The Female Gothic Connoisseur: Reading, Subjectivity, and the Feminist Uses of Gothic Fiction

The Female Gothic Connoisseur: Reading, Subjectivity, and the Feminist Uses of Gothic Fiction By Monica Cristina Soare A dissertation submitted in partial satisfaction of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy in English in the Graduate Division of the University of California, Berkeley Committee in charge: Professor Ian Duncan, Chair Professor Julia Bader Professor Michael Iarocci Spring 2013 1 Abstract The Female Gothic Connoisseur: Reading, Subjectivity, and the Feminist Uses of Gothic Fiction by Monica Cristina Soare Doctor or Philosophy in English University of California, Berkeley Professor Ian Duncan, Chair In my dissertation I argue for a new history of female Romanticism in which the romance – and particularly the Gothic romance – comes to represent the transformative power of the aesthetic for the female reader. The literary figure in which this formulation inheres is the Female Quixote – an eighteenth-century amalgamation of Cervantes's reading idealist and the satirized figure of the learned woman – who embodies both aesthetic enthusiasm and a feminist claim on the world of knowledge. While the Female Quixote has generally been understood as a satirical figure, I show that she is actually at the forefront of a development in British aesthetics in which art comes to be newly valued as a bulwark against worldliness. Such a development arises as part of mid-eighteenth-century sensibility culture and changes the meaning of an aesthetic practice that had been to that point criticized and satirized – that of over-investment in the arts, associated, as I show, with both the figure of the connoisseur and of the Female Quixote. Connoisseurship emerges in this period as a revolutionary aesthetic practice and has the most significant implications for its female representative, the Female Quixote, who mobilizes it against traditional femininity. I draw upon Matt Hills's theorization of connoisseurship, as a mode of aesthetic reception which is both passionately invested and sophisticatedly detached, to argue that this is why such a stance has historically been denied to women, rooted in the "real" and the domestic, and emerges as a feminist and idealist practice in Female Quixotism. The Gothic romance emerged as a vehicle for the new female connoisseur because of its generically conventional form, which enables connoisseurial mastery, and its anti-realist content, which renders it an emblem for the aesthetic more broadly and a counter to the domestic more particularly. My introduction and my first chapter map out a new history of eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century Female Quixotism in conjunction with eighteenth-century theories of connoisseurship in order to trace the rise of a feminist investment in aesthetics and define what I call the female connoisseur. After this macro-reading, I focus in my second chapter on what I identify as a particularly radical and important manifestation of the female connoisseur: Germaine de Staël's Corinne, heroine of her 1807 eponymous novel. Staël develops the figure of the aesthetic woman to what she aspires to be in the British tradition: female artist and genius. In my third chapter, I look at an actual historical 2 instance of female connoisseurship: the female reader-writers of The Lady's Magazine (1770-1832). The Lady's was the first periodical to publish tales and serialized novels in the newly invented mode of the Gothic romance, rendering their female readers the first experts in this new aesthetic mode. Further, the Lady's solicited Gothic romances from its female readers, encouraging them to become connoisseurs of the Gothic. The importance of the Gothic to the new female aestheticism I am tracing is rendered most powerfully in Brontë's Jane Eyre (1847), the focus of my fourth chapter. Brontë's novel instantiates the logic of female connoisseurship in that its reliance on romance conventions constitutes its female readers, who recognize these conventions, as aesthetic subjects. I close with a chapter that looks at the state of female connoisseurship today and its relationship to the Gothic. I posit that the horror film is the cultural site in which the feminist implications of connoisseurship are most salient. Like its Gothic novel predecessor, the woman's horror film relies on the Romantic formula in which the Gothic stands in for the aesthetic, a realm only partially open to women and so aspired to by a questing female figure; the Female Quixote has become Carol Clover's Final Girl. i For Dave ii Table of Contents Acknowledgements iii – vii Introduction 1 – 30 Quixotic Connoisseurship Chapter One 31 – 93 Art and Artfulness: Theorizing the Female Connoisseur through Female Quixote Satires Chapter Two: 94 – 111 Quixotic Corinne: Staël, Sensibility, and the British Female Quixote