Copyright by Jessica Elise Shafer 2014 The Dissertation Committee for Jessica Elise Shafer Certifies that this is the approved version of the following dissertation: Reading Female Learning in the mid-Victorian Novel Committee: Carol MacKay Supervisor Linda Ferreira-Buckley Neville Hoad Philippa Levine Jerome Bump Reading Female Learning in the mid-Victorian Novel by Jessica Elise Shafer, B.A.; M.A. Dissertation Presented to the Faculty of the Graduate School of The University of Texas at Austin in Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements for the Degree of Doctor of Philosophy The University of Texas at Austin May 2014 Acknowledgements At every stage of this project I have learned from and been encouraged, challenged, and supported by a number of people. I am honored to thank them here. My first thanks must go to Professor Carol MacKay, who--in innumerable ways--made this dissertation possible. She opened countless opportunities to me throughout my graduate career. Her guidance has been essential to my success and to my growth as a scholar. I am immensely grateful for her unfailing generosity in matters scholarly, institutional, professional, and personal. Professor Linda Ferreira-Buckley has also been critical to the development of this project and to my development as a scholar and teacher. Her enthusiasm for my ideas and for helping me to improve in the classroom and on the page have heartened and inspired me. To Professor Neville Hoad I am grateful for his incisive but always generous engagement with my work. His involvement as I drafted the prospectus especially helped me to focus my inquiries and arguments, for which I am greatly appreciative. To Professor Philippa Levine I am thankful for her insightful reading of this project’s historical arguments as well as for her care in discussing ideas and answering questions about a wide range of topics, Victorian and otherwise. Professor Jerry Bump shared his extensive knowledge of the Alice books with me, which was both a scholarly aid and a treat. I am thankful for his insights and the kindness with which he invariably offers them. I count myself lucky to have such excellent models of what work and collegiality in the academy look like. I count myself equally lucky in my friends and family, who have influenced and supported me in countless ways. I am grateful for the kindness of my friends at UT, especially Melissa, Jen, and Amanda, in sharing work, experiences, advice, and free time with me. To Jake I owe an enormous debt of gratitude. He introduced me to Charlotte Yonge, returned books, read hundreds of emails, and cannonaded my writing. More than that, I am thankful for his friendship. I have benefitted immensely from his smart, conscientious scholarship and from his willingness to talk, scheme, and laugh with me. Life and this project would not have been the same without him. iv Jackie has been a voice of reason, a sounding board, and a distraction during this process- -in short, everything a dear friend should be. Thanks to Lisey and Paul for their support. Lisey was always happy to cheer me on, and Paul’s influence and encouragement have been exactly what a learning girl wants from her brother. Writing this dissertation on the same computer on which he wrote his has been a fitting expression of the brother-sister bond that I treasure. For my parents, my love and gratitude is immeasurable. Their love, example, and encouragement have made me who I am. My thanks to them for always supporting my reading and learning: if I am blooming in my own garden, it is one that they have allowed me to find and helped me to tend. Finally, my husband Brian deserves more thanks than I have room for here. This dissertation would not exist without his support, patience, and love. He reassured me when I needed it, pushed me when I needed it, and always made his faith in me clear. So much has happened in our life together during the course of this project, and I look forward to new adventures as we end this one. I am so grateful for his love and our partnership: they make everything and every day better. v Reading Female Learning in the mid-Victorian Novel Jessica Elise Shafer, Ph. D. The University of Texas at Austin, 2014 Supervisor: Carol MacKay “Reading Female Learning in the mid-Victorian Novel” considers depictions of learning girls and learned women in English novels between 1848 and 1870 as dramatizing the varied relationships between femininity and learning during an era of great educational change. In analyzing novels by Charlotte Yonge, Charles Dickens, Charlotte Brontë, George Eliot, and Lewis Carroll in the context of their cultural-historical conditions, this project examines the significance of education to understandings and performances of Victorian femininity. Its readings identify a pervasive vision of middle-class femininity as incompatible with scholarly learning or educational ambition. “Reading Female Learning” surveys shifting contemporary perceptions and practices of education for girls and women, demonstrating that female education remained a central concern over the course of the nineteenth century in England. Close readings track how novels portray how education affects the female learner as well as how novels construct, consider, and resolve (or not) the perceived incompatibility between femininity and learning. This dissertation reads narratives of girls’ progress to womanhood in novels by Yonge and Dickens as modeling the effects of learning on individual women and broader concepts of womanhood. It investigates how Brontë’s Villette and Carroll’s Alice books represent the impact of education and ambition for learning on the female body. It examines how Eliot’s The Mill on the Floss represents the influence of learning on individual female identity in relation to society. As a whole, the project explores the relationships between individual women and society, paying particular attention to how novels implicitly or explicitly position the learning female character as a example for women inside and outside the text. Looking beyond the governess and the “New Woman” to the diverse concepts and experiences of female education in mid-Victorian England, “Reading Female Learning” presents the learning or learned woman as a valuable lens through which to investigate education’s potentials for and effects on individual and gender development. vi Table of Contents Introduction: Reading Female Learning ..................................................................1 Femininity or Intellectuality ...........................................................................4 Brothers and Sisters ........................................................................................6 Chapter Descriptions .....................................................................................10 Chapter 1: Renaissance and Revolution: Female Education in Nineteenth-Century England .........................................................................................................16 Education 1800 to 1848 ................................................................................17 Education 1848 to 1860 ................................................................................25 Education 1860 to 1870 ................................................................................38 Education 1870 to 1900 ................................................................................54 Conclusion ....................................................................................................69 Chapter 2: “As good for household matters as for books”: Learning Femininity in Yonge’s The Daisy Chain and The Clever Woman of the Family ................72 “I have always viewed myself as a sort of instrument for popularizing church views”: Yonge on Learning and Literature ..........................................75 “[A]s good for household matters as for books”: Maturing into Feminine Womanhood in The Daisy Chain .........................................................86 “Proving the ‘very womanhood’ of his Clever Woman”: Re-educating the Learned Lady in The Clever Woman of the Family ...........................103 Brotherly Influence and Womanly “home usefulness” ..............................115 Chapter 3: Home Learning: Education and Models of Femininity in Dickens’s Bleak House and Hard Times ................................................................................125 An “instance of patient womanly devotion”: Dickens, Femininity, and Education ...........................................................................................128 “The obligations of home”: Learning Femininity in Bleak House .............134 “I don’t know what other girls know”: Distorted Femininity in Hard Times156 Chapter 4: “Quieter on the surface”: Schooling the Female Mind and Body in Brontë’s Villette ..........................................................................................181 “[T]he limits proper to my sex”: Learning and Femininity ........................182 vii Lucy’s Education: Learning and Teaching Self and Others .......................192 “[A] strange fever of the nerves and blood”: the Mutual Influence of Female Mind and Body ..................................................................................206 “[O]n the surface only the common gaze will fall”: the Legible Body and Reading for Mastery ..........................................................................218 Chapter 5: Learning Self and Society: Negotiating Education’s Double-Bind