Dissertation
Both the heroine and the hero are vitally necessary to the marriage plot of the Romantic-era domestic novel. However, while the heroine has received her fair share of scrutiny, the hero has not. Using feminist narratology and contemporary reader accounts in journals, letters, and reviews, this dissertation interrogates the implications for the marriage plot of the narrative experimentation with masculine emotional concealment, confession, and education that four Romantic-era female novelists employed in order to appropriate masculine subjectivity for their own ends.
In A Simple Story (1791), Elizabeth Inchbald constructs the hero’s masculine authority as inevitable and deserved by manipulating the reader’s access to internal views of his emotions, but closure of the marriage plot is unsuccessful because the hero is unsusceptible to feminine influence. In Self-Control (1810), Mary Brunton constructs relational masculinities in an attempt to define the ideal husband. In her extremely popular and socially conservative novel, Coelebs in Search of a Wife (1808), Hannah More’s unusual choice of masculine first-person perspective enables the text itself to embody the ideologies of silent feminine usefulness that it espouses. As a result, the continuation of all the ideological hopes of the novel rests in the female reader’s pleasure in the novel, so that the act of reading becomes an act of power. Jane Austen appropriates the betrothal scenes of her novels, Pride and Prejudice (1813), Emma (1816), and Persuasion (1818), to demonstrate the successful education of her heroes in order to argue that heterosexual union is as necessary for the completion of men as it is for women.
By analyzing the ways in which female authors of the Romantic era constructed the sentiments of their male characters and by attempting to understand the ways in which those sentiments were read by contemporary audiences, my project argues that these four novelists asserted the dependence of masculine subjectivity for its very existence on feminine subjectivity and on the marriage plot. My project, therefore, represents a fundamental reconsideration of the domestic marriage plot that shaped modern notions of subjectivity, class, gender, and sexuality.
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