Reading Women in Eighteenth-Century British Novels
Open Access DepositedNovel Extraction
My dissertation connects the phenomenon that I term ‘novel extraction’ to the discursive formation of women as reading subjects. As a term, novel extraction describes the feedback loop of eighteenth-century novel culture wherein novel writers extract from life to rewrite observed experiences as fiction. In turn, novel readers extract from novel text to rewrite details of plot, narration, and character as moral lessons in their own lives. Through this cycle of extraction, novels also gain a new kind of cultural power as readers begin to form their own subjectivities under the influence of novels. ‘Novel extraction,’ the first term of my title, argues that eighteenth-century novels both represent existing ways of thinking and being in text, but also that they begin to permeate the public with novel ways of thinking and novel ways of being. The second piece of my title, ‘Reading Women,’ invokes ‘reading’ as both an adjective and a verb. ‘Reading women’ describes women who read, the imagined and much-discussed woman reader of the eighteenth-century novel. But ‘reading women’ also refers to the critical practice of examining the representation of women in text. Through examining this phenomenon of ‘reading women,’ my dissertation engages with the terms of ‘the woman question,’ which broadly refers to the discourses on women’s subjectivity and position in society that emerge and proliferate throughout the eighteenth century and into the present. ‘Reading women’ become regular subjects of the novel, anxious to establish not only that its protagonist reads, but also, what she reads. The novel’s concern about reading comes hand in hand with its concerns about women, suggesting that both women and novels are interpretable subjects always up for debate.
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