An ethics of becoming: Configurations of feminine subjectivity in Jane Austen, Charlotte Bronte, and George Eliot

In attempting to conceptualize feminine subjectivity beyond the familiar paradigm of dualism and within the parameters of ethical becoming, this dissertation examines the political and intellectual identity of contemporary poststructuralist feminism and its profound resonance with the nineteenth-century British female Bildungsroman. Growing out of fundamental questions about the nexus between theory and literature, genre and gender, subjectivity and ethics, sexuality and textuality, and mimesis and politics, the present study aims specifically to configure feminine subjectivity in the horizon of becoming---always incomplete, non-identarian, performative, unknowable, and unbecoming---as it disseminates in a modality of alterity in novels by Jane Austen, Charlotte Bronte and George Eliot. I illuminate the artistic density and ethical depth of their novels by demonstrating that these women writers rewrite the genealogy of subjectivity and invent their own Bildungsroman as a rich narrative vehicle for the feminine.; The introductory chapter situates the landscape of poststructuralist feminism in the terrain of modern identity politics and the ethics of alterity. Each main chapter seeks to tease out the singular and unique ways in which each novelist navigates through the semantics of feminine subjectivity. The second chapter, devoted to Austen's marriage plot novels such as Emma and Persuasion, examines her masterful rendering of feminine erotic subjectivity and her subtle yet revolutionary remaking of the romantic comedy genre. The next chapter looks at Bronte's mapping of feminine hermeneutic subjectivity in Jane Eyre and Villette, analyzing the ways in which she employs the fantasy of secrecy and its uncanny relation to writing. The fourth chapter investigates George Eliot's feminist evolution and its revealing (post)modernity by interpreting her thorough commitment to elucidating the conjunction between realism and feminism in Adam Bede and Daniel Deronda.; Presenting a deconstructionist reading of the female Bildungsroman, in which I argue that the female subject's failure is not translated into political acquiescence but nourishes the writer's ethical experiment with alterity, I ultimately suggest that both feminism and feminist literary criticism are ethical practices that enable becoming in the very failure of becoming and in the very acknowledgment of the failure.