The pursuit of gypsiness in nineteenth-century Britain.

다국어 초록 (Multilingual Abstract)

This dissertation examines the construction of gypsiness as simultaneously an intellectual puzzle, a social problem, and a literary convention. At the beginning of the century, the wandering “gypsy” was already a conventional figure of mystery. German research deriving Gypsies from India both challenged this view and provided new and more sophisticated evidence for it. While the discovery that Gypsies in every nation retained remnants of an original unique language fueled many writers' fantasies of Gypsies' secret depth, it could also stand as proof of their incorrigible rejection of the benefits of progress and sedentary civilization. As both highly literary and quasi-scientific treatments of gypsies proliferated throughout the century, these two apparently separate threads must be seen as simultaneously inhibiting and inciting each other, reflecting both a profound determination to comprehend the essence (origins, history, and present conditions) of real gypsies and an equally urgent desire to retain gypsiness itself as pure essence, a diffuse source of mystery and freedom with special relevance for practitioners of imaginative art.
Walter Scott's <italic>Guy Mannering</italic> illustrates the discovery of the metaphorical flexibility of gypsiness, as the gypsy crone Meg Merrilies turns out to be a model for the modern subject: fortuneteller and trickster rather than productive worker and wandering exile rather than fully integrated member of an organic community. Dickens's <italic>Barnaby Rudge</italic> offers a critique of Scott's celebration of gypsiness, by showing the way a willfully romanticized perspective works to blind those in power to a sense of their connections and ethical responsibilities to all outsiders. The writer most responsible for the nineteenth century's romanticization of Gypsies finds a way to combine this romanticization with a deep sense of connection, but in doing so, he makes himself as eccentric and mysterious as his Gypsy friends and advocates neither charity nor assimilation but continued separate survival. Finally with George Eliot's <italic>The Spanish Gypsy</italic>, gypsiness comes to stand not as opposed to a sense of ethical responsibilities and human connectedness, but as their epitome.