WOMEN’S SELF-EMPOWERMENT IN ELIZABETH GASKELL’S FICTION

Abstract

Elizabeth Gaskell’s early cognisance of the politics of gender has propelled interest in coping with the need for empowering women to attain autonomy. Gaskell’s narrative discourse presents unprecedented meticulous attention to discriminatory sexual standards which reduce Victorian womanhood to normalised biological functions. The resilient question of challenging gender as performance ignites the need to empower the silenced category. The objective of this paper is, therefore, to diagnose gender gaps considering women’s cultural subjugation through the application of Judith Butler’s theory of gender as performance. Examination of the empowerment strategies in Gaskell’s novels comprises a disclosure of the process of the pragmatism of women’s intrinsic ways of self-knowledge, self-expression, and self-esteem. These epitomise the information of one’s self-awareness and frame the ontological and phenomenological pattern of becoming a woman through acting.  The womanly acting or doing is the repeated performances marking the dynamics of female characters’ evolution and revolution. Implemented in the gender performative acts is the rhetoric which endorses the construction of autonomous personae in the preliminary phase of Mary Barton (1848) and the innovative stage in the posthumous novel, Wives and Daughters (1866).