Hortense Moore Analysis

By casting Hortense Moore as the "preceptress" who (re)constructs Caroline to fit into her prescribed role as quintessential Victorian heroine, Bronti's text critiques the female subject's complicity in a system that both marginalizes and contains her. Early in the narrative, Caroline clearly resists Hortense's rules of feminine conduct, openly criticizing the French poetry she is made to memorize (96) and refusing to sew quietly while Robert reads Shakespeare aloud (115). Caroline's resistance to convention leads Hortense to label her "defective" and to prescribe her own "forming hand and almost motherly care" in an effort to meet the demands of the social system by making her young student "uniformly sedate and decorous" (95). Hortense claims the role of Caroline's now-absent mother in order to compel her to accept her proper position in English society; her gesture, therefore, (re)constructs the mother-daughter relationship according to patriarchal so- cial necessity, strengthening the existing system and granting Hortense a certain amount of power to the extent that she participates in the mainte- nance of the social order. …show more content…
By casting Hortense, how- ever temporarily, as Caroline's "mother," the narrative reveals the extent to which a certain construction of the "maternal" serves the interests of what Luce Irigaray identifies as a phallic economy. As Irigaray notes, patriarchal society operates in the name of the father and organizes all social property so that it benefits the (male) head of the family ("Power of Discourse" 83); a mother, "marked with the name of the father," both reinforces and perpetu- ates the patriarchal