<p>This dissertation argues that nineteenth-century
novelists depended on aesthetically unremarkable—or plain—women characters to
establish the realist novel as the genre of the British middle class by mapping
class values onto plain women’s bodies. By creating female characters with an
unremarkable appearance, novelists train readers in the skills necessary to
read the realist novel by focusing on interiority rather than materiality. I
theorize plainness as a middle ground between beautiful and ugly that allowed
authors to define a morality distinct from the upper and lower classes; plain
heroines’ unremarkable exteriors embodied middle-class British values of
authenticity, restraint, and morality. More than merely the non-beautiful,
plainness delineated a very specific kind of moral and classed female
subjectivity.</p>
<p>The aesthetic of plainness
allowed novelists to engage with cultural discussions of modern female
subjectivity, for in creating plain female characters, novelists wrote against
idealized depictions of passive women. To accentuate a female character’s inner
life, plainness in novels functions primarily through comparison, through
networks of represented women. Whereas the literary angel-whore binary has been
well-established, I am interested in how the presence of a plain woman—neither
angel nor monster—complicates our understanding of heroines in novels. The
progressive potential of plain woman speaks to a contemporary movement that
rebukes the misogynistic trope of distrusting a woman’s surface and instead
portrays plain women with deep feeling and individuated identities.</p>
| Identifer | oai:union.ndltd.org:purdue.edu/oai:figshare.com:article/8006282 |
| Date | 15 May 2019 |
| Creators | Amy L Elliot (6597107) |
| Source Sets | Purdue University |
| Detected Language | English |
| Type | Text, Thesis |
| Rights | CC BY 4.0 |
| Relation | https://figshare.com/articles/Hiding_in_Plain_Sight_The_Aesthetic_of_Plainness_and_the_Nineteenth-Century_Novel_Form/8006282 |
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