Discipline And Rebellion

No Name is one of the major works written by Wilkie Collins who is a notedsensation English novelist in the nineteenth century. The novel was popular amongreaders of the time, but had been criticized repeatedly for the portrayal of therebellious female characters ever since its publication. The novel presents a wholesurvival situation of the Victorian women who are not only regulated by the moraldiscipline but also oppressed by the unjust law of the day. Some of them choose torebel against the unfair regulation of the society instead of keeping silent, whichmakes it possible to study the novel from the perspective of Foucault’s power theory.This thesis is going to analyze the female characters of the novel by using Foucault’stheory of disciplinary power in order to enrich and extend the study of No Name.This thesis contains four chapters with one introduction and one conclusion. Theintroduction scans Collins’s characteristics of works, the contents of No Name, theliterature review of No Name at home and broad, and finally proposes the centralargument, the research question and the significance of the thesis.The first chapter introduces Foucault’s power theory and explains the operatingmechanism of disciplinary power and its two technical means: hierarchy gaze andnormalized adjudication.The second chapter focuses on the moral discipline encountered by femalecharacters. The prevailing concept of division of labor according to genders and theconcept of separate spheres establish women’s subordinate position in Victoriansociety. The female characters are required to behave according to the codes of angelin the house and they are supervised by people from all directions. Fortunately, theychallenge the traditional morality actively.The third chapter centers on legal regulation that restrict the female characters.The unjust Inheritance Law not only disinherits the two sisters’ legacy, but also theirnames because of their illegitimate identity. It is the unjust law that pushes them into adesperate position. The protagonist is full of sense of justice and consequentlyrecaptures her own fortunate by a series of extreme methods. And another femalecharacter refuses to accept her master’s suppression, so she rebels to capture thepension she deserves and allocates it in female vocational education. The fourth chapter studies the significance of the female characters’ rebellion.These female characters rebel against the authority of the patriarchy society by theirown methods. The point is their rebellion fuels the birth of modern womenconsciousness.The conclusion summarizes and concludes the major points of the thesis.