Belated travelers and posthumous children: Phantoms of Romanticism in Victorian literature (Charlotte Bronte, Emily Bronte, Charles Dickens)

This dissertation explores the significance of ghosts in Victorian narratives of self-formation, asserting that the figuring of the supernatural in terms of the Romantic in these novels indicates that Victorian conceptions of identity remained haunted by Romantic ideals of the self. By crossing boundaries between these two disparate systems of identity formation, ghosts serve to highlight these boundaries as well as draw attention to the fissures within such systems. An introductory gloss of Mary Shelley's proto-Victorian novel Frankenstein illustrates the dichotomy between Romantic and Victorian ideologies. The dissertation proceeds to examine the presence of the supernatural in relation to the construction of personal and communal identity in three representative mid-nineteenth-century novels: Emily Bronte's Wuthering Heights, Charlotte Bronte's Jane Eyre, and Charles Dickens's David Copperfield. Combining close readings with an emphasis on the historical specificity of the literary text, this dissertation analyzes the tension between the subject and object position in first-person narratives as representative of the conflict between oppositional ideological strategies.; The novels are discussed in chronological order of their publication. Chapter One, "Breaking the Frame: Romantic Hauntings in Wuthering Heights," examines the vulnerability of Victorian systems of identity formation to intrusion by the Romantic. It also explores the limitations of such structures for, while providing frameworks for identity formation, cultural and ideological systems also imprison or exclude those attempting to formulate their identities in relation to such systems. Chapter Two, "Charlotte Bronte's Belated Travelers: Romantic Hauntings in Jane Eyre," contends that Jane's assumption of the subject position in her narrative is inspired by the Romantics, but that the abundant spectrality in the novel simultaneously indicates that there is something "super-natural" about such gestures of female agency. Chapter Three, "Copperfield and Son: A Daughter After All? Phantoms of Romanticism and Gender in Charles Dickens's David Copperfield" examines spectrality as a by-product of David's feminization and resultant disembodiment. The persistence of Romantic conceptions of identity jeopardizes the project of these narratives, the inscription of the narrator into the Victorian realm of the domestic.