Zelma Catalan Department of English and American Studies Sofia University

"Not a Regular Autobiography": Feminine Autobiography and Romantic Irony in Victorian Women's Fiction

The inspiration for this paper came as I was going through a recent study on Victorian literature, A World of Possibilities: Romantic Irony in Victorian Literature by Clyde de L.Ryals (1990). What I found was that all the authors discussed in it were men. At first, the omission of women writers seemed hardly surprising in view of the rather unconventional perspective on Victorian literature - as the author himself points out, "insofar as it has been applied to English authors, romantic irony ... has been associated chiefly with the romantics and hardly at all with the Victorians " (Ryals 14). It also seemed that Ryals's choice of novelists - Dickens with his Bleak House and Thackeray with his Vanity Fair - had been prompted by his need to be narrowly

selective within a vast field of investigation. But looking at the index of Ryals's study, I found that the references to Victorian women novelists amounted to just one, and it was to Charlotte Bront's death as the theme of Matthew Arnold's elegy Haworth Churchyard (72). In effect, then, romantic irony within the Victorian period turned out to be an exclusively male territory, with women featuring only at its margin as the addressees of pronouncements made by men, or, like Charlotte Bront and Matthew Arnold, as a source of their inspiration. Now Victorian novels, especially from the early and middle part of the period the period of the Bronts, Mrs.Gaskell and George Eliot - share certain common

characteristics irrespective of whether the authors are women or men. Briefly, they include a linear narrative of fulfilment ending with the marriage of the main hero and heroine, an omniscient or autobiographical narrator and a double or multiplot structure. Traditionally, these novels have been classified as "realistic"; realism itself being now regarded as a mode which, in Catherine Belsey's well-known view, is characterised by "illusionism, narrative which leads to closure and a hierarchy of discourses which The classic realist narratives of the

establish the "truth" of the story" (Belsey 70).

nineteenth century are often built on the principle of mystery or enigma whose "dissolution" in the closure grants the reader an attitude which, to quote Catherine Belsey again, "is given as non-contradictory, fixed in 'knowing' subjectivity" (82). Because of its assertion of the possibility of truth, knowledge and order, the classic realist novel is the natural site of traditional irony. The reader is assumed to be capable of interpreting the assertions offered by the narrative; indeed, as has been claimed, "traditional irony resides in the space between the narrative and the reader" (Furst 229). Romantic irony, on the contrary, "is situated primarily in the space

between the narrator and his narrative" (Furst 230). Its fictions exhibit such features as the avoidance of closure and fixed meanings, suppressed or often non-existent narrative linearity, a self-conscious and even openly intrusive narrator whose act of telling takes precedence over the story told. It places the reader in a position of

suspicion and distrust - a position enforced by the ambiguous stance of the narrator visa vis the work itself. Uncertainty is enhanced by the idiosyncrasy of form as well: a work written in the romantic ironic mode often challenges definitions of form as it mixes, often in a contradictory fashion, different styles and genres. Like the "interrogative" text which Catherine Belsey sets in opposition to the classic realist one (Belsey 91-2), the romantic ironic one invites the reader to confront it with questions; unlike the interrogative text, however, romantic irony constantly disconcerts such efforts as it puts forward the tension created by the Apollonian and the Dionyssian drive, by the conflict
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between the masculine and the feminine, between being and becoming, between order and chaos (Ryals 13). What it foregrounds in the author is subjectivity without restraint, while the reader is offered not any fixed knowledge but paradox which Schlegel saw as the form that irony takes (Schlegel 126). In spite of the various transformations that romantic irony has undergone since its first emergence in German aesthetic theory, its affirmation of tension, doubt and paradox has remained as its chief defining characteristic. It is radically different from the assurance of knowledge, associated with classic realism, about what is truth and what is untruth and from the stable vantage point of the author's ego even though, as George Levine has argued, the Victorian period offers repeated examples of fictional conventions self-consciously displayed and subverted by the artists in defiance of this certainty (Levine 15-17). To a large extent the stability of nineteenth-century realism derives from the coherence of the masculine constructions of the self. But in Victorian England, alongside realistic fiction, there flourished another kind of writing which, by its very essence, avoids static definitions of self and the solid perspective they can allow. It is feminine autobiography "informed by the dynamics of self-becoming" (Anderson 59). Autobiographical writing, fictional or genuine, in the form of diary or linear narrative, was a mode favoured by Victorian women, for whom it was often the only way they could reach into their most personal and intimate selves. Those selves, however, were not given, but constructed in the process of writing by a sense of

