Date of Award

5-1-2024

Language

English

Document Type

Dissertation

Degree Name

Doctor of Philosophy (PhD)

College/School/Department

Department of English

Dissertation/Thesis Chair

Kir Kuiken

Committee Members

Jed Mayer, James Lilley, Helene Scheck

Keywords

animals, children, children's literature, education, novels, Victorian

Subject Categories

English Language and Literature

Abstract

The (Dis)Obedience Politics of Victorian Literature argues that Victorian children learned thesocial valuation of themselves and others through the figure of the animal, and while this learning was often hegemonic, some Victorian authors subverted this form of didacticism, creating alternative pedagogies that extended subjecthood to those who were often excluded. While it is well-known that animals have historically been enlisted as teaching symbols, I contend that literary animals in Victorian fiction were used to critique, expose, and otherwise provide commentary and context for the potentially widespread disciplinary practice of childrearing as these practices defined and qualified subjectivity and objectivity. To trace this vast array of didacticism and pedagogy, as well as various authors’ views and reactions towards these cultural trends, I use my concepts obedience and disobedience politics. Obedience politics conveys the child’s vulnerability through literary descriptions of trauma, pain, damage, and/or discomfort after being made to witness violent animal treatment, by being asked to slaughter animal bodies, and in being pushed to consider themselves and other humans as “animalistic.” While the lessons of objectification across literary texts I examine are varied, they all ask children to uphold a normative conception of so-called “proper” Victorian subjecthood by devaluing the animal in relation to the human. Disobedience politics, on the other hand, is a way to categorize literary depictions that subvert such a didactic epistemology in looking to children as full subjects who recognize both the subjectivity of themselves and others, often teaching these values to adult characters. (For example, I find disobedience politics in scenes where a child teaches an adult to protect and value an animal’s life. Such a scene not only exposes obedience politics by showing the child eschewing their training in human exceptionalism and anthropocentrism, but the child teaching the adult about humaneness also overtly asks readers to consider the child’s value and subjecthood through their valuation of animal subjectivity.) By imaginatively exploring disobedience politics in their narratives, I find, that in the process, certain Victorian authors could radically call for a view of the nonhuman-animal as subject, as opposed to a mere objectified symbol at work for a human cultural imagination. My project outlines different versions of obedience and disobedience politics using examples from children’s literature and novels including: Thomas Hardy’s Jude the Obscure (1895) and Tess of the d’Urbervilles (1891); Emily Brontë’s Wuthering Heights (1847); Lewis Carroll’s Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland (1865), Through the Looking-Glass (1871), Sylvie & Bruno (1889), and Sylvie & Bruno Concluded (1893); and Maggie Browne’s Wanted a King—or How Merle set the Nursery Rhymes to Rights (1890).

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