Victorian Women's Fiction

Marriage, Freedom, and the Individual

Shirley Foster

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2012
• ISBN:
  9781136321801
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Literatura
• Subtopic: Crítica literaria feminista

Focusing on the ways in which female novelists have, in their creative work, challenged or scrutinised contemporary assumptions about their own sex, this book's critical interest in women's fiction shows how mid-nineteenth-century women writers confront the conflict between the pressures of matrimonial ideologies and the often more attractive alternative of single or professional life. In arguing that the tensions and dualities of their work represent the honest confrontation of their own ambivalence rather than attempted conformity to convention, it calls for a fresh look at patterns of imaginative representation in Victorian women's literature.

Making extensive use of letters and non-fiction, this study relates the opinions expressed there to the themes and methods of the fictional narratives. The first chapter outlines the social and ideological framework within which the authors were writing; the subsequent five chapters deal with the individual novelists, Craik, Charlotte Bronté, Sewell, Gaskell, and Eliot, examining the works of each and also pointing to the similarities between them, thus suggesting a shared female 'voice'.

Dealing with minor writers as well as better-known figures, it opens up new areas of critical investigation, claiming not only that many nineteenth-century female novelists have been undeservedly neglected but also that the major ones are further illuminated by being considered alongside their less familiar contemporaries.

1	Introductory: Women and Marriage in Mid-Nineteenth-Century England

One of the commonest assumptions about the novel has always been that love is its primary concern. Most Victorian criticism takes it for granted that romantic interest is ‘the one topic which forms the staple of most novels, and [is] a main ingredient in all’;¹ one commentator even claims that contemporary fiction is so exclusively dedicated to ‘the passion of love’ that the very name ‘romance’ has been engrossed by the term ‘novel’.² Not all were entirely happy with this state of things; though the form had expanded to embrace ‘low-life’ fiction of the 1830s and ‘social-purpose’ novels of the 1840s and 1850s, for some mid-century observers the domination of love and marriage in the contemporary novel represented ‘a serious contraction of its capabilities’.³ But for the majority of Victorian critics and novelists alike, affairs of the heart were the basic stuff of fiction, however restricting this might seem in practice. Even a writer like Elizabeth Sewell, who saw that her talents as a story-teller lay in quite other directions, felt obliged to try her hand at a ‘regular novel, or a story in which love is the essential interest’;⁴ such a work, like one of her later ones, is ‘unquestionably a novel’ because it centres on ‘love affairs’.⁵

For women writers, the association of romance and fiction was of particular significance. Lady novelists, forming a creative line that includes the romances of Aphra Behn, the Gothic novels of Ann Radcliffe, the sharply-observed social tales of Fanny Burney, and the coolly witty comedies of Jane Austen, had always focused predominantly on love. With the proliferation of female fiction in the Victorian period, however, this characteristic became a matter of artistic principle, as critical opinion increasingly insisted on the distinctiveness of women’s writing, in both style and subject. Women, it was argued, wrote best about what they knew best; since, as a recent critic has put it, the central, defining preoccupation of the novel is ‘the elaboration of an intensely personal experience’,⁶ the most obvious female fictional material is the treatment of emotions, within a domestic context. Throughout the period, commentators claimed that the special merit of women novelists lay in their capacity for portraying love. G.H. Lewes, welcoming the advent of a new kind of fiction written by women and offering ‘woman’s view of life, woman’s experience’,⁷ claims: ‘The domestic experience which form the bulk of woman’s knowledge find an appropriate form in novels … Love is the staple of fiction, for it “forms the story of a woman’s life”.’⁸ Later in the century, reviewing the achievements of her predecessors, Mrs Humphry Ward posits that the strength of women novelists is ‘their peculiar vision’ of ‘the one subject which they have eternally at command, which is interesting to all the world, and whereof large tracts are naturally and wholly their own … the subject of love … love as the woman understands it’.⁹ Some critics even took the extreme line that the success of female fiction depended not only on the portrayal of romance, but on the writer’s direct personal involvement with it. J.M. Ludlow, for instance, argues that because women’s novels should emanate from the fullness of ‘wifely and motherly experience’,¹⁰ unmarried women should refrain from writing them since they have never felt these emotions.

