The Promise of an Ambiguous Self: Eradicating an Essentialist Femininity through Deceit in the Victorian Novel

In this study, I explore the extent to which Victorian women participate in the creation of their own stereotypical representations, how these representations are often misinterpreted as essential femininity, and, furthermore, how women resist these claims even as they conform to them. In his Rhetoric of Motives, Kenneth Burke insists that the \u27\u27individual person strives to form himself in accordance with the communicative norms that match the cooperative ways of his society and in order to act upon himself persuasively, he must variously resort to images and ideas that are formative (39). In other words, I am suggesting that if women are to benefit from a society that assigns them certain roles or attributes, they must, unfortunately, play the part-even if they must conceal, fool, or lie to do it In order to examine the dynamics of women writing themselves in patriarchal Victorian England, and moreover, to perceive how the image of the vacuous “Angel in the House has been able to sustain itself, I examine a series of works composed by women throughout the era: Elizabeth Gaskell\u27s North and South (1855), George Eliot\u27s Daniel Deronda (1876) Charlotte Bronte’s Villette (1852), and Sarah Grand\u27s The Heavenly Twins (1893). I offer a model by which to dissect the elusive constructions of language-based identities and uncover parallels between the communicative relationships of heroines and other characters in a novel, an author and her audience, and lastly, a woman and her society at large--the woman in each case possessing a voice that may be potentially repudiated, but that may also deceive, manipulate, and control. Ultimately, it is the points of resistance, the mistranslated messages (both within and outside of the texts), the agonizing cries of suffocation-subtle or silent-that necessitate reexamination and feminist critique