| Critics have long emphasized the Victorian novel's disengagement from the culture of the machine. Even so-called 'industrial' novels often seem to neglect the world of the factory for more pastoral scenes of private human experience, at best expressing what Catherine Gallagher terms "simultaneous impulses to associate and to dissociate" social and domestic realms. My dissertation, however, claims that images of the machine wield a more subtle and pervasive influence on novels than we might expect. Reading nonfictional accounts of the "Factory System" in conjunction with social fiction from the 1830s to the 1860s, I argue that the machine serves as a powerful model for human subjectivity. Consequently, my project examines the anxious relation between people and machines, in works that either directly or indirectly contest views of human nature as stable, distinctive, and autonomous. While interpreters have viewed these texts as mourning a loss of psychic complexity among factory-hands, I seek to redefine our understanding of industrial 'character.' Challenging these tragic humanist readings, I argue for the emergence of a modern and more mechanical notion of the human in Victorian industrial fiction and nonfiction.;My project considers a collection of texts both technophobic and technophilic: novels by writers such as Samuel Butler, Charles Dickens, and Elizabeth Gaskell, and culturally influential nonfiction ranging from Karl Marx's Capital to works by Charles Babbage, Peter Gaskell, and Harriet Martineau. My first chapter contends that Victorian factory accounts offer us a distinctly architectural image of subjectivity, defined by the joining of various human and mechanical parts. The second chapter examines the machine as a figure of animalistic irrationalism, whereas the third and fourth chapters show how this figure expresses and produces new and often distinctly classed forms of affect and appetite. Revealing a profound human identification with the machine, these works infuse mechanically 'regular' feelings with specifically classed and gendered connotations. Thus, I explore the ways in which Victorian texts construct necessarily hybrid models of industrial subjectivity, which sometimes succeed and sometimes fail to resolve cultural preoccupations surrounding the organic and the mechanistic, the intentional and the automatic, the feeling and the unfeeling, the human and the inhuman. |
