Translation, Authorship and the Victorian Professional Woman

Charlotte Brontë, Harriet Martineau and George Eliot

Lesa Scholl

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2016
• ISBN:
  9781317007081
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Literatura
• Subtopic: Crítica literaria para la literatura comparada

In her study of Charlotte Brontë, Harriet Martineau and George Eliot, Lesa Scholl shows how three Victorian women writers broadened their capacity for literary professionalism by participating in translation and other conventionally derivative activities such as editing and reviewing early in their careers. In the nineteenth century, a move away from translating Greek and Latin Classical texts in favour of radical French and German philosophical works took place. As England colonised the globe, Continental philosophies penetrated English shores, causing fissures of faith, understanding and cultural stability. The influence of these new texts in England was unprecedented, and Eliot, Brontë and Martineau were instrumental in both literally and figuratively translating these ideas for their English audience. Each was transformed by access to foreign languages and cultures, first through the written word and then by travel to foreign locales, and the effects of this exposure manifest in their journalism, travel writing and fiction. Ultimately, Scholl argues, their study of foreign languages and their translation of foreign-language texts, nations and cultures enabled them to transgress the physical and ideological boundaries imposed by English middle-class conventions.

PART 1
Learning the Language of Transgression

Inasmuch as young men go into offices where they have to conduct foreign correspondence, and, as they travel about all over the world, they are taught the dead languages. As woman’s place is the domestic hearth, and as middle class women rarely see a foreigner, they are taught modern languages with a special view to facility in speaking.

—Emily Davies, The Higher Education of Women

(London: Alexander Strahan, 1866), p. 132.

Chapter 1
Masters at Home

In 1866, Emily Davies criticised the irrationality of teaching middle-class women modern languages when social convention would not permit them to venture beyond the domestic hearth. This kind of education, however, even though it was considered less important than learning the classical languages, actually provided a loophole for some women to enter the public sphere as prominent literary figures. Apart from opening up practical career opportunities for women, the study of languages also opened their minds to the philosophies and ideologies explicated in foreign texts, enabling them to explore previously unknown cultural ideas, as well as providing them with alternative means of self-expression. The study of languages took women beyond their instructors by giving them independent access to ideas that were outside their current cultural sphere.

The language master initially has the power to choose the cultural material presented in the foreign language, although as the pupil masters the language, they can access other texts without assistance or further mediation. The relationship can never be clear cut, though: ‘the language of another becomes our own when we begin to speak to ourselves as others first spoke to us’.1 There is the potential for originality in owning the language, yet also the risk of still being defined by the influential material choices of the master. Within this conflict of roles, the significance of educational development in constructing identity becomes clear: as the pupil models him- or herself on the master, emulating the authority displayed, the master manifestly loses power as the pupil seeks to obtain it, for the identity of the master is interdependent with that of the pupil. The pupil desires to learn from the master, not just information, but how to engage in their authority, which symbolises success. This internalisation of knowledge is an act of translation in itself, as the pupil takes the material and, in effect, rewrites it as his or her own. As pupils grow in knowledge (and consequent authority), they seek to go beyond the master, and begin to resist the master’s role in relation to themselves. Their movement from participation in the act of learning to taking responsibility for that learning marks their departure from dependence on the master for knowledge and status. It is essential for this resistance to occur, for in seeking to take on the master’s role, the pupil must relinquish the pupil identity: the roles become mutually exclusive.

The development of a second language enables the pupil to establish a new sense of self that identifies with the culture of the second language as well as the first. This new identification broadens the field of perception to encapsulate the experiences of the other culture: the pupil can call upon a second ‘cultural repertoire’.2 There is some limit to this development, in that the pupil has not been exposed to the other culture in the same way, or for as long, as to the home culture and language; however, depending on the type of exposure given, the pupil who becomes fluent in the language, experiencing immersion either through textual and theoretical experience or through travel, is able to develop a stronger mastery of self that is less dependent on the ideologies of their home culture. Even more interesting, a dynamic combination of the two cultures enables the pupil to transgress the cultural boundaries almost at will. Through this transgression, they expose the boundaries, even becoming, as Homi Bhabha suggests, the markers of those shifting perimeters,3 thus claiming mastery and authorship of them. In this way, the pupil goes beyond embodying both cultures, permeating the limitations set by the master. These limits are both secured and resisted through the medium of language. Access to other languages, therefore, means access to other forms of teaching and learning. It is this factor which culturally empowers the educated nineteenth-century woman.

