Possibilities of Hidden Things: Narrative Transgression in Victorian Fictional Autobiographies (Studies in Nineteenth-Century British Literature)

Hsiao-Hung Lee's «Possibilities of Hidden Things» traces submerged narratives as transgressive actions against self-identities and conventional strategies in three major Victorian fictional autobiographies: Jane Eyre, Villette, David Copperfield. Narrative transgression in these three novels breaks the boundaries between reality and imagination, historical events and fiction, reason and emotion. Instances of the «possibilities of hidden things,» self's wish to become the other, fairy tales taking over personal history are typical of narrative transgression fully exemplified in these novels. Narrative transgression, therefore, has greatly shaken the stability of «I» as the centering voice in the first-person narrative.