Abstract
This article analyses the representation of migrant workers in Victorian fiction. While exploring the seldom-discussed experience of such migrants, I argue that in the fiction of the time, ...migration for work outside of the empire expresses the experience of individual isolation as the result of increasing urban anonymity as well as of global exchanges. The figure of the migrant thereby literalizes modern isolation in an emergent society of strangers. In depicting migratory characters as embodiments of loneliness, while establishing it as a shared experience through parallel plots, nineteenth-century novels map out possible connections in a globalizing world. In parsing the interplay of isolation and imaginary sympathy in two texts of the 1850s, Charles Dickens’s Little Dorrit and Charlotte Brontë’s Villette, I argue that the experience of feeling foreign while working abroad enables characters to seek connections that transcend boundaries of class and national identity, even as the sympathy they imagine might be flawed, warped by projection and identification. In Little Dorrit, Cavalletto’s accident in the streets of London enacts a pivotal moment of imagined sympathy for the recently returned Arthur Clennam that ultimately helps to solve the renegotiation of home and host country in the novel, while in Villette, a female migrant articulates an increasingly widespread experience not only of modern isolation, social invisibility, and cultural disorientation, but also of the power of anonymity. A critical analysis of migratory work in Victorian fiction adds an important new dimension to nineteenth-century global studies.
The article analyses John Harwood’s The Ghost Writer (2004) as a neo-Victorian novel and places it against the backdrop of the multifarious definitions of the term. Like numerous other neo-Victorian ...novels, Harwood’s narrative revolves around the modern protagonist’s quest into the Victorian past. Gerard Freeman’s amateur research into his family history leads to the discovery of manuscripts authored by his Victorian great-grandmother. Subsequently, the ghost stories that stimulate the protagonist’s interest in an unknown part of his own ancestry are paralleled by his increasing sense of being haunted by Victorian spectres. This article argues that whereas, as a rule, in neo-Victorian fiction communication with the Victorian dead takes place either in the textual or the supernatural realm, Harwood’s novel combines the two modes, mixing the textual and the spectral. The intertextual allusions, epistolary components as well as intersections between the fictional narratives and the protagonist’s experience further obliterate the distinctions between literature and reality, between the living and the dead, between the Victorians and their twentieth-century descendants. It is argued that Harwood’s novel represents an intricate combination of several modes typically employed in neo-Victorian fiction. The essential duality of The Ghost Writer, in which nineteenth-century and contemporary plots run in parallel and occasionally intersect, is another recurrent characteristic of neo-Victorian narratives; however, compared with “romances of the archive” such as Byatt’s Possession (cf. Keen 2003), the protagonist’s repeated encounters with the material and immaterial remnants of the past, rather than liberating him, ultimately entangle him even further in the textual fabric.
Compassion as Commodity Hendrikje Kaube
Journal of world-systems research,
04/2024, Letnik:
30, Številka:
1
Journal Article
Recenzirano
Odprti dostop
While it was common for Victorian working-class women to be employed outside of the home, a paid occupation spelled the end of gentility for their bourgeois counterparts. Yet many of these ladies ...found respectable alternatives to make a living. For our research of the nineteenth century, we rely to a great extent on numbers – census data, population statistics, percentages. However, few contemporary employment records give an accurate or reliable account of the respective household constellation, particularly with regard to women. Looking at these numbers, we have to bear in mind that we are also looking at numbers accrued with certain assumptions about the role of women in society. Unlike the New Woman of the fin de siècle, who is a typist or clerk, some held positions which fell outside of the common labor categories. From Charles Dickens to Neo-Edwardian literature, these ‘odd women’ appear as caretakers, companions, and assistants performing various duties. Broadening the scope of investigation into women and work in England during the long nineteenth century beyond considerations of manual and educational employment into the realm of emotional labor, we can obtain more information on the restrictions of contemporary ideology and the power dynamics of affective care.
The article considers two main aspects of literary estrangement in neo-Victorian fiction, starting from a very brief introduction to Shklovsky’s concept in the context of English literature. The ...first part refers to the structural use of defamiliarization and foregrounding of narrative strategies innovated by John Fowles’ seminal 1969 The French Lieutenant’s Woman. Fowles ‘made strange’ the Victorian novel reinventing its form, promoting a renovation of realism and a reconsideration of the great themes of Victorian fiction through an inventive use of narrative distance and of the narratorial voice. The second part of the article focusses on the ‘restoration’ of the object mentioned by Shklovsky in considering a specific material and cultural object - the fossil- connoted by an epistemic tension which was investigated by Foucault and Mitchell. The fossil is thus analysed as a catalyst of estrangement in some neo-Victorian novels of the last fifty years, among which Fowles’ masterpiece, Graham Swift’s Ever After (1992) and Tracy Chevalier’s Remarkable Creatures (2009).
