The dissertation examines the narrative erasure enacted upon mothers by English courtship novels of the eighteenth century, an erasure that seems historically incongruous given that century's cultural fascination with maternity. While the popular fiction of the time minutely traces the tales of beautiful and morally deserving young women negotiating their ways through the marriage market, most of these novels terminate before the heroine's motherhood. The generic erasure of women after marriage reflects the political, legal, social and economic erasures enacted upon eighteenth-century women within the institution of marriage. The novel's pleasure, proffered for popular consumption, performed the ideological function of making the erasure of women's subjectivity palatable, even sweet. Further, the inevitably tragic fate of almost any novel's heroine who narratively survived into maternity promoted an ideology of gender that denied women independent and autonomous identity, and packaged the culture's violence toward women within an ideology of maternal sacrifice that bound women in contracts of affection and self-sacrifice Moreover, while they construct female characters on the basis of individual identity and agency, the courtship novels deny any but the most illusory of subjectivity to women. Susan Staves' Married Women's Separate Property elucidates eighteenth-century Britain's legal machinations which sought to prevent women's political and economic claims to equality in the face of the liberal ideology of the individual. Elizabeth Kowaleski-Wallace's Consuming Subjects examines the cultural construction of the female consumer which bore the weight of much social anxiety over commercialization. The economic power of capital could potentially, and sometimes did, extend to women through property. Furthermore, the liberal ideology of the long eighteenth century's last third threatened to disturb gendered distinctions of power, explaining in part why Mary Wollstonecraft was so reviled after her death. In each of the four novels upon which the dissertation focuses the heroine must evaporate after her marriage or suffer abjection and death. The dissertation argues that women were defined in the eighteenth century as a profitless surplus, what Georges Bataille calls the 'Accursed Share,' upon which was enacted what Joseph Roach terms a performance of waste / acase@tulane.edu
| Identifer | oai:union.ndltd.org:TULANE/oai:http://digitallibrary.tulane.edu/:tulane_26425 |
| Date | January 1999 |
| Contributors | Bisson, Georgette Marie (Author), Lowenthal, Cynthia (Thesis advisor) |
| Publisher | Tulane University |
| Source Sets | Tulane University |
| Language | English |
| Detected Language | English |
| Rights | Access requires a license to the Dissertations and Theses (ProQuest) database., Copyright is in accordance with U.S. Copyright law |
Page generated in 0.002 seconds