Browsing by Author "Psomiades, Kathy A"

This project addresses how democratic regimes founded on ideals of individual agency and personal freedom systematically disadvantage groups and persons. I argue that (neo-)liberalism enacts this inequity not incidentally, but by design, creating an illusion of free choice and consensual contract while actively obscuring the coercive mechanisms that sustain inequality. As the era in which contractual agency was consolidated into a national political program, the Victorian period produced a plethora of legal and literary justifications for the injustices sanctioned by English liberalism. I aim to reveal the contradictions internal to these justifications, while also disclosing methodologies of resistance. Today, we remain Victorian in our reliance on a model of individual consent to rationalize our political system; my interest in Victorian novels lies in their ability to reimagine and critique the political conditions that we take for granted today.

"Fictions of Consent" starts with a puzzle: there are certain kinds of criminal behavior—murder, sexual deviance, cannibalism—that are exceptional rather than typical, yet nevertheless generated enormous concern in Victorian jurisprudence and popular culture. I contend that nineteenth-century law and literature seem to have allocated undue attention to exceptional crimes not because of their sensationalism per se—not because they’re extraordinary—but because they’re actually dangerously ordinary. There are behaviors, I argue, that the law is invested in expelling as criminal, but that the novel can help us see as contractual. When novelists translated outlandish criminal behavior into rational attempts of modern subjects to negotiate consensual relationships with one another, they transformed these ostensible anomalies into the predictable culmination of a liberal social order: these crimes now became part and parcel of a society based on freedom of contract. Novelists including George Eliot, Charles Dickens, Robert Louis Stevenson, Mona Caird, and Thomas Hardy suggest that the violent coercion apparently unique to the extreme situation in fact represents the ordinary logic of liberalism.

This dissertation argues that the Victorian novel created a sensory self much like that articulated by Victorian physiological psychology: a multi-centered and process-oriented body that reacts to situations and stimuli as they arise by mobilizing appropriate cognitive and nervous functions. By reading Victorian fiction alongside psychology as it was developing into a distinct scientific discipline (during the 1840s-70s), this project addresses broader interdisciplinary questions about how the interaction between literature and science in the nineteenth century provided new ways of understanding human consciousness. I show that narrative engagements with psychology in the novel form made it possible for readers to understand the modern person as productively rather than pathologically heterogeneous. To accomplish this, fiction offered author and reader an experimental form for engaging ideas posed and debated concurrently in science.

The novels I read - by authors including Charlotte Brontë, Charles Dickens, Wilkie Collins, Mary Elizabeth Braddon, and George Eliot - emerge as narrative testing grounds for constructions of subjectivity and personhood unavailable to scientific discourse. I attribute the novel's ability to create a sensory self to its formal tactics, from composites of multiple first-person accounts to strange juxtapositions of omniscience and subjectivity, from gaps and shifts in narrative to the extended form-in-process of the serial novel. My side-by-side readings of scientific and literary experiments make it clear that fiction is where we find the most innovative methods of investigation into embodied forms of human experience.

Victorian England was the first empire in history to imagine itself as liberal, believing that its own power could bring law to the darkest and most unruly corners of the world. But despite covering nearly the entire period known as the Pax Britannica, Victoria's long reign did not include a single year without war.

The conceptual knots presented by England's global power forced some of the century's most canonical authors to confront, and attempt to solve, contradictions fundamental to their self-consciously liberal society. Because law was understood by many Victorian theorists as the opposite of violence, it was when metropolitan thinkers came up against the fringes of civilization's ordering power, in the empire, that the violence underwriting peace become most uncomfortably plain. "Out there," said jurist James Fitzjames Stephen, "you see real government." But if what Stephen called the liberal state's quiet but crushing force emerged most explicitly at the peripheries of law's reach, literary forms composed at the center of the imperial network --London-- reveal the problem of liberal violence as absence, as silence: as a problem. These problems became dilemmas of narrative and poetic form that I argue are legible across linked areas of Victorian literary production: from the realist masterpiece (The Mill on the Floss) and the philosophical treatise (A System of Logic) to works of political historicism (On Liberty), sensation fiction (Armadale), and apparently apolitical poetry about flowers (Poems and Ballads). Forms of Empire looks to show how the Victorian state's interrelated forms --literary and political, conceptual and historical-- expose the violence liberal theory could not see.

