Women, Power and Subversion (Routledge Revivals)

Social Strategies in British Fiction, 1778-1860

Judith Lowder Newton

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2013
• Print ISBN: 9780415637039
• eBook ISBN: 9781136193989
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: Feminist Literary Criticism
• Index: Literature

First published in 1981, this book explores the reactions of some female writers to the social effects of industrial capitalism between 1778 and 1860. The period set in motion a crisis over the status of middle-class women that culminated in the constructed idea of "women's proper sphere". This concept disguised inequities between men and women, first by asserting the reality of female power, and then by restricting it to self-sacrificing influence.

In this book, Judith Newton analyses novels such as Fanny Burney's Evelina, Jane Austen's Pride and Prejudice, Charlotte Brontë's Villette and George Eliot's The Mill on the Floss in order to demonstrate how some female writers reacted to the issue by covertly resisting inequities of power and reconciling ideologies in their art. She argues that in this time period, novels became increasingly rebellious as well as ambivalent . Heroines were endowed with power, and emphasis was given to female ability, rather than to feminine influence.

1. Evelina

To read this history of a young lady’s entrance into the world is to read a chronicle of assault: for having made her debut in “public company,” amid a round of London’s most “fashionable Spring Diversions,” Burney’s genteel young heroine finds that she can go but few places indeed without being forced, intruded upon, seized, kidnapped, or in some other way violated by a male.¹ At her first assembly she is provoked by the “negligent impertinence” of a fop, at her second “tormented … to death” by a baronet.² A trip to the opera marks her first kidnapping, an evening at the play a public attack. At the Pantheon a lord affronts her by staring; at Vauxhall “gentlemen” “rudely” seize upon and pursue her; and at Marylebone, when she loses her party and her way, she finds that her distress “only furnished a pretence for impertinent witticisms” on the part of “bold and unfeeling” males (181, 218). Burney’s Evelina, in fact, presents us with a world dominated by the imposition of men upon women, a world in which male control takes the form of assault, and a world in which male assault is the most central expression of power.

That the author of Evelina, herself a young woman of good family, should give this emphasis to male control, that she should portray male control as violation, and that she should virtually equate a young lady’s entry into the world with her subjection to abuse expresses something pointed about the situation of genteel unmarried women in 1778. It evokes the fact that the status of young middle-class women was in doubt; it suggests that men felt a special authority to impose their will upon them; and it implies that respectable unmarried women were essentially powerless to avoid if not to resist this imposition. Evelina, in fact, evokes Burney’s own experience of this general historical situation, for in 1775, only one year before she wrote the major part of her novel, Fanny Burney suffered what might be termed a species of male assault upon her status and autonomy.

Burney was then twenty-three, self-educated, evidently destined for marriage, interested in love but harboring some distaste for the awkward rituals of courtship, and liable to feel, with a distinct sense of her own autonomy, that “upon the whole, the most dignified thing for an exalted female must be to die an old maid.” She enjoyed, too, unusual freedom in disposing of her own time, “following my own vagaries which my papa never controls,” and she had besides a sense of personal status and value. She served as amanuensis to the great Dr. Burney, and she was engaged in writing long and witty journal letters to an admiring Mr. Crisp: “Send me a minute Journal of every thing, and never mind their being trifles—trifles well-dressed, are excellent food, and your cookery is (with me) of established reputation.”³

The Burney family, moreover, though it had humble connections, was at least uneasily genteel. If Dr. Burney was a mere music teacher, he was also a respected scholar with an Oxford degree, and though his family remained to some extent “such sort of people,” he himself entered easily into the great world.⁴ His was not a family either to worry about finance for, though money for dowries was not to be had, there were funds to send one of Fanny’s brothers to Cambridge and two of her sisters to France, and Burney’s diary is free of those allusions to economy which so dominate the letters of Jane Austen. It came, then, as a shock that, at twenty-three, Fanny should be pressured to place herself upon the market, should be urged to consider marrying a man she hardly knew and did not care for—and this chiefly for his money.

