Milan Terlunen will examine how narrative form can serve as a vehicle for antagonism. As twist narratives, where two distinct plots sit side by side, developed into a well-known technique in the course of the nineteenth century, writers experimented with their power for dramatizing social antagonisms. In Terlunen’s case studies, Heinrich von Kleist's "The Marquise of O..." (1808) and Honoré de Balzac's "Sarrasine" (1830), the twist is connected with an act of sexual violence. Kleist's story reveals that its inexplicably pregnant protagonist was raped while unconscious by a man with whom she has, disturbingly, fallen in love. Balzac's story reveals that a woman character is in fact a castrato, leading her lover to attempt to kill her. Terlunen will demonstrate that these twists also mobilize class antagonisms between the aristocracy and military in Kleist and between Parisian high society and Italian artists in Balzac.
Caitlin Anderson will examine the antagonism of Alec toward Tess in Thomas Hardy’s Tess of the D’Urbervilles (1891) with the lens of Critical Plant Studies. Anderson will suggest that in his antagonisms of Tess, Alec simultaneously abuses the natural world. The Victorians loved to grow flowers in gardens and pluck them for bouquets in the context of the systematic colonial ecological abuse of uprooting flowers from foreign soil and growing and uprooting them in British lands for decoration. With scenes such as Tess’ rape being preceeded by her being lost in the woods, the scene of Sorrow being buried in the ground, and Tess finally finding peace while sleeping outside in the natural world, Hardy’s novel depicts antagonism in which the natural world shares the abuses levied against Tess until she can only find solace in nature, her partner in gender- and class-based abuses.
Dara Rossman Regaignon will examine the gendered and racialized antagonism of Annette Beveridge’s writings in order to draw connections between middle-class English feminists’ advocacy for the rights of liberal individualism, their racialized and classed hierarchies of cultures, and their essentialist positing of “womanhood” as persistently vulnerable. On March 6, 1883, the Calcutta newspaper The Englishman published a letter by Beveridge, about which scholars and biographers have typically expressed surprised regret. Writing to oppose the Ilbert Bill’s removal of racial discrimination—which would allow Indian magistrates to try white people in criminal courts—Beveridge seeks to distinguish herself from the racism of previous correspondents. Regaignon will show not only that Beveridge’s feminist activism and scholarship are linked to her racism, but that both are motivated by a gendered racial hierarchy in which white women must save brown women from brown men.
Riya Das will examine the troubled-yet-effective power of antagonism in loosening gender structures in fin-de-siècle New Woman novels. Das will suggest that the New Woman entered the professional world of the British Empire by rejecting the domestic ideal of the sympathetic, friendly woman. The New Woman desired intellectual freedom and financial security beyond the Victorian tradition of marriage and motherhood, and consequently ended up antagonizing both conventional gender norms and women from the laboring class. Hadria, the artistically inclined heroine in Mona Caird’s novel The Daughters of Danaus (1894), for instance, abandons her children to pursue music, and Rhoda Nunn, in George Gissing’s The Odd Women (1893) categorically refuses to help working-class women. Exploring these narratives along with social commentary on gender in the British Imperial context by John Stuart Mill and John Ruskin, Das will demonstrate the antagonistic self-fashioning of the New Woman.
Together, these presentations will demonstrate nineteenth-century literary representations of antagonism in various European and imperial/colonial contexts, and widen the critical view of antagonism as a social and narrative element.