difference and through the deconstruction of the discourses available to the writers. That is why, unlike male autobiographies, they do not follow the pattern of the

bildungsroman, but work to disrupt the linearity of the narrative and thus to undermine the realist mode as a whole. Fictionalised female autobiographies in Victorian England did not necessarily appear on their own: the mode informed much of the novel writing during the period. What I am going to argue in this paper is that the insertion of feminine autobiography in classic realist texts written by Victorian women opens up
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spaces of disorder and indeterminacy, thus pointing in the direction of Romantic irony. My examples are taken from the best-known novels of the Bront sisters: Wuthering Heights, Jane Eyre and The Tenant of Wildfell Hall. In all three of them, I believe, in spite of the lack of any formal markers such as an intrusive, self-dramatising narrator, the confrontation of the two modes is to be found at pivotal places, creating conflicts that cannot find adequate resolution in the formal narrative closure suspended in the form of paradox. I want to start my analysis with Wuthering Heights, admittedly one of the richest and most multidimensional Victorian novels. Its complex narrative structure naturally entails a number of different perspectives but none of them seems, at first glance, autobiographical. The framing narrative, thinly disguised as a diary, is centred around Lockwood whose misunderstanding of the "truth" about Wuthering Heights and its inhabitants is constantly undercut and "corrected" by the inserted stories, Nellie's foremost. Lockwood therefore emerges as a model "victim" of traditional overt irony and his unreliability as an interpreter justifies the emergence of other, more authoritative accounts. However, Lockwood's inadequacy, openly displayed in the first three chapters, cannot and does not in itself displace him from his position of a narrating persona - it is a well-known fact that many works of fiction gain their effect by and are left

exploiting the potential of a narrator with a limited or erroneous point of view. What then is the factor causing him to give up his privileged status and retreat into the background? Is it his desire to learn more about Heathcliff and the other inhabitants of Wuthering Heights? Indeed, Lockwood's curiosity is what provokes him to shower But

Nellie Dean with questions about his neighbours (Bront Emily 457-9; Ch.4).

Lockwood's transformed status may also be seen as the result of his emotional state - "I was excited", he says, "almost to a pitch of foolishness through my nerves and brain" (459; Ch.4). Both circumstances do work to validate the need of the new narrative; still, because they are so little contingent on Lockwood's character and
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temperament, they point back to the event that has produced them - the memorable night spent in the closet bed at Wuthering Heights. There, even before he has had his nightmare with its disturbing and gratuitous violence, a change has been forced upon him by no other factor than the names Catherine Earnshaw, Catherine Heathcliff and Catherine Linton which he sees scratched in the paint . As he reads them over and over again, Lockwood becomes aware of the hypnotic effect these three names have on him. His narrative even shapes out a miniature Gothic experience: In vapid listlessness, I leant my head against the window, and continued spelling over Catherine Earnshaw - Heathcliff - Linton, till my eyes closed; but they had not rested five minutes when a glare of white letters started from the dark as vivid as spectres - the air swarmed with Catherines; and rousing myself to dispel the obtrusive name, I discovered my candle wick reclining on one of the antique volumes, and perfuming the place with an odour of roasted calf-skin. (446; Ch.3) The anticlimactic ending of the episode follows the pattern of Gothic romance where the supernatural is finally expelled by the exercise of reason. The closure,

however, is ironically deceptive: Lockwood's experience becomes an event of crucial significance as the presence of the three names formulates the enigma that the

narrative of Wuthering Heights will have to solve. For Lockwood the writing contains a riddle - the names mean nothing to him until he opens the Testament in whose margin Cathy has scribbled her diary and realises that they stand for a real person. But apart from the riddle, the writing also contain a flaw that remains unmended even after the end of the episode. Viewed retrospectively, the names represent Cathy's autobiography marked by the three major stages in it. What Lockwood sees, however, is "nothing but a name repeated in all kinds of characters, large and small - Catherine Earnshaw; here and there varied to Catherine Heathcliff, and then again to Catherine Linton " (446; Ch.3). Out of this chaos Lockwood attempts to create order by producing a series 5

