The 'Improper' Feminine

The Women's Sensation Novel and the New Woman Writing

Lyn Pykett

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2003
• eBook ISBN: 9781134944828
• Topic: Philosophy
• Subtopic: Philosophy History & Theory

The women's sensation novel of the 1860s and the New Woman fiction of the 1890s were two major examples of a perceived feminine invasion of fiction which caused a critical furore in their day.
Both genres, with their shocking, `fast' heroines, fired the popular imagination by putting female sexuality on the literary agenda and undermining the `proper feminine' ideal to which nineteenth-century women and fictional heroines were supposed to aspire.
By exploring in impressive depth and breadth the material and discursive conditions in which these novels were produced, The `Improper' Feminine draws attention to key gendered interrelationships within the literary and wider cultures of the mid-Victorian and fin-de-diècle periods.

Part I

The ‘Improper’ Feminine

1

Gender and writing, writing and gender

A man’s book is a book. A woman’s book is a woman’s book.

(Christiane Rochefort 1981:183)

The canonical map of literary history represents the novel as a primitive territory colonised and civilised by brave male explorers. This masculinised version of the history of fiction is particularly dominant in the case of the two decades which are the focus of this study: the 1860s and the 1890s. George Eliot, whose final novel was published in 1876, is virtually the only woman writing in the 1860s to have achieved canonical status, and it has often seemed that she secured her place in the canon by being accepted as an honorary man – a process encouraged by her adoption of the lofty, mandarin tone of a masculine or gender-neutral form of address.¹ The traditional history of the later Victorian novel is entirely dominated by male writers: the central figure of Thomas Hardy is surrounded by the attendant spirits of the three lesser Georges – Meredith, Gissing and Moore.

As many feminist literary historians have pointed out,² the construction of this canon has involved the filtering out of a great deal of writing, including virtually all of the fiction produced by women. Clearly women writers were extremely active in the production of fiction throughout the nineteenth century, and they certainly played a very important part in two particularly fiercely debated developments: the sensation novel of the 1860s and the fiction variously described as the ‘Fiction of Sex’, the ‘New Fiction’, or the ‘New Woman Fiction’ of the 1890s. The women’s sensation novel and the New Woman fiction were two of the most prominent examples of a perceived invasion of fiction by the feminine which was a major talking-point in the press throughout the Victorian period. The shocking, unconventional heroines of the women sensation writers, such as Mary Elizabeth Braddon, Ellen Wood, Rhoda Broughton and ‘Ouida’ (Marie Louise de la Ramée), and the daring or neurotic fictional New Women and their female creators, who included Sarah Grand, Mona Caird, Menié Muriel Dowie, Netta Syrrett and George Egerton, were among the most widely discussed and hotly contested aspects of this ‘irruption of the feminine’ (Boumelha 1982:79) into fiction and the culture at large

This study aims to explore the nature of this irruption of the feminine, and its contemporary cultural significance, as well as to suggest something of its continuing interest and importance for both present-day feminists and students of nineteenth-century literature and culture. Although the cultural phenomenon denoted by the phrase ‘irruption of the feminine’ is not exclusively the domain of female writers,³ my own concern will be with women’s writing, and with the discursive and material conditions in which it was produced and mediated.

It is, I hope, no longer necessary to justify the project of focusing exclusively on women’s writing, or of resurrecting the forgotten texts of ‘bourgeois’ women novelists. As Juliet Mitchell (1984) argues, ‘We have to know where women are, why women have to write the novel, the story of their own domesticity, the story of their own seclusion within the home and the possibilities and impossibilities provided by that’ (289). My particular justification for focusing exclusively on the women writers of the 1860s and the 1890s, rather than examining them in relation to their male contemporaries, is that this latter task has already been ably performed by others.⁴ One of the problems of the existing studies, however, is that some of them tend to represent women’s writing as ancillary to, or merely prefigurative of, the dominant and achieved forms of male writing.