Forms of Empire builds on and seeks to advance work on the pairing of "liberalism and empire" in the broad area of cultural studies. To do so it works dialectically, placing Victorian liberalism's vision of perpetual peace in the context of the empire's endless war and tracking loose networks of London-based thinkers as they confronted the problem of how violence relates to law. This process exposes live debates, both explicit and implicit, about just what force secured Victorian England's so-called Age of Equipoise. What emerges is a particularly literary analysis of how linked coteries of Victorian writers, through the height and decline of a great world power, attempted to make sense of the uneasy links they saw (and did not see) between liberalism and empire, the forms of law and the disorder of violence --the vexed connection, that is, between peace and war.

The project's focus on literary structure and political theory is also historical, tracing Victorian global rule from its phase of hegemonic globalization at mid-century (the so-called Age of Equipoise) into its more openly war-torn, post-1870 decline, a structure that corresponds to the project's two halves. While reframing existing periodizations of empire in Victorian Studies, this genealogical procedure also particularizes what is often studied as a homogenous "imperial discourse." Forms of Empire is necessarily interdisciplinary, since it charts the conceptual cross-pollination among semi-autonomous fields of Victorian knowledge: political theory, anthropology, economics, philosophy, and literature, among others. But it is also focused on method, showing that theoretical debates among Victorians themselves --about the dilemmas of their hegemony-- can illuminate controversies about liberalism, violence, and method in a newer moment of empire, ours.

By the time of David Hume and Adam Smith, as A.O. Hirschman famously tells us, the early modern passions had been rehabilitated as a creative force, one driven by economic interest. From the turn of the nineteenth century onward, however, the passions returned with a vengeance — as indicated by the works of Jeremy Bentham, Thomas Malthus, and the Brontë sisters. What we now call “the emotions” had suddenly slipped out from under the control of individual reason and become a force of nature. As such, they could be held responsible both for keeping the individual alive and for the species’ ability to prosper and expand in number. Michel Foucault has offered perhaps the clearest articulation of how the century that followed developed new forms of government that both taught individuals to manage themselves by observing disciplinary regimens and regulated the unruliness of entire populations by means of biopolitical policies. But while, like Hirschman, Foucault links the redefinition of sexuality and how behaviors and effects were classified and managed directly to the emergence of industrial capitalism, neither he nor Hirschman consider the novel instrumental in their respective accounts of the passions. Novels, as the self-anointed discourse of personal experience, were ideally positioned to respond both critically and creatively to the disruptions of daily life that began in the late eighteenth century. In the decades that followed, I will show, the novel successively updated the causes and effects of emotional experience to accommodate the transition to an industrial society from an agrarian way of life supported by commerce and early colonization.

From Jane Eyre to Daniel Deronda, the novel features a protagonist whose biographical destiny depends on a form of yearning well in excess of the prevailing social classification system. This unnamable sense of belonging elsewhere is indeed so in excess of then existing codes of conduct and self-expression that it escapes the confines of the individual and pervades each habitat it enters with a sense of lack and constriction. The natural principles Charles Darwin first discovered during his landmark Voyage of the Beagle gave him the grounds, by 1872, to conclude that just as any species, man or animal, must physically adapt to its environment, so too must its feelings. Darwin understood that these affects — a term I use for feelings that have not been codified as one of the then recognized emotions — allow the species to develop new relations among themselves to enable survival. Over the century, the novel followed this same principle perhaps more so than any other form of writing, as it sought to alter the basis of human feeling to accommodate the material conditions of existence. My introduction explains how the novel carried out this project by capturing and reforming feelings in excess of accepted social roles and reworked both feelings and roles to form emotional ties capable of sustaining domestic life: first, during the early decades of the nineteenth century as inherited land lost its status as the coin of the realm, then in the economic crisis called the Hungry Forties, and finally during the period when England’s economy shifted from the English countryside to the imperial metropole.

