Conduct literature and the novel: Eighteenth-century constructions of the ideal woman

If one accepts the claim that literature represents ideologies that help construct lived experience, then we can see that literature helps create society and is not merely reflective of it. Contributing to women's literary history, this dissertation recovers that dynamic relationship at the intersection of conduct literature, the novel, and female education. Eighteenth-century conduct literature, because it is by definition prescriptive, is an excellent example of a source of ideology that portrays women as cultural objects. Conduct literature served to both perpetuate and challenge the ideology of the "feminine" in eighteenth-century culture.;Recently scholars have turned to conduct literature as a way to access a version of the lived experience of women. Yet much of this scholarship relies on overgeneralizations that depict conduct literature as monolithic. This false construction fails to recognize the diversity among texts, covering the social and political spectrum from revolutionary to reactionary.;In order to break down that monolith this dissertation approaches conduct literature as a study in women's education. The dissertation has two main sections. The first two chapters deal primarily with conduct literature itself. Chapter one examines conduct literature as a century-long tradition; its focus on education serves to illuminate a genealogy of the discourse of independence. Chapter two identifies the overlooked disjunction between courtship novels and conduct literature, which demonstrates the subversiveness of some courtship novels and how they represent ideological battles over gender role definitions.;The second major section of the dissertation applies the nuanced reading of conduct literature in part one to test cases of eighteenth-century novels that are explicitly concerned with women's education. The reading of Charlotte Lennox's Female Quixote in chapter three links reading, imagination, and desire to demonstrate the subversion of conduct literature's "archenarrative" that defines what makes young women marriageable. Chapter four employs Jane Austen's Mansfield Park to demonstrate challenges to the ideology of marriage that conflates moral and financial interests. Finally, chapter five examines the importance of the revolutionary moment of the 1790s for (re)defining women's "sphere," demonstrating the attempt by Mary Hays in Memoirs of Emma Courtney to reform society as a whole rather than to reform women's place within it. In short through a fuller appreciation of conduct literature, each of these chapters attempts to problematize that ubiquitous---but not---monolithic eighteenth-century vision: the ideal woman.