THE FIGURE OF THE NURSE: STRUGGLES FOR WHOLENESS IN THE NOVELS OF JANE AUSTEN, ANNE, CHARLOTTE, EMILY BRONTE, AND GEORGE ELIOT (MARRIAGE, POWER, IDENTITY).
Contributors: Purdue University.
Published: 1984
Number of pages: 173
Subjects: Literature, English.
Description: Jane Austen, Anne, Charlotte, and Emily Bronte, and George Eliot all use nurses and nursing in their novels to help define their world views and, in particular, their concepts of the role of women. Each of these five novelists employ nursing as a means to help characters learn important lessons about how they can best fit into society and how they can best attain identity of wholeness--conceptions which change from Austen to Eliot.

Austen shows her readers an enclosed existence, one characterized by small groups, small towns, ruled by strict decorum. Decorum is essential to the society the Brontes portray with this important difference: while Austen's novels show characters whose wholeness is dependent upon fitting into their society--and all whole characters achieve this by the end of the novels--the Brontes' novels show characters who are, for the most part, outcasts, and in order to fit into their society, they have to fight their way in. Moreover, all Bronte characters do not, finally, fit in. Instead, they discover how to accept themselves, whether society accepts them or not, by changing their personal idea of wholeness. Acceptance in Eliot's novels involves characters who do, at the beginning of the novels, fit in, but who discover in the course of the novels that they do not want to fit in, that fitting in negates their wholeness, their desires to grow--in every sense of the word. By the end of the novels, these characters do not care whether or not society recognizes their presence, much less accepts them.

In this study, struggles for wholeness will be defined within Austen, the Brontes, and Eliot by analyzing nurses and nursing. In many ways nursing relationships best further these novelists' intentions because characters can only grow while under stress, and while there are different ways for novelists to create stresses within plots, sickness was a stress that was present, believable, and relevant to their audiences, and it was also a stress with which women were especially familiar.
Notes: Source: Dissertation Abstracts International, Volume: 46-02, Section: A, page: 0427.

Thesis (PH.D.)--PURDUE UNIVERSITY, 1984.

School code: 0183.