Thackeray's post-1847 novels make increasing use of a complex and indecisive narrator. The clear perspectives of Thackeray's early narrators—such as the boastful Gahagan, the cynical Yellowplush, and the sentimental Fitzboodle—are superseded by the man of many parts, who is the mature narrator of the novels from Vanity Fair to Denis Duval. This many-faceted figure keeps one eye on his reader as he moves between joyous certainty and utter bewilderment regarding his own feelings and his own fiction. He is not afraid to be fickle, and appears in many guises:—as novelist and historian, visionary and disenchanted worldling, preacher and clown. The secondary fictional world is determined by the narrator's continued changes of stance, not only towards the characters, but also towards the reader, who, too, must play many parts. In its focus upon Thackeray's secondary fictional world, this study sees Thackeray as one of a line of novelists from Cervantes and Sterne to Joyce and Nabokov. These "novelists in motley" present their fiction as an elaborate game drawing the reader into the dual process of involvement in the main story, or primary fictional world, and detachment from it. In the secondary fictional world, both narrator and reader see the primary illusion as an illusion, yet they feel also its instinctive truth, its power to quicken their responses, and its value as a mode of self-discovery. Thus, while Thackeray's primary fictional world frequently suggests the neatness of conventional patterns found in heroic myth., moral fable, or the contemporary melodrama and fashionable novels, the secondary fictional world undermines these forms, even while they are being used as probes of the narrator's consciousness. These established literary conventions are the means through which the indefinite self attempts definition. In Thackeray's secondary fictional world, the reader is made to see himself playing such parts as those of hero, villain, and lover, but he is also made to understand that his whole self consists of an infinite number of potential parts, none of which defines him exclusively. Thackeray's own vacillation and waywardness becomes increasingly obtrusive in his mature work until, in Philip and Lovel the Widower, the plot and setting are dwarfed by the vastness of the narrator, whose monologues, in a bewildering variety of tone, style, and viewpoint, dominate the novels. The sharp satire and detached social observation of Yellowplush and Titmarsh give way to the ironies of a later narrator, who is painfully involved with his creations. Thackeray's typical novels thus purposely present no conclusive form, but, rather, a medley of loose ends and unresolved conflicts, Unlike the central intelligence of the traditional novel, the Thackerayan narrator never finally sheds his illusions, never comes to see the truth about himself, and never reaches a climactic moment of ultimate vision; yet neither does he become victim of the illusion that man can live without illusions. He presents his reader not with a progression of events leading to self-discovery, but with a revelation of the forms through which the changing self becomes manifest. / Arts, Faculty of / English, Department of / Graduate

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William Makepeace Thackeray's irony is largely responsible far the ambiguity which roused strongly conflicting opinions about his female characters. Critics have argued about why he wrote so ambiguously, but most likely he was expressing his artistic vision that life is full of incongruities and ironies. A study of specific examples of irony in the portrayal of "good" and "bad" women in his major novels clarifies how he uses it to make his characters life-like. It also illuminates the moral viewpoint and the structure of Thackeray's masterpiece, Vanity Fair.Irony in the characterization of Becky and Amelia in Vanity Fair is rich and complex. Following Thackeray's earlier disposition toward parody, he made both women serve as ironic satires on the stock heroines of popular novels in the early 1800's. Besides parody, there is a great deal of simple verbal irony, which is usually comic, and also much dramatic and situational irony, which is often more serious in tone. The verbal irony is usually at the expense of Becky and Amelia, whereas the other types use the women at the expense of society. Even more frequent are complex combinations of verbal, dramatic, and situational techniques, double meanings, afterthoughts, shifts of the ironist/victim functions, and romantic irony, in which the author seems capriciously to build and destroy his readers' illusions, as well as his own in his role of narrative persona. Both women are used as agents of Thackeray's irony at the expense of the readers, but in different ways. In her parodic function and in Thackeray's shifts of tonein describing her, Amelia is used directly to upset readers' expectations and complacency about their values. Although Becky also serves that function, she is more often used indirectly, as a clever ironist at the expense of the other characters in the book. But these characters, of course, represent an important proportion of the readers.In the novels following Vanity Fair, Thackeray gradually reduces both the quantity and the variety of all ironic techniques in characterizing women. In general he uses a little less irony to characterize "good" women than to characterize "bad." However, as the irony decreases that ratio narrows, and the differentiation between "goodness" and "badness" also narrows. At last, in The Newcomes, Rosey and Ethel, who begin as "good" and "bad," actually switch roles: Rosey deteriorates into "bad" and Ethel grows into "good." Parodic and comic irony are reduced; in Pendennis, Blanche and Laura are occasionally comic, but none of the later major women are. Dramatic and circumstantial techniques used seriously to expose social evil and human weakness are also reduced, but to a lesser degree, so that they seem to become relatively more prominent. Early in the sequence of novels, almost all verbal and romantic forms of irony are eliminated in which Thackeray is the direct ironist. He continues the dramatic method of using fate or circumstance as agents at the expense of the characters and the characters as agents at the expense of themselves or other characters. Only in characterizing Ethel during her "marriage market" years does Thackeray resume the techniques of verbal irony and of author as direct ironist.The increase of direct and verbal irony to make Ethel "bad" indicates that Thackeray uses such direct techniques to characterize bad qualities, as opposed to"bad" people. This fact supports those critics who interpret neither Becky not Amelia favorably. Despite the novel's contrastive structure described by Tillotson it is not necessary to view them as diametrically opposed. Becky's wickedness does not command Thackeray's secret admiration, and the sentimental effusions over Amelia are not serious; in different ways both have bad qualities, ironically revealing the shortcomings of Victorian values.

