Textual power: Female narration in the British novel

This dissertation studies plots of narration in five canonical nineteenth- and twentieth-century British novels. I demonstrate that how a woman tells her story is as crucial to our understanding of it as its content, for a novel's mode of narration frequently undermines its ostensible plot. Working with narratives which have been noted for their artlessness, I show how they are actually carefully constructed to deceive. After analyzing relationships between the sexes specifically in terms of battles for narrative authority, I argue for a rethinking of the history of the marriage plot.; In my first chapter I show how Jane Eyre is an elaborate confidence game in which Rochester takes Jane into his confidence in order to lie to her and Jane takes us into her confidence in order to lie to us. The result is not a conventional marriage plot, but a revenge novel in which Jane reveals secrets the blinded Rochester cannot read.; My second chapter examines the anomalous relationship between Esther Summerson and the omniscient third-person narrator in Dickens's Bleak House and shows how it is modeled on the many troubled parent/child relationships in the novel. Through her interaction with her companion narrator, Esther shows her desire both to reconcile and distance herself from her parents and her genetic inheritance. Chapter three questions the relationship between Marian Halcombe's and Walter Hartright's narratives in Collins's The Woman in White. I illustrate that Marian's narrative is not epistolary, but retrospective, and that she uses it not to contribute to Walter's project, but to work against his conservative marriage plot.; In Chapter four I argue for the artfulness of Molly Bloom's soliloquy in Ulysses. Like Homer's great artificer, Penelope, Molly weaves and unweaves language in the service of an elaborate hoax. Joyce's radical form of writing allows Molly to perform the conservative gesture of preserving her marriage.; I conclude by studying the relationship between contemporary feminist literary critics and nineteenth-century women writers in A.S. Byatt's Possession. Like Byatt, I explore the strategies female narrators use to defend themselves against the liberties taken by overzealous readers.