Catherine Earnshaw - Heathcliff - Linton, in which one item is redundant. For in the symbolic order where he, the epitome of the average Victorian male, locates his own self, a woman's name can alter only once to signify a change of positions, from daughter into wife. It is therefore hardly accidental that in the nightmare which follows Lockwood finds himself unable to identify the ghost by name and calls it "the creature" while the ghost itself uses the name "Catherine Linton" - that is, the last and

redundant one in the series (451; Ch.3). Lockwood's own confused interpretation of the dream is even more telling: as he recounts it to Heathcliff, he significantly fails in his attempts to tie his supernatural visitor to the name and identity it has given itself: "And that minx, Catherine Linton, or Earnshaw, or whoever she was called - she must have been a changeling - wicked little soul! " (453; Ch.3). Lockwood, therefore, proves to be a rather poor reader of Cathy's

autobiography and Nelly's narrative must come not only to inform him, but also to replace his mis-reading, to answer the question "Who was she?" without relegating it to the sphere of the supernatural. From a narrator, a male constructing story and

history, Lockwood must inevitably turn into a narratee. Yet how successful is he in his new capacity? The question "Who is/was she?" never reaches an answer that will fit Cathy into Lockwood's world of fixed interpretable differences: the disruption of the symbolic order can only lead to greater uncertainties. They are articulated in the final sentence of the book which, even on the linguistic level, betrays the ambiguity of the formal closure of the story, the deaths of Cathy and Heathcliff: 'And [I] wondered how any one could ever imagine unquiet slumbers for the sleepers in that quiet earth" (702; Ch.34). The end of Lockwood's narrative thus affirms not any solid verified truth, but his own imprisonment in the gap between fixity and transcendence, between masculinity and femininity - a conflict characteristic of Romantic irony. Ann Bront's The Tenant of Wildfell Hall bears some formal affinities with the work of her sister. It is similarly built along a chain of interlocking narratives, the framing
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one belonging to a male narrator, Gilbert Markham. Like Lockwood's, his story weaves around the enigma of a woman's identity - that of Mrs.Graham, who lives a mysterious and secluded life at Wildfell Hall and with whom he falls in love. The presence of a secret provides the motivating force of the framing narrative where we see Markham getting more and more obsessed until, again in manner reminiscent of Lockwood's nightmare, he resorts to gratuitous violence. It is at this point that the second narrative appears in the shape of a manuscript handed to him by Mrs.Graham herself with the words: "Bring it back when you have read it; and don't breath a word of what it tells you to any living being - I trust to your honour" (Bront Ann 802; Ch.15). "It" turns out to be Helen Graham's diary or, rather, autobiography which she gives Markham as a substitute of herself. As a form of feminine confessional text, it functions both as a metaphor and a metonymy - it speaks about her and for her. As a diary, it records the events of her life with her husband, Arthur Huntington, who is still living at the time she and Markham meet and fall in love. The substance of Helen's material is thus made up out of Huntington's physical and moral degradation and her reaction to it . As an autobiography, the text traces her change from a commonplace, self-willed and rather rash young girl into a woman of independent will, battling against the restrictions upon Victorian women. In this last capacity it foregrounds its author's subjectivity which exists characteristically on the dividing ground between private and public, passive and active, between heroine and victim. It is only the discourse of religion that does not allow it to leave this dividing line - to the end, even as she returns to look after her dying husband, Helen's writing retains a current of sympathy for the sinner unable to resist temptation. None of these features, however, can account for Helen's insistence upon

