Framing marriage: Male narrators in romantic fiction by Mary Shelley, George Sand, and Mariia Zhukova

This dissertation explores five framed narratives written by three romantic women writers, Mary Shelley's Frankenstein, or The Modern Prometheus and The Last Man, George Sand's Indiana and Mauprat, and Mariia Zhukova's Evenings by the Karpovka River. In these works the writers use first-person male narrators. Rather than making their narrators their mouthpieces, as has been assumed by literary critics up till now, these writers, I argue, create distance between their implied authors and their narrators, subverting and often ridiculing the latter. By introducing a subversive level into their texts these women writers simultaneously harness the authority allocated to male speakers in Western European culture and use this authority to undermine misogynistic attitudes. At the same time, in the texts I have chosen, all three women writers diminish the authority of their narrators through a number of devices such as creating secondary narrators, who refract the stories told by the primary speakers; and using authorial personas, who relate introductions or comment on the literary frames. The reader is invited to uncover the meaning of the texts in the complex relationships between the main narratives and their literary frames, between the narrators and the implied authors, and between the speakers within the four novels by Mary Shelley and George Sand and one collection of novellas by Mariia Zhukova. Withholding ready-made judgments, not only do the authors encourage their audience to read actively rather than consume fiction passively, but also avoid critical censure for non-conformist messages.;Working in the first half of the nineteenth century, Shelley, Sand, and Zhukova had to confront romantic and bourgeois paradigms, both of which were covertly pernicious for women. The writers exposed the harm, in the form of death and silencing, that came to women who followed these paradigms. It is appropriate that male narrators should tell about female death and muteness not only because to employ female speakers would be impossible in such cases, but also because men, as Shelley, Sand, and Zhukova reaveal in their framing of the male discourse on marriage, benefit from their priviledged situation as fathers, husbands, and lovers.