Sisters in Time: Imagining Gender in Nineteenth-Century British FictionAsking why the 19th-century British novel features heroines, and how and why it features "feminine heroism," Susan Morgan traces the relationship between fictional depictions of gender and Victorian ideas of history and progress. Morgan approaches gender in selected 19th-century British novels as an imaginative category, accessible to authors and characters of either sex. Arguing that conventional definitions of heroism offer a fixed and history-denying perspective on life, the book traces a literary tradition that represents social progress as a process of feminization. The capacities for flexibility, mercy, and self-doubt, conventionally devalued as feminine, can make it possible for characters to enter history. She shows that Austen and Scott offer revolutionary definitions of feminine heroism, and the tradition is elaborated and transformed by Gaskell, Eliot, Meredith, and James (partly through one of his last "heroines," the aging hero of The Ambassadors.) Throughout the study, Morgan considers how gender functions both in individual novels and more extensively as a means of tracing larger patterns and interests, especially those concerned with the redemptive possibilities of a temporal and historical perspective. |
Contents
| 3 | |
2 Why Theres No Sex in Jane Austens Fiction | 23 |
3 Old Heroes and a New Heroine in the Waverley Novels | 56 |
4 Gaskells Daughters in Time | 83 |
Eliots Edens Without Eve | 127 |
Language as Betrayal in Merediths Later Fiction | 162 |
7 The Feminine Heroic Tradition and Henry James | 193 |
Notes | 231 |
Index | 251 |
Other editions - View all
Sisters in Time: Imagining Gender in Nineteenth-century British Fiction Susan Morgan Limited preview - 1989 |
Common terms and phrases
Adam Bede Ambassadors argue Austen's fiction Balfour British novels Brontë century choice Clara Clarissa conventions Cranford culture daughter defined Diana Dorothea Drumble Effie Egoist eighteenth-century Eliot's fiction Elizabeth Elizabeth Bennet Elizabeth Gaskell Emma fate father female feminist feminist criticism fulfillment future Gaskell Gaskell's novels gender George Gwendolen Gwendolen Harleth Heart of Midlothian Henry James hero heroic figures heroines Hetty Hetty Sorrel Hetty's human images imagination insight Isabel James's Jane Jane Austen Jeanie Lady lead characters literary lives lover male Mansfield Park Maria marriage Mary Mary Barton masculine means Meredith's Middlemarch Molly moral narrative Newsome nineteenth-century British fiction novelists offers paradise passion pattern Percy plot political Portrait Pygmalion readers realism reality Redgauntlet relations role Ruth Scott's sense sexual simply social story Strether Sylvia Sylvia's Lovers Tess tion tradition truth University Press Victorian vision Waverley Waverley novels woman women Woollett writing
Popular passages
Page 232 - Sandra M. Gilbert and Susan Gubar, The Madwoman in the Attic: The Woman Writer and the Nineteenth-Century Literary Imagination (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1979...
Page 59 - Saxon gentlemen are laughing," he said, " because a poor man, such as me, thinks my life, or the life of six of my degree, is worth that of Vich Ian Vohr, it's like enough they may be very right ; but if they laugh because they think I would not keep my word, and come back to redeem him, I can tell them they ken neither the heart of a Hielandman, nor the honour of a gentleman.
Page 162 - Ah ! Meredith ! Who can define him ? His style is chaos illumined by flashes of lightning. As a writer he has mastered everything except language : as a novelist he can do everything, except tell a story : as an artist he is everything, except articulate.
Page 83 - If I've killed one man, I've killed two— The vampire who said he was you And drank my blood for a year, Seven years, if you want to know. Daddy, you can lie back now. There's a stake in your fat black heart And the villagers never liked you.
Page 173 - ... she turned her face to where the load of virginal blossom, whiter than summercloud on the sky, showered and drooped and clustered so thick as to claim colour and seem, like higher Alpine snows in noon-sunlight, a flush of white. From deep to deeper heavens of white, her eyes perched and soared. Wonder lived in her. Happiness in the beauty of the tree pressed to supplant it, and was more mortal and narrower. Reflection came, contracting her vision and weighing her to earth. Her reflection was:...
Page 83 - Charlie, that the labourer is worthy of his hire,' she said, brightly. It's queer how out of touch with truth women are. They live in a world of their own, and there has never been anything like it, and never can be. It is too beautiful altogether, and if they were to set it up it would go to pieces before the first sunset. Some confounded fact we men have been living contentedly with ever since the day of creation would start up and knock the whole thing over.
Page 67 - Ride your ways,' said the gipsy, 'ride your ways, Laird of Ellangowan — ride your ways, Godfrey Bertram! — This day have ye quenched seven smoking hearths — see if the fire in your ain parlour burn the blither for that. Ye have riven the thack off seven cottar houses — look if your ain roof-tree stand the faster. — Ye may stable your stirks in the shealings at Derncleugh — see that the hare does not couch on the hearthstane at Ellangowan.
Page 133 - Do you not see how necessary a World of Pains and troubles is to school an Intelligence and make it a soul?
Page 127 - In learning they seek their goal; in the ordinary tasks of womanhood; in the wider service of their kind. They do not find what they seek, and we cannot wonder. The ancient consciousness of woman, charged with suffering and sensibility, and for so many ages dumb, seems in them to have brimmed and overflowed and uttered a demand for something - they scarcely know what - for something that is perhaps incompatible with the facts of human existence.
Page 27 - What have you been judging from ? Remember the country and the age in which we live. Remember that we are English : that we are Christians. Consult your own understanding, your own sense of the probable, your own observation of what is passing around you.
References to this book
The Consumption of Culture, 1600-1800: Image, Object, Text Ann Bermingham,John Brewer No preview available - 1995 |
Devoted Sisters: Representations of the Sister Relationship in Nineteenth ... Sarah Annes Brown No preview available - 2003 |