The Novels of Frances Hodgson Burnett

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Thomas Recchio. The Novels of Frances Hodgson Burnett

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The Novels of Frances Hodgson Burnett

In “the World of Actual Literature”

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Whether we are put off or not by the vocabulary of goodness, well-doing, sympathy, faith and so on in an evaluation of a serious literary work, and whether we are skeptical about Hawthorne’s response because it smacks of a socially constructed gender ideology that he is assuming as natural, the idea that reading the novel brought to the surface for Hawthorne an affective dimension of his character that he otherwise would not have recognized speaks to how the heroine takes possession of the reader through the power of narrative.

What I am describing does partake of sentimentality, but it also has a quality of Wordsworth’s “unremembered acts of kindness and of love” and is thus something of substance, a kind of strength buried beneath a superficial perception of weakness. So the discourse of reviews that highlight the heroines in Burnett’s novels can lead us to think about them less as contradictory and more as protean: strength appears in many guises, even its apparent opposite. Coming to an understanding of the variety and continuity of the heroines that emerged in Burnett’s novels—from her youthful insight of the Junoesque pit-girl in Manchester, where she apprehended the possibility that an inter-animation of female physical strength and conventional markers of female outer and inner beauty can produce a sense of individual composure defined in the first instance by bodily integrity—provides a through line for my interpretive project in this study.

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