DISOBEDIENT BODIES: THE INTERSECTION OF CLASS AND SENSATION IN THE VICTORIAN NOVEL Bella Book April 24, 2015 Presented to the English Department of Mount Holyoke College in partial fulfillment of the requirements for a degree of Bachelor of Arts with Honors. ii ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS My biggest, and grandest, thanks go to my project advisor, Jenny Pyke. How you managed to be so kind, forthright, and clear-sighted from the beginning of this project right until the very end absolutely astounds me. Thank you so much for the wonderful leadership and example that you have been throughout my time at Mount Holyoke. Your insight and kindness have made this experience transformative. The ways you engage with text and ideas are so amazing and humbling. You changed the way I view words. Such a gift. Thank you for teaching me. Thank you! A huge thank you to Amy Martin, not only for assigning Bleak House and being so present in my third chapter, but for always being supportive and engaging and positive. I am so glad to have met and begun working with you this past year! How lucky am I to have two such wonderful role models in scholarship, leadership, and living kindly? Answer: Extremely lucky. To Liz Markovits, thank you for finding the time to read and consider this work and thank you for your wonderful dedication to student experience at Mount Holyoke! I would like to thank Meghan Healy‘11 and the women of the John Portico Library in Manchester. The time spent exploring the city, especially touching the original doors in Elizabeth Gaskell’s home, was unreal, and jump-started my research and enthusiasm for this project. In this vein, I would also like to thank Katherine Inglis for the talk she gave in the spring of 2014 on Ruth and contagion and Gayle Davis for her course Making of the Modern Body, which inspired my academic interest in the body. The insights gained in that course provided an invaluable framework for this project. A huge thank you to all of my lovely friends who have been so positive and supportive in relation to this project, and in life generally, even in the midst of this hectic year. I would especially like to thank Hallie Saber, whose support, friendship, and steady stream of “it’s going to be great” and quiet confidence was at once inspiring and stabilizing. To Rachel Lovett, Leah Brooke, and Sarah iii Martin, whose support was so quiet and gentle and perfect, thank you! And to Kay Heffernan, who listened and mentored and checked in with such kindness. I owe a lot of my growth, and the growth of this project to one twenty minute conversation we had at the end of January. Thank you thank you thank you! I would also like to thank my little brother, Joseph Book, and my dad, Dewayne Book, who now intimately know the plot of four Victorian novels and who were always willing to listen. A big special thanks to my dad, who gave me the chance to relax and defrost this March while I wrote that last all-consuming chapter, and who always picks up when I call and who can sense, whether from across the room, the eastern seaboard, or the Atlantic, when I need him. I would like to thank my mom, Connie Book, for being a role model and inspiration in all things and for always being available to watch BBC Victorian adaptations in her bed on a Saturday afternoon. Thank you for always encouraging my interests and for being so kind-hearted and so strong and so fearlessly open. When I grow up, hopefully, I will be like my mother. This project is dedicated to my grandfather, Clarence Ledoux, who would have so disapproved of my obvious love for Marx, and many of the ideas present in this thesis, but whose belief in the power of education has now changed the lives of two generations. Thank you. iv TABLE OF CONTENTS Introduction 1 Seeing and Narrative Sympathy in Mary Barton 17 Moral Femininity, Narrative Control, and Margaret Hale’s Body 52 in North and South Female Sexuality, Motherhood, and the Fallen Woman 80 in Bleak House and Mary Barton Disease, Exhaustion, and the Worker 112 in North and South and Hard Times Dear Reader: Articulating the Worker’s Body 149 in the Twenty-First Century Works Cited 153 It is a consequence of the wonderful complexity of our organism, in which each part plays on another, that remote and unsuspected influences produce important results. Mental agitation will suddenly arrest or increase the secretions; imperfect, or too abundant secretions will depress or confuse the mind. An idea will agitate the heart, and disturb the liver…So indissolubly is our mental life bound up with our bodily life. George Henry Lewes, The Physiology of Common Life, 1859 How can a human being enter into a narrative world and not disrupt the distribution of attention? Alex