Telling the story: Gender and narrative voice in the Victorian novel (Charles Dickens, Charlotte Bronte, George Eliot)

This dissertation explores the politics and erotics of narration in the Victorian novel, and illustrates how these novels, by manipulating discursive authority, work to question and perpetuate gendered conventions. Narration is inherently gendered and can be used to perpetuate and contest the limits of self, knowledge, and authority mapped by gender. I'll investigate the intersections among four theoretical issues: the narrative situation (the relations among the implied author, narrator, characters, and readers); the construction of sexed/gendered identities in the novel; the mechanisms of power which operate through the novel's discourse, creating sites from which to contest the construction of sexed/gendered identities; and the nineteenth-century critical response to manipulations of gender and discursive authority in these novels.; In chapter one, I'll examine interrelationships between fictional narration and cultural narratives of gender, which work together to create prescriptive norms of gender behavior by which authors, narrators, and novels are judged. In particular, I'll look at the literary marketplace where critics, novelists and readers met on a gendered field. In chapter two, I'll read Dickens's Great Expectations, whose first-person narrator demonstrates the complexities of constructing an "appropriate" masculine identity and narrative voice. In chapter three, I'll read Bronte's Villette , whose highly involved first-person narrator raises questions about constructing a self that must negotiate its deviance from the standard story of feminine development. Chapter four will explore the construction of a gendered self through the "cross-dressed" first-person narration of Bleak House, truly an experiment on Dickens's part. He experiments with the differences inherent in viewing events from a first- or third-person perspective and explicitly genders these differences. Finally, in chapter five, I'll use Middlemarch to challenge the implicit assumption that omniscience is naturally or inherently masculine or gender neutral.; Ultimately, I intend to look at how gendered expectations are both challenged and enforced in these novels through the methods these authors use to exploit "gendered" narrators and points of view, and in the process, provide an insight into the way these novels participate in creating a discourse that naturalizes differences between genders and between the power and authority assigned to each gender.