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Dissertation Information for Paula Marantz Cohen

NAME:
- Paula Marantz Cohen

DEGREE:
- Ph.D.

DISCIPLINE:
- Literature

SCHOOL:
- Columbia University (USA) (1981)

ADVISORS:
- None

COMMITTEE MEMBERS:
- None

MPACT Status: Incomplete - Inspected

Title: HEROINISM: THE WOMAN AS THE VEHICLE FOR VALUES IN THE NINETEENTH-CENTURY ENGLISH NOVEL FROM JANE AUSTEN TO HENRY JAMES

Abstract: "The dissertation illustrates how changes in the characterization of heroines in the nineteenth-century English novel correspond to changes in the concept and determination of the self as represented through the novels. I concentrate on the work of Jane Austen and Henry James as the end points or respective limits of a conception of ""heroinism"" which implicitly expresses these changes. I support this model with close readings from Austen's and James's novels and with a general overview of the novels which lie between them. What I have been able to trace describes an evolution.

As we first encounter her in the early Austen novels, the heroine has no imagination to speak of. In a society which defines the boundaries within which desire can safely operate (and such is the society which Austen creates in her early novels), the possession of an imaginative faculty hinders the heroine's progress to personal fulfillment. Should she wander outside the established boundaries of her role, she must find herself, like Marianne Dashwood in Sense and Sensibility, cut off from the rest of life, with no practical means with which to give shape to her aspirations.

In the later Austen novels, however, the world no longer holds to established boundaries, and the heroine must come to depend upon her imagination to reestablish an order and security which has been lost. But though she is now awakened to her imaginative life, her imagination is still a source of tension and ambivalence to her since it must work against itself in order to place her back within a traditional self-effacing role. In various forms, this regressive tendency is present in the novel up until Henry James, who finally situates the heroine within a context which does not negate or subvert her according to traditional role expectations. In James, the heroine's imagination is given a priority which finally allows her to replace an old order of social relationships with a new order of her own making. It is out of this evolution of the heroine that more modern expressions of imagination and creativity-expressions which disregard the distinction of gender--can be said to emerge.

The dissertation places the phenomenon of heroinism into a larger context. It identifies the woman as a temporary vehicle for values in the novel--as the embodiment of those personal qualitities which novelists could not yet effectively express through other means."

MPACT Scores for Paula Marantz Cohen

A = 0
C = 1
A+C = 1
T = 0
G = 0
W = 0
TD = 0
TA = 0
calculated 2008-01-31 06:03:15

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