An Ethics of Becoming

Configurations of Feminine Subjectivity in Jane Austen Charlotte Bronte, and George Eliot

Sonjeong Cho

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2014
• ISBN:
  9781135491031
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: Literary Criticism
• Index: Literature

In attempting to conceptualize feminine subjectivity beyond the familiar paradigm of dualism and within the parameters of ethics, this study examines the political and intellectual identity of contemporary poststructuralist feminism and its profound resonance with the nineteenth-century British female Bildungsroman. Rooted in fundamental questions about the nexus between feminist theory and feminist literature, genre and gender, subjectivity and ethics, sexuality and textuality, and mimesis and politics, this book aims specifically to configure feminine subjectivity in the horizon of becoming - always incomplete, non-identarian, performative, unknowable, and thus paradoxically unbecoming - as it disseminates in a modality of alterity in novels by Jane Austen, Charlotte Brontë, and George Eliot. The close reading of major novels by these women writers illuminates the artistic density and ethical depth of their writing by demonstrating that these women writers rewrite the genealogy of subjectivity and invent their own Bildungsroman as a rich narrative vehicle for the feminine.

LITERARY CRITICISM AND CULTURAL THEORY

WILLIAM E. CAIN, General Editor

ETHICAL DIVERSIONS

The Post-Holocaust Narratives of Pynchon, Abish, DeLillo, and Spiegelman

Katalin Orbán

POSTMODERN COUNTERNARRATIVES

Irony and Audience in the Novels of Paul Auster, Don DeLillo, Charles Johnson, and Tim O'Brien

Christopher Donovan

THE END OF THE MIND

The Edge of the Intelligible in Hardy, Stevens, Larkin, Plath, and Glück

DeSales Harrison

AUTHORING THE SELF

Self-Representation, Authorship, and the Print Market in British Poetry from Pope through Wordsworth

Scott Hess

NARRATIVE MUTATIONS

Discourses of Heredity and Caribbean Literature

Rudyard J. Alcocer

BETWEEN PROFITS AND PRIMITIVISM

Shaping White Middle-Class Masculinity in the United States 1880–1917

Athena Devlin

POETRY AND REPETITION

Walt Whitman, Wallace Stevens, John Ashbery

Krystyna Mazur

THE FICTION OF NATIONALITY IN AN ERA OF TRANSNATIONALISM

Nyla Ali Khan

GENDERED PATHOLOGIES

The Female Body and Biomedical Discourse in the Nineteenth-Century English Novel

Sondra M. Archimedes

“TWENTIETH-CENTURY AMERICANISM”

Identity and Ideology in Depression-Era Leftist Fiction

Andrew C. Yerkes

WILDERNESS CITY

The Post World War II American Urban Novel from Algren to Wideman

Ted L. Clontz

THE IMPERIAL QUEST AND MODERN MEMORY FROM CONRAD TO GREENE

J. M. Rawa

THE ETHICS OF EXILE

Colonialism in the Fictions of Charles Brockden Brown and J. M. Coetzee

Timothy Francis Strode

THE ROMANTIC SUBLIME AND MIDDLE-CLASS SUBJECTIVITY IN THE VICTORIAN NOVEL

Stephen Hancock

VITAL CONTACT

Downclassing Journeys in American Literature from Herman Melville to Richard Wright

Patrick Chura

COSMOPOLITAN FICTIONS

Ethics, Politics, and Global Change in the Works of Kazuo Ishiguro, Michael Ondaatje, Jamaica Kincaid, and J. M. Coetzee

Katherine Stanton

OUTSIDER CITIZENS

The Remaking of Postwar Identity in Wright, Beauvoir, and Baldwin

Sarah Relyea

AN ETHICS OF BECOMING

Configurations of Feminine Subjectivity in Jane Austen, Charlotte Brontë, and George Eliot

Sonjeong Cho

An Ethics of Becoming

Configurations of Feminine Subjectivity in Jane Austen, Charlotte Brontë, and George Eliot

Sonjeong Cho

Routledge

New York & London

Published in 2006 by

Routledge

Taylor & Frands Group

270 Madison Avenue

New York, NY 10016

Published in Great Britain by

Routledge

Taylor & Francis Group

2 Park Square

Milton Park, Abingdon

Chon OX14 4RN

© 2006 by Taylor & Francis Group, LLC

Routledge is an imprint of Taylor & Frands Group

International Standard Book Number-10: 0-415-97537-9 (Hardcover)

International Standard Book Number-13: 978-0-415-97537-7 (Hardcover)

Library of Congress Card Number 2005017709

No part of this book may be reprinted, reproduced, transmitted, or utilized in any form by any electronic, mechanical, or other means, now known or hereafter invented, including photocopying, microfilming, and recording, or in any information storage or retrieval system, without written permission from the publishers.

Trademark Notice: Product or corporate names may be trademarks or registered trademarks, and are used only for identification and explanation without intent to infringe.

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Cho, Sonjeong.

An ethics of becoming : configurations of feminine subjectivity in Jane Austen, Charlotte Bronte, and George Eliot / by Sonjeong Cho.

p. cm. -- (Literary criticism and cultural theory)

Includes bibliographical references and index.

ISBN 0-415-97537-9 (alk. paper)

DOI: 10.4324/9780203959268

1. English fiction--Women authors--History and criticism. 2. Feminism and literature--England--History--19th century. 3. Women and literature--England--History--19th century. 4. English fiction--19th century--History and criticism. 5. Feminist fiction, English--History and criticism. 6. Brontë, Charlotte, 1816-1855--Ethics. 7. Bildungsromans--History and criticism. 8. Eliot, George, 1819-1880--Ethics. 9. Austen, Jane, 1775-1817--Ethics. 10. Subjectivity in literature. 11. Femininity in literature. 12. Ethics in literature. I. Title. 11. Series.

PR868.F45C48 2005

823′.8099287--dc22

2005017709

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Table of Contents

• Acknowledgments
• Chapter One Marking of the Feminine: The Possible Happening of the Impossible
• Chapter Two The Marriage Plot and Its Discontents: Choreographies of Erotic Subjectivity in Jane Austen
• Chapter Three...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Half Title Page
• Frontmatter 1
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• Acknowledgments
• Chapter One Marking of the Feminine: The Possible Happening of the Impossible
• Chapter Two The Marriage Plot and Its Discontents: Choreographies of Erotic Subjectivity in Jane Austen
• Chapter Three Scenes of Reading and Writing Scenes: The Open Secret of Writing Subjectivity in Charlotte Brontë
• Chapter Four A Threshold of the Feminine: The Dissemination of Subjectivity in George Eliot
• Conclusion An Ethics of Becoming
• Notes
• Works Cited
• Index