secrecy as she hands the manuscript to Markham. Apart from the stigma attached to the wife who has left her husband, there is little other justification for her strange behaviour. Yet, her gesture transcends mere artificiality. It is symbolic, for by allowing
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Markham access to her most private self she opens herself to judgement according to laws instituted against her as a woman. The danger in Helen's particular case is even greater, since her diary pronounces a denunciation on the masculine world in general: all the male characters in her story are presented at various stages of corruption and degeneration, both physical and moral. Thus Arthur Huntington, Helen's husband, is an alcoholic and a philanderer whose life reveals the horrid facts hidden behind the word "rake"; what is more, as a last challenge to all human norms, he begins

instructing his own son into the art of drink and depravity. Nor are his friends any better - Lord Lowborough, a "reformed" alcoholic, is a physical and moral invalid, with no will power and with only the smallest modicum of dignity left; Hargrave, who wears the mask of high morality, is a cool-headed schemer. Between Helen's perspective on the male world therefore and that offered by Markham's narrative there remains a gap in which the reader is bound to intrude with the question of Markham's own worth - an assumption never challenged by his own first-person account. The story itself hardly leaves any time for such questions, for it precipitates the closure, the happy end, but the ambiguity lurks even in the last scene of the union between the hero and the heroine. In it we see Markham remaining what he has been throughout - an

inadequate and often comic version of the Romantic hero, another Lockwood with an extra dash of ardour perhaps but with little more sensitivity or intelligence. The meaning of the novel is thus left suspended not only between Romantic myths of love and their de-mythologising, but also between the different positions from which these myths are created. It remains hovering at a point where the reader can find no certainty of

interpretation, where both positions look equally -and paradoxically - unstable. The effect of the autobiographical narrative in The Tenant of Wildfell Hall on the structure of the novel and the way it subverts determinate meanings can be traced to a characteristic feature of fictionalised feminine autobiography in Victorian England. As Kimberley Reynolds and Nicola Humble say in their book Victorian Heroines, it "rejects
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the forms associated with masculine accounts of the self as false and ... makes a political statement about the role of women in Victorian society and the ways in which that society regarded attempts by women to construct independent identities as subversive" (148). To a great extent this also holds true of Jane Eyre, perhaps the most famous fictionalised autobiography written by a Victorian woman. Often seen as a model of classic realism, Jane Eyre can similarly be read in ways which show that it is not immune to impulses towards instability and paradox. As in Wuthering Heights and The Tenant of Wildfell Hall, these forces come into action at crucial points in the text where the heroine must define her identity by answering the questions "Who am I?" and "Whom am I addressing?" Who is Jane? Firstly, of course, she is Jane Rochester looking back at her life with the intention of writing it. Now Jane Rochester, who appears in her proper person at the end of the novel, is a rather disappointing figure. She poorly compares with the girl who makes her impassioned plea for the need and right of women to express themselves otherwise than through "the making of puddings and knitting stockings ... playing on the piano and embroidering bags" (Bront Charlotte 106; Ch.12). Jane Rochester's autobiography is a romance written from the fixed position of a "married woman" and with the intention of showing how this fixity was reached - how she managed to make her dreams come true. But these dreams, now placed within the ideology of domesticity, are not the same ones which earlier, in chapter twelve, she has described as "a tale" - " a tale my imagination created, and narrated continuously, quickened with all of incident, fire, feeling, that I desired and had not in my actual existence" (106; Ch.12). Jane Eyre, the young heroine, has indeed had a taste of all these - until her marriage with Rochester. The transition point from one identity of the protagonist to the other is signalled by the short, simple and smug phrase "Reader, I married him" which begins the last chapter. To Jane Rochester also belongs the voice which so often apostrophises the reader over and not through her text. The
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interpretative route pointed out by her fixed identity of a domesticated married woman requires that throughout the narrative, the reader should drop all questions save one: will she marry Rochester or not? And to the extent to which Jane Rochester's story is one of resisting temptation as well and is thus embedded in the discourse and ideology of Christianity, the model reader she envisages may well be the woman "in black gown and widow's cap; frigid, perhaps, but not uncivil: a model of elderly English respectability" (86; Ch.10) who spends her time not unlike Jane Rochester herself - that is, making puddings and jellies, embroidering bags and reading novels about virtuous women marrying heroic men. Reductive as it may sound, such a reading of the novel proceeds from the mulitiplicity of discourses that make up the representation of Jane Eyre. But Jane is also the woman reaching into her memory in order to recreate herself as a process rather than as a product. Her story, like that of Cathy in Wuthering Heights, can be represented by the triad Jane Eyre - Jane Reed - Jane Rochester. Her autobiography is in this sense typical of female autobiographic writing as a search for an "alternative place for identification" but "without a point of arrival" for "the author can neither transcend herself nor attain to some authentic fullness of being" (Anderson 59). And whereas Jane Rochester is fixed in the pose of the writer of romance, Jane Eyre is reading this story and re-writing it with a difference. As Steven Cohan and Linda Shires say, she is presenting herself as "a series of fragmented subjectivities inscribed in discourse" (Cohan and Shires 142). Her readers will therefore be equally engaged in a process of constant revision of meanings, altering their responses to Jane's character as each fragment emerges out of the new discourse. But even this kind of instability can hardly be regarded in the light of romantic irony, for though the various discourses may be in conflict, as those of women's freedom and patriarchal domesticity are, none of them is negated: for instance, Jane's homelessness is seen as an absence to be regretted and hopefully filled, servitude to the others is treated as a Christian duty and
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emotionality as a weakness to be mastered. There is, however, still another way in which the autobiographical narrator in Charlotte Bront's novel constructs herself and it is the opposite of the other two. The question it now foregrounds is "Whom am I addressing?" And while the first two Janes are voices, presences, this third one is an omission that forms the basis of her

