JASPER PACKLEMERTON, VICTORIAN FREAK

2006 ◽  
Vol 34 (1) ◽  
pp. 209-232
Author(s):  
Kelly Hager
Keyword(s):  
Victorian Novel ◽  
The Body ◽  
The Self ◽  
The Novel ◽  
Our Mutual Friend ◽  
High Degree ◽  
Mutual Friend

ONE OF THEOED'S DEFINITIONSof the word “freak” is that of a freak of nature, “a monstrosity, an abnormally developed individual of any species; a living curiosity exhibited in a show.” The freak of nature I wish to focus on in this essay is marriage, and specifically, marriage as it is “exhibited” in Dickens's novelThe Old Curiosity Shop(1840–41). To refer to marriage in a Victorian novel as a freak of nature is perhaps surprising. To refer to the sacred institution as freakish in a Dickens novel may seem to border on heresy. After all, Dickens is the self-appointed novelist of hearth and home, the creator of conservative domestic plots that celebrate marriage as the institution that establishes closure for the novel and for the society it represents. Despite this apparent conservatism and despite our vague sense that most marriages in Dickens are as happy as David and Agnes's, Esther and Allen Woodcourt's, Biddy and Joe's, it is in fact the case that in all his novels, fromThe Pickwick PaperstoOur Mutual Friend, Dickens is fascinated–in a multiplicity of ways both large and small, in a manner that is alternately comic, tragic, melodramatic, ironic–with marriage's discontents. In fact, the disintegration of the institution is one of the things that Dickens makes fictions from, giving the failure of marriage a surprisingly high degree of visibility and presenting the breaking of the matrimonial bond with remarkable clarity and persistence. Dickens novels are full of wives who leave their husbands (Edith Dombey, Lady Dedlock, Louisa Gradgrind), breach of promise suits (inPickwickandOur Mutual Friendmost famously) and characters who try to find legal ways of escaping their marriages (Stephen Blackpool, Betsey Trotwood,Nickleby's Madame Mantalini). This essay, then, is an analysis of how Dickens undermines the institution early in his career, and of how the comic and grotesque display of the body, the sprawling, teeming physical surfaces ofThe Old Curiosity Shop, both conceal and reveal a story of marital skepticism.

"A Dismal Swamp": Darwin, Design, and Evolution in Our Mutual Friend

1994 ◽  
Vol 49 (1) ◽  
pp. 50-74 ◽  
Author(s):  
Howard W. Fulweiler
Keyword(s):  
The Novel ◽  
Human Beings ◽  
Origin Of Species ◽  
Victorian Fiction ◽  
Dismal Swamp ◽  
Human World ◽  
Laissez Faire ◽  
Our Mutual Friend ◽  
The Relationship ◽  
Mutual Friend

Our Mutual Friend, published just six years after Darwin's The Origin of Species, is structured on a Darwinian pattern. As its title hints, the novel is an account of the mutual-though hidden-relations of its characters, a fictional world of individuals seeking their own advantage, a "dismal swamp" of "crawling, creeping, fluttering, and buzzing creatures." The relationship between the two works is quite direct in light of the large number of reviews on science, evolution, and The Origin from 1859 through the early 1860s in Dicken's magazine, All the Year Round. Given the laissez-faire origin of the Origin, Dicken's use of it in a book directed against laissez-faire economics is ironic. Important Darwinian themes in the novel are predation, mutual relationships, chance, and, especially, inheritance, a central issue in both Victorian fiction and in The Origin of Species. The novel asks whether predatory self-seeking or generosity should be the desired inheritance for human beings. The victory of generosity is symbolized by a dying child's "willing" his inheritance of a toy Noah's Ark, "all the Creation," to another child. Our Mutual Friend is saturated with the motifs of Darwinian biology, therefore, to display their inadequacy. Although Dickens made use of the explanatory powers of natural selection and remained sympathetic to science, the novel transcends and opposes its Darwinian structure in order to project a teleological and designed evolution in the human world toward a moral community of responsible men and women.

