Transmitting the home: Photography, telegraphy and Victorian domestic narratives

Though critical attention has focused on the intersection of Victorian fiction and Victorian technology, this study examines the specific relationship between domestic narratives and two related technological processes: photography and telegraphy. I argue, first, that photography and telegraphy were considered under a single cultural rubric described by the classification philosophical instruments. Second, I claim that these technologies are strongly process- (rather than product-) based, as I show how process includes both the scientific and technological principles required for the practice of photography and telegraphy and the social processes that described the application of these technologies. Third, I assert that photography and telegraphy are often both distinctly domestic in practice, and that their domestic applications are the foundation for the relationship between these technologies and Victorian domestic fiction.; I articulate these arguments by examining three Victorian fiction genres, each treated in a separate chapter. In my second chapter, I examine domestic sentimental texts that feature photography and telegraphy---Carte de Visite, "A Spoilt Negative," "The Telegraph Girl," and A Laodicean---to show how sentimental fiction demonstrated the proper use of new technologies in the domestic sphere in order to reinforce existing social conventions. Chapter III examines three sensation novels--- The Woman in White, Lady Audley's Secret, and Dracula---to show how fantastic literary tropes like telepathy were linked to new technologies and how fantastic and technological forms of communication were integrated into legal and imperial plots to transform the Victorian conception of femininity. The final chapter shows how new technologies in two realist texts, Hardy's "Imaginative Woman" and James' "In the Cage," become conduits between imagination and external reality and redefine both intimacy and infidelity in domestic relations.; These chapters show how photography and telegraphy could inhabit the domestic sphere and how these technologies entered into a reciprocal relationship with domestic narrative conventions. Literary depictions of photography and telegraphy influenced their social articulations, insofar as they changed the public's imagination of these technologies. In return, these technologies transformed modes of communication and definitions of information and intimacy within society, effectively changing social functions vital to many domestic narratives.