relationship with Rochester. What is missing is an autobiography specifically addressed to him, so that he could know her as well as the reader of the text. In one sense, of course, he does not need it, for thinks he has the uncanny power of reading her through her eyes, as he very early warns her: "Beware, by the by, what you express with that organ; I am quick at interpreting its language" (131; Ch.14). Jane, in fact, has already sensed this: when she mentally accuses him of disregarding his own faults, she writes: "My eye met his as the idea crossed my mind: he seemed to read the glance, answering as if its import had been spoken as well as imagined" (130; Ch.14). But what is the "text" that Rochester reads? Is it Jane as the reader knows her? It is not - the text is the one he wants to read, built on a paradigm of passivity and sympathetic understanding: "It is not your forte to tell of yourself," he tells her, "but to listen while others talk of themselves; they will feel, too, that you listen while others talk of themselves; they will feel, too, that you listen with no malevolent scorn of indiscretion, but with a kind of innate sympathy; not the less comforting and encouraging because it is very unobtrusive in its manifestations" (131; Ch.14) Jane as a listener and Rochester as a narrator - these are the roles which continuously emerge in the course of their relationship. "I," she says, "talked comparatively little; but I heard him talk with relish" and then explains why: It was his nature to be communicative; he liked to open to a mind unacquainted with the world, glimpses of its scenes and ways (I do not mean its corrupt scenes and wicked ways, but such as derived their interest from the great scale on which they were acted, the strange novelty by which they were characterised); and I had a
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keen delight in receiving the new ideas he offered, in imagining the new pictures he portrayed, or followed him in thought through the new regions he disclosed, never startled or troubled by one noxious allusion. (141; Ch.15) "I heard him talk with relish" - It was his nature" - "I was never startled or troubled" - these sound like an acceptance of the identicity of "man" and "narrator", of "woman" and "narratee", of "life" and "book". But earlier in the story this has been seriously questioned, by a different kind of silence on Jane's part. During their second meeting, Rochester has invited her to come entertain him by her talk. He asks - indeed orders her - to speak to him - to speak of herself: "It would please me now to draw you out - to learn more of you - therefore speak.' Instead of speaking, I smiled; and not a very complacent or submissive smile either. "Speak", he urged. "What about, sir?" "Whatever you like. I leave both the choice of subject and the manner of treating it entirely to yourself." Accordingly I sat down and said nothing. "If he expects me to talk for the mere sake of talking and showing off, he will find he has addressed himself to the wrong person", I thought. "You are dumb, Miss Eyre." I was dumb still. He bent his head a little towards me, and with a single hasty glance seemed to dive into my eyes". (128; Ch.14) In this passage of conversation, we see Jane ascribing a different significance to silence - as a reaction to imposed authorship which, in her eyes, will be inauthentic. Both speaking of herself - that is, presenting him with her autobiography, and herself speaking - that is, "authoring" without the certainty that she will be understood and appreciated, will, according to Jane, place her in a false position. "The eagerness of a
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listener quickens the tongue of narrator", she tells Rochester in a later scene (190; Ch.19). To avoid the danger therefore Jane deliberately turns the narrative away from herself and into Rochester's hands. Her silence has been a way of showing power, it has been productive - but only because Jane has been successful in manipulating communication according to her own rules of the game, a game which replicates the fictional form in which it is inscribed. And this casts a doubt on the certainty of the other pattern where Rochester has the dominating role, as well as on the closure of Jane's story. It even makes possible one more crucial question: would the closure - Jane Eyre becoming Jane Rochester - have been the same if those silences had not been there, if what is available to the reader of her autobiography had been available to Rochester, if he had read not her eyes, but her text? This question could not be legitimately asked if Jane Eyre were read solely as a classic realist novel. It can only exist in a line of argument proceeding from the uncertainties grounded on the conflict between the orderliness of the realistic paradigm and the disorder imposed by the autobiographical mode. But even then the answer will be far from definitive - what is more, it might be both "yes" and "no", a combination usually defined as paradox. At the beginning of chapter ten Jane announces that "this is not to be a regular autobiography" (81). Nor are the autobiographies in Wuthering Heights and The Tenant of Wildfell Hall "regular" - in all three cases there is a

