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This dissertation charts a lineage of nineteenth-century British literary interventions into the arena of science and philosophy jointly known as vitalism. Intended in part as a contribution to the history of science, Passive Life reconstructs the largely forgotten genealogy of a robust tradition of Victorian-era materialist vitalism, or vital materialism: the theory that a principle of life inheres in all physical matter. I connect this scientific trend to a concurrent surge of cultural engagement with the seventeenth-century philosophy of Baruch Spinoza, whose monist doctrine received renewed attention as experimental developments in biology, physics, physiology, and epidemiology increasingly supported a vital materialist account of the nature of life. Through readings of novels by Mary Shelley, Harriet Martineau, and George Eliot, I position these three women writers as key figures in vitalism’s cultural reception. By attending to the thematic resonances between their novels and materialist vitalism’s major principles and provocations, Passive Life traces the narrative arc of Victorian vitalism, deepening and expanding extant scholarly accounts of the rich interchange among literature and science in the nineteenth century. Moving beyond reception history, however, this dissertation argues that the novels of Shelley, Martineau, and Eliot worked to construct critical interpretations of vitalist theory with a shared emphasis on passivity as a fundamental feature of life. Through innovative techniques of description and characterization, their fiction locates the passivity of life at the level of the material body, in its inherent contingency, fluidity, and impressibility. The view of embodied subjectivity that thus emerges from these novels complicates the liberal humanist model that rose to predominance in Victorian culture and privileged an active, self-determining subject. Within the counter-tradition to which Shelley, Martineau, and Eliot belonged, the idea of “passive life” occasioned pressing ethical and political quandaries involving the relationships between self and other and between subject and environment. On the one hand, treating embodied life as passive pointed speculatively toward more liberated, open-ended, and mutually sustaining forms of communal being. On the other hand, “passive life” also suggested the vulnerability and precarity of bodies helplessly exposed to their material and affective surroundings, raising important questions regarding intention, obligation, and accountability. How do we live well in a world where so many other embodied lives impress upon our own? Can pain and harm be prevented in such a world? What habits of perception and practices of sociality might be evolved and adapted to the realities of passive life? In confronting these questions, nineteenth-century British fiction provides conceptual frameworks well suited to interrogating the political and ethical implications of the twenty-first-century new materialist turn.

Cheung Fung-Ling. / Thesis (M.Phil.)--Chinese University of Hong Kong, 2003. / Includes bibliographical references (leaves 106-112). / Abstracts in English and Chinese. / Abstract --- p.i / Acknowledgements --- p.v / Chapter Chapter One --- Introduction --- p.1 / Chapter Chapter Two --- Passionate Impulses in Childhood and Adolescence --- p.26 / Chapter Chapter Three --- Moral Dilemmas in Love --- p.52 / Chapter Chapter Four --- The Ultimate Return --- p.75 / Chapter Chapter Five --- Conclusion --- p.99 / Notes --- p.104 / Bibliography --- p.106

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This dissertation asserts a strong connection between democratic culture and the novel form in the period 1832--1867. As England debated constitutional reform and the extension of the franchise, novelists Charles Dickens, Elizabeth Gaskell, and George Eliot endeavoured to define human communities on democratic terms. Drawing on work of contemporary political philosopher John Rawls to develop a methodology that considers constitutions and novelistic representations as analogous contexts for reasoning about shared political values and citizenship, this study provides readings of Bleak House, North and South, and Felix Holt that emphasize each novel's contribution to the period's ongoing deliberations about pluralism, justice, and the meaning of membership in democratic life. When read alongside Bentham's work on legislative reform, Bleak House offers a parallel model of social interaction that weighs the values of diversity of thought, security from coercion, and the nature of harmful actions. Felix Holt and North and South are novelistic contributions to defining and contesting the attributes of the new liberal citizen. Through their central characters, as well as in their respective novelistic practices, Eliot and Gaskell highlight the difficulty of uniting autonomous individuals with collective social groups, and this was as much a problem for literary practice in the period as it was for constitutional reform.

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This thesis explores the gendered symbolism of women's music lessons in English fiction, 1870-1914. I consider canonical and non-canonical fiction in the context of a wider discourse about music, gender and society. Traditionally, women's music lessons were a marker of upper- and middle-class respectability. Musical ‘accomplishment' was a means to differentiate women in the ‘marriage market', and the music lesson itself was seen to encode a dynamic of obedient submission to male authority as a ‘rehearsal' for married life. However, as the market for musical goods and services burgeoned, musical training also offered women the potential of an independent career. Close reading George Eliot's Daniel Deronda (1876) and Jessie Fothergill's The First Violin (1877), I discuss four young women who negotiate their marital and vocational choices through their interactions with powerful music teachers. Through the lens of the music lessons in Emma Marshall's Alma (1888) and Israel Zangwill's Merely Mary Ann (1893), I consider the issues of class, respectability and social emulation, paying particular attention to the relationship between aesthetic taste and moral values. I continue by considering George Du Maurier's Trilby (1894) alongside Elizabeth Godfrey's Cornish Diamonds (1895), texts in which female pupils exhibit genuine power, eventually eclipsing both their music teachers and the artist-suitors for whom they once modelled. My final chapter discusses three texts which problematize the power of women's musical performance through depicting female music pupils as ‘New Women' in conflict with the people around them: Sarah Grand's The Beth Book (1895), D. H. Lawrence's The Trespasser (1912) and Compton Mackenzie's Sinister Street (1913). I conclude by looking forward to representations of women's music lessons in the modernist period and beyond, with a reading of Katherine Mansfield's ‘The Wind Blows' (1920) as well as Rebecca West's The Fountain Overflows (1956).