BIOGRAPHICAL SKETCH

Abstract

This dissertation examines the proliferation of weak or damaged male characters in the mid-nineteenth-century novel. A number of new literary types appeared on the scene in the novels of the 1850s, including the self-made man, the public schoolboy, and the muscular Christian. Because novelists sought to represent ideal types rather than idiosyncratic individuals, silent exemplars rather than effusive characters, authors needed a way of narrating the story of the hero without undermining his exemplarity. They did so by pairing the strong man with a weak friend who elicited emotions from the silent hero of these novels. The pairing of the strong man with the weak man led to a variety of narrative effects, including the juxtaposition of the ennui of the sickroom with active labour, and an emphasis on domesticity, sentimentality, and sympathy. The homoerotic friendships of the weak man and the strong man offered a queer perspective on the home and the increasingly industrialized workplace that sought to standardize men’s bodies. The novels of Charles Kingsley, Thomas Hughes’s Tom Brown’s Schooldays, Dinah Mulock Craik’s John Halifax, Gentleman, and Charlotte Yonge’s The Heir of Redclyffe all engage this narrative strategy. George