Collapsing the Secret Self: Thackeray's The History of Pendennis as a Performative Parody

<p>By collapsing the distinctions between private and public as he presents individual interiority as yet another performance, Thackeray’s <em>The History of Pendennis</em> undercuts disciplinary individualism, so that performances are not the product of social regulation but rather are as genuine as any presumed private thoughts or feelings. <em>Pendennis</em> actively performs the dissolution of interiority, as it thematically and stylistically enacts the awkwardness of genuine affectation as a routine and unavoidable reality of modern life. Reveling in the discomfort that accompanies the absence of secrecy, Thackeray parodies the privileging of secrecy and one’s interior self that pervades the Bildung genre he has appropriated. Just as Pen’s performances have an unrelenting presence in almost every scene, Thackeray similarly infuses the narrative with gestures and speeches to the reader, as if the novel itself is a performed event. While novels of interiority posit these gestures as symptoms of an otherwise unarticulated emotion or thought, <em>Pendennis </em>incorporates apostrophes to the reader as constitutive elements of an adaptive, social model of character, which reiterate the universality of human experience rather than privilege the individual reader. In the world of <em>Pendennis</em>, there is no room for a compromise between a public and private self, but the whole self – character, narrator, reader, and author – is subsumed by the performativity of the modern world, which dissembles secrets and replaces them with an insistent display of affectation as the only authenticity to which we have access.</p>

Name thesis:degree_name

MA English

Level thesis:degree_level

Thesis

Discipline thesis:degree_discipline

English

Year dc:date.available

2014

Author dc:creator

• Freire, Rachel

Contributors dc:contributor

• Dr. Jonathan Farina
• Dr. Arundhati Sanyal

• Victorian
• Individualism
• Interiority
• Nineteenth-century
• Sociability
• Epistemology
• Literature in English, British Isles
• Performance Studies

Repository record dc:identifier

https://scholarship.shu.edu/dissertations/1968

OAI identifier oai:identifier

oai:scholarship.shu.edu:dissertations-2983