Spinning 'strange and flimsy fancies': Nineteenth-century superstition in novels by Thomas Hardy, Charlotte Bronte, and Mary Augusta Ward

This dissertation argues that the treatments of superstition by novelists Thomas Hardy, Charlotte Bronte, and Mary Augusta Ward provide an approbation of irrational thought that differs from the evaluations of superstition in contemporary non-fiction works of antiquaries, amateur folklorists, and other popularizers of English lore.;Chapter one introduces representative non-fiction works addressing superstition as the romantic relics of England's past but also as the errors of uneducated people. These attitudes reveal a feeling of ambivalence about the survival of seemingly vulgar and pagan superstition in an age that took pride in having progressed beyond "error." Manipulating rationalist and imaginative interests in rural English superstition, the novelists find a faith in the irrational, depicting in their fiction superstitions of three major categories: superstition and regionalism; superstition and perceptions of women; superstition and Catholicism.;Chapter two focuses on Hardy's The Return of the Native (1878), which presents superstition as an aspect of regionalism. The chapter examines the survival of ritual on Egdon Heath and the distinctions Hardy makes among various types of rustic, irrational thought.;The third and fourth chapters address superstition as informing fictional representations of women. Chapter three studies the evil eye superstition as an element of Hardy's A Pair of Blue Eyes (1873), in which the charming influence of Elfride Swancourt's eyes affects and alters other characters' images of her. Bronte's Jane Eyre (1847) is the subject of chapter four, which analyzes the omens that provide Jane with irrational resources she cultivates in her heroic progress and in her search for a home.;Chapters five and six discuss the perceptions of Catholic superstition presented in Bronte's Villette (1853) and Ward's Helbeck of Bannisdale (1898). Villette presents Lucy Snowe's development of emotional and imaginative expression as a confrontation between the Catholic superstitions she abhors and the conventual otherworldliness that attracts her. Ward's Helbeck of Bannisdale dismisses earlier Protestant superstitions about Jesuits, while depicting a female rationalist's struggle to negotiate her desire for the Jesuit with Catholic superstitions about the physical body.