Speaking Subjects and Surplus Objects: Womanly Words in Dickens and Gaskell = Speaking Subjects and Surplus Objects: Womanly Words in Dickens and Gaskell

다국어 초록 (Multilingual Abstract)

The word "subject," like its apparent antonym "agent" is ambiguous. By "speaking subject" I intend both meanings: the spoken about, and the speaker, and the spoken about, in more or less that order. The paper contrasts the way women are spoken about in the 19th Century debate over the role of women between John Ruskin and John Mill, and then in literary criticism of feminists nearer our own time, Kate Millet and Elizabeth Langland. I then move on to women as speaking subjects, first in the form of an imaginary speaking subject created by a male speaker, Charles Dickens channeling the confessional journal of Esther Summerson in Bleak House. The comparison with Elizabeth Gaskell, a genuine speaking subject, is highly instructive. I draw attention to symmetrical, in the sense of opposite, narrative strategies. Where Dickens begins in journalese, with a gritty, realistic opening that only gradually reveals a Cinderella in the ashes, Gaskell begins with a nursery rhyme, in an actual nursery, but goes on to reveal some rather sordid economic facts. Where Dickens creates a ventriloquist`s doll, Gaskell succeeds in creating recognizable, if not always admirable, female voices. I conclude that just as the novel may be read as a real utterance in a real conversation, it is also possible to read the true emergence of women novelists in the 19th Century as nothing more and nothing less than the creation of the first truly womanly words about women: women as speaking subjects in both senses of the word.