The human voice: The narration of the self in 'Mansfield Park', 'Villette'; and 'Middlemarch'

This dissertation argues that the omniscient narrators of Mansfield Park, Villette and Middlemarch provide a blueprint for the creation of new individuals. The heart of my discussion is the comparison of the narrator's voice and the heroine's voice in the three novels.;My first chapter offers a fresh understanding of Mansfield Park 's puzzling heroine by comparing her to the Austen narrator. Fanny Price seeks to arm herself against a dependent situation by cultivating rational judgment of character and tranquillity of mind, two characteristics which the Austen narrator incarnates superbly. Fanny's vision of other characters approaches the narrator's vision, but she never achieves the narrator's authoritative voice. Nor does she gain the tranquillity of the Austen narrator through reading. Austen's invention of Fanny evaluates habits of mind that are especially attractive to sympathetic readers of her novels.;My second chapter explains why Villette is Charlotte Bronte's most painful novel. Villette's narrator, Lucy Snowe, patterns two narrative voices in order to create a world in which individuality is understood as the susceptibility to overwhelming feeling. Lucy's "voice of analysis" (very similar to Austen's omniscient voice of character analysis) uncovers the pain of other characters, while her "voice of confession" reveals her own pain. The design of the novel blends the two voices, at first so distinct, into one. Pain becomes permeable from person to person. Lucy's voices enlist the novel's reader into a charmed circle of suffering.;My third chapter presents the narrator's voice in Middlemarch as the ideal vehicle for Eliot's philosophy of self-reflection. Self-reflection is a recognition that one's own point of view is just that---a point of view, rather than a first principle which orders the universe. Eliot writes: "One morning, some weeks after her arrival at Lowick, Dorothea---but why always Dorothea?" The narrator scrutinizes her own voice to expose its bias. Eliot's meta-narration underpins the self-reflective ideal: the turn upon the self, the transcendence of egoism. I answer Eliot's rhetorical question by suggesting that Dorothea Brooke is a central presence because she learns to speak in the Middlemarch narrator's self-reflective voice.