George Gissing and the Woman Question

Convention and Dissent

Christine Huguet, Simon J. James

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2016
• eBook ISBN: 9781317128588
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: Literary Criticism
• Index: Literature

Approaching its subject both contextually and comparatively, George Gissing and the Woman Question reads Gissing's novels, short stories and personal writings as a crux in European fiction's formulations of gender and sexuality. The collection places Gissing alongside nineteenth- and twentieth-century authors as diverse as Paul Bourget, Ella Hepworth Dixon, May Sinclair and Theodore Dreiser, theorizing the ways in which late-Victorian sexual difference is challenged, explored and performed in Gissing's work. In addition to analyzing the major novels, essays make a case for Gissing as a significant short story writer and address Gissing's own life and afterlife in ways that avoid biographical mimetics. The contributors also place Gissing's work in relation to discourses of subjectivity and intersubjectivity, identity, public space, class and labour, especially literary production. Increasingly viewed as a key chronicler of the late Victorian period's various redefinitions of sexual difference, Gissing is here recognized as a sincere, uncompromising chronicler of social change.

PART I
Gissing’s Complex Discourse of (New) Womanhood

Chapter 1
Gissing and Prostitution

David Grylls

Gissing the man was closely involved with a prostitute; Gissing the writer treated prostitution extensively in his fiction. Meditating on his own experience, he moved from youthful idealization through rueful self-criticism to settled disgust. Portraying prostitution in his fiction, he was likewise both radical and conservative. In his novels, especially the first two to be published, he explored prostitution with a fullness and boldness that violated accepted limits of expression (at least for the English novel). At the same time his treatment of the topic was heavily reliant on literary convention, deploying established symbols and tropes derived from earlier fiction. The following account will start with an analysis of the biographical basis of Gissing’s involvement with what was called ‘The Great Social Evil’. After that an attempt will be made to trace the development of the topic in his fiction, arguing that his early novels in particular are simultaneously transgressive and compliant.

Gissing’s relationship with a prostitute started as an act of youthful folly and became the defining moment of his life. As a student at Owens College, Manchester, he met and fell in love with Nell Harrison, skipped classes and stole money for her, and contracted venereal disease. Caught stealing, he was convicted of theft, expelled from college, sent to prison and packed off to make a new life in America. While there, despite a brief flirtation, he seems to have remained faithful to Nell, whom he lived with on his return to London and married in 1879, four years after first meeting her.

In outline, these events are of course familiar to critics and biographers of Gissing. What is worth emphasizing, however, is the gap between Gissing’s views of his conduct and society’s judgement on it. Officially, Gissing was a convicted criminal who had abandoned decent behaviour. According to the college disciplinary council, he was guilty not only of theft but ‘a life of immorality and dissipation’.1 His conviction exposed him as uncommitted, unethical, dishonest and self-indulgent. But in Gissing’s mind he was none of these things: in fact he was precisely the opposite. His commitment to Nell was proven in life by his returning to her and marrying her in church. In his early writings it is strongly implied by a poem he wrote before sailing to America (‘Farewell, my love; though far apart/Tonight our spirits meet’) and short stories written in Chicago (especially ‘Too Wretched to Live’) that condemn male infidelity.2 Entries in his American Notebook suggest he saw his relationship with Nell not as a casual amour but a grande passion.3 And far from it being immoral or selfish or a betrayal of family values, it followed that philanthropy to fallen women recommended by his lost, beloved father in his collection Margaret, and Other Poems. Here, Thomas Gissing had defended such women against ‘sneers and ribaldry’, suggesting only kindness would help them reform.4 Gissing gave a copy of this volume to Nell and found it preserved in her room at her death. It was accompanied not only by his portrait and letters but also by certificates of teetotalism.5 Clearly it had been part of their mutual commitment to her moral reclamation.

