Sensing Bodies: Negotiating the Body and Identity in Mary Elizabeth Braddon’s Aurora Floyd and Wilkie Collins’s The Moonstone

2019 ◽  
pp. 77-108
Author(s):  
Kylee-Anne Hingston
Keyword(s):  
Case Studies ◽  
Narrative Structure ◽  
The Body ◽  
The Self ◽  
First Person ◽  
The Novel ◽  
Sensation Fiction ◽  
The Moonstone ◽  
Corporeal Body ◽  
Physical Instability

This chapter illustrates how mid-Victorian sensation fiction responds to anxieties exacerbated by nascent Victorian psychology’s attempt to map the self on the corporeal body. Examining the form and focalization of Mary Elizabeth Braddon’s Aurora Floyd (1862–63) and Wilkie Collins’s The Moonstone (1868), this chapter argues that bodies in sensation fiction function both as spectacle, exhibitions of physical instability, and as specimens, case studies on the source of identity. In Aurora Floyd, focalization through an authoritative external perspective provides ‘correct’ interpretations of bodies which have previously been misinterpreted by physiognomy, phrenology, and lineage. In particular, the narrator uses external focalization on disabled villains to manifest how identity appears in bodies and to place eugenic value on those with healthy bodies. By contrast, The Moonstone, lacking authoritative external focalization due to its multiple first-person narrators, uses plot to reveal misinterpretations of disabled bodies, in particular that of Rosanna Spearman. In addition, internally focalized interactions between normate narrators and disabled characters in the novel often cause the narrators to recognize the instability of their own identities and bodies, and thus of normalcy. However, the novel’s overall narrative structure works to control deviance through linearity, which imposes normalcy as a stable, final result.

Articulating Bodies

2019 ◽  
Author(s):  
Kylee-Anne Hingston
Keyword(s):  
Case Studies ◽  
English Translation ◽  
Narrative Structure ◽  
The Body ◽  
Narrative Form ◽  
Victorian Fiction ◽  
Science Technology ◽  
The Social ◽  
Linear Movement ◽  
Body Positioning

Articulating Bodies investigates the contemporaneous developments of Victorian fiction and disability’s medicalization by focusing on the intersection between narrative form and the body. The book examines texts from across the century, from Frederic Shoberl’s 1833 English translation of Victor Hugo’s Notre-Dame de Paris (1831) to Arthur Conan Doyle’s Sherlock Holmes story “The Adventure of the Crooked Man” (1893), covering genres that typically relied upon disabled or diseased characters. By tracing the patterns of focalization and narrative structure across six decades of the nineteenth century and across six genres, Articulating Bodies shows the mutability of the Victorians’ understanding of the human body’s centrality to identity—an understanding made mutable by changes in science, technology, religion, and class. It also demonstrates how that understanding changed along with developing narrative styles: as disability became increasingly medicalized and the soul increasingly psychologized, the mode of looking at deviant bodies shifted from gaping at spectacle to scrutinizing specimen, and the shape of narratives evolved from lengthy multiple-plot novels to slim case studies. Moreover, the book illustrates that, despite this overall linear movement from spectacle to specimen in literature and culture, individual texts consistently reveal ambivalence about categorizing the body, positioning some bodies as abnormally deviant while also denying the reality or stability of normalcy. Bodies in Victorian fiction never remain stable entities, in spite of narrative drives and the social, medical, or scientific discourses that attempted to control and understand them.

Blind Men Speaking of Colors: Paul's Recollection and the Self-Image of Early Thirteenth-Century Theologians

2014 ◽  
Vol 107 (4) ◽  
pp. 425-446
Author(s):  
Ayelet Even-Ezra
Keyword(s):  
Thirteenth Century ◽  
The Body ◽  
The Self ◽  
First Person ◽  
Knowledge Of God ◽  
The Third ◽  
Self Image ◽  
Third Person ◽  
The Subject ◽  
The Third Person

