Description
- Abstract:
- This dissertation examines the forms through which identification is courted and resisted in the novels of Jane Austen, Charlotte Brontë, George Eliot, and Thomas Hardy. While critics have long associated the Victorian novel with the uncritical (or even embarrassing) encouragement of identification, this project demonstrates that the identificatory engagements of these authors were marked by ambivalence and reflexivity. That is, for these novelists, inviting identification was at once an incredibly appealing and an extremely ethically-fraught proposition. On the one hand, they were attracted to identification by the pleasure it provides to readers, as well as its ethico-political potential to forge connections between readers and characters across difference. In particular, identification enabled these novelists to invite their primarily middle-class readership to invest affectively in the lives of those they might otherwise never encounter: to inhabit the righteous anger (“Unjust! — unjust!”) and the triumph (“Reader, I married him”) of Brontë’s marginalized governess in Jane Eyre and to see themselves in the working-class boy dreaming of the university in Hardy’s Jude the Obscure. On the other hand, these novelists were concerned about the tendency of identification to suppress the representation of nuance, complexity, and irreducible difference, as well as its tendency to encourage readers to paper over material differences between the characters and themselves. Indeed, Readerly Identification argues that the questions this project poses about the pleasures, limits, and power of identification, as well as its suitability for various aesthetic, ethical, and political projects, were also open questions for these authors — questions with which they attempted to grapple through formal experimentation and shifts in their novelistic projects. Each chapter of this project traces the trajectory of a single author across their novelistic career. Readerly Identification aims not to produce a linear historical narrative but rather to attend to a selective set of innovative and dynamic responses to the problematic of readerly identification. So attending offers insights into the extent to which identificatory strategies can effectively advance ethico-political projects through the novel, as well as the limitations associated with identification’s constitutive emphasis of similarity over difference.
- Notes:
- Thesis (Ph. D.)--Brown University, 2023
Citation
Gilligan, Christina J.,
"Readerly Identification in the Realist Novel from Austen to Hardy"
(2023).
English Theses and Dissertations.
Brown Digital Repository. Brown University Library.
https://repository.library.brown.edu/studio/item/bdr:dkk9ag94/
