Fin-de-Siècle British existentialism emerges in response to late-Victorian attitudes about progress and human development. The technological, imperial, and conceptual developments during Queen Victoria’s reign were unprecedented up to that point in human history. As her reign neared its end, many in England looked back on the 19th century with a sense of pride and looked forward to the 20th century with nearly unbridled optimism. In the midst of this celebration of progress, Thomas Hardy, Joseph Conrad, and G. K. Chesterton wrote novels expressing skepticism towards these contemporary attitudes. In “Failure and Finitude: Existentialism in Fin-de-Siècle Britain,” I argue Tess of the D’Urbervilles (1890), Heart of Darkness (1899), and The Man Who Was Thursday (1908) were focused on the human cost of Victorian progress. Basing their critiques on existential themes of contingency, freedom, angst, and alienation, these authors develop an existentialism concerned with human finitude as expressed in failure.

Recognizing Hardy, Conrad, and Chesterton as part of the existential tradition clarifies where these authors fit in literary history. While the Victorian realist novel was interested in the human subject, it focused on the individual’s relationship to the broader community. The existential novel examines the self’s relationship to itself. To express the individual human subject struggling for self-realization, the British existentialists transformed the novel. However, the existential novel does not resemble the bold experimental fiction of Woolf and Joyce. The existential novelists did not experiment with form for the sake of experimentation—their development of an existential form was necessary for expressing their existential vision. Thus, my dissertation establishes the novel form as uniquely suited to the development of existentialism.

The existential style of Conrad, Hardy, and Chesterton uses allegory, characterization, and narrative trajectory to develop existential visions of the world. The existential novel uses characters to represent ways of being, to emphasize the human subject’s experience of their world, and to feature a plot that culminates in an existential choice. In addition to a general existential style, each author has individual stylistics that define their unique existentialism. Conrad emphasizes epistemological uncertainty and the impossibility of communication; Hardy uses an omniscient narrator to emphasize human contingency; Chesterton borrows features of nonsense literature to illustrate wonder and existential joy.

 In my first chapter I argue Heart of Darkness uses a frame narrative and oral storytelling to present a narrative about the failure of communication. Conrad uses these formal features to create in readers the mental and emotional experience of an existential crisis, or what I call existential horror. While existential horror bears similarities to Sartre’s concept of nausea and Camus’s concept of the absurd, existential horror establishes the threat involved in the existential crisis. In the novel, this threat solidifies in the final interview with the Intended. It is here that Marlow faces his existential crisis, where he is forced to choose whether or not to lie to the Intended. The atmosphere Conrad builds in this scene establishes the horror interpenetrates all of existence, undermining our binaries between light and darkness, civilization and savagery. This scene disrupts our typical allegorical frameworks for creating meaning. This combined with the frame narrative creates a reading experience that is difficult to describe, causing Conrad’s readers to feel the same sense of frustration and uncertainty that Marlow exhibits as he comes up against the limits of human reason and his inability to communicate the meaning of his experience.

My second chapter on Tess of the D’Urbervilles argues that the novel itself is a failure. The failure of Tess of the D’Urbervilles to realize Tess’s subjectivity indicates limitations of the realist form and emphasizes the need to develop a new, existential form. At the beginning of the novel suggests the possibility of representing Tess’s subjectivity; however, because the novel still follows the narrative conventions of the realist tradition, it ultimately fails to depict Tess Durbeyfield as an authentic subject. This failure becomes visible in characters who interact with Tess according to mythic frameworks, and as a result cannot recognize her as an individual human person. While Hardy reveals the harm that comes from tendency to overlook the individual woman for her symbolic significance, he becomes guilty of doing the same himself. The novel eventually replaces Tess’s vitality with passivity through a narrative insistence that she conform to prescribed symbolic roles. Hardy’s commitment to his subtitle “A Pure Woman” prevents him from portraying his protagonist as an authentic subject. Instead of depicting Tess’s journey towards self-realization, the novel ultimately replaces Tess with her “spiritualized image”, her sister. This makes Tess of the D’Urbervilles a failed feminist existential project and highlights the need to develop a new narrative form to accommodate a woman’s journey to self-realization.

My final chapter on The Man Who Was Thursday argues existential joy emerges paradoxically out of a failure of understanding. While Chesterton shares an interest in failure with Conrad and Hardy, failure does not lead to despair but to peace. To accomplish this, Chesterton blends nonsense literature, allegory, and The Book of Job into a novel about the threat of philosophical emptiness. Throughout the novel, Syme and the other detectives find themselves threatened by nihilism and solipsism, assailed by metaphysical doubts, and pursued by natural and supernatural fears. The novel presents and then undermines an allegory about chaos and order, with the detectives on the side of order fighting chaos represented by the Central Anarchist Council. Eventually the novel unmasks the allegory of chaos and order and reveals an allegory about the failure of understanding. Each detective, who initially appeared to be one path to anarchy, represents a philosophical outlook that fails to make sense of Sunday. Chesterton connects the figure of Sunday to the paradox of the Cross, which combines unbearable suffering with unaccountable joy. While Syme has spent his nightmare defending existence, when he makes his existential choice of faith, he recovers his sense of wonder and surprise at the mere fact of existence.

My dissertation concludes showing how the analysis of the literary existentialism of these fin-de-siecle British novels revolutionizes our understanding of Jean Paul Sartre’s Nausea and Albert Camus’s The Stranger. I establish the significance of these novels’ forms to their contribution to existential thought. Like the British existentialists, both novels use characters to represent ways of being, emphasize failure, and lead to an existential choice. However, Meursault’s dispassionate narrative voice and Roquentin’s diary distinguish the existentialism of Camus and Sartre from that of Hardy, Conrad and Chesterton. I establish that these formal choices are crucial both to understanding existentialism and to understanding why the novel form is the best medium for the development of existential philosophy.