Matter of the Mind: Narrative's Knowledge and the Novel of Impressionability, 1897-present
Date of Award
Spring 2024
Document Type
Dissertation
Degree Name
Doctor of Philosophy (PhD)
Department
English Language and Literature
First Advisor
Yeazell, Ruth
Abstract
Matter of the Mind theorizes a distinctive genre of the long twentieth century, the “novel of impressionability.” On its surface, the novel of impressionability looks something like a bildungsroman, in that it centers the experiences of a young, somewhat naïve protagonist as she encounters the adult world. But there are crucial—and I argue, essential—differences. The bildungsroman is structured around the coming-of-age of its protagonist, historically a young man, who by the end of the novel has been assimilated into society, emerging as a mostly legible, recognizably realist social “type.” In the novel of impressionability, this maturation never wholly occurs, for while the protagonist’s experience is centered (and she is always, as I explore, female), large parts of her inner life remain inaccessible. With remarkable consistency, the novels examined in this dissertation avoid revealing precisely what the protagonist understands about her situation, thereby refusing any final word on who, meaningfully, she is. Far from transparent, the impressionable protagonist’s mind is at times almost obstructively embodied; this study traces how the re-instatement of material boundaries around the represented mind illuminates and reconfigures essential properties of narrative form and desire. The approach throughout is primarily narratological: close-readings of the featured novels identify and theorize the narrative strategies characteristic of the novel of impressionability—strategies that have evolved to emphasize epistemic uncertainty about the workings of the protagonist’s mind. At its most expansive, this work suggests that the figure of the impressionable protagonist plays a significant role in the novel’s re-negotiation of its relationship with reality in the wake of nineteenth-century realism. The vagueness and opaqueness of her mind are not merely indications of an evolving skepticism or self-consciousness about the boundaries of novelistic representation; rather, impressionability itself emerges as a site for the interrogation of these boundaries—of how much the novel can and should claim to know about the inner lives of its characters in the twentieth century and beyond.
Recommended Citation
Mundell-Perkins, Elizabeth, "Matter of the Mind: Narrative's Knowledge and the Novel of Impressionability, 1897-present" (2024). Yale Graduate School of Arts and Sciences Dissertations. 1270.
https://elischolar.library.yale.edu/gsas_dissertations/1270