Tradition Chapter Three: 112 – 183 The Lady's Magazine and the Reader-Writer: A Historical Case Study of Female Gothic Connoisseurship Chapter Four: 184 – 209 The 'Lurid Hieroglyphics' of Literary Conventions: Aestheticizing Conventionality in Jane Eyre Chapter Five: 210 – 229 The Final Girl as Female Quixote: The Career-Woman-in-Peril-Thriller and the Endurance of the Feminist Uses of the Gothic Bibliography and Filmography 230 – 240 iii Acknowledgements I finish this project not tired and ready to step away from the computer, but energized and eager to set out again – like the Female Quixote figure at the center of the project, I am ready to read and to create. For this I have to thank my brilliant, enthusiastic, and encouraging committee: Ian Duncan, Julia Bader, and Michael Iarocci. My warmest thank you and greatest gratitude is to my adviser, Ian Duncan, for believing in my project from the beginning and guiding me so that I could realize what I wanted to say and say it with true confidence. From the first class I took with Professor Duncan my first year in graduate school – when I thought I could figure out what Romanticism "was" by looking at the canonical figures and to renowned critics – his teaching opened up for me a complex and varied world of Romanticism, of novels, plays, fragments, tales, periodicals, that were entertaining and odd and uncategorizable. And from then I was off on the quest, investigating for myself, reading more widely and intensely than ever, guided by Professor Duncan's incredible knowledge, passion, and encouragement of rigorous intellectual dialogue. And I was discovering the great beauty and variety of the Romantic novel. (I remember particularly fondly sitting in a pizza place on Telegraph Avenue and being unable to tear myself away from Scott's Redgauntlet, a novel in Professor Duncan's seminar. I was part of the long tradition I document in this dissertation of readers who mark the pages of novels with food stains because they cannot tear themselves away.) I was at first unsure of myself, not ready to argue with other scholars, but, with Professor Duncan's training, I now feel brave enough to hold my own with any scholar in the field, which is the major gift an adviser can give a student. Professor Duncan is also a spellbinding teacher and thrilling interlocutor, and being able to work with him has been an honor and the highlight of my career. He has opened up to me the world of scholarship, and has lit in me an enthusiasm for the work that will stay with me forever. Professor Duncan knew what I was trying to articulate long before I did, and I am more grateful than he can know for helping me realize it. I also cannot express enough how much Professor Julia Bader has influenced and encouraged me, from my days as an undergraduate at Berkeley and throughout my graduate career. The graduate class on the Gothic she allowed me to join in my last year as an undergraduate has formed the basis for so much of my work. Professor Bader, like Professor Duncan, elicits what is best from a student rather than imposing from without; when I speak with her, as with Professor Duncan, I feel more energized and creative myself. Professor Bader has also taught me how to analyze and speak about films so that criticism and teaching become forms of creative thinking. She has taught me how to harness enthusiasm for art into creation. Further, she has taught me feminist criticism – not just the major critics (though she has given me countless books), but its deeper and more powerful meaning. Finally, she has generously given me many guest teaching opportunities, letting me find my style as a discussion leader and class planner. A student once said something about my teaching bearing some similarity to Professor Bader's technique, and it was the best compliment she could have given me. iv Michael Iarocci, aside from guiding me throughout with acute questions and suggestions, gave me one of the best pieces of advice at my prospectus conference (in the form of a question): he asked me what story I was telling in my dissertation. This push toward clarity and narrative has guided me ever since, making me realize that every argument is a kind of story and has as much power as the "stories" we study. (Professor Iarocci also recommended Matt Hills's work at a crucial point in my thinking, and it has become central to my dissertation, so I thank him for this kind of invaluable help at every turn.) Though Kevis Goodman is not officially on my committee, the dedication she has shown to me and my work makes her the fourth member of the close intellectual group that has guided me throughout. It was her class on sensibility and the mid-eighteenth century that made me fall in love with the period. The discussions in her eighteenth-century seminar remain some of the most rewarding I have had in my entire career.

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