challenge to the determinate meaning of a fixed progressive order, one whereby the self can be formed and happiness achieved by certain means that can be known, guessed or predicted. It is the uncertainty and the paradoxes which the women

protagonists in these works introduce when telling of their lives that makes such a comfortable fixity impossible. And this may qualify the three novels, as well as others written by Victorian women, for the next book on romantic irony.

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Works Cited

Anderson, Linda, "At the Threshold of the Self: Women and Autobiography." Women's Writing: A Challenge to Theory. Ed. Moira Monteith. Brighton: The Harvester Press, 1986. Belsey, Catherine. Critical Practice. London: Routledge, 1980. Bront, Ann. "The Tenant of Wildfell Hall." Penguin, 1979 (first published 1848). Bront, Charlotte. "Jane Eyre." The Penguin Bront Sisters. London: Penguin, 1979 (first published 1847). Bront, Emily. "Wuthering Heights." The Penguin Bront Sisters. London: Penguin, 1979 (first published 1847). Cohan, Steven and Linda M. Shires. Telling Stories: A Theoretical Analysis of The Penguin Bront Sisters. London:

Narrative Fiction. London: Routledge, 1988. Furst, Lilian R. Fictions of Romantic Irony in European Narrative, 1760-1857. London: Macmillan, 1984. Levine, George. The Realistic Imagination: English Fiction from Frankenstein to Lady Chatterley. Chicago: U of Chicago P, 1981. Reynolds, Kimberley and Nicola Humble. Victorian Heroines: Representations of

Femininity in Nineteenth-Century Literature and Art. New York: Harvester Wheatsheaf, 1993. Ryals, Clyde de L. A World of Possibilities: Romantic Irony in Victorian Literature.

Columbus: Ohio State UP, 1990. Schlegel, Friedrich. "The Lyceum." Dialogue on Poetry and Literary Aphorisms.

