'Strange contrasts': Intersubjectivity and the cohesion of romance in the novels of Charlotte Bronte and Jean Rhys (Dominica).

摘要

My dissertation analyzes the use of romantic conceptions of love in the work of Charlotte Bronte and Jean Rhys by contextualizing romance within the psychoanalytic frameworks of mutual recognition and intersubjective affirmations. Within the tradition of women's romantic fiction, Bronte's Jane Eyre is a paradigmatic text, outlining the romantic heroine's search for an idealized other who will recognize and authenticate her subjectivity. The common dismissal of this novel as a trivial romantic narrative is most famously summed up by Virginia Woolf's criticism of Jane Eyre: "Always to be a governess and always to be in love is a serious limitation in a world which is full, after all, of people who are neither one nor the other." But if we consider Jane Eyre and her successors' tendency "always to be in love" in the light of contemporary psychoanalytic theories, their romantic predilection assumes a new significance: their need for love emerges not as a "serious limitation" but as a means of transcending their limitations. I argue that these characters are not seeking a man to complete them; rather, they are seeking recognition and affirmation of their independent identity. Deprived of a facilitating environment that would foster their emotional and psychic development, these heroines seek love objects who will enable them to heal their divided psyches and authenticate their sense of self. To reconcile their "strange contrasts," they seek a romantic partner who can see through their external reserve and recognize the full complexity of their character. Bronte and Rhys suggest, however, that this romantic fantasy is not an easily achieved reality. Both authors analyze the common breakdown of mutual recognition and its origins but also consider how---and whether---the negative pattern can be broken. Bronte has a more optimistic view of love's potential to heal the self, whereas Rhys takes a more fatalistic perspective on love's potential to destroy the self. My dissertation thus complicates the traditional assessment of Bronte's and Rhys's novels, since even sympathetic readings of their works take a dismissive attitude toward their romantic plots.