scholarly journals Formasi Diskursus dan Subjektivitas dalam Novel The Water Knife Karya Paolo Bacigalupi : Kajian Arkeo-Genealogi Foucault

ATAVISME ◽  
2017 ◽  
Vol 20 (2) ◽  
pp. 138-154
Author(s):  
Budi Tri Santosa
Keyword(s):  
The Body ◽  
The Self ◽  
The Novel ◽  
Care Of The Self ◽  
Strategy Formation ◽  
Discursive Formation ◽  
Dominant Discourse ◽  
Intensive Control

This research is conducted to elaborate discursive formations, formation and surveillance of discursive subject, and the subject’s struggle towards the discourse in Paolo Bacigalupi’s The Water Knife. Data that is successfully collected are analyzed using Foucault’s archeo-genealogy method in two steps: archeology reading and genealogy reading. The result shows that there four formations forming a discourse, namely object, enunciative, conceptual, and strategy formation. Then, there are also four mechanisms of discursive formation, which are centering individual from society, training of control the activity of the body, testing individual’s body in the certain degree, and creating subject as body-machine of discourse. The mechanism of surveillance is done through three ways, they are hierarchial control, norm forming, and examination as intensive control. The effect of the dominant discourse is the rebellion against the discourse. There are two rebellion ways in the novel, namely parrhesia as the discourse discontinuity and the care of the self as means against the discourse.

Written on the Body: Ekphrasis, Perception and Deception in Heliodorus' Aethiopica

Ramus ◽  
2002 ◽  
Vol 31 (1-2) ◽  
pp. 111-125 ◽  
Author(s):  
Tim Whitmarsh
Keyword(s):  
Solid Material ◽  
The Body ◽  
The Self ◽  
Skin Colour ◽  
The Novel ◽  
White Space ◽  
Physical Form ◽  
The Moment

Novels have so much solid and monolithic bulk when they sit in a hand or on a shelf; inside, the pages are forests of symbols, as though even in books of such magnitude the sentences needed compression to fit on to pages. How different to poetic volumes, beguilingly slender, their pages brilliant with blank, white space, across which the spindly words stretch like gossamer. In terms of content, however, novels are rarely as monolithic as their physical form suggests. From earliest times since, the genre has dealt, centrally, with themes of metamorphosis, transubstantiation, the fundamentally permeable nature of the self. The solid material aspect of the novel often masks a central preoccupation with the fluidity of identity.In the compass of this article, I want to explore the central role accorded by Heliodorus, arguably the greatest of ancient novelists, to questions of perceptual deception, to seeing and seeming; and in particular, I want to explore the role of artworks within Heliodorus' narrative economy. The narrative turns, as is well known, on the amazing paradox of an Ethiopian girl born white. Charicleia's skin colour is a visual trap, an illusion. Given that her freakish pigmentation is the result of her mother's glancing at an art-work at the moment of conception, Charicleia can almost be said to be a walking ekphrasis, an embodiment of the illusory traps of the unreal.

JANE EYRE'S PURSE: WOMEN'S QUEER ECONOMIC DESIRE IN THE VICTORIAN NOVEL

2016 ◽  
Vol 44 (4) ◽  
pp. 741-759
Author(s):  
Meg Dobbins
Keyword(s):  
Political Economy ◽  
Subject Matter ◽  
Victorian Novel ◽  
Economic Thought ◽  
The Self ◽  
The Novel ◽  
The Core ◽  
Self Interest ◽  
The Subject ◽  
Political Economic

“Young ladies don't understandpolitical economy, you know,” asserts the casually misogynistic uncle of Dorothea Brooke in George Eliot'sMiddlemarch(1871) (17; bk. 1, ch 1). Although Eliot's heroine resents both her uncle's remark and “that never-explained science which was thrust as an extinguisher over all her lights,” her attempt to teach herself political economy in the novel only seems to confirm her uncle's assessment (18; bk. 1, ch. 1): Dorothea gathers a “little heap of books on political economy” and sets forth to learn “the best way of spending money so as not to injure one's neighbors, or – what comes to the same thing – so as to do them the most good” (805; bk. 5, ch. 48). Naively likening “spending money so as not to injure one's neighbors” to “do[ing] them the most good,” Dorothea fails to grasp the self-interest at the core of nineteenth-century political economic thought and so misunderstands the subject matter before her: “Unhappily her mind slipped off [the book] for a whole hour; and at the end she found herself reading sentences twice over with an intense consciousness of many things, but not of any one thing contained in the text. This was hopeless” (805; bk. 5, ch. 48).

