Beauty as a matter of course : the representation of the heroine in the novels of Charlotte Brontë, Elizabeth Gaskell and George Eliot

Abstract

This thesis analyses the development of the convention of the beautiful heroine in the eighteenth- and nineteenth-century British novel. The period inherited a profoundly dichotomised conception of beauty, beauty as a faithful index of moral goodness, and beauty as seductive veneer, that animated its presence in the form. Throughout this thesis I employ elements of feminist and new historicist methodologies to analyse the phenomenology and representation of beauty in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, and to suggest some consequences of the interrelationship of the two. It is my contention that in the embodiment of their heroines Charlotte Bronte, Elizabeth Gaskell and George Eliot engaged with the traditional use of beauty in the representation of the heroine, and its role within the evaluation of the female in the social world. I advance a nuanced reading of the work of each novelist in which I demonstrate the extent of their conformity to and defiance of dominant cultural constructions of beauty.