This study is primarily concerned with the formulation of Thackeray's theory of the novel through a thorough investigation of his various reviews and critiques of Victorian fiction which appeared in periodicals and by a careful examination of his letters, By evaluating the numerous comments on particular works of fiction and on the art of "novel-spinning" in general which came from Thackeray's pen, this study investigates the various Thackerayan ideas as to how novels should be written with regard to the function of the novel, the formulation of plot and character, realism and morality, the presentation of description, and the style in which novels were to be written. This investigation concludes that Thackeray's theory of the novel was that novels were to be written in a simple, straightforward style and were to present "living" characters who performed realistic, believable actions within tightly unified, logical plots in such a manner as to provide entertainment and to reaffirm the Victorian moral code.

This dissertation makes two arguments: First, it elaborates a depressive genealogy of the Victorian novel that asserts a category of realism rooted in affect rather than period or place. Second, it argues for a critical strategy called "depressive reading" that has unique purchase on this literary history. Drawing on Melanie Klein's "depressive position," the project asserts an alternative to novel theories that are rooted in sympathy and desire. By being attentive to mood and critical disposition, depressive reading homes in on the barely-contained negativities of realism. Through readings of novels by William Makepeace Thackeray, Anthony Trollope, Thomas Hardy, and Charlotte Brontë, it explores feelings of ambivalence, soreness, and dislike as aesthetic responses and interpretations, as well as prompts to varieties of non-instrumentalist ethics. In the final chapter, the psychological and literary strategy of play emerges as a creative and scholarly possibility.

[Typescript] Includes bibliography.

This dissertation considers the role of affective management in realist aesthetics and British imperial culture. Drawing on formalist analyses of English novels, nineteenth-century theories of emotion, and postcolonial accounts that identify the colonizer’s affective desensitization as the ground from which ongoing violence can be perpetrated, this study explores how domestic English novels developed new techniques for deflating the heightened feelings surrounding empire and distant intimacy. Through satires of sensibility, the replacement of epistolary style with impersonal omniscience, and newly dispassionate presentations of villains and protagonists alike, realist novelists explored affective restraint as at once a generic characteristic and an increasingly central element of British imperial and racial identities. This dissertation therefore argues, through readings of works by Jane Austen, William Makepeace Thackeray, George Eliot, and Joseph Conrad, for the deep influence of imperial culture on the realist novel’s distinguishing formal features. At the same time, it prompts critics to revisit longstanding accounts of the relationship between the novel and sympathy. Since the Victorian era, critics have readily understood the realist novel as concerned with the expansion of readers’ sympathies: this study reframes this important account by examining how the insistence on sympathy in novels often rerouted more turbulent reactions to empire’s dislocations—such as longing, desire for vengeance, and guilt—into cooler, more tractable feelings.

This thesis investigates the way that moral and aesthetic concerns about the relationship between fiction and reality are manifested in the work of particular novelists writing at different periods in the nineteenth century, Chapter One examines an early-century subgenre of the novel that features deluded female readers who fail to differentiate between fantasy and reality, and who consequently attempt to live their lives according to foolish precepts learned from novels. The second chapter deals with the realist aesthetic of W. M. Thackeray; focusing on the techniques by which his fiction marks its own relationship both to less realistic fiction and to reality itself. The final chapter discusses Oscar Wilde's critical stance that art is meaningful and intellectually satisfying, while reality and realism are aesthetically worthless: it then goes on the explore how these ideas play out in his novel, The Picture of Dorian Gray. / iv, 120 leaves ; 28 cm.