Disrupted legacies: Family structure and narrative form in the eighteenth century novel

The dissertation examines the correspondence between the development of the novel in the eighteenth century and the historical emergence of the modern nuclear family. Tracing the gradual intensification of how family structure conditions narrative strategy in the works of English novelists from Defoe to Sterne, the dissertation investigates how these novels deliver and subvert myths about the privacy of family and the autonomy of individual experience. The narrative embodiment of disrupted relations manifests not a simple contradiction between traditional values and the disruptive values of individualism, but a complex modification of existing ideologies by new ideological pressures. Because of dramatic changes in the configurations of family, the novel emerged as a dominant literary form, patterned on the complex relations among family members. The dissertation identifies three stages to this process. The first is represented by Robinson Crusoe. Defoe treats family relations in a dismissive manner to glorify individual autonomy. Like the scandal chronicles, travel narratives, and criminal fictions popular in his day, Defoe\u27s narratives produce an apparent disjuncture between self and family and between narrative relations and diegetic autonomy, sublimating the role of family in defining both individual identity and novelistic form. During the second phase, the novel is used to scrutinize the psychological, social and political consequences of kinship. Richardson, Fielding and others inaugurated the dominant mode the novel would eventually take. Preserving the essential conflict between self-definition and social coercion, these writers, instead of sublimating the conflict, constructed fictions that made the relevance of family to narrative acts a primary and unifying force of the novel. In the final stage, novelists adopt a skeptical, but no less intense attitude toward this familiarizing activity. The anxieties about household government, affective relations and genealogical imperatives canvassed by the mid-century writers become central and disruptive features in the work of writers like Sterne and Wollstonecraft. These later novelists responded to the family novel with a darker vision: here external factors disrupt the comfortable world of the family threatening to undo it or turn it into a force of repression