There is a contradictive part of Swedish women's history that has been overlooked by too many historians. It is about the ways in which the women's movement viewed men in their arguments for citizenship. In this study I examine how man, men and masculinity were constructed as rhetorical objects of female emancipation in Kvinnornas tidning ('The Women's Magazine'). The magazine was published to educate women on civil matters after women's suffrage was granted in Sweden. By stuying the first publications from 1921-1922, I evaluate the obstacles that were connected to citizenship as a male prerogative, despite women's right to vote.  The magazine is characterized by its aim to aggregate women to inluence the male, public sphere and thereby be defined as citizens. By identifying an ideology of separate spheres in the magazine, I study how men were portrayed in each sphere. Here I use the feminist theory of sameness-difference to map where Kvinnornas tidning referred to men as defined by their sex, and where this conflicted with (male) citizenship. My argument is that the ideas of men in the magazine related to how emancipatory aims were subject to male and female normative positions in each sphere. I argue that in the female private sphere, it was easier to strengthen women's authority by rejecting men based on sex, but that in the public sphere, men were the citizens that women aspired to become. By using the contract theory of political theorist Carole Pateman, I illustrate how the contradictions inherent in the original citizenship led to conflicts in their aim for female citizenship, which are evidenced by their ambivalence towards masculinity. Since their definitions of men either reinforced womanhood or confirmed the masculinity of citizenship, they reproduced the patriarchal sexual contract.

Detractors of sentimental literature argue that such novels are unoriginal and concerned primarily with emotions. Feminist scholars redeem the reputation of sentimental literature to an extent. At present, a multitude of approaches present sentimental authors as active agents, engaging with public issues. Building upon the scholarship of prominent feminist historians and literary critics, this thesis provides direct evidence that three female authors embrace the responsibilities of being a social critic. The Wide, Wide World (1850) by Susan Warner, Uncle Tom’s Cabin (1851) by Harriet Beecher Stowe, and The Hidden Hand (1859) by Emma D.E.N. Southworth provide unique commentaries on the separation of the private and public spheres, market revolution, and religion. Decisive differences between the authors’ opinions reveal a high degree of engagement with the public issues.

My thesis explores how female writers of the Golden Age of children’s literature used their domestic stories to convey their visions of a more desirable society to their child readers, and thus to widen their influence beyond the homely sphere. My first chapter reconsiders the nineteenth-century historical circumstances wherein the woman and the child came to be constructed and enshrined as the domestic woman and the Romantic child within the home, and excluded from the public discourses. I then consider how in domestic stories women writers tried to overcome this shared deprivation of autonomy with the child, focusing on the works of Charlotte Yonge, Juliana Ewing, and Mary Louisa Molesworth. It emerges that these women writers were all keen to encourage their young readers to question the boundaries that separate home from the public realm, and to imagine a society wherein these dividing lines would be mitigated and even be extinguished. The thesis argues that these female writers’ literary efforts to exhaust the potential of the domestic story, and that their motivation to provide their child readers a sense of agency were integral in the development of Golden Age children’s literature. Charlotte Yonge’s technique of evoking sympathy for the child characters forged a more intimate relationship between adult author and young reader, and initiated the unsettling of the hierarchy between old and young, and author and reader. Juliana Ewing’s experiments with child narrators and her mingling of adventure and fantasy stories with domestic stories showed successive writers the various directions the domestic story could go. Mary Louisa Molesworth’s nursery stories realized the purpose of Ewing’s literary experiments, as her stories’ natural interweaving of quotidian nursery and fairy tale elements not only alleviated the hierarchy between fantasy and domestic realism, but also opened an era in which the blending of these two modes would become one of the most popular genres in children’s literature.

Anne Brontë died in 1848, having written two novels, Agnes Grey (1847) and The Tenant of Wildfell Hall (1848). Although these novels, especially The Tenant of Wildfell Hall, initially received a favourable critical response, the unsympathetic remarks of Charlotte Brontë and Elizabeth Gaskell initiated a dismissive attitude towards Anne Brontë’s work. For over a hundred years, she was marginalized and silenced by a critical world that admired and respected the work of her two sisters, Charlotte and Emily, but that refused to acknowledge the substantial merits of her own fiction. However, in 1959 revisionist scholars such as Derek Stanford, Ada Harrison and Winifred Gérin, offered important, more enlightened readings that helped to liberate Brontë scholarship from the old conservatisms and to direct it into new directions. Since then, her fiction has been the focus of a robust, but still incomplete, revisionist critical scholarship. My work too is revisionist in orientation, and seeks to position itself within this revisionist approach. It has a double focus that appraises both Brontë’s social commentary and her narratology. It thus integrates two principal areas of enquiry: firstly, an investigation into how Brontë interrogates the position of middle class women in their society, and secondly, an examination of how that interrogation is conveyed by her creative deployment of narrative techniques, especially by her awareness of the rich potential of the first person narrative voice. Chapter 1 looks at the critical response to Brontë’s fiction from 1847 to the present, and shows how the revisionist readings of 1959 were pivotal in re-invigorating the critical approach to her work. Chapter 2 contextualizes the key legal, social, and economic consequences of Victorian patriarchy that so angered and frustrated feminist thinkers and writers such as Brontë. The chapter also demonstrates the extent to which a number of her core concerns relating to Victorian society and the status of women are reflected in her work. In Chapter 3 I discuss three important biographical influences on Brontë: her family, her painful experiences as a governess, and her reading history. Chapter 4 contains a detailed analysis of Agnes Grey, which includes an exploration of the narrative devices that help to reinforce its core concerns. Chapter 5 focuses on The Tenant of Wildfell Hall, showing how the novel offers a richer and more sophisticated analysis of feminist concerns than those that are explored in Agnes Grey. These are broadened to include an investigation of the lives of married women, particularly those trapped in abusive marriages. The chapter also stresses Brontë’s skilful deployment of an intricate and layered narrative technique. The conclusion points to the ways in which my study participates in and extends the current revisionist trend and suggests some aspects of Brontë’s work that would reward further critical attention. / Thesis (DLitt)--University of Pretoria, 2013. / gm2014 / English / Unrestricted

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