindley hits him an iron weight” and pushes him under a horse (Brontë 31-2). Later, when reminded of his responsibility to care for them, Hindley is “reminded [. . .] to order Heathcliff a flogging, and Catherine a fast from dinner or supper” (Brontë 36). Finally, throughout the novel boys and men are subject to punishments tendered by greed itself: Hindley dies as a result of his dissipation; Linton's petulance renders him insufferable; and Heathcliff's vengeful desire for the Grange and the Heights never grants him peace. Similarly, girls' and women's devotion to men brings them harm, as does their passion and vanity. Isabella, who must be “[flattered] into a good temper” (Brontë 77) is demeaned and abused by her husband—eventually, she is stabbed with a dinner knife (Brontë 141). In a similar vein, Catherine's passion for Heathcliff and the conflict between him and her husband ultimately lead her to self-inflicted violence that is remarkably akin to the burning up experienced by girls in children's books. Let me be clear: fictional children, especially girls, go hungry, as Catherine does in the beginning of the novel. But Catherine's death is the result of a self- inflicted starvation that is like the burning experienced by vain and passionate girl

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characters in children's harm narratives. Upon the beginning of her starved descent, Catherine contrasts her anger to Edgar's, saying “your could blood cannot be worked into a fever; your veins are full of ice-water, but mine are boiling” (Brontë 92); Nelly describes her in “a feverish bewilderment” (Brontë 95); and Catherine herself declares “Oh, I am burning!” (Brontë 98). Here, Brontë metaphorizes what children's books render literal: passionate girls burn; Catherine's passion burns her from the inside, out, leading her to starve herself in a bid for revenge.lxxxi Even relatively good, but spoiled, willful girls are subject to one of the worst types of violence reserved for them by children's harm narratives—kidnapping and implied rape—as is the case for second-generation Cathy. Though minimized by Nelly in her conversation with Edgar Linton, there is no question that Cathy has been subject to some of book's most brutal treatment. She is forced to marry someone who “[winks] to see [his] father strike a dog, or a horse, he does it so hard” and is pleased to see her treated the same way, and who colludes in keeping her from her dying father (214). Of all the book's characters, only Cathy's treatment approaches the excessive brutality meted out on Heathcliff earlier in the novel, and with as little real reason. The worst of Cathy's crimes is deception, though this doesn't lead directly to her unhappiness in the last quarter of the novel, as well as its beginning—instead, her compassion for Linton and love and loyalty to her father are what place her in harm's way—that and an apparently inadequate caretaker. What Wuthering Heights does with these generic types of harm is as important as the fact that Brontë includes them at all. As I discussed in the beginning of this chapter, children's harm narratives shift between cautionary tales and simple, gratuitous violence. Though some tales can be simply defined as one or the other, often this difference may well depend on which child you happen to be focusing on. Wuthering Heights further conflates these trajectories, calling into question whether any harm is ultimately deserved, no matter what crime the boy or girl character has committed. Wuthering Heights also disrupts some of the cautionary harm narrative's tropes, particularly its dictum that boy only be harmed through approved beatings. In so doing, the novel undermines the notion that girls,

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only, are victims within the nineteenth-century moral economy. As Kevin Morrison points out, Wuthering Heights, like The Mill on the Floss, examines the “suffering” of the white, middle-class male subject, both legitimizing and critiquing it (273). And so, Hindley pays for his sins, losing his property to Heathcliff and dying “true to character, drunk as a lord” (Brontë 144). We witness Hindley's suffering and his grapples with his temptation to murder Heathcliff, though for much of the novel the real consequences for Hindley's sins are played out on others. First Heathcliff and Catherine suffer and bear the brunt of his iniquities; then Heathcliff seeks vengeance on Hareton, Hindley's son. At the same time, by positioning Heathcliff, Edgar, Isabella, and Linton, through their abuse of animals, as a kind of inequitable foursome, the novel intimates that women, if given the opportunity, are capable of the same kinds of violence as men, especially when it arises out of desire: selfishness (as with Edgar and Linton), pleasure (as with Linton and Heathcliff), or vengeance (as with Heathcliff).lxxxii This intimation is a significant departure from the children’s harm narratives, in which girls are inevitably victims of their own or each other’s misdeeds. Isabella's sins are numerable. She is spoiled: she hurts one animal out of her desire for it, and another for her desire for Heathcliff. She spoils her son. Even so, Brontë makes clear that Isabella's relative virtue isn't innate—rather, it is the result of inopportunity and personal struggle. Isabella admits to her desire for a pistol—”How powerful I should be possessing such an instrument!” —and describes her own “covetousness” for it (Brontë 110). Lest we imagine she wants the gun only for self-defense, Isabella later declares “his weakness was the only time when I could taste the delight of paying wrong for wrong” (Brontë 139). Violence is powerfully attractive to Isabella, who seems unable to be warned off of Heathcliff; and, though she doesn't relish violence inflicted on herself, she nourishes her own hatred and viciousness, lusting after violent objects and taking pleasure, delight in “returning wrong for wrong,” much like Heathcliff himself. It wouldn't be quite accurate to say that Brontë equalizes male and female subjects, or to say that the novel treats male and female characters similarly. Despite

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Wuthering Heights's emphasis on the possibility for male harm—or, on its revelation that men can be harmed by their own tyrannical behavior—male and female, boy and girl characters nonetheless have different narrative trajectories. With the exception of Nelly, Joseph, Zillah, and the other domestic help, only two characters survive this novel: Cathy and Hareton, who are destined for marriage. Whereas male characters retain abundant ability to hurt others, female characters are far more limited in this respect. Both Catherine and Isabella are more prone to hurting themselves than they are others. Cathy lashes out at Heathcliff and Linton to little result: they remain intact (though Linton cries) and she is beaten. Still, by showing the degree of Cathy's degradation—even more than Hareton's—in the last quarter of the novel, Brontë links male and female destinies. Though Catherine declares that Heathcliff “is more myself than I am,” Cathy is most like him (Brontë 63). Cathy is thrust from a position of privilege to one of absolute want, and, unlike Hareton, is old enough to appreciate the change; Cathy is beaten and lashes out against the man who beats her; Cathy begins to treat others with anger and contempt, and, by the time Lockwood meets her is almost unknowable. It is also Cathy, who, when she makes up to Hareton could well be declaring “what's the use?” in continuing the feud—though these are Heathcliff's words (Brontë 247). Cathy, like Heathcliff, bears the brunt of a man's desire for revenge and his capacity for cruelty, and she is ultimately his beneficiary. The twists and turns in this plot make the moral or cautionary logic of the harm narrative unfollowable. All we have left, by the end, is sheer, brutal force, and a violence that descends into tenuous peace as the result of silent, personal choice and perhaps loss of will. Upon gaining custodianship of Hareton, Heathcliff states “Now, my bonny lad, you are mine! And we'll see if one tree won't grow as crooked as another, with the same wind to twist it” (Brontë 145). Heathcliff's declaration acts as an educational hypothesis, one that takes on the lessons taught by early children's harm narratives and exposes their crookedness—their lack of logic and their failed moral lessons. As I have demonstrated, the novelty in this narrative is decidedly not in its depiction of harm, realistic or otherwise, which only echoes eighteenth- and early nineteenth-

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century children's books. Instead, Wuthering Heights lays bare the cyclicality of harm and violence. Like children's books, it lays blame at the feet of bad parents and guardians, while showing how violence breeds excess. Moreover, Brontë takes children's books to task, showing the relationship between readerly pleasure in harm and a character's pleasure in violence and demonstrating that the values cultivated in these books, especially in the seemingly less culpably cautionary tales, encourages a vengeance-based morality rather than one based on discipline or even love. Rather than show violence and harm as they exist in the world, Wuthering Heights exposes literary violence, and troubles the relationship between orthodox morals and the critique of them. Ultimately, what this novel teaches is that critique itself, when violent, can breed violence and harm.

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Chapter 4: Everyday Life: Family Narratives and the Gender of Reality Anna Laetitia Barbauld's “Washing-Day” (1797) begins with muses “turned gossips”: Come then, domestic Muse, In slipshod measure loosely prattling on Of farm or orchard, pleasant curds and cream, Or drowning flies, or shoe lost in the mire, By little whimpering boy with rueful face (3-7) In full, mock-heroic form, Barbauld uses epic conventions. After invoking her Muse, Barbauld enumerates an epic list, repurposing what could have been a description of weapons or battle into everyday domestic details. This muse, like Barbauld herself, is concerned with the typically un-notable and small. From farms and orchards (as opposed to nations), she moves to even more minor details: curds, cream, flies, shoes, and little, whimpering boys. “Washing-Day” is not a children's family narrative. A poem written for adults, “Washing Day” has been credited with reinterpreting Richard Samuel's painting, “Nine Living Muses of Great Britain,” (in which Barbauld features) as well as with rebuking Alexander Pope's The Dunciad (Markidou 28). According to Vassiliki Markidou, Barbauld “thus establishes a linearity of female oral discourse as opposed to the stock, male, written one and underscores its origins” (22). I do not dispute Markidou's conclusions. Much of what makes “Washing-Day” powerful is its appropriation of masculine epic conventions; it undeniably counter-mocks Pope. This move is particularly effective because it reverses the satirized object’s gender. Barbauld takes women’s work seriously while outright mocking men. At the same time, though “Washing-Day” reverses Pope’s gendered object of satire. In Barbauld’s poem, women may well be overly concerned with the “petty miseries of life,” but men don’t even have the wherewithal to notice

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others’ work (28). A man “who call’st thyself perchance the master there” (34), or who tries to “claim / on such a day the hospitable rites” is not only rightly ignored (44-45). His sagacity is called into question and his indolence is exposed: “the unlucky guest / in silence dines, and early sinks away” (55-56). Barbauld’s gentle mockery—comparing women’s reaction to rain to Guatimozin’s torture, for instance—nonetheless illuminates women's serious and difficult work. In so doing, she elevates washing-days to epic importance. Barbauld surveys her domain with a careful eye, missing no minor detail, and she dutifully reshapes domestic labor into pleasing, ornamented, and informative poetry. In short, she refashions women's lives in the georgic mode, a mode traditionally opposed to pastoral’s idealism and which emphasizes both education and work. She reimagines the “poem about rural life and husbandry,” which focuses largely and seriously on men’s experience of labor, as a disquisition on women’s home labor, and by doing so she ameliorates the satiric bite of mock epic (“georgic” 342). My own focus on “Washing-Day” may well seem to be a departure from the major work of this dissertation. Nonetheless, I open with Barbauld's poem because, like the novels I will discuss in the latter half of this chapter, it elegantly repurposes the children's family narrative’s most notable conventions. “Washing-Day” models attention to the material details that add up to domestic realism; it embraces a composite, list-making structure at the levels of sentence and plot; it portrays family life in all its non-exemplarity; and it attends to the dramas of everyday life that children's family narratives strive to capture. This is by no means a coincidence. Barbauld is as notable for her position in the history of children's literature as she is for her work as Romantic poet. Her work in Lessons for Children (1778-1788) and Evenings at Home (1792-1796), as much as Charlotte Smith's Rural Walks (1795) and Rambles Farther (1796), shaped the genre I will delineate in this chapter. It might well be said, too, that these children's books, with their emphasis on familial and domestic spaces and the objects and people that occupy them, influenced Barbauld's later detail-oriented domestic poetry. As I have already indicated, in the terms of adult literary studies “Washing-Day” might well be said to be a significant

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instance of georgic regendering—a kind of higher-class version of Mary Collier's 1739 “The Woman's Labour: An Epistle to Mr. Stephen Duck.”lxxxiii Certainly, “Washing-Day” has trouble escaping children's perspectives on the hallowed occasion. In addition to the whimpering boy, there is Barbauld herself: I well remember, when a child, the awe This day struck into me; for then the maids, I scarce knew why, looked cross, and drove me from them; Nor soft caress could I obtain, nor hope Usual indulgences; jelly or creams, Relic of costly suppers, and set by For me, their petted one; or buttered toast, When butter was forbid; or thrilling tale Of ghost or witch, or murder (58-65) [. . .] At intervals my mother's voice was heard, Urging dispatch; briskly the work went on, All hands employed to wash, to rinse, to wring, To fold, and starch, and clap, and iron, and plait. Then would I sit me down, and ponder much Why washings were. (74-79) “Washing-Day” captures the emotional and the physical memories of an eighteenth- century, much-loved child. Barbauld preserves for us her own bewilderment, the maids' changing emotions, the material details of her interactions with them, and her mother's authoritative voice. Here, crossness stands in contrast to daily kindnesses, cold dinners oppose the “usual” jellies, creams, and butter. The process of cleaning laundry (wash, rinse, wring, fold, starch, clap, iron, plait) is preserved, memorialized.lxxxiv The domestic space, defined in this poem as a place for women's work, is codified by the actions and items within it. Though more elegantly written, this poem has much in common with the opening pages of Barbauld's Lessons for Children, Ages 2-4. These early versions of

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the family narrative are written as unmarked dialogue: The sun shines. Open your eyes, Little boy. Get up. Maid, come and dress Charles. Go down stairs. Get your break- Fast. Boil some milk for a poor little hungry boy. Do not spill the milk. Hold the spoon in the other hand. Do not throw your bread upon the ground. (3) Like “Washing-Day” Early Lessons records the familial interactions and objects that make up the domestic sphere. Barbauld illustrates the daily task of waking children. Even this highly simplified description contains much teaching matter for both boy and girl readers. The fictional mother takes Charles through his morning routine, instructing boy and girl readers to avoid spilling milk, to hold their spoons correctly, and to refrain from throwing their food. For girls, this passage models the care of infants and delineates labor within the middle-class household. The maid dresses the child and cooks for him; the mother wakens and instructs in proper behavior.lxxxv Barbauld's later and more developed works, Evenings at Home and Hymns in Prose do similar work, using dialogue and prose to flesh out a family- oriented domestic world that, while at times idealized, is not free of work or suffering. For us, twenty-first century readers, these books vivify a long-dead, ordinary past. This chapter examines the children's family narrative, a genre which, I will argue, developed out of Barbauld's immensely popular and influential stories.lxxxvi The genre progresses from the dialogue Barbauld employs and develops across the nineteenth century, but it maintains her concern with the people and objects that populate and constitute the domestic space—the material entities that the domestic forms itself around. I use the term “family narratives” here, rather than “domestic

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narratives” because I want to differentiate between the later, adult genre and this children’s one.lxxxvii Family narratives are domestic, to be sure. They portray the domestic space, and they are concerned with what it means to live within that space—for men and women, boys and girls alike. Michelle Levy has asserted, about Evenings at Home, that both girls and boys must be taught to value the domestic affections, and to see them as essential to both their own happiness and the welfare of the nation as a whole [. . .] in both the frame narrative and the individual pieces, we are presented with a domestic space that is neither feminized nor privatized, but rather is populated by men, women, and children, from within and outside the family. (127) Or, as William McCarthy argues about Lessons for Children, “reality as imagined in Lessons is not simply a site of stubbed egos. It is equally a site of pleasure, of keen enjoyment of daily sensations” (99). Much of this remains true of the family narrative genre, which similarly promotes “domestic affections” as necessary for boys and girls alike; which also emphasizes that domestic space is familial space, populated by men and women, boys and girls alike; and which likewise envisions “daily sensations” as a place for enjoyment. As well as any other children's genre, the family narrative is fundamentally concerned with gender and gender formation, with how gender impacts children's life-possibilities, and with how gender constrains them. As in “Washing-Day,” which portrays a world populated with men and women but one in which women labor, many books portray familial spaces as more feminized and privatized than Evenings at Home is, in Michelle Levy's interpretation. In Barbauld's canon, Early Lessons similarly formulates the family home as a place for women's work. As Sarah Robbins has posited, however, “Like little Charles throughout his Lessons, then, [his] middle- class mother is simultaneously constrained and empowering. Situated primarily in the home, she also reaches beyond it, and her pedagogical practice blurs private- public boundaries through her preparation of the child for his active, enlightened adulthood” ( 144). Robbins reads the nineteenth-century arguments made by John

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Ruskin and Sarah Stickney Ellis into Barbauld's work, demonstrating that women's public influence is an echo of their private work. As I will demonstrate, family narratives do more than reify these tenets of separate spheres ideology. While elevating women's work within the home, they also work to envelop the public sphere into the domestic. War, empire, business—no less masculine things than these—are ultimately subordinated to familial plots. Rather than constructing the domestic space as a place devoted to enjoyment and pleasure, the family narrative emphasizes that women’s work is work, and it demonstrates the potential of this work to have public consequence. After a brief discussion of the children’s family narrative’s material features and the other critics who have studied it, in the first section of this chapter I will assert that the children’s family narrative co-opts the georgic mode, using the mode's omniscient narration, its attention to material particularities—to things and bodily work—and even its prominent poets to elevate domestic labor, spaces, and practices. Children's family narratives use the georgic's omniscient-I/eye narration, the enumeration of small and insignificant things and details, and an additive “and”-based sentence structure to broaden reader's sense of the domestic world, as well as to record it. Secondly, I turn from the genre’s appropriation of the georgic, arguing that the children’s family narrative attends to familial structures, privileging exemplary families over individuals. Thirdly, I posit that children's family narratives use expansive, meandering plots to emphasize the interconnectedness of all things and all people, thus undermining any sense of the domestic space as one closed off from the public world. The family narrative's use plot and trope as a means of glorifying family life and honoring girls' and women's work—while also acknowledging its tedium. Throughout all of this, I will remain attentive to the family narrative's presumed impact on girl and women readers—to the way the genre seeks to shape and mediate gender as lived experience. Family narratives as domestic georgics privilege the work of women and girls even as they teach it. Most importantly, family narratives acknowledge the tedium of the domestic sphere; they sympathize with the girls who remain stuck within it, even as they fail to offer them a way out.

