| This dissertation focuses on three nineteenth-century women novelists, Jane Austen, Emily Bronte, and Charlotte Bronte, with special attention accorded their place as feminist writers within the tradition and development of the British novel. I examine Jane Austen's Northanger Abbey and Pride and Prejudice, Emily Bronte's Wuthering Heights, and Charlotte Bronte's Jane Eyre from the combined perspectives of archetypal and feminist criticism.;I trace the origin and development of the novel in the eighteenth-century novels of Samuel Richardson and Henry Fielding in order to identify the literary conventions established as precedent for nineteenth-century novels, and to show how these conventions derive from archetypal stories about women and their relations with men. What has come to be partially characterized as the "Pamela Plot," a conflation of the Eve myth and the Cinderella fairy tale, is the paradigmatic story I find Austen and the Brontes reinterpreting, by revising those conventions of plot, theme, characterization, romance and realism, which gave traditional assumptions about women literary expression.;The Eve-Cinderella paradigm allows me to see how some revision strategies common to these women are given individual expression and meaning, as well as to see some strategies unique to each novelist.;The purpose of this study is to demonstrate how these women revised the conventions of the novel as a means to openly inauthenticate sterotyped definitions of women, envisage themselves anew, and thereby provide models for change. |
