“Less of the Heroine than the Woman”: Parsing Gender in the British Novel

Abstract

This essay offers two methods that will help students resist the temptation to judge eighteenth-century novels by twenty-first-century standards. These methods prompt students to parse the question of whether female protagonists in novels—in this case, Daniel Defoe’s Roxana (1724), Samuel Johnson’s Rasselas (1759), and Charlotte Lennox’s Sophia (1762)—are portrayed as perfect models or as complex humans. The first method asks them to engage with definitions of the term “heroine,” and the second method uses word clouds to extend their thinking about the complexity of embodying a mid-eighteenth-century female identity.

Keywords

• teaching
• pedadogy
• female protagonists
• women
• eighteent-century novel
• methods for teaching
• heroine
• word clouds
• female identify
• embodying.