Graduate Program

English

Degree Name

Master of Arts (MA)

Semester of Degree Completion

2007

Thesis Director

Dagni Bredesen

Thesis Committee Member

Robin Murray

Thesis Committee Member

Randall Beebe

Abstract

Victorian fiction often represents a domestic space that is designed both architecturally and psychologically to protect its residents from the external harsh and hostile world. Novelists ofthe period perceived a weakness in the domestic fortress and incorporated characters that could enter these homes in various ways, whether invited or not, and threatened to expose the families to the world they represented. This thesis investigates characters able to disrupt this domestic idea ofprivacy including the orphaned outsider Heathcliff from Emily Bronte's Wuthering Heights (1847), the impostor Lucy Graham in Mary Elizabeth Braddon's Lady Audley 's Secret (1862), and the detective Sergeant Cuff in Wilkie Collins' The Moonstone (1868).

In order to explain the Victorian ideology that underlies domestic space and its perceived threats, my thesis discusses several different aspects of identity in relation to inside and outside the home. I rely on the work of sociologist Richard Jenkins, who maintains, "It is not enough to assert an identity. That identity must also be validated (or not) by those with whom we have dealings" (19). According to Jenkins, one must not only believe in their own identity but also prove to others around them that one is deserving ofthis position. This conflicting identity perception poses problems for the represented Victorian families as it disrupts their homes.

Heathcliff and Catherine of Wuthering Heights embody outsider identities and primitiveness in contrast to the cultured and presumably more socially sophisticated residents of Thrushcross Grange. Catherine attempts to fmd happiness in her marriage to Edgar and fully transform into a cultured insider. Heathcliff never truly assimilates to the rough Earnshaw home or "civilized" society ofthe Lintons, because his appearance and temperament hinders acceptance. In Mary Elizabeth Braddon' s Lady Audley 's Secret, Lucy Graham uses her beauty and feminine traits to gain access into Audley Court; the actions that cross the community's accepted feminine boundaries ultimately aid in her success, but also reveal her faults to the amateur detective Robert Audley. In my epilogue, I focus on Wilkie Collins' The Moonstone as a way to summarize the patterns of containment and disruption at work in Wuthering Heights and Lady Audley's Secret, and as a way to point to a third pattern at work in the newly emerging genre of detective novels. The novel includes the impostor Godfrey Ablewhite, the detective Sergeant Cuff, and the colonial others Ezra Jennings and the Brahmin Indians, all who that threaten to expose the Verinder family to the outside world.

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