Edwardian everyday: the problem of escape in H.G. Wells and Arnold Bennett.
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Date
09/07/2019Author
Edwards, Ryan John
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Abstract
This thesis examines the concept of escaping the everyday in the Edwardian novels of H.G.
Wells and Arnold Bennett. Both are interested in the ordinary lives of overlooked individuals but
differ profoundly on what constitutes the everyday; both presage subsequent important
theoretical critiques of the everyday. The first chapter indicates theoretical problems with the
everyday as articulated by various approaches to its potential significances, and the logics
underpinning its apparent stability. The issue of escape is implicit in many of these approaches,
particularly Marxist critiques of capitalism’s colonisation of day-to-day routines. Rather than
simply examine the everyday as it is represented by Wells and Bennett, the logic of exodic
critiques, those that mandate escape, offers a lucid means of exposing their perhaps irreconcilable
evaluations of the quotidian. Wells’s approach is predicated upon the necessity and feasibility of
escape. His Edwardian futurological speculations of post-everyday possibilities can be read in
conjunction with the novels’ itemisation of miserable everydays produced by the otiose structures
of capitalism. The consolidation of this predicate means that escape appears as wholly necessary
to agency and individuality, and the novels outline increasingly individuated, and implausible,
escape attempts. The viability of these efforts reveals Wells’s ideological misconception of petit
bourgeois agency. However, Wells’s failure to cogently outline what or where the post-everyday
might be is also partly a problem of escape. In the final instance, he recognises that the escape
attempts of his approach to the everyday involve a terminal and interminable problem: endless
prospects of escape. Bennett dissents from Wells in three important ways. Firstly, he indicates
that escape offers insufficient alterity: holidays involve massifying consumption, are
superintended by capitalism, involve a return to wage-labour, and are invariably constituted by
someone else’s occluded everyday. For Bennett, everyday regularities provide a means of
orientating oneself, consolidate identity, and provide meaning – traits which might be found in
work. Secondly, the epistemic precarity which saturates Bennett’s novels inhibits the confident
projection of post-everyday felicity. Whereas Wells, confidently outlined an improved, if ductile,
futurity, Bennett implicitly recognises that such speculations are ideologically conditioned and
prone to the reinscription of anterior suppositions. Thirdly, Bennett posits that the everyday is
axiomatically constituted by individuals whose agency is not coeval with escape. This is manifest
in Bennett’s conception of historical agency denied by critical accounts, such as Henri Lefebvre’s,
which pose the everyday as a hegemonic, disciplinary force. Bennett’s conception of ordinary
individuals’ purposeful, meaningful praxis as the very fabric of the everyday undoes the necessity
of escape. The everyday is not the denial of agency but the plane upon which history is immanent
and constituted by ordinary people. The thesis concludes with a brief coda outlining a
foundational tenet shared by Bennett and Wells that has implications beyond their Edwardian
work.