Sara Crewe or What Happened at Miss Minchin’s, by Frances Hodgson Burnett: The Process of Subjectification and Self-Making of the Heroine

Abstract

The present work is a study of the novel Sara Crewe or, what happened at Miss Minchin’s (Burnett, 1888). The critical approach of New Historicism, that places the text in its socio-historical environment (Abrams, 2012), is used to analyze the text, along with elements of Female Studies, mainly the combination of feminist theory with Foucault’s discourse theory, according to which gender is shaped by social conventions that influence the sense of self (Mills, 2001). We try to determine the extent and the ways the text undermines the dominant discourses that it reproduces