This dissertation traces metaphors of mental emptiness in the British novel in the first half of the nineteenth century, and argues that novels during this period construct unique representations of vacancy as a state of psychological interiority. Challenging a contemporary didactic discourse that insists upon the vacant mind’s one−dimensional blankness, an important group of novels provides access to the thoughts, feelings, and perceptions of vacant–minded characters, whose vacancy is defined as the absence or partial effectiveness of specific mental mechanisms like perception or volition. These novels psychologize vacancy by providing narrative access to characters’ minds and by carefully depicting the relationship between mental character and outward conduct. In the process, these works make larger points about the way social order is created and maintained, about how the individual experiences subjectivity in an emotionally fraught social existence, and about how culture contributes to mental variations across particular social groups. This project examines four crucial permutations of mental vacancy represented in nineteenth–century novels: partial perception in Jane Austen's Emma, sympathetic disconnection in Charles Dickens' Barnaby Rudge, emotional catharsis in Charlotte Brontë's Villette, and volitional weakness in Wilkie Collins' The Woman in White. These novels offer thoughtful arguments about mental vacancy and the social order, carefully considering mental functions that are fundamental to the interaction between individual and environment.In addition to the conceptual work these texts perform in reimagining contemporary models of mind, they also aim to construct readers’ psychological interiors through their rhetorical strategies. Each narrative places specific mental demands on its audience that correspond to the very mental mechanisms upon which vacancy relies. These novels thereby work to redress socially disruptive forms of vacancy and to encourage psychologically beneficial forms of vacancy in readers. This project forges new ground in the literary study of theories of mind, bringing critical attention to a concept and cultural discourse largely overlooked in the relationships between literature and psychology, and in histories of psychology. It engages critical conversations about cultural histories of particular mental states and functions, bringing a new term to this conversation that, unlike memory or boredom, is not part of the ready vocabulary we apply to the mind. It also intervenes in research on theories of mind that are grounded in traditionally defined historical periods, introducing a mental trope that actually stretches across multiple models of mind and across traditional chronological divisions between the Romantic and Victorian eras. Finally, this project adds to the emergent literary history of mental emptiness, which has so far taken shape in Alan Richardson’s work on the sublimity of mental voids in Romantic poetry. This project extends the chronological scope of this literary history into the Victorian period, arguing that mental vacancy undergoes changes in form, function, and representation toward the end of the Romantic period. Vacancy thus identifies and analyzes a new paradigm in the literary history of mental emptiness.
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