Outlaws, Outcasts, and Criminals of the British Novel, 1800-1850

Abstract/nOutlaws, Outcasts, and Criminals of the British Novel, 1800-1850/nBy/nRuth Elizabeth Baldwin/nDoctor of Philosophy in English/nUniversity of California, Berkeley/nProfessor Ian Duncan, Chair/n"Outlaws, Outcasts, and Criminals" provides a new account of the nineteenth-century historical novel by using the category of outlawry to illuminate the transitional period between Romantic and Victorian literary regimes. I argue that any account of the late eighteenth- and nineteenth-century novel must theorize the crucial link between outlawry and the novel form. Far from being a product of history, crime in these novels activates the category of history on which they depend. As the novel develops, the link between crime and history becomes an essential structural part of the genre. This recognition enables me to forge new and surprising connections between the Romantic outlaw as instituted by Schiller's The Robbers, the outlaw anti-heroes of Walter Scott's historical novels, the historical criminals of W.H. Ainsworth's "Newgate" novels, the female social climbers of Jane Austen's novels, and the scandalous anti-heroines of Thackeray's Vanity Fair and of M.E. Braddon's sensation novels./nKey to the developments I am tracing is a new kind of anti-hero made possible by the early nineteenth-century novel's incorporation of other, non-novelistic genres. During a period when the novel was becoming a force of cultural normativity, outlaw figures emerged from the margins of the plot to assume a central role. Unlike the Gothic villain or Byronic anti-hero, who are solitary outcasts, these anti-heroes represent an alternative, rival, outlaw society, from which they colonize the central plot. I examine the structural tension between the ostensible hero, the outlaw anti-hero, and the actual antagonists in Scott's Ivanhoe and Rob Roy. These cases are particularly telling, as Scott's system of history almost always focuses on groups that are, in some sense, outside of the law: Jacobites and members of the proscribed clan MacGregor in Rob Roy; Robin Hood's band, the disinherited Ivanhoe, the Jews Isaac and Rebecca, and even the illegitimate regime of Prince John and his knights in Ivanhoe. The dynamic outlaw energy that originates with Rob Roy and with Robin Hood infects the entire narrative and symbolic system. In my final chapter, I examine the transformation of the new anti-hero into an anti-heroine--a rival to the protagonist of the traditional marriage plot. Ambitious lower-class women threaten the social order in their attempts to maneuver into high society through marriage. As the anti-hero becomes feminized and infects the domestic novel, novelists change their narrative strategies in subtle and unexpected ways. Through the development of free indirect style, affective withdrawal, and strategic reticence, Austen, Thackeray, and Braddon develop new ways of dealing with the anti-social threats to their novel's marriage plots. The outlawry that I argue is so crucial to the development of the novel form thus brings about important changes in narrative technique./nBetween Scott's death and the establishment of the novel as the dominant literary form by mid century, the genre was in flux: novelists interpolated non-canonical historical sources, ballads, broadsides, chapbooks, plays, and other ephemera, while collaborating with illustrators and engaging with theatrical and other adaptations of their work, to an unprecedented degree. This experimentation develops out of Scott's use of ballads and other popular forms in his historical novels. In this decade or so of generic instability the novel is actively reimagined as a locus of cultural consolidation. The past becomes intelligible through the medium of the historical novel, rather than through primary historical materials and artifacts, or historiography itself. Ainsworth's Jack Sheppard (1839), with its many unacknowledged allusions to and incorporation of earlier renditions of the eighteenth-century criminal's biography, marks a turning point in the long history of Sheppard narratives. Echoing the seriality of Sheppard's crimes and escapes, the novel's serial form provides a mechanism through which his crimes pervade not only the story world of the novel but the real social world of Ainsworth's readers.

Advisor: Duncan, Ian