Abstract
“Narrative Intimacy” argues that the figure of the confidante plays a major role in the nineteenth-century British novel through her foregrounding of two factors: the vital importance of female intimacy and the interpersonal development of narrative. Although the confidante is usually a socially marginalized figure—a woman of a lower social class, frequently disabled, who participates in the marriage plots of others rather than her own—she takes a central place in the form of the novel’s narrative through her reception of others’ confidences, which she in turn helps to convey to the reader. Through readings of novels including Jane Austen’s Mansfield Park, Harriet Martineau’s Deerbrook, Charles Dickens’s Bleak House, Amy Levy’s The Romance of a Shop, and George Paston’s A Writer of Books, I show how the confidante’s relationship to her confiding friend troubles the centrality of the heterosexual marriage plot. Instead, these novels emphasize women’s intimacies with each other and thus queer the marriage plot, leading to such conclusions as a non-traditional found family (as in Bleak House) or a woman finding refuge with a female friend after the collapse of her marriage (as in A Writer of Books). Furthermore, the confidante serves to facilitate the telling of the novel’s story. Her presence allows other characters to express their thoughts, feelings, and secrets, which the reader then receives access to, usually through the confidante’s own perspective or narration.\r This study builds on scholarship on both nineteenth-century women’s relationships and narrative theory in order to illustrate how the two combine: how the novel’s narrative is built on the passing along of confidences between intimates and thus foregrounds that intimacy. The conclusion of the confidante plot varies from text to text and develops over time. In Mansfield Park and Deerbrook, while the form of the novel emphasizes female intimacy, its ending returns to the heterosexual marriage plot; Bleak House, by contrast, presents a continuum of relationships in which queer female intimacy and heterosexual marriage exist in non-hierarchical harmony. The Romance of a Shop and A Writer of Books portray female intimacies developed in the world of work, and their heroines must choose between this realm and the domestic space. While these conclusions present alternate fates for the confidante, I argue that she remains central to the reader’s understanding, both for her foregrounding of alternate queer intimacies and her shaping of the novelistic form.