Gender, Genre, and Victorian Historical Writing

Rohan Amanda Maitzen

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2013
• Print ISBN:
  9781138974968
• eBook ISBN:
  9781136526510
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: Historiography
• Index: Literature

First published in 1999. and Middlemarch and of a range of nineteenth-century historical works, including works by and about women that are discussed extensively here for the first time. The blurring of boundaries between historical and fictional narratives, stimulated by the enormous success of Walter Scott's novels, and the development of social history are shown to have been key factors in an uneven, controversial, but persistent feminization of history, the first because of the longstanding association of novels with women the second because social history focuses on the private sphere, traditionally women's domain. Along with the appearance of numerous historical texts written by women and taking women as their subjects, these developments challenged conventional beliefs about historical authority and relevance that had long relegated women to the margins, both literally and metaphorically. In its exploration of these changes and their implications, Gender and Victorian Historical Writing revises standard assumptions about Victorian ideas of history, finding an awareness of and experimentation with gender and genre that prefigure theoretical and scholarly concerns in contemporary women's history.

CHAPTER ONE

The Victorian Discourse of History

Problems of Gender and Genre

Are means to the end, themselves in part the end?

Is fiction which makes fact alive, fact too?¹

“The perfect historian,” Macaulay wrote in 1828, “… gives to truth those attractions which have been usurped by fiction.”² Today, “usurped” seems a strong and even strange word in this context; its unexpected force alerts us to the intense competition between history and fiction during the nineteenth century. They competed to dominate the historical field, an influential jurisdiction in an age coming, as much recent scholarship has confirmed, to place more and more faith in the past's explanatory power.³ Reviewing Froude's history of Tudor England in 1864, Charles Kingsley remarked that

[t]his generation is getting a wholesome philosophical instinct, that only by knowing the past can one guess at the future; that the future is contained in the past, and the child father to the man; that one generation reaps what its forefathers have sown.… [I]t desires more and more to know what manner of men they were, these ancestors of ours. …⁴

As the metaphors in this passage suggest, the Victorian historical sense was generational and evolutionary; the relationship between past and present—and thus between present and future—was one of organic process and development. Existing conditions resulted from previous events and actions; today's choices would in their turn determine tomorrow's aspect. Historical interpretation was therefore of vital present-day importance: historical description easily could, and often did, become political prescription. If the past was not dead but lived on in contemporary problems (or successes), the historian might be not a dusty antiquarian, but a sage, a teacher, or even a prophet.

History's seemingly sudden appeal itself grew out of historical circumstances. In a time of dramatic technological, social, and political transformation, and of profound challenges from science and scholarship to the belief systems that had ordered the world in earlier centuries, historical explanations were, potentially, secularized theodicies; they replaced chaos and tumult with order fixed not in abstractions but in the lives of real human beings in a real social environment. “[T]he reading public,” as T. W. Heyck explains, “wanted to establish continuities with the past, to be assured that English institutions were sound, to use the past as a guide through perilous times, and to secure a basis for hope that continuing change would be beneficial.”⁵ Peter Allan Dale draws a similar conclusion: “the intellectual history of the nineteenth century,” he submits, “may fairly be described as a search for an adequate replacement for the lost Christian totality.”⁶ In the right historical context, change could appear grounds for optimism rather than anxiety, and as these remarks suggest, historical knowledge was one way of easing the sensation of displacement and loss under which the Victorian consciousness suffered. In the words of Archibald Alison, a prominent Victorian historian, after the cataclysm of the French Revolution the public sought a history

which should bring the experience of the past to bear on the visions of the present, and tell men, from the recorded events of history, what they had to hope, and what to fear, from the passion for innovation which had seized possession of so large a portion of the active part of mankind.⁷

For all of these reasons, the Victorian public's “appetite for history [was] a great and increasing one,” and books flooded from the presses to feed it.⁸

Vital present-day political and social concerns thus made the territory over which historiography and fiction struggled highly significant. In this contest for representational ascendancy, conventional historiography had the advantage of tradition, centuries of authority backing its claims. But fiction, although lacking in overtly scholarly credentials, had other advantages: novelists had imaginative access to the interior states of history's characters, as well as freedom to describe and embellish so as to present individual actions and circumstances with greater immediacy. A fictional account could be more evocative, more colorful, and more emotionally gripping than a conventional historical one, while still depicting undeniably historical events. The usurper Macaulay had particularly in mind in his essay was Sir Walter Scott, who with the 1814 publication of Waverley had issued an unprecedented challenge to historiography, combining historical detail with fictional interest “in a manner,” to quote Macaulay again, “that might well provoke [the historian's] envy.”⁹ Scott's novels, exemplifying the possibilities of a fictional historiography, powerfully stimulated the generic rivalry. “Without one word of direct precept,” wrote one early reviewer, “ [the Waverley novels] have made us feel more than any essays or lectures ever did, to what end history should be read, and in what manner it should be written.”¹⁰ Not everyone was equally appreciative, but everyone recognized that, for good or ill, his novels had changed the terms of the historiographical debate. He had, in the words of one contemporary, “laid the muse of History under contribution to the nymph of fiction.”¹¹