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Family Narratives As Barbauld's example indicates, while scholars have investigated individual works and authors writing within the children's family narrative genre, very few have addressed the children's family narrative as such. In The Oxford History of the Novel in English: The Nineteenth-Century, Susan Fraiman describes something that looks very like the children's family narrative. The nineteenth-century domestic novel, she asserts, features “domestic settings, ordinary people, plots centered on courtship and kinship” (169); is “most often attuned to the respectable middle” (169); is “closely tied to notions about women's normative relation to marriage, family, and the domestic sphere” (170); demonstrates “complicated and sometimes dissenting views on female independence, intellect, sexuality, and political citizenship” (171); and is characterized by a “domestic aesthetic”—attending “closely and fondly to everyday domestic details, concerns, and values” and “the ethical imperative to acknowledge ordinary bodies and repetitive work” (174). Fraiman attributes the development of this type of novel to Austen's work, as well to silver fork novelists like Edward Bulwer-Lytton—but never to the early children's fiction that, as I will argue here, both predates these authors and more seriously attends to the domestic than they do. The children's family narrative, as I will demonstrate, establishes the domestic realist form we are used to seeing in the nineteenth-century realist novel. It also exceeds this later form because, where later domestic novels ultimately concern themselves with marriage plots, children's family narratives fail to adhere to any such limited account of the world. Understanding the domestic novel's source in the children's family narrative, I argue, can help us read beyond the marriage plots that later novels emphasize and scholars privilege. Only Elizabeth Thiel has expressly studied the genre. In her book dedicated to the topic, however, Thiel is more interested in the family units modeled by children's family narratives than she is in the form those narratives take. Operating on the assumption that the static, immediate-family model was considered both normative and divine, Thiel proposes the model of the “transnormative family”—

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families made up of atypical units—and expresses surprise at the “relative dearth of mid-Victorian children's fiction that focuses on what has been perceived as the ideal family of mother, father and siblings” (8-9).lxxxviii Thiel's point is well taken: mid- to late-Victorian family novels do indeed represent atypical family units as a matter of course. But I don't share her surprise at this fact, nor do I consider it anomalous. Though Thiel positions transnormative mid-Victorian familial units against the Georgian domestic narratives that make up much of my own study, her limited sample set leads her to wrongly conclude that Georgian domestic narratives only portrayed traditional families. In fact, portraying wide and ranging families is a generic conceit. Thiel expects that Victorian children's books should ascribe to a perfect separate-spheres ideology, one in which the mother reigns over the home while the father heads into the world—and this model leaves little room for variation. The children's family narrative, as it develops over the course of the nineteenth-century, is increasingly aware of the pressures of separate spheres ideology. But their concern with the messiness of life, rather than ideal life, is a matter of genre rather than an anomaly. If anything, family narratives take an ambivalent stance toward this social theory, critiquing its ideological import while nonetheless promoting the value of the domestic sphere.lxxxix Strikingly, two successful critical works that draw on the children's family narrative are little concerned with issues of genre, at all. Instead, they treat the works as windows into reality—perhaps a consequence of the georgic mode’s effectiveness. Claudia Nelson, for instance, uses many children's family narratives as resources in Family Ties in Victorian England, a book that explores the tension between the fact that “English society clung to the idea that family might provide stability and access to eternal values” and the fact that “the pattern of family life was itself in flux” (6). Notably, and undermining Thiel's argument, Nelson demonstrates that “as is the case in our own culture, the Victorians did not always agree about how the family should operate and what the role of any given family member should ideally be” (10). Judith Flanders similarly uses children's family narratives as cultural evidence in her book Inside the Victorian Home: A Portrait of Domestic Life in

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Victorian England. Flanders reminds us that “at the end of the day, after ruling empires or finishing the late shift at the factory, we all go back to our homes. Different as those homes are, how we live at home, where we live, what we do all day when we're not doing whatever it is that history is recording—these are some of the most telling things about any age, any people” (4). As Flanders’s use of children's family narratives like Charlotte Mary Yonge's The Daisy Chain, among many others, demonstrates, this genre tells a compelling story of family life that is not limited to the sphere of girls and women. Instead, the domestic space featured in these narratives encompasses empire-makers and factory-workers. That Nelson and Flanders to equal degrees consider children's family narratives as useful representations in works of cultural and historical recovery attests to the genre's successful use of Georgic detail and familial specificity—these fictional portrayals are considered as useful as the details of life itself. One might even say that the realist effect of this genre is so successful that Nelson and Flanders forget it is influenced by form and generic conventions. They take it for real. For better or worse, Nelson and Flanders believe family narratives accurately reflect nineteenth- century reality. The children's family narrative is, first and foremost, a genre large in number and in size. They rival the school story in sheer numerousness—I have located no fewer than 100 extant family narratives, and constantly come across more. In their material details, family narratives depart from children's genres like it and harm narratives. Whereas these genres are most often short in length and small in physical size—rarely over a hundred pages long and often less than twenty— children's family narratives look more like novels twenty-first century readers are used to seeing. Bound in cloth, marbled boards, or leather, family narratives are usually the size of a modern mass-market paperback novel. They range in length from a hundred to several-hundred pages and many are multi-volumed, serially published, installments. Anna Laetitia Barbauld's Evenings at Home is made up of six different installments, each about 150 pages long. Even Lessons for Children, a volume unusual for its attention to very young readers, was originally published in

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separate volumes. In their lengthiness and in their occasional inclusion of familiar- formatxc dialog and inset stories, early family narratives occasionally resemble school stories. In family narratives, however, education always comes from a parent and the emphasis is on moral education and cultivating taste rather than imparting factual information. Especially as the genre progresses, education may be referred to (“Mary learned to sew.”). It is not included in the books wholesale (“This is how to sew:”). Whereas short length and the prevalence of illustrations, combined with simplified language, indicate that harm and it narratives were aimed at young or inexperienced readers, family narratives aim for a slightly older and more advanced reading audience.xci As Charlotte Mary Yonge states, in her introduction to The Daisy Chain (1856), “no one can be more sensible than is the Author that the present is an overgrown book of a nondescript class, neither the 'tale' for the young, nor a novel for their elders, but a mixture of both.” Yonge connects The Daisy Chain's length and unwieldiness with an audience that is neither young nor old. Judging by the relative ages of Yonge's characters, as well, it is safe to assume that the book was written for a teenage or young-adult audience. This difference in material make-up may be accounted for, in part, by a difference in audience. As I have argued, most harm- and it-narratives were written for a mix-gendered audience. With the exception of specifically-gendered it narratives, such as doll stories and top stories, by situating harm and it narratives in mixed anthologies and by featuring boy and girl characters equally in their works, authors made a bid for a larger reading audience— something M.O. Grenby has shown was common during this period (The Child Reader 52-60). Family narratives like Barbauld’s Lessons for Children and Maria Edgeworth’s Harry and Lucy (1801-1825) obviously address both male and female children. This feature sets them apart from most family narratives, which address and assume a primarily female audience. All family narratives describe the domestic sphere while demonstrating that boys and men, as well as girls and women, form that sphere. But family narratives written for older readers, and especially those written in the

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nineteenth century, ultimately privilege girl readers. Family narratives often indicate this audience through their subject matter, using free indirect discourse to focus on female characters’ thoughts and emotions. Some indicate audience with their introductions. Charlotte Smith’s introduction to Rural Walks (1795), one of the earliest in this genre, is typical: “To repress discontent; to inculcate the necessity of submitting cheerfully to such situations as fortune may throw them into; to check that flippancy of remark, so frequently disgusting in girls of twelve or thirteen” (iii- iv). Even if Smith hadn't directly addressed a desire to improve “girls of twelve or thirteen,” it would be easy enough to understand whom she was addressing. Her goals, “to repress discontent,” to teach “the necessity of submitting cheerfully,” and to inculcate the “pure pleasures of retirement,” directly address girls' domestic concerns, seeking to mediate the boredom and discontent that come with “retirement” and suggesting cheerfulness as a remedy to enforced submission (iii- iv). Form and the Family Narrative Like many children's genres, family narratives make use of omniscient narration. But whereas the school stories and harm narratives, which also use this narrative style, frequently restrict the narrating-eye to characters’ exteriors—only intermittently do school stories allow access to character's thoughts—the narrators of children's family narratives frequently employ free indirect discourse. They direct readers especially to thoughts and emotions of children, emphasizing the interiority of girl protagonists and women above all. These narrators are often self-aware and—impossibly—embodied, for instance employing meta-narrational shifts at the beginnings and end of novels. The narrator of Elizabeth Milner's The Twins; Or Home Scenes (1855), opens by observing that “My young readers would have liked to peep with me into a cottage situated in a village in the north of England” (3) before describing, “Alone in the room, and near to the open window, stood Mary and Elizabeth—familiarly termed Lily—Fortescue, looking out upon the garden and the prospect beyond” (4). The Holiday Spy (Anon. 1780) similarly begins “My first visit was to Lady Thoroughgoods, whose little family consists of Master Tommy, and the

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Misses Charlotte and Deborah; and sweet pretty little creatures they are” (14). These narrators do not hesitate to issue judgment, though they are for more likely to describe something sweet and pretty than they are to ascribe negative attributes to the familial sphere—for that, they have parents. While these omniscient narrators have the power to dip in and out of characters’ minds, they frequently refrain from doing so. As much as they focus on girls and women, they are equally invested in portraying the familial sphere in all of its fullness and detail. For the family narrative, this detail might range from the physical to the conversational. In the same way that a narrator might go to great lengths to describe the material elements in a scene, she similarly recounts every evocation in a conversation. Like early school stories, early family narratives frequently rely on familiar-format dialogue. But whereas in school stories familiar format is used to convey a great deal of information, in family narratives familiar format above all serves as an exacting record of familial interaction. In later family narratives, familiar format becomes long stretches of dialogue. Consider the first chapter of Charlotte Mary Yonge's The Daisy Chain: Ethel was on her feet, and open-mouthed. “O, Miss Winter! If you would be so kind as to walk to Cocksmoor with us.” “To Cocksmoor, my dear!” exclaimed the governess in dismay. “Yes, yes, but hear” cried Ethel. “It is not for nothing. Yesterday--” “No, the day before,” interposed Flora. “There was a poor man brought into the hospital. He had been terribly hurt in the quarry, and papa says he’ll die. He was in great distress for his wife has just got twins, and there were lots of children before. They want everything—food and clothes—and want to walk and take it.” “We had a collection of clothes ready, luckily,” said Flora; “and we have a blanket and some tea and some arrowroot, and a bit of bacon, and mamma says she does not think it too far for us to walk, if

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you will be so kind to go with us.” Miss Winter looked perplexed. “How could you carry the blanket, my dear?” “O, we have settled that,’” said Ethel, “we mean to make the donkey a sumpter-mule, so, if you are tired, you may ride home on her.” “But, my dear, has your mamma considered? They are such a set of wild people at Cocksmoor; I don’t think we could walk there alone.” “It is Saturday,” said Ethel, “we can get the boys.” (6) This dialogue, which in fact began on the previous page, continues for another five. In it, Yonge captures children's interactions with each other: their impulsive need to speak over one another, to be right, and to convince their governess. It is imperfect. Miss Winter says “my dear” three times over the next page. The boys join them and use slang. They get into an argument, and then the conversation moves on to discuss an older brother and a new baby. Broken, repetitive, and meandering, dialogue in these narratives is treated with the disproportionate value with which minor detail is habitually treated in this genre. Both are given the narrative prominence usually, in novels, only allotted to major events. The Georgic at Home The family narrative exploits the eighteenth-century georgic's characteristics, namely its description of the humdrum everyday and minor human endeavors, reusing them to articulate and record domestic interiors and actions. In the same way that Barbauld's “Washing-Day” exchanges agricultural labors and landscapes for domestic chores and home spaces, the children's family narrative trains the georgic eye on family activities and interactions, and the spaces where they take place. The eighteenth-century georgic itself has been described by Kevis Goodman as accounting for the “noise of living” (3-4). In Goodman's explanation, for instance, “to read The Seasons is to be made aware of an ongoing dialectic of distance and proximity, the vertiginous movement from the vision of the bird's eye

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to the sight of moisture gathering on a bird's wing” (40). Goodman accounts for this movement by describing the “new type of professional observer [. . .] whose trade it is to ‘observe everything’” (Goodman 40). For Goodman, the sensory world, and especially the visual world, is articulated by the georgic mode. The enumerated products of an all-seeing, all- observing eye are specified and recorded for posterity, and this poetic labor is reckoned no less necessary to advancing knowledge than is the scientific eye. The poetic eye extends from the natural to the social. Goodman's assertion is affirmed by J. Chalker, who sees the georgic's impact on Defoe in the “particularly striking” fact that “in Defoe this sense of human responsibility in the face of the environment should involve a meticulous concern for the minutiae of physical existence” (13). April London, too, argues that the georgic mode as reinterpreted by Richardson “[accords] property the central importance it holds in the civic humanist tradition” while awarding it to “those who labor constructively to restore order” (16). The eponymous Clarissa, London says “affirms the value of her labor” which “recalls the emphasis within the georgic mode on the capacity of individuals to invest the quotidian with meaning” (25). As it is interpreted by these scholars, the eighteenth century georgic mode might well be said to measure and reward human action through its concern for the minute and quotidian. Small details and actions reverberate outward, into the world. The minor has the potential for major repercussions. Small wonder, then, that the family narrative uses the georgic mode: in so doing, the genre expands its own reach. Its minor discussions of teapots and tinder become quasi-historical record. Its legitimization of familial interaction and work is a bid for public recognition. Family narratives make thematic and formal use of the georgic mode, but it is worth noting at the outset that many family narratives explicitly refer to and borrow from eighteenth-century georgics, most frequently those written by Cowper and Thomson. Portions of poems like The Seasons are frequently quoted by characters within texts, or given as lessons for children to learn. In Charlotte Smith's Rural Walks, Caroline is made to “copy [. . .] a few lines from Thompson, on the subject of

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the thoughtlessness of the affluent and fortunate” (15). Later, Mrs. Woodfield quotes Thomson to her charges: Every copse Deep tangled, tree irregular, and bush Bending with dewy moisture o'er the heads Of the coy questers that lodge within, Are prodigal of harmony. The thrush And woodlark o'er the kind contending throng, Superior heard, run through the sweetest length Of notes; while listening Philomena deigns To let them joy, and purposes, in thought Elate, to make her night excel their day. (74). This quotation, which comes from Spring, embodies the poem's georgic thrust. Its attention to minor details--dew on bushes, the relative noise of bird species—and combination of periodic and cumulative sentences add up to a complex, nuanced description of an awakening natural world. By citing this section on her walk, Mrs. Woodfield uses georgic description as a model for understanding her interactions with the springtime world. Literature, she teaches her daughters, helps people see and appreciate the quotidian.xcii Like a georgic poem, with its interest in the countryside and the agricultural labor that goes on there, children's family narratives are invariably set in the country and they portray it as a domestic ideal. Elizabeth Sandham’s The Happy Family at Eason House (1822) thematizes this trait. Though the story begins “in one of the principal streets of London” (1), by page two the Eason daughters are lobbying their father for a country house. They dream of “bees and silkworms,” “gardens and shrubberies,” chickens and fields (4). The girls get their wish early on, and the rest of the work (like all other family narratives) depicts children taking part in home life and discovering the countryside. These works paint detailed images of the English countryside. Smith's Rural Walks, which quotes Thomson extensively, relies on the attention to the minor

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characterized by his work: the snow-drop, however, faintly peeped forth amidst the tempest, and some other wintry flowers announced the return of spring. The first that reared its tender head above the fallen leaves and dead grass, in a corner of their little shrubbery, gave inexpressible pleasure to Henrietta, who every morning passed that way to feed some favorite poultry, lodged in an adjoining out-house. (25) This sentence is packed with the minor details that make up everyday life for the people who are attentive to georgic minutiae. It announces the hemispheric (“the return of spring”) by focusing on the extremely specific. The first, individual snow- drop, surrounded by leaves and dead grass, which “gives pleasure”—as single emotion to a single individual. Buried in all of this detail is a daily domestic task, feeding poultry, and an acknowledgement of the space in which that chore occurs. In this novel, snowdrops and dead leaves are framed by gardens, shrubberies, and outhouses. Labor is framed, too, within the confines of the home and its immediate environs. These books don't limit domestic labor to girls and women. In Elizabeth May's Memoirs of the Danby Family (1799), boys “followed their father into the garden, where each received his respective task [. . .] Charles's was that of weeding a flower-bed, and William's the less skillful one of assisting his father in putting down sticks for the support of a crop of peas” (29). Weeding and supporting peas is domestic work that contributes to the family. As is typical for family narratives, while girls may take on the major burden of such labor, it is not limited to them. Nor is the labor necessarily a class marker. While it would be easy to assume that Mr. Danby and his sons grow vegetables out of necessity, in fact the novel explains that he was left a “handsome legacy” from his uncle, including property and money (5). Participation in domestic labor and contributing to the family is as important for the wealthy as it is for those with less money. By exploring the domestic landscape, boys and girls alike learn to appreciate and emulate the omniscient eye that characterizes georgic poetry and family-

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narrative narration. These omniscient narrators move rapidly between the gargantuan and tiny—and children learn to appreciate this degree of scope. In Georgiana Ancram's The East Indians at Selwood (1834), Aunt Ann instructs when we look at the present state of man, when we see the useful and powerful machines which he has invented, his wealth, the wisdom of his agriculture, the command, in short, which his reason gives him of all the concealed elements in nature, we are apt to look as something wonderful while looking over the domestic landscape. (20) During their outdoor exploration, Robert and Isabel (Ann's charges) witness farm labor and see farm machines, but they are also attentive to individual blades of grass (20), and lime quarries and fossils (123). Their eyes, like the omniscient narrating eye that relays their story to us, are able to see from the extremely specific to the ancient and grand. Similarly, in Elizabeth Sandham's More Trifles! For the Benefit of a Rising Generation (1804) Charlotte Merton locates beauty in “the daisy-covered grass, the cowslips and anemones” as well as in the less beautiful winter landscape (50). Charlotte finds splendor not merely in the obviously pleasant. She sees beauty equally in winter dormancy because, for her, beauty includes productive potential. Children's family narratives illuminate the agricultural and domestic landscapes which surround homes and in which families work. Aside from direct quotation and their use of an omniscient, far-reaching narrator, this feature is the genre's strongest connection with the georgic mode. Still, these techniques make up only a small portion of the family narrative. They may well extend the domestic space away from the familial hearth, but family narratives are nonetheless more explicitly concerned with home and home details. When turning to interior spaces and domestic labor, family narratives do not drop the georgic mode they otherwise work with. Instead, they reappropriate its attention to detail and its additive world- making qualities for feminine interiors. Smith's Rural Walks is, for instance, a bit of a misnomer. Though the work (as with her later book, Rambles Farthur) hails from Thomson's georgic preoccupation with the English countryside, Smith balances her descriptions of the landscape with equally detailed, vivid home scenes. Though

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Smith privileges Nature and aims to teach girls to appreciate it, she also reassesses the value of the domestic everyday. When one daughter mocks “that little woman talks so about her pigs and her poultry, and how she makes bacon, and how many apples she had in her orchard, and such sort of things, that it really tires one” (29) she meets with firm reproof from Mrs. Woodbridge. That “little woman” may be neither “elegant, nor even educated; but she had many good qualities” (29). Smith's work, as with the family narratives that follow it, values this kind of talk and description. In these books, the elegant and well-appointed is on equal standing with rough-hewn and simple. Family narrative's physical thickness (they are long books) is complemented by thick, detail-laden descriptions of home environs with emphases on usefulness rather than ornamentation. Narrators relish exposing minor details in the way that Alex Woloch argues that the realist novel depicts minor characters; they validate the everyday masses with their attention. In Memoirs of the Danby Family, descriptions of a sloping lawn are balanced with “useful gardens, an orchard, and shrubbery [. . .] an extensive farm-yard, well stocked with poultry, and furnished with buildings of various kinds for the reception of grain, and for other purposes requisite in the farming business” (1-2). Poultry has a place in these novels—as do dogs, cats, and dormice—and not merely as background descriptions.xciii Chickens are fed; girls sew and accidentally drop hems. Children eat “strawberries and cream” and “bread”; “tea equipage” isn't taken for granted. (Memoirs of the Danby Family 8). Boys debate about their gardens, “I cannot determine what I should put in this bed; whether I should sow annuals, or plant shrubs, which my father has given me leave to ale out of the shrubbery” (Memoirs of the Danby Family 22). More importantly, these things are merely what they are; they are full of what Elaine Freedgood, in The Ideas in Things, calls, simply, “objectness.” They are defined by their “material characteristics” rather than metaphorical import. Neither metaphorized into higher meaning nor developed into plot points, poultry and strawberries are merely edibles; hats and gloves are not fetishized—they are simply to put on before going out; shrubbery is simply shrubbery.

