| While many forms of narrative experimentation are evident within the mid-Victorian period, four novels are particularly noteworthy for their innovative techniques: Emily Bronte's Wuthering Heights (1847), Anne Bronte's The Tenant of Wildfell Hall (1848), Charles Dickens's Bleak House (1852-53), and Wilkie Collins's The Woman in White (1859-60). These novels experiment extensively with structural framing, with subjective perspectives and narrative reliability, with the rhetorical situation of each narrator, and with the collaborative relationship established by the multiple narrators in each novel. This collaborative relationship can be influenced by gender and class.;Various political, social, and religious movements in the thirteen-year period during which these four novels were published encouraged such experimentation. Similarly, earlier experimental novels in the British tradition influenced the Victorian authors' treatment of the genre.;The focus in analyzing the four novels is on both individual narrators and the ways in which they collaborate in creating the novel. Specifically, the four novels highlight the collaborative relationship between Lockwood and Nelly in Wuthering Heights, Gilbert and Helen in The Tenant of Wildfell Hall, Esther and the omniscient narrator in Bleak House, and Walter, Marian, and other narrators in The Woman in White. Through devices such as narrative framing, the authors use structure to reflect degrees of narrative equity.;The innovations of these four novelists influenced narrative experimentation in other areas, particularly, the narrative experimentation in Victorian poetry (e.g., Browning's The Ring and the Book, Meredith's Modern Love) and in late nineteenth- and twentieth-century British and American novels (e.g., Conrad's Heart of Darkness, Vonnegut's Slaughterhouse-Five). |
