Nineteenth-century fiction and the search for meaning

This thesis reads nineteenth-century novels through the lens of Viktor Frankl’s theory of logotherapy, as articulated in Man’s Search for Meaning (1946). I link Frankl’s theory that the search for meaning is the fundamental human drive to the structure of nineteenth-century realist novels; the character moving through narrative resembles the individual’s quest for meaning. On this basis of this premise, I apply logotherapy to five novels: Jane Austen’s Sense and Sensibility (1811), Charlotte Brontë’s Villette (1853), Elizabeth Gaskell’s North and South (1855), George Eliot’s Middlemarch (1871), and in my conclusion, Margaret Oliphant’s Kirsteen (1890). Frankl’s theoretical framework introduces numerous thematic parallels with major nineteenth-century areas of debate: his emphasis on meaning as an individual responsibility intersects with questions of social responsibility, and his commitment to the individual’s agency in meaning-making highlights the nineteenth-century debates concerning human agency and materialism. I draw out these larger conceptual themes through character analysis. Linking character analysis with Frankl’s conception of the individual searching for meaning, I explore how novelists articulate meaning both through character arcs and on the larger scale of the narratives which encompass them. Each of my selected novels engages with questions associated with meaning, including the degree to which it is relational and the relative agency of the individual in working it out. The lens of Frankl’s theoretical framework of meaning highlights particular facets of narrative technique in each novel (particularly narrative voice), and I examine the way realist narratives develop across the century. I argue that the overarching trend of nineteenth-century narratives is pessimistic, in that the novel’s structure moves away from a unified and coherent meaning narrative toward a structure strained by multiple meaning narratives. Likewise, these narratives increasingly circumscribe individual agency with the shaping power of circumstance.