ABSTRACT
This chapter shifts the focus to female characters. Following in the pattern laid down by Chaucer’s Criseyde, such characters as Clarissa Harlowe, Elizabeth Bennett, and Jane Eyre each struggle to turn toward the Other, to escape the narrow boundaries of self and role that have been laid down for them, though perhaps the latter two are more successful than the first. Elizabeth Bennet and Jane Eyre each struggle internally and externally, managing a retournement dans l’Autre both within and without, and in so doing discover—not the fragmentation, or disappearance, or provisional nature of their “selves,” but their fullest, most powerful selves. To adapt, slightly the famous line from Simone de Beauvoir (“On ne naît pas femme: on le devient” [One is not born woman: one becomes one]), each of these characters—while they may not have been born a self—becomes a self.