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Family narratives might well be defined by this extensive domestic detail. The genre consistently privileges detail over plot. Omniscient narrators used by this genre expect readers to wait, or linger, over domestic scenes. Though other, more exciting incidents may go on in the world, these are given no more privilege than tea-things. In The East Indians at Selwood, readers, along with Robert and Isabel, must wait until “they were all seated at tea, in the honey-suckle porch, and partaking of aunt Ann's nice honey, fresh milk, homemade cakes, and red-ripe raspberries” before “they began to speak of their long voyage” (4). Travel may be exciting but there is a time and place to speak of it, and this place seems to fall behind an itemized list of an (admittedly idyllic) English tea. After all this, the narrator provides far less detail into the “long voyage” than she does, a few pages later, when describing their walk around the yard: A brood of young turkeys, some tame pheasants, the sight of the rabbits, who fed out of their hands, and a little lamb, who poked its nose into their pockets, to see if they had got any thing for it, were all equally delightful: and as, towards the evening, they sat on the soft grass of the meadow and saw the cows milked, the peasants returning home, and all the poultry going to roost. (Ancram 7) Even the death of Robert's and Isabel's parents is given less attention than these domestic pleasures. Young turkeys, tame pheasants, rabbits, lambs, soft grass, and milked cows all supersede the impulse toward narrative. This generic trait is exhibited, too, in the narrative's tendency to interrupt story to provide the history of everyday things. Conversations about how objects work, and long histories of how domestic things are made, frequently interrupt these narrative's trajectories.xciv At the level of narration and at the level of story, everyday things—and especially those things that are similarly valued by georgic poetry—are devoted time and interest. What Roland Barthes calls “the reality effect,” “the irreducible residues of functional analysis” which “denote what is ordinarily called ‘concrete reality’” and signify nothing other than itself” becomes all in the family narrative (The Rustle of Language 146). And this is important because the family narrative recognizes that

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the small things that give rise to “concrete reality” validate certain kinds of realities over others. To Barthes’ question, “what is ultimately, so to speak, the significance of this insignificance?,” the family narrative might answer that valued detail shapes readers’ values (The Rustle of Language 143). This not to suggest that virtually everything in the home sphere or domestic landscape is enumerated. The narrator’s careful eye does not roam toward chamber pots, and it rarely dwells on the more violent elements of husbandry. While the genre embraces a bit of the georgic’s idealism, as I will discuss later in this chapter, it nonetheless also depicts some of rural life’s misfortune in this period: the unemployed and starving peasants that also make up the rural landscape. In a sense, the family narrative follows the model provided in a letter by the Memoirs of the Danby Family's Miss Danby. “I must tell you exactly how I spent this day,” she writes, and then spends the next six pages articulating what in any other genre would be minor detail: a paragraph on reciting a poem; a walk (with dialogue); being called to dinner; eating dinner; bored siblings; a walk to a farm; tea; feeding poultry; reading out loud; and church. This may be mere minutiae, but it is the minutia that makes up girls and women's lives for the middle class. The domestic narrative emphasizes their importance by refusing to gloss over the humdrum and every day. It dwells on the every day in loving detail, turning poultry into literature. In addition to devoting the formal quality of written space to minutia, the family narrative expresses lingering fondness at the level of sentence structure. In family narratives, sentences tend toward the long and unwieldy, often using a cumulative sentence structure. Characterized by commas, prepositional phrases, long lists, and the word “and,” these sentences are easy to get lost in. Though at times these sentences may in fact be using free indirect discourse to reflect a childlike logic, they also recall phrasing from georgic poems like Thomson's The Seasons and John Grainger's Sugar Cane. For example, Grainger writes, But would'st thou see huge casks, in order due, Roll'd numerous on the Bay, all fully fraught

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With strong-grain'd muscovado, silvery-grey, Joy of the planter; and if happy Fate Permit a choice: avoid the rocky slope, The clay-cold bottom, and the sandy beach. (27-32) Grainger's sentence is cumulative and unwieldy in part because of his strict adherence to iambic pentameter and because of his need to impart information on processing sugar. At the same time, Grainger's structure is similar to Sandham's in The East Indians at Selwood: “When tea was over, tired as they were they would walk over the garden; and were very sorry to hear that the chickens were gone to roost, for they wanted to see them” (4). Both cumulative sentences use a semi-colon followed by “and.” Both contrast a positive sight (“huge casks” and a garden) with a potential pitfall (casks hitting rocks, chickens gone to sleep).xcv Both use minor details to provide depth to their setting. Long lists, even in simple sentences, contribute to a sense of accumulated things and actions. Even the most straightforward sentences use lists to illustrate the world around them. In The Twins; Or, Home Scenes (1855), Elizabeth Milner writes “Battledores, shuttlecocks, soft balls, and other toys, lay scattered in all directions” (4). Her simple description of a messy nursery also sheds light on what two cosseted eight-year olds might have played with in the mid-nineteenth century. In a more typical example from The Dew Drop: Or Summer's Morning Walk (1816), Frances Bowyer Vaux writes So saying, Edward, who during this speech had been putting on his stockings, jumped out of bed, and dressed himself as quickly as he could, but although he was in great haste, and although his sister Harriet frequently called out “how long you are, Edward; pray come down,” he did not forget to brush his nails, clean his teeth, and comb his hair very neatly, before he went into the garden. (3-4) Buried in this complex sentence are lists that itemize the tasks of preparing oneself for the day. In addition to dressing, Edward models good hygiene for child readers

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by brushing his nails, cleaning his teeth, and combing his hair. Long sentences populated by commas, semi-colons, and colons are far more commonly used by children's family narratives than by any other early children's genre featured in this study. The lengths to which these sentences go are in fact so expansive that it is difficult to provide proper examples without running on, myself. Take, for instance, the opening of Henry, A Story (1815), Vaux writes Henry was a little boy about five years old; and one day, whilst his mother was busy at work, he stood by her side, and amused himself with trying to write upon a pretty little slate, that had been given to him for being a good boy; it had a red leather frame, and at the top was a little hole through which the string was put, with a slate pencil tied to the end of it, for Henry to write with: and there was another bit of string put through the same hole, with a little spurge tied to it, that Henry might rub out those letters he made badly: and after he had written on his slate till he was tired, he left off, and stood still a little time, and then he said to his mother, “Mother I am just hinting that I wish I knew where all the things in the world come from and what is the use of them:” and his mother said, “I believe there are very few people that know so much as that, my dear; but you may, by paying attention, learn the use of a great many things.” (9-10) This sentence, which takes up the first two pages of the book, contains much worth unpacking: Henry's task, learning to write (itself a domestic occupation), while his mother works; and the close attention to Henry's “pretty little slate” with its red leather, holes, strings, pencil, and sponge. What I find most interesting here, however, is how a sentence beginning with “Henry was a little boy about five years old” expands to capture a moment in Henry's life through a rich variety of detail. There is no reason for this detail, except to demonstrate care and appreciation for domestic scenes and things—a care Henry models through his desire to know “where all the things in the world come from” and their use. Henry, A Story continues is this style for the rest of the narrative, with each sentence capturing entire

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conversations, entire domestic scenes. Its expansiveness models the family narrative's desire to capture and record the seemingly trivial, proving that, in this context, minor details are not minor at all. Family Structures The family narrative's interest in the specific, material details that populate the domestic world is mirrored by an equally specific interest in family units. Family narratives consistently portray extended families and use familial interaction as the primary driver of their plots. As demonstrated in the opening of this chapter, families in this genre are one of its only features to have been allotted critical assessment. Both Elizabeth Thiel and Claudia Nelson offer full, itemized descriptions of the kinds of characters, identified by their familial role, that populate these novels: mothers, fathers, boy and girl children, aunts, uncles, cousins, and other extended family members are all described in their critical assessments. At the same time, what neither Thiel, with her emphasis on “transnormative” families, nor Nelson, with her use of family narrative as historical source, adequately account for is the degree to which familial concerns superseding individual ones is a narrative device.xcvi Especially as the genre ages into the nineteenth-century, family narratives place a greater emphasis on girl characters; however, ultimately these novels are about exemplary families rather than exemplary individuals. They privilege action and interaction over personal feelings. Given that family narratives are written for and focused on children and teenagers whose lives are limited to the familial sphere, it perhaps should not be surprising that parents are not depicted as round characters with social lives or significant commitments outside of their families. With the exception of dead parents and the occasional working father (who ultimately mends his ways to spend more time with his children), parents are not allotted lives apart from their familial roles. Even in those narratives written for older readers and which feature courtship and marriage, parents' feelings for each other as mother and father invariably supersede those for husband and wife. In real life, mothers may run a household and (if they are wealthy) spend little time with children; fathers certainly

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work. But in family narratives, mothers and fathers are portrayed taking an active part in their children's education and upbringing. In The Dew Drop, mamma comes to “hear” her children recite their lessons and discuss the “ourang-outang” (29) and father teaches his children about dew drops (7). In Henry, A Story the father, as much as the mother, instructs, telling Henry “I will be your dictionary again on this occasion [. . .] subterraneous signifies underground” (9) and helping Henry find “objects new and wonderful” on the seashore” (11).xcvii These depictions, in which men as well as women focus their energies on childrearing, are at odd with Nelson's assertion that nineteenth-century literature (both fiction and nonfiction) reveals a growing suspicion about fathers’ abilities within the home, as well as mothers’. Discussing parents in Victorian culture broadly, Nelson argues that whereas fathers were “seen as withdrawn, overbearing, or ineffectual” (11), mothers were often “pilloried as weak and childlike, complacent and hypocritical, or even physically or emotionally abusive” (12).xcviii This is not to dispute Nelson's argument: broader literature may well have portrayed mothers and fathers in this way, and, as I have demonstrated, there is no shortage of bad parenting even in children's books. But children's family narratives depart from this model, offering instead what may well be a fantasy of good and caring parenting meant to educate boys and girls on their own future roles. Moving against cultural currents that increasingly positioned men in a public sphere distinct from homemaking and childrearing, family narratives reposition women's work as familial responsibility. This idealized depiction of parents does not translate into an ideally equitable depiction of boys and girls, though family narratives do offer all child characters greater depth than other genres. Boys, the genre seems to state, will be boys. They are depicted (as in Rural Walks) continually robbing nests, (as in Memoirs of the Danby Family) running away from school, (as in The East Indians at Selwood) aspiring to heroic, masculine greatness, and (as in The Dew Drop) interrupting their sisters. But they are also capable of deep feeling toward their families and the animal world that surrounds them. Rural Walks' “little Edward,” for

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instance, gently nurses young birds after they are stolen from their parents (77). The East Indians at Selwood’s Richard learns that it is better to be good than great and grows up to be “a worthy and honored member of society” (169). If boys are prone to the same raucousness and violence as they are in other genres, girls are occasionally liable to feminine flaws. Though some girls continue to be portrayed as vain, prideful, passionate—one child is amusingly portrayed as too passionate to bathe—more often they are portrayed as loving, helpful members of their limited societies.xcix As I will demonstrate in the following section, the family narrative emphasizes girls' power to do good within their communities, and their surprisingly large scope of action. Far from being confined to homes and domestic labor within then, girls are portrayed as productive members of larger society with the capacity for far-reaching impact.c They are productive without needing to be married, a fact that is all the more important as the genre ages into the nineteenth century. After all, following the Census of 1851, people were more and more concerned with what they thought of as “redundant women” (W.R. Gregg, cited in Poovey 1). As Mary Poovey neatly sums this development up, pointing out that “the 1851 Census was instrumental in two dialectically related processes by which the unmarried woman was constituted as a social problem” (14). Unmarried women were, at least to some, considered useless social burdens. In response to this, the family narrative demonstrates a range of possibilities for girls and women. What Plot? Writing about the Thomson's The Seasons, John Chalker describes the poem's “apparent flabbiness”: The reader easily gets lost (or at least loses his sense of direction), and when he reaches the end he may have difficulty in ordering his memories of the ground that has been covered: the various episodes of the poem are not linked by an easily perceived structural thread. There is also some difficulty in deciding what the basic mode of the poem is. Is it fundamentally descriptive, reflective, or didactic? (92) One might well ask these questions, too, of the children's family narrative. Saving

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the fact that the works are linked by an easily perceived structural thread—that of the bildung—children's family narratives move between describing scenes in family life, reflecting on their meaning, and teaching children how to behave, and why. The narratives are tied together by children's growth, and offer little in the way of dramatic or scintillating plot. To enjoy these works requires that readers buy in to the importance of family life and especially into the importance of women's domestic lives. Though children's family narratives depict both boys and girls, they privilege girls' plots, and these plots are significantly more circumscribed than their brothers'. Family narratives are ultimately novels in which very little happens. For instance, in The Thimble Restored (anon. 1821), the most substantive action occurs when Lucy tries to get Emily's attention. She steals the thimble to give to a kitten, but is caught when Mrs. Foresight sees holes in her clothes. Lucy is required to mend her clothes rather than play. Over the course of the story, Lucy becomes a more productive citizen of the household; in the meantime, we are treated to descriptions of reading, sewing, and playing battledore. Children's family narratives feature the minor (but nonetheless great, as these narratives argue) dramas of everyday life: walks and country outings, visits, going to church, illness and death, familial reunions. Boys may go off to sea or school, but the books don't follow them there. Instead, these narratives illustrate women's forays into the public realm, especially in their ability to alleviate poverty through excellent schemes for the public good. While occasionally straying into the sentimental or romantic, children's family narratives are not guilty of novelistic happy endings. Their endings are mixed, like life's, and leave readers with a sense of continuation. The story might end, these works seem to say, but the characters continue with their domestic tasks. The vast majority of these books are made up of everyday tedium: children going and coming from lessons, studying, complaining. Family narratives are made up of lengthy descriptions, acute depictions of everyday life, and minor events presented with tedious accuracy. The sum of these parts adds up to bulky novels that seem to go nowhere and in which nothing seems to happen. For middle- and

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upper-class girl readers, they replicate the long days spent within the home that will, presumably, make up most of their lives. While these books cast the everyday in a valuable light, demonstrating its worthiness of narrative attention, they also might be said to inure female readers to tedium. What seems at first like boring nothingness, after habituation, may well seem eventful. The genre has certainly worked on me in this manner. Whereas the first family narrative I ever read, The Daisy Chain, literally put me to sleep, by the time I was ready to write this chapter I was convinced of their inherent value and interest. At any rate, what might seem like a minor incident in any other genre becomes a chapter, or two, in this one. In the first chapter of Charlotte Mary Yonge's The Daisy Chain (1855), for instance, the narrator reports that Ethel doesn't get along with her governess. In Chapter Seven, Ethel's sum was wrong, and she wanted to work it right, but Miss Winter, who had little liking for the higher branches of arithmetic, said she had spent time enough over it, and summoned her to an examination such as the governess was very fond of and often practiced. Ethel thought it useless, and was teased by it and though her answers were chiefly correct, they were given in an irritated tone. (64) Yonge provides us with five example questions, a description of the tasks Ethel completes next (in full detail) and, three pages later, finally discusses her problems with her older sister. Ethel's educational problems don't end here, of course, and the narrator continues to depict them in full detail, offering this domestic concern the full attention other narratives allot only to adventure or straightforward instruction—even in school or harm narratives, scenes of education gone wrong would be glossed over. Incidents like these may depict the boring and irritating components of daily life, but family narratives emphasize that not all domestic life is composed of chores: there is pleasure here, too. If family narratives depict in excruciating detail the humdrum and mundane, they also pay loving attention to outings and visits. As these narratives are set in the country, it is no wonder that they include many walks

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and country outings. Time spent on these ventures is used to introduce new characters and new scenes to families, while lessons learned on walks make explicit the connection between people and things. The East Indians at Selwood learn that “if you were to look only at a man, a dog, a fly, and a cabbage, you would laugh if any one were to tell you that they were closely connected; yet so it is. That is to say, there are such gradual changes in those species, as to make the distinctions faint” (28). Discussions like these, which point out the proximity and interdependency of living things in the world around characters, are typical of family narratives. So too are descriptions like the one preceding this discussion: “few things are more pleasant than a walk in the summer, after it has rained. The lowers seem to smell sweeter, and every green leaf and blade of grass glistens in the sun like diamonds [. . .] they were going along a heath, where the broom was growing plentifully” (6). Georgic descriptions like these are attentive to sensory details like the sweet smells following rain, as well as minute characteristics. Every green leaf and blade of grass is attended to. Outings introduce children to the wealth of entertainment available to them. Family outings include picnics and boat ventures as a matter of course. They also include more exotic fare: trips to the fair and to balloon launches are common features of these narratives. In Tales of the Pemberton Family (1825), Amelia Opie writes that, “When they reached the field, whence the balloon was to ascend, they found a large space full of raised seats railed off round the balloon, to which no one could be admitted without a ticket” (48). The family Could observe the whole process of filling the balloon [. . .] At length the balloon, with its daring occupier, rose gradually and majestically over their heads, and when it was at a certain height, the Pembertons re-entered their carriage, and followed its direction. Then, when tired of pursuing its course, they went to a friend's house, where they found some boys of their acquaintance playing at trap-ball on a beautiful lawn, and others partaking of various refreshments at a table spread under fine trees. (50)

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Opie's description of a fanciful family outing recalls the close of Barbauld's “Washing-Day.” Whereas Barbauld's childhood self ( “little dreaming then / To see, Montgolfier, thy silken ball/ Ride buoyant through the clouds” (81-83)) little expected to see the marvel of a hot air balloon, for families of Opie's later period this outing counts as an extravagant but not impossible adventure. Like Barbauld, Opie situates this spectacle firmly in the everyday and records it with the same careful detail allotted to a breakfast, lunch, or dinner. Perhaps the best of all domestic drama—the happiest, and the most explicitly emotional—is the inevitable homecoming. As though to solidify the importance of filial love, reunion, rather than union, is emphasized as the most joyful occasion possible. Nearly every family tale involves a homecoming of some sort—but the most affecting are those that welcome a returning traveler (inevitably a man who has gone out in the world) back into the domestic realm, as in Memoirs of the Danby Family, in which an uncle returns from years living abroad. In Rural Scenes the affect is heightened when a letter arrives late at night—surely this is bad news, and the characters experience real suspense numerous times in this short scene. At first afraid of the man who delivers the letter, the women's fear quickly turns to the letter writer, as they imagine numerous injuries and illness that could have befallen him or her. They worry more, still, when they see the letter is addressed by Caroline's father—and they are ultimately relieved to find that he is merely returning home early. As Smith tells us, “the re-union of the members of a family long separated and tenderly attached to each other, is one of the most pleasing and affecting spectacles that society presents” (279). Trips to see balloon ascents, garden parties, and picnics rank among the great events of everyday life that make up these narratives. In keeping with the family narrative's emphasis on the real and reasonable, these include the illness and death that equally make up people's home lives and define their familial connections. Family narratives treat illness and harm with the same matter-of-fact outlook with which they treat everything else. Injury and death, they acknowledge, are grievous and traumatizing, but they are no more or less important than all the

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other facets of family life. In Memoirs of the Danby Family, for instance, injuries come and go without pleasurable depiction or undue emphasis. Tommy's injury is allotted half a paragraph. Miss Maitland has a concussion, but she gets better. Another young man who has “totally lost one eye, and had some degree of weakness in the other” still manages to study “agriculture and botany” (253). Injuries, even permanent ones, are obstacles to be gotten over. Deaths are treated similarly. Charlotte Mary Yonge's The Daisy Chain charts the May family's recovery after the mother is killed in a carriage crash and the oldest daughter is paralyzed. These harms are not hyperbolized, however, and though the novel is deeply interested in and sympathetic to the characters' grief and physical trauma, the fact remains that someone must take care of the baby and make sure candles are lit. Neither the narrator nor the characters gloss over these details. Even the most dramatic events in familial life are replete with domestic details and daily concerns. Family narratives get their momentum less from outings, reunions, and death than they do from their concern for impoverished families and individuals. Inevitably, middle- and upper-class characters are confronted with the dire straits of those who live around them. Country outings expose children to the poverty of the lower classes and to the novelties of life in this period. Few, if any, children's family narratives portray a country walk without at least one encounter with an impoverished person or family, through which middle- and upper-class children learn to appreciate their own fortune and help others. Vaux's Domestic Pleasures; Or, the Happy Fireside (1816) also opens with a reflection on others’ poverty, throwing into stark relief the comfort experienced by the family. In Smith's Rural Walks, Mrs. Woodfield, Caroline, and Elizabeth “visit a poor family, who are in a situation to want even the little assistance [they] can give them” (Smith 10). There, they entered a cottage, of which the mud walls were in many places falling down, the thatch broken, and the windows darkened [. . .] over a few embers, which the green sticks that were laid upon them could not make aspire to a flame, sat a Cottager, whose pale squalid countenance, and emaciated figure, presented to them an image of

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disease and famine. (11-12) The capitalized first letter of cottager indicates the degree to which poverty itself has already, in Smith's case, become an unmovable trope of the genre. Also emblematic of the genre is the Woodfields’ own lack of wealth. Like many families in family narratives, the Woodfields are not themselves rich—worry over money is common enough in this genre. Family narratives emphasize people's responsibility to the truly poor without regard for the variations in wealth for middle- or upper- class families; just as they revise our sense of gendered import, family narratives revise our sense of class relations and standards. They collapse boundaries we tend to assume are important in favor or promoting generosity and charity. Whatever their privilege, true reflection of others’ poverty leads good children to what Vaux calls “an excellent scheme” for improving the lives of those around them (The Happy Family 4). The Bernard children, for instance, plot to provide a local family with nice warm clothes made from their own fabric, and plan to supplement their supply with prize money. This is what scheming means in the family narrative: not subterfuge and slyness, but gentle plans to improve the lots of others by providing for their domestic and religious comfort, often all at once. Boys are certainly capable of doing good in their communities: in The Pemberton Family, Edward is depicted giving his money to a poor boy. But girls inevitably lead the charge in grand scheming and large effects. Nelson calls this “meaningful occupation,” noting that women without it “faced tedium and lack of self-respect in an era that prized earnestness and saw work, whether or not it was remunerated, as a psychological necessity” (85). But “teaching Sunday school,” “organizing community activities such as charity bazaars,” and “district visiting” also offer girls and women in these novels access to the wide world beyond the domestic sphere (Nelson 85). This influence is aptly modeled by The Daisy Chain's main character, Etheldred May. As a child, Ethel dreams of helping her neighbors by founding a school and creating a church. Her domestic virtue—generosity—makes for powerful public impact. Each of Ethel's generous acts takes an outward trajectory that, over