My own focus on the production, consumption and critical mediation of the female sensation novel and the (women’s) New Woman writing will enable me to raise important questions about the specificity of women’s writing, about women’s writing and difference, and about women’s writing as difference. My primary concern will be to explore an historically specific sense of difference by examining the ways in which these two forms of nineteenth-century women’s writing thematise, analyse and articulate difference. I shall be looking at the women’s sensation novel and the New Woman writing as (differing) forms of écriture féminine, but I shall want to avoid the universalism and essentialism that have sometimes been attached to this concept. The women’s writing of the 1860s and 1890s, like all writing by women, is marked by the writers’ specific experiences as women, and by the ways in which their biological femaleness is structured and mediated by socio-cultural concepts of femininity. To this extent these women writers will be seen to reinscribe their culture’s stories about femininity. However, they also participated in a rewriting of this script of the feminine, as, in various ways and to varying degrees, they self-consciously explored or implicitly exposed the contradictions of prevailing versions of femininity, or developed new styles and modes through which to articulate their own specific sense of the feminine.

At first sight nothing could appear more dissimilar than the popular sensation novel of the 1860s, with its bigamous or adulterous heroines and complicated plots of crime and intrigue, and the ‘modern women’s books of the introspective type’ (Stutfield 1897:104), those ‘portentous anthems’ (Showalter 1978a:181) on the wrongs of women and the evils of men and marriage which appeared in the 1880s and 1890s. Many twentieth-century readers have readily identified the progressive social views and proto-feminism of some of the New Woman writers. Few (if any) of the female sensationalists could be regarded as either feminist or progressive. However, there are a number of reasons why it is interesting to consider these two apparently disparate kinds of fiction together. One of the most obvious is that, although they are generically different, and appear to offer radically different views of women’s predicament, nevertheless both the women’s sensation novel and the New Woman fiction consist mainly of works which fit W.T. Stead’s (1894) description of the ‘novel of the modern woman’; they are novels ‘by a woman about women from the standpoint of Woman’ (64). Both types of fiction are grounded in women writers’ attempts to find a form, or forms, in which to represent and articulate women’s experience, and women’s aspirations and anxieties, as well as anxieties about women. They are, therefore, particularly fertile ground for feminist investigation.

The women sensationalists and the New Woman writers both worked with forms which have usually been regarded as predominantly feminine, even when they have been used by male writers. The sensationalists brought together, in varying ways and proportions, the dominant female forms of the early nineteenth century: female gothic, melodrama and domestic realism. The New Woman writers reworked and recombined melodrama, gothic, sensationalism and the domestic, as well as developing new modes of ‘feminine’ writing, such as introspective reverie, dream sequences and, in some cases, a distinctive, idiosyncratic and highly wrought lyricism.

Both groups of writers focused minutely on individual women’s lives, demonstrating or exploring the contradictions of the dominant ideology of the feminine, by charting the conflict between ‘actual’ female experience and the domestic, private, angelic feminine ideal. Both focused on marriage, rather than on the courtship which formed the main narrative trajectory of most Victorian fiction. Both constructed plots and characters which registered or interrogated the contradictions of contemporary marriage and the domestic ideal. In short, both of these genres were produced by, and were interventions in the changing debate on, the Woman Question. Both actively contested, or implicitly (but nonetheless shockingly) challenged the dominant definitions of ‘woman’ and her prescribed social and familial roles, and both generated critical controversies which became a focus for broader socio-cultural anxieties, particularly for contemporary anxieties about gender.

The women’s sensation novel in the 1860s and the New Woman writing of the 1890s also shared the distinction of being among the main sensations of their time. A number of individual novels from each group enjoyed the brief but intense notoriety of a succès de scandale. Both kinds of fiction were also sensationally successful with readers. Ellen Wood’s East Lynne was one of the bestsellers of its year (1861), and had sold over 500,000 copies by the end of the century. Mary Elizabeth Braddon’s Lady Audley’s Secret went through nine editions in three months when it was issued in volume form (in 1862, after first appearing as a magazine serial), and Aurora Floyd was even more successful. Sarah Grand’s The Heavenly Twins, for many the prototypical New Woman novel, sold 30,000 copies in its first year (1893), and George Egerton’s Keynotes, which came out in the same year, went into its seventh edition by 1896.

