State fantasy: The late nineteenth-century British novel and the cultural formation of state personhood (Thomas Hardy, George Gissing, Sarah Grand)

This dissertation argues that a fantasy of “the State” as a heroic actor that should intervene in the brutalities of capitalism and gender inequality was becoming normalized in late nineteenth-century British culture. The circulation of this fantasy generated both optimism that the government could enact personal and social change, as well as anxiety that it would undermine the cherished ideals of British national character, defined chiefly in terms of individual and corporate autonomy. While my historical archive includes political theory, sociology, psychology, parliamentary reports, newspapers, and personal letters, I privilege late realist novels in my investigation. Focusing in particular on those by Thomas Hardy, George Gissing, and Sarah Grand, I argue that they uniquely show how this fundamental fantasy determined the horizon of the historically possible. As cultural institutions which constructed notions of the everyday, these novels thematize how state interventionist practices impacted not only the ways British subjects moved through spaces, but also the ways they began to think about themselves in relation to the social world. As literary narratives which claimed to produce the effect of the real through artful methods, they also tacitly participated in transforming a heterogeneous and disparate array of practices, discourses, logics, spaces, officials, and functions into “the State,” a discrete, animated entity distinct from the economy or society. Above all, by narrating how the idea of the state as a heroic actor served as a national cathexis for optimism and anxiety, these novels point to a crucial aspect of the late Victorian state: the role of fantasy in mediating the subject's lived relation to governmental and official political practices. My dissertation explores how subjects invest the idea of the state with meaning and how this investment shapes liberal individuals' experience of their political, social, and intimate selves. Furthermore, by returning to a historical moment when a culture both appealed to and resisted the idea of the state as a site of optimism for individual and collective transformation, my work seeks to complicate the Foucauldian tendency to approach the modern state merely as a site of discipline.