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the novel's course, becomes greater and greater. By helping at home and aiding her brother, Norman, she helps him and his new wife become successful missionaries. Through them, her influence extends globally. More significantly, her dedication to the Cocksmoor, a poor hamlet near her town, ends in the church and school she always dreamed of. To a twenty-first century perspective, Ethel's impact may well seem fantastical, if not downright colonial. But the family narrative takes endeavors like Ethel's seriously. Girl characters’ industriousness bears narrative fruit, has narrative impact. Thus, family narratives imagine a way for women to enter the public sphere and have a meaningful impact there through their own action. And, though this fantasy may be a pure fiction, it is nonetheless a powerful one, as Sarah Stickney Ellis's The Women of England: Their Social Duties and Domestic Habits (1839) makes clear: The sphere of [women's] direct personal influence is central, and consequently small; but its extreme operations are as widely extended as the range of human feeling [. . .] as far as the noble daring of Britain has sent forth her adventurous sons, and that is to every point of danger on the habitable globe, they have borne along with them a generosity, a disinterestedness, and a moral courage, derived in no small measure from the female influence of their native country. (1722) Ellis minimizes the same public activity that children's family narratives demonstrate is central to women's and girls' worldly effectiveness. Ellis rewrites the central conceit of the children's family narrative into impact through female influence—the original might well better be called impact through interference. Finally, the children's family narrative features mixed endings, rather than the comic or tragic endings normally employed by novels. These narratives are more interested in mirroring life's lack of closure than they are in closure. Tomorrow, they seem to say, will go on just as today has. Almost laughably, Rural Walks ends with a simple sentence: “Remarks on this little narrative closed the evening” (316). The narrator of The Twins closes “And now, for the satisfaction of

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my young readers, I gladly bear testimony to the sincerity of little Mary's resolution to overcome her dread of sea-bathing [. . .] Six weeks rolled swiftly by; and again Mrs. Fortescue stood by her own hearth, with the twins beside her; Mary once more in full health and vigour, and in great delight at being again at home” (160). The episode may close, but we are left with the distinct sense that more are potentially in the making. At home, there are always new domestic challenges to overcome, there is always more to learn. Others end on a mixed note by failing to find a clear resolution. The Daisy Chain's Ethel closes the novel by thinking Home and Cocksmoor had been her choice, and they were before her. Home! But her eyes had been opened to see that earthly homes may not endure, nor fill the heart [. . .] she had begun to understand that the unmarried woman must not seek undivided return of affection [. . .] she might look to becoming comparatively solitary in the course of years. (413)ci A model of familial citizenship, Ethel has given up her own educational and marital chances to support her family, only to realize at the end of the novel that all of her younger siblings will grow up and leave her. Ethel, herself, will remain alone. This melancholia draws attention to the tension exhibited by family narratives, as well as to the specific social circumstances in which Yonge was writing in 1856—she certainly seems to be positing a solution to the redundant woman problem. Like Ethel, children's family narratives espouse the virtues of “Home.” They value its fixtures and its people, itemizing them for posterity and demonstrating the worth of women’s work within the home. At the same time, the descriptions themselves run on to tedium and the narratives become long works in which very little happens. In portraying the familial in its all its detail, children's family narratives also draw attention to what domestic life is or can be: tedious, quotidian, boring. The Family Narrative in Nineteenth-Century Fiction Children's family novels never fully fade into disuse. Much the opposite, they continue to develop and thrive over the course of the nineteenth century,

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experiencing their height in the years after this study ends. The genre began to be adapted for adults long before it peaked in the 1870s and 1880s. Women writers, especially, adapted the tropological conventions and the minute attention to detail provided by the family narrative. Whereas early children's writers used detail to celebrate and legitimate the private sphere, making analogical comparisons between celebrated rural labor and home labor, writers for adults frequently critique this sphere and its perceived ability to influence. Whereas writers following Harriet Martineau and her publication of Deerbrook (1838) took the family narrative’s conventions seriously, reshaping them for adults, others gently satirize them. Jane Austen in Emma and Elizabeth Barrett Browning alike make use of and mock the conventions of the family narrative. For these authors, minutiae signaling the everyday also signal tedium, low, poor taste, and even a sense of entrapment within the domestic sphere. It would perhaps be a simple enough thing to attribute sensorial, detail- oriented concerns with the rise of the domestic novel in the nineteenth-century. As I've demonstrated in the preceding portion of this chapter, however, these concerns were first and predominantly the concerns of children's family narratives. In this brief survey of realist work influenced by the children's family narrative, however, it would be a mistake to leave out Deerbrook. Written by noted domestic economist and children's author, Harriet Martineau, Deerbrook has been heralded as one of the first realist domestic novels. Susan Fraiman, in her survey of the genre, focuses explicitly on this work as exemplary of the domestic genre. Monica Fryckstedt argues that When Harriet Martineau's Deerbrook was published in 1839 It struck the reading public as a pioneering novel. [. . .] novel readers were unprepared for a domestic love story, with a village apothecary for its hero, which glorified the values of family and home. Deerbook was bourgeois and unromantic, and it was precisely for this reason [. . .] that the publisher John Murray declined it. (9)cii Contemporary and twenty-first century readers alike agree that Deerbook is

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characterized by much of what is typical of the children's family narrative, though they have not classified it as such: quiet rural settings, interest in family and community dynamics, domestic detail, attention to middling characters and “lumbering” unadventurous plot. Given that she published The Crofton Boys in 1841—only two years after Deerbrook—Martineau was almost certainly aware of the children's literature market. More tellingly, she was once a child reader. In Martineau's own words, she knew “Mrs. Barbauld's Prose Hymns by heart; and there were parts of them which I dearly loved: but other parts made me shiver with awe” (excerpted in Records of Girlhood 128). As an adult, she filled her first novel with domestic details and focused on family dynamics. She valued everyday things and conversations. When describing the sisters’ introduction to Deerbrook, for instance, Martineau writes that, “She glanced over the room, to see that nothing was wanting; pointed out the bell, intimated that the washstands were mahogany, which showed every splash, and explained that the green blinds were meant to be always down when the sun shown in, lest it should fade the carpet” (14). Martineau records not only the objects in a bedroom, but their functional failures. Mahogany shows every drip, carpets fade. Martineau reports, too, the humorous interactions of daily life: “What in the world is that noise?” Asked Margaret. “Only somebody killing a pig,” replied Sydney, decidedly. “Do not believe him,” said Mr. Enderby. “The Deerbrook people have better manners than to kill their pigs in the hearing of ladies on summer afternoons.” “But what is it? It seems coming nearer.” “I once told you,” said Mr. Enderby, “that we possess an inhabitant, whose voice you might know before her name.” (105) Certainly, Martineau means this conversation to be a humorous characterization of a raucous female character, and it has its intended effect. Even so, passages like the above one are less important for their character development than they are for their representation of familial interaction. The child Sydney is depicted in discussion with his cousin and the doctor. In passages like this one, Martineau’s narrator

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extends her attention to conversations between children and adults—something of a rarity in nineteenth-century novels outside of Dickens. Though Martineau’s Deerbrook exemplifies the family narrative’s adoption by the realist novel, elements of the genre began to erupt in the decades before it. Conventions of the family narrative—picnics and country outings; fruit, chickens, and eggs; attention to charity—may not seem notable now, but eighteenth century novels are explicitly not interested in these everyday things. Instead, they depict foreign shores, gothic and romantic intrigue, adventure, and high life. Family narratives make depiction of the everyday possible for fiction writers. This shift in narrative attention can even be seen in the difference between early Austen and late Austen novels. Whereas Austen’s early novels, Northanger Abbey, Sense and Sensibility, and Pride and Prejudice, satirize eighteenth-century conventions, her later works, Mansfield Park (1814) and Emma (1815) gently satirize domestic characters, making fun of Mansfield Park's Mrs. Norris's concern for domestic economy and Mr. Woodhouse's speechifying upon the benefits of gruel. While by writing in the satirical mode Austen might be said to change the family narrative somewhat, that there exists something to satire reveals the genres perspicuity. It is recognizable. Austen’s late novels, too, make much of the daily adventures undertaken in children's family narratives—trips to nearby estates, walks in the shrubbery, and visitations among friends. Even more than Mansfield Park, Emma takes up one of the main concerns of the family narrative: the well-bred woman with little to do. Austen depicts the unfortunate waste of Emma's good qualities, demonstrating how a lack occupation fosters small-minded intrigue. Emma is at her best when obeying the children's family narrative's charitable dictum: Emma was very compassionate; and the distresses of the poor were as sure of relief from her personal attention and kindness, her counsel and her patience, as from her purse. She understood their ways, could allow for their ignorance and their temptations, had no romantic expectations of extraordinary virtue from those, for whom education

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had done so little; entered into their troubles with ready sympathy, and always gave her assistance with as much intelligence as good-will. In the present instance, it was sickness and poverty together she came to visit. (84) Here, Emma models the compassionate qualities so much lauded by the children's family narrative. Rather than expect “extraordinary virtue,” through her attention to the poor, her kindness, and her understanding, Emma demonstrates that she has adopted the family narrative's stance toward the less fortunate and strategy for worldly influence. Emma is good at sympathy and goodwill; this, more than any other scene in the early novel, prefigures Emma's eventual domestic success. At the same time, Austen seems to lampoon the specifically domestic care modeled by children's family narratives in her depiction of Miss Bates. This character's overwhelming speeches demonstrate a tedious preoccupation with the minutiae: “Oh! Here it is. I was sure it could not be far off; but I had put my housewife upon it, you seen, without being aware, and so it was quite hid, but I had it in my hand so very lately that I was almost sure it must be on the table. I was reading it to Mrs. Cole, and since she went away, I was reading it again to my mother, for it is such a pleasure to her--a letter from Jane--that she can never hear it often enough; so I knew it could not be far off, and here it is, only just under my housewife.” (147) Miss Bates's enumeration of domestic objects (housewife, table, housewife again) and her attention to specific motions (“I had it in my hand”; “I was reading it”) spoof the family narrative's enumerations and lingering attention. The omniscient narrator's repetition of Miss Bates's repetitive speech, too, mirrors the family narrative's portrayal of domestic and unrefined conversation. Here, however, domestic concern appears to be ridiculed instead of lauded. Miss Bates is a caricature, a threatening representation of what Emma could, in the event of poor fortune, come to be. However, Austen’s depiction of Miss Bates mirrors the family

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narrative’s reframing of similarly ridiculed domestic characters. In the same way that Charlotte Smith, in Rural Walks, emphasizes the “many good qualities” of a “little woman [who] talks to about her pigs and her poultry” (29), Austen goes out of her way to show Emma, not the narrator, ridicules and devalues Miss Bates. And Emma is firmly chastised for her lack of sympathy and care. Later author Elizabeth Barrett Browning amplifies Austen’s gentle censure, while limitedly celebrating women’s domestic capabilities. In her 1856 poem, Aurora Leigh, Barrett Browning doesn't condemn what she sees as female knowledge. Describing Aurora's mother, for instance, Barrett Browning writes that Women know The way to rear up children, (to be just,) They know a simple, merry, tender knack Of tying sashes, fitting baby-shoes, And stringing pretty words that make no sense, And kissing full sense into empty words; Which things are corals to cut life upon, Although such trifles (I.47-54) Though women's work may be, from a certain perspective, “trifles” this domestic labor of tying sashes and fitting shoes nonetheless shapes lives—it actively turns babyish nonsense into sense. Despite this fair and even laudatory description of women's valuable knowledge, Aurora turns to domestic, homey detail when describing life with her aunt and especially when lamenting the limitations of that life. Aurora's description of “a harmless life, she called a virtuous life, / a quiet life, which was not life at all” (I.287-89) and “a sort of caged bird life” are often quoted (305). Less studiously attended to is the litany of everyday tasks which lies between these lines: The poor-club exercised her Christian gifts Of knitting stockings, stitching petticoats, Because we are of one flesh after all And need one flannel, (with a proper sense

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Of difference in the quality)--and still The book-club guarded from your modern trick Of shaking dangerous questions from the crease, preserved her intellectual. (297-304) Aurora's attention to the kinds of “Christian gifts” her aunt makes, to stockings and petticoats, and to the differences in flannel creates a domestic record, but it does so with a scathing attitude toward the limited life led by her aunt and women like her. These domestic details, she demonstrates, are in a different category from women’s knowledge. Aurora extends a similarly-exacting eye to the domestic interiors of her childhood: I had a little chamber in the house, As green as any privet-hedge [. . .] The walls Were green, the carpet was pure green, the straight Small bed was curtained greenly, and the folds Hung green about the window, which let in The out-door world, with all its greenery. (I.567-574) Aurora's bedroom, which she makes clear is as good as a cage, is recorded in all its green-hued monotony. Walls, bed, curtains, and window alike contribute to Aurora's overwhelming sense of oppression. For Barrett Browning, valuation of the domestic can be tantamount to the circumscription of women—a noted problem with separate spheres ideology and one that children's family narratives are certainly, if unwittingly, able to feed into. George Eliot's 1870-71 novel Middlemarch takes up just this complexity. Middlemarch In a review of Middlemarch, Henry James attested “It is not compact; but when was a panorama compact” (Qutd. In Swann 279). James's statement spontaneously spotlights the novel's achievement and its greatest difficulty. Middlemarch, as James illustrates, is a panoramic reflection of a small rural community. It moves from the highborn to those existing in the middle, occasionally

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glancing at the poor and despondent. Eliot's omniscient narrator provides insight into the highborn Miss Brooke but is also invested in privileging alternate perspectives: she sheds light on the unattractive Casaubon's mind, and makes time for the minds of lesser mortals. Middlemarch does not firmly adhere to a single category of children's fiction, and I'm not arguing that the novel is a pure, straightforward version of the children's family narrative. This novel—which might well be credited as the crowning achievement of nineteenth-century realist fiction— is too complex to wear any one label firmly. Indeed, it might better be said to change genres as it changes and incorporates new plots, moving from between the familial, the mysterious, the political, the scientific, and the religious. Nonetheless, through Eliot's concern for the middling perspective and the connections between community members, as well as through her rich use of domestic detail, it is possible to trace the children's family narrative's influence. In Middlemarch, the family narrative’s conventions appear primarily as discourse, or the way the story is told, and this is especially evident in the narrator’s use of detail in domestic settings. Further, I argue that when read within the genealogy of the family narrative, Dorothea’s desire to make an impact on her community must be read as a personal failure rather than a social one—and this is in part because Dorothea fails to understand that value lies in goodness rather than greatness. For Eliot, as for the family narrative, the notion of goodness is connected to notions of family and interconnectedness rather than marriage and singular achievement (or, for that matter, singular achievement through marriage). By depicting Dorothea and consigning her to the familial background, Eliot seems to punish her most obviously feminist character. At least, she has been continuously read this way. But by critiquing Dorothea’s investment in the superegoed self, Eliot in fact critiques modern culture’s—including feminism’s—investment in something unsavory: that which values the self over others, that which puts emphasis on masculine individualism. The qualities Middlemarch borrows from the children's family narrative have not gone without comment, though they have not been correctly attributed. Daryl

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Ogden assigns Eliot's “Politics of Domesticity” to Sarah Stickney Ellis, astutely demonstrating that Ellis's “‘theory' of domestic visions [. . .] helped open up a politically important scopic space for Victorian women not only by formulating a theory of domestic praxis but also by providing a discourse of social power for women within the domestic sphere” (586). Ogden credits Eliot's domestic description to Ellis's artistic philosophy that “visual appreciation of the mundane, satisfaction with viewing the most common objects, proves invaluable preparation for the young girl or young women with a domestic life in front of her” (587). Though Ogden gives Ellis too much credit for philosophies and formal elements that had been well established by the children's family narrative, his argument ultimately demonstrates that Eliot's descriptive practice is a reflection of domestic politics. With the exception of Ogden, approaches to Eliot's use of domestic detail have been limited to arguments that treat detail as a reflection of character's interiority,ciii and those that have grown out of Bryan Swann’s and J. Hillis Miller’s work in the 1960s and 1970s. Swann, for instance, attempts to account for James's critique of the novel: “Middlemarch is a treasure-house of details, but it is an indifferent whole” (279) and rebuts the idea that Middlemarch's realism is a pure reflection of life; instead he argues that Eliot uses symbol to highlight and delineate the differences between minds and the way they adapt themselves to each other. Other criticism has tied Middlemarch to works and genres that were similarly used by or developed from the children's family narrative. In her work on the English Georgic, Kevis Goodman connects Middlemarch with Thomson's Seasons by referring to Eliot's understanding of noise—”that if we had a keen vision and feeling [. . .] we should die of the roar that lies on the other side of silence”; Goodman believes that Eliot, as much is Thomson, is interested in the discomfort associated with aural overwhelming and sensory overload (38). In an argument that doesn't mention Barbauld's “Washing-Day,” Kenny Marotta nonetheless observes that Middlemarch makes use of the “epic genre,” “combining domesticity with grandeur” (403). Like Ogden, Marotta ties domesticity with a bid for greatness. Finally, June Sturrock has connected Emma with Middlemarch and Yonge's The Clever Woman of

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Family, arguing that these later novels are revisions of Austen's plot and her depiction of an engaging woman who “[lacks] an obvious outlet for her energy” (325). As this survey demonstrates, some scholars of Middlemarch have attended to its use of domestic detail, while others have connected it to the georgic, the epic, and Austen's brand of realism.civ Still, the vast majority of criticism on this novel has focused on Dorothea. Very few have condescended to examine the novel's middling domestic characters such as Rosamond and Mary Garth. This critical failure has been noted by Garth-ists and Rosamond-ists alike, all of whom lament that these significant portions of the novel have been neglected. These scholars include Nicole M. Coonradt, who convincingly argues that Mary Garth acts as an effective middle ground to Rosamond's and Dorothea's extremes—her life is ultimately livable and happy. Bernard J. Paris, in Rereading George Eliot, also goes out of his way to examine Mary and the other Garths as an alternative to the “egoism” demonstrated by the novel's other characters (82). Chinnie Ding focuses on Caleb Garth, arguing that his character “enables George Eliot at once to idealize labor in principle and to relegate its actuality to a past at odds with the version of modernity she advocates” (918). Finally, Rebecca Mitchell reads for “Rosamond Plots” in Jane Eyre and Middlemarch, arguing that in Eliot's work Rosamond herself acts as a critique of the hyper-self awareness lauded by Brontë's novel (309). Together, Coonradt, Ding, and Mitchell make a persuasive argument for a returned focus on the middle-class characters that, after all, make up the novel's title. As the conclusion of this chapter will demonstrate, Eliot deploys traces of the family narrative—omniscient narration, georgic webs of connection, domestic realism, and middle-class people themselves—to reinvest the domestic with a compelling wholesomeness—one that values communal ties over individual achievements for both men and women. As is common in the children's family narrative, Eliot’s narrator is omniscient, possessing a god-like ability to dip into and out of character's minds. At the same time, this narrator acknowledges her own failures: her inability, in fact, to show all. I don't want to make too much of this connection. After all, not only is

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omniscient narration the nineteenth-century realist novel's default mode by the time of Eliot's writing, Eliot uses omniscient narration in her own work with too much consistency to attribute this formal choice to a minor genre. Still, it is worth noting that Eliot takes advantage of a georgic narrational style that would be as familiar to readers of family narratives as it would readers of eighteenth century (or classical) poetry. That is, Eliot’s use of discourse, and especially her digressions and deviations from plot, recall the family narrative’s own interest in extensive detail. What is compelling about Eliot's highly-refined, self-reflective omniscience is less that she uses a familiar narrative form but that she articulates its ability to irradiate the trivial. Eliot's narrator balances the very large against the very small, ranging as she does between St. Theresa, to the intrusion of the railroad onto the country, to the small familial squabbles between the Brooke sisters, the Vincys, and the Lydgates. Moreover, she draws attention to this very ability. Eliot’s narrator observes Even with a microscope directed on a water-drop we find ourselves making interpretations which turn out to be rather coarse; for whereas under a weak lens you may seem to see a creature exhibiting an active voracity into which there smaller creatures actively play as if they were so many animated tax-pennies, a stronger lens reveals to you certain hairlets which make vortices for these victims while the swallower waits passively at his receipt of custom. In this way, metaphorically speaking, a strong lens applied to Mrs. Cadwallader's match-making will show a play of minute causes producing what may be called thought and speech vortices to bring her the sort of food she needed. Her life was rurally simple, quite free from secrets either foul, dangerous, or otherwise important, and not consciously affected by the great affairs of the world. (38) Like the writers of family narratives, Eliot relies on long and complex additive sentences. In this passage, her style is similarly punctuated with semicolons and lists. The narrator’s use of the microscope here recalls Thomson's ability to move