Woloch, The One vs The Many, 2003 1 INTRODUCTION Charles Dickens, writing to the emerging author of Mary Barton on January 31, 1850, asserted that the aim of his magazine Household Words “would be the raising up of those that are down, and the general improvement of our social condition” (Letter from Dickens to Gaskell, 31 January 1850). Elizabeth Gaskell, the then anonymous author of Mary Barton, was living and writing in Manchester, the definitive industrial city. Both authors were united by a common desire to “raise up those that are down.” To do this, they drew from their own observations and beliefs in how the different classes in England, separated by ideological, if not geographic, distance could be made aware of their interdependent economic and social relationship. Both Dickens and Gaskell sought to connect a privileged readership to the lives of the workers through sympathy. Gaskell’s short story “Lizzie Leigh” would be the leading story in the first issue of Household Words (Michie 88). With the growth of industrial cities and the fluctuating ideas about femininity and the factory, bodies became physical receptacles for ideological concerns. Gaskell and Dickens, among others such as Benjamin Disraeli, began to use fiction as a way to understand and reform ideas about how class and social 2 issues impacted their society. This genre of fiction had a social conscience and an explicit purpose. Mary Poovey, in her foundational text Making the Social Body, traces the motives that fueled this form of the novel. She writes, “Novelists’ contributions to the debate about the condition of England tended to challenge the modes of representation that political and social economists deemed adequate to contemporary woes” (153). These social reform novelists sought to personalize in a time when “the emergence and consolidation of modern domains entailed the productions of abstractions alongside and throughout the establishments of institutions” (7). Detailing Britons’ ordinary living conditions, these novels typically follow a set formula in which a character moves from self-interest, or limited social vision, to altruism (Cazamian 8). These novels, written for a mostly middle-class readership, emerged from the 1840s to the middle of the 1850s. Robin Gilmour, in The Novel in the Victorian Age, argues that the central task of the social reform novel was mediatory, seeking always to reconcile and synthesize (11). The story of the Victorian social reform novel is the story of how novelists’ attempt to interpret their changing world and to hold onto a hopeful, and more socially cohesive, vision of the future. The social reform novelist, then, follows a specific rhythm in his or her writing. The writer says: This is what is and this is what could be. Unlike political and social economists who, as Poovey notes, dealt largely with abstraction, writers like Dickens and Gaskell focused their narrative on the individual. Relying on the conventions of the novel, “they turned from 3 quantifiable features of the urban landscape to the toll that dirt, disease, and debility extracted from the poor” (Poovey 153). As Catherine Gallagher notes in her work, The Making of the Modern Body, “Imaginative texts gave the ‘social body’ a local habitation and name” (3). Fiction, specifically the realist novel,1 becomes a uniquely effective vehicle for social reform. In her collection of essays Unstable Bodies, Jill Matus notes, “working-class domesticity, it can be argued, was the social problem that gave birth to Victorian social science...Victorians believed that the ‘condition of England’ was to be seen, accounted for, and modified in the home” (57). By writing these stories of working-class lives, social reform writers sought to bring the working-class character into the mind and the private home of the middle-class reader in order to reveal the social relationship that was obscured by the visibility of the middle class and the invisibility of the working class. Fictional representations of the worker became a way for the mass of new bodies to be translated and made more accessible and legible for the middle class. Though united in their desire to bring about social reform, Gaskell and Dickens had a complicated relationship. Dickens was at once a supporter, a fellow writer, and Gaskell’s editor for North and South when it first appeared in Household Words in 1854. Hard Times was being written, and published, simultaneously and within the same magazine. These two novels are in 1 Pamela Gilbert argues that the novel deals with “a secret self” (Disease, Desire, and the Body in Victorian Women's Popular Novels 47), because of the insight the reader gets into the character’s interiority. 4 conversation with one another.