Exploring ideas through another language enabled such women to recreate themselves, which often led them to rebel against their masters. This rebellion is outworked through the pupil’s desire to become the master, or at least to take on the authority of mastery, a redefinition that the master, more often than not, resists. A dynamic interplay is thus created, which is similar to that existing between the translator and author in literary and philosophical translation. There is a direct correlation between the translator’s activity in taking a text and transforming its content, and the pupils who take and interpret their master’s knowledge before recreating it as their own once they have assumed the master’s role. In effect, the master provides the pupil with access to cultural capital, which the pupil then appropriates in order to establish his or her own social and intellectual position.

André Lefevere speaks of cultural capital as ‘the kind of capital intellectuals still claim to have ... as opposed to economic capital ... Cultural capital is what makes you acceptable in your society at the end of the socialisation process known as education’,4 while according to the Russian developmental psychologist Lev Semyonovich Vygotsky, who founded sociocultural psychology, ‘human learning presupposes a specific social nature and a process by which children grow into the intellectual life of those around them’.5 Yet although in some contexts it seems that the master/pupil relationship presupposes an unequal exchange between an authority figure and an eager, submissive inquisitor, by mastering cultural capital, the pupil not only gains knowledge, but acquires a level of authority in the wider sphere of society. Vygotsky’s idea turns on the word ‘presupposes’. It could suggest that the submission of the pupil is necessary for learning; but the reader must also confront the assumption that the pupil is always, to some degree, dependent on the master, and therefore grows to fill a predetermined space of learning – that is, the already existing intellectual space of those who influence and teach them. Significantly, the mastery of languages enables pupils to access not only the authority available in their own culture, but also the cultural values of the foreign texts they read and translate. The pupil can then take on the political task of mediating between the two cultures. This act of mediation is always one of dialogue and a certain level of cultural exchange. The mediator is a translator, one who is able to create understanding across previously uncrossed boundaries.

With language providing access to other cultural spheres, these boundaries could be, and were, penetrated by women such as Brontë, Martineau and Eliot. Their respective educations, often self-motivated, reveal the value of mastering the master by determining their own potential and development. They took the knowledge given by their masters – specifically the knowledge of the languages they studied – and went beyond their masters by independently using those skills to master the cultures and ideologies to which those languages gave them access. Through seeking to take on the master’s role, rather than just the knowledge belonging to the master, these women overstepped the immediate boundaries imposed upon them. Apart from biographical and autobiographical writings, the translational activities entered into by Brontë, Martineau and Eliot show the influence of these texts on the translators, as well as the way they entered into dialogue with the originals. Furthermore, the depictions of masters and pupils in their fiction reveal a great deal regarding the way these women positioned themselves both as pupils and educators; for while, unlike Brontë, Eliot and Martineau were never employed as teachers, they very clearly saw it as their role to educate their readership. All three women make the move from translator to author, thereby enacting the desired progression from pupil to master.

The middle-class woman of the mid-nineteenth century would generally receive a certain level of education, but it would not necessarily be equal to that of her brothers, nor would it give her much freedom to use that education beyond the family hearth. Indeed, the master is often also the father, educating his daughters alongside his sons until the sons go to school; thus the metaphor of the master fathering knowledge becomes even more bound to female learning: the father teaches his daughter, as we see in Eliot’s Romola (1862–63), perhaps to a level of usefulness to himself; yet she is still bound by his authority, as well as the sense of duty imposed upon her by the wider cultural milieu. Sending one’s daughter to boarding school, however, disrupted these ties to the hearth. Kathryn Hughes comments:

The scorn of conservative commentators was aimed particularly at farmers’ daughters who, returning home from a stint at boarding school, spurned the delights of butter-making in favour of embroidery and afternoon tea with their friends. Behind such criticism lay the paradoxical fear that once able but low-born girls were given an ornamental education, it would be impossible to tell who was a lady and who was not.6

For Martineau, Eliot and Brontë, boarding school played a significant role in developing both identity and intellect, and the impact of their experiences features prominently in their writings. Boarding schools temporarily removed girls, not just from the hearth (although they were in some cases seemingly designed to promote the desire to return home as quickly as possible), but from their accustomed social environment. Thus by travelling to school, a young girl was already transgressing the boundaries of her cultural knowledge. The removal to an institution apart from the home could be an empowering and enlightening situation, if at times socially and emotionally traumatic. It could also lead to a more long-term psychological separation from the family, as the young girl would be expected to be able to exist within both environments, even though the expectations were often conflicting. This separation can be seen, for example, in Martineau’s and Eliot’s religious turns, and Brontë’s desire to travel.

Martineau was a particular anomaly in this case, as she and her sister ...