Acts of coercion: Father -daughter relationships and the pressure to confess in British women's fiction, 1778--1814.
Item
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Title
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Acts of coercion: Father -daughter relationships and the pressure to confess in British women's fiction, 1778--1814.
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Identifier
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AAI3083678
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identifier
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3083678
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Creator
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Kane, Sonia.
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Contributor
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Adviser: Rachel M. Brownstein
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Date
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2003
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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 examines the recurring motifs of interrogation, coercion, and confession in father-daughter relationships in British women's novels of the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. A consistent narrative feature in the novels I consider is a scene of confrontation in which a father or guardian interrogates a young woman upon the state of her affections. In the scenes, the fictional daughters must choose between conflicting directives of proper feminine behavior in the eighteenth century: to admit to feelings of desire for a man who has not made his own feelings known was to face censure and contempt, even from one's own father, but, on the other hand, to refuse a father the confidence he demanded was undutiful. In presenting father-daughter relationships as sites of distress, discomfort, and psychological coercion, the novels demonstrate women's lack of power within the family and should thus be read as feminist. The representations of daughters under duress reflect an anxiety on the part of the women writers not only over the uneasy status of daughters in the eighteenth-century family but also over the issue of what a woman could safely say---both as a daughter and as a writer. The fictional daughters' dilemmas over whether or not to speak are analogous to the dilemmas faced by their creators, who wrote during a period in which it was considered somewhat daring for a respectable woman to publish.;My first chapter deals with the work of Frances Burney and Maria Edgeworth, both of whom had complex and consuming relationships with their own writing fathers. In my second chapter, I treat the novels of the English Jacobin writers Elizabeth Inchbald and Eliza Fenwick. The third chapter looks at novels by Jane Austen and Mary Brunton, with particular attention to the authors' representations of the workings of sensibility---and the contagion of emotion it engenders---within the family. For all six of these women writers, I conclude, the depiction of the scene of father-daughter interrogation conveys a complex of unease, protest, and anger over the power relations between fathers and daughters---and, by extension, men and women---in their culture.
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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.