In my dissertation, I attempt to demonstrate how both Romantic and Victorian literature and science came together to produce the idea of “objectivity.” Whereas prior naturalists had tended to embrace an epistemic ideal of what they called “truth to nature”—which involved manipulating observed phenomena to capture their underlying structure—I argue that philosophers of science soon came to recognise that this tendency distorted, instead of elucidated, the objects which they set out to study. In attempting to uncover the abstract form beneath material facts, scientists often ended up merely projecting their subjective beliefs onto nature itself. To prevent this epistemic misunderstanding, I suggest, philosophers began to emphasise the need for what they called “objectivity.” This meant attempting to regulate the unconscious biases of subjects through adopting both particular technologies—notably photographic reproduction—yet also mundane methods of self-regulation, including an emphasis on the need for reproducibility within observation. Through these different forms of epistemic self-restraint, which sought to remove personal belief from science, Romantic and Victorian authors thus attempted to capture the objective structure of nature.

The Victorians popularized of the idea of progress as well as the linear and unidirectional temporality that this concept implies. However, the problematic nature of progressive temporality is now more visible than ever. New research about climate change has changed our understanding of the planet’s recent geological history from a exhortation of humanity’s achievement to a condemnation of humanity’s destruction. This destruction has been enabled in part by the progressive ideologies that drove nineteenth-century capitalism’s insatiable exploitation of the Earth’s resources. My dissertation argues that, even as a progressive idea of time became a dominant temporal form throughout Victorian culture and society, authors experimented with different temporalities in various literary forms. I investigate these alternative temporal forms and I argue that, though these alternatives died out in the past, their latent intellectual infrastructure, which was preserved within various literary forms, can be revitalized.This research contributes to a growing body of research that reevaluates narratives of progress during the Victorian era. While other works, such as Elisha Cohn’s Still Life, examine scenes within Victorian novels that disrupt capitalist development, my dissertation shows how this narrative of development and alternatives to it were thought through and experimented with in different literary forms. I include a study of two different novels, a work of prose nonfiction, and a pair of dramas written primarily in verse. Grouping this collection of works together gives a better understanding of the alternative temporalities that were experimented with during the Victorian period and which became a central focus in the Modernist literature that followed. Additionally, my project contributes to a growing field of Anthropocene studies. In the examples of nineteenth century literature that I discuss, I argue that we find a possible answer to questions raised by Donna Haraway, Bruno Latour, Amitav Ghosh, Dipesh Chakrabarty and many others about the place of the human in a rapidly-changing ecosystem by reconsidering the temporality that has inform the structure of our thought. I believe that, within the nineteenth century and elsewhere in our past, alternative possibilities of our present lie latent and waiting to be awakened.