It was in May of 1775, shortly before her twenty-fourth birthday, that Fanny received a declaration of sorts from a Mr. Barlow, an unremarkable young man whom she had met at tea four days before and whom—it is hardly surprising—she was eager to refuse: “I am too spoilt,” she wrote, “by such men as my father and Mr. Crisp to content myself with a character merely inoffensive. I should expire of fatigue with him.”⁵ But Dr. Burney had several daughters without dowries, and Fanny, to her dismay, was urged by her sister, her grandmother, her maiden aunts, and her dear friend Daddy Crisp to consider the economics of her situation—Mr. Barlow too appeared provokingly “sanguine” at first about her acceptance. Mr. Crisp, for example, after recommending what he had heard of Mr. Barlow’s disposition, went on to “the grand object of enquiry,” Mr. Barlow’s fortune:

Is he of any profession, or only of an independent fortune? is either, or both, sufficient to promise … a comfortable [income]? You may live to the age of your grandmother, and not meet with so valuable an offer… . Look round you, Fan; look at your aunts; Fanny Burney won’t always be what she is now! Mrs. Hamilton once had an offer of £3, ooo-a-year, or near it; a parcel of young giggling girls laugh’d her out of it. The man, forsooth, was not quite smart enough, though otherwise estimable. Oh, Fan, this is not a marrying age, without a handsome Fortune! … Suppose you lose your father, — take in all chances. Consider the situation of an unprotected, unprovided woman!⁶

The letter was well intended, but that Daddy Crisp, a model of gentility and a sort of father-monitor as well, should ask her to consider a man she did not know and could not love, and all for the sake of an establishment, obviously pained Fanny and took her by surprise: “[Mr. Crisp] has written me such a letter! God knows how I shall answer it! Every body is against me but my beloved father.” And then, perhaps a week later, Dr. Burney joined the cause, spoke to her “in favour of Mr. Barlow,” and urged her not to be “peremptory” in her answer. The effect was devastating: Fanny felt assailed yet powerless to resist:

I was terrified to death. I felt the utter impossibility of resisting not merely my father’s persuasion, but even his advice. … I wept like an infant, when alone; ate nothing; seemed as if already married and passed the whole day in more misery than, merely on my own account, I ever did in my life, except [when a child] upon the loss of my own beloved mother, and ever revered and most dear grandmother!⁷

The extent of her suffering, however, moved Dr. Burney to relent, and that very evening Fanny went to bed “light, happy, and thankful, as if escaped from destruction.” On May 16 she wrote Daddy Crisp, asking forgiveness but maintaining that she was unable to act “from worldly motives,” declaring herself “QUITE FIXED,” and explaining that she had “long accustomed [herself] to the idea of being an old maid”; and so, for the most part, the affair of Mr. Barlow was ended.⁸ But it could not have ended, one assumes, without leaving its trace, without putting Fanny in some doubt about the inviolability of her status and freedom. Evelina, which was written largely in the following year, gives all evidence of being a mode of coming to terms with this experience, the experience of being placed upon the market, the experience of being regarded with sanguinity by an unremarkable young man, the experience of being made to lose status and power—the experience, in short, of undergoing a species of assault.

What, in a general sense, lay behind this incursion upon Burney’s status and autonomy was to a large degree the declining economic stature of genteel young women in the eighteenth century, for women of all stations had lost and were continuing to lose their previously recognized economic value. The working of household plots, the home production of household articles, the participation in family industry were all in decline, and the economic drift was to make women, especially women of the middle orders, more dependent economically upon men and men less recognizably dependent upon the domestic work of women. This decline in recognized economic value enforced women’s traditionally subordinate position in relation to men, a phenomenon that did not go unnoticed by the age. Defoe, for one, understood that women’s lower status went hand in hand with their loss of economic function, and he suggests that men took advantage of the situation: “They will not make them useful that they may not value themselves upon it, and make themselves, as it were, the equals of their husbands.”⁹

The waning status of single dependent women in particular is also suggested by a familiar shift in the use of the word “spinster.” Once a positive term for female manufacturers and a reflection of the importance that unmarried women had enjoyed as participants in family industry, “spinster” became, early in the eighteenth century, a term of opprobrium for women beyond the usual age for marriage. By implication, then, dependent women of the middle orders lost status because they ceased to be or to be seen as economic assets to the family and became instead liabilities.¹⁰ This state of things was particularly difficult for women like Fanny Burney women with aspirations to gentility, for they were prohibited by the definitions of gentility itself from being employed outside the home—at low wages and in occupations already glutted with women from poorer backgrounds—while inside the home fashion, at least, increasingly required them to be idle. More than one father must have advised his daughters, as did Dr. Gregory, to take up needlework that they might have something to occupy their time, for Thomas Gisborne notes that young women in general were unsuccessful in their efforts to “quicken and enliven the slow-paced hours.”¹¹

