As No One Save a Woman Can

A new Brontë-related thesis:

Feeling “As No One Save a Woman Can”: Representations of Female Emotional Labor in Dickens, Charlotte Brontë, and Gaskell
Lanette Moss Carter 
Idaho State University,  2023

This thesis employs sociologist Arlie Russell Hochschild’s process of emotional labor as a framework through which to analyze how Victorian emotions were regulated and affected by the culture and social structures of the period. Drawing on works by Charles Dickens, Charlotte Brontë, and Elizabeth Gaskell, this project investigates the lives of female characters as they perform emotional labor in public and private settings. In some cases, these enactments challenge the assumption of the feminine ideal. Other instances feature emotional labor as a form of self-preservation and economic survival. And still, another perspective focuses on emotional labor as commodified care that is susceptible to manipulation. Hochschild’s social theories of emotion can be used to challenge the veracity of domestic ideology by exposing the myth of the feminine ideal for what it truly was—emotional work, fraught with physical and mental costs, enacted to uphold or challenge the norms of a patriarchal society.