LLoouuiissiiaannaa SSttaattee UUnniivveerrssiittyy LLSSUU DDiiggiittaall CCoommmmoonnss LSU Historical Dissertations and Theses Graduate School 1994 NNuurrttuurriinngg iinn tthhee NNoovveellss ooff FFaannnnyy BBuurrnneeyy,, AAnnnn RRaaddcclliiffffee,, aanndd EElllleenn PPrriiccee WWoooodd.. Sarah Domingue Spence Louisiana State University and Agricultural & Mechanical College Follow this and additional works at: https://digitalcommons.lsu.edu/gradschool_disstheses RReeccoommmmeennddeedd CCiittaattiioonn Spence, Sarah Domingue, "Nurturing in the Novels of Fanny Burney, Ann Radcliffe, and Ellen Price Wood." (1994). LSU Historical Dissertations and Theses. 5828. https://digitalcommons.lsu.edu/gradschool_disstheses/5828 This Dissertation is brought to you for free and open access by the Graduate School at LSU Digital Commons. It has been accepted for inclusion in LSU Historical Dissertations and Theses by an authorized administrator of LSU Digital Commons. 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Ann Arbor, MI 48106 NURTURING IN THE NOVELS OF FANNY BURNEY, ANN RADCLIFFE, AND ELLEN PRICE WOOD A Dissertation Submitted to the Graduate Faculty of the Louisiana State University and Agricultural and Mechanical College in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy in The Department of English by Sarah D. Spence B.A., Southeastern Louisiana University, 1979 M.A., Southeastern Louisiana University, 1981 M.A.E.T., University of New Orleans, 1987 August 1994 For Lee Russell Spence ii ACKNOWLEDGMENTS For his scholarly guidance, I am grateful to Dr. Kevin L. Cope, who directed my dissertation and served as an exemplary mentor. I also want to thank Dr. Josephine A. Roberts and Dr. Sharon Aronofsky Weltman for their careful reading of my manuscript and helpful suggestions. I am grateful to Dr. Rebecca W. Crump and Dr. Stephen Bretzius for their contributions and kind words of encouragement. I want to recognize the excellent work of the Interlibrary Loan personnel at Southeastern Louisiana University for their help. My thanks goes to my colleagues at Southeastern for their support. I appreciate the encouragement of my family: my mother, Nola Domingue; my children, Diane, Byron, Camille, Melanie, Maurice, and Stella. I especially owe a debt of gratitude to my husband Lee whose patience, confidence, and invaluable help supported my endeavors. PREFACE How and why is nurturing so important in childhood? If fiction mimics life, is not the nurturance theme relevant to the heroine as well? In my opinion, the novels of Fanny Burney, Ann Radcliffe, and Ellen Price Wood all accentuate attachment theory, which emphasizes caring, protecting and nurturing. The nurturance theme was gleaned from a paper for a Southern Literature class. The paper on Ellen Glasgow's Virginia. exemplifies a typical Victorian "idolization" of the mother novel. The work of Nancy Chodorow provides the background for the mother and daughter focus, delineating that "women's mothering reproduces itself cyclically." However, the novels of the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries here are problematic since the absent mother theme is dominant in these women's writing. In the novels of that era, I examine the heroine's foundation reinforced by the careful nurturing in infancy, usually by the mother or mother substitute, but then transferred to another attachment figure. Chapter 1 explicates the twentieth century psychoanalytic studies and attachment theory. It also discusses the psychologists and psychiatrists who provide the background for John Bowlby's attachment theory. The sociological background and the relevance of the courtesy books are also examined. iv I decided to expand the scope of the theory in this dissertation on women who authored novels with the absent mother and explore a potential surrogate mother and/or nurturer for the heroine. The novels included here span a hundred years and the distinctive characteristics represent four diverse types of novels: Burney's manners and morals novels, Evelina and Cecilia; Burney's The Wanderer, a combination of manners and morals and Romantic; Ann Radcliffe's Gothic romance, The Mysteries of Udolpho and The Italian; and Ellen Price Wood's Victorian "sensation" novel, East Lvnne. In spite of the wide expanse in time and variety of works, the human's need for love, nurturing, and succor remains constant. Chapter 2 covers three of Fanny Burney's novels written at the end of the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. Burney's first novel Evelina at the outset is problematic because the mother dies immediately after the child's birth; however, a striking resemblance exists between the association of author and her father with the vital bond between the heroine Evelina and Mr. Villars, her guardian. As the work of Burney moves into the nineteenth century, namely in The Wanderer. I explore the Romantic movement and the French Revolution as they affect the .actions of the heroine. In this chapter attachment theory is manifested in the father/guardian, the surrogate mother, and the sister bond. v