Abstract
My dissertation examines novels of midlife in Victorian England, novels whose importance as novels depicting midlife has largely gone unnoticed in literary history, in favor of the exhaustively studied and theorized bildungsroman. If the bildungsroman (along with the closely related “marriage plot” novel) is about development towards adulthood, the midlife novel is about the afterlife of this supposed conclusion. George Eliot’s Middlemarch features a young, undetermined woman as its central protagonist. But it is Dorothea Brooke’s second marriage, and her overall re-education, that is the main storyline and the one all the other storylines intertwine with at some point, leading Virginia Woolf to declare Middlemarch “one of the few English novels for grown up people.” In my dissertation, the works of authors such as George Eliot, Anthony Trollope, Elizabeth Gaskell, and Thomas Hardy are considered from the dual perspectives of age studies and narrative theory. By approaching midlife novels from these two perspectives, I explore the historical, cultural, and formal innovations that the midlife novel brought about, and how it paved the way for what we call “modernism.” Simply put, my argument is that the prominence of “middle-aged” characters in the Victorian novel—difficult as it still is to define this kind of character, and hidden as that prominence may still be—brought about a diversity of form in the novel. One specific diversion of form that can be identified as important in my dissertation is that of the use of narrative repetition. The following individual chapters all deal with the concept of repetition, and its relation to the establishment of what may be called midlife narratives, in differing ways. In the introduction, I present the questions and problems that will guide the dissertation as a whole, and then discuss how the double plot structure in George Eliot’s Middlemarch comes out of an anxiety about the “middleness” of life. Chapter 1, on Anthony Trollope’s novel series The Chronicles of Barsetshire, focuses on the series as a form in itself, and on Trollope’s use of backstory. These two formal elements end up having large implications for Trollope’s depiction of middle-aged and aged characters. Turning to Elizabeth Gaskell’s Cranford, Chapter 2 considers the production of feminine narratives outside the realm of marriage plots, and takes as its narratological focus the episodic. Understanding Cranford as a collection of episodes that refuse to become a coherent narrative helps us see the status of middle-aged women in mid-nineteenth century Britain. Chapter 3, a reading of several of Thomas Hardy’s novels, considers repetition in connection with mobility, namely the physical and social mobility of middle-aged characters and the narrative mobility of a story itself. Finally, the concluding chapter discusses how midlife narratives not only continued to persist but became a central feature of literary modernism in the twentieth century.