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between the very large and the minutely small, the many and the individual in The Seasons. And, of course, the children's family narrative shares with this georgic poem the emphasis on enumeration and particularization. Here, Eliot writes simultaneously to a variety of reading backgrounds. She passes from the georgic and the scientific before falling into the rural and the familial, centered on the actions of an individual, middling (and meddling) sort of woman. From microscopes and water drops, the narrator moves to hairs and then matchmaking. She closes on a “rurally simple” life, an insignificant “not consciously affected by the great affairs” life. Embedded in her prose are the children's family narrative's investments and its own derivation from the georgic mode—as well as some departure from these investments and derivations. For Eliot, the very small, whether the microscopic detail under a lens or a small woman, is intermixed with a sense of foreboding. A stronger lens, she argues, turns what seems like mere play into a fight to the death. Some are swallowers; some are victims. Specifically, Eliot's narrator promotes the family narrative's emphasis on community and connection. Though it opens with Dorothea, Middlemarch eschews the bildungsroman's singular focus, widening its gaze to take in the entire rural community. Eliot doesn't merely linger on instances of communal interaction; she explicitly takes this interaction as her subject. For Eliot, these connections are rendered in humble terms. Eliot writes Old provincial society had its share of this subtle movement: had not only its striking downfalls, its brilliant young professional dandies who ended by living up an entry with a drab and six children for their establishment, but also those less marked vicissitudes which are constantly shifting the boundaries of social intercourse, and begetting new consciousness of interdependence. [. . .] Municipal town and rural parish gradually made fresh threads of connection. (61) Eliot explains that “old provincial society” should not be taken for granted. Though its movements may be subtle, rural communities are not places for stasis. Movement may well not be the romantic developments we expect in a novel. “Young

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professional dandies” end up burdened and domesticated by their wives and children. Still, even those “less marked vicissitudes” create “fresh threads of connection.” It is interesting that, though Eliot may be obliquely referring to the construction of the railroad, the new routes that webbed the English countryside and connected people with one another, she nonetheless describes the connection in purely domestic terms. “Fresh threads,” here, recall sewing, the constant work of women. Eliot extends this metaphor a few chapters later: “I at least have so much to do in unravelling certain human lots, and seeing how they were woven and interwoven, that all the light I can command must be concentrated on this particular web, and not dispersed over that tempting range of relevancies called the universe” (91). The narrator explicitly compares her work to a piece of woven fabric, her task unknotting the intricate interweavings that make it up. Rather than the fancy work taken up by characters like Dorothea, Celia, and Rosamond, web-making is foundational task of fabric making itself. The task of Middlemarch, as the narrator explains it, is less to follow georgic webs, with their emphasis on nature, than to follow domestic, handcrafted webs. Throughout the novel, the narrator employs thick realist description to depict the countryside and to give shape to specifically domestic interiors. Public spaces—hospitals, churches, town centers—receive little to no material description. These places may well be important in their way, but they are not allotted the lingering gaze employed for other settings. Indeed, public settings are most often described through social interaction rather than spatial description—through dialogue rather than explication. While I will return to domestic description in the following pages, for now it is worth noting that in Middlemarch domestic objects and concerns intrude into public spaces. Nowhere is this fact made more evident than in Eliot's description of the Larchers’ sale. This public event, attended by nearly everyone in town, is almost entirely made up of domestic descriptions. Eliot devotes hundreds of words to a fender “of polished steel, with much lancet-shaped open- work and a sharp edge” (374) before Mr. Trumbull, the auctioneer, moves on to “a

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collection of trifles for the drawing room table,” “a practical rebus,” “a book of riddles,” “an engraving of the Duke of Wellington,” “two Dutch prints,” and “a painting of the Italian School” (375-76). Each of these is described in intricate detail, none of them meriting fewer than fifty words. As Mr. Trumbull makes obvious in his disquisition upon the loaded tray, “trifles make the sum of human things” (375). The goal of this chapter, surely, is to introduce Will Ladislaw to Raffles, the man who will eventually reveal his dubious ancestry—but we get there only by meandering through a valuation of household things. Given that Eliot herself attends to everyday things, equating her work to hard domestic labor, and that her novel demonstrates the intrusion of domestic things into public life, it must be significant that Middlemarch’s heroine, Dorothea Brooke both fails to appreciate everyday detail and fails in her goal to achieve greatness first through public works and then through marriage to a great man. Dorothea has for good reason received no shortage of critical commentary.cv For most of the novel, however, Dorothea's story fails to intersect with the family narrative— instead, her plot is one of unhappy marriage to a wealthy man and useless ambition to do good in her community. Dorothea's misery through much of the novel comes largely as the result of being cut off from the kinds of values promoted by the family narrative. As Charles Ogden has pointed out, “Dorothea's vision proves deficient in comparison to Celia's precisely because, unlike Celia, Dorothea neglects to see things from what the narrator calls 'the proper feminine angle,' a perspective which, like Ellis's theory, stresses the visibility of hearth and home, husband and child” (596).cvi In short, Dorothea lacks the practicality lauded by the children's family narrative. Though her motives may be noble, her desire to achieve greatness or serve greatness—her masculine ego—misdirects her. Though she has property and a desire for public service, Dorothea is impractical and unable to serve in the more minor ways that characters like Mary Garth and Henrietta Noble, do. For that matter, Dorothea fails to have the public and charitable impact that characters in family narratives invariably achieve. Of all the characters in the novel, she is most like Mr. Garth, who is similarly careless of

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money and practicality, and who, like her, cares about cottages. Lacking both his masculinity and his humility, however, Dorothea is a comic rebuttal to the family narrative type. Like Emma, she has too little to do. Like The Daisy Chain's Ethel, she builds castles—or, rather, cottages—in the air. For all her work in the “infant school which she had set going in the village,” however, Dorothea lacks Ethel's efficacy (8). She is also less effective than many of the genre’s very small children who spend their free time and money creating clothes for others. Middlemarch’s “Prelude” seems to blame this failure on “domestic reality [. . .] in the shape of uncles” and ‘meanness of opportunity”; but the novel demonstrates that Dorothea’s uncle is unable or unwilling to control her, that her failure is in fact the product of her obsession with plans and large-scale schemes (3). Famously “short-sighted” Dorothea is unable to see the lesser opportunities offered her until the end of the novel, when she offers Lydgate a loan and substantively alleviates his sense of persecution and failure (20). This failure is at least in part due to Dorothea’s belief that, if she cannot do substantive good on her own, then she must do good through a great man. Unlike the family narrative, which assumes that marriage serves the family’s interest, Dorothea imagines that marriage will serve her own. Fantasizing about her marriage, Dorothea imagines that she could achieve “voluntary submission to a guide who would taker her along the grandest path”; she imagines that she could “learn everything” from Casaubon and contribute to his great work (19). Dorothea’s desire for voluntary submission is paradoxically bound to her own desire to achieve masculine learning (Latin, Greek, and Hebrew) and to follow an individually oriented path (41). It is no small wonder, then, that Dorothea’s marital home lacks any spark of family life or the pleasure of familial interactions. Dorothea’s lack of care for her surroundings is part of her larger disregard for small domestic concerns and things. Nonetheless, the narrator takes care to itemize Dorothea’s home, a “building, of greenish stone” with “the dark book-shelves in the long library, the carpets and curtains with colors subdued by time, the curious old maps and bird's-eye views on

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the walks of the corridor, with here an there an old vase below” (47). Dorothea’s boudoir is described multiple times in the novel, possessing a “bow-window” and furniture was all of a faded blue, and there were miniatures of ladies and gentlemen with powdered hair hanging in a group. A piece of tapestry over a door also showed a blue-green world with a pale stag in it. The chairs and tables were thin-legged and easy to upset [. . .]A light book-case contained duodecimo volumes of polite literature in calf completing their furniture. (48) In the drawing room “the damask matched the wood-work, which was all white and gold; there were two tall mirrors and tables with nothing on them” (335). Dorothea's surroundings are luxurious and well selected, but they have no life in them. Rarely does the narrator need to place people in relation to one another, provide sensory detail, or depict domestic labor. Like Aurora Leigh’s home with her aunt, Dorothea’s surroundings are oppressive and caging. In them, she has little to occupy herself with and her experience illustrates that all the house and furniture in the world are little guarantee of happiness at home. At the end of Middlemarch, Dorothea’s choice to marry Will Ladislaw is not just the culmination of a successful marriage plot. In what amounts to a proposal to him, Dorothea declares that she will attend to everyday things. Dorothea exclaims “We could live quite well on my own fortune—it is too much—seven hundred-a- year—I want so little—no new clothes--and I will learn what everything costs” (500). For Dorothea, to “learn what everything costs” means to give up the grand ambitions that kept her from achieving anything. By the novel's end, we know that she will invest her time and energy in domestic economy. Like Mrs. Cadwallader, who worries about the relative costs of cannibal poultry and “the Rector's chicken- broth on a Sunday,” Dorothea gives up status and leisure in favor of activity—unlike Mrs. Cadwallader, Dorothea’s activity is useful and good activity rather than gossip and manipulation (33). Most importantly, Dorothea's own newfound recognition of the middling domestic sphere's value enables her to do so without real harm to herself. Among Eliot's novels, this is a soft landing for “so substantive and rare a

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creature” (513). Dorothea is ultimately “only known in a certain circle as a wife and mother”—but she is alive and happy (513). Her life is useful because she has traded the marriage plot for the family narrative—a family narrative that Middlemarch has been depicting all along. After all, the family narrative’s meandering description (exacerbated and satirized in Eliot’s depiction of Trumbull), is subtly practiced throughout the novel. It is especially prevalent in descriptions portraying middling characters and those who espouse family values. Even relatively minor characters have their surroundings described in minute detail. Introducing the Rev. Cadwallader, for instance, the narrator notes “Happily, the Rector was at home, and his visitor was shown into the study, where all the fishing-tackle hung” (43). With a similar eye for minor detail, the narrator describes the Farebrother household: There were painted white chairs, with gilding and wreaths on them, and some lingering red silk damask with slits in it. There were engraved portraits of Lord Chancellors and other celebrated lawyers of the last century; and their were old pier glasses to reflect them, as well as the little satin-wood tables and the sofas resembling a prolongation of uneasy chairs, all standing in relief against the dark wainscot. [. . .]Meanwhile tiny Miss Noble carried on her arm a small basket, into which diverted a bit of sugar, she had first dropped in her saucer as if by mistake; looking round furtively afterwards, and reverting to her tea-cup with a small innocent noise as of a tiny timid quadruped. (108) Given that many other characters are illustrated without such attentive regard for their surroundings, the goal here cannot be merely to help us understand those mentioned in these two passages—though surely Cadwallader's fishing tackle and Miss Noble's sugar help us understand them. In these passages, Eliot lingers over happy, if somewhat impoverished, depictions of home. She lingers on the objects and specific actions that lend to that happiness. White chairs with gilding, lingering silk, old portraits, old mirrors, and delicate tables and sofas signal faded glamour.

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They are objects that, if valued by their owners, do not speak to a fixation on objects. Comfort does not require the new and fashionable—though it may well require the generosity that inspires the movements Eliot describes in this passage. Miss Noble’s small basket, sugar, and saucer, her diversion of the sugar and “small innocent noise” recall the family narrative's dictum that we do for others as we can. Eliot continues and extends this style of depiction, which values and privileges simple domestic life's mild pleasures in her treatment of the Garth family. In fact, Eliot expends the majority of her descriptive powers on the passages that feature the Garths. By the end of the novel, we are left with a nuanced understanding of their home, their familial interactions and daily tasks, their inexpensive pleasure in country walks, and their value. If, in Victorian parlance, the home was considered central to all life, private or not, the Garth's homeliness echoes out into the novel—in their material specificity and simple values, they are the novel's foundation and its center. They are not perfect—Mr. Garth’s disregard for money nearly runs them into the ground—but this is precisely the point. The domestic Eliot portrays allows for imperfection. When first introducing the family, Eliot writes that their house was a little way outside the town--a homely place with an orchard in front of it, a rambling, old-fashioned, half-timbered building, which before the town had spread, had been a farmhouse, but was now surrounded with the private gardens of the townsmen [. . .] The Garth family, which was rather a large one, for Mary had four brothers and one sister, were very fond of their old house, from which all the best furniture had long been sold. Fred liked it to, knowing it by heart even to the attic which smelt deliciously of apples and quinces. (153) This passage recalls descriptions of the Cadwallader and Farebrother households and their lack of the newest and best things. Ensconced within other people's gardens, the home hearkens to an earlier age. This house, “from which all the best furniture had all been sold” and which was once a rambling farmhouse is nonetheless well loved by the Garths and by the temporarily more affluent Fred.

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Their affection for the homely space is offered without critique or censure and of all the dwellings in the novel it is the least troubled. As is typical of a children's family narrative, Eliot's narrator evokes the sensory experience of being in the space, too— the attic “smelt deliciously of apples and quinces.” Like all the chapters that center on the Garths, this one itemizes their actions and placement. It gives no less attention to the house's interior than to its exterior. In this scene, Mrs. Garth works in the kitchen: making her pies at the well-scoured deal table on one side of that airy room, observing Sally's movements at the oven and dough-tub through an open door, and giving lessons to her youngest boy and girl, who were standing opposite to her a the table with their books and slates before them. A tub and a clotheshorse at the other end of the kitchen indicated an intermittent wash of small things also going on. Mrs. Garth, with her sleeves turned above her elbows, deftly handling her pastry—applying her rolling-pin and giving ornamental pinches, while she expounded with grammatical fervor what were the right views about the concord of verbs and pronouns. (154) This depiction of an active, working kitchen is something of a rarity in the realist novel outside of Gaskell, as well as in the novels and genres that have been linked to Middlemarch. The pies, deal table, oven, dough-tub, books, slates, tub, clotheshorse, sleeves, pastry, and rolling-pin are hardly the stuff of epic. Nor are they even the stuff of Emma. Rarely do Miss Bates and Mr. Woodhouse's concerns explicitly delineate domestic labor, and Eliot certainly never treats Mrs. Garth with the contempt offered Austen's characters. The young Garths with their books and slates recall the eponymous protagonist of Henry, A Story, who stands by his mother while she works and writes. And this passage, brimming as it is with domestic description is hardly the only such passage in this chapter. The ensuing pages introduce us to “apple-peel” and pigs, whips and “horse-riding” (155-56), as well as to Mr. Garth's forgetfulness, described by Mrs. Garth as like “your buttons; you let them burst off without telling me, and go out with your wristband hanging” (158).

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Mrs. Garth expresses her frustration through a domestic metaphor, one that explains Caleb Garth's absentmindedness while recalling the family narrative's attention to even minor placement, interactions, and actions. This metaphor is, of course, a departure from the family narrative’s model, which is essentially concerned with the objecthood of objects rather than their symbolic potential.cvii Nonetheless, Mrs. Garth's detailed actions in this early passage, her observation of Sally, disquisition on grammar, and her “ornamental pinches” to pie pastry are echoed in later chapters, which are similarly attentive to what people are doing and where they are in relationship to each other. Later in the novel, the narrator describes the evening, when Caleb, rather tired with his day's work, was seated in silence with his pocket-book open on his knee, while Mrs. Garth and Mary were at their sewing and Letty in a corner was whispering with her doll, Mr. Farebrother came up the orchard walk. (251) Once more, this description serves little purpose except to pay homage to domestic life. Caleb Garth's exhaustion, his wife and daughter's work, and his young child's play are hardly idyllic, but they are valued, both by the narrator who dwells on them and the esteemed Mr. Farebrother who comes to greet them. This high estimation of the everyday is indeed the point of the Garth family in this novel. They do not merely serve as an antidote to the more vexing Rosamond and Dorothea; their actions are recorded by the narrator for themselves. And this extends to repeating their unrefined conversation—including recording a near- exact account of how Mary and Fred love each other three different times (349). Their unremarkable affection, Eliot demonstrates, is in fact worth remarking. “The family group, dogs and cats included, under the great apple tree in the orchard” is included for itself (353). And the family members are valued for their imperfect selves. Mary may not be the beauty Rosamond is, but “honesty, truth-telling fairness, was Mary's reigning virtue” (73). Mrs. Garth's “passage from governess into housewife and wrought itself a little too strongly into her consciousness,” but she nonetheless holds her family together (154). Caleb Garth may be too unconcerned

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with money, but he is nonetheless a good and loving father and husband. For all Mary and Fred's marriage plot, ongoing throughout the novel, the Garths’ narrative is primarily the story of a happy family. Eliot emphasizes this near the novel's end, when Caleb Garth brings Mary news that she and Fred will soon be able to marry: “Oh, you dear good father!” cried Mary, putting her hands round her father's neck, while he bent his head placidly, willing to be caressed. “I wonder if any other girl thinks her father the best man in the world!” “Nonsense, child; you'll think your husband better.” “Impossible,” said Mary, relapsing into her usual tone; “husbands are an inferior class of men, who require keeping in order.” (509) In this late, humorous passage, Eliot affirms the central conceit of the children's family narrative. Husbands and, indeed, wives may be inferior. They may require keeping in order. But the family narrative is not a husband and wife romance. Its narrator loves the tedium of daily life. It is a romance of family, in which fathers have the chance to become “the best man in the world.” Wealthier than the Garths, but still of the middle classes, the Vincys’ household is similarly vibrantly depicted. Our first venture into the Vincy establishment finds us here: though the room was a little overheated with the fire, which had sent the spaniel panting to a remote corner, Rosamond, for some reason, continued to sit at her embroidery longer than usual, now and then giving herself a little shake, and laying her work on her knee to contemplate it with an air of hesitating weakness. Her mamma, who had returned from an excursion to the kitchen, sat on the other side of a small work-table with an air of more entire placidity. (63) The placidity of the Vincy home doesn't reach the happiness of the Garths. Despite their greater wealth, the Vincys don’t appreciate the value of home and are consequently strained for money. The siblings do not get along. Still, Eliot's depiction features sensory detail, attention to motion and placement, and sentence-

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level use of addition to portray abundant detail. The heat of the fire is given as much importance as Rosamond's embroidery. Rosamond, her mother, and the spaniel are minutely depicted in relation to one other. Their silent work is soon interrupted by Fred who, finally coming to breakfast, brings a new wealth of gustatory articles to the chapter: “coffee and buttered toast,” “ham, potted beef, and other cold remnants,” “eggs,” and “a grilled bone” (64). Rosamond and Fred, like the Garths, take pleasure in country outings, and Eliot's descriptions of these events recall the family narrative's interest in georgic walks and entertainment. Describing “the ride to Stone Court,” Eliot writes that it lay through a pretty bit of midland landscape, almost all meadows and pastures, with hedgerows still allowed to grow in bushy beauty and to spread out coral fruit for the bird. Little details gave each field a particular physiognomy, dear to the eyes that have looked on them from childhood: the pool in the corner where the grasses were dank and trees leaned whisperingly; the great oak shadowing a bare place in mid-pasture; the high bank where the ash-trees grew; the sudden slope of the old marl-pit making a red background for the burdock; the huddled roofs and ricks of the homestead without a traceable way of approach; the grey gate and fences against the depths of the bordering wood; and the stray hovel, its old, old thatch full of mossy hills and valleys with wondrous modulations of light and shadow such as we travel far to see in later life, and see larger, but not more beautiful. (67) Eliot's lush description is attentive to minor attributes. Here, “little details [. . .] dear to the eye that have looked on them from childhood” is given all the importance that a Romantic landscape would in a Gothic novel. Instead of mountains and Sublimity, however, Eliot offers us a “the pool in the corner,” trees, banks, “huddled roofs and ricks,” a “grey gate and fence” which are no less subject to “wondrous modulations of light and shadow” than a grand landscape, despite being more humble fair. Eliot's description is of a domestic landscape, shaped by small accents and the remnants of

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people's work—and this is a landscape Rosamond and Fred appreciate because of their childhood wanderings. This learned appreciation demonstrates the outcome of children's family narrative's own emphasis on homely landscapes--appreciation for domestic exteriors as much as interiors. No less than Mary Garth, Rosamond and Fred could well be older children in a family narrative: though imperfect, they value home and struggle to make themselves at home. Like those children's family narratives, however, which acknowledge the family's and the domestic's failings, Middlemarch doesn't simply idealize the domestic realm. The Vincy household is depicted in familiar cheerful detail, and even forays into the countryside are reminiscent of children's family narrative's adaptation of the georgic. But the Lydgate household’s experiences, which Rosamond marries into, demonstrate the private realm’s capacity for sorrow. Rosamond's plot especially is defined by her faulty knowledge of what constitutes home—perhaps she is reading the wrong kinds of novels. Like Dorothea, Rosamond believes that marriage is her key to achieving social greatness, though, unlike Dorothea, she confuses greatness with fine things. Eliot describes Rosamond's romantic imaginings as a “rapid forecast and rumination concerning house- furniture,” in addition to affection for her soon-to-be husband Tertius Lydgate (169). And, of course, as though to emphasize the centrality of domestic space— objects, no less than people's actions in them—to any success in the public realm, Eliot repeatedly demonstrates that Lydgate's public professionalism and success is dampened and ultimately destroyed by domestic concerns. Unlike for Dorothea, the domestic is Lydgate’s tragedy; but it is so because Lydgate consistently misvalues the domestic, conflating domesticity with the overpriced and luxurious objects he pays for. Lydgate, like Rosamond, imagines comfortable home life as the product of the best things. Lydgate assumes that they must have “green glasses for hock and excellent waiting at table” (217); he “hated ugly crockery” (220). Together, Rosamond and Lydgate demonstrate a mistaken and exacerbated appreciation for the materiality of home; like Rosamond’s parents, they might as well be poor readers of family narratives, who take material itemization to mean that material