In the Second Epistle to the Corinthians, Paul writes: It is doubtless not profitable for me to boast. I will come to visions and revelations of the Lord: I know a man in Christ who fourteen years ago—whether in the body I do not know, or whether out of the body I do not know, God knows—such a one was caught up to the third heaven. And I know such a man—whether in the body or out of the body I do not know, God knows—how he was caught up into Paradise and heard inexpressible words, which it is not lawful for a man to utter. Of such a one I will boast; yet of myself I will not boast, except in my infirmities. (2 Cor 12:1–5 nkiv) This brief and enigmatic account is caught between multiple dialectics of power and infirmity, pride and humility, unveiling and secrecy. At this point in his letter Paul is turning to a new source of power in order to establish his authority against the crowd of boasting false apostles who populate the previous paragraphs. He wishes to divulge his intimate, occult knowledge of God, but at the same time keep his position as antihero that is prevalent throughout the epistle. These dialectics are enhanced by a sophisticated play of first and third person. The third person denotes the subject who experienced rapture fourteen years ago, while the first person denotes the narrator in the present. Only after several verses does the reader realize that these two are in fact the same person. This alienation allows Paul the intricate play of boasting, for “of such a one I will boast, yet of myself I will not boast.”

scholarly journals Maximalist Autofiction, Surrealism and Late Socialism in Mircea Cărtărescu’s Solenoid

2021 ◽  
Vol 10 ◽  
pp. RLS66-RLS87
Author(s):  
Doris Mironescu ◽  
Andreea Mironescu
Keyword(s):  
Cold War ◽  
Narrative Structure ◽  
The Self ◽  
Eastern European ◽  
The Novel ◽  
Post Cold War ◽  
The World ◽  
Late Socialism ◽  
East West

This article studies the fictionalization of late Eastern-European socialism in contemporary Romania, namely the literary projection of the 1980s in Mircea Cărtărescu’s autofictional novel Solenoid (2015). The novel is an ample, paranoid, metaphysical, and counterfactual autobiography that uses a late-communist backdrop to create a metaphorically skewed representation of the self and the world. In order to describe this narrative structure as an emergent subgenre of the postmodern maximalist novel, we coined the term ‘maximalist autofiction.’ We then discussed Cărtărescu’s option for maximalist autofiction and the effects this literary choice has had on his representation of Romanian late socialism. This option is influenced by the author’s biography, as well as by his own relationship with the memory burden of socialism in today’s post-Cold War world. Cărtărescu uses hyperbole, metaphysical parody, and a maximalist surrealist imagination to propel the discussion of socialism and cultural peripherality beyond the dated parameters of the East/West dichotomies.

scholarly journals Formasi Diskursus dan Subjektivitas dalam Novel The Water Knife Karya Paolo Bacigalupi : Kajian Arkeo-Genealogi Foucault

ATAVISME ◽  
2017 ◽  
Vol 20 (2) ◽  
pp. 138-154
Author(s):  
Budi Tri Santosa
Keyword(s):  
The Body ◽  
The Self ◽  
The Novel ◽  
Care Of The Self ◽  
Strategy Formation ◽  
Discursive Formation ◽  
Dominant Discourse ◽  
Intensive Control

This research is conducted to elaborate discursive formations, formation and surveillance of discursive subject, and the subject’s struggle towards the discourse in Paolo Bacigalupi’s The Water Knife. Data that is successfully collected are analyzed using Foucault’s archeo-genealogy method in two steps: archeology reading and genealogy reading. The result shows that there four formations forming a discourse, namely object, enunciative, conceptual, and strategy formation. Then, there are also four mechanisms of discursive formation, which are centering individual from society, training of control the activity of the body, testing individual’s body in the certain degree, and creating subject as body-machine of discourse. The mechanism of surveillance is done through three ways, they are hierarchial control, norm forming, and examination as intensive control. The effect of the dominant discourse is the rebellion against the discourse. There are two rebellion ways in the novel, namely parrhesia as the discourse discontinuity and the care of the self as means against the discourse.

scholarly journals Plotting Sensation Stories: Affect and Intuition in Short Sensation Fiction

2000 ◽  
pp. 41-58
Author(s):  
Brittany Roberts
Keyword(s):  
Charles Dickens ◽  
Short Story ◽  
Real Life ◽  
The Body ◽  
British Society ◽  
The Novel ◽  
Sensation Fiction ◽  
Commodity Culture ◽  
Mistaken Identity ◽  
Difficult Time

