| This dissertation analyzes, through close textual readings, the explicit and implicit engagement of six paradigmatic novels in a nationalist project of defining English identity in the Victorian era. I argue that the protagonists of these novels either are or become representatives of an idealized Englishness that rests on a constructed foundation of moral superiority. I investigate the interlocking ways in which definitions of Englishness interact with changing social and cultural conditions at home, and with imperial imperatives abroad. The six novels, evenly spaced chronologically, are Bronte's Jane Eyre, Dickens' Great Expectations, Eliot's Daniel Deronda, Haggard's King Solomon's Mines and She, and Kipling's Kim.; These novels treat character as integral to English identity and to its superiority. Jane Eyre locates character partly in the originary, intrinsic, and uniquely English virtue of sincerity, and partly in a bourgeois, Protestant, ethical system of values and conduct, accompanied by gentility: gentility being construed as manners and refinement. In the succeeding novels, gentility becomes the hallmark of ideal English character, and a mainspring of its elitism. In the earlier domestic novels, gentility also incorporates female-identified virtues of compassion, sensitivity, and self-abnegation. The later colonial novels seek to redefine it in more robust, masculine terms, while, at the same time, strategically appropriating "feminine" virtues to provide a justificatory rhetoric for the imperial "civilizing mission," similar to the earlier rhetoric of domestic reform.; My dissertation also investigates textual strategies deployed to contain and stabilize constructions of national identity through displacements of deviations from the "norm," and through oppositional and consolidating representations of alterity. It uncovers instabilities resulting from contradictions between normative constructions of Englishness and overlapping, hegemonic discourses relating to class, gender, ethnicity and race. It concludes that the novels' romantic impulse to construct a national identity that transcends difference through sentiment, sympathy and the "sexual contract" founders on these inherent instabilities. |