All a respectable young woman could really do to ease the strain of her dependency, and the uneasy status which such dependency entailed, was to marry. But the possibility of marriage in the late eighteenth century, as Daddy Crisp suggests, was becoming increasingly unlikely. Men were marrying late, perhaps because wives were now luxury items, and when men did marry they were liable to require a dowry. Gisborne, in fact, reflects a late eighteenth-century conviction when he suggests that marriage among the middle and upper middle classes was openly becoming a mercantile matter—where a “calculating broker” pored over pedigrees, summed up the property in hand, and computed “at the market price” what a young woman was worth.¹² On top of this, the number of women appears to have exceeded the number of men, all of which must have endorsed the traditionally superior status of single men while it enforced a general lowering of status for single women. For, once young women were of an age for marriage, they were still vulnerable to being seen as liabilities and now as liabilities in overplentiful supply. If, within the family, many single women felt like burdens, the unfavorable conditions of the marriage market must have imposed upon them the even lower identity of merchandise, and it is precisely the discomfort, the oppression of being rendered merchandise, which Burney encounters in Evelina, and which she reinvokes as the experience of being assaulted by men.

II

Evelina finds Burney firmly committed to the ideology that marriage is a woman’s natural and only destiny and to the understanding that she achieves that destiny by displaying herself and waiting to be chosen. Given Burney’s own trauma on the marriage market, this is a commitment which suggests how impoverished any other options must have appeared. Evelina’s entrance into the world, like Fanny Burney’s, is patently an entry onto the marriage market, and the assemblies, operas, plays, and pleasure gardens, while initiating her into knowledge of society, also function as occasions upon which she is displayed. Indeed, there is some fun early in the novel when Evelina describes the sensation of turning herself out London-style: “You can’t think how oddly my head feels; full of powder and black pins, and a great cushion on the top of it” (17). Being an object is odd, but it is also amusing, and it is even thrilling when the princely Lord Orville asks one to dance. But being on display, which is necessary to secure a husband, to fulfill one’s destiny, and to be supported, is pleasant only when one is regarded as a fascinating treasure. Unfortunately, the logic of women’s economic situation dictates that she may also be regarded as something of lower value—as overstocked merchandise, for example, by men of the lower orders or, at best, by gentlemen as prey.

The workings of this logic are widely, though intuitively, evoked in Evelina, for it is women’s economic dependency which lurks behind men’s easy assumption that Evelina may be pursued, imposed upon, and controlled. Burney, moreover, although she never protests or makes a point of the fact that it is a woman’s destiny to display herself on the market, is one of the few writers in the century to describe the experience in such a way as to emphasize its discomfort and oppression—and she is one of the very few to take this discomfort seriously. The language of Evelina’s response to male assault—she is “provoked,” “distressed,” “terrified,” “angered”—impresses upon us what ought to be obvious—that Evelina finds it oppressive to be raped—and that critics have not noticed this aspect of the novel is merely a comment on what we have come to accept as women’s due.¹³

But, while intuitively evoking the discomfort of being forcibly reduced to merchandise or prey, Burney maintains another ideological version of a genteel woman’s situation and of her relation to society, a version which is much in conflict with the first. This second version suggests not only that genteel women are not merchandise at all but that there are no shared economic conditions which would tend to impose that identity upon them. And it is this vision of a genteel woman’s lot that ameliorates the inescapable experience of being assailed and that ultimately helps establish an eighteenth-century patriarchy, with all its restrictions on young women, as something bearable by and indeed beneficial to young women of the middle classes.

