Pandemic Consciousness and Narrative Perspective in Sheri Holman’s The Dress Lodger

2021 ◽  
Vol 11 (2) ◽  
pp. 185-205
Author(s):  
Katarina Gephardt
Keyword(s):  
Working Class ◽  
Medical Discourse ◽  
Victorian Novel ◽  
The Novel ◽  
Narrative Strategies ◽  
Victorian Fiction ◽  
Narrative Perspective ◽  
Cholera Epidemic ◽  
Points Of View ◽  
Central Characters

Sheri Holman’s neo-Victorian novel The Dress Lodger (1999 ) depicts the beginning of the 1831 cholera epidemic in Britain. The novel skilfully manipulates the conventions of nineteenth-century realism and neo-Victorian fiction to test the limits of readerly empathy and its foundations in the conception of the liberal subject as disembodied and disinterested. Although the novel seems ‘faux-Victorian’ and apparently encourages immersion in the story and identification with the central characters, metaphorical uses of language and shifting points of view disrupt such comfortable ways of reading, challenging the readers’ tendency to derive pleasure from representations of working-class suffering. Through complex characterisation of the protagonists, the factory and sex worker Gustine and the doctor Henry Chiver, the narrative exposes the violence of representation through parallels with medical discourse. This essay argues that Holman’s experimentation with narrative strategies ultimately suggests the need for a pandemic consciousness that transcends the clashing responses to the cholera epidemic and cultivates an awareness of global interdependence. The possibility of such pandemic consciousness is conveyed through ‘the Great Narration’ by the novel’s unconventional intradiegetic narrator, the working-class Dead, whose bodies were stolen by doctors for the purposes of dissection.

Becoming Foreign in the Victorian Novel: International Migration in Little Dorrit and Villette

2020 ◽  
Author(s):  
Tamara S Wagner
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Migrant Workers ◽  
Victorian Novel ◽  
The Novel ◽  
Global Studies ◽  
Victorian Fiction ◽  
Time Migration ◽  
Globalizing World ◽  
Social Invisibility ◽  
Nineteenth Century Novels

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.

HARDY’S RUSTICS AND THE CONSTRUCTION OF CLASS

2000 ◽  
Vol 28 (2) ◽  
pp. 411-425 ◽  
Author(s):  
Rosemary Jann
Keyword(s):  
Rural Communities ◽  
Working Class ◽  
Social Mobility ◽  
Greek Tragedy ◽  
Victorian Novel ◽  
Class Identity ◽  
Local Color ◽  
Minor Characters ◽  
Central Characters

IT WAS FORMANY YEARS conventional in Hardy studies to treat his rustics — those minor working-class characters who flesh out rural communities, especially in the early novels — in terms that effectively muted their ideological significance: to consider them as literary conventions like the chorus of Greek tragedy or Shakespeare’s clowns, for instance, or at best nostalgic details of local color (for examples, see Wotton 189–91). More recently, some Marxist critics have exposed the biases of such approaches, although at times oversimplifying in other ways the ideological functions of these characters.1 My objective in this essay is to argue for what I see as the more complicated and more dialogic ways in which these minor characters function to focus issues of social mobility that are at the heart of Hardy’s fiction. I am interested in the ways rustic characters function as agents of class rivalry, but more specifically in the ways their characteristic behaviors help to define by contrast the kinds of subjectivity that justify the higher social positions of the more central characters. Hardy’s characteristic combination of this strategy with the more conventional one for advancing bourgeois values in the Victorian novel — by exposing the unworthiness of gentry and aristocrats — can be linked to his insecurities about his own class identity and the repressions involved in maintaining it. He sympathized with the resentments of the lower classes, yet was also invested in positioning them as different from those who, like himself,

scholarly journals NARRATIVE STRATEGIES IN L. ULITSKAYA ’S NOVEL THE KUKOTSKY ENIGMA

2020 ◽  
Vol 11 (3) ◽  
pp. 65-75
Author(s):  
I.S. Bukal ◽  
Keyword(s):  
Short Stories ◽  
Research Methodology ◽  
Research Result ◽  
The Novel ◽  
Narrative Strategies ◽  
Problem Statement ◽  
Narrative Strategy ◽  
The World ◽  
The Subject ◽  
Points Of View

Problem statement and goal. Lyudmila Ulitskaya is one of the most widely read contemporary Russian authors. L. Ulitskaya’s works are popular not only in Russia, but also in other countries. They arouse genuine research interest both among literary critics and linguists. Currently, there are more than two dozen dissertations, many review chapters in monographs, as well as scientific articles devoted to the analysis of such works of the author as novellas Sonechka, The Funeral Party, Women’s Lies; collections of short stories Poor Relatives, Girls, Gift not made with hands; novels Sincerely your Shurik, Medea and Her Children, Daniel Stein, Interpreter, The Big Green Tent. L. Ulitskaya’s novel The Kukotsky Enigma remains the least studied text of the author. In this article, the content of this novel is analyzed for narratology. The researcher reflects on one of the topical literary problems: the influence of narrative strategies on the reception of the author’s text. The research was based on the works by V. Tyupa, Yu. Lotman, N. Leiderman, and M. Lipovetsky. The research methodology is based on historical-cultural and structural-typological approaches. The subject of the research is the specifics of the implementation of narrative strategies in L. Ulitskaya’s novel The Kukotsky Enigma. Research result. Based on the analysis of L. Ulitskaya’s novel The Kukotsky Enigma, it is shown how the narrative strategy of the work affects its potential reception. Based on the concept by V. Tyupa, who defined the narrative strategy as a set of three equivalent bases (the narrative picture of the world, the narrative modality, and the narrative intrigue), the researcher identifies the changes that the narrative strategy undergoes in the course of the plot development, notes how these changes affect the poetics of the novel and its axiological content. Conclusion. The narrative strategy by which the narrative of the novel in question is organized can be defined as “the strategy of breaking the horizon of readers’ expectations”. Multiple changes in the narrative instance fill the work with a variety of points of view, creates a sense of ghostly, ephemeral events, and encourages the reader to independently search for the truth. The content of the novel is not directly dependent on the chronology of events. Fragments of the story are arranged inversely, segmentally, so that their juxtaposition contributes to the fullest understanding of the content. The narratives presented in the novel actualize the “ontological intrigue”, based on the representation of individual mythopoetic models and revealing the plot of comprehension of truth and purpose.

