Creating textual space: women's use of epideictic rhetoric in mid-Victorian fiction

Abstract

My dissertation examines women's use of epideictic rhetoric (in the sense of praise or blame as indirect persuasion) in three Victorian texts: George Eliot's Middlemarch, Charlotte Bronte's Shirley, and Elizabeth Barrett Browning's Aurora Leigh. I argue that these authors use praise and blame in narrative form to expand and revise the paradigmatic models available to Victorian women within traditional discourse, thus enlarging the textual space available to women and promoting new models of behavior. The rhetoric of praise and blame (particularly praise) has been unusually important in women's texts as a socially permitted, yet powerfully persuasive form of expression. Epideictic rhetoric, especially in narrative form, is a powerful mechanism for promulgating ideology and an important factor in forming subjectivity--gendered subjectivity--for both audience and rhetor. Because of its central role in the construction of gender identity, and because it frequently persuades without provoking outright opposition or negotiation, we urgently need to renew our theoretical understanding of the cultural work that epideictic narrative performs. In the first chapter I develop a definition of epideictic narrative, drawing on the work of Walter Fisher on the role of narrative in creating meaning, the practice and theory of classical orators like Isocrates, Plato, and Aristotle, Kenneth Burke's concept of identification, and the work of Chaim Perelman and Lynn Olbrechts-Tyteca on epideictic rhetoric as a way of forming consensus and community. Chapter Two sets the stage for examining the cultural ramifications of epideictic textual strategies in Victorian literary works by reviewing some of the limiting or coercive images of women that Bronte, Eliot, and Barrett Browning were contesting. The subsequent readings of Shirley, Aurora Leigh, and Middlemarch examine the ways in which gendered subjectivities are replicated and revised in these texts. Chapter Three looks at Charlotte Bronte's idealized portrait of Shirley Keeldar, an early challenge to the stereotype of the domestic angel, and at Bronte's analysis and refutation of some of the prevailing epideictic discourse of her period. Chapter Four discusses Aurora Leigh, Elizabeth Barrett Browning's female poet-genius, who models a way for Victorian women to pursue a vocation and prepare themselves for a newly egalitarian form of marriage. In Chapter Five, I examine George Eliot's hortatory portrayal of Dorothea Brooke's urgent search for "meaningful work." Eliot urges women to negotiate complex webs of constraint and desire while warning that all decisions will inevitably be both partial and compromised.