| In my dissertation I analyze the transference of the Faust myth to female protagonists in four nineteenth-century novels: Lamiel by Stendhal, Der grune Heinrich (first version) by Keller, Mademoiselle de Maupin by Gautier, and The Portrait of a Lady by James. The main features of the Faust myth as brought to bear on the modern era are: the protagonist's passionate quest for self-fulfilment, his desire to create a freer society, and his awareness of the intrinsic unrealizability of his quest. While the Faust myth especially lends itself to an analysis of how male subjectivity is shaped, in the nineteenth century, with the coming of the Industrial Revolution, its use becomes increasingly problematic. Since so many nineteenth-century writers make female subjectivity the arena in which the conflicts of male subjecthood are debated, their attempts to create female versions of the heroic quest for self-knowledge not only speak to the crisis of the male model, but also to a crisis in the realistic novel. My theoretical approach is informed by the work of the French critic Luce Irigaray, especially her notion of a female mimeticism, by Naomi Schor's analysis of the economy of the nineteenth-century realist novel as dependent on a binding of female energy, and by Freudian theory about the construction of gender. The process of feminization consists of two phases: first, the female hero imitates a male pattern of the quest for knowledge, then she attempts to go beyond it by generating her own quest-pattern. There are three possible outcomes: either suicide, as in the case of Lamiel who fully imitates the male model, or a dehumanized solitary grandeur, as in the case of Keller's Judith, whose Faustian achievement can only be told, not shown within the confines of realistic description, or sisterhood, a form of collaborative female bonding, as in the cases of Madelaine and Isabel, which allows the quest to be carried on. While we do not have a successful Faustian heroine whose quest is shown in its entirety, by the end of the century, we do have some Faustian achievement. |
