This dissertation rethinks a set of Victorian novels by close reading the loaded term "misery." I argue that the middle-class novelists under consideration here were self-conscious of their appropriation of the voice of working-class women and tried to give more space and individual voice to the working-class female characters by often shifting in narrative perspectives, i.e., handing over the narrative agency to them. This dissertation closely reads how the novels grapple with the working-class characters' desperate situations by introducing the term "misery," which is a euphemistic expression of the characters' scandalous situations. The study will demonstrate how the uses of the term "misery" provide transformative moments for the working-class female characters to stand above the situations. Reinstating the working-class women's agency in the mid-to-late Victorian narratives by staging a series of contexts and places where they achieve perverse power over against what the loaded word "misery" defines, this dissertation has an aspiration to draw an alternative history of women's literature built around the middle-class depictions of the Victorian working-class women moving outside the sphere of domesticity, which even led to the fictional representations of the lower-middle-class New Woman in the fin-de-siecle.This study's perspective reframes the accepted view of considering Victorian female working-class women as an inferior object for the completion of moral virtues of the middle-class domestic women and bourgeois men as Nancy Armstrong famously contended in her works, Desire and Domestic Fiction (1987) and How Novels Think: The Limits of Individualism from 1719-1900 (2005). In this regard, this study importantly refers to Patricia Johnson's groundbreaking reassertion of the importance of the industrial novels, where the complex roles of the working-class women in the reform movements are portrayed, in Hidden Hands: Working-Class Women and Victorian Social-Problem Fiction (2001). However, this study attempts to overcome Johnson's reading of the working-class women in the industrial novels as victims by strategically delving into the narrative techniques used in the four novels for the purpose of giving agency back to the working-class characters. For the theorization of the narrative techniques observed in the novels of my consideration, I refer to Susan Sniader Lanser's Fictions of Authority: Women Writers and Narrative Voice (1992) where she explores the ways in which women writers acquire narrative authority.My dissertation critically revises a line of feminist criticism that defined middle-class female activists and writers' exploration in the public space against their antagonism towards the working-class women in the streets as observed in Judith R. Walkowitz's City of Dreadful Delight: Narratives of Sexual Danger in Late Victorian London (1992) and Deborah Epstein Nord's Walking the Victorian Streets: Women, Representation, and the City (1995). Unlike Walkowitz and Nord who considered the middle-class women as antagonistic or disinterested observers of the life of the working-class women on the streets, my dissertation examines the middle-class authors' cultural appropriation of the ideas of working-class women by reading much more complex mixed gestures of sympathetic identification through focalized narration and ironic distance through free indirect discourses.
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