Structural Devices and their Provocative Powers: A Formal Analysis of Women’s Eighteenth-Century Literature

Abstract

In recent years, scholars have identified a missing link in the critical conversation with respect to feminist formalist analyses of early modern literature. These close, formal readings are important tools of analysis for women’s literature in particular, as much of that literature emerges from a political landscape in which women’s speech is necessarily curtailed. This dissertation joins that critical conversion, building upon the work undertaken in recent years to analyse literature from the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, to provide a feminist formalist analysis of three eighteenth-century texts: The Female Quixote by Charlotte Lennox, Evelina by Frances Burney, and The Mysteries of Udolpho, by Ann Radcliffe. Contextualising each text within its specific surrounding cultural and historical landscape, this dissertation applies narrative and reader response theories to delineate a distinct reading of the selected texts that identifies subversive challenges to the gender norms associated with eighteenth-century English society. Notable topics of concern identified through this formal analysis include marriage, education, the dichotomy of public versus private space as it pertains to the domestic containment of women, and behavioural standards as they are applied both to women and to men. This dissertation concludes that where women’s speech is shaped by the strictures of the world in which they live, new modes of communication emerge through which to delineate a feminine subjectivity, free from the constraints of ‘the real language of men’.