Amy S. Watkin

Date of Award

2-5-2007

Document Type

Dissertation

Degree Name

Doctor of Philosophy (PhD)

Department

Teaching & Learning

First Advisor

Sheryl O'Donnell

Abstract

This dissertation examines Enlightenment ideologies concerning marriage and the choice of life in Samuel Johnson's 1759 The History of Rasselas, Prince of Abissinia and how four women writers appropriate Rasselas to covey their theories on the same topics. This study unearths some rarely studied work by eighteenth- and nineteenth-century women writers and makes an original contribution by foregrounding each writer's historical context and arguing how the particularities of each writer's style and situation create widely varying theories. These four women writers responded to Rasselas in specific ways both because and in spite of their gender, and they responded both to Johnson's critique and to his embodiment of Enlightenment ideologies regarding marriage and choices in their intertextualizations of his work. Mary Wollstonecraft's unfinished tale, "The Cave of Fancy" (1787), and semi-autobiographical novel Mary, A Fiction (1787), take Johnson's choice of life theme into the personal realm. "The Cave of Fancy" likely remains unfinished because Wollstonecraft could not realistically provide her female characters with the choices she wished for them. Mary illustrates one woman's struggle with established marriage ideologies that lead her into a choice of death rather than life. In contrast, Ellis Cornelia Knight's Dinarbas (1790) emphasizes duty over any choice of life (including marriage), indicating a specifically female point of view while also revealing Knight's lofty social position. Elizabeth Pope Whately's The Second Part of the History of Rasselas (1835) is the only one of the six works that does not address marriage. Whately's work is nearly an evangelical treatise on the necessity of Christianity, arguing that one's choice of life is determined only by God. In this sense, Whately writes not as a woman, but as a devoted subject carrying the missionary hope of England on her shoulders. Charlotte Brontë's Jane Eyre (1848) returns to the personal struggle of one woman and comes full circle back to Johnson's larger questions concerning the choice of life and the implications of class and gender. Brontë both synthesizes and juxtaposes Enlightenment and Victorian ideologies by contrasting Helen's weaker eighteenth-century girl with Jane's determined nineteenth-century woman.

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