Needy Narrator and Sympathetic Reader: The Critique of Gender Convention and Narrator-Reader Traditi...

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" Needy Narrator and Sympathetic Reader: The Critique of Gender Convention and Narrator-Reader Tradition in Charlotte Brontë’s Villette "
Lo, Stephanie

Document Type	:	AL
Record Number	:	925837
Doc. No	:	LA7dw305v9
Language of Document	:	English
Main Entry	:	Lo, Stephanie
Title & Author	:	Needy Narrator and Sympathetic Reader: The Critique of Gender Convention and Narrator-Reader Tradition in Charlotte Brontë’s Villette [Article]\ Lo, Stephanie
Title of Periodical	:	Berkeley Undergraduate Journal
Volume/ Issue Number	:	25/2
Date	:	2012
Abstract	:	This thesis addresses how Charlotte Brontë’s Villette creates a sympathetic economy that challenges nineteenth-century English gender convention and first-person novelistic narrator-reader tradition. It posits that Brontë’s social critique of gender convention in nineteenth-century England is related to her novelistic critique of narrator-reader tradition in first-person novels. In the same way that gender convention dictates the context in which social sympathy should be felt thereby perpetuating gendered power relationships, novelistic tradition also dictates the context in which readerly sympathy should be felt and also endorses a power relationship between narrator and reader. However, this thesis concludes that Brontë’s creation of a contentious and oppositional narrator in Villette ultimately reverses this latter power relationship between narrator and reader.