COLLABORATION AND CONTESTATION: THE VICTORIAN MULTIPLE- NARRATOR NOVEL by Alexandra Rae Valint B.A., University of Virginia, 2004 Submitted to the Graduate Faculty of Dietrich School of Arts and Sciences in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy University of Pittsburgh 2012 UNIVERSITY OF PITTSBURGH DIETRICH SCHOOL OF ARTS AND SCIENCES This dissertation was presented by Alexandra Rae Valint It was defended on July 27, 2012 and approved by Troy Boone, PhD, Associate Professor, English Department Marah Gubar, PhD, Associate Professor, English Department Giuseppina Mecchia, PhD, Associate Professor, French and Italian Languages and Literatures Dissertation Advisor: Jonathan Arac, PhD, Andrew W. Mellon Professor, English Department ii Copyright © by Alexandra Rae Valint 2012 iii COLLABORATION AND CONTESTATION: THE VICTORIAN MULTIPLE- NARRATOR NOVEL Alexandra Rae Valint, PhD University of Pittsburgh, 2012 This dissertation argues that the multiple-narrator structure enables unity and harmony among narrators rather than pursuing the perspectival splintering and cacophony that one might expect to rise from such a structure. The Victorian multiple-narrator novel, therefore, embodies a fantasy of smooth collaboration among a heterogeneous selection of narrators—including women and men, adults and children, working class and gentry—and thereby employs a liberal, though not quite democratic, integration of narrators. Although narrators may possess different backgrounds, interests, and beliefs, their narrations neatly support each other’s presentation of the facts; the multiple-narrator novel, therefore, provides a system by which to mobilize and collate facts—the fact being central to the Victorians’ conception of knowledge. The dissertation’s opening chapter distinguishes the Victorians’ multiple-narrator offerings from similar iterations in the eighteenth and early twentieth century. Successful and self-conscious collaboration—both in narrative and in plot—proves unique to the Victorian versions of this structure. By drawing attention to the similarities between the two narrators of Charles Dickens’s Bleak House, chapter two argues that the novel’s content and structure actualize the shift between the aristocratic woman of surface and the feminine domestic ideal of depth. Chapter three covers novels that utilize more than two narrators: Bram Stoker’s Dracula, iv Richard Marsh’s The Beetle, and Wilkie Collins’s The Moonstone and The Woman in White. In each novel, a foreign entity invades England, and the British respond with a narrative that counters the invader by creating a balance between the individual and the community. The quick switch—a sole, brief switch in narrators—in Robert Louis Stevenson’s Treasure Island and Juliana Ewing’s A Great Emergency is the purview of chapter four. The quick switch is the exception to my argument because it magnifies rather than minimizes the differences between narrators by using narrative as a form of punishment. As chapter five argues, the narrators in Emily Brontë’s Wuthering Heights and Anne Brontë’s The Tenant of Wildfell Hall differ in gender and status yet bond over the sharing of narrative, but while Lockwood and Nelly both desire distance and closure, Gilbert and Helen pursue exchange and closeness. v TABLE OF CONTENTS INTRODUCTION: “ONE COHERENT AND TRUSTWORTHY CHRONICLE”..............1 1.0 EPISTLES TO NARRATIVES TO MONOLOGUES: A HISTORY OF THE MULTIPLE-PERSPECTIVE FORM........................................................................................23 1.1 THE EPISTOLARY NOVEL AND MORAL REALISM.......................................29 1.2 THE VICTORIAN MULTIPLE-NARRATOR NOVEL AND REALISM OF METHOD..........................................................................................................................38 1.3 HEART OF DARKNESS AND THE SPEAKING SELF.......................................45 1.4 THE MULTIPLE-VOICE NOVEL AND REALISM OF CONSCIOUSNESS....55 1.5 COMMUNITIES AND COMMUNICATION........................................................68 2.0 FROM SURFACE TO DEPTH: WOMEN, CLASS, AND THE DUAL NARRATION OF BLEAK HOUSE.....................................................................................................................82 2.1 DUAL—NOT DUELING NARRATORS...............................................................87 2.2 QUESTIONING OMNISCIENCE...........................................................................95 2.3 SURFACE AND DEPTH........................................................................................109 3.0 “POWER OF COMBINATION”: INVASIONS AND MULTIPLE-NARRATOR COUNTER-ATTACKS IN THE MOONSTONE, THE WOMAN IN WHITE, DRACULA, AND THE BEETLE...................................................................................................................150 3.1 THE INVADER.......................................................................................................157 vi 3.2 THE COMMUNAL RESPONSE...........................................................................167 3.3 ANTI-COMMUNICATION FORCE....................................................................185 3.4 PRIVATE WRITING..............................................................................................201 3.5 HOME AND EMPIRE............................................................................................212 4.0 THE QUICK SWITCH: NARRATIVE AS PUNISHMENT IN TREASURE ISLAND AND A GREAT EMERGENCY.................................................................................................226 4.1 TREASURE ISLAND...............................................................................................230 4.2 A GREAT EMERGENCY........................................................................................268 4.3 CONCLUSION........................................................................................................282 5.0 “HAPPILY COINCIDING”: FRAME NARRATIVES IN WUTHERING HEIGHTS AND THE TENANT OF WILDFELL HALL...........................................................................289 5.1 ART FRAMES AND NARRATIVE FRAMES....................................................289 5.2 WUTHERING HEIGHTS........................................................................................307 5.3 THE TENANT OF WILDFELL HALL..................................................................345 BIBLIOGRAPHY......................................................................................................................378 vii LIST OF FIGURES 2.1 “Sunset in the Long Drawing Room.”...................................................................................142 2.2 “Shadow.”..............................................................................................................................143 2.3 “Morning.”.............................................................................................................................143 2.4 “Family Portraits at Mr Bayham Badger’s.”..........................................................................144 2.5 “In Re Guppy Extraordinary Proceedings.”...........................................................................145 2.6 “Little Old Lady.”..................................................................................................................146 2.7 “Miss Jellyby.”.......................................................................................................................147 2.8 “Sir Leicester Dedlock.”........................................................................................................148 2.9 “Light.”..................................................................................................................................149 4.1 “If any one of you six make a signal of any description, that man’s dead.”..........................286 4.2 “the squire raised his gun, the rowing ceased.”.....................................................................287 4.3 “Death of Tom Redruth.”.......................................................................................................288 viii ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS I consider my dissertation committee a dream team; they are a veritable library of knowledge and advice. I am filled with gratitude towards their enthusiasm, honesty, and support. Thank you to Jonathan Arac for your wise guidance and genuine kindness—you let me find my own way and cleared the path at the same time. Thank you for granting me time when I needed it and wielding deadlines when I needed them. I could not have asked for a better chair and mentor. Thank you to Marah Gubar for simultaneously giving me insightful criticism and enthusiastic support—you always pushed me to do better while also making me feel that I had already done a good job. Thank you to Troy Boone for your exacting standards and meticulous proofreading—when I edit, it’s with you in my head! And thank you to Giuseppina Mecchia for graciously being my outside reader. One begins to understand Dickens’s appreciation of his readers, readers that he praises and thanks in many of his novels’ prefaces. It is a wonderful thing to be read by such kind, intelligent, responsive, and forgiving readers as I have had in my committee members. As Dickens says in the preface to Bleak House, “May we meet again!” Many faculty members in the English department have been helpful, inspiring, and supportive both during courses and long after seminars had ended. Thank you to Don Bialostosky, Steve Carr,