In Oliver Twist (1837), Dickens explains that Oliver’s father had been “solemnly contracted” to marry Oliver’s mother, but was already married to another woman. A “clanking bond,” this marriage ...becomes a metaphorical slavery. In reality, legal thinkers turned to slavery law to litigate England’s domestic future, drawing on cases that regulated enslaved people’s movements to support changing marriage policies for metropolitan English families. By reading Oliver Twist in relation to these legal intimacies, we can see how the Victorian family was legitimated through its encounters with the recent history of British slavery and enslaved families excluded from English family law.
Over more than fifty years of its existence, and particularly since the 1990s, the genre of Neo-Victorian fiction has gained in popularity, readership, status and prestige not only in Britain but ...worldwide. Its definition and delineation, however, have undergone certain evolution over the past three decades which, understandably, has included a number of substantial metamorphoses. Ian McGuire’s novel, The North Water (2016), is set in Victorian England and tells a story of a fraudulent whaling expedition to the Arctic Circle. Although in its portrayal of a moral conflict between good and evil, or more precisely, between fallible responsibility and ultimate selfishness, The North Water follows the Conradian tradition rather than that of a conventional mainstream Victorian narrative, this article argues that the novel in fact represents a distinct example of Neo-Victorian fiction which complies with the more recent development of this genre.
Among the most amusing vignettes in Victorian novels are German governesses created by Charlotte Yonge, Charlotte Brontë and Mary Braddon. Fräulein Ohnglaube is a votary who believes in ghosts. ...Fräulein Müller is a vixen with a secret ambition, and Fräulein Braun is a vulgarian who scoffs two breakfasts of beef and beer. All are depicted as potential threats to the values and norms of the English 'cult' of domesticity.This paper argues that these authors wished to preserve and celebrate 'pure' English domesticity . Their negative representations of German governesses reveal how thoroughly English and anti-cosmopolitan were their conceptualisations of domestic life.
Compassion as Commodity Kaube, Hendrikje
Journal of world-systems research,
04/2024, Letnik:
30, Številka:
1
Journal Article
Recenzirano
Odprti dostop
While it was common for Victorian working-class women to be employed outside of the home, a paid occupation spelled the end of gentility for their bourgeois counterparts. Yet many of these ladies ...found respectable alternatives to make a living. For our research of the nineteenth century, we rely to a great extent on numbers – census data, population statistics, percentages. However, few contemporary employment records give an accurate or reliable account of the respective household constellation, particularly with regard to women. Looking at these numbers, we have to bear in mind that we are also looking at numbers accrued with certain assumptions about the role of women in society. Unlike the New Woman of the fin de siècle, who is a typist or clerk, some held positions which fell outside of the common labor categories. From Charles Dickens to Neo-Edwardian literature, these ‘odd women’ appear as caretakers, companions, and assistants performing various duties. Broadening the scope of investigation into women and work in England during the long nineteenth century beyond considerations of manual and educational employment into the realm of emotional labor, we can obtain more information on the restrictions of contemporary ideology and the power dynamics of affective care.
Matthew Kneale’s neo-Victorian novel English Passengers (2000) is underlain by contemporary, revisionist views of Victorian ideologies. In particular, by placing its action on board a ship headed ...towards Tasmania as well as in Tasmania itself, the novel examines colonial attitudes and relations between cultures. Accordingly, it has been analysed as a novel about national identity and imperial politics (Boccardi 2009). This article takes the novel’s form as the starting point for analysis. Told in twenty voices, with events developing on two temporal planes which continually intersect and eventually converge, English Passengers foregrounds the co-existence of multiple perspectives and the simultaneity of events in its representation of the past, and by doing so it disrupts the convention of narrative. The article argues that, rather than relying on linearity and causality, Kneale’s novel constructs an image of the past as a structure with many dimensions, in which temporal change depends on a variety of overlapping, conflicting or convergent points of view and attitudes. Ultimately, the discussion attempts to demonstrate that through its structure English Passengers, without being overtly metafictional or metahistorical, addresses the problem of representing the past.
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