Description
- Abstract:
- Abstract of “The Anatomy of Suspense: Rethinking the Victorian Bildungsroman” by Suzy Soomin Kim, Ph.D., Brown University, October 2023 This dissertation argues that the British Bildungsroman’s aspiration to unite narrative process and individual progress fails within the nineteenth century and that this failure is aesthetically represented in the increasing disruptions of narrative suspense. Taking up cinematic and philosophical discourses, this project defines suspense in the Bildungsroman as a phenomenon in which the formal features of a story encourage the reader to keep on reading with a certain expectation of progress in mind. In an ideal Bildungsroman, there is a neat parallel between the youth-to-maturity trajectory of the Bildung plot and the suspense-to-payoff structure of the narrative. Such is the case in David Copperfield or Jane Eyre, where narrative suspense sets up an array of expectations for David and Jane, and the satisfying resolutions confirm the correctness of their choices all along. Framed this way, suspense and its payoff in a British Bildungsroman amplify the import of the protagonist’s selection of one course of life over another by tightening the causal link between his expectation in making a choice and its fulfillment. However, as the Victorian era advances, rather than distending the expectation until its gratification, suspense abruptly results in arbitrary consequences (Charles Dickens’s Great Expectations), never arrives (Charlotte Brontë’s Villette), is converted to a payment of debt (Wilkie Collins’s novels of 1860s), or is left up to chance (George Eliot’s Daniel Deronda). Indeed, suspense is increasingly used in more experimental and distorted ways that represent the difficulty of progressive life achievement. This change in literary suspense works to delimit the freedom of choice in the Victorian novel, and rather shows the characters’ powerlessness to shape the courses of their lives. Reading the increasing disruption to the structures of suspense in the Victorian era ultimately lights up the various inconsistencies, tensions, and hidden injustices in what once appeared to be so pleasurable, so smooth, as the developmental paradigm of the Bildungsroman.
- Notes:
- Thesis (Ph. D.)--Brown University, 2023
Citation
Kim, Suzy Soomin,
"The Anatomy of Suspense: Rethinking the Victorian Bildungsroman"
(2023).
English Theses and Dissertations.
Brown Digital Repository. Brown University Library.
https://repository.library.brown.edu/studio/item/bdr:rf68s6d6/
