Description
- Abstract:
- This dissertation undertakes an examination of the role of monolithic national ‘ordinariness’ in the fin de siècle Bildungsroman. It offers a new reading of the paradoxical nature of socialized ordinariness in the early 20th century novel, and argues that authors are able to mobilize the delicate scaffolding of ordinary subjectivity through avant-garde approaches to literary form – in particular, that of the novel of development. In this project, the concept of an “ordinary subject” is discussed as a protean and powerful instrument of hegemony that Britain developed at home, and exported to its colonies both actively and passively. Regulatory concepts which seem absolutely central to contemporary and historical understandings of racial, ethnic and national identity – the border, the subject, the resident, the law, the citizen, the pariah– are shown in my project to rely on the paradoxical, impossible idea of an “ordinary subject” to whom they pertain, but who can never actually exist. Like a mirage, the ordinary disappears when it is scrutinized; it exists solely as a mutually understood symptom of collectivity. The Bildungsroman relies on the social fata morgana of ordinariness as a way of knowing and appraising the other, a mirage that functions for its characters as a state- and community-implemented sensitivity to conformity, unremarkability, and the requirements of passing. To make these claims, I take as my primary materials George Eliot’s Daniel Deronda, Thomas Hardy’s Jude the Obscure, Tess of the D’Urbervilles and The Well-Beloved, Elizabeth Bowen’s The Last September, and Christopher Isherwood’s Berlin Stories and their 1976 paratext Christopher and his Kind. These writers turn the Bildungsroman against itself, making the bones and requirements of the form obvious and extraordinary, and the reader aware of their own biases and expectations for the development of characters.
- Notes:
- Thesis (Ph. D.)--Brown University, 2022
Citation
Stefanik, Eleanor,
"Ordinary Subjects: Being British, the Border and the Bildungsroman."
(2022).
English Theses and Dissertations.
Brown Digital Repository. Brown University Library.
https://repository.library.brown.edu/studio/item/bdr:7p2tfesf/
