| This study analyzes one way Victorian writers responded to changes in philological theory in nineteenth-century England. Comparative philology, which developed on the continent in the 1820's, posited that the basis of language lay in spoken words whose only meaning arose from convention. This new philology was not quickly accepted in England, where the traditional sense of language as a close representation of reality enjoyed avid support until the end of the century. Support for an outmoded philology lingered on primarily because of the tendency of English culture to ground itself on texts. Scripture, poetry, even the Oxford English Dictionary, the grandest philological project ever conceived, were seen as foundations to the culture. Victorian England, as dependent on texts as it was, naturally found threatening a concept that held language as oral, rather than written; as arbitrary, rather than representational; as conventional, rather than eternal.; I argue that Victorian writers employed the already powerful and evocative icon of Woman to try to repair this rift between words and things. Within the novels I examine here, male novelists create a fictional woman's text which acts as a talisman to invoke and reinforce the lost connection between language and reality. This tactic took advantage of the fact that this icon was multifaceted and evolving; the three novels I consider serve as examples of the ways that Victorian writers used three aspects of this icon--the angel in the house, her demonic counterpart, and the New Woman.; Chapter one sketches pertinent developments of philological thought, and chapter two analyzes Charles Dickens's Bleak House (1851-53) as a diagnosis of language in Victorian England. Chapters three, four, and five analyze novels that represent aspects of the Victorian myth of Woman: Bleak House, which responds to its own diagnosis by presenting a hypernaturally virtuous woman as the savior of language; H. Rider Haggard's She (1886-87), which paints a mysterious and supernaturally powerful woman as the embodiment of Truth; and W. H. Mallock's A Human Document (1892), which gives us the possibility that a New Woman could also be a womanly text. I concentrate on three novels to give an in-depth look at the tactic of locating meaning in the icon of woman, but in order to assess the extent of this pattern, in chapter six I provide brief analyses of a number of other novels that follow this or similar responses to the loss of representation. |
