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University Microfilms International 300 N. Zeeb Road Ann Arbor, Ml 48106 8510574 Friedman, Betty McClanahan THE PRINCESS IN EXILE: THE ALIENATION OF THE FEMALE ARTIST IN CHARLOTTE BRONTE, GEORGE ELIOT, AND VIRGINIA WOOLF The Ohio State University PH.D. 1985 University Microfilms I nter n ati 0 nal 300 N. Zeeb Road, Ann Arbor, Ml 48106 Copyright 1985 by Friedman, Betty McClanahan All Rights Reserved THE PRINCESS IN EXILE: THE ALIENATION OF THE FEMALE ARTIST IN CHARLOTTE BRONTE, GEORGE ELIOT, AND VIRGINIA WOOLF DISSERTATION Presented in Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements for the Degree Doctor of Philosophy in the Graduate School of The Ohio State University By Betty McClanahan Friedman ***** The Ohio State University 1985 Reading Committee: Approved By: Morris Beja Barbara Rigney Arnold Shapiro Adviser^ Department of English Copyright by Betty McClanahan Friedman 1985 ACKNOWLEDGMENTS Any extended work, such as this, relies not only of the persistence and belief of the author but on the support and love of family and friends as well. I must acknowledge those who shared in the completion of this project; in many ways, it is as much their work as mine: my brothers, C. Edward McClanahan and David F. Gavino, and their families were continuous sources of interest and support during the often disruptive and dispassionate times of this work; Lillian Kelly McClanahan, who voluntarily read many of the books discussed in this dissertation, maintained a belief in myself and in this project which was often stronger and more profound than my own belief. Two individuals have had an extraordinary influence on my intellectual and emotional lives: without them, my life and my work would certainly have been radically different: Mrs. Johnson, my seventh and eighth grade "English" teacher, defied the convention of indifferent or negligent teaching in ghetto schools and fired her students1 imaginations with poetry and hope; Harvey Friedman, who pursues his life and his research without consideration for the conventional or the impossible, has taught and continues to teach me how to live an authentic life and how to work with passion. ii VITA November 23, 1949 Born—Davis, Oklahoma 1976 B.A., S.U.N.Y. at Buffalo Buffalo, New York 1977-1982 Teaching Associate The Ohio State University Columbus, Ohio 1980 . , M.A., The Ohio State University Columbus, Ohio FIELDS OF STUDY Major Field: The Novel, Professor Morris Beja Literature By and About Women, Professor Barbara Rigney Nineteenth Century Literature, Professor Arnold Shapiro Twentieth Century Literature, Professor Anthony Libby iii TABLE OF CONTENTS Page ACKNOWLEDMENTS ii VITA Mi INTRODUCTION. The Female Artist: Towards An Articulation of "Difference" 1 CHAPTER I. "Nobody's Daughter": Villette and the Reification of Feminine Alienation 60 CHAPTER II. Something of an Outlaw: The Rebel as Artist in The Mill on the Floss 128 CHAPTER 111. "No-Man's Land": Originating Inheritance in To the Lighthouse 190 CODA 234 BIBLIOGRAPHY OF WORKS CONSULTED 246 iv INTRODUCTION. The Female Artist: Towards an Articulation of "Difference" Woman and artist—either incomplete. Both credulous of completion. Elizabeth Barrett Browning Nor would I be a Poet— It's f.nei—own the Eai— Enamored—impotent—content The License to revere, A privilege so awful What would the Dower be, Had I the Art to stun myself With Bolts of Melody! Emily Dickinson The truth is that when we write of a woman, everything is out of place—culminations and perorations; the accent never falls where it does with a man. Virginia Woolf I was an artist, an escape artist. Margaret Atwood -1- 2 In her essay on George Eliot, Virginia Woolf praises Eliot's refusal to "renounce her own inheritance—the difference of view, the difference of standard." With these few words, Woolf not only retrieves Eliot from masculine literary tradition but authors a feminist approach for the recovery and reconstruction of women's literature as well. The metaphor of female historical and aesthetic difference, reproduced in the metaphors of disenfranchisement in A Room of One's Own and of otherness in Simone de Beauvoir's The Second Sex, is the metaphor most energetically employed in contemporary feminist criticism's attempts to construct, on the scaffolding of Woolfs 2 female difference, a "re-vision" of women's literature. This "re-vision" of literature by and about women is not only the recovery of "a chapter in cultural history" or an "act of survival" for women readers but an important interpretative method for deciphering the recalcitrant and palimpsestic texts of women; for instance, a rereading of Eliot's Quixotic princesses yields an image of women's internal and external alienation: unconscious of the famine that consumes her, oblivious to the postlapsarian and non-heroic world that surrounds her, projecting desire onto an unobliging reality, and asserting the primacy of self and imagination, the "princess in exile," the female artist, refuses to be intimidated by reality or contained within circumstance: Always she was the princess in, exile, who in time of famine was to have her breakfast-roll made of the finest-boited flour from the seven thin ears of wheat, and in a general decampment , was to have her silver fork kept out of the baggage. 3 The female artist, more dramatically than her male counterpart, is conceived and defined in opposition to reality and desire. In A Room of One's Own, Virginia Woolf attempts to answer the question so poignantly raised in the epigraph by Emily Dickinson: what would the "dower1 be for a woman possessed of poetic talent and voice and a fateful refusal to recognize those impediments which work against the articulation of her talent and voice? It is a question and a challenge which produces trembling in Dickinson's inquisitive persona, yet it is a question and a challenge unblinkingly undertaken and documented in the life and work of Emily Dickinson. As with Dickinson and her persona, Woolf's imagined response to this formidable challenge is a much abbreviated and meager version of her own struggles and realization as a female artist: Virginia Woolf, consummate female artist, creates, in her seminal inquisition into the economics of the female artist, the emblem of the historical betrayal and abandon­ ment of the female artist, Judith Shakespeare: Let me imagine, since facts are so hard to come by, what would have happened had Shakespeare had a wonderfully gifted sister, called Judith,... She was as adventurous, as imaginative, as agog to see the world as he was. But she was not sent to school. She had no chance of learning grammar and logic, let alone of reading Horace and Virgil. She picked up a book now and then, one of her brother's perhaps, and read a few pages. But then her parents came in and told her to mend the stockings or mind the stew and not moon about with books and papers... .Perhaps she scribbled some pages up in an apple loft on the sly, but was careful to hide them or set fire to them. Soon, however, before she was out of her teens, she was betrothed to the son of a neighboring wool- stapler. She cried out that marriage was hateful to her and for that she was seriously beaten by 4 her father... .How could she disobey him? How could she break his heart? The force of her own gift alone drove her to it. She made a small parcel of her belongings, let herself down by a rope one summer's night and took the road to London. She was not seventeen She had the quickest fancy, a gift like her brother's, for the tune of words. Like him, she had a taste for the theatre. She stood at the stage door; she wanted to act, she said.