Shawn Maurer
Spring 2002

Course Description and Goals:

In this seminar, we will examine a range of works from the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries to explore the ways in which women writers represented the critical period of female development. What does it mean for a female character to "come-of-age" and how might that process change across time? What is the relationship between fictional coming-of-age narratives and other texts that describe (and prescribe) women's behavior, including conduct literature, educational treatises, and sermons? What are the narrative and thematic strategies employed by each author to depict, analyze, and often, at times, to subvert beliefs about ideal or proper femininity? Who is being educated in these works?

Our approach, which will focus both on the narratives themselves and on their relation to broader cultural issues surrounding women's place, will also enable us to address crucial questions regarding the development of a women's novelistic tradition. Why is it the case that so many women writers-both those who have remained within the British literary canon and those who have been, until recently, excluded from it-have written novels focused on female coming-of-age?

Texts (in chronological order):

Eliza Haywood, The History of Miss Betsy Thoughtless (1756) [Broadview]
Sarah Scott, Millenium Hall (1762) [Broadview]
Frances Burney, Evelina, or the History of A Young Lady's Entrance into the World (1778) [Bedford]
Elizabeth Inchbald, A Simple Story (1791) [Oxford]
Mary Hays, The Victim of Prejudice (1799) [Broadview]
Jane Austen, Emma (1816) [Oxford]
Charlotte Bronte, Jane Eyre (1847) [Bedford]
George Eliot, The Mill on the Floss (1860) [Penguin]

Course Requirements:

1) Engaged and active class participation. I would like each of you to come to class not only having read the material, but also having thought about and prepared it in such a way that, if asked, you could lead the discussion. Your preparation should include the writing of at least three discussion questions to present in class. [20%]

2) Response papers. Due Wednesday by 11 a.m., these brief (1-2 pp.) essays will be distributed among us via e-mail or Blackboard, and will form one of the bases for class discussion. [15%]

3) An analytic essay (5-7 pp.) comparing two novels from the first part of the course. [20%]

4) An oral presentation and write-up of one of the critical essays on Jane Eyre [10%]

4) A seminar paper (10-15 pp.) addressing some of the issues we have raised in class and incorporating at least five bibliographic sources. [35%]

SCHEDULE OF READINGS & ASSIGNMENTS

(an asterisk indicates that a response paper is due)

PART I: HISTORICAL AND CRITICAL BACKGROUNDS

1/16 Eighteenth-century cultural and literary contexts:

Bridget Hill, Eighteenth-Century Women: An Anthology (London: Allen and Unwin, 1984): Sections on "Ideas of Female Perfection," "Chastity," "Female Education," "Approaching Marriage," and "Marriage and After"

Selections from Daniel Defoe, Moll Flanders (1722), and Samuel Richardson, Pamela (1740)

1/23 Twentieth-century critical contexts:

Susan Fraiman, "Is There a Female Bildungsroman?" from Unbecoming Women: British Women Writers and the Novel of Development (New York: Columbia University Press, 1993):
1-31.

Mary Poovey, "The Proper Lady" from The Proper Lady and the Woman Writer: Ideology as Style in the Works of Mary Wollstonecraft, Mary Shelley, and Jane Austen (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1984): 3-47.

Jane Spencer, "Introduction" and "Chapter 1: Wit's Mild Empire: The Rise of Women's Writing" from The Rise of the Woman Novelist, From Aphra Behn to Jane Austen (London: Basil Blackwell, 1986): viii-xii, 1-40.

Haywood, Betsy Thoughtless, Vol. I

Hill, "Women's Legal Position," "Women without Husbands"

PART II: THE EIGHTEENTH CENTURY

1/30* Haywood, Betsy Thoughtless, Vols. II through IV

Spencer, "Reformed Heroines: The Didactic Tradition," 140-144, 147-153.

[Lorna Beth Ellis, "Engendering the Bildungsroman: The Bildung of Betsy Thoughtless,"
Genre XXVIII (Fall 1995): 279-302.]

2/6* Scott, Millenium Hall (be sure to read critical introduction first)

Hill, "Women Protest"

[George Haggerty, "'Romantic Friendship' and Patriarchal Narrative in Sarah Scott's Millenium
Hall," Genders No. 13 (Spring 1992): 108-122. ]

2/13* Burney, Evelina

Student presentation of critical essays


2/20* Inchbald, A Simple Story

[George Haggerty, "Female Abjection in A Simple Story" from Unnatural Affections: Women and Fiction in the Later 18th Century (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1998): 37-51.]

[Terry Castle, "Masquerade and Utopia II: Inchbald's 'A Simple Story'" from Masquerade and Civilization: The Carnivalesque in Eighteenth-Century Culture and Fiction (Stanford, Ca.: Stanford University Press, 1986): 290-367.]

2/27 Hays, The Victim of Prejudice

Selections from Mary Wollstonecraft, Vindication of the Rights of Woman (1792)

[Eleanor Ty, "The Imprisoned Female Body in Mary Hays's The Victim of Prejudice" in Women, Revolution, and the Novels of the 1790s, ed. Linda Lang-Peralta (East Lansing: Michigan State University Press, 1999): 133-153.]

Comparative Paper due

PART III: THE NINETEENTH CENTURY

3/13 Nineteenth-century historical and cultural background:

Selections from Sandra Gilbert and Susan Gubar, The Madwoman in the Attic: The Woman
Writer and the Nineteenth-Century Literary Imagination (New Haven: Yale University
Press, 1979).

Pat Macpherson, "Portrait of a Governess, Disconnected, Poor, and Plain," from Reflecting on
"Jane Eyre" (London: Routledge, 1989): 1-9.

Austen, Emma, Vol. I

3/20* Emma, Vols. II & III

[Devoney Looser, " 'The Duty of Woman by Woman': Reforming Feminism in Emma," in
Emma, edited Alistair Duckworth (Boston: Bedford/St.Martin's Press, 2002): 577-593.]

3/27 No class

4/3* Bronte, Jane Eyre

[Adrienne Rich, "Jane Eyre: The Temptations of a Motherless Woman," from On Lies,
Secrets, and Silence (New York: Norton, 1979): 89-106.]

4/10 Jane Eyre: presentation of critical essays

Critical paper due

4/17* Eliot, Mill on the Floss, Books 1 to 3

4/24 Mill on the Floss, Books 4 to 7; seminar presentations

5/2 Final paper due