The Feminist Adventure Novel: From the Curious Girl to the New Woman

Abstract

This dissertation identifies and historicizes the feminist adventure novel, a transatlantic genre that grew from "The Arabian Nights Entertainments" and empowered female readers to negotiate their identities, rights, and educations between childhood and adulthood. In Antoine Galland’s "Les Mille et Une Nuits" (1704-1717), two sisters trade wonderful tales and questions for their lives, layering stories within stories to extend a violent king’s curiosity and delay his plans to murder the women of their kingdom. Their tales proliferated in eighteenth-century Britain as 1) a model for women’s collaborative narration, 2) a hybrid literary form that could absorb a wonderful variety of inset genres, and 3) an intertext that associated young women’s curiosity and storytelling with their choice to adventure, or risk themselves. I offer a theoretical framework and a method, combining reception history and formalist reading, to reveal the persistence of the "Nights" into the twentieth century as a formal model and an intertext for women’s adventures. In eighteenth-century British novel experiments with the "Nights," such as Sarah Fielding’s "The Little Female Academy" (1749) and Charlotte Smith’s "Rural Walks" series (1795-1798), girls transgress limits placed on their educations by wandering from their homes, wondering about their environments, and narrating lessons and tales that further their curiosity. In the nineteenth century, on both sides of the Atlantic, feminist adventures spanned larger geographic scopes and invoked the life-or-death stakes of the "Nights," as in Maria Edgeworth’s "Belinda" (1801), Walter Scott’s "The Heart of Mid-Lothian" (1818), and Hannah Crafts’s "The Bondwoman’s Narrative" (1858). These novels absorbed intertexts that responded to the "Nights," such as anti-curiosity "Bluebeard" tales, and the hybridity of feminist adventures emerged as one of their defining formal features. From the mid-nineteenth century through the era of the New Woman, feminist adventures by George Eliot, Louisa May Alcott, Frances Hodgson Burnett, Amelia E. Johnson, and Lucy Maud Montgomery situated "The Pilgrim’s Progress" alongside the "Nights" as a competing model for girls’ ventures to find new homes, families, and professions. While it is often assumed that pre-1900 adventure fiction was coded male, my case studies use the term adventure, or venture, to describe their heroines’ geographic and intellectual journeys. These novels resist the individualist, expansionist model of boys’ imperial adventures, as well as the linear trajectory of the female bildungsroman toward marriage. With its characteristic hybridity and reliance on women’s narration, the feminist adventure genre offers girls equal opportunity to develop their own method of venturing, rather than imitating Victorian boys’ adventures. Between geographic destinations, between life stages, between interlocutors, and surrounded by intertexts, the feminist adventurer occupies a capacious narrative middle. I identify this middle as a version of Bakhtin’s adventure-biographical chronotope, in which any question about the heroine’s environment may lead to more radical questioning about who she is or could be.