| This study illustrates the ways in which specific fairy tales ("Cinderella," "Beauty and the Beast," "Blue Beard," and "King Thrushbeard") and the nineteenth-century British novels which draw on their patterns and archetypes (Jane Eyre, The Mill on the Floss, The Woman in White, The Tenant of Wildfell Hall, and Our Mutual Friend) helped to shape perceptions and expectations of the feminine in the nineteenth century. Following Michel Foucault and Nancy Armstrong, this study posits that concepts of "the self" are not inherent and unchangeable but are in fact grounded in history, in which print culture plays a crucial role. The female subject's identity is inescapably affected by the society and culture of which she is a part, and her hope of achieving some degree of autonomy lies in her awareness of these effects and her willingness to challenge them.; Charlotte and Anne Bronte, George Eliot, Wilkie Collins, and Charles Dickens enlist fairy tale plots to illustrate the struggle between material and spiritual values. These authors both endorse the prescription of the feminine found in the fairy tale (by borrowing patterns and types from different tales) and challenge it (by making changes in the patterns and in characterization). In Jane Eyre, Charlotte Bronte uses both "Cinderella" and "Beauty and the Beast" to show how the "domestic woman" (Armstrong's term) might claim power from a potentially disempowering situation, while in The Mill on the Floss, Eliot shows the co-dependence suggested in the Beauty-and-the-Beast relationship as destructive for the female. In The Woman in White and The Tenant of Wildfell Hall, Wilkie Collins and Anne Bronte use "Blue Beard" to critique the powerlessness of wives under nineteenth-century marriage laws, and in Our Mutual Friend, Dickens uses "King Thrushbeard" to show a woman's education in submissive wifehood as a gradual grinding-down of her will and personality. |
