Fabricating Femininity: Interwoven Threads of Gender, Race, and Empire in Burney and Brontë

Abstract

In each interwoven thread, textiles archive the histories of a multitude of disparate yet interconnected people, from those who harvest the raw fibers of cotton and silk to those who buy and wear such fabrics. My thesis asks how the tensions of empire and nation embedded in textiles function within the eighteenth and nineteenth-century British novel to fabricate ideals of white, English womanhood. In my readings of two novels by English women writers, Frances Burney and Charlotte Brontë, I examine the process through which women are metonymically associated with the material qualities and histories in textiles and how the women in these novels actively assert their own agency and identities through their work with and self-fashioning of textiles. My chapter on Burney’s The Wanderer; or, Female Difficulties (1814) looks at the heroine Juliet’s interactions with silk and French textiles alongside the history of England’s small but symbolically important domestic silk industry, stereotypes of French fashion and silk, and the smuggling of fabrics between the two countries to further elucidate the conflicts of nationalism, race, and gender throughout the novel. Reflecting the dominance of cotton as the decades progress, my next chapter on Brontë’s Villette (1853) analyzes the muslin and cambric needlework of a young girl, Paulina, as well as the mass of fabrics in a painting of Cleopatra. I examine the veiled violence of Paulina’s needlework and the commodification of Cleopatra alongside the history of the East India Company’s trade in cotton to understand the shifting image of white British womanhood during the Victorian period