Reading the Body in Dickens’s Bleak House and Our Mutual Friend

2019 ◽  
Vol 27 ◽  
pp. 275-292
Author(s):  
Zeynep Harputlu Shah
Keyword(s):  
The Body ◽  
Literary Responses ◽  
Infant Deaths ◽  
Bleak House ◽  
The Dead ◽  
Our Mutual Friend ◽  
Physical Degradation ◽  
Mutual Friend ◽  
The Grotesque ◽  
Grotesque Body

This article examines the ways in which the Victorian body and identity were being transformed in the mid-nineteenth century and identifies three distinctive ways the biological and normative boundaries of the body were violated as represented in Dickens’s fiction: the grotesque body, the vulnerable body and the dead body. In this sense, Dickens’s Bleak House (1851-53) and Our Mutual Friend (1864-65) present creative and challenging literary responses to the Victorian body abjected through deprivation, physical vulnerability and death. In the novels, the grotesque body challenges the abject via a tragicomic and hybrid representation of the body and of character. Regarding the vulnerable body, the study elaborates on a body “out-of-control”, threatening the boundaries between the object and the subject, inside and outside, by holding a liminal state through ill-health, excessive labour, starvation and physical degradation. Finally, it is argued that there was an intimate and abject relationship between the living and the dead bodies in the capital, beside prevalent infant deaths, high mortality rates, diseased bodies and overflowing graveyards in the city.

DICKENS'S “JEWISH QUESTION”: PARIAH CAPITALISM AND THE WAY OUT

2010 ◽  
Vol 39 (1) ◽  
pp. 27-45 ◽  
Author(s):  
Deborah Epstein Nord
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Jewish Question ◽  
Late Nineteenth Century ◽  
The Novel ◽  
Jewish Family ◽  
Late Nineteenth ◽  
Amy Levy ◽  
Our Mutual Friend ◽  
Great Writer ◽  
Mutual Friend

The story – we might almost saylegend – of how Dickens came to make the character of Riah inOur Mutual Frienda benign figure and a deliberate revision of Fagin, underworld denizen ofOliver Twist, is well known. In 1860, an Anglo-Jewish couple, J. P. and Eliza Davis, bought Charles Dickens's London home, Tavistock House. Dickens remarked to his personal secretary, William Wills, that he could not recall any “money-making dealings . . . that have been so satisfactory, considerate, and trusting” (Johnson 487). This expression of relief and slight surprise that the sale of his property to a Jewish family was without complication followed on Dickens's suspicion, crudely expressed earlier in the negotiations, that the “Jew Money-Lender” (as he referred to J. P. Davis) would not come through on the deal (Stone 243). But, though the Davises proved surprisingly cooperative in this phase of the transaction as far as Dickens was concerned, Mrs. Davis did ultimately have a complaint to register with the great writer and delivered it politely in a letter three years later. It was not about the house or the terms of purchase but rather about the character of Fagin, created by Dickens in 1837, some twenty-six years earlier. English Jews, she told him, had taken offense at this portrayal of one of their people and believed Dickens had done them a “great wrong” by offering the greedy, thieving, child-corrupting, sausage-eating criminal as representative of their “scattered nation” (Lane 98). Still, she added, while the author lived he might conceivably “justify himself or atone” for this deed. Apparently contrite and unaware of feeling any of the prejudices his portrait of the London fence might convey, Dickens declared in a letter back to Mrs. Davis that he had only “friendly feelings” for the Jews. His contrition did not end there. For the novel he was then beginning to write, Dickens would create a beneficent Jewish character, Riah, friend to the river dredger's daughter, Lizzie Hexam, and her misshapen companion, the dolls’ dressmaker, Jenny Wren. As the late-nineteenth century Anglo-Jewish poet and novelist Amy Levy put it, Dickens “trie[d] to compensate for his having affixed the label ‘Jew’ to one of his bad fairies by creating the good fairy Riah” (Levy 176).

