Sensational confessions: Disruptions of form and epistemology in Victorian narrative

"Sensational Confessions" explores the relationship between confession and narrative in Victorian fiction and poetry, more specifically the ways in which moments of confession disrupt generic and formal conventions. Western culture has long regarded confession, religious and secular, as an essential form of self-expression. But people can make false confessions or be forced to confess; the act of confessing thus often unsettles notions of truth, authenticity, and reality, and, as a result, poses myriad problems for narrative representation. I argue that confession frustrates narrative efforts toward resolution, rendering the conclusions of the texts I analyze fractured and unsettling. In chapters on 1860s Victorian sensation novels, George Eliot's "The Lifted Veil" and Henry James's The Aspern Papers, Charlotte Bronte's Villette, and Robert Browning's The Ring and the Book, I pursue two related lines of inquiry. First, I explore the historical and cultural contexts of confession in the nineteenth century: how developments in law, religion, and medicine shaped confessional acts, and how writers used fictional scenes of confession to explore problems of truth and subjectivity. Second, I examine confession's peculiarly disruptive effect on form and genre. Although sensational confessions seem to represent an alternative form of knowledge, they also expose the texts' dominant epistemological frameworks as inadequate for uncovering truth and producing knowledge. This incommensurability of narrative and epistemological frameworks frustrates the texts' efforts to achieve resolution. While my project is informed by existing studies of confession, gender, and sexuality, my central interest is in questions of genre and narrative; consequently, my work engages in "activist formalism"---renewed interest in historically alert approaches to narratological, formal issues. This project also joins recent discussions of Victorian epistemology. The appearance of confession in these texts points to the anxiety generated by the pursuit of objectivity and disinterested forms of knowledge---a reassertion, that is, of the personal in the face of a larger cultural movement away from interested modes of knowledge. In addition to reframing critical discussions of realism, narrative, and genre in nineteenth-century novels and narrative poetry, my work contributes to ongoing critical reevaluation of nineteenth-century realism and its relationship to other genres.