In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:

Victorian Studies 43.4 (2001) 659-661



[Access article in PDF]

Book Review

Plotting Women: Gender and Narration in the Eighteenth- and Nineteenth-Century British Novel


Plotting Women: Gender and Narration in the Eighteenth- and Nineteenth-Century British Novel, by Alison A. Case; pp. x + 223. Charlottesville and London: University of Virginia Press, 1999, $37.50, £31.95.

Alison Case's Plotting Women interrogates the nature of gender dynamics in narration within the eighteenth- and nineteenth-century British novel. Case begins by identifying the novel's female narrator as a site of anxiety over narrative mastery. She asks, "What does it mean for a woman to tell a story? to tell her own story?" (1). Case argues that a disconnect exists between the act of narration--telling the story, shaping the story through plots and plotting-- and eighteenth- and nineteenth-century expectations of virtuous feminine conduct that require a woman's "artlessness" and unselfconsciousness. Women should be transparent; plotting and narrating introduce complexity and interpretation, an acuity and knowledge that is troubling to traditional conceptions of feminine conduct. And yet the female narrator becomes a popular figure in eighteenth- and especially nineteenth-century novels. The result of this competing set of concerns is the literary convention of "feminine narration."

Turning to Samuel Richardson repeatedly through the course of the book to help set the terms of her argument, Case argues that his novels both initiate the issue of gender and narration in British fiction (in Pamela [1740-41]) and contain the central tenets of "feminine narration" (in Clarissa [1747-48]): "Clarissa's reasoned, willed acceptance [End Page 659] of the position of the feminine narrator, and the novel's linking of that acceptance with her moral exemplarity for women, makes Clarissa a powerful foundational text for the conventions of feminine narration" (37). It is Clarissa's inaction--her refusal to "plot" and her refusal to justify herself--that both confirms her virtue and enables her to succeed in the face of Lovelace's scheming. Finally, after Clarissa's death, Belford must tell Clarissa's story, Case maintains, because "to the extent that Clarissa triumphs morally, she does so because she willingly resigns herself to having no story to tell, resigns herself to the benevolent male authority who will tell it for her" (69).

Case, however, must bridge the story of the "antiplotter" Clarissa and "artless" Pamela to Charlotte Brontë's Jane Eyre, who is "redeemed" as a plotting woman and who rewrites the story of feminine authority in narrating: "Jane as narrator is empowered to shape her tale retroactively in a way that, as we have seen, Pamela is unable to without undercutting the very grounds of her famous 'virtue'" (98). Starting as the "artless" narrator of Gateshead, Jane later rejects the role of passive narrator, represented by Helen Burns at Lowood, finally becoming the authoritative narrator--virtue fully intact--of Jane Eyre (1847). Bertha Mason takes the negative force of the "plotting woman," allowing Jane to claim both virtue and authority in telling her story. Elizabeth Barrett Browning, too, in her "novel-poem" Aurora Leigh (1856), also challenges the conventions of feminine narration.

The chapter on the "documentary novel" focuses on Wilkie Collins's The Woman in White (1860) and Bram Stoker's Dracula (1897), in which male and female narrators compete for narrative mastery. Within the documentary novel, the "acquisition, collation, and interpretation of documents, to a large extent, is the plot" (148), so the narrator who has the greatest control in organizing and interpreting these documents holds the most power as plotter and as narrator. As in Clarissa, anxiety arises about female plotters and feminine narration, here in response to the New Woman; to ease this anxiety, the masculine narrative must be asserted. In Dracula, this is made most evident through the virtuous Mina whose narrative mastery is displaced once she is compromised by the vampire's bite. Only the men in the novel can rescue Mina from vampire taint and in so doing reassert the masculine narrative.

If the substantial chapters on Clarissa and the documentary...

pdf

Share