The one vs. the many : minor characters and the space of the protagonist in the novel

Nineteenth-Century Auction Narratives and Compassionate Reading

Through a reading of C. L. R. James's Mariners, Renegades and Castaways (a reading of Melville's Moby Dick, which James wrote while imprisoned on Ellis Island in 1952 awaiting deportation hearings), this essay examines James's effort to rethink – through an anti-colonial and Marxist lens – the political limits of the novel form in general and the realist novel in particular as representational regimes. The essay begins by examining how James uses his own status as a political alien not merely to ‘reinterpret’ Moby Dick but more importantly to (re)tell what he claims was the novel's intended but ultimately ‘untold’ central story – i.e. that of the crew – a collectivity of stateless migrants and refugees labouring in the shadow of US Empire. That these stories remained untold, for James, was not merely a political choice but a formal one – that is, these experiences of migrant labour and collectivity haunt the ideological and representational limits of the realist novel. As such, I argue, ‘retelling’ these ...

At the formal limits

Those moments in Moby-Dick where Ishmael directly addresses the possibility of an uprising against Ahab may not account for the full extent of worker unrest aboard the Pequod. While Ishmael is ready to contemplate the ofﬁcers and crew joining forces to restore the compact Ahab has breached in his usurpation of the ship's lawful purpose, he seems far less comfortable with the prospect of spontaneous revolutionary action on the part of the crew. This essay highlights subtle connections between the inset narrative of Steelkilt's mutiny in \"The Town-Ho's Story\" (ch. 54) and the frame narrative to suggest that Ishmael might be using the self-enclosed, safely distanced space of a separate ship to tease out a \"darker thread\" of labor tension in the Pequod's history. These connections also shed light on the shadowy member of Ahab's crew known as Bulkington, whose career aboard the Pequod is submerged in Ishmael's narration, but whose portrait offers striking parallels with Steelkilt's. By making Ishmael's coverage of labor conflict hesitant and uneven, Melville demonstrates how the egalitarian ideals of Jacksonian democracy made it difﬁcult to acknowledge the reality of divided class interests in the United States.

"The Town-Ho's Story," Bulkington, and Moby-Dick's "Darker Thread" of Labor Tension

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From the Corners of the Russian Novel: Minor Characters in Gogol, Goncharov, Tolstoy, and Dostoevsky

The main character of Charlotte Brontë’s Villette (1853), Lucy Snowe, suffers from a famously incomprehensible psychological trauma. Like Ginevra, readers find her “so peculiar and so mysterious.” Villette is often read as a surreal fairy tale or a protomodernist experimental narrative, but I want to argue that its innovative writing derives from what Leila May has called the “political and economic forces of materiality” affecting Lucy’s conception of herself (60). Lucy is a female migrant caregiver, a situation that generates a crisis about identity, vulnerability, and language, and in this article I draw on recent sociological studies to show that her “mysterious” psychological state actually conforms to well-known conditions among this vulnerable population. If Lucy is in many ways typical of the migrant caregiver, however, she is not just one among many such subjects; she is unique in that she is a fictional construct developing her own narrative, and that position allows us to recognize just how the interiority so fundamental to the novel form depends on class privilege. A subject who experiences her emotions as exploited for money, altered by migration, publicly erased, or privately fetishized cannot offer those feelings as unproblematic truths. Rather, I argue, the strategies that allow Lucy to survive her employment leave traces in language, and in this article, I show how Villette develops an alternative form of narrative. Villette is unusual, but it is not alone. It is, rather, a crucial early narrative of this emerging sector of the global economy, and it can help us understand how to read other Victorian caregivers. The factors that afflict Lucy are actually widespread in Victorian fiction, which is full of governesses, companions, and nurses—people who give care for money without necessarily caring much at all, like Miss Briggs in William Makepeace Thackeray’s Vanity Fair, Miss Macnulty in Anthony Trollope’s

The one vs. the many : minor characters and the space of the protagonist in the novel

Citations

Nineteenth-Century Auction Narratives and Compassionate Reading

At the formal limits

"The Town-Ho's Story," Bulkington, and Moby-Dick's "Darker Thread" of Labor Tension

From the Corners of the Russian Novel: Minor Characters in Gogol, Goncharov, Tolstoy, and Dostoevsky

Why Lucy Doesn't Care: Migration and Emotional Labor in Villette

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