QUEEN: The Remaking of Character in the Modernist Novel

<p>Virginia Woolf famously declared that, “on or about 1910 human character changed,” prompting her to call for a change in the way novelists depicted character. I study one such character, Queen Victoria, to trace how Woolf and James Joyce reimagined how to depict a historical figure in a novel. What is Queen Victoria in the Modernist novel and why does she begin to appear? She is a symptom and symbol of a problem the Modern writers were trying to work out. Despite having an ambivalent or even hostile relationship with the Queen, she is one of the most represented historical figures in Joyce’s and Woolf’s work. Although a historian, I study Lytton Strachey’s genre-bending biography of the Queen because it models what Woolf and Joyce were doing with the Queen as they imagine what the Queen thinks to suggest who she might be. In comparing the fiction writers with the historian, I also analyze what remained of the generic boundaries of fiction and biography in the early 20 th century. Woolf, Joyce and Strachey were writing during the intersection of two significant literary periods at a time of tremendous change in the way literature and biography were being written and I believe examination of Queen Victoria’s character can teach us something about the nature of the Modern character which has not been studied before. Through their writing, I show how those three writers explore what E.M. Forster calls “the hidden life” of the Queen’s character. Instead of representing the world, I show how those Modern writers relied upon the Queen as a tool to present the “problem” of representing the world. In their interrogation, everything was up for reconsideration, what it meant to be a woman, wife, mother, nation, citizen and even a Queen.</p>

Name thesis:degree_name

English, PhD

Level thesis:degree_level

Open Access Dissertation

Discipline thesis:degree_discipline

School of Arts and Humanities

Year dc:date.available

2025

Author dc:creator

• Wilson Green, Ann L.

Contributors dc:contributor

• Joshua Goode
• Kent Puckett

• Character
• James Joyce
• Lytton Strachey
• Modern novel
• Queen Victoria
• Virginia Woolf
• English Language and Literature
• History

Repository record dc:identifier

https://scholarship.claremont.edu/cgu_etd/993

OAI identifier oai:identifier

oai:scholarship.claremont.edu:cgu_etd-2015