Duty, choice, and agency in nineteenth-century women’s fiction

Abstract

This thesis re-examines depictions of duty in four nineteenth-century novels by women writers: Jane Austen’s Mansfield Park (1814), Anne Brontë’s The Tenant of Wildfell Hall (1848), Elizabeth Gaskell’s Ruth (1853), and George Eliot’s Middlemarch (1871-72). These novels are placed alongside sermons, conduct books, and periodicals from the 1760s to the 1860s in order to challenge the idea that duty was only seen as a repressive force that restricted women’s agency and narrowed their choices because of the social pressure that it exerted over women to behave in a particular way. I suggest instead that duty was frequently represented as dynamic; these dynamic representations illustrate that the object of one’s duty and the obligations duty places on women are subject to change. Furthermore, I point out that the origins of duty, which one may presume are theological, are in fact rooted in the social mores and conventions of specific historical periods too. I contribute to existing scholarship by redefining the concept of duty through these key insights. The authors studied in this thesis acknowledge that duty is, fundamentally, impossible to generalise about and dependent on the particularities of unique circumstances. In doing so, this study demonstrates that these four women novelists showed that determining one’s duty involves a choice and is therefore an act of volition, a decision. Conflicts of duty in the narratives, therefore, become moments when their heroines exercise agency by making a decision about what they should do in order to arrive at morally appropriate choices. Because those choices sometimes put them at odds with patriarchal forces, the novels present duty as a means of resistance for women that is nonetheless presented as ethically motivated and morally correct.