The city as monster: Reading monstrosity in the nineteenth-century British urban landscape

Tania Bhattacharyya, Purdue University

Abstract

This dissertation focuses on literary representations of the nineteenth-century urban landscape in the wake of the Industrial Revolution during which the British cities saw an overwhelming rise in working-class migration, subsequent housing and sanitation problems, concern about the filth and disease that plagued the slums and a growing fear of working-class unrest. It investigates the constantly recurring images of the city as a monster and examines the reactions of fear, horror and dread that the authors document as a response to its monstrosity. I focus on Friedrich Engels' The Condition of the Working-Class in England: From Personal Observation and Authentic Sources (1844) to set up a non-fictional representation of nineteenth-century class hegemony and its relation to industrialization. In Benjamin Disraeli's Sybil (1845), Elizabeth Gaskell's Mary Barton (1848) and Charles Dickens' Bleak House (1851-53) I show how notions of physical deformity and disease, gender and class identity inform the framework of monstrosity in the fictional representations of the nineteenth-century urban landscape, both industrial and non-industrial. I contend that the nineteenth-century cityscape, the symbol of middle-class prosperity, was also a constant challenge to the middle-class sense of identity owing to its threat of contamination and revolution. The isolation and anonymity of the working class due to the cityscape was a source of trepidation and concern for the middle class. Further, the availability of factory jobs for women in the nineteenth-century city promoted a deviant working-class family structure that allowed working-class women to step outside the surveillance and monitoring of domestic jobs. I argue that this challenged nineteenth-century middle-class identity by confronting middle-class domestic ideology, based on the notion of the middle-class woman as the keeper of class hegemony, through the supervision and monitoring of domestic servants. I draw on Mary Shelley's Frankenstein, Foucault's concept of panopticism, and feminist theories to analyze how notions of the working-class family structure are shaped within the middle-class domestic ideology. The representations of the monstrous cityscape are acknowledgements by the authors of the severe problems that plagued the nineteenth-century British city, and attempts to align this symbol of middle-class growth and success with middle-class ideology on the other.

Degree

Ph.D.

Advisors

Palmer, Purdue University.

Subject Area

British and Irish literature

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