Reiteration as resistance: Performativity in the novels of Charlotte Yonge, George Eliot, and Margaret Oliphant

Nineteenth-century authors of fiction and literary criticism had to balance competing demands as they tried to achieve popular and financial success and to raise cultural standards. This dissertation examines the works of Charlotte Yonge, George Eliot, and Margaret Oliphant, whose nonfiction expresses concerns about the content of literature and its effects on society while their fiction aspires to be both successful and socially responsible. To understand their complex negotiations, I use the work of Judith Butler, whose theory of performativity suggests both that the reiterative power of discourse produces the phenomena it regulates and constrains and that resistance occurs in unfaithful reiterations that reveal the instability of the law. I argue that the work of these authors ultimately reveals breaks in the codes that govern fiction, thus drawing attention to the very constructedness of those laws. Specifically, chapter two examines Yonge's critical essays and her novels The Daisy Chain and Heartsease, which seem to reiterate a dominant ideal of femininity. Her work creates cultural standards of duty, piety, and morality, which reiterate dominant social codes, but she does not provide entirely faithful reiterations. Instead, Yonge clearly reveals the costs involved in conforming to those standards, thus providing resistance to the very codes she appears to uphold. Chapter three explores Eliot's unusual position in the literary marketplace, which resists conforming to norms surrounding either male- or female-authored literature. In "Silly Novels by Lady Novelists," she suggests that women's fiction fails when women try to write about subjects beyond their limited realm of knowledge and experience. In Middlemarch, Eliot engages in an extended investigation of knowledge itself, examining both intellect and the emotional complexity surrounding knowledge, thus merging qualities attributed to male and female authors. Chapter four turns to Oliphant's essays about sensation, which help to establish the "law" of sensation fiction, and her attempts to use sensation in Salem Chapel and Hester, which conform only to certain aspects of the law, resisting others by refusing to faithfully reiterate the established norms. Her unfaithful reiterations of sensation conventions suggest that the conventions might be manipulated to allow for more socially responsible fiction.