Affective Contradictions of Subject-Formation and the Bildung Paradox in the Victorian Bildungsroman

Date

2026-1-29

Author

İpekçi, Yeşim

Metadata

Show full item record

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License.

Item Usage Stats

1113
views

0
downloads

Cite This

This study explores the Victorian bildungsroman through the concept of affective masochism to examine the emotional mechanisms behind the subject-formation in the selected novels. Literary criticism on the Victorian bildungsroman has traditionally situated the bildung ideal within a conciliatory paradigm and positioned it in contrast to the failure paradigm of the antibildungsroman. This thesis argues that a reconsideration of the Victorian bildung ideal through the contemporary accounts of masochism and the affective dispositions involved in the bildung process problematizes both the process of subject-formation and such generic classifications typically ascribed to the Victorian iterations of the genre. It argues that the Victorian novel of formation incorporates a paradoxical, masochistic structure in which self-realization depends upon emotional submission, expressed through internalization of power and transformation of pain into virtue. Reading the paradoxes of the Victorian bildung ideal by integrating affect theory, psychoanalysis, and poststructuralist ideas, this thesis re-evaluates the Victorian examples of the genre in dialogue with the ideals of Victorian bourgeois morality and the distinct affects embedded within them. Within this theoretical framework, the thesis analyzes Charlotte Brontë‘s Jane Eyre (1847), Charles Dickens‘s Great Expectations (1861), and George Eliot‘s The Mill on the Floss (1860), and demonstrates that the protagonists‘ pursuit of autonomy is inseparable from the masochistic pain/pleasure of affective subjectivization, underlining how the Victorian fiction processes liberal individualism as both an ethical ideal and affective hegemony. Accordingly, the thesis situates the Victorian bildungsroman within a new paradigm that reconfigures bildung as an affective process rather than a linear or teleological narrative of reconciliation between individual and society and reveals the simultaneous co-presence of conciliation and failure or self-realization and self-negation paradigms in the Victorian bildungsroman.

Subject Keywords

Victorian Bildungsroman, Affective masochism, Subject-formation, Victorian bourgeois morality, Jane Eyre, Great Expectations, The Mill on the Floss

URI

https://hdl.handle.net/11511/118375

Collections

Graduate School of Social Sciences, Thesis