| Telling Relationships posits that as novels became more popular and more influential in determining gender norms during the late eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, they began to bring to light many of the concerns later raised by twentieth- and twenty-first century feminist ethical theory, thereby suggesting an inherent connection between feminist and narrative forms of ethics. In recent years, feminists such as Virginia Held and Nel Noddings have challenged the gendered assumptions foundational to Western traditions of ethics, insisting that we must value emotion, interpersonal care, and individual cases alongside reason, civic rights, and general theories when we make ethical judgments. Feminist ethicists suggest that we should devise guidelines for behavior based on the premise of relationality: people are not isolated entities, but members of interconnected communities that shape and influence them as individuals and to which they owe responsibility. While most existing work on feminist ethics has discussed current societal instances of ethical decision-making, this dissertation demonstrates that the questions raised by feminist philosophers are encoded on a narrative level in novels of the Romantic and Victorian periods.; By focusing on narrative structure, I also contribute to the field of narrative ethics, which like feminist ethics emphasizes the importance of relationality, but has not yet fully considered the effects of gender on narrative ethical interactions. Examining Mary Hays's Memoirs of Emma Courtney , Jane Austen's Emma, Charles Dickens's Bleak House, and Elizabeth Gaskell's Cranford, I argue that the narrators and author-figures in these novels, through their negotiations of narrative authority, represent an active reimagining of ethical authority that engages both central tenets and problematic aspects of feminist ethical thought. Feminist ethical theory offers insight into these novels in part because their historical context was steeped in anxiety over gender roles, especially in regard to the novel itself. Even as the plots of these novels model ethical behavior based on emotion, connectedness, and community, their narrative structures exemplify a feminist, relational form of ethical thinking. Ultimately, my dissertation reveals an existing but under-explored literary-ethical tradition and provides a new perspective from which to consider the feminist value of realist novels. |
