Becoming conduct. Victorian women writers negotiating gender: Charlotte Bronte, Elizabeth Gaskell, Elizabeth Barrett Browning, George Eliot

In Imagining the Penitentiary (1987), John Bender defines ideology as a matrix of symbolic practices, embedded in discourse, through which we realize our subjectivities or social presences. In this study I explore one point, of the many available, at which the symbolic practices of writing (and publication) intersect with female subjectivity and impinge upon how that subjectivity is understood and experienced as gender. I focus on prescriptive texts which shaped--and were shaped by--literary texts. Initially, I pursue the dialogical relationship between prescriptive and literary texts through an analysis of female gender roles and "essential" attributes set down in popular conduct books, designed almost exclusively for middle-class women and published from the 1770s to the 1860s. I follow this with a comparative analysis of the extent to which literary heroines in the texts of major Victorian women writers--Charlotte Bronte's Jane Eyre: An Autobiography (1847) and Shirley (1849); Elizabeth Gaskell's The Life of Charlotte Bronte (1857); Elizabeth Barrett Browning's Aurora Leigh (1857); and George Eliot's Middlemarch (1871-2)--both conform to and depart from the implicit and explicit gender norms recorded in conduct literature.;By tracing the gender linkages between prescriptive, fictional, and biographical texts, I underscore the ideological reciprocity between the construction of women in literary spaces and the manner in which others interpret their behavior in various social spaces. Conduct books make this connection particularly clear because they represent a crucial material site in which we can situate a point of intersection between writing, female subjectivity, and the cultural production of gender ideology. One of my premises is that an understanding of Victorian gender ideology, as we encounter it in conduct literature, can enable us to read the women writers of the period with a keener awareness of the sexual politics to which their texts and heroines were responding.