What They Talk About When They Talk About Self: Conceptions of Personhood in Austen and Brontë | Maria Frawley

This paper takes as its point of departure the moment in Pride and Prejudice when Elizabeth Bennet, in crisis mode after having just learned of her sister Lydia’s elopement, thinks first of what she believes she has forever lost in Mr. Darcy. The narrator interrupts Elizabeth’s train of thought to interject that “self, though it would intrude, could not engross her,” and the narrative pivots to Elizabeth’s desire to return home and help her family. The sentence is striking in part because Jane Austen uses the term “self” in this stand-alone fashion so rarely. Instead, she draws on phrases such as self-reproach, self-importance, and self-deception that draw her reader’s attention to the subjective experience of her characters. Charlotte Brontë, too, peppers her fiction with terms anchored in the self, but her cache suggests subtle differences of interest than one finds in Austen’s works. In Jane Eyre, for example, Brontë flags…