“The Complete Bentham: Rationality’s Afterlife in Victorian Literature,” focuses on one of the nineteenth century’s most contentious attempts to imagine the social good in quantitative terms: Jeremy Bentham’s proposal to measure and manage “the greatest happiness for the greatest number.” The last time literary studies took Bentham seriously, the guiding assumption was that his Panopticon prison trained individuals in the routines of self-policing that liberal government required, and that the novel carried that disciplinary training to the reading public. I show that this argument considers only a small part of Bentham’s massive corpus and so misses both the radical reformulation of liberal government that he was proposing and the aesthetic possibilities that his utilitarianism opened up as a result. The Victorians certainly thought there was something caustic in Bentham’s system of cost-benefit analysis, a worry expressed in charges that Bentham was an emotionally deficient thinker who would, like Dickens’s Mr. Gradgrind, “weigh and measure any parcel of human nature and tell you what it comes to.” This critique, I argue, has its basis in the Victorian recognition that Bentham’s logic challenges liberalism’s normative commitments including the individual’s right to own property and the primacy of the family as the fundamental unit of society. When Bentham asserts that the only way to manage a population of rational individuals is to maximize pleasures and minimize pains, no matter their source, he imagined a form of cost-benefit analysis that makes any particular right or social norm expendable in the name of producing “the greatest happiness for the greatest number.” Rather than show how the novel appropriates Bentham’s panoptic apparatus to reinforce the norms of liberal society, I argue that Bentham’s excessive reason is the means by which nineteenth-century literature found its way outside those norms. When Victorian novelists join liberal thinkers in chastising Bentham for translating qualities of life into quantities of pleasure and pain, they also memorably preserve the perverse implications of utilitarian rationalism and imagine new qualities of life. Even so obvious a caricature of Bentham as Dickens’s Mr. Gradgrind offers a vision of a life passionately animated by the compulsion to calculate.

In order to see what became of utilitarianism’s calculating rationality in the Victorian cultural imagination, each chapter of my dissertation considers how a different novelist takes up one aspect of Bentham’s multi-faceted theory in order to contemplate its radical consequences. My first chapter, “Calculating Pleasure,” begins with Bentham’s assumption that individuals who imagine future pleasures and pains can be governed by means of a carefully calibrated threat of future punishment. Shelley’s Frankenstein takes up this calculating logic in order to reverse it: the more Victor and his creature imagine their futures, the more ungovernable they become as their disappointment and hope lead them to increasingly antisocial behaviors. In my second chapter, “Expanding Bureaucracy,” I show how Dickens enacts a different reversal when considering the universal suspicion that motivates Bentham’s plans for a universal bureaucracy. While Bentham, ever distrustful of government functionaries, insists on layering one level of government inspectors on top of another until the whole population is involved in monitoring bureaucratic institutions, Dickens’s late city novels (no less suspicions of government functionaries) see these bonds of mutual surveillance as the basis for forming bonds of trust and mutual aid. My third chapter, “Panoptic Economics,” returns to Bentham’s famous Panopticon prison in order to argue that even as it establishes the protocols for disciplining individuals it also imagines an alternative socialist economy that would care for and manage all unemployed people. While Wilkie Collins’s detective fiction has often been read in terms of totalizing panoptic surveillance, a revised understanding of the Panopticon allows us to see that these novels also imagine a utopian condition of full employment where everyone becomes the possessor of potentially valuable information no one can be dismissed as part of a disposable surplus population. My final chapter, “Sexual Irregularities,” considers the queer potential of Bentham’s utilitarianism. I show that Bentham’s little-known defense of homosexual, bestial, and necrophilic acts joins the aestheticism of Walter Pater in promoting pleasures that belong, not to the reproductive future of the bourgeois family, but rather “give nothing but the highest quality to your moments as they pass, and simply for those moments’ sake.” Taken as a whole, my dissertation offers us a way of seeing the word “utilitarian” as something other than the catch-all term of derision for a practical, depoliticized, and unaesthetic education that sometimes appears in op-eds bemoaning the “Death of the Humanities.” By returning to Bentham’s contentious place in the Victorian cultural imagination I hope to show just how impractical, political, and aesthetic utilitarianism can be.

