Spinning their wheels: Spinsters and narrative in eighteenth- and nineteenth-century British women's fiction

This dissertation examines the narrative issues raised by the figure of the spinster in eighteenth- and nineteenth-century British women's fiction. The spinster's resistance to the standard plots available for women's fiction allows her to expose the exigencies of female plots and what they forcibly exclude. My project both accounts for the absence of a central spinster plot and highlights the function of the spinster subplot in women's fiction. These spinster subplots comment on the central plot, disclosing its proscriptions as well as its possibilities. They challenge the social conditions that make spinsterhood so problematic and the literary conditions that delimit the narrative options of feminocentric novels. The authors of my study use the spinster subplot to dramatize the quandary of the woman writer who seeks an alternative to the marriage and seduction plots-that is, an autonomous female plot.;My first chapter situates the figure of the spinster within the context of eighteenth- and nineteenth-century British culture. The remaining chapters provide close readings of the novels and letters of three authors who began their literary careers as spinsters. The writings of Frances Burney, Jane Austen, and Charlotte Bronte grapple with the apparent "nothingness" of the female life that doesn't conform to social and literary precedents. Burney uses satire to fault her society for subjecting spinsters to economic hardship and physical danger. Austen takes on the charge that spinsters have nothing to do and hence nothing to say, indicting her society for its refusal to hear spinsters. Austen suggests that female agency is partially available through language---through authorship. Bronte's concern is with the dynamics of narrative---specifically, narrative time. Bronte deplores the isolation of the spinster, denied both meaningful work and human connection. Her spinster figures, cut off from erotic bonds and generation, seem to drop out of time itself. Through their attempted spinster plots, all three authors reveal their dissatisfaction with the limitations placed on both women's lives and women's fiction.