Description
- Abstract:
- This dissertation traces the emergence and development of a new model of villainy in Victorian literature and social discourse. I trace the origins of this model, which I call "malevolent civility," to a tension in contemporary social reform tracts. Across a wide political spectrum extending from William Booth to Edwin Chadwick and Friedrich Engels, reformers generate a self-defeating logic. While calling for the assimilation of social outsiders through educational and economic improvement, they admit that some people lack the sufficient humanity to be reformed. The fear is that inassimilable creatures might adopt the forms of behavior necessary for admission to the social body, but remain essentially alien. Such incomplete assimilation would, as Booth put it in 1890, be akin building the "perfect . . . architectural beauty" with "unkilned clay." Reformers responded to the threat of malevolent civility by working to make social outsiders legible; they accumulated empirical data thought capable of distinguishing the redeemably human from the recalcitrantly inhuman. The fiction I consider, however, demonstrates the futility of these efforts. Through readings of Charles Dickens's Oliver Twist, Emily Brontë's Wuthering Heights, Thomas Hardy's The Mayor of Casterbridge, and Bram Stoker's Dracula, I argue that nineteenth-century novels test and reject strategies that seek to identify and eliminate aliens by reading their interior. These novels, representative of a wide generic and historical span (1832 -- 1897), instead demonstrate that no coherent, legible interior is there to be read. But these novels never pathologize this lack of coherent interiority. Instead, this lack becomes the very basis of what it means to be human. To save the reform effort from its own self-defeating logic, the Victorian novel renounces what a century of critics have seen as its defining formal feature" access to what E.M. Forster called the "hidden lives" of characters. Instead, these novels force us to judge others on the civic value of their perceptible actions alone. In so doing, they stage a utilitarian-inspired critique of the essentialist logic that both subtended and disrupted Victorian thought on social reform" and social formation more broadly.
- Notes:
- Thesis (Ph.D. -- Brown University (2013)
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Citation
Gonzalez, Khristina Faith,
"Malevolent Civility: The Victorian Novel and the Logic of Reform"
(2013).
English Theses and Dissertations.
Brown Digital Repository. Brown University Library.
https://doi.org/10.7301/Z0M61HKX