Gissing’s initial idealism about Nell, and about prostitution, is repeatedly suggested in his writings. A quotation from George Sand in his American Notebook suggests that if a noble and honest man should fall violently in love with a wretched courtesan he should not blush for it.6 In Extracts from my Reading Gissing writes: ‘It is quite possible that what men call a crime may often, from the higher standpoint, be a virtuous act’.7 In his Commonplace Book he transcribes the famous dictum on the prostitute from Lecky’s History of European Morals: ‘She remains while creeds & civilizations rise & fall, the eternal priestess of humanity, blasted for the sins of the people’.8 He also quotes extensively from Murger’s Scènes de la Vie de Bohème – noting, however, that Murger’s fascinating grisettes perhaps never existed in real life.9 Behind the quotations from Lecky and Murger we can glimpse two contrasting forms of sympathy for prostitutes, both powerfully attractive to Gissing. In Lecky’s European Morals the prostitute is an unhappy figure whose vices and sufferings paradoxically preserve the purity of the respectable family. In Murger the grisettes are delightful, happy figures who remain essentially innocent. Prostitutes, then, could be viewed sympathetically both as objects of compassion and as objects of desire. The twisting together of these two responses – attraction and pity, passion and compassion – is powerfully analyzed by Gissing in several texts. But to these should be added other responses in order to grasp the variety of ways in which Gissing interpreted his experience. In his American Notebook he sketches out a possible plot for a story: ‘Young, enthusiastic man marries and is deceived by his wife. Loses all faith in women and becomes wild. Woman of the town falls in love with him and reclaims him’.10 That final phrase is interesting: according to Victorian liberal convention it was prostitutes who were to be ‘reclaimed’. Here Gissing proposes to invert the process – just as, in a sense, he did later in the rewritten ending of The Unclassed, where not only is Ida reclaimed from prostitution but her love reclaims Waymark from cynicism.

Fig. 1.1 ‘She was beautiful in her evening dress’. Illustration by F.A. Carter. The Unclassed. First American edition (New York: R.F. Fenno, 1896, p. 155).

This vision of mutual reclamation no doubt had its origins in Gissing’s feelings in the years after the debacle at Manchester. His affair with Nell had ruined him but if he remained faithful to her he could save her and somehow she could save him. It failed to happen like that, of course. Nell was nothing like Murger’s grisettes – ‘moitié abeilles, moitié cigales’: half bee, half cicada.11 She was more like half wasp, half tapeworm – or so Gissing came to feel. Increasingly, he became disillusioned both with Nell and his earlier idealism. And as he did so, he began to invert another aspect of the liberal view of prostitution – not the view that prostitutes should be reclaimed, but the somewhat different view that they were ordinary women who, under pressure of poverty, succumbed to a single moment of temptation and then, as ‘fallen’ women, were permanently blighted. Gissing inverted this conventional view by applying it not to prostitutes but rather to the men they ensnared – specifically, to himself. It was he, after all, who had succumbed to temptation; it was he who had lapsed into dishonest conduct; it was he whose life was permanently blighted. In Demos (1886) we hear that Hubert Eldon has lost his inheritance because of an affair with a French actress (here Gissing follows English convention in making ‘French actress’ more or less synonymous with ‘high-class courtesan’). Gissing’s reappraisal of his own situation peeps through when Eldon is bitterly reproached by his aristocratic mother: ‘The purity of your soul was precious to me … I thought I had seen in you a love of that chastity without which a man is nothing; and I ever did my best to keep your eyes upon a noble ideal of womanhood. You have fallen’.12 The language applied to Eldon here – ‘purity’, ‘chastity’, ‘fallen’ – might seem curious. It is, though, in keeping with the chivalric tenor of the Eldon sections of the novel and it seems to confirm an inverted view of the nature of sexual surrender. But if this part of Demos suggests that Eldon is the male equivalent of a fallen woman, elsewhere the text implies something very different – and something much closer to Gissing’s earlier view of his own erotic lapse. Eldon later reflects on the woman’s face that had led him ‘through strange scenes, as far from the beaten road of a college curriculum as well could be’:

