The ludic drive and the Victorian novel
Abstract
This dissertation (re-)defines the life of the individual as a tension resulting from the interaction of three forces, by adding to Freud's life and death drive a third drive, which it terms the ludic drive. Whereas the life drive is responsible for procreation, and therefore for the propagation of the species, and the death drive draws the individual toward quiescent matter, the ludic drive is instrumental in the individual self-fashioning. The overtly playful Victorian age and the Victorian novel reflect the ludic drive in its two manifestations, the individual force (the individual's intuitive thoughts) and the social force (the individual's mimetic behavior) of the drive. To capture the two aspects of the ludic drive, its individual and social force, and their (im)balance, in different hypostases, this project examines what the author considers to be the most playful novels of the time: Charlotte Brontë's Villette (1853), William Makepeace Thackeray's Vanity Fair (1848), George Eliot's Daniel Deronda (1876), and Oscar Wilde's Picture of Dorian Gray (1890). The first three chapters focus on the role of the ludic drive in the fashioning of three female characters. The last two chapters direct attention to the ludic fashioning of two male characters, a successful and unsuccessful, rather macabre, fin de siècle fashioning, respectively.
Degree
Ph.D.
Advisors
Allen, Purdue University.
Subject Area
Literature|British and Irish literature
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