Liminal Figures of the Imagined Community and Their Bildung Process: The Dialectics of Inclusion and Exclusion in Dickens’ and Brontë’s Novels

This article examines how Charles Dickens’s Great Expectations and Charlotte Brontë’s Villette reveal the similar mechanisms of subject formation within nineteenth-century British national ideology. Through close readings of Pip’s and Lucy’s bildung narratives, this study argues that both protagonists construct their British national identities through dialectical processes of exclusion and incorporation of various social Others—class-based, religious, and colonial. In Great Expectations, Pip’s transformation depends upon repressing class anxieties embodied by Magwitch and Joe Gargery, while colonial wealth enabling his ascension paradoxically threatens his genteel identity. Similarly, Lucy’s journey involves systematic othering of non-Protestant subjects, consolidating her Protestant Englishness through linguistic discrimination and religious prejudice. Drawing on Benedict Anderson’s concepts of “imagined communities” and Franco Moretti’s notion of geographical imagination, this article demonstrates how both texts employ spatial metaphors of home/exile to negotiate tensions between autonomy and belonging. Moreover, this paper further discusses how the protagonists’ neurotic symptoms reveal psychic costs of internalizing national ideology. While superficially affirming social integration, both novels expose the impossibility of stable identities within national frameworks. Spectral Others, for instance, persistently haunt their consciousness, revealing instabilities between self/other, home/abroad, etc. And these ambivalent narratives reveal English identity as an imaginary construct sustained through continuous yet incomplete repudiation of constitutive Others, exposing how exclusion paradoxically reinforces dependence on what is expelled.