RACE, GENDER, AND CLOSURE IN LATE VICTORIAN FICTION

Abstract

While the study of closure in Victorian fiction has been marked by astute interventions in gender theory, these insights often fail to take an intersectional approach, particularly when it comes to the racial dynamics of the expanding British Empire. Race, Gender, and Closure in Late Victorian Fiction studies how ethnicity, foreignness, and race complicate our preconceived notions of gendered closure that often posit the narrative options for women as a moralistic system that rewards with marriage or punishes with death. With the expansion of the Empire, the Victorian Novel expanded its ability to depict foreign space; however, our understanding of gendered closure has not taken a sufficient correlative leap to include women of color or ethnic bodies that exist outside of the purview of the British domestic sphere. By analyzing the closural ends for English characters in foreign space, the conclusions of hybrid characters and hybridized space, and the fates of characters and spaces subject to imperial control, this project aims to further develop our understanding of narrative closure for Victorian fiction, ultimately demonstrating the limitations of the marriage/death binary for female characters. Race, Gender, and Closure in Late Victorian Fiction shows the rhetorical violence of being forgotten within the text yet reveals the ways in which these lapses express how the line between Victorian and Modernist genre expectations blur, ultimately demonstrating the ideological instabilities of what we perceive as Victorian narrative mainstays of closure themselves.