A great many Victorian novels were originally written, published, distributed, and read in parts over time—that is to say, serially. Yet today we rarely read those novels in serial format. Nor do we consider that format in any way equivalent to what we mean by the form of the novels in question. Only rarely do we consider the material fact that the novel was not in the first instance—and perhaps even later—supposed to be understood as a “whole” product so much as a process of articulating parts that appeared over a year or more. With the exception of the Brontës, most of the Victorian novelists whom we now consider worth reading, teaching, and treating as the subject of literary criticism published many if not all their novels in serial form. In that this claim holds true for Charles Dickens, William Thackeray, Wilkie Collins, Mary Elizabeth Braddon, Anthony Trollope, Elizabeth Gaskell, Margaret Oliphant, and George Eliot, it follows that, at the very least, we should entertain the possibility that the serial form was indeed one and the same as that of the Victorian novel itself. Each of these novelists had a hand in developing the serial formats in which they published, as each sought his or her route to developing what can only be described as a world in pieces. Where Charles Dickens experienced his greatest successes in the serial publication of long novels of twenty parts that appeared independently over nineteen months, churning out weekly novels only when the finances of his own journals demanded that he do so, Wilkie Collins thrived in the weekly format. Setting out to bring the polite literary readership into the same company with the mass readership he called “the unknown public,” Collins favored sensational plots that relied on doubles, mistaken identities, and long-buried secret scandals that were both exposed and further entangled from week to week. My first chapter shows how Walter, a befuddled art teacher to daughters of the landed elite, gets entangled in a conspiracy that operates by dispersing, replacing, and falsifying the certificates guaranteeing identity and position in the world, and how then, in the second half of the novel, Walter serves as both detective and information worker, moving from installment to installment and removing each obstruction in the path of an open information system. Installment by installment, he shines the sunlight of public knowledge on the closed and intentionally deceptive control of information by aristocratic pretenders who have forged the documents allowing them to corrupt the rituals of country house society. Collins makes it possible for his readership to participate in reversing the flow of information as the novel uncovers and circulates this account of the consequences of disinformation among its readership. My second chapter shows how Trollope succeeded in opening up the world of the traditional country house by extending its membership exclusively to those that observed its protocols for speech and behavior. The network expands the preserve of taste beyond those of the hereditary elite to those who serve them professionally as well as to those who can amuse them. As hubmasters of the country house, however, representatives of the heredity elite not only consume the information emanating from the metropolis, dramatizing the readership’s vicariously information-dependent relation to the social world, the Pallisers are also there to entertain us. Trollope’s country house is the setting for a spectacle to provide polite entertainment for what has clearly become a metropolitan society. Trollope suggests, moreover, that the spectacle of what is becoming primary a cultural rather than a political component of society is nonetheless necessary to government. In this way, Trollope expanded the imagined community not just to those who could actually hope to attend Lady Glencora’s parties, but to those who could enjoy the spectacle of such a party as a form of entertainment, a fantasy of vicarious inclusion. Though distinct from either Dickens, Collins, or Trollope in how she construed the reader she hoped to reach, George Eliot was a formidable serial novelist in her own right, as my third chapter will demonstrate. Although her literary reputation does not make her the first author to come to mind when we think of Victorian serial novelists, she experimented with both the traditional three-volume novel and the monthly periodical publication that suited Trollope. By the time she set out to write Middlemarch, Eliot was committed to forging her own serial path. To succeed in the marketplace while achieving literary status, she developed a format for publishing a novel in eight half-volume parts at two-month intervals. Bringing together the discrete communities of discourse defining the country town, on the one hand, and the landed gentry, on the other, Eliot forges links between their respective discourses while allowing them to retain their distinctive modes of social interaction and political belief. Eliot takes on the task of changing the means of circulating information as well as its social character in the wake of the Second Reform Act (1867). By setting Middlemarch a generation earlier, in the years immediately leading up to the First Reform Act (1832), she transforms the intractable political conflict between town and gentry constituencies divided by cultural taste, political interest, and social practice into a negotiable merger of print culture. Eliot elaborates for us how townsfolk and landed gentry might come, however provisionally and uncomfortably, to coexist in a shared community, but the larger stakes of this model of sociality lie in the fact that it is theoretically scalable and transferrable: if shared print culture can bind rural town and country, then perhaps it can connect metropolis and countryside, or even metropole and periphery of empire. This model of a conditionally shared culture is open to a common reader who can consider it from any number of perspectives and locations. With access to a print culture that can disseminate information across divergent social communities and cultural spaces, a reader can imagine even different, distant peoples as civil interlocutors in a common knowable community. Each of the authors to whom I have devoted chapters developed quite different narrative techniques that rerouted the information exchanged within the traditional country house through the new commercial-industrial city by routes that forged links among the various segments of Victorian society. Dickens is, by contrast, an unapologetic city novelist; only his Hard Times neglects to reroute the information comprising its various storyspace through the metropolis of London into its storyworld. Rather than the odd man out among the great Victorian serial novelists, I will insist, Dickens’s novels reveal the other side of the same coin, namely, an urban world that operates as a noisy hive of disinformation, information that is concealed, misdirected, falsified, or misconstrued. My effort has been to show how three of his contemporaries, each of whom strikes us as singular if not eccentric in their exercise of the serial imagination, form an ensemble that, in concert with those perhaps less dependent or adroit in manipulating the serial format, can be held responsible for a major change in the novel during the 1860s and 1870s. This transformation generated the notion of “form” that earned them all, with the exception of George Eliot, the derisive label of baggy monsters. Together, the pioneers of the new serial form exploited the capacity of the weekly or monthly format to attract and hold the attention of a diverse readership with the oddity of divergent demographic groups and enthrall them with the architecture that enabled one sequentially to experience wildly different spaces for storing curious objects and the aberrant people who lived among them. Whether the electrifying touch of an unknown woman, an unfinished story overheard in the parlors of the elite, or the struggle it took to publish from a country house a newspaper that can circulate in the town and eventually the city, the serial form relies on “connectors,” plot devices that establish ties among social groups that lack the social and familial bonds that would otherwise make them a community. As for character, the most memorable characters of the novels that serve as my sample texts can themselves be called “connectors”: Count Fosco and Marian Halcombe face off as respectively good and bad conveyers of information in The Woman in White; Lady Glencora Palliser serves in the role of participant-observer who doubles as hostess and spectator to keep the Palliser series on track; and Will Ladislaw is fashioned as a conduit between archaic and emergent modes of producing and circulating print culture. Each novelist, I maintain, owes his or her enduring reputations in great part to developing signature iterations of the serial imagination.

