Lost and Found: Mid-Nineteenth Century British Literary Imagination of Crowds

Oana M Chivoiu, Purdue University

Abstract

This dissertation explores the British literary imagination of crowds in 1850s, a decade credited to be the beginning of mass culture when questions about the relationship between individual and collective forms of identity were becoming pressing. Situated between the two Reform Bills from 1832 and 1867 that granted middle-class first and then working-class the right to individual political opinion, the 1850s was a decade of intense literary imagination of crowds, which came to be a system of reference for individual distinction. This study is a collection of moments of literary iconicity showing individuals in the crowds, an experience, which I argue, transforms them and reveals new possibilities of distinction and anonymity. The argument that the individual finds his/her transformed other in the crowd is conceptualized at two levels. I attempt to show how mid-Victorian novels adopt the collective event as a punctual alternative system of reference to carve momentary portraits of individuality. In doing so, I show how mid-Victorian novels pluralize and challenge the monolithic bourgeois ideology, which was the main system of individual definition in place since the beginning of the realist novel in the eighteenth century. Four extremely popular novels of the decade imagine crowd scenes where individuals discover things that were not felt and known before, and often have a consciousness of this transformation. These novels are: Villette (1853) by Charlotte Brontë, North and South (1855) by Elizabeth Gaskell, Aurora Leigh (1856) by Elizabeth Barrett Browning, and A Tale of Two Cities (1859) by Charles Dickens. The study explores the memorialization of small-scale individual moments of transformation/revolution on the backdrop of the collective experience, which attests to the need of mid-Victorian novels explored in this study to safeguard the idea of the individual by documenting its renewal. To explore how one is revolutionized by collective experiences, I take recourse to Mikhail Bakhtin’s concept of the chronotope, which in its triangulation of time-space-image, provides a critical instrument to capture the iconicity of the moment in the crowd and its portability as image beyond its original site.

Degree

Ph.D.

Advisors

Allen, Purdue University.

Subject Area

Literature|British and Irish literature

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