The Androgynous Mind and the Narration of Gender Identity in Brontë’s Shirley

Abstract: This essay reads Charlotte Brontë’s Shirley (1849) through the lens of queer narrative theory, positioning Brontë’s work as formative in developing the concept of the androgynous mind that was coined by S.T. Coleridge in Table Talk (1835) and deliberated upon by Virginia Woolf in A Room of One’s Own (1929). Through moments of hypothetical focalization, the novel disrupts gendered identities and social expectations, suggesting its author’s conscious efforts to occupy the androgynous mind and to consider the limits and possibilities of its application to embodied behaviors. Anticipating Woolf’s frustration over the limits of androgynous thinking in a society that values gendered embodiment, Brontë experiments with narration in ways that underscore the distinction between social and self-perceptions of gender, a distinction that plays out not only at the levels of author, narrator, and character, but also in past and present readers’ reviews of the text.