DEMYSTIFYING VICTORIAN SECRECY: THE PARADOXICAL REVELATIONS OF NEO-VICTORIAN FICTION

Abstract

This thesis adopts the “referential” reading approach, relying on the making (as opposed to merely the revealing) of connections between three pairs of texts—each pair including a Victorian novel and a neo-Victorian novel. The thesis will study Victorian sexual repression within Carmilla (1872) and Tipping the Velvet (1998), before looking at the treatment of “trauma culture” in She (1886) and The Siege of Krishnapur (1973). The study will proceed with a theoretical reclassification of The Picture of Dorian Gray (1890) and Dorian: An Imitation (2002). The study establishes the neo-Victorian inadequacy in disclosing the secrets produced by the Victorian structures of exclusion, eventually being disillusioned of its grand schemes for hermeneutical superiority. Instead, neo-Victorianism manages to give voice to the “Victorian other”—in particular, the “other” of sexual, racial or cultural out-groups—and creates its own voice only by re-establishing the Victorian’s very own master narratives, ideologies, and secrecy.