Date of Graduation

1996

Document Type

Thesis

Abstract

Published during the years that mark the English working-class movement known as Chartism, Thomas Carlyle's French Revolution (1837), Charles Dickens' Barnaby Rudge (1841), and Elizabeth Gaskell's Mary Barton (1848) all present a picture of social revolt. The scenes depicted in these narratives (all of which are based upon historical events--respectively, the French Revolution, the 1780 Gordon Riots in London, and the Chartist rebellion after the failure of the first petition in 1839) strongly suggest that the act of social revolt stems not so much from radical strategies of political action as from the proliferation of a set of dangerous "passions" and behaviors, or pathologies. Throughout these texts we see a common image associated with revolt--the image of a pathological "social body." As such, the texts encapsulate a mode of thinking and speaking about the working-class population, especially its moral and physical condition, made understandable through a discourse of social "health." A critical analysis of these texts begins with the "pathological" as an interpretive framework to the literary text. The pathological itself is a function of a social discourse that sought to know the population through projecting a regulated body and to establish rationales for putting into practice official measures for administering remedies to the unregulated. These measures can be seen to operate in the profession of mental health medicine and in the movement for public health, both of which are rooted in middle-class moral and domestic values and in the preeminence of disciplined individuality. Not immune to social discourse, the literary texts narrate the pathological. They likewise suggest remedies that demand greater "moral management" (a term used in Victorian psychiatry). Carlyle's French Revolution presents a history "written in hysterics"; Barnabi Rudge depicts the riots of 1780 as a "moral plague" that emerges through the neglect of an unregulated social body; and Gaskell's Mary Barton shows the essence of working-class politics to rise from pathologies distinct to an alienated laboring population. These narratives suggest, through the discursive framework erected in each, the need in society for social intervention and rehabilitation.

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