In establishing this vision, Burney simply omits from the novel the economic conditions which in her own life and in the lives of women like her most restricted autonomy and lowered status and which also enforced the authority which men of the middle and landed orders felt in relation to women. Evelina, for example, is a woman of independent fortune, a fact which sets her quite apart from Fanny Burney and probably from the majority of women of good family. Evelina’s fortune will not sustain her in a life of fashion, but it may “make her happy, if she is disposed to be so in private life”; and, while hopes of a good marriage are entertained for her by Mr. Villars (her guardian, a character based to some extent on Daddy Crisp), Evelina will never be required to consider a stiff and unremarkable young man for the sake, say, of £3,000 a year (8). But it is not only Evelina who escapes economic restriction. The general economic inequities of men’s and women’s lives are also omitted from the novel. With the exception of the £30,000 which Evelina’s father bestows upon her at the end of the book, we never know, as we do in Austen, how much men and women inherit; we never know how much anyone is worth. And since everyone in the novel appears at leisure, even women and men of the trading classes, we are never in contact with any inequality in access to work.

Indeed, most concern for or consciousness of money is confined to the lower orders, where it is caricatured and dismissed. It is Mr. Smith, for example, a would-be gentleman and the tenant of a silversmith’s dining room, who hints most directly at the economic contradiction of men’s and women’s lots and at the resulting inequities in status and in power. Despite some hapless gestures at courtliness—blunt references to Evelina’s beauty and entirely false assertions that he always studies “what the ladies like”—Smith is fond of driving home some distinctly uncourtly realities (171). He is aware that women are economically dependent on men, and he reminds Evelina that “marriage is all in all with the ladies; but with us gentlemen it’s quite another thing!” (209). He is also aware that he is a buyer in a buyer’s market, and it pleases him to call attention to the fact that the laws of supply and demand make him the treasure: “… there are a great many other ladies that have been proposed to me … so you may very well be proud … for I assure you, there is nobody so likely to catch me at last as yourself” (210). The status which male privilege and the conditions of the marriage market confer on Smith provides him in turn with the agreeable conclusion that it is natural, and even desirable, to women that he impose his will on them. Smith, in fact, is “thunderstruck with amazement” when Evelina refuses the assembly tickets he has tried to force upon her, and with the self-righteousness of one who feels that society has empowered him to do the imposing he “thought proper to desire [she] would tell him [her] reasons” (164).

Young Branghton, Evelina’s cousin and the son and heir of a silversmith, has even fewer pretensions to courtliness than Mr. Smith; he merely assumes, with some candor, that those who can confer economic benefits have a right to dictate. He is eager, therefore, to pay for Evelina’s coach fares and opera tickets and to treat her at public places, for “if I pay, I think I’ve a right to have it my own way” (172). Like Mr. Smith, young Branghton is highly conscious of the fact that women depend on men and marriage, and like Smith he is fond of twitting them about their inability to impose their will on men. Indeed, his entire relation with his sisters consists of tormenting them about their lack of marriageable qualities. They will never get a man because they are “ugly enough to frighten a horse” and liable to being exposed with “all their dirty things on, and all their hair about their ears” (160).

Consciousness of money, of its relation to men’s superior status and to their control over women, is made so rude and so untenable in Branghton and Smith that it may easily be mocked. But, more than that, in Branghton and Smith the very existence of this consciousness is explained away. It is not a response, not even an exaggerated response, to economic realities but merely a habit of mind apt to be cultivated by persons among the lower orders and particularly by persons in trade. Branghton, especially, is seen as reflecting an obsessive interest in money and prices, profit and advance, weights and measures, and physical qualities in general. In this context any attention to money in its relation to women, status, and power may be put down as one more vulgarity of the lower orders, may be cast with other perversities, like references to untidy hair and dirty underclothes, may be laughed off the stage. In the guise, then, of satirizing the vulgarities of station, Burney undermines an economic consciousness which was not at all confined to the trading classes and which was, in fact, generally imposed by real economic conditions on genteel young women like herself. In the process she also mystifies the reality of the economic conditions which were sustained by a landed patriarchy as a whole and especially by men of the ruling class.

What Burney also mystifies is community—community as the...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Original Title Page
• Original Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Table of Contents
• Acknowledgments
• Preface: Criticism and History
• Introduction: Power and the Ideology of “Woman’s Sphere”
• 1. Evelina
• 2. Pride and Prejudice
• 3. Villette
• 4. The Mill on the Floss
• Afterword: Women’s Politics and “Woman’s Sphere”
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Index