Passionate for truth : the emergence of the verse-novel in the Victorian era

Abstract

This thesis explores the rise and fall of the verse-novel, an early Victorian literary genre. With the novel becoming the dominant genre in the literary market, poetry was relegated to a prestigious but marginalized form of writing. In the struggle between these two genres, the verse-novel emerged and was, for a brief period of time, embraced by some poets and novelists. In this thesis, I argue that the emergence of the form is not a compromise between poetry and the novel. Rather, the verse-novel is a generic critique of the novel’s inability to represent moral truth and instil in the reader proper moral values.

The first chapter looks at the origins of the verse-novel by examining both Anna Seward’s Louisa: a Poetical Novel in Four Epistles and Lord Byron’s Don Juan. Seward’s generically self-conscious work demonstrates the inherent tension in casting a novelistic plot in poetic form. This tension was later exploited by Lord Byron in Don Juan, where humour is used to expose the novel’s generic flaw of representing the plausible over the possible. The novel’s tendency to represent the plausible – i.e. the self-consistent simulation of reality – is in conflict with its purpose of morally educating the reader.

The second chapter examines Elizabeth Barrett Browning’s verse-novel Aurora Leigh to further develop my argument that the verse-novel is a generic critique of the eighteenth and early nineteenth-century novel. Verse as a medium of writing is capable of this generic critique because of its properties: reflexivity, delineation, multi-voicedness and intertextuality. Each of these properties helps to expose the problems of the realist novel and how it is incapable of representing moral truths.

The third chapter presents an analysis of novelistic conventions in George Meredith’s Modern Love. I show that novelistic conventions impart values of the dominant ideology, particularly concerning the “Woman Question” and the institution of marriage. Ultimately, versification enables the verse-novelist not only to consider the problem of representing moral truth; it further exposes moral truth as ideology and critiques social practices through deconstructing literary conventions.