Department of English

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Browsing Department of English by browse.metadata.advisor "Alexander, R."

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    Patriarchal structures of control and female homosocial relationships in the novels of Charlotte Brontë
    (Stellenbosch : Stellenbosch University, 2001-03) Ellis, Jeanne; Alexander, R.; Stellenbosch University. Faculty of Arts & Social Sciences. Dept. of English.
    ENGLISH ABSTRACT: In Charlotte Bronte's novels, the importance accorded to female homosocial relationships - such as friendship and the mother-daughter relationship - challenges the conventional structure of the Victorian realist novel, in which the focus of the female protagonist's development is almost exclusively on the eventual achievement of heterosexual marriage Structurally. heterosexual marriage at closure re-establishes the status quo that has been threatened or destabilised during the unfolding of the plot. Yet what Bronte's novels reveal, is that the status quo thus re-established also confirms patriarchy as a system in which the bonds between men are consolidated to maintain social, political and economic power as a male prerogative By contrast, the ideology that promotes marriage as the sine qua non of women's existence positions women as rivals and the representation of female homosocial relationships in the nineteenth-century novel is either relegated to the margins of the text or erased entirely. In Bronte's novels, the structural relationship between this conventional displacement of female homosocial relationships and the silencing and containment of female desire in heterosexual marriage at closure is consistently explored and subverted. In an increasingly complex process of rewriting the Victorian novel from a female perspective, Bronte's novels construct alternative plots that privilege the representation of female homosocial relationships even as they imitate conventional plot structure In so doing. the gendering of narrative voice as female lays claim to a female discourse of desire. which is rooted in female homosociality and inclusive of lesbian desire. Compulsory (female) heterosexuality which is exclusively domestic and maternal. IS therefore challenged by an alternative representation of female desire as defiant of the ngid categories Imposed by heterosexuality. because it is fiurd and multiple in Its expression This thesis explores the process of recuperation through which Bronte both places the representation of female hornosocial relationships at the centre of her novels and reveals patriarchal structures of control at work