scholarly journals Who’s That in Charge? It’s Jenny Wren, “The Person of the House”

2009 ◽  
Vol 29 (3) ◽  
Author(s):  
Sara D. Schotland
Keyword(s):  
Victorian Novel ◽  
Victorian Fiction ◽  
Successful Adaptation ◽  
Disabled Women ◽  
The Disabled ◽  
Our Mutual Friend ◽  
Interdependent Relationships ◽  
Mutual Friend

While several Dickens characters fit binary stereotypes of the disabled (pitiful/helpless; monstrous/villainous), Jenny Wren, the dolls’ dressmaker in Our Mutual Friend,(1864-5),creates a unique and constructive life overcoming her infirmities. This essay considers her successful adaptation and argues that in several respects she reverses and challenges the limits ordinarily imposed on disabled women in Victorian fiction. Jenny Wren anticipates today’s view that the disabled and the able-bodied can work together in interdependent relationships, subverting the expectation that the disabled are inevitably dependent. While typically the disabled woman in the Victorian novel is denied a reproductive future, Jenny is an exception. Dickens was ahead of his time in providing a suitor for Jenny, and envisioning that a disabled woman can be beautiful.

Our Mutual Friend

2008 ◽  
Author(s):  
Charles Dickens
Keyword(s):  
Individual Identity ◽  
The Novel ◽  
Financial Speculation ◽  
Our Mutual Friend ◽  
The City ◽  
Mutual Friend

Following his father's death John Harmon returns to London to claim his inheritance, but he finds he is eligible only if he marries Bella Wilfur. To observe her character he assumes another identity and secures work with his father's foreman, Mr Boffin, who is also Bella's guardian. Disguise and concealment play an important role in the novel and individual identity is examined within the wider setting of London life: in the 1860s the city was aflame with spiralling financial speculation while thousands of homeless scratched a living from the detritus of the more fortunate-indeed John Harmon's father has amassed his wealth by recycling waste. This edition includes extensive explanatory notes and significant manuscript variants.

Sensing Bodies: Negotiating the Body and Identity in Mary Elizabeth Braddon’s Aurora Floyd and Wilkie Collins’s The Moonstone

2019 ◽  
pp. 77-108
Author(s):  
Kylee-Anne Hingston
Keyword(s):  
Case Studies ◽  
Narrative Structure ◽  
The Body ◽  
The Self ◽  
First Person ◽  
The Novel ◽  
Sensation Fiction ◽  
The Moonstone ◽  
Corporeal Body ◽  
Physical Instability

This chapter illustrates how mid-Victorian sensation fiction responds to anxieties exacerbated by nascent Victorian psychology’s attempt to map the self on the corporeal body. Examining the form and focalization of Mary Elizabeth Braddon’s Aurora Floyd (1862–63) and Wilkie Collins’s The Moonstone (1868), this chapter argues that bodies in sensation fiction function both as spectacle, exhibitions of physical instability, and as specimens, case studies on the source of identity. In Aurora Floyd, focalization through an authoritative external perspective provides ‘correct’ interpretations of bodies which have previously been misinterpreted by physiognomy, phrenology, and lineage. In particular, the narrator uses external focalization on disabled villains to manifest how identity appears in bodies and to place eugenic value on those with healthy bodies. By contrast, The Moonstone, lacking authoritative external focalization due to its multiple first-person narrators, uses plot to reveal misinterpretations of disabled bodies, in particular that of Rosanna Spearman. In addition, internally focalized interactions between normate narrators and disabled characters in the novel often cause the narrators to recognize the instability of their own identities and bodies, and thus of normalcy. However, the novel’s overall narrative structure works to control deviance through linearity, which imposes normalcy as a stable, final result.

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