Intro Blog: When Novels Argue With Themselves: Habitus-Ideology Lag in Gaskell and Bronte Novels

Welcome to my senior project: an analytical study of habitus-ideology lag in the proto-feminist novels of Elizabeth Gaskell and Charlotte Bronte. Though this project is confined to two short months, it has its roots in a larger project that first started about five years ago. Through my reading, I’d begun to notice a tendency of authors to undercut and self-contradict their messages, especially when that message was a part of a progressive new social ideology. Often, I’d notice a tension between the message emphasized by the grand plot points and the details. A story might have a plot arc that argues against the objectification of women, while simultaneously introducing and describing their female characters through an objectifying lens. The explicit messaging, seen in things like plot arc, character endings, and major dialogue, tended to conform with the progressive ideologies the author seemed to support. But the more implicit messaging in details like character descriptions, minor dialogue, side-character roles, and word-choice often undermined the progressive point the authors were making. The more I read, the more different questions began to crop up. Was this more common if the author belonged to the minority group they were writing about? Was there an evolution in the prevalence of this phenomenon as an ideology became less new and radical and more established? Was it representative of an author’s subconscious cognitive dissonance, outright lying, or a combination of the two?

It was the height of quarantine, and I took advantage of my enforced free time to begin compiling a binder of research, questions, and examples. I jotted down notes on self-contradictions in scores of random novels, from Grapes of Wrath to The Things They Carried to Little Women. I didn’t have the vocabulary to fully conceptualize my analysis, but it was the beginning of an interest that would grow into a slew of new questions as a made my way through a seemingly never-ending list of books. Was this contradiction more common in out-group authored works across dozens of novels? Did the frequency of authors’ self-contradictions evolve across their body of work? Was this more common at the onset of a new ideology, or at its peak?

Of course, two months would never be enough time to make it through my entire reading list or answer all these question. As such, I’ve narrowed my project to focus on Elizabeth Gaskell and Charlotte Bronte. Their novels offer a perfect starting place in that they are some of the first pioneering proto-feminist novels in English. Written at the very onset of first-wave feminism, they reflect all the inherent contradiction of when new ideology clashes with longstanding tradition. As with any radical new movement, first-wave feminism was complicated by habitus-ideology lag, wherein even the staunchest supporters of feminist ideology were often undercut by their own social conditioning and subconscious bias. Reading through Gaskell’s and Bronte’s novels, I’ll be able to start building a preliminary answer to some of those questions about the evolution in self-contradiction as a writer and movement evolves through time.

Alongside this analysis, I’ll be interning with the American Council of Trustees and Alumni to support their What Will They Learn? project. I’ll be working under former literature professors, supporting them in evaluating the educational merits of core curricula and researching everything from the decline in undergraduate Shakespeare studies to waning language proficiency.