Name: Catherine Cronquist Browning

Title: "A carefully conned lesson": Schoolroom Theatrics in the Victorian Female Bildungsroman.”

Abstract: In this essay I argue that Geraldine Jewsbury’s 1848 novel The Half-Sisters shares with its predecessor Jane Eyre a tendency to figure adult rites of passage as extensions of schoolroom memorization and performance. An extended metaphor of rote learning disrupts the traditional structure of the Bildungsroman by reasserting the primacy of child over adult experience; that is, these novels trace, not a growth out of childhood, but the development of an ability to perform adulthood that is derived from the educational patterns of the schoolroom. Readers familiar with Jane Eyre will remark her radical unlikeness to Jewsbury’s unconventional protagonist Bianca, the half-Italian illegitimate daughter who declines to marry her wealthy, titled suitor in favor of pursuing her stage career. Bianca’s titular half-sister, Alice, leads a more conventional life as a proto-Dorothea Brooke, an intelligent woman, searching for a literary and philosophical teacher, but stymied in her attempts at self-improvement by mistakenly marrying a complacent, condescending man who desires only an “angel in the house.” Alice and Jane both learn to play social roles based on their student experiences memorizing lessons; bluntly, the schoolroom prepares them for the bedroom. Bianca undergoes a similar process with regard to her stage roles; her adolescent theatrical training prepares her to play herself as an adult. The persistence of schoolroom recitation as a figuration for important rituals of adulthood reminds readers that social roles are, especially though not exclusively for Victorian women, merely an extension of the scholastic roles learned in early childhood.

 

Catherine Cronquist Browning is a Ph.D. candidate in her fourth year at UC Berkeley interested in nineteenth-century British literature and culture, religion and literature, and the depiction of children in literary texts. Her dissertation, The Uncertain Child: Belief, Doubt, and Growth in British Literature, 1832-1911, uses Carlylean structures of faith and doubt to explore a variety of texts that prominently figure child subjects, including The Water-Babies, At the Back of the North Wind, David Copperfield, Jane Eyre, Father and Son, and Harriet Martineau's Autobiography. In addition to survey courses, Catherine has taught classes at UC Berkeley on the rise of the European fairy tale and on confession as an interdisciplinary phenomenon.