Nineteenth-century discourses of play and the British Victorian novel
Abstract (summary)
This dissertation investigates figurations of play as represented in three Victorian discourses: gambling, theatricality, and aesthetic theory. While the focus is on the mid-Victorian novel, the approach is to analyze each discourse across a range of texts, situating the novels historically. The most general argument is that the three discourses participated in an overarching discourse for which play was the master trope. Thus, through readings of Eliot's Middlemarch and Trollope's The Duke's Children, gambling is analyzed as the play between chance and necessity that mediated between "good" and "bad" forms of value. Theatricality is analyzed in Bronte's Shirley and Villette and Eliot's Felix Holt and Daniel Deronda as the play along the boundary between authenticity and artificiality that defined the gendered bourgeois subject. Aesthetics, which theorizes the epistemological gap between subject and object in terms of play, itself defined the play of the cultural imagination by which Victorian society encoded its most disturbing issues. Aesthetic play is analyzed from its modern origin in Kant's Critique of Judqment into Ruskin's Stones of Venice and Modern Painters and Arnold's Culture and Anarchy and then in Thackeray's Pendennis and Kingsley's Alton Locke.
The findings are diverse and extensive. A few examples must suffice. In The Duke's Children, gambling functions as the necessarily evil Other to "good" sources of money such as marriage and charity. Yet charity proves to be a domesticated form of "fortune," and marriage oscillates between the gamble of romance and the romance of gambling. In Shirley, contradictions between class codes and prescribed gender roles produce conflicted subject positions for characters, revealing the performativeness of gender identity. Multiple levels of female masquerade with varying degrees of subversiveness are identified. In Pendennis, art-as-play--linked to Romantic poetics and to political activism--is translated into art-as-work, which reflects on the professionalization of the artist, especially and self-consciously the novelist. Aesthetic play is corrected by another permutation of play, "fair play," which lends itself to the interests of British colonialism. One general argument is that play is a site within nineteenth-century novelistic Realism where it confronts its own formal claims and ideological work. Play is the figure of the novel's Other.
Indexing (details)
European history;
Theater;
British & Irish literature
0335: European history
0465: Theater