Dethroning the authoritative discourse : heteroglossia in Wilde's and Shaw's novelized plays.

This thesis demonstrates heteroglossia in Oscar Wilde’s and George Bernard Shaw’s plays which enables the repudiation of social, moral and linguistic conventions. The dialogic interplay in A Woman of No Importance (1893), An Ideal Husband (1895), Mrs. Warren’s Profession (1893), and Pygmalion (1912) underscores Mikhail Bakhtin’s theorization of “the co-existence of socio-ideological contradictions [which] intersect each other in a variety of ways.” (Bakhtin 291) In other words, despite the well-known opposition of Wilde and Shaw on the value of aesthetism, both playwrights’ works demonstrate the novelistic concern with how the contest of social discourses induces language and society to evolve. In this manner, they reveal a shared interest in disrupting the conventions that govern gendered, classed, and dramatized identities in late Victorian England. Heteroglossia, though tailored for the genre of the novel, is relevant to studying these particular plays, as they are informed by the process of “novelization”, a term that describes the novel’s influence on other genres, including drama. Novelization causes language to become dialogized, characterized by “laughter, irony . . . indeterminacy, and a certain semantic open-endedness.” (Bakhtin 7) Analyzing heteroglossia in these works is thus instrumental in highlighting the power dynamics of social hierarchy as the reconsideration of the claims of monologic discourse becomes foregrounded. As these hybridized, novelized plays attend to the voice of the subaltern, authoritative discourse is challenged by the iconoclastic, disrupting unjust, repressive social systems, and pointing to the need for change in society.Master of Arts (HSS