The subversive symbolic nature of abject, unromantic children in selected Victorian novels

Abstract

My thesis focuses on the literary symbolic value of what I term the unromantic, abject child figure in Victorian texts. The idea is largely derived from Julia Kristeva’s seminal work on the Abject. The thesis looks at how this figure is represented in Charles Dickens’s Nicholas Nickleby and Great Expectations; Emily Brontë’s Wuthering Heights; Charlotte Brontë’s Jane Eyre, and Victor Hugo’s The Man Who Laughs. I examine how the abject child in these novels is placed in juxtaposition to the ideal Romantic child (a largely symbolic concept popularised by the Romantic poets of the Regency era), and how that juxtaposition causes the children to function as symbolic literary devices that subvert Victorian expectations about proper childhood. The thesis argues that the authors deliberately used child protagonists in these selected texts, children who were anti- Romantic and anti-redemptive. They did so to both challenge the status quo of Romantic childhood (which often ignored the abject suffering of real Victorian children) and to present a subversion and blending of both polarities, creating child characters that become symbolic paradigms representing specific social issues. These textual children offer a new, more balanced view of childhood which does indeed, as the poets argued, contain the seeds of redemption for a fallen adult world. Contrary to Romantic ideals, the study argues that abject qualities become vital to the child figure’s potential for inspiring reform and redemption in a world scarred by the aftermath of the Industrial Revolution.