Technologies of the self: Habit and the Victorian novel.
Item
-
Title
-
Technologies of the self: Habit and the Victorian novel.
-
Identifier
-
AAI3213251
-
identifier
-
3213251
-
Creator
-
O'Toole, Shawn.
-
Contributor
-
Adviser: Rachel M. Brownstein
-
Date
-
2006
-
Language
-
English
-
Publisher
-
City University of New York.
-
Subject
-
Literature, English | Literature, American
-
Abstract
-
This dissertation examines novelists' contributions to the "psychology of habit" as it emerged in mid- to late-nineteenth-century England and America. First, I situate the realist novel within a larger cultural debate about the social and psychological effects of habitual behavior, retracing the tradition of writing on habit in Victorian philosophy, psychology, and popular advice literature. At stake was the culture's view of itself as the traditions of the past faded and new identities emerged. The chapters then analyze a series of texts written between 1850 and 1900, demonstrating how major novelists took up and often extended the terms of this debate: a frequently overlooked novella, George Eliot's The Lifted Veil; novels such as George Meredith's The Egoist and Henry James's The Spoils of Poynton; as well as better known works such as Charles Dickens's Little Dorrit, Eliot's Daniel Deronda, and James's The Portrait of a Lady. I argue that the unprecedented and unparalleled range of observations about habitual behavior in Victorian fiction had roots in, and in turn helped shape, burgeoning psychological and sociological theories. What is more, these novels all present habit as, potentially, a matrix for creativity and change. Habit, in the view that my study offers, makes vivid both the construction of new identities in this period and the intransigencies of a social structure that resisted their deployment. In the twentieth century, many intellectuals repudiated the concept of habit, seeing it as a prop for greater mechanization and thus a threat to the "vitality" of human life; simultaneously, moralizing models based on the opposition of "compulsion" and "will" supervened and took hold. This study retraces an alternate route---one that has been largely forgotten---via the distinctive contributions imaginative fiction made to understanding habit's role in shaping human behavior and experience. In this view, the concept of habit usefully registers both the construction of new ways of being and the mutual imprints of material culture and mental life in this period.
-
Type
-
dissertation
-
Source
-
PQT Legacy CUNY.xlsx
-
degree
-
Ph.D.
