Unsuitable for narrative : Working women in Victorian literature

Nineteenth-century working women challenged the ideal of the Victorian woman, in whom contemporary narrative had a significant investment. This dissertation looks at representations of working women in Victorian literature to examine how narrative accommodates the historically changing issues of work, gender, sexuality, and class. I consider working women as a narrative category across nineteenth-century British literature, and argue that women working in the factories and mines in the industrial novels of the 1830s and 1840s face oppressions of ideology and narrative similar to those faced by the New Women working in offices in the New Woman fiction of the 1880s and 1890s. I use what I call women\u27s work narratives, the literary descriptions of their paid labor, to bring women\u27s work experiences to the analytical foreground. Work narratives offer an unexplored connection between women that transcends conventional boundaries of class, and act as a site of destabilization of ideological constructs. ^ Working women in industrial fiction are working-class and usually depicted as victims. Ultimately, as demonstrated by Charlotte Elizabeth Tonna\u27s The Wrongs of Woman, the most realistic representations of working women necessitate a break with conventional narrative form. By mid-century, working women in narrative have become middle-class and agent. Charlotte Brontë\u27s Lucy Snowe transgresses gender- and class-marked boundaries of both narrative and character. Charles Dickens\u27 Miss Wade and Fanny Dorrit, both aware of their class statuses, also resist and manipulate using various methods of performance. ^ I look at two examples in which women workers are invested with the authority of public narrative. Elizabeth Barrett Browning\u27s Aurora Leigh is a published poet, and George Eliot\u27s Dinah Morris in Adam Bede is a millworker and Methodist preacher. As evident in Aurora Leigh\u27s move to Italy and Dinah Morris\u27 demotion per the Methodist Convention, nineteenth-century England is not accommodating of women with such authority. Lastly, I argue that prostitutes Eulalie from Augusta Webster\u27s poem A Castaway and Mrs. Warren from Bernard Shaw\u27s Mrs. Warren\u27s Profession should be considered New Women. I read these characters as demonstrating New Woman consciousnesses despite the fact that they are excluded from this identity category because of their work.