Religion, gender and authority in the novels of Charlotte Bronte

This dissertation argues that in her novelistic depiction of male-female relationships, Charlotte Bronte employs the biblically-influenced ideal of mutual submission. Rather than rebelling against Christianity as a patriarchal institution, Bronte worked within her Anglican tradition in order to challenge her culture's division of authority and submission along gender lines. Although Bronte creates male-female relationships that still demonstrate a traditional hierarchy, characters ultimately possess equality as human beings. She creates a fictional world that depicts service and submission as inevitable facts of life: the exercise of the individual's will does not create autonomy, but allows one to choose whom one serves. Bronte thus creates tension in her four novels between the characters' desire to submit to the divine will and their earthly desire for love and marriage; she expresses this tension in terms of "idolatry.";Chapter One examines Bronte's first novel, The Professor , and argues that Bronte portrays the protagonist William Crimsworth's submission to divine authority as ultimately enabling his idealized marriage of mutual submission at the end of the novel. Chapter Two argues that Jane Eyre describes not the protagonist's search for autonomy, but her search for authority enacted in the context of mutual submission. Bronte figures Jane Eyre's obedience to divine authority as authorizing her marriage of equality with her husband Edward Rochester. In Chapter Three, Bronte's focus on community in Shirley leads to a more wide-ranging exploration of the dynamic of mutual submission within hierarchical structures, moving from the more narrow focus on male-female relationships in Jane Eyre to a more inclusive consideration of this dynamic in the realms of religion, business, and domestic life. Chapter Four examines how Bronte constructs a narrative for her heroine Lucy Snowe that addresses and resolves the broader religious and moral questions present in all four novels, particularly the "problem" of the protagonist's idolizing of the earthly beloved. The final chapter examines the concept of authority and submission in novels by George Eliot and Thomas Hardy, and considers the relationship between the disappearance of God and the disappearance of the ethic of mutual submission in the nineteenth-century novel.