French Women as The Other in Some Victorian Novels
French Women as The Other in Some Victorian Novels

Summary/Abstract: Far from having been invented by the Victorians, but having taken shape in the eighteenth century, the novel became a means of portraying life and defining the women’s roles. In this paper we discuss the nature of some foreign female characters, the French, being concerned primarily with the dif erent reception of the other regarding these women in Victorian England. The postcolonial approaches employ the term otherness to refer to ‘dif erence’ in close relation to race, women, natives, minorities and multiculturalism. The process of defining the other has also been employed to identify dif erences and to distance the Self from the Other which may cause exclusion or marginalization from the group. The foreign women presence also deals with the other in Victorian literature from dif erent perspectives: cultural, social, and political. In this way, we analyze some forms of otherness, including the portrayals of the French women, making reference to literary works of writers such as Charles Dickens, J. Sheridan Le Fanu, and Charlotte Brontë. In Charles Dickens' Bleak House, we look upon Mademoiselle Hortense, the French-born maid of Lady Dedlock, a minor character with a significant role, and in Sheridan Le Fanu's Gothic novel, Uncle Silas, we also explore a French character, Madam de la Rougierre, the grotesque representation of an “evil” governess. As the female individuals of the nineteenth century occupied a position of duality within the Victorian culture, being either pure or ruined, familiar or foreign, Charlotte Brontë engenders some French women in her Jane Eyre such as AdèleVarens - the illegitimate child of the French opera dancer Céline Varens, and her maid Sophie. Jane Eyre describes her French teacher as "harsh and grotesque".

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