'Unconfessed Confessions': Strategies of (Not) Telling in Nineteenth-Century Narratives

My dissertation explores the narratological techniques of displaced representation and covert narration in writings that belong to the realist mode. It investigates the relationships between novelistic non-telling and confessional "truth," and it evaluates the reasons for the prominence of the phenomenon of hidden and implicit narration specifically in realist plots. The nineteenth-century's literary milieu witnessed the emergence of a paradoxical trend: even while oriented towards (self) exposure and realism, the writings of the period were characterized by increased repression, withholding, and non-representation. As a mode that hinges on mimesis and strives towards the ideal of truth-telling, yet which precisely in order to appear authentic disguises its artifice, realism has concealments at its core. Confessionality is similarly self-contradictory, exhibiting the conflict between Jean Jacques Rousseau's claim in his Confessions that "no one can write a man's life except himself" and the assertion of Zino Cosini, the protagonist of Italo Svevo's La Coscienza di Zeno, that "a confession in writing is always a lie." Realism and confession, then, are asymptotes of sorts: they lay claims to verisimilitude and completeness of representation, approaching both but fully attaining neither.;One underlying thesis of my project is that multiple realist accounts replicate these dualities on the intra-diegetic level, transposing to their content and plot pattern realism's desire to tell "all" along with the impossibility of the endeavor. In order to demonstrate these complexities, I introduce what I call unconfession, defined as the displacement of the confession into narrative and discursive modes different from those the text suggests its confessionals will encompass. What emerges is not the absence of the confession, but its rendering through alternative and indirect means. A signifier of absence, as it refers to that which is not directly told, unconfession also denotes presence as it exposes the hidden, a characteristic that distinguishes it from non-confession and positions it on the borderline between (Freudian) repressions and (Foucauldian) discursivity.;In four case studies that focus on narratives by Charlotte Brontë, Elizabeth Gaskell, and Fyodor Dostoevsky, I trace the manifestations and methods of unconfessions as they emerge in their writings, writings that not only have confessionality at their center but also encompass various modes of confessional displacements: from the legal to the religious and the moral, from the written to the visual, and from the biographical to the autobiographical and the fictional. Examining multiple genres (including epistolarity, fictional autobiography, and biography), various stylistic, structural, and rhetorical devices (repetitions, peculiarities of punctuation, shifts between first- and third-person narration, free indirect discourse, metaphor/metonymy), as well as thematic indirections (ekphrasis), I demonstrate that unconfessions, transcending generic and geographical boundaries, bring the hidden to the fore and provide a meta-commentary on the ways in which to unearth the veiled narrative strands both in the examined texts and beyond. The investigation of unconfessions calls for narrative hermeneutics that accords equal, and at times greater, significance to the withheld and the untold. By pointing out the interrelations between realism and narratology, such analysis allows us to view both fields in new ways, elucidating realism's orientation towards non-representation and highlighting the relevance of narratology for examining the unutterable and the non-narrated.