Worlds Enough

2019 ◽  
Author(s):  
Elaine Freedgood
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Literary History ◽  
World Literature ◽  
Victorian Novel ◽  
The Novel ◽  
Victorian Novels ◽  
Realist Novel ◽  
Victorian Fiction ◽  
To Come ◽  
The Aesthetic

Now praised for its realism and formal coherence, the Victorian novel was not always great, or even good, in the eyes of its critics. As this book reveals, it was only in the late 1970s that literary critics constructed a prestigious version of British realism, erasing more than a century of controversy about the value of Victorian fiction. Examining criticism of Victorian novels since the 1850s, this book demonstrates that while they were praised for their ability to bring certain social truths to fictional life, these novels were also criticized for their formal failures and compared unfavorably to their French and German counterparts. The book analyzes the characteristics of realism—denotation, omniscience, paratext, reference, and ontology—and the politics inherent in them, arguing that if critics displaced the nineteenth-century realist novel as the standard by which others are judged, literary history might be richer. It would allow peripheral literatures and the neglected wisdom of their critics to come fully into view. It concludes by questioning the aesthetic racism built into prevailing ideas about the centrality of realism in the novel, and how those ideas have affected debates about world literature. By re-examining the critical reception of the Victorian novel, the book suggests how we can rethink our practices and perceptions about books we think we know.

Persuasion: Fellow Creatures

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Pam Morris
Keyword(s):  
The Self ◽  
The Novel ◽  
Class Relations ◽  
Narrative Perspective ◽  
Class Hierarchies ◽  
A Chain ◽  
Porous Boundaries

Persuasion overtly foregrounds the self as embodied: physical accidents and sickness are recurrent. Sir Walter Eliot’s belief in the time-defying bodily grace of nobility is subject to Austen’s harshest irony. The transition from vertically ordered place to horizontal space in Persuasion is more extreme than in any other of the completed novels. Anne Elliot’s movement from social exclusiveness to socially inclusive possibility allows Austen to challenge gender and class hierarchies traditionally held to be inborn. Her writerly experimentation expands the possibilities of narrative perspective to encompass the porous boundaries of the physical, the emotional and the rational that constitute any moment of consciousness. Her focalisation techniques in the text look directly towards Woolf’s stylist innovations. A chain of references to guns and shooting gathers into the novel contentious contemporary discursive networks on class relations, notions of masculinity and the nature of creaturely life.

Mary Barton

2008 ◽  
Author(s):  
Elizabeth Gaskell
Keyword(s):  
Working Class ◽  
Elizabeth Gaskell ◽  
Class Conflict ◽  
The Novel ◽  
The Poor ◽  
Deep Sympathy ◽  
The Relationship ◽  
Class Community

‘It's the masters as has wrought this woe; it's the masters as should pay for it.’ Set in Manchester in the 1840s - a period of industrial unrest and extreme deprivation - Mary Barton depicts the effects of economic and physical hardship upon the city's working-class community. Paralleling the novel's treatment of the relationship between masters and men, the suffering of the poor, and the workmen's angry response, is the story of Mary herself: a factory-worker's daughter who attracts the attentions of the mill-owner's son, she becomes caught up in the violence of class conflict when a brutal murder forces her to confront her true feelings and allegiances. Mary Barton was praised by contemporary critics for its vivid realism, its convincing characters and its deep sympathy with the poor, and it still has the power to engage and move readers today. This edition reproduces the last edition of the novel supervised by Elizabeth Gaskell and includes her husband's two lectures on the Lancashire dialect.

Esther Waters

2012 ◽  
Author(s):  
George Moore
Keyword(s):  
Working Class ◽  
James Joyce ◽  
Religious Beliefs ◽  
Horse Racing ◽  
The Novel ◽  
Victorian Culture ◽  
Illegitimate Child ◽  
Class Woman

I daresay I shall get through my trouble somehow.’ Esther Waters is a young, working-class woman with strong religious beliefs who takes a position as a kitchen-maid at a horse-racing estate. She is seduced and abandoned, and forced to support herself and her illegitimate child in any way that she can. The novel depicts with extraordinary candour Esther's struggles against prejudice and injustice, and the growth of her character as she determines to protect her son. Her moving story is set against the backdrop of a world of horse racing, betting, and public houses, whose vivid depiction led James Joyce to call Esther Waters ‘the best novel of modern English life’. Controversial and influential on its first appearance in 1894, the book opened up a new direction for the English realist tradition. Unflinching in its depiction of the dark and sordid side of Victorian culture, it remains one of the great novels of London life and labour in the 1890s.

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