The British short story is still an understudied form in Victorian studies, and particularly so in studies of sensation fiction. Despite rich and growing scholarship on sensation fiction and its relationship with literary markets and commodity culture, scholars have a had a difficult time shaking off its enduring brand “the novel with a secret,” which has problematically discounted an incredible body of periodical fiction that falls “short” of our expectations about what this kind of fiction looks like. Short periodical works, however, are crucial if we are to understand the nexus of consumerism, mass marketing, social anxiety, and literary production that first peaked in the 1860s, things which have largely come to organise our understanding of what was so sensational about this historical moment in time. This essay compares short and long works from Wilkie Collins, Charles Dickens, Ellen Wood, and J.S. Le Fanu to explore how short stories could take up common themes and features of sensation novels (mistaken identity, unchecked passion, family secrets, shocking revelations, etc.) while also considering how formal considerations of length encouraged greater reliance on impressions and feelings to resolve conflicts in the text. These sensation stories so often suggest that deviance is best discerned through the body rather than the mind, and they create a path to pleasurable revelation where trusting one’s gut offers the most effective form of policing. These supposedly “unimportant” periodical works – sensational not only in the way they glutted periodicals with their sheer volume – could in turn promote suspicion and distrust in readers that were capable of damaging real-life bonds and relationships. Although short fiction could provoke anxieties about shifting roles and hierarchies in an increasingly fast-paced, automated British society, the tremendous visibility of the novel effectively shielded them from comparable criticism.

scholarly journals Embodying Asceticism: Masculinity, Manliness, and the Male Body in Muḥammad al-ʿArabī al-Darqāwī’s Majmūʿ Rasā⁠ʾil

2020 ◽  
Vol 4 (1-2) ◽  
pp. 128-154
Author(s):  
Brittany Landorf
Keyword(s):  
Natural Environment ◽  
The Body ◽  
The Self ◽  
Male Body ◽  
Material World ◽  
Hierarchical Relationship ◽  
The World ◽  
Gender Hierarchies ◽  
Corporeal Body

Abstract This study examines the logics of masculinity, manliness, and the corporeal male body in shaykh Muḥammad al-ʿArabī ibn Aḥmad al-Darqāwī al-Ḥasanī’s (d. 1239/1823) Majmūʿ Rasā⁠ʾil (“Collection of Epistles”). It argues that al-Darqāwī’s Rasā⁠ʾil constructed a prescriptive pious masculinity defined by mastery of the body and self, practical acts of ascetic devotion and humility, the hierarchical relationship between a Sufi master and his disciples, and the denigration of normative masculine virtues and behaviours. While al-Darqāwī instructed his followers to practice tajrīd, or divestment from the material world, and to eschew the habits of the men of murūʾa, this act did not seek to completely transcend the masculine body. Rather, his understanding of prescriptive pious masculinity was centred in embodied ascetic acts which created an analogous relationship between the physical act of purifying the corporeal body with the disciplining of the self (nafs). Mastering the body and the self, al-Darqāwī wrote, would lead to both growing near to God as well as, importantly, his Sufi followers’ mastery over other men, their wives and children, and even the natural environment. Al-Darqāwī’s Rasā⁠ʾil highlight the tension between Sufism as a spiritual and mystical path that seems to transcend gender hierarchies with its imbrication in epistemologies, ontologies, and cosmologies shaped by a masculine way of being in the world.

scholarly journals Anachronisms in Charles Dickens’s ‘Great Expectations’: A Case Study Based on Gerard Genette’s Structural Narratology: الإيقاع الزمني في رواية تشارلز ديكنز "آمال عظيمة" دراسة حالة في ضوء تقنيات السرد البنائي عند جيرارد جينيت

2021 ◽  
Vol 5 (14) ◽  
pp. 130-117
Author(s):  
Rajaa Radwan Hilles Rajaa Radwan Hilles
Keyword(s):  
Linear Order ◽  
Narrative Structure ◽  
Point Of View ◽  
Current Paper ◽  
First Person ◽  
Logical Relation ◽  
The Novel ◽  
Great Expectations ◽  
Sequence Of Events

This paper deals with the narrative order of time in Charles Dickens’s novel Great Expectations. Time is crucial in narratological structure as it establishes a logical relation for events in the narrative. Besides, a narrative develops its point of view through the voices in the narrative. This point of view is called focalization. This paper assumes that the sequence of events in Dickens’s Great Expectations does not follow a linear order and consequently, the point of focalization changes throughout the narrative. Accordingly, the current paper intends to investigate the order of narration in the novel. It intends to explore the ultimate thematic concern of the novel as well. The discussion will be in the light of Gerard Genette’s narratological structure and will be applied on Dickens’s Great Expectations. It is the 13th novel in his independent literary works. It has been published unillustrated in 36 weekly instalments in All the Year Round from 1860 through 1861. Then, it has been published in three volumes by Chapman & Hall in1861. The narrative voice has a great impact on the story’s timeline and on the readers because it is narrated in the first-person voice by the protagonist, Philip Pirrip. (Davis, 2007: P 126) The analysis is based on Genette’s theorization of time order in telling a story and communicating a broader point of view that the author intends to make throughout the whole narrative structure.