Discussion of appropriate subject-matter for women writers was closely linked to the notion that there were certain innately feminine characteristics which found best expression in romantic and domestic fiction. R.H. Hutton propounds such a thesis: women respond from the heart, not the head; their perceptions are ‘finer, subtler, quicker than men’s’, and they have ‘delicacy and skill in delineation’, but they find it hard to reason abstractly and ‘what they lack is an eye for universality, a power of seeing the broad and representative element’;¹¹ therefore their art cannot successfully penetrate areas of professional and intellectual life, but does best in the emotional arena. Hutton wanted to see a widening in women’s creative writing, achieved through better education, but other critics were anxious to maintain this sexual distinctiveness. Miss Stodart, in her Female Writers: Thoughts on their Proper Sphere and on their Powers (1842), was one of the first to suggest that womanly qualities of delicacy, sensitivity, quick sympathy, and powers of observation commit women novelists to a particular literary mode — the depiction of home and family; and, following her lead, other critics insisted that women novelists’ ‘keen sympathies’, ‘glowing sentiment’, and ‘sensitive consciences’¹² especially equipped them to deal with the emotional side of life. The high-lighting of such qualities — which, as we shall see, are intrinsic elements in the age’s ‘angel’ ideology — reflects, like strictures on the appropriate material of women’s fiction, current insistence on the supremacy of wifely and motherly functions. Anne Mozley posits that the most admirable female writers are those who turn their gifts to social and domestic account, who refrain from making themselves ‘exceptions from the ordinary domestic type of women’, and who write ‘on subjects especially open to feminine treatment’ with their natural ‘delicate fingering … soft touch, and quick perception’.¹³ Even George Eliot, hardly representative of the more traditional aspects of womanhood, claims that the peculiar beauty of woman depends on ‘a class of sensations and emotions — the maternal ones — which must remain unknown to man’¹⁴ and which will be part of her specialness as an artist. Lewes’s praise of the particular merits of female fiction rests on the notion of biological separateness:

The grand function of woman … is, and ever must be Maternity … the prolific source, not only of the best affections and virtues of which our nature is capable, but also of the wise thoughtfulness, and most useful habits of observation, by which that nature can be elevated and adorned.¹⁵

Woman, by her greater affectionateness, her greater range and depth of emotional experience, is well-fitted to give expression to the emotional facts of life.¹⁶

Many women novelists themselves recognised that this apparent tribute to female literary skills was in reality a thinly-disguised weapon of limitation. It not only subjected them to the notorious double standard in reviewing, but made it extremely hard for them to contravene the generally-upheld criteria. One reason for the central idealising focus on love and marriage in so much Victorian female fiction is certainly pressure from publishers, prudently responding to the tastes (which they had in part created) of a readership which consisted largely of young women, themselves preoccupied with affairs of the heart. Harriet Taylor sums up the situation with cynical neatness: ‘it is the personal interest of these [literary] women to profess whatever opinions they expect will be agreeable to men … [because] they depend on men’s opinion for their literary as well as for their feminine successes.’¹⁷ Only the strongest female authors could resist the tyranny of romantic conventions. Charlotte Brontë’s refusal to comply with the urgings of her father and of George Smith, her publisher, to change the last part of Villette so that the novel would convey ‘the spirit of romance … far more flowery and inviting’¹⁸ is an indication of her determined literary integrity; other women novelists, as a recent critic has demonstrated, submerged any unease they may have felt, perhaps in propitiation of male values, and complied with the demands of their intended audiences — women and families — who accepted traditional female roles and expected novels to depict them.¹⁹