This dissertation argues that the literary, intellectual, and cultural borders of Victorian Britain extended as far as Australia and New Zealand, and that the tradition of nation-based literary criticism inherited from the Victorians has blinded Victorian Studies to that possibility. Building upon the nineteenth century concept of "Greater Britain," a term invoking the expansion of the British nation through settler colonization, I demonstrate that literary forms did not simply diffuse from the core to the periphery of the empire, but instead were able to circulate within the space of Greater Britain. That process of circulation shaped Victorian literature and culture, as local colonial circumstances led writers to modify literary forms and knowledge formations; those modifications were then able to be further disseminated through the empire by way of the networks that constituted Greater Britain.

My argument focuses on the novel, because its formal allegiance to the imagined national community made it a valuable testing ground for the multi-centered nation that was being formed by settlement. I specifically locate the Victorian novel in the context of Britain's relations with the colonies of Australia and New Zealand, which were unique in that their transition from initial settlement to independent nations occurred almost entirely during the Victorian period. The chapters of Unsettled Nation focus on realism, romance and political economy's interest in settlement; the bildungsroman and theories of discipline developed in the penal colonies; the theorization of imperial spatiality in utopian and invasion fiction; and the legacy of the Waverley novel in the portrayal of colonization in temporal terms. Each chapter presents a specific example of how knowledge formations and literary forms were modified as a result of their circulation through the archipelagic nation space of Greater Britain.

Working at the intersection between Victorian Studies and Australian and New Zealand literary criticism, I seek to recover and reconsider the geographical mobility of nineteenth century Britons and their literature. Thus, more than merely trying to cast light on a dimension of imperialism largely ignored by critics of Victorian literature, I use the specific example of Australasia to make the broader claim that the very idea of Victorian Britain can and must be profitably expanded to include its settler colonies.