Trans. Ernst Behler and Roman Strug. University Park: The Pensylvannia State UP, 1968.
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Jane's frankness, as well as the wealth of imagination which he discovers in her drawings obviously arouse Rochester's interest and he summons her to the second of their conversations. But having constructed his own version of Jane's biography, he now wants to fill in the gaps and so he tells her, "It will please me to draw you out - to learn more of you - therefore speak," Yet Jane is well aware that Rochester now requires something different, while at the same time retaining his male construction of her as a woman and a dependent. So to this paradox she offers her own: according to this model, she cannot be an author, she cannot produce a text. "I cannot introduce a topic", she says, "because how do I know what will interest you? Ask me questions, and I will do my best to answer them." (Ch.14). Rochester is

himself caught in the new paradox, for he is at a loss for further questions. So, as a bait, he offers his own autobiography. But at the same time he goes on "reading" her: "he seemed to read /my/ glance", she says, and later he boasts of his talent: "Beware, by the by, what you express with that organ, I am quick at interpreting its language". The two thus engage in a game, in which Jane carefully and wittily repulses his attempts to get her to talk about herelf and, as a good reader, comments on and criticises his own tales of himself. , constructions which rely on ready-made fictions about the humble orphan and the well-meaning rake. Jane never openly rejects his version of herself, but instead of offers him each other The beginning of the second scene mirrors the first: again, Rochester has all the initiative. - he wants her autobiography. Rochester thus places himself in the position of a reader, well aware of what he expects to find in the text he is about to start. Yet Jane is well aware of the impossibility of her task, for there is no reason why she should break the mould of the public self he has constructed for her. Her private self cannot be a suitable topic,
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therefore to his repeated command "Speak!", she asks, "What about, sir?" Rochester's own uncertainty comes out in his answer: "Whatever you like. I leave both the choice of subject and the manner of treating it entirely to yourself". This acts as an imposition of authorship which presupposes a reversal of the hierarchy, yet Rochester does nothing, either through speech or manner, to effect this change. That is why Jane can only ask for a repetition of the pattern of their previous conversation: Still, both Jane and Rochester are playing a complex game,

manipulating discourses and even genres. Jane, for instance, fuses together Christian sententiousness and witty repartee and in fact makes it impossible for Rochester to ask questions. Rochester, on the other hand, provides his own version of autobiography entirely harmonious with his position of an unrepressed, dominant male: "I have a past existence", he tells her, "a series of deeds, a colour of life to contemplate in my own breast, which might well call my sneers and censures from my neighbours to myself", and, a bit later, "Since happiness is irrevocably denied to me, I have a right to get pleasure out of life: and I will get it, cost what it may." But while Rochester sustains the conversation by drawing the right of authorship to himself, he at the same time never renounces the initial position of a reader: in fact, his "reading" Jane's mind through her eyes is one of the leitmotifs of the scene. In spite of her confession that "the discourse was all darkness to me, and/.../ that the character of my interlocutor was beyond my penetration; at least, beyond its present reach", Jane, too, "reads" the whole situation well enough to know that the best way for her is to replace unsafe criticism with Christian parables, to substitute the story of "The Rake's Progess" with the parable of the Prodigal Son. Rochester's attempt to wrest from Jane her private self reaches its
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climax during the third scene, when, disguised as a gipsy, he "tells" Jane her fortune. This time he does not offer any alternatives - there are no more autobiographies to be told, no more biographies to be constructed. This makes Jane feel more insecure than in the first two conversations: she loses bearing of her position. "In short, I believe you have beent trying to draw me out - or in,", she tells Rochester when he has thrown away his disguise. What is at stake is therefore the story to be told and its narrator. Here, the stake of the game between them is raised to its highest level. Both of them compete for the status of "narrator":

