Relegated relations: The British aunt in the nineteenth-century fiction

The British aunt, peering disapprovingly from the margins of families, society, and literary imagination, mediates between opposing generations, domains, cultures, and conceptions of womankind. Aunts are in plentiful supply in 19th-century literature, playing important pedagogical roles, and standing as tropes for the most prominent Victorian genre of all: indeed, the proper place and status of both aunt and novel is continually debated. Both, often scorned as socially useless, can be tedious; both illuminate culture apart from the world's "real" action. Both, constructed around relationship, represent the intergenerational family and primary versus secondary stories. Both are social nexuses within a broad cultural setting. Finally, both disappear with the advent of Modernism.;Chapter 4 considers popular novels by Margaret Oliphant, Mary Braddon, Anthony Trollope, and Wilkie Collins featuring financially shrewd, literary, and independent aunts. New Woman antecedents are ridiculed, yet traditional women are simultaneously exposed as victims. In Chapter (5), fin-de-siecle authors Saki, Oscar Wilde, and P. G. Wodehouse celebrate the aunt's disappearance from literature in camp genres that signal the perceived obsolescence of traditional cultural mores, imperialism, and the Victorian novel itself.;This study examines aunts at five cultural moments. In Chapter 1, Pride and Prejudice and Mansfield Park show Jane Austen using the oblique shaft of auntly connexion to worry and pry loose the vertical relationships of traditional biological descent that structure her novelistic families. Early stockbreeding texts corroborate a radical Austenian eugenics of natural association. In Chapter 2, Elizabeth Gaskell's Mary Barton uses working-class aunts as both metaphors and tools for enduring and solving the crises accompanying the sociological shift from farm to factory. Chapter 3 examines the stereotypically repellent midcentury bodies of myth-like ogress aunts from Charlotte Bronte's Jane Eyre, Charles Dickens' Bleak House, and Elizabeth Barrett-Browning's Aurora Leigh. These aunts, sites of conflict and hostility, reflect Nonconformist religious repression, the demographic preponderance of single women, and emerging feminist ideals.