Scenic views and paternalistic obligations : depictions of landscape in the Victorian realist novel
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Thesis Ph. D. Michigan State University. English 2015.%%%%With the many details that fill Victorian realist novels, the frequent descriptions of scenic country views that interrupt and halt the action of the narrative could be dismissed as part of realism’s illusion of comprehensive and objective reporting. However, I suggest that the realist novel uses landscape depictions as a vehicle for exploring the tensions between its wish to relieve the suffering of the rural poor and its desire to preserve the countryside as a site to be enjoyed by the privileged. By representing the countryside in terms of landscape, the novels showcase what is pleasing about land that has not been developed for purposes of industry, yet landscape, as a representative and interpretative mode, is grounded in ideologies that validate and reinforce the oppressive power structures that are largely responsible for the hardships that the novels wish to alleviate. I argue that the realist novel attempts to solve this paradox by shifting the way landscape is represented and interpreted, thus changing the way the countryside itself is perceived, in order to posit a new understanding of the relationship between social leadership and control over the land. This project examines how mid-century realist novels employ landscape as a means of linking the pleasures of land ownership with a paternalistic obligation to care for the local poor in an attempt to solve the problems of rural poverty and social instability. These novels are sympathetic to the plight of the poor, yet they are also invested in the preservation of the country estate, not only in terms of maintaining the existing physical structures that make up an estate and its grounds, but also with regard to its roles as an institution of land ownership and as a seat of political power. I suggest that this problem drives how land is represented in many realist novels: by depicting the enjoyment of landscape as being linked with a paternalistic responsibility to provide for the poor, the novels attempt to mitigate the social problems of the countryside, which are rooted in the landholding institution, while still preserving the relative sociopolitical stability provided by the landholding model and the accompanying aesthetic properties of landed estates and undeveloped countryside. Chapter one examines Jane Austen’s Mansfield Park as an example of how the landed gentry’s desire to manipulate the structure of private land through “improvements” resulted in their virtual appropriation of all open lands in the countryside. In chapter two, I claim that Dinah Craik’s John Halifax, Gentleman and Charles Dickens’s Bleak House depict the estate as a reward for good behavior as opposed to an indicator of lineage, and the novels work to change the meaning of landscape by infusing the enjoyment of scenic views with a sense of paternalistic duty; however, they are unsure of how to handle the large manor house, both as a physical entity in which the characters live and as a symbol of the estate in general. The…
Fetched live from OpenAlex and de-inverted. Abstracts are not stored in this database: the inverted indexes are 8.6 GB of the frame’s 9.3 GB of text, and the host has 13 GB free.
How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.009 | 0.018 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.007 | 0.003 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.003 |
| Research integrity | 0.001 | 0.004 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.004 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".