Self -possessed subjects: Property, identity and the love -letter in British women's fiction, 1781--1853.
Item
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Title
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Self -possessed subjects: Property, identity and the love -letter in British women's fiction, 1781--1853.
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Identifier
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AAI3213257
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identifier
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3213257
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Creator
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George, Margaret Chase.
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Contributor
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Adviser: Nancy K. Miller
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Date
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2006
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Language
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English
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Publisher
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City University of New York.
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Subject
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Literature, English | Women's Studies
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Abstract
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This dissertation traces the effects of a particular writing strategy used by British women writers of the Romantic and Victorian periods: the embedding of personal love-letters within works of fiction. I argue that the private love-letters of the writers I have selected, though taken from actual correspondences, reprise the seventeenth-century French genre of the love-letter, particularly in the ways they reiterate obsessive, unreciprocated feeling. Incorporated into novels, the love-letters aid in creating unconventional courtship plots by enabling the representation of a confrontational form of female desire normally precluded from sentimental fiction of the period. The writers I have chosen refuse to silence their heroines or sentence them to death for violating codes of propriety and avowing their feelings directly to male characters. The embedded love-letters invite the collapsing of biographical and fictional narratives and the identification of the authors with their heroines, disrupting the novels' retrospective master narratives and violating rules of genre as well as normative gender. Situated at the intersection of the legal definitions of corporeal and incorporeal property, letters function as contested property historically and also as they are deployed within the fictions. Although love-letters in the French tradition appear to reenact the author's subjection to an unequal romantic attachment, by asserting proprietary rights to, and controlling the public transmission of, such deeply private and legally ambiguous texts, the writers I include in this dissertation claim a form of proprietary authorship largely unavailable to women writers of the period. In owning their texts and their feelings in spite of restrictive generic and social proprieties, they demonstrate what I define as a radical form of self-possessive identity.
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Type
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dissertation
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Source
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PQT Legacy CUNY.xlsx
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degree
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Ph.D.
