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The Function of Letters in Nineteenth-century Realist Novels PDF
By:Kathleen Marion Sullivan
Published on 2016 by

Critics have argued that a crucial shift occurred in the epistolary tradition in British fiction after the eighteenth century. In eighteenth-century epistolary novels, attention was on the letter-writer: the letter provided a space for the writer to divulge his or her inner life. However, as the epistolary novel waned in popularity in the early nineteenth-century, novels increasingly included letters in the form of interjections, interpolations that interrupt the more dominant third-person narration. Attention was therefore shifted away from the psychology of the letter-writer to encompass that of the letter-reader as well. The Function of Letters in Nineteenth-Century Realist Novels: Epistolarity and Character in Austen, Thackeray, Dickens, and Gaskell explores this important shift in the novel between first- and third-person narration, arguing for a continuity that is often looked in the representation of interiority via epistolary methods. In contrast to critics who solely prioritize third-person narration, claiming letters function as plot points simply to instigate a response in the letter-reader, I argue that the inward divulgence of the letter-writer is a crucial component of realist fiction. Focusing on the confessional nature of epistolary interludes in realist fiction, I show how nineteenth-century authors maintained conventions of the epistolary genre convention to make letters the residuary of an inner life that could only be understood through first-person accounts. Chapters one through four of this study present a detailed discussion of the ways that letters affect the characters and plotline in novels by Jane Austen, William Makepeace Thackeray, Charles Dickens, and Elizabeth Gaskell. In particular, these chapters examine Austen's Pride and Prejudice (Chapter One), Thackeray's Vanity Fair: A Novel Without a Hero (Chapter Two), Dickens' Little Dorrit (Chapter Three), and Gaskell's Wives and Daughters: An Every-Day Story (Chapter Four). In these works, their authors use letters at particular moments in the narrative to reveal a character's motivations, reflections, feelings and impressions, and thereby, to instigate a reaction in the letter-reader in a manner that shapes plot action. By enabling characters who are separated by time and distance to interact with each other, authors channel this epistolary device to suit their novel's particular aims: to assist with a protagonist's growth in self-knowledge (Austen), to depict the exposure of a character's pretenses and vanities (Thackeray), to represent methods by which characters manage psychological and physical imprisonments (Dickens), and to instigate reform of class segregation and elitism (Gaskell). These chapters overall argue that instead of there being a clear break between the eighteenth- and nineteenth-century narrative representational methods, there is continuity in maintaining, yet revitalizing, the epistolary mode to facilitate the novelists' realist objectives. In addition to charting the continuity of eighteenth-century epistolary conventions in Victorian novels, this dissertation makes two critical contributions: it demonstrates that letters are used in realist novels to grant prominence to minor characters as integral elements in the protagonist's overarching narrative. Secondly, this study provides a deeper understanding of how previous methods for capturing interiority and subjectivity continued to inform the realist novel by means of interpolated letters. Overall, this dissertation examines the progression and posterity of the letter-form as a narrative device, charting the renovation of the epistolary tradition in realist methods for capturing character and plot development.

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