CENTURY LITERATURE A Dissertation by JUNG SUN ... - Repository

associated with the articulation of the word “queer.” As language is within the social
system that necessitates the disciplinary function in language use, the articulation of the
word “queer” thus provokes a power relation between the speaker of the word and the
recipient. If queering is to discipline bad subjects like Hargraves, it also aims to
discipline Aurora who is a bad subject in her own way. For the novel’s objective in
converting Aurora into a proper individual feminine figure to be achieved, her
individuality must be sublimated and the source of her affective response must be
eliminated. Aurora’s unruly temper must be made docile through encounters with
Hargraves for her own benefit and her society’s. At the end of the novel, this grand
objective is realized when Aurora becomes docile and learns to submit herself to
patriarchal authority.
Nineteenth-century fiction’s investment in money often manifests itself in the
representation of various encounters involving the economic, the sexual, or something in
between. The nineteenth-century novel often capitalizes on the obscure association of
money and sex, obscurity that is imagined as sexually and monetarily illegitimate
contrasts to the transparency of the norm. While Victorian fiction is famous for dealing
with the inherent linkage of illegitimate money to illegitimate sexuality, Braddon’s
novels take an interest in the economic relations that make the sexual secondary. Aurora
Floyd shows that money is a primary driving force to the novel’s narrative that relies on
money’s materiality and on economic metaphor to describe the social relations of human
subjects through gender, sex, or class relations. In the intimately interacting relations
among the literary, the sexual, and the economic, Victorian popular novelists were
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