Frustrated Journeys: Social Immobility and the Aesthetics of Disappointment in Nineteenth-Century Fiction
Date of Award
Spring 2024
Document Type
Dissertation
Degree Name
Doctor of Philosophy (PhD)
Department
English Language and Literature
First Advisor
Bernard Yeazell, Ruth
Abstract
This dissertation tracks the trope of frustrated travel in a handful of nineteenth-century, mostly English novels and stories, exploring the connections between geographic and social mobility in a period of railway travel and mass emigration, when traditional distances were beginning to narrow. The dissertation attends to the role that travel—or lack of travel—plays in the Bildungsroman genre. Critics tend to think of the Bildungsroman as a genre that culminates in some kind of social or economic repositioning, generally in some degree of advancement. Conventionally, it is a journey, and not merely an allegorical one, that enables this movement and that catalyzes a protagonist's transition from adolescence to adulthood. Many of the protagonists examined in this dissertation, however, remain would-be travelers from first to last, dreaming of journeys that constantly elude them. Others get their journeys too briefly or too late, or get journeys that lead to dead ends. This dissertation examines the artful construction of narratives whose protagonists seem to be going nowhere in an age when everyone seems to be going somewhere. Most of the fictional journeys considered in this dissertation end not with a hero's character-deepening compromise with modernity, as Franco Moretti understands the telos of the Bildungsroman genre, but with a physical or spiritual death. In what follows, various mobility plots (including the country-to-the-city plot, the international-episode plot, and the Grand-Tour plot) are examined as frustrated Bildungsromane. There are of course various narrative traditions of travel in Western literature: the epic journey, the pilgrim’s progress, the chivalric quest, among others. But the phenomenon examined in this dissertation bears a negative relation to these modes of epic and restorative travel. In the plots considered, the sacred and historic destinations of literary tradition are cast further and further in the distance until finally disappearing: characters realize they'll never arrive.
Recommended Citation
Diaz de la Rocha, Daniel Benjamin, "Frustrated Journeys: Social Immobility and the Aesthetics of Disappointment in Nineteenth-Century Fiction" (2024). Yale Graduate School of Arts and Sciences Dissertations. 1302.
https://elischolar.library.yale.edu/gsas_dissertations/1302
