The Wound and the Show: Representations of Eccentricity in Sterne, Wordsworth, Lamb, and Dickens
This dissertation explores eccentrics as characters, and eccentricity as a stylistic signature, in the work of four writers between the mid-eighteenth and later nineteenth century: Laurence Sterne, William Wordsworth, Charles Lamb, and Charles Dickens. It takes off from the eccentric as a figure who the reader perceives as damaged or hurt in some way, yet who also conveys a peculiar kind of pleasure or a sense of reassurance, ambiguously situated between the character’s subjectivity and the reader’s experience. This ambiguity, I suggest, relates to an obliquity in the communication of feeling that renders the eccentric figure inaccessible to full sympathy or understanding, thereby guaranteeing a kind of immunity. The eccentric differs from the solitary or exile in that his estrangement depends upon a contingent social context or audience; I argue that such contingency is essential to the effect of the eccentric upon others, generating uncertainties about how far his predicament is generalisable. My account of why eccentricity matters is supported by two explanatory frameworks. In David Hume’s philosophy of self-experience, we see a shift from the emphasis of Lockean epistemology, which investigates the formation of patterns between self and world, toward a concern with trust and intersubjectivity. Hume’s philosophy of self-experience, preserved from inward collapse by the repetitions of custom, implies an eccentricity — an incommensurability of being — concealed only as long as uniform social conventions hold sway. I also draw upon psychoanalytic writings as offering a privileged later model for how to access unavailable feelings interpersonally. In particular, I use D. W. Winnicott’s account of how a child negotiates the impingement of external reality upon his inner world, which emphasises non-interpretability as a positive value, and offers illuminating analogies with the elusive integrity evoked by the eccentric figures on display. In each chapter, I interpret eccentricity as a feature of character and through formal signatures such as diminution, deflation, irony, or non-development. Sterne, a writer who troubles canonicity, forms a kind of backdrop to my thesis, fostering a legacy in the differently experimental forms which come afterwards. In the case of Sterne, I focus on nostalgia, as a term often used to detract from the value of a literary work, or to frame it as temporally or epistemologically anachronistic. Through readings of 'Tristram Shandy', I argue for a form of nostalgia which avoids either fetish or restorative longing, but instead acts as a tool to reinvent a more playful relationship with narrative teleology. I consider the critical debate over whether Wordsworth was highly sensitive or tone deaf to his readers, arguing that the poet was explicitly interested in disappointing them and that this interest encompasses a set of more general concerns about desire, purpose, and satisfaction. I explore anti-climax in a range of forms: formal, metrical, and psychological, and evoke anti-climax as an influence on poems such as ‘Old Man Travelling’, ‘The Sailor’s Mother’, and ‘Two April Mornings’, and on characters who repeatedly fail to get to where they are going, and who exemplify the poet’s own resistance to conventional satisfactions. I explore the contradictory attitudes to solitude expressed by Lamb’s 'Essays of Elia', reading solitude as both a wished-for-state and a concept under formation in his prose. I suggest that the aesthetic qualities of Lamb’s essays — their irony, playfulness, and emphatic slightness — stem from the essayist’s perceived inability to generate for himself the kind of self-enclosure envisioned by the Romantic lyric, reading the 'Elia' essays as experimental attempts to generate the right kind of solitude in the company of his readers. I offer an account of the difficulty of identifying with the ‘centres’ of Dickens’s novels and, contiguously, reflect on the often observed and often distracting liveliness of their eccentric characters. Through readings of 'The Pickwick Papers' and 'David Copperfield', I claim that the tics and antics of these eccentric figures can tell us something about where the pressures of Dickens’s writing really lie, and specifically the fears of radical isolation or difference which underpin the romantic closures of his plots.
Eccentricity, Psychoanalysis, Romanticism, Character, Play, Anticlimax, Nostalgia, William Wordsworth, Laurence Sterne, Charles Lamb, Charles Dickens
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