Of course, high sales alone are not necessarily an index of the cultural significance of either individual novels or particular categories of fiction. However, these novels by and about women not only sold well, they were also widely discussed, analysed and, not infrequently, derided. The sensation novel and the New Woman fiction were both immediately constituted as distinct sub-genres, and each occasioned a kind of moral panic among its first reviewers. Indeed, the sensationalised response to both kinds of fiction is yet another example of the way in which women and women’s writing are (for good or ill) cast in the role of the exotic other, or wild zone of a culture.

Both the women’s sensation novel and the New Woman fiction were produced by, and productive of, controversy. They were interventions in a broader cultural debate, and also (although to different degrees and in different ways) in a cultural and political struggle. The sensation novels of the 1860s were, at least implicitly and indirectly, produced by, and to some extent reproduced, the anxieties and tensions generated by contemporary ideological contestation of the nature of woman, and of women’s social and familial roles. The New Woman novels, on the other hand, were much more directly linked to contemporary controversies surrounding the Woman Question, and to the various discourses within which they were produced and mediated. Many of the New Woman novelists were also prominent contributors to the debates on ‘woman’ in the newspaper and periodical press, and the New Woman fiction was sometimes reviewed alongside sociological and other polemical works, as if it were part of a seamless discourse on the Woman Question.⁵

The sensation novelists and New Woman writers not only caused a sensation by generating critical controversy, they also generated controversy by being sensational. Reviewers of both groups of writers were dismayed by their tendency to dwell on physical sensation, particularly in their representation of women and women’s sexual feelings. Alarmed reviewers repeatedly discussed these novels in terms of the physical sensations they produced (or were deemed likely to produce) in their readers. The Christian Remembrancer (1863), for example, described the sensation novel as an ‘appeal to the nerves’, which worked by ‘drugging thought and reason, and stimulating the attention through the lower and more animal instincts’. Such fiction, it affirmed, was likely to produce both moral and social disorder by ‘willingly and designedly draw[-ing] a picture of life which … make[s] reality insipid and the routine of ordinary existence intolerable to the imagination’ (210). Youthful readers were thought to be in particular danger from the ‘utter unrestraint in which the heroines of this [fiction] are allowed to expatiate and develop their impulsive, stormy, passionate characters’, and to question the customary social checks on feeling (212).

Harmful effects on the young also troubled one of the first readers of George Egerton’s Keynotes.

[T]ake the effect on a young fellow in his student period … of a particularly warm description of rounded limbs and the rest. It puts him in a state that he either goes off and has a woman or it is bad for his health (and possibly worse for his morals) if he doesn’t.

(T.P. Gill, quoted in de Vere White 1958:23)

Their controversial subject-matter was not the only cause of the sensation these novels created among reviewers and readers. Reviewers of all persuasions were exercised by the way in which these women writers (mis)used, deviated from, or challenged traditional conceptions of novelistic practice, and of art (or Art). The women’s sensation novel was usually regarded as a low form, tainted by its association with a variety of familiar popular forms; it was an ephemeral, formulaic, mass-produced commodity, ‘redolent of the manufactory and the shop’ (Mansel 1863:483). The New Woman writers, on the other hand, were taken to task for their failure, or refusal, to conform to traditional fictional paradigms, and to observe the formal (and other) proprieties. William Barry’s (1894) review of Sarah Grand’s The Heavenly Twins is symptomatic, attacking Grand for filling pages with ‘shrieking’, for inappropriately combining love affairs and ideas, and writing in a manner which is ‘self-conscious, or even pedantic’ (295).