As several contemporary commentators suggested, Victorian women novelists may have focused on romance and marriage also as a kind of consolation for personal dissatisfaction. Trapped in their private domestic sphere, they imaginatively enacted in fiction their own soothing dreams of blessed fulfilment. A Saturday Review contributor lightly describes ‘the young recluse author’, thrown back on herself within a monotonous round of domestic duties, ‘put[ting] on paper what she would herself like to be’.²⁰ More sombrely, Anna Jameson, foreshadowing Lewes’s assumption that women turn to writing ‘always to solace … the sorrow that in silence wastes their lives … [to] escape from the pressure of that burden’,²¹ sees literary activity as a compensation for ‘the void of existence’, especially for single women:

only in utility … only in the assiduous employment of such faculties as we are permitted to exercise, can we find health and peace, and compensation for the wasted or repressed impulses and energies more proper to our sex — more natural.²²

To argue that preoccupation with romantic themes in Victorian women’s fiction is either wish-fulfilment or capitulation to publishing convention — or a mixture of both — is not, however, to give the whole picture. There are even more cogent reasons why women at this time were exploring questions of love, marriage, and female domesticity in their creative work. In treating these topics, their narratives accord with one of the most sacred of Victorian canons, the appeal to realism; however much they may seem to be escaping from actuality into the idealising world of the imagination, mid-Victorian women novelists are in fact responding to contemporary conditions and ideologies. Foreign observers noted this fact with a degree of ironic amusement. In 1849, Eugène Forçade, comparing French and English novels, saw how the latter mirrored the social phenomenon in England that a woman’s age of romance concluded with marriage,²³ while Taine, writing about his visit to England in 1859, observed that there was almost as much reverence paid to women and the institution of matrimony in real life as in literature.²⁴

The subject which formed the basis of nearly all Victorian female fiction was of especial significance for the writers at this time. Victorian women, in fact, faced what many saw as a crisis in the affairs of their sex, emanating from conflicting cultural and social conditions. As has already been indicated, one of the most pervasive ideologies of the age rested on the assumption that the ideal womanly virtues — sacrifice, self-effacement, moral purity, service — were best expressed in the vocations of wife and mother. To be truly feminine, a woman must fulfil the beneficent functions which nature has assigned to her. She thus becomes the angelic figure which finds its best-known definition in Patmore’s paean to married bliss, The Angelin the House (1855, 1856):

Her disposition is devout

Her countenance angelical;

The best things that the best believe

Are in her face so kindly writ

The faithless, seeing her, conceive

Not only heaven, but hope of it.

(Book I, Canto IV, Preludes I)

The wife, in Patmore’s vision, offers a haven of domestic peace and security:

On settled poles turn solid joys,

And sunlike pleasures shine at home.

(Book II, Canto VII, Preludes I)

These sentiments are echoed in another much-quoted text of the period — Ruskin’s ‘Of Queens’ Gardens’, in his Sesame and Lilies (1865) — which similarly stresses the sacredness of woman’s ‘true place and power’ in the Home, itself ‘a vestal temple, a temple of the hearth watched over by Household Gods’;²⁵ it also attributes quasidivine power to ‘the tender and delicate woman … with the child at her breast’.²⁶ Patmore’s and Ruskin’s attitudes towards feminine roles have gained such notoriety that it is easy to overlook the fact that the ideology was current much earlier in the period, and has antecedents in the previous century.²⁷ It is also tempting to claim that the relegation of woman to what, though spiritually elevated, was in reality a narrowed and restricted function, had its source in a masculine self-preserving strategy disguised as a doctrine of adulation. We should note, however, that many women themselves not only apparently accepted this view of their own sex but actually sought to promulgate it. Even if their response was unconsciously conditioned by male pressure, many nineteenth-century female writers earnestly voiced their belief in an exclusively domestic and maternal standard of womanly excellence. Mrs Sandford, in her Woman in her Social and Domestic Character (1831) posits that ‘domestic life is the chief sphere of her [woman’s] influence’;²⁸ in the appropriate arena of home, she must be ‘the tender nurse, the patient instructress, the sympathising and forgiving counsellor, receiving back from her children the recompense of her own filial affection’.²⁹ In her Woman’s Mission (1839), Sarah Lewis similarly claims that woman’s influence is dependent ...