This dissertation explores the role of the paid female companion in the Victorian novel. As the paid friends of other women, companions were hired to enact the private virtues supposed to be organic to relationships between women; in particular, they were expected to serve as a receptacle for their mistresses most intimate confidences, to provide company and sympathy. However, as a number of Victorian writers show, this purchased sympathy-on-demand could be distorted and corrupted. I argue that authors such as William Makepeace Thackeray, Charles Dickens, Mary Elizabeth Braddon, Ellen Wood, Wilkie Collins, and Thomas Hardy used their companion characters to interrogate and deconstruct sympathy. The novels I discuss experiment with portrayals of sympathy not as a selfless, empathetic understanding of others suffering but as a manipulative mode of relating. In these texts, sympathy is represented as a self-centered strategy for gaining transgressive power, social mobility, romantic attachments, and narrative centrality.
<p> The ambiguity in the mistress-companion relationship enabled Victorian writers to experiment with the diverse narrative versatility of the companion character as well. The companion figure has a special relationship to narrativity because she provides an unstable, mobile locus authors could use to perform ancillary narrative functions. As such, this dissertation also examines the ways companion characters reveal and promulgate supplementary knowledge to other characters and to the reader and address the relationship among author, text, and reader. The companions status as an intersection of class, economic, and affective investments troubles the very meaning of womens work and womens relationships in the Victorian period; however, the companion is lost to historical and literary studies, hidden in the crux of scholarship on the governess and domestic servantlingering only in the Victorian novels we read today. This project introduces the figure into the critical dialogue on nineteenth-century womens work and relationships, highlighting both the pervasiveness of the figure in Victorian literature as well as illuminating the ways in which authors used the companion to address troubled contemporary issues as diverse as gender roles, employment dynamics, power, eroticism, sympathy, and narrative structure in their work.
| Identifer | oai:union.ndltd.org:VANDERBILT/oai:VANDERBILTETD:etd-06272009-093656 |
| Date | 07 July 2009 |
| Creators | Hoffer, Lauren Nicole |
| Contributors | James Epstein, Mark Schoenfield, Carolyn Dever, Jay Clayton |
| Publisher | VANDERBILT |
| Source Sets | Vanderbilt University Theses |
| Language | English |
| Detected Language | English |
| Type | text |
| Format | application/pdf |
| Source | http://etd.library.vanderbilt.edu/available/etd-06272009-093656/ |
| Rights | unrestricted, I hereby certify that, if appropriate, I have obtained and attached hereto a written permission statement from the owner(s) of each third party copyrighted matter to be included in my thesis, dissertation, or project report, allowing distribution as specified below. I certify that the version I submitted is the same as that approved by my advisory committee. I hereby grant to Vanderbilt University or its agents the non-exclusive license to archive and make accessible, under the conditions specified below, my thesis, dissertation, or project report in whole or in part in all forms of media, now or hereafter known. I retain all other ownership rights to the copyright of the thesis, dissertation or project report. I also retain the right to use in future works (such as articles or books) all or part of this thesis, dissertation, or project report. |
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