Textual Bodies in the Novels of Burney, Austen, Brontë, and Eliot

This thesis explores textual metaphors surrounding the female body in eighteenth- and nineteenth-century novels written by women. Spanning nearly 100 years, from Frances Burney’s Cecilia (1782) and Jane Austen’s Northanger Abbey(1817) to Charlotte Brontë’s Villette (1853) and George Eliot’s Middlemarch (1871-2), I seek to trace a genealogy of female novelists who are interested in how the female body is treated as a textual object—a site of meaning that is both bound by male authority and subject to reading, interpretation, and revision from other characters and readers alike. My analysis employs a variety of theoretical frameworks—including gender studies, disability studies, and object studies—to demonstrate how this metaphor of woman-as-text merges embodied realities of female autonomy, sexuality, and identity with the material conditions of text. I ultimately seek to illustrate how Burney, Austen, Brontë, and Eliot used the textualized female body to demonstrate the capacity for textual objects, novel forms, and language itself to not only reproduce subjectivity but also reflect the materiality of the female body.