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MacLean, Meghan S.

English

2012

M.A.

While Charlotte Brontë's Jane Eyre has been extensively written-on over time, there is a continual degree of controversy over its implications as a text that addresses women's rights. Sarah Grand's text The Beth Book, although lesser known and written on, has undergone a similar debate among its critics. Despite their recognition ofthe progressive qualities of these texts and the assertive qualities of their heroines, critics continually question whether Jane Eyre and The Beth Book can be positioned as texts that decisively affirm women as knowing and assertive subjects. Critics question the political and social import of these texts for focusing so closely on the personal, providing little scope of public life. In the following, I challenge the notion that Brontë's and Grand's focus on the personal narrative of their heroines and inclusion of sentiment are problematic in terms of the texts as examples of assertive female subjectivity.
My inquiry shifts the emphasis from the surface of Brontë and Grand's narrative choices to an understanding of their more fundamentally subversive elements: the assertion of a woman's moral compass, a refusal to bow to authority, and an ability to enact agency. I provide an analysis of the ways in which these texts generate social and political force through a focus on the personal. In the centering of their narratives on an individual woman's domestic life, these texts portray the significance of a woman's understanding of herself, inclusive of her sentiment, as essential to her ability to impact her social and political world. The two chapters consist ofa n inquiry into the ways in which Brontë and Grand respectively create heroines with a liminal notion of subjectivity, as well as an exploration of the ways in which grappling with the difficulties of becoming a knowing female subject can create the means to confront social and political convention.