Little terrors: the child s threat to social order in the Victorian bildungsroman

Abstract

This thesis is a study of rebellious child protagonists in Victorian bildungsroman. It discusses five novels Jane Eyre, The Mill on the Floss, What Maisie Knew, Vanity Fair and Kim that feature radical child protagonists who use indirect methods of narrative control to resist conservative models of character development. It argues that these novels form a subset of subversive English bildungsromane, which threaten the genre s traditionally liberal values. Theories of narrative desire, reader seduction and discursive manipulation are used to reveal how the radical child in the Victorian bildungsroman takes command of the reader s sympathy and gains power over the realist text, despite its physical and social powerlessness. Especially important is the presence of a fantasy counterplot, which coexists with, and ultimately undermines, the bildungsroman s realistic surface narrative of successful socialisation. The counterplot allows radical child protagonists to develop in a non-linear manner that contradicts bourgeois ideals of stable progress. Focusing instead on sites of rupture between the individual and society, subversive bildungsromane resist both the dialectical model of character, which aims to harmoniously unite the protagonist with the realist world, and the dialogic model of interaction, which requires the restriction of personal liberty for the common good. This rebellious child in the Victorian bildungsroman thus represents an assault on the genre s democratic ideals. Rejecting compromise, the radical child replaces the bildungsroman s central ethic of interpersonal responsibility with an individualistic ethic of domination. Indeed, the thesis argues that the appeal of such child protagonistslies in their rejection of the obligatory, but anticlimactic, exchange of freedom for security that underpins the realist bildungsroman s social contract, a rejection attractive to the reader precisely because it is unrealisable in reality. Finally, the thesis compares this radical child with the Gothic monster. While the monster is punished for its subversion, the radical child s counterplot enables it to enact most of its subversive desires unpunished. The conservative English bildungsroman thus becomes a more effective way of representing asocial energies than the more obviously radical Gothic genre, which openly displays its anti-democratic sentiments.