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Full-Text Articles in Feminist, Gender, and Sexuality Studies
Plotting The Mother: Caroline Norton, Helen Huntingdon, And Isabel Vane, Elisabeth Rose Gruner
Plotting The Mother: Caroline Norton, Helen Huntingdon, And Isabel Vane, Elisabeth Rose Gruner
English Faculty Publications
The proper Victorian heroine neither acts nor plots. Heroines as disparate as Fanny Price of Mansfield Park and Gwendolen Harleth of Daniel Deronda prove their virtue by failing as actresses. When Fanny protests, “Indeed, I cannot act,” we know that it is because she cannot be other than what she is: virtuous. Gwendolen Harleth’s aborted attempt to make a career as an actress seems, in Daniel Deronda, to signal her essential difference from the Princess Halm-Eberstein, the mother who has abandoned Daniel in order to pursue her acting career. Gwendolen is flawed, but at least she is not an …
Crossing Boundaries: Land And Sea In Jane Austen's 'Persuasion', Laura Vorachek
Crossing Boundaries: Land And Sea In Jane Austen's 'Persuasion', Laura Vorachek
English Faculty Publications
Jane Austen suggests in Persuasion the pressures that the increased mobility of the middle class placed on the established aristocratic society in her time. Anne Elliot especially brings to light the inherited assumptions of her society. She can marry within her social rank (Mr. Elliot or Charles Musgrove) or marry below her (Wentworth at age 23), but either is a choice within the limits established by her society. One owns land or one does not. But when Wentworth returns a man of name and wealth, he is not a member of the landed gentry nor is he below Anne in …