Fictional Minds and Female Sexuality: The Consciousness Scene from Pamela to Lady Chatterley's Lover

Why have all the major novelistic innovations in representing consciousness been achieved through depicting the minds of female characters? This essay argues that eighteenth-century conduct books provided the cultural impetus and structural frame for a particular subjectivity--the self-examining heroine--that required the development of narrative techniques for rendering fictional minds. The essay traces the consciousness scene from the early novel to the twentieth century in order to demonstrate how the historical development of modes of thought representation has been synonymous with explorations of female sexual identity, played out most specifically in the relation between narrator and character fostered by free indirect discourse.