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things are what matter. Lydgate and Rosamond's marital and domestic failure is first signaled by “a letter insisting on the payment of a bill for furniture” (290). This and other bills, of course, lead Lydgate to accept a loan from Bulstrode, destroying his chance at a career in Middlemarch. More importantly, it ultimately brings Lydgate to think “in his bitterness, what can a woman care about so much as a house and furniture? A husband without them is an absurdity” (406). Given that Lydgate himself insisted on buying expensive home goods, his thought is of course an ironized understanding of marital life. But it also remarkably echoes Mary Garth's explanation that “husbands are an inferior class of men” (509). Lydgate fails to recognize what the Garths easily see: that family more than romance creates opportunity for both men and women in domestic life. Still, he understands that husbands themselves are individually incapable of providing happiness for women trapped within the home: “he saw even more keenly than Rosamond did the dreariness of taking her into the small house on Bride Street, where she would have scanty furniture around her and discontent within” (409). While Eliot is certainly not commending Rosamond's discontent, nor is she fully sympathizing with the notion that “scanty furniture” is a recipe for unhappiness, both she and Lydgate understand that, for a woman trapped within the home, small rooms and unloved material goods are more confining than they would be for a man. Rosamond is the victim of her education and upbringing, and of the domestic ideology that provides her little opportunity for advancement. In turn, as Eliot demonstrates, the need to provide Rosamond with the material goods to keep her satisfied comes at a public cost. Who knows what scientific and medical advancements are delayed or lost when Lydgate relinquishes his professional ambitions in service to his family’s need for material goods. Middlemarch’s conclusion is perhaps more conclusive than that of a family narrative. Two couples will soon be happily married, and Eliot privileges us with a glimpse into the future of all the novel’s primary characters. At the same time, the narrator acknowledges the sense that life goes on even after the novel is finished “Every limit,” she writes, “is a beginning as well as an ending. Who can quit young

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lives after being long in company with them, and not desire to know what befell them in their after-years?” (110). Eliot sums up the reader’s investment in both the family narrative and her novel by acknowledging that these characters are like “young people” we have been “long in company with.” More than elements of story, these characters come to seem like intimate acquaintances. Of equal note, Eliot emphasizes that the marriages concluding her novel are less important than what comes after them: “It is still the beginning of the home epic—the gradual conquest or irremediable loss of that complete union which makes the advancing years a climax, and age the harvest of sweet memories in common” (511). These marriages only make anew what Eliot has been exploring over the course of the novel. The home epic, with all of its nuance, is as much her subject matter as romance or mystery. Eliot critiques Lydgates cosmopolitan life, revealing his early death and the unhappy intervening years, and she moves us away from Middlemarch’s small town intrigue. She emphasizes the domestic happiness, filling her description of Fred and Mary Vincy’s family with the same loving attention to detail she allotted the Garths. Their life, like Eliot’s narration, is full of crop yields and cattle sales, marbles and pears and petticoats—and didactic literature (511-512). Fred writes his own kind of georgic “a work on the ‘Cultivation of Green Crops and the Economy of Cattle Feeding” (511). It might as well be Grainger’s Sugar Cane. Mary writes “a little book for her boys, called ‘Stories of Great Men, taken from Plutarch” (511). Eliot leaves us grounded in Dorothea’s life as wife and homemaker, and she makes explicit this life’s importance: “but the effect of her being on those around her was incalculably diffusive: for the growing good of the work is partly dependent on unhistoric acts” (515). By studying the diffusiveness of the unhistoric, Eliot celebrates the value of the home epic, as it is depicted in the family narrative. By portraying the Garths’ goodness, the Lydgates’ misery and failure, and Dorothea’s ultimate fall into contentment, Eliot praises a home life independent of worldly gain, one, like those depicted in family narratives, that recognizes the importance of interactive, interconnected goodness rather than individual greatness, one that privileges communal good of the superegoed self.

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Coda: Gendered Forms, Here and Now The novels studied here—Villete, Bleak House, Wuthering Heights, and Middlemarch—exemplify nineteenth-century British Realism. They also, according to my argument, constitute an apotheosis for early children’s genres. The novels signify early children’s genres’ considerable reach and their didactic power, while simultaneously projecting that reach well beyond child or even adult eighteenth- and nineteenth-century readers. The realist novel has been a powerful force on the behalf of school stories, it-narratives, harm narratives, and family narratives. Even if we are put off by Esther’s feminine narration in Bleak House or the violence of Wuthering Heights, even if we cannot personally track the school story or the harm narrative, and have never read a family narrative to our knowledge, when we teach these novels in our college (and high school) classrooms, adapt them to film and television, or read and reread them ourselves, we ensure that the minor genres live on, so that they still have a chance to help us think about classification and structure, show us the frictions of representation, implicate harmful moralities, and teach us to attend to minutia. We turn to these novels again and again, as Rebecca Mead does with Eliot’s novel in her recent book, My Life in Middlemarch (2014). Mead summarizes her early attraction to the novel, observing that The questions George Eliot showed her characters wrestling with would all be mine eventually. How is wisdom to be attained? What are the satisfactions of personal ambition, and how might they be weighed against ties and duties to others? What does a good marriage consist of, and what makes a bad one? What do the young owe to the

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old, and vice versa? What is the proper foundation of morality? (4) Many of these questions are the same questions early children’s books strive to answer—or, at least, they strive to help their readers answer. Family narratives show people reaching for wisdom and weighing moral duties. Like Middlemarch, they land on the side of modest goals and modest improvements as a way to achieve goodness. Reflecting on Eliot, nearing the end of her life, Mead observes Her passion was not for literary immortality—though she got that— but for a kind of encompassing empathy that would make the punishing experience of egoism shrink and dwindle. She believed that growth depends upon complex connections and openness to others, and does not derive from a solitary swelling of the self. She became great because she recognized that she was small. (265) Mead’s book is not an academic biography, indeed concerned as it is with her self and with her own growth, My Life in Middlemarch has no pretensions to biography’s generic conventions, its strict reliance on fact and historical record. Nonetheless, Mead’s analysis of Eliot corresponds strikingly well with my analysis of her sympathies in Middlemarch. Eliot, Mead believes, rejects the “solitary swelling of the self” in all its egotism. Her “smallness” lies in her emphasis on human connection and caring, her attention to the regular and everyday, to sunshine streaming through a window—and this very attention, written into the realist novel, established her “literary immortality” (Mead 265). That My Life in Middlemarch became a New York Times bestseller, was included in Entertainment Weekly’s “Must” list, and was named a “Best Book of the Year” by no fewer than seven entities attests not only to Middlemarch’s enduring relevance, but to the our continued appetite for the kind of careful attention to women’s lives valued by the family narrative.cviii Novels like Middlemarch also signal a kind of end for these early genres. It is a commonplace in children’s literary studies that the field substantially changed after Lewis Carroll’s publication of Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland in 1865. By demonstrating that early children’s books were always more than boring didactic tracks, I hope my dissertation has, to some degree, undermined this assumption. But

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there is some truth to the assertion as well. Children’s books published in the latter- half of the nineteenth century were, by and large, substantially different than those published in the preceding hundred years. They are more interested in individual psychology and in plot (and in magic and adventure). They possess more narrativity and are more like novels than were their progenitors. These are the books we still read: Alice, of course, and The Waterbabies, Treasure Island, The Jungle Book and Black Beauty. And then, a little later, The Railway Children, The Little Princess, The Secret Garden, Peter Rabbit, Winnie the Pooh, and Peter Pan. Early children’s genres don’t die out so much as they substantially change. Their traces remain in the books we’ve held dear for the past century. One might argue that Carroll’s Alice books retain elements of the harm narrative, though he strips them of all pain and suffering. Black Beauty, Peter Rabbit, and Winnie the Pooh are all object narratives. The Little Princess is a school story. The Secret Garden a family narrative. It isn’t merely that we read and adapt watered-down latter-day versions of the early genres. Authors continue to write in these modes, one way or another creating either something very close to the early genres or reworking realist novels. Laline Paull’s recent novel, The Bees, sells itself as a dystopian novel—but it is in fact an object narrative that closely follows the life of one bee. Though written for adults, it maintains the children’s it-narrative’s rejection of satire, and is ultimately a serious, if entertaining, disquisition on environmental pollution, global warming, and women’s treatment in the twenty-first century. In children’s fiction, Newbury Award winner Kate DiCamillo’s The Miraculous Journey of Edward Tulane describes the eventful “life” of a china rabbit: “he had china arms and china legs, china paws and a china head, a china torso and a china nose” (5). The novel is concerned with Edward’s feelings and emotions, his treatment by others, as well as with the families he encounters over the course of his long life. It reflects, too, on his pain and mortality, his physical and material reality and its representation: How does a china rabbit die? Can a china rabbit drown? Is my hat still on my head?

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These were the questions that Edward asked himself as he went sailing out over the blue sea. (47). DiCamillo quickly deflects the harm implied by her first two questions, but she nonetheless takes them seriously. A china rabbit cannot die, or drown, she shows. But a china rabbit can wait, unable to blink, at the ocean’s bottom for decades, and this misery may be worse than drowning. Other children’s books retain remainders of the family narrative, the school story, and the harm narrative. Elizabeth Thiel has argued that J.K. Rowling’s Harry Potter series is touched by Victorian portrayals of the family, though she believes that the series privileges the “natural family” over the “transnormative” family—a view I don’t share. Depictions of the Weasley family home, overstuffed with domestic objects and details, recall the family narrative’s interest in the minor and everyday even as it makes the everyday magical. Jeanne Birdsall’s National Book Award winning The Penderwicks: A Summer Tale of Four Sisters, Two Rabbits, and a Very Interesting Boy much more directly models itself on the family narrative. Hardly anything happens in this novel. Its main events are escaping rabbits, soccer games, and walks around a Berkshire estate’s garden. Instead of a protagonist, Birdsall depicts a family network. She treats readers to meticulous detail. Describing the youngest, for instance, Birdsall writes that Batty had a lot of organizing to do before she could go to sleep. She had to tuck Funty into Rosalind’s bed, then go back through the closet for Ursula the bear and then again for Fed the other bear. Rosalind put her foot down about Sedgewick the horse and Yaz, the new wooden rabbit—she said there would be no room left for people. Then Batty decided she couldn’t sleep without her special unicorn blanket, so Jeffrey had to get up and let Rosalind switch that blanket with the green blanket from Rosalind’s bed. (232) This passage occurs in what might have been the novel’s climax—Jeffrey has run away from home and is spending the night at the Penderwick’s—but Birdsall’s treatment of the event is decidedly anticlimactic. She spends more time discussing

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Batty and her stuffed animals, her special blanket, than she does Jeffrey’s tumult. Running away is ultimately less important than, or perhaps as important as, going to bed. Birdsall, like the eighteenth-century and nineteenth-century authors before her, takes the family and its things seriously. The early girls’ school story is similarly adapted—though not without a bit of humor. Maryrose Wood’s popular The Incorrigible Children of Ashton Place series features many elements of the early girls’ school story, as it was revised by Charlotte Brontë. Its heroine, Miss Penelope Lumley, “although only fifteen years old, [. . .]was a recent graduate of the Swanburne Academy for Poor Bright Females. During her years at that well-regarded school, Miss Lumley had been taught a great deal, of both an academic and a philosophical nature” (5). Miss Lumley becomes a governess of incorrigible children and, though she wants to teach Latin, French, geography, and The History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire must settle, at first, for teaching basic manners to children who have been allowed to go feral. Wood’s novels, like harm narratives and school stories alike, highlight parental negligence as the source of childhood misdemeanor. Harm has been a less popular source for children’s books. Though much of the violence and jealousy in Stephanie Meyer’s Twilight series might be traced to Wuthering Heights (the novels even cite Brontë), Meyer fails to adapt its moral import—harm is truly gratuitous, without children’s genre’s insight into fortune and misfortune. We might also, as I have already indicated, see the echoes of harm narratives in R.L. Steine’s horror novels or in Holly Black’s The Coldest Girl in Coldtown, a young adult novel so gruesome that I had to put it down. These are all, however, paranormal novels. They remove harm from the facts of this world, relegating it to the realm of the imaginary and less consequential. Perhaps we no longer have a taste for exposing children to the harsh realities of everyday life—or perhaps we want children to feel that there is moral justice in this world. After all, harm hasn’t gone out of children’s books altogether. Children are still threatened. People still get hurt. But, more often than not, those people are parents. In Roald Dahl’s novels, though children are threatened, none are seriously injured. Instead, as

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in Matilda, unworthy adults are embarrassed, frightened, and hurt. Lois Lowry’s The Willoughbys illustrates this point quite neatly. Here, as in harm narratives, the parents are bad. Unlike in harm narratives, the parents suffer the punishment, as well. At the end of the novel, Mr. and Mrs. Willoughby are dead, frozen to death on an unnamed Alp, There, at the foot of the mountain [their children] stood solemnly, passing binoculars back and forth and gazing at the treacherous peak that had orphaned the four of them. Together they saluted the distant figures of their parents, who had frozen into place, happy to have achieved such heights, with gleaming smiles on their faces forever. It was not a sad occasion, really. Just something the Willoughbys did and always followed with cocoa. (157) Though she transfers the harm to those deserving of it, Lowry shares the harm narrative’s sense of pleasure and glee. The parents are preserved forever as monuments to their own idiocy, while the children live happily ever after. This list could keep going. Locating the books mentioned here was no difficult task. Early children’s genres, whether they come to us filtered through the realist novel, or whether their generic markers have lived on through adaptations and permutations of an always changing children’s literature, remain with us. They have always been there, waiting to teach the people who could read them. .

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Endnotes

i Alan Richardson, too, critiques Myers for oversimplification (168), as does ii O'Malley does spend some time acknowledging the difference in content in books written explicitly for girls. These, he notes, are more concerned with managing time and households, as well as identifying plants and animals (102-104). iii For further examples of this kind of assumption, see also Samuel Pickering's Moral Instruction and Fiction for Children and Patrick C. Fleming, “The Rise of the Moral Tale: Children's Literature, the Novel, and The Governess. For a look at how this same assumption can be turned to teaching consumerist morals, see Megan Norcia's essay, “The London Shopscape: Educating the Child Consumer in the Stories of Mary Wollstonecraft, Maria Edgeworth, and Mary Martha Sherwood.” iv Grenby defines cross-reading broadly: “boys using girls' books, Anglicans enjoying Dissenting or Catholic texts, the rich reading material designed for the poor, the young using advanced texts, and so on” (92). v Published in the first edition of Parent's Assistant. vi Megan Norcia similarly notes that children's books by Mary Wollstonecraft, Mary Martha Sherwood, and Maria Edgeworth specifically took issue with the girls' unbridled consumerism, instead trying to teach them about “Charity, salvation, and mortality” (30). vii Despite the number of school stories written between 1749 and 1850, the vast majority of scholars follow Adrian Alington’s 1937 argument in “School Stories—Old and New,” which imagines that Tom Brown’s School Days is the genre’s origin point and that girls’ school stories are a new development. As James Eli Adams writes in his History of Victorian Literature (2011), “based on his own experiences at Rugby under the headmasterships of Thomas Arnold, Hughes’s novel [Tom Brown’s Schooldays] inaugurated the genre of the school story’” in 1857 (162).

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Even scholars who specifically examine girls’ school stories, as Mary Cadogan, Gill Frith, and Isabel Quigly do, turn their attention to those written in the late- nineteenth and early-twentieth centuries. Beverly Lyon Clark and Rosemary Auchmuty note the relative paucity of critical work pertaining to this field. Clark in her introduction to Sassy Sissies and Tattling Tomboys: Regendering the School Story; Auchmuty in her introduction to The Encyclopeadia of Girls' Schools Stories, and Grey in her Introduction to the 1968 facsimile edition of The Governess. See Mary Cadogan, You’re a Brick, Angela!, Gill Frith, “ The Time of Your Life: The Meaning of School Story,” and Isabel Quigly, The Heirs of Tom Brown. viiiWhile Deborah Downs-Miers views the novel’s didacticism as a means to condition girls for possibility, arguing that “there need be no dichotomy between an active life and a virtuous one” (32), she is virtually the only such critic, and her essay on the novel is more a brief overview than a critical interpretation. Others view The Governess as an exercise in restriction. See also: Arlene Fish Wilner, Judith Burdan, and Mika Suzuki. ix Mitzi Myers discusses Wollstonecraft's Original Stories in her seminal essay “Rational Dames and Moral Mothers.” Myers offers a critically important reading of didacticism’s power when she asserts that “The teacher in her tale educates her pupils—and often serves as a moral guide to adults in her community as well. At the same time, the fictional instructor readies her audience of child and parent readers to export Georgian faith in moral regulation through education into the real world” (39). x Julie Straight examines how Charles and Mary Lamb treat girls' reading differently in their contributions to Mrs. Leicester's School, while Meaghan Hanrahan Dobson asserts that “stories by both Charles and Mary demonstrate the unease with which [. . .] feminine voices assert themselves, further supporting the patriarchal code of the speaking subject as male” (19). xi For instance, Karlijn Navest, Carol Percy, and Andrea Immel consider the implications of Ellenor Fenn’s grammar lessons and her toys together with her school stories. 256

xii Alan Rauch groups Ann Murry’s Mentoria with all science writing; Patrick C. Fleming does something similarwhen he calls The Governess a “moral tale,” a label he applies to all eighteenth-century children’s literature. xiii The mother in The Polite Lady, for instance, warns her daughter against that “vice [. . .] tale-bearing” (3). xiv . Clark’s assertion is mirrored and further explored by Patrick C. Fleming, who, in his discussion of The Governess, argues that the moral tale might be defined by the “the relationship between the frame story and the embedded tales [which] trains the reader in the practice of interpretation” (472). By treating stories as allegories, he argues, the child reader learns directly from the “interpolated talks” which “allow adult characters to offer the ‘correct’ interpretations”; the students then apply these interpretations to their own lives, becoming more moral, altogether better children (Fleming 475). For Fleming, the moral tale’s emphasis on interpreting other stories is its defining formal feature. Through this feature, the moral tale teaches children to be good readers—or, at any rate, to read all kinds of fiction for “good.”” Fleming’s assertion—that the moral tale teaches children to read fictions allegorically—has much in common with Pickering’s reading of eighteenth- century children’s fiction, which he notes frequently used allegory as “the structure for a simple moral tale.” (Moral Instruction 3). xv Though Fleming and Pickering connect the school story to allegory, most early girls’ school stories do not make use of allegorical thinking, which metaphorizes the ordinary into abstraction. Walter Benjamin’s untraditional but insightful definition is useful here. According to Benjamin, in allegory “any person, any object, any relationship can mean absolutely anything else. With this possibility a destructive, but just verdict is passed on the profane world: it is characterized as a world in which detail is of no importance. [. . .] all of the things which are used to signify derive, from the very fact of their pointing to something else, a power which makes them appear no longer commensurable with profane things, which raises them onto a higher plan and which can, indeed, sanctify them. Considered in allegorical terms, then, the profane world is both elevated and devalued” (175). No 257

such elevation occurs in the typical school story. The interpretations given to items, be they objects or people within the diegesis, mean straightforwardly. A person is a person, an object an object, and they mean accordingly. They point either to themselves, or to corresponding objects in the real world. This generic trait has especially important implications for the early girls’ school story, pays minute attention to the profane things of the world—to objects, animals, and people interpreted as such. For all their morality, early girls’ school stories, with their interest in the material world, might be much better said to have something to do with realism. Though they may not always be particularly realistic themselves, their interest in cause and effect, in history and biography, and individuating persons from social structures, mirrors realism’s interests. xvi I suspect, too, that as this failure to identify a single protagonist occurs far more often in the early girls’ school story than it does in corresponding stories for boys, the form also subverts a masculine impulse to aggressive individuality. Instead, girls are meant to see themselves as part of a community to which everyone contributes. xvii For an excellent discussion of “familiar format” dialogue in early children’s books, see Michele Cohen, “‘Familiar Conversation’: ‘Familiar Format’ in Education in Eighteenth- and Nineteenth-Century England” in Educating the Child in Enlightenment Britain: Beliefs, Cultures, Practices. 99-116. xviii See Gerard Genette’s Narrative Discourse: An Essay in Method. xix In The Village School, the governess's daughter plans to marry at the end of the story, only to have her fiancé die in the churchyard in the moments before the wedding. The daughter dies shortly thereafter of brain fever. xx See The Convent: A Narrative Founded on Fact (1848) and The School-Girl in France (1859)—or even Brontë’s Villette. xxi Some motifs are more limited to traditional girls’ school story types— those stories actually set at school—and become increasingly more common after 1820. These stories, which follow a schoolgirl’s experience from her introduction to the school to her reluctant leave-taking of it, commonly rely on the familiar motifs of 258

