'Taking her part in a duet': The painful creation of the self in Austen, Gaskell, and Eliot

Contemporary feminist criticism, which focuses on recovering lost texts by women and rereading women's texts traditionally absorbed in and obscured by the male canon, bears broadening to incorporate insights into the female psyche that come from research in other disciplines. Anthropological studies of primitive cultures show that historically men have viewed women as exchange objects in the development of commerce. Initially traded along with other goods, women were simply an extra commodity necessary to solidify tribal relationships. Gradually, however, women assumed status as gifts, theoretically given freely but actually commanding formal reciprocity. Slowly, through insidious acculturation, women internalized the notion of themselves as gift objects and gradually much psychic, emotional, and physical energy was channeled toward creation of a Self that makes women acceptable to man and successful in the marriage market. Most frequently, women seek a man to be mentor in their struggles; less often a woman attempts to self-create, but always with a male standard as her ensign.;This study suggests that these authors explore one aspect of an inherited, collective female psyche, but at their historical moments posit no success for women who try to escape this acculturation.;Nineteenth-century women novelists frequently depict heroines wrestling with this dilemma. Austen, Gaskell, and Eliot approach their heroines' creation of the Self from vastly different perspectives. Focusing on Emma, Mary Barton, Middlemarch, and Daniel Deronda, this dissertation explores the way the heroines expend their creative energies to achieve an autonomous Self acceptable in a patriarchal society that grants them little but reflected male status. Whether they are victims of unwitting manipulation, attempt selfcreation, or seek male guidance and sanction, each heroine fails or abandons the idea that she can be better. Austen and Gaskell finally assert that women have no option except proper, traditional marriage. Eliot rages against that notion, but cannot conscientiously give her heroines success society would deny. Dorothea accepts that Casaubon's epistemology is closed to her and shifts her creative energies to Ladislaw; her success is completely vicarious. Eliot leaves Gwendolen widowed, with no man on the horizon, and unsure that she can achieve a moral Self.