Performative Speech and Minor Characters

Abstract

This dissertation, utilizing the theories of J. L. Austin, Jacques Derrida, Judith Butler, and Alex Woloch, analyzes performative speech in Victorian novels to highlight its profound illocutionary effects on minor characters and diegetic outcomes. I argue that performatives act as the crucial textual site of convention and characterization, intention and ethicality, representation and ideology, storyworld and structure. Be it promising, naming, warning, narrativizing, expressing love, or becoming engaged, this “doing something with words” is a textual mechanism by which authors effect plot-level action and highlight or create a character’s otherness. Beyond the storyworld, the reverberations of dialogic and novelistic performatives produce unforeseen, and little explored, multifaceted perlocutionary ethical effects and structural disruption.