hidden books, false accusations, prizes, and, surprisingly, marriage plots. All of these, too, correspond to an increasing novelization of the school story’s form. Though still quite didactic, and still concerned with the experiences of a few girls rather than with one, these later stories rely more heavily on their own plot devices rather than embedded narratives to maintain reader interest—though they continue to use embedded narratives as educational and entertaining devices. Common motifs of this type include the competition for a prize, the discovery of hidden novels within the school (and the subsequent punishment of a schoolgirl) and reluctant goodbyes. Whereas the reluctant goodbye is a fairly straightforward motif, establishing the goodness and belovedness of one individual girl when she leaves the school through tears and promised letters, others are more complicated. Perhaps reflecting an anxiety over their own changing form, a common motif in these later stories is that of the Hidden Novel, in which schoolgirls sneakily subscribe to a lending library and read novels covertly. Novels and fantasies have been written about as particularly ruinous to young girls, and the girls’ school story has always had a vexed relationship with these kinds of narratives. Mrs. Teachum warns her students about becoming too invested in the fantastical components of fairy tales-but she still allows them to be told, and Mrs. Teachwell (School Occurrences) forbids novels in her school (some girls still read them), but allows that The Castle of Otranto has some merit. It seems that, rather than a problem with content, the major problem with novels is the kind of action they inspire. It can make the reader “discontented with her real situation in life” (Letters on Several Subjects 42). More importantly, reading them can itself become a self-indulgent species of idleness; in Letters on Several Subjects from a Preceptress, one character forgets all her duties to the pleasures of reading. In Agnes Loudon’s Tales of School Life (1850), Clara falls prey to the addictive pleasures of (hidden) novel reading and “began to feel ennui at school” (147). In Grace Hamilton’s Schooldays (1856), novel reading is depicted as a gateway-vice, driving girls to other, more dangerous sins: borrowing (money for novels), stealing (money for novels), lying (about novels) and cheating (to hide the time spent with novels). Interestingly, the stories make clear 259

that it is at least in part the need to hide novels that makes girls run wild. For more insight into girls and novel reading, see Samuel Pickering’s “The School Story and Allegory” and Patrick Fleming’s “The Rise of the Moral Tale.” Though the forms of the early girls’ school story persist well into the nineteenth century, by the 1850s, these generic developments, combined with a new emphasis on single protagonists, alters the early genre into something we would recognize much more easily today. xxii Jerome Beatty questions the plausibility of this, though he acknowledged that the earlier work could have been in general readers’ repertoire (226). xxiii It’s worth noting that though Bellamy disagrees with Flint on circulation as the defining trait of object narratives in this entry in Blackwell’s collection, her earlier work on classifies the it-narrative as an “object of circulation” (Commerce, Morality, and the Eighteenth-Century Novel 125). Moreover, she argues here that the “dependence on exchange as a plot mechanism” necessitates the genre’s renunciation of formal continuity (125). Moreover, all of these definitions, pertaining specifically to eighteenth-century works are (like the realist works I later focus on) are at odds with the typical understanding of objects in the modernism, defined by Bill Brown as decontextualized from their human or “domestic” world and work (A Sense of Things, 9). This understanding of objects is interested in “the place things occupy in daily life; the place they occupy, if you will, in the history of human-being; the pressure they exert on us to engage them as something other than mere surfaces” (Brown, A Sense of things 12). Brown’s special issue of Critical Inquiry and his follow-up collection Things head this call, taking on individual things and reading them for more than surface. Lorainne Daston’s edited collection Things that Talk does something similar.In contrast, and as I shall demonstrate, these earlier object-narratives and the things that occupy them emphasize the degree to which things are mere surface, mere material; they emphasize the ways in which people are not exempt from this mode of being. As Ian Bogost puts it in Alien Phenomenology, models like these “[put] things at the center of being [. . .] contends that nothing has special status, but that everything exists equally” (6). Though “Object-Oriented Ontologies,” as Bogost calls them, might seem like a new 260

development in academic interest, we might argue that like children’s object narratives they grow out of the eighteenth century’s interest in the similarities between people and things—especially people and animals (6). As Laura Brown argues in Fables of Modernity, growing interest in house pets and monkeys led to an increased appreciation for their affinity with humans—lap dogs, especially, were associated with and sometimes metonymy for fine ladies (256). From kinship between fine ladies to lap dogs, and lap dogs and objects, it’s only a small step to comparing ladies and objects. xxiv Ultimately, Festa optimistically argues that children's object narratives teach them to be good consumers and owners--”masters and mistresses of that portion of the world over which they hold sway”—and they do so by emphasizing the consequences of “undervaluing one's possessions” (310). This much is true. By emphasizing the harm that comes to objects, the stories certainly promote good ownership. xxv Douglas’s argument is echoed by Julie Park in The Self and It: Novel Objects in Eighteenth-Century England, a book that “[uncovers] how both things and textual representations share an intense desire to penetrate and embody an authentic human and predominantly female interiority” (xix). xxvi Brown is concerned with modernism's creation of the person-as-thing and thing theory. Blackwell et al. have demonstrated that much of Brown's argument can in fact be predated to the eighteenth-century object narratives they study, but Brown, unlike them, is less interested in the relationship between the object and the market—literary or otherwise. xxvii For example, Adventures of a Pincushion remained in print until at least 1828 under its own title, and was reprinted in The Annualette: A Christmas and New Year’s Gift for Children (1841). In her introduction to the 1870 edition of Storehouse of Stories, Charlotte Mary Yonge lists the History of a Pincushion (same book, slightly misremembered title) with The Adventures of a Peg-Top among her childhood favorites (vii). Kilner (with Ellenor Fenn) is remembered for these two specific stories in Gabrielle Festing’s Unstoried in History: Portraits of Some Famous Women 261

of the 16th, 17th, and 18th Centuries (1901). It is remembered and cited as an illustration in A Few Years of the Life of Mary Elizabeth Elton (1877). More recently, The Adventures of a Pincushion was anthologized in Patricia Demer’s From Instruction to Delight: An Anthology of Children’s Literature to 1850. xxviii This is also true of some few it-gendered narratives--The Silver Penny, and Clara Balfour’s Passages in the History of a Shilling (1862). Perhaps it is not a coincidence that these are money narratives, and thus more explicitly revising eighteenth-century object narratives of the same kind. Perhaps also, this has some relationship to their role in the public marketplace. xxix Kilner explicitly states this in her introduction to The Memoirs of a Peg- Top: The different inclinations, employments, ad amusements which engage the attention of boys and girls, suggested to the Author of the following trifling performance, that such a design might not be useless to fill up those intervals of leisure, which may occur to the former from their more important studies [. . .] The indulgent attention with which the Adventures of a Pincushion has been honored, flattered the writer with an opinion, that a work like the present might meet with equal success [. . .] the former work was designed chiefly for the use of young Ladies, this is evidently calculated for young Gentlemen. (v-vii) xxx The major exception to this rule is the 1798 History of a Pin, Told by Itself. This Pin clearly focuses on the worlds of girls and women and emphasizes that it is “writing my own history, not theirs” (22-23). The Pin does teach feminine traits (selflessness, propriety, management of anger) to girls and women.For example, the Pin writes, “A young lady, to please judicious observers, must possess a cultivated mind, be elegant in her deportment, dignified in her manners, without affectation, and gentle in her temper.--She must not have that sort of artificial good breeding that is put on like a best cap or gown, only upon particular occasions; but she should exhibit that fascinating civility which arises spontaneously from the heart, and which no external circumstance can alter” (39-40). Still, this pen breaks many of the rules of children's object narratives.

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Though for the most part sincere, it does satirize some of the bad children encounters. There is more humor in the text, often incorporated as playful language—the pin makes “pointed” remarks, for example. This is a rare text--one that belatedly bridges the gap between the children's and adult's object narrative, and is a special case. xxxi Festa is right to note that, “by explicitly articulating the fictitious nature of the account, the author circumvents accusations of deliberately misleading her innocent reader” (317). xxxii This formal marker perhaps hales from the adult object narrative’s subconscious attention to writing. Christopher Flint and Hilary Englert liken object narration to an ongoing debate over the status of authorship and literary ownership, in which the object stands in for the author, while Mark Blackwell is interested in the degree to which object narratives show an “anxiety” over their publication model, one he describes as “hackwork” and “genre fiction” (189). Both Christine Lupton, writing about eighteenth-century object narratives, and Leah Price, writing about those published in the nineteenth, are interested in the degree to which object narratives are about the book-as-object. As Lupton demonstrates, they are “fictions that are capable of speaking formulaically about their own constitutions, appearance in print, handling as objects, and the movement of their readers through their pages” (402). Finally, Crystal Lake argues that “eighteenth-century it- narratives function as serious philosophical meditations on the ways that fiction's increasing pretensions to verisimilitude dangerously threaten to refashion an individual's capacity to engage [. . .] with the world around them” (183). Lake's thesis is that object-narratives position themselves as a counterpoint to fiction, offering slices of unmediated reality rather than false, fashioned verisimilitude. What these scholars have in common is their attention to the object-narrative's interest in the nature of discourse. xxxiii In an essay on spirits that inhabit objects, Barbara Benedict teases out the relationship between the animated object and the occult, arguing that both object narratives and spirit narratives “express anxiety about unseen powers that 263

control human beings” (20). Benedict is primarily interested in the power objects have over others, a power scholars agree exists in object narratives. Hilary Englert takes this argument a step further, considering the fact that the “‘object narrator' is, in fact, conventionally a supernatural agent’” and arguing that this possession allows the object a god-like omniscience: “protean, invisible and untethered to any one material embodiment or perspective, these fictional observers enjoy both a radical mobility and a capacity to access the deepest recesses of the social work” (221). Englert alludes to the many adult object narratives in which the it-narrator is inhabited by an supernatural spirit and, thus, is also not entirely bound by the conventions of realism, even as they apply to these unusual narrators. Extrapolating from these arguments, Nicholas Hudson elegantly argues that the object narrative, with its access to places high and low and with its freedom from moral bias, is an important and necessary development in the history of eighteenth-century narrative that ultimately leads to the omniscient narrator and free-indirect discourse. xxxiv Festa refers to such scenes when she argues that the child's object narrative makes the child into a good owner by emphasizing the degree to which objects love those who treat them well. But the similar treatment of child-reader and child-character broadens this scope. xxxv Jonathan Lamb, in The Things Things Say, describes these as “chapbook stories of pins and coins and small animals, all armed with sturdy morals of fair play and goodwill” (201) xxxvi Object narratives are at pains to demonstrate the degree to which children are like the objects associated with them. It is not just that mobile, entertaining, and competitive objects like marbles and tops come to be associated with boys, while domestic objects like dolls and sewing instruments stand in for and with their girl owners. Objects are often explicitly compared to children. The Whipping Top states that “bad boys are to be compared to a silly Top, which must be well lashed before it can please you” (Adventures of a Whipping Top 119). The Dog of

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Knowledge discusses “The Education of Children and Puppies--Both Often Essentially Wrong” (Table of Contents). xxxvii Again, Festa is useful here, though I don't agree with her entire argument. “Children,” she posits, “like animals and things, are often helpless bystanders and powerless victims” (320). She goes on to argue that they ultimately “uphold a traditional hierarchy based on reciprocal but unequal relations between owner and owned, master and servant” (310). If we read these children's tales as allegories of class-relations, then I cannot argue with Festa's interpretation. But these narratives go to some length to break down the differences between social classes. xxxviii Jonathan Lamb sums up this trait as it also appears in the eighteenth- century object narrative for adults: Furniture and vehicles are involved in events they would rather have avoided. Coins and chattels get used up, are forsaken or destroyed. Animals provide a little diversion and then are tortured or killed” (Lamb, The Things Things Say xvi). xxxix The emphasis on pain as the price of passivity is certainly handed down from adult object narratives, and this point has been widely recognized by critics. Discussing eighteenth-century object narratives, Markman Ellis examines the relationship between the it-narrative and the slave-narrative. “Slaves,” he writes, “like animals, were degraded to the status of things” and points to the disparate treatment of pampered lapdogs and abused slaves in many narratives of the period (95). Leah Price also notes this correlation: “like slaves, it-narrators find themselves lumped together with the inarticulate objects at the moment of changing hands” (115). What is more, Price states that “it-narrators must suffer, because the only voice with which prosopopoeia can invest them is passive”—she even goes so far as to compare them to the abused children of a Dickens or Bronte novel (122-23). Though Price is discussing book it-narrators written primarily for adults, she points to a salient component of all children's it-narratives. In the context of the larger gendered structure of the children’s object narratives, however, it seems to me that pain is not merely the price for prosopopoeia—it’s the price for usefulness, and thus 265

is one that can be spread from thing to animal to person. Surely it is not a coincidence that usefulness is a primarily gendered feminine trait in the Victorian period. xl Freedgood argues that the nineteenth-century it-narrative presents people who are oppressed by Victorian culture, like objects, as having a certain amount of omniscient power because of their dispossession--a power of “knowing the social world, inside and out” (99). While I cannot agree with her in this instance-- children's it-narratives at least are interested in the limits of narration--I nonetheless find her assertion that “there may have been a significant degree of animism extant within Victorian Britain, a subject-object hybridity” (86) compelling. This conflation of objects with subjects works well for my own thesis, though I suggest that children's it-narratives are mainly interested in how a subject is, in fact, an object defined by its materiality. xli Case makes a compelling argument that Esther's feminine narration is a positive contrast “to the oppressively systematic exposition of social decay and despair” demonstrated by the omniscient narrator (125). The idea that feminine narration, in this instance, opposes systematic oppressions, fits in neatly with my own argument, which is that Esther's narrative, like object narratives more generally, expose oppressive narrative structures. I would not, however, like Case, argue that Esther is artless and unaware of her potential as a writer. xlii Case makes a compelling argument that Esther's feminine narration is a positive contrast “to the oppressively systematic exposition of social decay and despair” demonstrated by the omniscient narrator (125). The idea that feminine narration, in this instance, opposes systematic oppressions, fits in neatly with my own argument, which is that Esther's narrative, like object narratives more generally, expose oppressive narrative structures. I would not, however, like Case, argue that Esther is artless and unaware of her potential as a writer. xliii See Ryoji Tsurumi, “The Development of Mother Goose in Britain in the Nineteenth Century.” xliv See, for instance, Samuel Pickering, Andrew O’Malley, and Patrick Fleming. 266

xlv For more information on gratuitous and entertaining violence in the eighteenth-century novel, see Simon Dickie’s book, Cruelty and Laughter: Forgotten Comic Literature and the Unsentimental Eighteenth Century. xlvi In “Death and Violence in Some Victorian School Reading Books.” xlvii Perhaps a bit of the reluctance to look at early, violent children's literature, too, is a product of what Adriana Craciun has argued is central to our misreadings of early children's author Mary Lamb—the essentialist assumption that “women as a class [. . .] eschew violence, destructiveness, and cruelty, except in self- defense or rebellion” (46). If women aren't supposed to relish violence, what are we supposed to do with texts about children, written by women, that seem to relish harming their child characters? xlviii Some very good work on violence in late nineteenth-century and contemporary children's fiction has been done. Michelle Abate's new book, Bloody Murder: The Homicide Tradition in Children's Literature, is perhaps the best example of this, but even Abate attributes the (primarily American) interest in child-murder to the larger American cultural obsession with murder as is reflected in television crime dramas like NCIS and in popular culture more generally. Saving an analysis of the Grimm brother's “Snow White” (though particularly in the contemporary American context), Abate is more interested in murder post-Alice, which she asserts reflects contemporary concerns with capital punishment (63). xlix Stallcup in “Power, Fear, and Children's Picture Books” and Zipes in “Second Thoughts on Socialization through Literature for Children”. Stallcup for instance writes that “The Gastlycrum Tinies is part of a long tradition in children's literature in which young characters meet with violent punishments and death because they transgress social boundaries and challenge adult authority. Many eighteenth- and nineteenth century texts were designed to frighten young readers into obedience through threatening dire punishments for disobedience” (125). l Indeed, Stallcup is far more interested in contemporary works of children's fiction and thinking about how they teach children how to behave while also helping them overcome childhood fears. 267

li The European Monthly Magazine, however, betrays a gruesome interest in the way children, as well as adults, die. Issues from May 1803 and July 1804 report death by lightning strike, carbon monoxide poisoning, beatings, carriage wrecks, devouring by rats, shipwreck and drowning, burning, gun accident, sink holes, and being stuck in a wheel. Many of these short narratives recall the horrendous deaths of children, and emphasize the precariousness of life in the early nineteenth century. lii Emer O'Sullivan's essay “Anything to me is sweeter: British Translations of Heinrich Hoffman's Struwwelpeter” provides and excellent overview of the books' publishing history in Victorian England. See also Jacke Stallcup, “Power, Fear, and Children's Picture Books” and Kevin Shortsleeve, “Edward Gory, Children's Literature, and Nonsense Verse.” Stallcup in “Power, Fear, and Children's Picture Books” and Zipes in “Second Thoughts on Socialization through Literature for Children”. liii Though commonly known as Foxe’s Book of Martyrs, the original edition was titled Actes and Monuments of these Latter and Perillous Days, Touching Matters of the Church. liv Sedgwick argues that “onanisnm” was one of many sexual identities that did not stand in opposition to each other, as we typically assume heterosexual and homosexual do. At the same time, the self-love was treated as something that needed to be readied. In an argument about Sense and Sensibility which identifies Marianne Dashwood as “the masturbating girl” (827), Sedgwick cites contemporary case histories that describe the symptoms of onanism as well as its horrific treatment: tied hands and “hot points” applied to clitorises (829). lv Further, as Joanne Cantor notes in her article “Children’s Attraction to Violent Television Programming,” that children are attracted to media violence for an extremely wide range of reasons. “Violent programs” she states, “are repeatedly successful with child audiences in catering to both the jaded and the meek, they will perhaps provide ‘something for everyone’” (114). Comparing child readers with twenty-first century television viewers is, of course, an extreme anachronism. Even so, the argument that a wide variety of pleasure await those who enjoy harm and 268

violence is hardly new—her statement simply indicates that Tatar’s argument and my own intuition may have some truth to them. lvi More than one critic has pointed this out, and while I’m focusing on Tatar’s argument here as the most thorough and most similar to my own, Lee Burns has also demonstrated that though “Red Riding Hood” changes from telling to telling, the threat of violence or actual violence drive the narrative in every iteration. In a similar vein, Michelle Abate argues that “‘Snow White' [. . .] endures not in spite of its depiction of a heinous queen who engages in the horrific act of child murder but because of it” (37-8). lvii Tatar states, “The Grimms only occasionally took advantage of opportunities to tone down descriptions of brutal punishments visited on villains or to eliminate pain and suffering from their tales. When they did, it was often at the behest of a friend or colleague rather than of their own volition. More often, the Grimms made a point of adding or intensifying violent episodes” (Hard Facts 5). lviii Tatar writes that children, who invariably count themselves among the downtrodden and underprivileged, identify and empathize with the protagonist [. . .] the more Hansel, Gretel, Cinderella, and Snow White are victimized by the powers of evil, the more sympathy they elicit and the more captivating they are for children. (Hard Facts 21) lix Though Tatar doesn’t recognize that the harm narrative is itself a genre with particular conventions and formal attributes, she does address some harm narratives under the rubric of the “cautionary tale.” She makes much of this commonality, exploiting harm and punishment, asserting that children's books learn from early fairy tales their essential “folktale plots (prohibition/ violation/punishment)” (Off With Their Heads 10). This much may well be true, but it is nonetheless worth pointing out that children's fiction rose with and in some cases before fairy tales began to be published for children. Certainly, cautionary tales like Struwwelpeter flourished in the nineteenth-century—but children's harm narratives were being written well before that. And, whereas Tatar emphasizes the “protective didactic coloring that has been virtually impossible to remove” from 269

