Stone Walls Do Not A Prison Make: Reclaiming Agency through Narrative in Jean Rhys' _Good Morning, Midnight_ and Charlotte Bronte's _Villette_ Pubblico

Wojciechowski, Miranda Kay (2014)

Permanent URL: https://etd.library.emory.edu/concern/etds/44558d63r?locale=it
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Abstract

Throughout Charlotte Bronte's Villette and Jean Rhys's Good Morning, Midnight, the narrators attempt to both express and to escape their physical, psychological, and social imprisonment. Bronte's Lucy Snowe and Rhys's Sasha Jensen's internalized perceptions of gendered expectation initially prevent them from breaking free from cycles of isolation and repression. As they experience various nervous breakdowns, these narrators attempt to reconcile their fragmented identities, turning to external remedies such as alcoholic substance and religious rhetoric. These attempts themselves ultimately fail to move Lucy and Sasha towards a more cohesive, conceptualized presentation of identity. However, by articulating these failed attempts, writing themselves, and formulating their own stories, Lucy and Sasha gain insight into the self-perpetuating processes of isolation and repression, eventually acquiring conscious agency over their construction of identity both on the page and in the events which subsequently unfold in their narratives. Through simultaneously examining the alternative temporalities and differing narrative perspectives produced by Victorian and Modern constructions, I hope to parallel Lucy and Sasha's narrative journeys by deconstructing the critical categorizations which often limit the interpretative possibilities of the literary works.

Table of Contents

Introduction..........................................................................................................................1

Chapter 1- The Distorting Mirror: Performances of Womanhood in Villette and Good Morning, Midnight... 4

Chapter 2- Things Rootless and Perishable: Depression, Isolation, and the Narrative Landscape.......... 31

Chapter 3- Unveiling Social Specters: Alcohol, Religious Sentiment, and the "Writing Cure"..................51

Bibliography..........................................................................................................................71

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