Improving language: Victorian literature and the civilizing process

Whereas “civilization” has often been dismissed in nineteenth-century studies as a rallying cry for empire, this dissertation offers a critical re-evaluation of how the Victorians understood this concept and its implications for literature’s educational possibilities. Integrating Norbert Elias’s theory of the civilizing process into a critical framework that draws on literary linguistics and rhetorical studies, my first chapter studies nineteenth-century writings from a range of disciplines – including economics, sociology, and linguistics – to show that “civilization” represented a key site for Victorian writers to reflect holistically on wider processes of social change and their linguistic dimensions. The second chapter analyzes the poetics of John Stuart Mill and Matthew Arnold in the context of this discourse. Arguing that the discourse of civilization provides a crucial framework for understanding how these thinkers conceived literary language as “improving,” I reveal the impact of this discourse on the period’s most influential theories about literature’s educational value. While the first part of the dissertation considers the literary implications of “civilization” on the level of theory, the second part explores how Victorian poets and novelists addressed these implications in practice by considering classic texts such as Jane Eyre and David Copperfield alongside less canonical female Bildungsromane and children’s adventure tales. Chapter Three begins by demonstrating how a range of Victorian genres dramatize and reflect on the civilizing process, then focuses specifically on narratives of writers’ Bildung (formation). I argue that these Bildungsromane show particularly clearly how Victorian writers’ creative engagement with the discourse of civilization enables them to construct a model of literary language that facilitates social integration, while fostering a value for individuality and inventiveness essential to active participation in social processes. Turning to narratives of feminine Bildung like Margaret Oliphant’s Miss Marjoribanks and Ibsen’s A Doll’s House, the concluding chapter illustrates how writers imagined how such private pastimes as reading might sustain wider civilizing trends. By exploiting the links between gender and genre, these texts are able, I suggest, to conceive the possibility of altering Victorian society’s deeply ingrained sexism through the strategic appropriation – rather than outright rejection – of its gendered norms.Ph.D.Includes bibliographical referencesIncludes vitaby Paul L. Yeo