“Less of the Heroine than the Woman”: Parsing Gender in the British Novel
This essay offers two methods that will help students resist the temptation to judge eighteenth-century novels by twenty-first-century standards. These methods prompt students to parse the question of whether female protagonists in novels—in this case, Daniel Defoe’s Roxana (1724), Samuel Johnson’s...
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| Format: | Article |
| Language: | English |
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Aphra Behn Society
2017-06-01
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| Series: | ABO : Interactive Journal for Women in the Arts 1640-1830 |
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| Online Access: | http://scholarcommons.usf.edu/abo/vol7/iss1/6/ |
| Summary: | This essay offers two methods that will help students resist the temptation to judge eighteenth-century novels by twenty-first-century standards. These methods prompt students to parse the question of whether female protagonists in novels—in this case, Daniel Defoe’s Roxana (1724), Samuel Johnson’s Rasselas (1759), and Charlotte Lennox’s Sophia (1762)—are portrayed as perfect models or as complex humans. The first method asks them to engage with definitions of the term “heroine,” and the second method uses word clouds to extend their thinking about the complexity of embodying a mid-eighteenth-century female identity.
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| ISSN: | 2157-7129 2157-7129 |