fairy tales and children's books (Off With Their Heads 11), I argue that early harm narratives engage more in entertainment than the strict moral order Tatar highlights. lx When I number harm narratives here, I am enumerating those narratives that rely exclusively or near-exclusively on the harm narrative form, rather than including the many harm narratives that appear as embedded narratives in school stories, object narratives, or other genres. While I feel that I have covered the breadth of this genre, the fact that harm narratives are so often anthologized under innocuous or completely misleading titles leads me to believe, too, that there must be some out there that I have not encountered. lxi For a discussion of Ellen, the Teacher and Jane Eyre, see Jerome Beaty's Misreading Jane Eyre: A Postformalist Paradigm (37). lxii One might also argue that by so clearly locating blame, these works follow Macpherson’s model of strict liability. lxiii As the nineteenth-century ripened, one more subgenre of harm narrative was developed by prolific children's author Mary Martha Sherwood. These narratives have some clear relationships to religious narratives about adults such as Foxe's Book of Martyrs and stories about the saint's lives, in which people maintain their religious beliefs through adversity, though they ultimately die. Sherwood does something unique, however, in turning these into stories about children. Written about “little girls too good for their world,” as Brown points out “Such sentimental narratives of the ultimate triumph of the child's [Christian] values, usually at the cost of her life or suffering, clearly express and celebrate the softer Christianity then gaining ascendancy over Calvinism during the nineteenth century” (82). While using the formal components of many harm narratives, these religious tracts develop into something quite different from the harm narrative over the course of the century. I would argue that they began as something similar. Sherwood's phenomenally best-selling works, The History of Little Henry and His Bearer (1814) and The History of Little Lucy and Her Dhaye (1823) follow a different narrative trajectory than a cautionary harm narrative.lxiii In each of these, 270

the English child living in India is sadly neglected (harmed, both physically and spiritually) by his or her parents, though they are taken care and loved by their heathen Indian nurses. The children come in contact with Christian adults who care for them, convert to Christianity, and then sicken. They experience a drawn-out and painful illness before dying, and their final wish is that their nurse will be converted, too. As in later conversion narratives, these stories, at the end, emphasize Christian joy and acceptance of death over the trials the children must suffer. What fundamentally separates them from later generic developments, however, is their autobiographical roots. In her biographic entry on Sherwood, Janis Dawson points out that during the decade she spend in India, Sherwood witnessed firsthand the troubling neglect of children and the degeneracy of English soldiers living in army barracks; she was privy to the harm colonialism wreaked upon its subjects at a time when the British Empire was only beginning to amass its full force (275). These two stories aren't merely records of the real harm experienced by children in the colonies—though they do depict it in some detail—they are homages to Sherwood's own two children, Henry and Lucy, who died there. Instead of merely preaching evangelical Christianity, Henry and Lucy expose the dangers of colonial life to children, and they mourn Sherwood's own. Belonging, as they do, to the harm narrative genre, Henry and Lucy use omniscient narration and narrative perspective, repeated, cyclical, and disproportionate harm, and parental blame to cast aspersions on the colonial endeavor with its disregard for human life. lxiv Even these, however, are actually bound up with other individually published works, presumably after bought for a child. In the archives, I often found myself the recipient of a bulky collection—leather-bound, with mismatched pages— when I had expected a single, paper volume. lxv While was originally my own characterization, it is also, conveniently aligns with Barthes’s description of Sade’s writing: “the same sensual pleasure in classification, the same mania for cutting up [. . .] the same enumerative sensation” (Sade/Fourier/Loyola 3). 271

lxvi The Young Liar is most obviously a school story that makes use of harm on a large scale. There are others, as well, in which the harmed child is not necessarily bad. The heroine of Ellen, the Teacher lives through a series of harmful humiliations—and she is practically angelic. It's worth noting, too, that very rarely, if ever, are harm narratives the only narrative taking place in a text like this. Even in texts like The Young Liar and Ellen, the Teacher—or, in another example, The Young Truants—all of which seem like they are focused on one or two individuals, these harm narratives are ensconced with layers of other narratives. In The Young Truants, as with other similar stories, before we ever get to the child protagonists, we learn of their family's history—their grandparents, their parents, stepparents, and benefactors. lxvii There is something unusual about relying on fear and threats of harm in this post-Lockean educational period. After all, Locke emphasized the importance of teaching children rationality. He advocated sparing the rod, and instead teaching children how to think. And while it might be fair to argue that these texts advocate Rousseau's theory of education instead—showing children consequences instead of punishment—as I have already demonstrated many of the texts take pleasure directly in punishment. He advocated sparing the rod, and instead teaching children how to think. Further, and as I will continue to demonstrate, those stories that emphasize natural consequences push those consequences beyond the natural. Their extremism moves well beyond what can be expected in life—especially in contrast with the more rational narratives that are collected along with them. See Alan Richardson, Literature, Education, and Romanticism for a much more in-depth discussion of Locke’s and Rousseau’s pedagogy in action during the Romantic period. He advocated sparing the rod, and instead teaching children how to think. lxviii Really, there are more examples of this than I am able to enumerate. In Heedless Harry's Day of Disasters (1850)—a day that, relatively speaking, isn't all that bad—concludes with an admonition against carelessness and a description of some bad things that had happened to other children. Whereas a two young girls

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mishandle hot water and kill themselves, the only two boys to misbehave kill others: one boy his canary, another his sister with a gun (14-15). lxix In Dangerous Sport one boy, guilty of allowing himself to be peer- pressured, actually shoots someone. While his victim lives and Robert learns a thing or two about guns, again the harm is pushed off onto someone else. (16) lxx In “Self-Will,” Philip disobeys his parents instructions not to go to town: bending their rules, he sends his cousin William to town instead, where he catches the small-pox. By the end of the narrative, William is mangled, and another boy, Thomas, dead, but naughty Philip is still alive to play another day. lxxi As Ulrich Wiedmann notes in his essay on the topic, the “inflammable maiden” is a readily identifiable narrative trope in early children's literature (72) lxxii In the Oxford Edition of the novel. lxxiii The young evangelical who dies in Mary Martha Sherwood’s Little Lucy and her Dhaye. lxxiv. Lewis argues that “the novel itself, in its gaps, silences and compulsive repetitions, mimics structurally several features of what readers today might understand as post-traumatic stress disorder” (36). I am not disputing Lewis's interpretation of novelistic form as PTSD—argument is compelling and logical. I instead, however, posit that Wuthering Heights at the very least also uses gaps, silence, and repetition to draw our attention to harm itself. After all, it is the interim periods between harm that the novel remains silent about or skips over. lxxv This is, of course, also the largest difference between Wuthering Heights and other novels written for adults during the Victorian period. lxxvi Though Judith Pike points to this letter as an example of domestic abuse, Isabella's narrative, though miserable, is largely externally focused. It fills in the gaps, letting us know who is being hurt and how within the Heights household. Only at the end does she acknowledge “[Heathcliff] told me of Catherine's illness, and accused my brother of causing it; promising that I should be Edgar's proxy in suffering, till he could et hold of him” (114). Isabella acknowledges that she is “wretched” but she also closes the letter within two sentences (114). Like other 273

moments of harm in this novel, Isabella's example has a distancing effect from the reader, here because (remarkably) it lacks specificity. lxxvii As though to reaffirm the failure of didacticism in harm narratives, Nelly’s advice and morals rarely turn out well. She’s at best an inefficient nanny to Cathy, for instance, and she aids Catherine to her death by not reporting her illness. lxxviii Emily Rena-Dozier posits that Wuthering Heights's narrative framework, has a “proliferation of storytellers within a central frame, storytellers who are by and large completely unsympathetic to, and often disapproving of, the stories they tell” (757). lxxix Manning argues that “the novel presents us with several functional S/M relationships that [. . .] are marked by con sensuality and discursive exchange and which privilege and empower female sexuality and textuality” (49). Though I think Manning a bit guilty of taking marriage in this novel to mean “consent,” she undeniably picks up on the discourse of prurient pleasure that runs throughout Wuthering Heights. Lisa May also makes some connection between violence and pleasure, observing that, like dissection narratives, Wuthering Heights “[demonstrates] that mutual sexual gratification can be found in passionate reinscriptions of gender imbalances, violence, and death. They also provide a model of female sexual subjectivity that does not shy away from the intermingling of pleasure and danger” (415). Like dissection narratives, this novel “[probes] the pleasure and perils of feminine submission to masculine handling” (415). lxxx Lisa Surridge's essay on animal cruelty compelling asserts that Wuthering Heights “refutes many aspects of the Victorian rhetoric of animality, with its implicit assumption of the superiority of humans over beasts; it relentlessly undermines language which devalues the “brutal” in favor of the “civilized” (“Animals” 161). lxxxi I could, perhaps, include Hareton here, too. He does hang “a litter of puppies” (141). But we never know his own reaction to this act, and, moreover, I would argue that Hareton's action is a product solely of his education, rather than the miseducation and desire that powers the other characters.

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lxxxii I could, perhaps, include Hareton here, too. He does hang “a litter of puppies” (141). But we never know his own reaction to this act, and, moreover, I would argue that Hareton's action is a product solely of his education, rather than the miseducation and desire that powers the other characters. lxxxiii Mary Collier’s poem responds to Stephen Duck’s georgic poem, “The Thresher’s Labor,” which is notable because it emphasizes the physical laboriousness of his work. Collier, in term, uses her poem to argue that while women work as hard as men in the fields, women’s work continues once the sun has set. For more information on these poets, and especially Collier, see Donna Landry’s The Muses of Resistance. Also, Kyung Sook Shin argues that Barbauld revises the georgic emphasis on masculine labor in her essay, “Rewriting the Georgic: Anna Laetitia Barbauld’s ‘Washing Day.” lxxxiv That this “profusion of objects” is typical of Barbauld's work has been discussed by Joanna Wharton, who argues that “many of her poems are about, were inscribed on or accompanied physical objects, which are then given as gifts to friends. others still imagined such inscription. Barbauld's objects are diverse, and aside from the notable exception of an icehouse, they are of the quotidian and domestic” (535). Wharton makes a compelling argument when she states that in works like Hymns in Prose Barbauld uses physical objects to teach children religious “habits of mind [. . .] through the practice of looking at, and perhaps also smelling and touching, natural objects” (538). Still, I think Wharton is misguided to dismiss the domestic nature of these details in Barbauld's larger works. lxxxv At the same time, Barbauld's lesson evokes a recognizable domestic scene even for twenty-first century readers. lxxxvi Emily Rena-Dozier has useful summed up domestic narratives, noting that “the domestic novel, both at the level of plot and the level of narration, comes to be considered a feminine genre by nineteenth-century literary critics and historians. Writers set the domestic novel in the sphere of women (the home) and wrote narration from a feminine point of view (narratorial omniscience was linked with

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women's 'tact of perception' and constrained area of observation. Most importantly, the domestic novel was usually written by women” (813). lxxxvii In this, children's family narratives affirm what Amanda Vickery, in her book Women's Lives in Georgian England, has argued about the futility of treating separate spheres ideology as though it were either novel to the eighteenth or nineteenth centuries or a true representation of them. As Vickery states, “The dialectical polarity between home and world is an ancient trope of western writing; the notion that women were uniquely fashioned for the private realm is at least as old as Aristotle” (6). About the nineteenth century particularly, Vickery argues that “in fact, where historians have researched the activities of particular individuals and groups, rather than the contemporary social theories which allegedly hobbled them, Victorian women emerge as no less adventurous, capable, and, most importantly, diverse a crew as in any other century” (297). lxxxviii Thiel argues that “the transnormative family, essentially the antithesis of the idealized 'natural' paradigm, was frequently depicted as commonplace and unremarkable. However, and significantly, representations of transnormative family units often aped more ideologically conformist representations of the family [. . .] there is a sense of collaboration with prescribed family ideology as authors attempt to impose an idyllic facade onto tales of transformative families, but the result of this merger is often less than convincing” (9). lxxxix Even scholars who study Charlotte Mary Yonge, that paragon promoter of separate spheres ideology notice that her novels take a more ambiguous approach toward separate spheres ideology than she has previously been credited with. Lynn Shakinovsky, for instance, writes about Yonge's novels that “while much of the action of the novel may take place within the ostensibly narrow world of the family, every trifling action turns out to possess such far-reaching moral and spiritual consequences that its essentially domestic subject matter yields to another layer of discourse. With some of the most central and climactic scenes of the novel taking place far from England on foreign soil, Yonge expands her investigation and

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critique of the domestic from its initial familial focus to the broader national domestic world of England itself” (78). xc As a reminder, familiar format dialog is a way of representing conversation so that looks like a play, and was used frequently in educational text during the eighteenth and early-nineteenth centuries. xci While some few family narratives address younger audiences, the most notable of these advance with their readers. Children were meant to grow up with these books. The first sentence of Barbauld's Lessons for Children, “Come hither, Charles, come to mama” (1) is a far cry from its last: “She sits upon a thorn and sings melodiously all night long, while the dew lies upon the grass, and every thing is still and silent all around” (176). The same remains true of Maria Edgeworth's Harry and Lucy Stories, the first volume of which is made up of sentences like “Early in the morning, while Lucy was in bed, the sun shone through the window upon her face and wakened her” (7). In the last volume, Edgeworth writes “As she entered the laboratory, Lucy was very cautious not to touch any thing, and looked with reverence around her” (13). The simple, straightforward sentence structure, elementary topics (coming to mamma, waking), and one- and two-syllable words indicate that early volumes were written for young readers. The more difficult vocabulary, cumulative sentence structure and abstract topics of the later stories address older children. xcii While quotations like these appear as part of character's conversations, they also appear in the paratexts of family narratives, prefacing and situating the following story. Georgic quotations are frequently included in frontispieces. Frances Bowyer Vaux, for instance, quotes Cowper in the frontispiece to Domestic Pleasures (1816); “Domestic happiness, thou only bliss / Of Paradise, that has survived the fall!” What is more, out of all of the children's books I surveyed—more than 600 in all—those which I identified as family narratives were the only ones to use epigraphs to begin chapters. While inconsistent, epigraphs as chapter headings appear frequently enough to be called a common, though not defining, feature of the form. These epigraphs, too, regularly quote georgic poetry, as does the author of 277

Juliana, or the Affectionate Sisters (Eizabeth Sandham, 1800) at the beginning of Chapter One: “In these green days / reviving sickness lifts her languid head / Life flows afresh, and young-ey'd health exalts / The whole creation round” (1). As these examples demonstrate, authors of children's family narratives explicitly used georgic quotation to frame their own work on domestic life. xciii In both Rural Walks and The Little Indians at Selwood, for instance, a man shows the children a dormouse: “the tame dormouse was brought in, as it was about the hour it usually had its supper. It was gay and lively; it took a nut in its forepaw, like a squirrel, and nibbled away greedily; then it drank milk out of a spoon, and sucked some bread soaked in it, with great relish” (Little Indians 15). xciv In the Little Indians at Selwood, see the history of paper making and discussion of clocks (45), coffee (49), and candles (60). xcv It's worth noting, too, that I chose these examples more or less at random. xcvi Though Nelson does argue that “domestic novels such as those of Charlotte Yonge celebrate the pleasures of family life but also praise brothers and sisters who make sacrifices for one another,” she is not interested in how this operates within the genre (106). xcvii Author of “The Game at Jackstraws and the Christmas Box” in Birthday Stories (1835), Mrs. Sedgewick writes that “either one parent or the other was with the children nearly all the time” (20). xcviii Nelson does state that this prevailing trend does not mean that all Victorian father's were distant and unfeeling: “memoirs and letters from the period often record the existence of fathers who were tender, involved, adoring, and fun” (60). xcviii This occurs in Mamma's Pictures; Or the History of Mary and Fanny (1818). xcix This occurs in Mamma's Pictures; Or the History of Mary and Fanny (1818). c Extended families, too, have a place within the family narrative. Elizabeth Thiel has demonstrated that the family narrative is interested in portraying the ways extended family, as well as mothers and fathers, contribute to the upbringing 278

of children. Looking primarily at family narratives in the latter half of the nineteenth-century, Thiel argues that these novels are biased agains spinster women, privileging uncles and stepfathers because of their investment in patriarchy (102). But for early children's family narratives, this is not the case. Spinster women and good uncles play important roles in these novels. As in The East Indians at Selwood and Rural Walks, extended family members take the place of parents who are unable, for any reason, to raise their children. These aunts and uncles are consistently good surrogate parents; cousins, from time to time, are good surrogate siblings. Writing about The Clever Woman of Family Talia Schaffer has defined these relationships as those of “mutual care, loving interdependency” (102). Schaffer's description is useful because it points to the defining characteristic of family members in family novels: goodness. Characters are not typological Miss Worthys or Jenny Peaces. They are not perfect, but their consideration for the family unit overawes even their occasionally grievous faults. ci Ethel's sacrifices have not gone without critical notice. Kristen Moruzi notes attributes Ethel's self-sacrifice to Yonge's religiosity (58). Talia Schaffer notes that “To domesticate another is, in [The Daisy Chain]to reduce and preserve that subject forever [. . .] Yonge' religious drive produces a crushing drive toward conformity (91) and elaborates that “characters start as delightfully rebellious youths who must be painfully, painstakingly train to adhere to the law” (92). While this may well be true of Yonge (though I read her novels somewhat differently) it is not necessarily true of the family narrative, which takes different approaches toward the idea of discipline. cii Valerie Sanders, editor of the Penguin edition of the novel, similarly states that “while most reviewers admired [Martineau's] characterization and command of domestic detail, however, they were unsure what to make of the quiet setting and small-scale plot” (XV). John Warren states that Deerbrook “is widely seen as a lumbering pastiche of Jane Austen and argues, appropriately, I think, that the novel is “not primarily a love-story (convoluted or otherwise), but a novel about the correct relationship between individual, household, and community” (223-24). 279

ciii Summer J. Star argues that Eliot's approach to realism is “not so much an empirical but phenomenological approach to narrative”; Middlemarch concerns itself with “what it means to become aware of reality in the sense of becoming aware of oneself as a given being” (840). In her practical descriptions Eliot attempts to “reposition the [aesthetic] in the sphere of everyday life” (840). Kevin Morrison argues that local attachments are crucial to the development of growing characters in Middlemarch: the novel, he says, “suggests instead that, through a dynamic of exchange between mind and landscape, one can become rooted to a particular place” (319); like Star, Morrison sees external description as symbolic of character interiority. Adam Wright similarly argues that the details included in place description actually serve to illustrate the characters tied up in those places. Jonathan Farina also argues that Eliot's “grammar of things to what I call an “epistemology of character” because Eliot uses the same grammar of things to generate complex subjectivity within fully developed characters like Dorothea and Ladislaw as she does to describe scientific, conventional, religious, commercial, and physical realities.” civ Following in the steps of Gillian Beer, others focus on scientific detail and the novel's relationship to evolutionary theory. Others still are concerned with connection and exchange. Maria Iannou depicts the Rosamond's and Dorothea's bourgeoning friendship as a way of “[articulating] this female-centered story within the main narrative” (144). Thomas Holmes argues that “the two main characters of Middlemarch, Dorothea Brooke and Tertius Lydgate, are successful in the reform efforts as their ideas are shared through the web of relations that stretch beyond their immediate actions” (18). cv Those who focus on Dorothea largely debate whether or not Eliot approves of Dorothea's nascent feminism. June Szirotny argues that “while George Eliot admires Dorothea's ultimate attainment of selflessness, she does not always (allowing for her ambivalence) confound this virtue with doing good, as in her early novels [. . .[ on the contrary she seems to make Dorothea conform to the nineteenth- century ideal of women as self-sacrificing in order to explode the common view and 280

show that a woman does good by fulfilling herself” (18-19). Sherry Mitchell argues that “Eliot engages in strategies which magnify the loss of the speaking position that had been available to Saint Theresa” and “focuses on the wasted practical potential of talented women like Dorothea” (33). David Smith argues that Eliot uses Middlemarch, especially Dorothea's superiority to the men in her neighborhood “to impeach the patriarchal myth of male superiority, thereby to open for women additional fields of achievement” (34). Frank Christianson argues that “the novel wants to turn Dorothea as philanthropist into the new model of moral subjectivity, and yet her public ambitions and the philanthropic form they take are fraught with contradiction [. . .] Dorothea is the outcome of an interaction between a traditional religious type, St. Theresa, and a modern social context” (244-45) cvi It's worth noting here that the vast majority of domestic detail in the Dorothea chapters in fact involve Celia, who cares about “the making of a toy for the curate's children” (31); is revolted by Casaubon’s use of a soup spoon (31); and believes that “quite the best part of the day” occurs when her baby gets his bath (332). cvii This is common for Eliot. After all, Elaine Freedgood argues in The Ideas in Things that Eliot is primarily responsible for setting a “highbrow” reading standard that insists we take things as symbols rather than appreciating their material specificity. cviii My Life in Middlemarch was named New York Times Book Review Editor’s Choice. It was also listed by San Francisco Chronicle, Huffington Post, BookPage, Chicago Reader, Kirkus Review, Library Journal, and The Guardian as a “Best Book.”

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