In short, the New Woman novel, like the sensation novel before it, represented a threat to Art. Both types of writing were regarded as the agents and symptoms of a degenerative and improper feminisation of fiction and, indeed, of an insidious (ef)feminisation of the culture at large. Thus Alfred Austin, writing in Temple Bar in 1869, castigates the feminine spirit of the times, noting that ‘especially in the domain of Art … [men] have for some time been quite as subject to women … as is desirable … [and] there can be no question that, in the region of Art, their [women’s] influence has been unmitigatedly mischievous’ (457). In the 1860s (according to Austin), ‘we have as novelists and poets only women or men with womanly vices’ (465). Similarly, when W.L. Courtney (1904) turned his attention to complaints about the aesthetic decline of turn-of-the-century fiction he attributed them to the fact that ‘more and more in our modern age novels are written by women for women’ (xii). This fear of the feminisation, or emasculation, of art and the broader culture is a dominant feature of the gendered critical discourse by means of which both sensation fiction and the New Woman writing were judged and mediated, and which I discuss in section 4 below.

The sensationalists and the New Woman writers alike violated (or, just as importantly, were deemed to have violated) the unwritten laws governing both women novelists and the representation of women in fiction. The chief of these rules was succinctly expressed in W. Fraser Ray’s (1865) essay on sensation fiction: ‘From a lady novelist we naturally expect to have portraits of women which shall not be wholly untrue to nature’ (189). On the contrary, the female sensationalists and the New Woman writers either implicitly questioned or directly challenged the ‘naturalness’ of the prescribed role of the woman writer, and of the idealised woman who was the critics’ norm.

One of the most sensational aspects of these novels, much discussed in both the 1860s and the 1890s, was the apparently and variously transgressive nature of their heroines. Sensation heroines were (or were perceived to be) criminals, madwomen and domestic fiends, while the heroines of the New Woman fiction were invariably women who – either consciously and wittingly, or through force of circumstance – trangressed, rebelled against, or were deformed by constricting social pressures. The beautiful (sometimes), self-assertive, quasi-adulterous heroine of the sensation novel became, in the New Woman fiction, the destroying and/or self-destructive seeker after truth, personal fulfilment and a measure of social and sexual equality with men. The central female characters of each genre thus disrupted both prevailing fictional and social stereotyping. Similarly, the typical sensation or New Woman plot (which usually turns on a woman’s sexuality, or women’s role within marriage and the family) tended to foreground the female predicament in ways which challenged and problematised definitions of the feminine or of ‘woman’.

Both the women’s sensation novel and the New Woman fiction registered and reacted to the unfixing of gender categories which accompanied the challenges of reformers and feminists (and the counter-challenges to them) from the 1840s onwards. However, the writers I shall examine were not simply responding to a process of destabilisation, but were participating in that process. They were (in different ways, and to differing degrees) engaged in a general struggle about the definition of woman, and also about the nature, power and function of the feminine within the culture. It was this complex engagement with, and negotiation of, the dominant definitions of the feminine and the discourse on woman, which caused the women’s sensation novel and the New Woman fiction to be so vigorously debated in their own day. It will certainly be my case that the cultural significance of these novels and stories in their own time, and their continuing interest to twentieth-century readers, lie in the ways in which they reproduce, rework and negotiate⁶ – or afford their readers an opportunity to negotiate – the contemporary discourses on ‘woman’ to which I turn next.

2

The subject of Woman

Women … are double. They are allied with what is regular, according to the rules, since they are wives and mothers, and allied as well with those natural disturbances, their regular periods, which are the epitome of paradox, order and disorder.

(Cixous and Clement 1987:8)

In an age when everything seems pretty well discovered, when one cannot preserve even a shred of mystery to cloak the bareness of one’s own life, when the very surface of the globe is all mapped out, and the mysterious griffins of untraversed deserts are vanishing from the map, it is an amazing relief to know that an unsolved, nay … an insoluble mystery is standing on one’s very hearthrug.

(Saturday Review, January 25, 1868:109)

The essential and eternal mystery, the sole still point of a turning world referred to in the second extract above is, of course, ‘woman’. In this sardonic ce...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Half Title Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Contents
• Introductory note
• Part I The ‘Improper' Feminine
• Part II The Sentimental and Sensational Sixties: The Limits of the Proper Feminine
• Part III Breaking the Bounds The Improper Feminine and the Fiction of the New Woman
• Conclusion: reading out women's writing
• Notes
• Works referred to
• Index