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PERSEPHONE IN THE UNDERWORLD: THE MOTHERLESS HERO IN NOVELS BY BURNEY, RADCLIFFE, AUSTEN, BRONTE, ELIOT, AND WOOLF (FEMINIST CRITICISM, PSYCHOANALYTICAL CRITICISM, ARCHETYPAL CRITICISM)
Abstract
The female heroes in late eighteenth-century and in nineteenth-century English novels by women are strikingly motherless, lacking both a constructive model of adult female subjectivity and sexuality, and a matrilineal emotional and linguistic legacy with which to define themselves in a hostile patriarchal culture. Like Persephone in the Underworld, these heroes are captives in the wor(l)d of the father, experiencing heterosexuality as both seductive and coercive, desiring an impossible return to maternal oneness. Two narrative patterns emerge as female authors--themselves artistically motherless--trace the (socially impermissible) maturation of their heroes. In one, the representational tradition exemplified by the works of Fanny Burney, Jane Austen, and early George Eliot, female heroes initially resist patriarchal definition--cultural and psychological inscription expressed primarily in linguistic metaphors. Yet they are equally terrified by the subversive, semiotic, marginal, and declassee jouissance of maternal surrogates. Eventually, these heroes succumb to the Word of the Father and its model of feminine renunciation and silence, rather than risk the dangers of maternal reconciliation (rematriation), depicted as dirty, classless, promiscuous, and violent. By contrast, a surreal, Gothic, and fantasy narrative pattern, exemplified by the novels of Ann Radcliffe, Charlotte Bronte, later George Eliot, and Virginia Woolf, permits that dangerous, semiotic, maternal energy to disrupt and redefine the world of the novel. The patriarchal domination which threatens these heroes is heterosexual as well as linguistic, while the symbolic representatives of maternal origins they confront--often in the guise of irrational, life-saving forces--empower and renew them. Employing non-representational gestures--a species of l'ecriture feminine--to suggest such rematriation, these novels suggest a tentative, uneasy, and covert return to lost/repressed pre-Oedipal material. Employing elements of archetypal criticism, feminist psychoanalytical theory, and French feminism to examine these novels, we find a remarkable consistency of motifs: enforced silence and desire for voice/education; fear of invisibility and yearning for transcendence; profound dis-ease with (masculine) models of autonomous identity; fearless assertion on behalf of others; implicit homoerotic solace in female friendship; and a deep fear of maternal eroticism coupled with an intense desire for rematriation.
Subject Area
British and Irish literature
Recommended Citation
MURPHY, ANN BRIAN, "PERSEPHONE IN THE UNDERWORLD: THE MOTHERLESS HERO IN NOVELS BY BURNEY, RADCLIFFE, AUSTEN, BRONTE, ELIOT, AND WOOLF (FEMINIST CRITICISM, PSYCHOANALYTICAL CRITICISM, ARCHETYPAL CRITICISM)" (1986). Doctoral Dissertations Available from Proquest. AAI8701205.
https://scholarworks.umass.edu/dissertations/AAI8701205