Abstract

This dissertation treats the subject of "Birth and the Novel." Its basic premise is that authors of the novel often retell their own lives in order to correct the past by mastering certain traumatic events. In doing so, they resemble the protagonists of their novels who often engage in versions of Freud's "Family Romance" in order not to face the hard reality of their existences. Thus, in addition to discussing birth images, this study also addresses a number of related issues, including paternity , conception , education , and birth into language . Nomination is another related topic that traverses many of the others just mentioned. The first chapter, on Marivaux's La Vie de Marianne, examines the resemblance between its heroine and the unpedigreed genre of the novel. The chapter includes close readings of the double births of the manuscript from a hole in a wall and of Marianne from a carriage where her parents have just been killed by bandits. The origins of both are equally problematic because equally untraceable. The chapter on Mary Shelley's Frankenstein investigates connections between the author's biography and the birth of her "hideous progeny." The chapter on Dickens's Great Expectations focuses on Pip's act of self-naming in the opening scene--an act that seems to suggest a belief in the ability of the individual to give birth to himself and become the author of his own expectations. The chapter on Joyce's A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man generally addresses the subject of the birth of the artist, although it also focuses on the scene in which Stephen reads the word "Faetus" carved into a desk at his father's old school