The romance which most young men are content to enjoy in printed pages he had acted out in his life. He had lived through a glorious madness, as unlike the vulgar oat-sowing of the average young man of wealth as the latest valse on a street-organ is unlike a passionate dream of Chopin. However unworthy the object of his frenzy – and perhaps one were as worthy as another – the pursuit had borne him through an atmosphere of fire, tempering him for life, marking him for ever from plodders of the dusty highway. A reckless passion is a patent of nobility. (Demos, pp. 75–6)

Demos was published in 1886. Apparently, this was the last time that Gissing re-processed his affair with Nell in such self-flattering terms. As stated earlier, he changed his views about both her and prostitution. Were the two, perhaps, permanently linked in his mind? Did he, one wonders, ever use another prostitute? It seems possible, yet the truth is one we do not know. In his biography of Gissing, Paul Delany wonders whether Gissing visited prostitutes on his first trip to Paris in 1888. He concludes that the evidence suggests not.13 What we can say with reasonable confidence is that if Gissing did have experience of prostitutes after his affair with Nell, he would not have regarded it as ‘glorious’ or a ‘patent of nobility’. The whole tone of his treatment of the topic changes. Consider the sentence about Glazzard in Denzil Quarrier (1892), a man who, ‘with passionate ideals, had never known anything but a venal embrace’.14 Or consider the passage in The Crown of Life (1899) describing how Piers Otway

feared the streets at night-time; in his loneliness and misery, a gleam upon some wanton face would perchance have lured him, as had happened ere now. Not so much at the bidding of his youthful blood, as out of mere longing for companionship, the common cause of disorder in men condemned to solitude in great cities. A woman’s voice, the touch of a soft hand – this is what men so often hunger for, when they are censured for lawless appetite. But Piers Otway knew himself, and chose to sit alone in the dreary lodging-house.15

It is, of course, always perilous to infer biography from fiction, but in the memoirs of Brian Ború Dunne, who spent time with Gissing in Siena and Rome, we have direct evidence of Gissing’s attitude to prostitution by 1897–1898. Dunne reports that Gissing delivered a ‘most bitter invective against scarlet women’, pointing out that, because of the number of prostitutes outside the theatre and opera in London, ‘more than one cultured Englishman found his clothes torn or rumpled, and his hat knocked off or crushed. It was disgusting. And nothing was done about it’.16 In Rome, Dunne writes:

The sale of contraceptives on the street corners of the large cities and the flood of scarlet women let loose exactly at the noon hour up and down the Corso, Rome’s famous business and social thoroughfare, angered Gissing. Americans I talked to were first aghast and then amused. Gissing hated the name, the thought, the presence, the descriptions, the suggestion of prostitution, which was gaily discussed by Latins at luncheon.17

Dunne also reports that Gissing never used immodest language and seemed to think it improper even to use the word ‘seduce’.18 He may be exaggerating, though his impressions are supported by the defence of ‘verbal delicacy’ in section 27 of Henry Ryecroft and by Morley Roberts’s account of Gissing’s ‘extreme purity of thought and speech’.19

The transformation of Gissing’s attitudes towards prostitution can be illustrated by juxtaposing texts from the beginning and end of his career. As it happens, a prostitute appears in the first paragraph of his first story, ‘The Sins of the Fathers’ (1877), and the last completed chapter of his last novel, Veranilda (1904). The contrast in character and tone is striking. In that first story, Laura Lindon, a runaway girl found starving in the streets, arouses the hero Leonard’s profound compassion. In the final novel, Heliodora, a ‘crafty courtesan’ living in luxury, provokes the hero Basil’s alarmed disgust.20 In one dramatic scene Heliodora springs fiercely at Basil as he is about to leave:

Her arms were about his neck; her body clung against his; she breathed hotly into his eyes as she panted forth words, Latin, Gre...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Contents
• Acknowledgements
• List of Illustrations
• Notes on Contributors
• Introduction: George Gissing and the Woman Question
• PART I GISSING’S COMPLEX DISCOURSE OF (NEW) WOMANHOOD
• PART II GISSING’S VOICE: A COMPARATIST ASSESSMENT
• Bibliography
• Index