Connecting “Nature,” Culture and the Individual in Jane Eyre and My Brilliant Career

Submission note: Submitted in total fulfilment of the requirements for the degree Master of Arts to the Department of Creative Arts and English, School of Humanities and Social Sciences, College of Arts, Social Sciences and Commerce, La Trobe University, Victoria, Australia.

Connecting “Nature,” Culture and the Individual in Jane Eyre and My Brilliant Career In this thesis I take two Bildungsromane written by and about women on opposite sides of the world, and 50 years apart, in order to examine how concepts of nature and culture are translated from 1840s England to 1890s Australia. I explore the ways in which each woman’s identity in Jane Eyre and My Brilliant Career is produced through her interaction with the natural and social environments in which she finds herself. Grounding my analysis of the novels in criticism on the concept of “nature,” I explore the points of connection between nature and culture in the novels, and expose the ways in which this dualism influences the protagonists’ development. I argue that both Jane’s and Sybylla’s coming of age, and human identity more broadly, cannot be understood without reference to the ways in which nature and culture intersect. By focusing on how gender roles are represented in two nineteenth-century Bildungsromane, I draw out the ways in which the genre offers a three-way dialogue between nature, culture and the individual, each of these acting on and being acted on by each other. I argue not only that the nineteenth-century Bildungsroman made an important contribution to Victorian-era theories of identity formation, but also that it played a role in the conceptualisation of nature-culture relations, particularly as those relations were being placed under new material pressures, from industrialisation to settler-colonial agricultural exploitation. I demonstrate how Franklin builds on spaces left open by Brontë’s novel, reflecting changing attitudes to gender roles exhibited in the relationship between nature, culture and the individual between 1840s England and 1890s Australia. This analysis has implications for the way in which we understand how concepts of nature and culture are developed over time and in different environments, and adds to our understanding of the way in which these concepts may continue to evolve.