Educating the self: Critical reflection in the novels of Jane Austen, Charlotte Bronte, and George Eliot.

摘要

Many recent critics have argued that the novels of Jane Austen, Charlotte Bronte, and George Eliot depict the heroine as shamed into compliance by a representative of the dominant male culture. According to this reading, this final phase of the heroine's education, always leading to marriage, wipes out earlier signs of independence or rebellion. Other critics argue that the novelists subversively resist the patriarchal hegemony they illustrate. However, while female characters in nineteenth-century British novels by women usually marry and often marry males of authority, the heroines are not forced into submission. Instead, I contend that Austen, Bronte, and Eliot, in Pride and Prejudice, Emma, Persuasion, Jane Eyre, Villette , and Middlemarch, depict protagonists who grow into conscious mature women by actively participating in a process of self-education and self-determination based on experience and thought. According to John Dewey, "Active, persistent, and careful consideration of any belief or supposed form of knowledge in the light of the grounds that support it and the further conclusions to which it tends constitutes reflective thought" (How We Think 9). Austen, Bronte, and Eliot write novels about women coming of age and struggling to understand what they see and do through independent reflection. Although the heroines do not experience life or examine assumptions in the same manner (the dreams and visions of Bronte's characters, for example, are sources of data for reflection that are not mentioned by Austen), they all do participate in critical reflection. In fact, this process of reflecting on her experience, of actively examining all sources of information, helps the heroine shape her adult self and informs her decision to marry a particular male. By measuring the character's reflection against Dewey's definitions of reflective thought and of faulty thinking, I show how the heroine develops into a self-directed adult. The novelists' depiction of their characters' critical reflection brings into focus an important aspect of the female self.