Neoliberalism and Femininity

A couple of recent Brontë-related theses:

Literary Analysis Engages with Neoliberalism: Jane Eyre and Wide Sargasso Sea
Solomon, Sandra Lee
University of Iceland, 2018

Within the neoliberal economization of daily living, critical pedagogy proffers a holistic framework to practice “thought-full activism” in everyday life (Slee, 2011, p. 168). A primary component of critical pedagogy is to proffer students oppositional viewpoints that deconstruct dominant ideological practices. The practice of critical pedagogy enables students to identify and reformulate politicized categories of being and the worldviews they represent. With such tools, students can incorporate the creation of new knowledges through the use of course material and student dialogue to construct new ways of understanding, cultural schema, and self-reflexivity. In this context this means forefronting a critique of neoliberal ideology. In my thesis, I discuss how to use critical pedagogy in literary studies to interrogate and to offer resistance to neoliberal ideologies that commodify students, teachers, and education. The aim of this thesis is to offer readers an example of how fictional literature—Jane Eyre and Wide Sargasso Sea—might be used to facilitate students' understanding of and critical reflection upon neoliberalism and its role in shaping their lived-realities, thereby enabling students to engage "thought-fully" with the world in which they live.

Ambiguous Agency: The Construction of Femininity in the Gothic Writing of Burney, Radcliffe, Brontë, and Austen
Zhuang, Jie
University of California, Irvine, 2018

 This dissertation examines the configuration of feminine subjectivity under the mask of proper femininity in the Female Gothic genre and focuses primarily on the works of Frances Burney, Ann Radcliffe, Charlotte Brontë, and Jane Austen. By investigating the figure of the proper lady in the novels by these women writers, I argue that, despite the women writer’s conformity to the patriarchal demands of proper femininity, they create an ambiguous discourse through their employment of gothic tropes, thereby producing a discourse of resistance that undermines their conservative stances. The ambiguity enabled by the Gothic mode allows them to create a discursive site for the construction of female agency under the mask of the proper lady. Arguing that these women writers negotiate their ideological positions through such performative strategies in response to the rigid control of patriarchy, I provide a feminist account that recognizes a form of agency that I call “ambiguous” as a by-product of the particular historical period. While performative and gender theories provide a theoretical framework for my study, my attention to textual nuances allows me to uncover the masked discourses underneath the surface texts of normative femininity. Chapter one investigates the construction of gender through the ambiguity of the mask in Burney’s The Wanderer. Chapter two examines the ambiguities of the veil in producing female agency in Radcliffe’s The Mysteries of Udolpho and The Italian. Chapter three presents the figure of the ghost as a figure of ambiguity that enables the burgeoning of female subjectivity in Brontë’s Jane Eyre. Chapter four discusses Austen’s irony as a figure of mask and its performative function in Northanger Abby. By showing how my key writers all manage to embed an ambiguous discourse in their narratives through the Gothic mode, I demonstrate that the feminist aspect of the Female Gothic genre lies in the ambiguous discourse present in women’s writing, and that such ambiguity enables the burgeoning of female agency, albeit ambiguously, out of the masquerade of the proper lady.