ABSTRACT
The readings of Oroonoko and Roxana give a background for a new reading of the nineteenth-century novel. Read as ‘origins’, these texts-the first English novel (Oroonoko) or a femalenarrated novel by the first ‘recognised’ English novelist (Roxana) —show together how themes of gender, race and class intersect to produce the central subject who weaves the narrative. It is against this background that I would like to place Charlotte Brontë’s novels: that is, to show that she inherited and worked within a form of writing that had been set up around the notion of a coherent, consistent narrating subject, often female, who was constructed by the effacement of Other subjects. That many of these narrative voices were female has detracted cr itical attention from the imperialistic and oppressive factors within the genre. The novel does not work in a simple way: female-narrated or authored, speaking to other women. It is part of a discursive terrain in which the ideal, unified Enlightenment subject is placed, where a fantasy of unity is created by the invocation and subsequent obliteration of the Other subject, differentiated by class, race and gender.
