Ubiquitous Paper in Charles Dickens’s Great Expectations and Our Mutual Friend
Date Issued
2016
Date
2016
Author(s)
Chin, Tien-Ai
Abstract
This thesis investigates the materiality and active agency of paper in two of Charles Dickens’s late novels, Great Expectations and Our Mutual Friend, from the perspective of New Materialism and thing theory. I argue that paper is the basis of narratives of both novels, and that it is an active actant which holds radiant agency to affect others with its materiality.
I first delineate the nineteenth-century discussion on paper with a focus on the physicality, manufacture, and proliferation of the material to demonstrate the Victorian anxiety about ubiquitous paper. In my first chapter, I examine humans’ misinterpretation of paper in Great Expectations and classify paper by different kinds of agency––unfolding, establishing and severing relations between actants, and fashioning the characters. I look at a few of the many paper products in the novel to see how paper exerts its material force. Chapter Two on Our Mutual Friend probes into the unsettling ubiquity of paper. I study young Harmon’s identity papers and Old Harmon’s presence on wills to argue that paper is everywhere means it continuously and unexpectedly bubbles up like spring water and overflows London, and it actively and persistently takes actions to propel the story, whether it is “hidden underground” or not.
Subjects
Dickens
paper
New Materialism
thing theory
actant
agency
materiality
Type
thesis
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