About

This thesis argues that ‘bourgeois paternalistic literature’ (more specifically fiction) from the 1840s to the 1860s embodies a narrative instability, that is, the incompetence of the narrator in framing the working-class female figures stably and consistently due to a tension between bourgeois doctrines and other beliefs on the proletarian female want for a powerful position in society. ‘Bourgeois paternalistic literature’ is my term for a subgenre of the novel (a.) rhetorically addressed to the bourgeois narratee by a bourgeois, masculine (or presumably male), third-person omniscient narrator in a ‘paternalistic’ way, and (b.) featuring a shared ‘liminality’ specifically about working-class female characters. Liminality, by my definition, refers to the fluid state of the fictional figures, swaying in the aspects of age, sexuality, gender, humanity, standing somewhere between life and death, or oscillating from the familial or narratological perspectives. This thesis depends on three mid-Victorian bourgeois paternalistic novels, namely, Elizabeth Gaskell’s Mary Barton (1848), George Eliot’s Adam Bede (1859), and Charles Dickens’s Our Mutual Friend (1865), alongside contemporaneous novels, book reviews and other historical materials. In so doing, this thesis sets out to explore what working-class female characters want and what the text wants these characters to want. Drawing on narrative theories, feminism, Marxism, and theories on Victorian childhood, this thesis sets out to reframe ‘what does a woman want?’ as a narratological question — one to which the Victorian novel could not find a stable answer. My work thereby challenges the field’s longstanding belief that female desire provides a stable organising principle to realist fiction.