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Thesis (M.A.)--Lehigh University, 2009. / Adviser: Elizabeth A. Dolan.

This dissertation investigates through a close reading of four novels--The Pickwick Papers, David Copperfield, A Tale of Two Cities, and Great Expectations--the way in which masculinity and authorial subjectivity in Dickens's novels are bound to the figure of the circle, an image which functions both as a figure for an ideal narcissistic unity and as a sign of the individual's subjection to the metaphoric and metonymic movement of language within the symbolic order; what Jacques Lacan has identified as "symbolic necessity." I demonstrate this double function of the circle by showing how orality in Dickens's work belongs to a chain of images that include pretty lips, rings, necklaces, fur ringed boots, as well as the grinding wheels and gears of the legal system. As Dickens's career progresses, the novels become more and more haunted by the sense that the magic circle of personal fantasy is inhabited by the violent, whirling motion of the law and language. My argument culminates in readings of A Tale of Two Cities and Great Expectations which show how male masochism in Dickens's novels is not so much a negation of paternal power and privilege as it is a consequence of the latter's introjection within the subject as fantasy, a fantasy in which the subject is fastened, as in Pip's fever dream, to "a vast engine, clashing and whirling over a gulf."

Major scholars of the literary production of Rebecca West (1892-1983), English journalist, critic, biographer, historian, and novelist, universally cite the generic range of her writing as the primary impediment to a unified critical view of her work. For seventy-one years, from 1911 to 1982, her career as journalist, political analyst, theater critic, and literary reviewer was the stable matrix from which emerged her fiction, literary criticism, biography, and history. A growing body of scholarship is working toward the construction of a unified view of West's vast body of work, which includes eight books of fiction, twelve books of nonfiction, numerous lectures printed as monographs, perhaps one thousand newspaper articles and review-essays, and more than 10,000 letters. By far the greater portion of her work is her nonfiction prose, yet extended critiques of her nonfiction are surprisingly few. The present study considers the contexts to which West's major works of nonfiction respond, their central propositions, their formal organization, the images and metaphors that characterize her accounts of ideas incarnate in the experience of individuals, classes, and nations, the critical reception of these works at the time of their publication, and, where possible, more recent critical views. Comprehensive survey of West's nonfiction uncovers not a single unifying theme but rather a circuit of secular ideas indebted to the scientific-rational thought of Herbert Spencer, which was enormously persuasive among the educated classes of late Victorian and Edwardian England. According to Spencer, who is credited with having constructed the materialist body of thought known as Social Darwinism, the slow working of evolution finds a parallel in the evolution of social organization in human society. This broad view of the social organism, which was an article of faith with West's intellectual predecessors and mentors--her father, Charles Fairfield; her sister, Letitia Fairfield; her lover and colleague H. G. Wells--confirmed in West a hardy empiricism, a consciously scientific perspective on history, an uncompromising and lifelong feminism, and a progressive politics which inform her examination of complex social and political relationships among individuals, classes, and nations and which are everywhere evident in her literary criticism, political analysis, biography, and cultural history.

