'Shades of the prison-house': the disciplining of the Victorian literary orphan

Abstract

The Victorian fictive orphan as an aesthetic trope hypostatises a cultural moment in which the bourgeois ideology of the family attains a socio-political universal status. The thesis considers how the mode of narrating (what I will call the penal narrative) the oprhan in mid-Victorian literature reflects the ideology of the age: this penal narrative is a product of the Grand Narrative of the family which surveys and attempts to neutralise the orphan. This neutralisation manifests itself in the production of orphan fictional autobiographies which are increasingly confessional in nature. The 'Introduction' undertakes to contextualise the fictive orphan in three ways: cultural-historically through a consideration of the rise of the bourgeois ideology of the family; aesthetically through a consideration of Worsworthian Romanticism which fetishised the child; and theoretically through a consideration of Girard's notion of the scapegoat, Althusser's concept of ideology and Foucault's documentation of disciplinary techniques. The first chapter on Victorian Orphan Popular Literature deals with the production of the orphan as trope; establishing the orphan as representative of both a textual attitude and of the discursive regime of the period which articulates this new structure of feeling. This chapter considers how the discourse of orphanhood, in intersecting with other Victorian cultural discourses (especially high culture, religion and popular literature) forms a literary subgenre. The second chapter will analyse Dickens's Oliver Twist and The Old Curiosity Shop in which the orphans function primarily as redemptive child-orphans who do not grow. The third chapter deals with the novels Jane Eyre, Vanity Fair and David Copperfield. This chapter reads these narratives as penal narratives - functioning to neutralise and assimilate the orphan. The resistance offered by the orphan figures arises from their spiritual power inherited from their Romantic aesthetic genealogy. Chapter Four, in considering Villette and Little Dorrit, identifies a shift in the function of fictional autobiographical narrative from the creation to confession. In these narratives the notion of orphanhood is also extended to a socio-political status as Lucy Snowe and Arthur Clenman are orphan outcasts bereft of the family of the nation-state. This chapter also explore to what extent these narratives interpellate the reader into an agent for bourgeois ideology. Chapter Five reads George Eliot's Silas Marner as a hybrid between high art and fairy tale which endeavours to mythologise the notion of family (inh a Barthesian notion of myth). This chapter will form the conclusion of the thesis in its attempt to extend the notion of orphan as a cultural trope and ultimately an imperial trope.