Social Performance and Reticence: Mental Negotiations in Austen, Brontë, and Eliot

This thesis examines how three nineteenth-century British novels purvey and critique contemporary standards regarding social performance and reticence and the strains such standards place on those whose dispositions disincline them to conform to the regulations for decorum articulated in conduct books of the time. Utilizing the psychological lens of introversion and extroversion alongside the cognitive narrative theories of Alan Palmer and Lisa Zunshine, this thesis investigates the construction of individual character identities through the reading of interactions among multiple fictional minds in Charlotte Brontë’s Villette (1853), Jane Austen’s Pride and Prejudice (1813), and George Eliot’s The Mill on the Floss (1860)