Course info
LITC0033--STRAYS: Lost & Found in the Nineteenth-Century European Novel (21/22)
Strays--foundlings, bastards, foster-children, runaways, and street
children--have obsessed the modern European novel. From the expansion of
the novel’s place in the literary market in the late seventeenth century
and especially with the rise of the bourgeois reading public during the
Englightenment and Revolutionary era, the novel has taken form around
losing and finding children and adolescents. The novel’s families seem
almost fated to be broken. The novel notoriously postpones its promised
scenes of reunions between parents who have lost children and their
progeny. Marivaux’s Marianne never does get her reunion. Hardy’s Mayor
of Casterbridge discovers the child he hopes to reclaim as his own to be
actually the offspring of another man. Some parents, like Esther’s mother
in Bleak House, are divided about what finding their lost child might do to
their reputation or social prospects. Others, like Huck Finn, are depicted
by their novels as better off without their abusive blood relatives in the
picture. More paradoxically, the carelessness of parents will only rarely
be compensated in nineteenth-century novels by a narratorial presence who
prioritizes familial unity. Instead, broken bonds and lost connections are
privileged as places from which the novel enlists its readers in critical
perspectives on society, the family, and state institutions. Foundling
hospitals, orphanages, reform schools, and prisons populate novelistic
worlds where readers are enlisted into charitable perspectives, but often
with little more than lipservice given to social change. Who do these
novels represent and how? What kind of straying are we as
twenty-first-century readers invited to identify with and to what extent
are we asked to invest in the impossibility of reconnection? Our course
will take up a collection of novels (and one autobiographical work) that
are as likely to defer closure as to offer happy ends. Students will be
encouraged to read beyond our chosen syllabus, both in historical and
literary texts, as we concentrate--in the first iteration of this course in
Topics in the Modern Novel--on the period between 1789 and 1900. Readings
will include historical research on foundling hospitals and orphanages,
adoption and foster-family policies, and the theorization of legitimacy.
The novel’s designations of ‘nobody’s children’ and ‘blank
children’ will invite us to explore the tensions in social and literary
texts that contained and displayed those who are represented there as
unwanted and unclaimed.Feuerbach’s powerful analysis of the life of the
abused and abandoned Kaspar Hauser will let us think about the
Enlightenment theorization of the child without a past. Oliver Twist by
Dickens will let us explore the policies of mid-nineteenth-century England
in a broad historical context as well as invite us to visit the Foundling
Hospital near UCL and discover their and collections and related archives.
The most popular novel of the nineteenth century in France, Eugène Sue’s
Mysteries of Paris (of which students will be required to read the first
third of the new Penguin translation) will let us follow several strays
from their lives on the street in and out of institutions such as prisons,
brothels, factories, and asylums while also thinking about how the
novel’s very success depends on their waywardness. Jane Austen’s
Mansfield Park will give us a unique perspective on how the bourgeoisie--as
well as its predilections in reading and playacting--uses the plights of
unwanted children as a touchstone for its fantasies of proper family life.
To do this, we will also take up the play by Kotzebue that the characters
of that text prepare to stage, Lovers’ Vows (Das Kind der Liebe), about a
so-called ‘natural child’ and his adulteress mother. Next, two short
novels will frame antipodal pathways for “fallen women” and their
illegitimate offspring: Gaskell’s Ruth and Huysmans’s Marthe. Finally,
the most popular children’s novel in French history, Hector Malot’s
Sans famille, will set us on the roads of Europe with itinerant musicians
and foundlings.
Course contacts
Tutor
JM
Course Administrator
SW