With its linear narrative of spatial, temporal and psychological progression, it seems to allow less scope than "Wuthering Heights" and "The Tennant of Wildfell Hall" for a non-realist reading. Catherine Belsey even singles out this novel as an example of a coherently discursive text where the reader, often directly apostrophised, is systematically invited to identify with the narrating "I" of the heroine. Still, it seems to me that instability, shifting perspectives and self-mirroring provide the basis of the events which build the love-story of Jane and Rochester. Their three conversations before he declares his love for her bear a similarity and form a self-contained unity, stylistically foregrounded through the exclusive presence of dialogue and absence of comment, but also through the obvious manipulation on the part of each protagonist of discursive patterns and hierarchies. The first of these scenes takes place on the evening after Rochester's arrival at Thornfield. He summons Jane to the drawing-room and nothing to Jane does

divert the direction of his questioning: she even gives a Rochester's single attempt at a joke about her
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commonplace answer to

witch-like power. The conversation comes to an abrupt end when he looks at her drawings and finds himself singularly at a loss for further questions. The interactional pattern fails because Rochester suddenly faces Jane's

individuality in a way which is independent of the hierarchical order.

Opening Jane Eyre at chapter twelve, Virginia Woolf writes in "A Room of One's Own", she read "how Jane Eyre used to go up on to the roof when Mrs.Fairfax was making jellies" and how she longed for a "power of vision which might overpass that limit; which might reach the busy world, towns, regions,full of life I had heard of but never seen"; that then Jane "desired more of the practical expereince than /she/ possessed". Soon Virginia Woolf came upon the famous passage in which Jane expostulates about the role imposed on women by what she sees is a man's world, a passage that I will quote here:

"Women are supposed to be very calm generally, but women feel just as men feel; they need exercise for their faculties and a field for their efforts as much as their brothers do; they suffer from too rigid a restraint, too absolute a stagnation, precisely as men would suffer; and it is narrow-minded in their more privileged fellow-creatures to say that they ought to confine themselves to making pudding and knitting stockings, to playing on the piano and embroidering bags. It is thoughtless to condemn them, or laugh at them, if they seek to do more or learn more than custom has pronounced necessary for their sex. When thus alone I not infrequently heard Grace Poole laugh..."

Here Virginia Woolf breaks of her quotation to lay down her own
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reaction:

"This is an awkward break, I thought. It is upsetting to come upon Grace Poole all of a sudden. The continuity is disturbed'. Marking that "jerk", she goes on, that "indignation", one sees that a writer like Charlotte Bronte "will never get her genious expressed whole and entire. Her books will be deformed and twisted. She will write in a rage where she should write calmly. She will write foolishly where she should write wisely. She will write of herself where she should write of her characters."

Virginia Woolf's arguments against the kind of writing she had met with in the pages of "Jane Eyre" stem from a position built on the requirement of "integrity" , "that integrity which I take to be the backbone of the writer." "Anger", she writes a page or so later,

"was tampering with the integrity of Charlotte Bronte the novelist. She left her story, to which her entre devotion was due, to attend to some personal grievance. She remembered that she had been starved of her proper due of experience".

The pull of the narrative towards the "Reader, I married him". A tension between this pull and the confessional mode in which the weight is carried by the pursuit of the truth of the suvjective experience. Have you ever thought what happens to Jane Eyre after her marriage to Rochester? She says that to yiled her attendance /to Rochester/ was to

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indulge

my

sweetest

dreams.

Consequently,

Jane

has

become

"an

attendant". Where are her dreams of independence? She might be mending socks and making jellies just as she wished never to do. She must have betrayed her dreams. Traveling? Studying? How and when? Her "First-born" implies there are more.

The paper will look at women's novels in the early Victorian period through the prism of Romantic irony. It will problematise the absence of their texts from studies of Romantic irony in the 1840ies and try to reconcile traditional views on "feminine discourse" with the narrative disposition of the Romantic ironic novel. It will claim that at the basis of Mrs.Gaskell's and the Brontes' works is an acute sense of paradox regarding the place of the feminine self in the world and that the narrative modes in these novels are consequently built upon it. The paper will more specifically focus on the interweaving of the theme of writing as a way of declaring fictionality, as well as on modes of dialogue structuring and thought presentation whose principle of

argumentation oversteps the purpose of mimesis. Finally, the paper will argue that the self-consciousness associated with Romantic irony is inherent in the construction of all fictional texts written by women in the Victorian period.

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