Epiphany and feminine subjectivity in the novels of Charlotte Bronte, D.H. Lawrence and Doris Lessing

The purpose of this thesis lies in establishing the
importance of moments of epiphany in developing ways of
understanding feminine subjectivity in Charlotte Bronte's
Villette, D. H. Lawrence's Sons and Lovers, The Rainbow,
and Women in Love, and Doris Lessing's Children of Violence
series. The comparisons and contrasts in these texts'
treatment of the feminine subject are elaborated.
Epiphany's place in different narrative structures is
considered, as is the issue of how the implicit gendering
of those narrative patterns constructs the feminine
subject, sometimes in ways that may conflict with the
gender of the characters concerned. The conclusions of the
thesis suggest that an understanding of feminine
subjectivity in the novels considered is invaluably aided
by examining the novels' epiphanies; and elaborate the
previously implicit evaluative comparison of the three
writers' novels from the perspective outlined below.
The critical and theoretical approach of the thesis
relies on the combination of a feminist commitment to
understand and change patriarchal relations with
poststructuralist theories about language and the subject
that suggest the importance of language in constructing our
ideas. Psychoanalytic models and theories are frequently used as they best address the Issues I. find interesting in
these texts.
The thesis is divided into four chapters. The first Is
a history of epiphany's development as a concept from its
appearance in the work of Joyce to its use as a critical
term. The second deals with epiphany's disruption of
established models of feminine subjectivity In Villette.
The third discusses the differentiation of feminine and
masculine epiphanies and languages in Sons and Lovers and
The Rainbow, and that pattern's collapse in Women in Love;
and the fourth chapter deals with the various models of the
feminine subject in Children of Violence, and considers why
they do not productively conflict with, or question each
other.