The Moonstone

2019 ◽  
Author(s):  
Wilkie Collins
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Wilkie Collins ◽  
The Novel ◽  
Sensation Fiction ◽  
Country House ◽  
Men And Women ◽  
The Moonstone

‘Who, in the name of wonder, had taken the Moonstone out of Miss Rachel's drawer?’ A celebrated Indian yellow diamond is first stolen from India, then vanishes from a Yorkshire country house. Who took it? And where is it now? A dramatist as well as a novelist, Wilkie Collins gives to each of his narratorsa household servant, a detective, a lawyer, a cloth-eared Evangelical, a dying medical manvibrant identities as they separately tell the part of the story that concerns themselves. One of the great triumphs of nineteenth-century sensation fiction, The Moonstone tells of a mystery that for page after page becomes more, not less inexplicable. Collins's novel of addictions is itself addictive, moving through a sequence of startling revelations towards the final disclosure of the truth. Entranced with double lives, with men and women who only know part of the story, Collins weaves their narratives into a web of suspense. The Moonstone is a text that grows imaginatively out of the secrets that the unconventional Collins was obliged to keep as he wrote the novel.

Framing travel and terrorism: Allegory in The Reluctant Fundamentalist

2017 ◽  
Vol 54 (3) ◽  
pp. 444-459 ◽  
Author(s):  
Mandala White
Keyword(s):  
Significant Contribution ◽  
Narrative Structure ◽  
The Body ◽  
The Novel ◽  
Political Issues ◽  
Frame Narrative ◽  
Global Space ◽  
Political Novel

In contrast to others who have read Mohsin Hamid’s The Reluctant Fundamentalist exclusively as a political novel, I argue that the novel’s most significant contribution to the body of post-9/11 literature is formal in nature. The novel indeed mobilizes political issues, but it achieves this by creating a series of allegories that centre on various forms of travel connected to the terrorism hinted at in the term “fundamentalist” in the title. These allegories, which I examine in the first part of this article, revolve around the interactions between the protagonist and those he encounters as he travels: the hosts and guests in the travel interactions function as allegories of different nations, and the relationships between nations within global space. However, while the novel’s travel allegories indeed raise political concerns, these are often conflicted and ambiguous owing to the unreliability of the narrator. Rather than selecting one of the unreliable perspectives brought forth by the travel allegories as “true”, I read them as part of a larger meta-allegorical project in which the narrative itself becomes an allegory of the uncertainties of the post-9/11 environment. In the second part of this article, I discuss this meta-allegorical project through an examination of the novel’s narrative structure, particularly its frame narrative which, I argue, provides a means for Hamid to allegorically explore the ways that permeable borders engender paranoia and fear of terrorism in the post-9/11 context.

Written on the Body: Ekphrasis, Perception and Deception in Heliodorus' Aethiopica

Ramus ◽  
2002 ◽  
Vol 31 (1-2) ◽  
pp. 111-125 ◽  
Author(s):  
Tim Whitmarsh
Keyword(s):  
Solid Material ◽  
The Body ◽  
The Self ◽  
Skin Colour ◽  
The Novel ◽  
White Space ◽  
Physical Form ◽  
The Moment

Novels have so much solid and monolithic bulk when they sit in a hand or on a shelf; inside, the pages are forests of symbols, as though even in books of such magnitude the sentences needed compression to fit on to pages. How different to poetic volumes, beguilingly slender, their pages brilliant with blank, white space, across which the spindly words stretch like gossamer. In terms of content, however, novels are rarely as monolithic as their physical form suggests. From earliest times since, the genre has dealt, centrally, with themes of metamorphosis, transubstantiation, the fundamentally permeable nature of the self. The solid material aspect of the novel often masks a central preoccupation with the fluidity of identity.In the compass of this article, I want to explore the central role accorded by Heliodorus, arguably the greatest of ancient novelists, to questions of perceptual deception, to seeing and seeming; and in particular, I want to explore the role of artworks within Heliodorus' narrative economy. The narrative turns, as is well known, on the amazing paradox of an Ethiopian girl born white. Charicleia's skin colour is a visual trap, an illusion. Given that her freakish pigmentation is the result of her mother's glancing at an art-work at the moment of conception, Charicleia can almost be said to be a walking ekphrasis, an embodiment of the illusory traps of the unreal.

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