Domesticating the Empire: Class discord, racial discourse and the marriage plot in Victorian literature

While the plots of innumerable Victorian novels drive toward a narrative resolution through the marriage of hero and heroine, the obstacles to those unions are in fact shaped and driven by figures and events which exist in the colonial imaginary: that marginal space, beyond the action taking place in England, which factors into the imaginative landscape of the novels' characters. I argue that the metaphorical marriage of the Condition-of-England question with the slavery or ‘West India’ question (which would resurface nine years later in Carlyle's Discourse on the Nigger Question) is central to the narrative progress of Victorian novels that are ostensibly domestic narratives. The uncanny or gothic plot elements which threaten to disrupt the narrative drive towards marriage in “domestic” novels, such as Brontë's Jane Eyre and Shirley, share a place of origin with the similarly intrusive elements which disrupt, threaten or destroy the interracial marriage plots of colonial novels such as Stevenson's Beach at Falesá, and Conrad's Lord Jim and Heart of Darkness. This imaginary colonial space may be envisioned as either a promise of prosperity and new beginnings, as in Gaskell's Mary Barton, or a menacing, unknown “other” which threatens to take away what is valued or to give forth evil, as in Jane Eyre and Ruth, or as some uncomfortable amalgam of both elements, as in The Beach at Falesa. Along with novelistic representations of race and marriage, this dissertation examines texts of 19th century anthropology regarding race, as well as periodical fiction from Punch, “Miss Robinson Crusoe”, which parodies Defoe's Robinson Crusoe, setting the domestic “problem” of the surplus of unmarried women against an imaginary colonial backdrop. I argue that a colonial horizon, or an imagination of empire, determines the narrative drive of novels allegedly about matters of English domesticity, and that this distant horizon against which the English “self” is defined eventually becomes the center, rather than the periphery of the English novel by the end of the century.