This image of fiction as a graceful young maiden highlights a key implication of history's indebtedness to and competition with the novel: because the novel, from its earliest days, was an artistic medium accessible to and widely associated with women, the contest over genre was inevitably gendered. As the representational vehicle for private life, for instance, the novel focused on traditionally feminine topics: courtship, marriage, domestic life, manners, morals. Though most women were barred from the classical education considered necessary for other literary projects, “ [n]o educational restrictions can shut women out from the materials of fiction,” as George Eliot wrote in 1856, “and there is no species of art which is so free from rigid requirements.”¹² Further, the female mind, considered unfit for the rigors of philosophy or science, could, it was supposed, exert itself with facility in these lighter endeavors and produce narratives praiseworthy for such appropriately womanly qualities as liveliness, affect, insight into character, attentiveness to social milieu, and ingenuity in plotting. Many, perhaps most, would have agreed with M. A. Stodart, who wrote in 1842 that “ [women's] powers of delicate observation, joined to their instinctive penetration into the movements of the human heart,” gave them “peculiar advantages” as novelists.¹³

Historiography, by contrast, traditionally treated the major events of the public world: courts, not hearths; wars, not romances; treaties, not engagements; the births and deaths of empires, not of children. And it proceeded according to rules of form and content quite unlike the rules for fiction, or so at least many writers contended: it was impersonal, grave, serious, methodical, strictly impartial, and concerned with large transformations and philosophical abstractions rather than with concrete, personal details. “The task of an historian,” wrote W. R. Greg in the Edinburgh Review in 1853, “is a grand and noble one.… He sits in the judgment-seat of an august tribunal”; it is a “post of high dignity and solemn obligation.”¹⁴ Just as many qualities of fiction fall easily under the rubric “traditionally feminine,” these qualities are “traditionally masculine,” and the oppositions established are completely unsurprising, even mundane, typifying as they do well- known Victorian presuppositions about the differences between women and men. History, then, is to fiction as male is to female: a simple formula, it seems, for this intersection of gender and genre.

Not only explicit statements or manifestos from a variety of nineteenth-century writers on history but also twentieth-century studies of Victorian historiography tend to uphold this tidy model, simply by the total absence of any evidence to the contrary. John Kenyon's 1983 volume called simply The History Men is one striking example, but G. P. Gooch's classic survey History and Historians in the Nineteenth- Century (1913), Thomas Preston Peardon's The Transition in English Historical Writing 1760–1830 (1933), J. W. Burrow's 1981 study A Liberal Descent: Victorian Historians and the English Past, Rosemary Jann's The Art and Science of Victorian History (1985), and Joseph M. Levine's Humanism and History: Origins of Modern English Historiography (1987) similarly perpetuate the notion that, in this period, men and their concerns completely dominate the historical field. Literary critics, too, typically accept that historiography was a masculine preserve. Christina Crosby's provocative book The Ends of History: Victorians and ‘the Woman Question’ depends on this assumption, as her thesis is that women were the necessarily excluded “other” against which history (both as experience and as practice) was defined in the Victorian period. Carol Christ, in her turn, argues that nonfiction prose in general was aggressively masculinized during the nineteenth century, while the “discursive space that women could claim was that of the novel, and, to a much slighter extent, poetry.” Even Ina Ferris, in her sophisticated analysis of the ways the Waverley novels rearranged Victorian notions of history and fiction, accepts that Victorian historiography was an essentially masculine discourse. Scott, she maintains, appropriated history's (male) authority for his fictions, thereby forging, if only temporarily, a new, masculine, model of novel- writing and reading; once he had brought about this transformation, the struggle was to establish just which forms of this masculine discourse would be preeminent, what would qualify for membership in history's once-exclusive club.¹⁵

This study will assert, however, that this tidy model of the Victorian discourse of history treats as stable standards and oppositions which were, in fact, profoundly in question at the time. One can't read for long in the periodical literature without finding that writing of and about history in the period was not, for the Victorians, a unified, unproblematically masculine enterprise. Not only were numerous women claiming discursive space for themselves as well as representational space for women of the past, but also writers of both sexes were engaging in projects challenging the rigid and exclusionary standards of conventional historiography—both its form and its content—in ways that inevitably challenged its masculinist biases as well. Articles and reviews reveal a pervasive interest, enthusiastic or uneasy, in these developments. At stake, these essays make clear, was the nature of the historical project as a whole: What should be included? How should material be selected ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Literature and Society in Victorian Britain
• Full Title
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Contents
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction
• Chapter 1 The Victorian Discourse of History: Problems of Gender and Genre
• Chapter 2 “A Clique of Living Clios”: Nineteenth-Century Women Historians
• Chapter 3 Stitches in Time: Needlework and Victorian Historiography
• Chapter 4 Gender and Historiography in Romola
• Chapter 5 “‘Not At All Like Being A Queen’”? Historicizing Female Sovereignty in Middlemarch
• Chapter 6 Mary and Elizabeth: Reconfiguring Gender and Power
• Conclusion
• Bibliography
• Index