UVM Theses and Dissertations
Format:
Print
Author:
Moore, Anne
Dept./Program:
English
Year:
2004
Degree:
M.A.
Abstract:
Closure is always unsteady in the novel. Whether a novel self-consciously refuses traditional gestures of closure such as marriage or death, or it works within the established boundaries of genre, issues are always left unresolved at the novel's close which complicate the movement of the story into the arena D. A. Miller calls the "non-narratable": "a state of quiescence assumed by the novel before the beginning and supposedly recovered by it at the end" (ix). Although Miller's analysis exposes the inability of narratives to successfully achieve thorough closure, it does not consider the impact of gender and social power on what I refer to as "un-ending." In this project, I will examine the way gender affects the endings of four canonical Victorian novels, showing how authors negotiate the question of narratability in relation to established narratives, particularly the marriage plot. In doing so, I will highlight the centrality of gender to the narrative structure of these novels, and the shaping power of patriarchal narrative expectations.
In my first chapter, I will consider novels that appear to acquiesce to generic conventions, and show how concerns about gender and power serve to destabilize these seemingly steady closing scenes. Looking at George Eliot's Middlemarch and Anne Bronte's The Tenant of Wildfell Hall, I will show how these novels disrupt the boundary between narratable and non-narratable subject matter by highlighting the inability of marriage to "finish" the story. In my second chapter, I will examine Charlotte Bronte's novel, Villette, as one which refuses the traditional gestures of closure, ending with its heroine neither married nor dead. However, Bronte still works within the boundaries set by the marriage plot, even as she pushes their limits, using the interrupted marriage plot that ends the novel as a metaphor by which the heroine, Lucy Snowe, can articulate a non-narratable trauma from her early life. Although Lucy's early trauma drives her action throughout the narrative, the only story she can tell about it is the one gained at the novel's finish, of her lover's death. The novel thus exposes the marriage plot as simultaneously insufficient to express the truth of women's lives and as the only vocabulary available to women to refer to their lives.
In my third and final chapter, I will consider Great Expectations by Charles Dickens as an example of the relationship between "un-ending" and patriarchal narrative expectations. Examining both the original and revised endings, I will show how the revised ending achieves the same kind of "un-ending" achieved by the novels I considered in my first chapter, making gestures toward the traditional marriage plot, but undermining the power of its resolution by casting the union of Pip and Estella as little different from the obsession that has preceded it. At the same time, this un-ending can be understood as a resistant move on Dickens' part to the constraints of the marriage plot, which he had abandoned in the original ending. The doubled ending of Great Expectations thus shows both the problem of the marriage plot, in its socially imposed generic constraints, and the possibilities for narrative resistance within its structure.
In my first chapter, I will consider novels that appear to acquiesce to generic conventions, and show how concerns about gender and power serve to destabilize these seemingly steady closing scenes. Looking at George Eliot's Middlemarch and Anne Bronte's The Tenant of Wildfell Hall, I will show how these novels disrupt the boundary between narratable and non-narratable subject matter by highlighting the inability of marriage to "finish" the story. In my second chapter, I will examine Charlotte Bronte's novel, Villette, as one which refuses the traditional gestures of closure, ending with its heroine neither married nor dead. However, Bronte still works within the boundaries set by the marriage plot, even as she pushes their limits, using the interrupted marriage plot that ends the novel as a metaphor by which the heroine, Lucy Snowe, can articulate a non-narratable trauma from her early life. Although Lucy's early trauma drives her action throughout the narrative, the only story she can tell about it is the one gained at the novel's finish, of her lover's death. The novel thus exposes the marriage plot as simultaneously insufficient to express the truth of women's lives and as the only vocabulary available to women to refer to their lives.
In my third and final chapter, I will consider Great Expectations by Charles Dickens as an example of the relationship between "un-ending" and patriarchal narrative expectations. Examining both the original and revised endings, I will show how the revised ending achieves the same kind of "un-ending" achieved by the novels I considered in my first chapter, making gestures toward the traditional marriage plot, but undermining the power of its resolution by casting the union of Pip and Estella as little different from the obsession that has preceded it. At the same time, this un-ending can be understood as a resistant move on Dickens' part to the constraints of the marriage plot, which he had abandoned in the original ending. The doubled ending of Great Expectations thus shows both the problem of the marriage plot, in its socially imposed generic constraints, and the possibilities for narrative resistance within its structure.