'At once narrow and promiscuous': Representations of educated women in the Victorian novel.

摘要

"What I should like to be sure of as a result of higher education for women," wrote George Eliot in 1869, "is, their recognition of the great amount of social unproductive labour which needs to be done by women." Why did Eliot recommend such a goal for a reform movement that stressed women's right to intellectual and professional fulfillment? How did competing ideals of self-fulfillment (liberal individualism) and self-sacrifice (domestic ideology) shape the relationship of other novelists to the Victorian debate over women's education? My dissertation addresses these questions by analyzing the emergence of educated women as heroines of Victorian literature. In the first chapter I focus on Charlotte Bronte's Jane Eyre (1847) as the locus classicus of the governess narrative. In Jane Eyre, I suggest, the governess embodies an unresolved encounter between conflicting modes of subject construction--domestic ideology and liberal individualism. Anna Leonowens's The English Governess at the Siamese Court (1873), the subject of Chapter Two, brings the governess narrative into contact with imperialist assumptions, rewriting the conflict central to Jane Eyre as occurring not between competing Western ideologies, but between an ideal (English) national character, whose cultural representative is the English governess, and a dystopic (Siamese) national character, represented by the autocratic King Mongkut. In Chapter Three, I turn to woman as aspiring intellectual in George Eliot's Middlemarch (1872), which I place Middlemarch in the context of the debate over women's higher education. Middlemarch, I argue, presents a panoramic critique of middle-class education; at the same time, however, it questions the new model of women's education being proposed by reformers such as Davies, arriving at a stalemate that is acknowledged by the novel's mood of infinitely regressive nostalgia. Jude the Obscure (1896), the subject of Chapter Four, is Thomas Hardy's ambivalent representation of a future in which the new cultural authority of both the middle-class woman and the working-class man will result in the disintegration of boundaries of class and, more dramatically, of gender. The figure of the androgynous, classless intellectual that Sue Bridehead represents is one that the novel cannot sustain, but it represents, I argue, the aspirations of Hardy himself.