DUKE UNIVERSITY
Durham, North Carolina
From Status to Contract: Domesticating
Modernity in Wuthering Heights, The Mill on the Floss and Dracula
Violeta Solonova Foreman
March, 2011
Undergraduate Critical Honors Thesis
Trinity College of Arts and Sciences
English Department
Foreman 1
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
My deepest thanks to my thesis advisor, Professor Psomiades for her dedication, insight, positivity, encouragement, and inspiration. Also, thank you to loved ones for your constant support and love.
Foreman 2
TABLE OF CONTENTS
Acknowledgements……………………………………………………...…………ii
Table of contents………………………………….…………………….………...iii
Dedication………………………..………………………………………………...v
Epigraph…………...………………………………………………………………vi …show more content…
The social developments instigated by the French Revolution in France were making way across the channel, intensified by the technological innovation generated by the Industrial Revolution. As social hierarchies were altered by the rise of the middle class, so too was political organization disturbed with the passage of the Great Reform act of 1832. The final transition to a constitutional monarchy at home, together with the fall of the ancient
Spanish, Chinese, Holy Roman, Portuguese and Mughal empires abroad, made the period a time of unprecedented and fundamental change. Modernity, with a unique concentration on the present rather than the glorification of the past found in classicism or romanticism, would become the measure of social life. While the principles that would define modernism were evolving, as Bram Stoker notes, ―the old centuries had, and have, powers of their own which mere ‗modernity‘ cannot kill.‖1 The literature of the time reflected the transitional phase within the realism of the newly popular medium – the novel.