Victorian Novel Discourses: Julia Kavanagh’s Rachel Gray

Abstract

Many Victorian novels have been shunted to the margin of literary history, as they were written by neglected women writers. The great interest in women’s history produces nowadays an increased concern for researching these relatively obscure novels. One of them is Julia Kavanagh’s Rachel Gray. This paper is intended to show how the handling of Genettian narrative discourse categories helps the reader reach the major themes of Rachel Gray and how it is useful in finding out where the novel is situated on the trail between the classical concept of the novel and the modern one. Analyzing Rachel Gray according to Gérard Genette’s grid, one can notice that his structuralist categorization of narrative discourse is very useful to disclose the novel’s preoccupation with family issues. Furthermore, it contributes to determining that Rachel Gray, even if a realist novel, is inspired from the previous Romantic Movement and announces the subsequent arrival of modernist fiction.