Funeral ritual was a form of cultural performance that Victorian society modified both to reflect and to reinforce the ideological assumptions upon which nineteenth-century industrialism and commercialism were based. As a socially significant act, the funeral afforded participants a symbolic resolution to the contradictions inherent in industrial culture. In the Victorian funeral material goods ironically signified spiritual values. Charles Dickens presided over a similar evolution in fiction. His revival of the serial format and the innovative marketing of his work displaced more traditional notions of artistic creation by placing 'art' clearly in the 'marketplace' of ideas Despite their reliance on commercialism, both the funeral and the novel effaced their participation in the material exchanges of Victorian culture. Each form evoked a sense of the spiritual to counter the materialism of commodification--the funeral claimed an inherently religious nature that celebrated transcendence over material concerns, while the novel claimed an essentially aesthetic role as art, the deliberate celebration of the imaginative. This prevailing tension between the material impulse of commercialism and the spiritual desire for transcendence over the vicissitudes of industrialization and commercialization defines Victorian culture. In the juncture of the funeral represented in the novel, moreover, the contradictions that each form symbolically resolves tend to stand out in relief This study focuses primarily on represented funerals in three of Charles Dickens's novels--The Old Curiosity Shop, Martin Chuzzlewit, and David Copperfield--funeral scenes that have been read generally as either satirical pictures painted by a social reformer or as reflections of a romantic preoccupation with death. Both of these views tend, however, to oversimplify the role Dickens's fictional funerals play as sites at which cultural values are negotiated. Those ideological concerns reflect not just society's changing values and assumptions about wealth, class, and social mobility but Dickens's own concerns and anxieties for both himself as an artist and for the serial novel as a form of art. In each of these novels Dickens replicates the same spiritual/material tension he calls into question in the funeral scenes and reveals the extent of his own investment in the ideological forms of his culture / acase@tulane.edu
| Identifer | oai:union.ndltd.org:TULANE/oai:http://digitallibrary.tulane.edu/:tulane_26931 |
| Date | January 1992 |
| Contributors | Bell, John David (Author), Carlisle, Janice (Thesis advisor) |
| Publisher | Tulane University |
| Source Sets | Tulane University |
| Language | English |
| Detected Language | English |
| Rights | Access requires a license to the Dissertations and Theses (ProQuest) database., Copyright is in accordance with U.S. Copyright law |
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