"Homely Adventures": Travel and the Gender Economy of Colonial Difference in Eighteenth-Century British Literature examines the shift from adventure tales, in which characters dress up in the signs of colonial otherness, to domestic stories, in which characters are valued for their assimilation into an idealized, bourgeois identity. In so doing, I demonstrate that England's literary imagination and national identity were increasingly built upon an economy of colonial difference. In demonstrating the relationship between domesticity and difference, I analyze canonical fiction in a colonial context and read women's travel writing in the context of abolitionist poetry, natural history, and political pamphlets. Chapter one argues that Daniel Defoe's novel, Captain Singleton, moved questions of domesticity and sexuality, usually constellated around the notion of the home, into the public realm of colonial enterprise. Singleton transports his adventures to a home in England and threatens the countryside with piratical illegitimacy. Chapter two argues that Richard Cumberland's sentimental play, The West Indian, resolved colonialism's anxieties by incorporating worry about Afro-Caribbean commerce and sexuality into its domestic plot. Reworking the trope of the passionate Creole into the manageable figure of domestic husband, the sentimental script diffuses sexual danger and endorses patriarchy. Chapter three analyzes one of the scant travelogues written by a woman in the eighteenth century. Anna Maria Falconbridge's Narrative of Two Voyages to the River Sierra Leone challenges stereotypes of women that had become fundamental to empire by opening the domestic to exploration. In examining images of disease and representations of women in colonial contexts, I demonstrate that the connections between colonialism and domesticity in women's travel writing reorganized colonial discourse written by men. Chapter four argues that Austen's Mansfield Park represents class and race-mixing as dangerous excesses that threaten the ordered English countryside. Like many contemporary texts, Austen's novel views the relationship between female sexuality and labor as a way to define cultural (and moral) difference. Fanny Price and Edmund Bertram's marriage is an endorsement of patriarchal and imperial values based upon an ideology that fears the contaminating vices of cultural others whose difference is determined by the kinds of labor women perform.

During the Romantic period, England, which then led the world in slave exports, abolished both the African slave trade and West Indian slavery, setting a trend that the Portuguese, Danish, French, Germans, and Americans would follow. Abolition, a powerful moral engine, barreled through England on the tracks of pamphlets, poetry, engravings, speeches and sermons. Abolition was clearly the moral (as well as economic and social) issue of the age. My dissertation investigates the ways in which Romantic writing emerged from and responded to the issues brought on by the slavery question. Through primary and archival research, I reconstruct not only the voices of abolition, but also of various contributing discourses such as medicine, travel, cartography, labor, and iconography. This range of sources provides the basis from which I read major Romantic poems, advancing interpretations that make clear seemingly discordant relationships, like that between Keats, slavery and voodoo; between cartography, slavery and sonnets; and between Wordsworth, slavery, and abortion. The way Romanticism is haunted by the slavery question, I argue, needs to be recovered within literary history as much as within Romantic poetry itself. My dissertation thus combines three kinds of projects: a contribution to historical reconstructions based on primary research; a contribution to knowledge of specific literary works; and a contribution to ongoing arguments about critical method.

This dissertation argues that social investigators, novelists and prose writers often demonstrate similar concerns with regard to the status of workers and deploy workers to register and mitigate anxieties about industrialism and its effects. All of these writers consider what status workers should have as an emerging class. By embodying the fears and hopes of the industrial epoch, workers both serve and threaten a national identity increasingly built around Britain's industrial prowess. In chapter one, I compare Elizabeth Gaskell's 1848 novel Mary Barton and James Kay's 1832 political pamphlet, The Moral and Physical Conditions of the Working Classes. In considering the problem of the worker, middle-class utilitarians such as Kay differ sharply from working-class sympathizers such as Gaskell. Nevertheless, each suggests that the charity of the wealthier classes should be an instrument to alleviate the worker's suffering and to improve his physical condition. Thus, both Gaskell and Kay see paternalism as the solution. In chapter two I discuss the problem the worker poses to representation, showing that he challenges the fiction of organic society by resisting definition and placement within it. Focusing on George Eliot's 1856 essay on Riehl, "A Natural History of German Life," I argue that through the construction of what she calls "incarnate history"--the living connection all social ranks have to the past--she determines the worker's status. In addition, I show how Eliot's Adam Bede enacts what she considers to be a realistic portrayal of the worker. In contrast to the idealizations figured in popular iconography, Eliot calls for a realistic depiction of the worker as he actually exists. Eliot rejects the idyllic representation of the worker often demonstrated in the paintings she criticizes, yet reproduces this idealization in her characterization of Adam Bede, assimilating the worker into a vision of progress and social organization to which he no longer poses a threat. In chapter three, I explore Charlotte Bronte's investigation of a society governed by paternalism in Shirley (1849), developing an analysis of her revelation that the plight of workers and the condition of women are inextricably bound in an oppressive social order.