Inner voices: Narrated monologue and narrative voice in Jane Austen, George Eliot, and Virginia Woolf.
Item
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Title
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Inner voices: Narrated monologue and narrative voice in Jane Austen, George Eliot, and Virginia Woolf.
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Identifier
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AAI3245090
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identifier
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3245090
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Creator
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Oberman, Rachel Provenzano.
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Contributor
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Adviser: Rachel Brownstein
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Date
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2007
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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
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Abstract
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Through the extended use of "narrated monologue," a term coined by Dorrit Cohn to describe the third-person narrative rendering of a character's thoughts, Jane Austen, George Eliot, and Virginia Woolf construct narrative voices that dip in and out of their characters' minds, fusing a character's subjectivity to the narrator's omniscience. My dissertation will establish a trajectory of development of the use of narrated monologue from Austen to Woolf (whom I address in my Epilogue) in order to show how one of the hallmarks of the modernist novel, access to consciousness, actually goes back to the early 19th century.;Emma, Persuasion, Mill on the Floss, and Middlemarch represent works in which, at the height of their powers, Austen and Eliot use narrated monologue to tell stories in which the heroine's voice develops in the direction of the narrative voice. They construct heroines (and readers) that learn to emulate narrative skills, most importantly, the ability to imagine another's consciousness. The eponymous heroine of Emma learns that she is not the center of consciousness for the Highbury universe; she expands her consciousness to make room for other voices, as we see in the repeated use of the quoted language of others within Emma's narrated monologues. Persuasion's Anne Elliot, on the other hand, is unable to speak up for herself, but perpetually absorbing the thoughts of others; she is so aware of other people's claims that she stays silent about her own. Whereas for Emma Woodhouse "development" means an expansion of consciousness to include other voices, for Anne Eliot "development" means escape from consciousness into speech. While Mill on the Floss ends with the tragedy of Maggie's blocked development toward the linguistic flexibility of the narrative voice, Middlemarch depicts Dorothea's ethical development toward the narrative voice: Dorothea learns to imagine another's consciousness. My Epilogue moves ahead to Woolf's Mrs. Dalloway and The Waves, where we find a more fragmented relationship between narrative voice and figural consciousness. The dissolution of a knowable narrative voice in Woolf's novels begs the question of how readers make meaning without the guidance of the narrative voice, and what changes when they do.
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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.
