POETICS OF DISLOCATION: COMPARATIVE COSMOPOLITANISM IN CHARLOTTE BRONTË, FLORA TRISTAN, AND TORU DUTT _______________ A Dissertation Presented to The Faculty of the Department of English University of Houston _______________ In Partial Fulfillment Of the Requirements for the Degree of Doctor of Philosophy _______________ By Meera Jagannathan May, 2018 POETICS OF DISLOCATION: COMPARATIVE COSMOPOLITANISM IN CHARLOTTE BRONTË, FLORA TRISTAN, AND TORU DUTT _________________________ Meera Jagannathan APPROVED: _________________________ Lois Parkinson Zamora, Ph.D. Committee Chair _________________________ Elizabeth Gregory, Ph.D. _________________________ Cedric Tolliver, Ph.D. _________________________ Kavita Singh, Ph.D. _________________________ Richard Armstrong, PhD Department of Modern & Classical Languages _________________________ Antonio D. Tillis, Ph.D. Dean, College of Liberal Arts and Social Sciences Department of Hispanic Studies ii POETICS OF DISLOCATION: COMPARATIVE COSMOPOLITANISM IN CHARLOTTE BRONTË, FLORA TRISTAN, AND TORU DUTT _______________ An Abstract of a Dissertation Presented to The Faculty of the Department of English University of Houston _______________ In Partial Fulfillment Of the Requirements for the Degree of Doctor of Philosophy _______________ By Meera Jagannathan May, 2018 iii ABSTRACT This thesis explores three nineteenth-century women writers, who used the autofiction genre to transcribe their familial trauma and dislocation to reconstitute themselves with the help of their empathic readers. Charlotte Brontë's novels, Jane Eyre and Villette, Flora Tristan’s memoir from her travels to Peru, Pérégrinations d’une paria, and Toru Dutt’s novella, Le Journal de Mademoiselle d’Arvers, are the focus of this study. Brontë's heroines, Jane Eyre and Lucy Snowe, Tristan's champion of the oppressed, "the Pariah," and Dutt's heroine, Marguerite, are auto-portraits of the women writers themselves. The protagonists articulate their trauma through an aesthetic of wounding, which effectively transfers the burden of testimony onto the readers. Their narrative strategies rely on narration and transference for what Freud calls an, “abreaction,” or working through. This transference conscripts and co-opts the reader into becoming a collaborator with the autofiction. Reading these three writers together offers the reader a unique opportunity to read particular moments in nineteenth-century Europe as experienced by both the metropolitan and the colonized. These writers were deracinated from their own communities, which made them cosmopolitan by default. Their travels to distant places marked them as exiles, but at the same time, the new geographic spaces reordered their interior worlds and helped them comprehend the disenfranchised other. It is evident when reading their letters that their traumas led them to become agents of change, particularly regarding the status of women in society. I study how their individual trauma led them to engage with the collective trauma of gender, which they effectively transfer to the empathic reader through their texts. I suggest that through their masked, textual selves, iv they transformed their intensely traumatic, idiosyncratic experiences into public battles about women’s status in patriarchal societies. v DEDICATION To My Mother vi ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS This project has benefited from many enthusiastic friends and colleagues, too numerous to mention here. I am grateful to all of them for the rich conversations. First and foremost, I must thank my supervisor, Lois Parkinson Zamora, for her support and guidance through the course of this research. A mentor like no other and a true guru whose patient guidance shaped this dissertation at every stage. My committee members, Elizabeth Gregory, Richard Armstrong, Cedric Tolliver, and Kavita Singh engaged with my dissertation with passion and energy, offering valuable comments. I thank all of them for their warm support and a wonderful defense experience. Melanie C. Hawthorne may not have been part of my committee, but she could have been, for she read my chapters at various stages with great interest and provided valuable translation guidance when I needed it. My chapter on Charlotte Brontë began as a seminar paper for Sharon Marcus when I was a masters student at Columbia University. In her History of the Novel course I learned to read novels deeply and I owe her gratitude for encouraging me to explore the field of trauma. I experimented further with trauma theories for a conference paper I wrote on Titus Andronicus for a Shakespeare course I studied with Wyman Herendeen, whose feedback and encouragement led me to read it at the Trauma and Culture conference in LSU in March 2011 to a very engaged audience. Eileen Gillooly taught me the value of primary research when I took her Dickens seminar while at Columbia University. This project engages with the notion of female solidarity, and I can personally vouch for its value. My friend and one-time colleague in the Department of English, vii Cynthia Greenwood, read an earlier version of my chapter on Flora Tristan and raised interesting questions as a methodical and careful interlocutor. The chapter benefitted much from her deep commitment to my work. My friend and classicist, Cathleen O’Shea gladly undertook to read my chapter on Charlotte Brontë and gave valuable feedback on style and language. My friend and colleague from Texas A&M University, Debbie Pfuntner, who shared many strategies for successfully completing a dissertation, was a resource for all matters concerning research. Other friends offered encouragement when my energy flagged and taught me to trust my instincts when I was filled with self-doubt. All provided me with a sorority composed of intelligence and imagination, far exceeding anything I expected. A special note of gratitude to Manuel Monteagudo Valdez and his wife, Cécile Gauvrit, whose warm hospitality and friendship made all the difference to my research in Lima, Peru, in 2016. Likewise, Upal Chakraborty made arrangement for me to do research in the National Library, Kolkata, India, in 2008, when I started my work on Toru Dutt. My friend, Bahni Mukherjee, a librarian in Kidderpore College, Kolkata, thoughtfully sent me the photograph of Toru Dutt and her sister Aru Dutt from the library archives. Without interested friends such as these, this project would not have taken shape fully. I am especially lucky to have a family filled with intellectual curiosity and scholarly inclinations. My children, Malavika Jagannathan and Dhananjay Jagannathan, have helped me countless times with questions about style and writing, and this dissertation owes much to their brilliant suggestions over a period of nearly a decade. Their passionate belief in my project gave me the necessary ballast. But this dissertation would not have been possible without the love and faith of my husband, Jagannathan viii Viswanathan, whose intellectual energy and sense of adventure allowed me to dwell in rich possibilities. My travel to three continents for research was made easy because of his meticulous planning. He read all the chapters multiple times, and I always benefitted from his thoughtful feedback. This dissertation is his as much as mine. ix TABLE OF CONTENTS CONTENTS Page ABSTRACT .........................................................................................................................iii DEDICATION .................................................................................................................... vi ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS ................................................................................................ vii TABLE OF CONTENTS ...................................................................................................... x TABLE OF FIGURES ....................................................................................................... xii 1. INTRODUCTION: AUTOFICTION AND THE AESTHETIC OF WOUNDING ..........1 Writing as a Woman ............................................................................................ 12 Intervention of the Reader ................................................................................... 17 Theorizing Trauma .............................................................................................. 26 2. NARRATING THE SELF IN CHARLOTTE BRONTË ................................................42 Life Traumas and the Aesthetic of Wounding .................................................... 42 Writing the Self: Bronte’s Autofiction ................................................................ 49 The Insubstantial Self in Jane Eyre..................................................................... 54 Landscape of the Past .......................................................................................... 61 Narration as Performance .................................................................................... 70 Reader’s Trauma: Bearing Testimony ................................................................ 74 Strategies of Self Repression in Villette .............................................................. 85 Subverting Surveillance ...................................................................................... 91 Mourning the Cryptic Self................................................................................... 98 Self-Repression as Self-Sufficiency .................................................................. 105 3. FLORA TRISTAN’S SEARCH FOR THE