The governess, the man of the world and the child : the politics of character constellations in the novels of Charlotte Brontë and Henry James

Abstract

The long nineteenth century saw the rise and fall of British domestic fictions, informing and informed by the ways in which they configure the limit between the private and the public. Although middle-class ideology shored up the monolithic opposition of gendered spheres of life, it did not prevent the Victorians from imaging a proliferation of boundaries within and around the nuclear household. Critical endeavours to emphasize a self-reflexiveness in novelistic realism tend to investigate the porousness and fictionality of its social demarcations. But while they spotlight the human remainders in the novel’s fastidious division of spaces and species, and identify an anti-hegemonic strain in the novelist’s self-critical reproduction of hierarchies, they miss the opportunity to explore its democratic commitment in relation to those figures of liminality. My project therefore acknowledges the communitarian possibilities emerging from alternative relational patterns found in Charlotte Brontë and Henry James’s narratives of domesticity. Three character types, who individually occupy a marginal place in the household, are of common interest to the authors: namely, the governess-teacher, the gentleman of the world, and the child. Together, they invent and instantiate a microcosmic economy of individualism and family life. This thesis studies character constellations in Brontë and James’s novels to conceptualize an interpersonal politics of in-betweenness and crossing borders. I argue that the unusual intersections of the three character types point up to a triangulation of knowledge and sympathy, which reveals and reworks crucial discourses of class, gender, childhood and morality in the second half of the nineteenth century. In exploring how characters’ liminal positions in Victorian homes are imbricated with one another, I map shifting markers of individual identities onto shared interstices, thereby interrogating both the purview of conjoint social experiences and the extent of the private self. My close-readings of Brontë’s Jane Eyre (1847) and Villette (1853), and James’s What Maisie Knew (1897) and “The Turn of the Screw” (1898), elucidate a decline in the mid-century heuristics of introspection and fellow feeling as a rational mechanism to mitigate marginality, cultivate self-understanding, and promote community: when self and other are no longer knowable and sympathetic, but deal in purely fiduciary structures of truth and feeling, interactions at the periphery turn exploitative and solipsistic. The thresholds which Brontë conceives, through the class incongruity of her governess characters, as primarily social become psychological and perspectival in James’s men and children. For that reason, James’s radical imagining of a foster community is belied by the characters’ individual blindness and weaknesses. Yet while Brontë ultimately forecloses her vision of an extrafamilial republic to preserve conventional domesticity, James embraces the stepfamily as both a rhetorical reality and a transgressive impossibility. Parallel to the tortuous development from Brontë to James is the rise and fall of the Victorian Bildungsroman, a generic turning away from the twinned narratives of self-formation and social transformation towards the anti-Bildungsroman. (472 words)