Mother knows best: mothers as moral educators in the fiction of Anne Brontë and Elizabeth Gaskell

Abstract

This thesis concentrates on identifying and examining ambivalence and contradictions in the discourse of moral education within mid-nineteenth-century British literature. Through an analysis of contemporary women’s advice literature and the fiction of two authors I locate the discourse within the larger ideologies of femininity (which defined women as different from men based on their gender) and domesticity (which assigned women to the domestic sphere because of gender) and analyse its fundamental features. The mother was a representation of the ideal woman and thus the measure for standards of behaviour within the discourse of moral education, and, indeed, within the ideologies of femininity and domesticity for all women. I focus on the inconsistencies that the discourse of moral education attempts to mask in its representations of women. Part I (Chapters One, Two and Three) examines the social standards of behaviour for mothers established in women’s advice literature and the literature’s simultaneous resistance to these standards. Chapters Four and Five are dedicated to Anne Brontë’s two novels, Agnes Grey and The Tenant of Wildfell Hall; in particular, Chapter Five examines how Helen Huntingdon’s attempts to be the perfect moral mother are constantly open to conflicting ideological interpretation exposing ambivalence within the discourse of moral education and in the novel’s approach to the discourse. Chapters Six, Seven and Eight focus on many of Gaskell’s short stories as well as her novel Ruth. The inherent conflict within the discourse of moral education results in three separate images of motherhood for Gaskell’s fiction: traditional mothers who gain their moral influence through an association with death, the ideologically contradictory moral mother, and women who use maternal traits to live in communities of women without men. I conclude that none of the texts are categorically resistant to or complicit with the ideals within the discourse of moral education but are internally contradictory. In particular, the fiction simultaneously promotes conventional ideals of womanhood and moral mothers as self-sacrificing and nurturing and offers a vision of women either in unhappy compliance with or otherwise defying these ideals, for example, by living in unconventional relationships without men.