Browsing by Subject "Victorian literature"

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.

“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.

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.