At Home in the World

Women Writers and Public Life, from Austen to the Present

Maria DiBattista, Deborah Epstein Nord

• Publisher: Princeton University Press
• Year: 2017
• Print ISBN: 9780691191430, 9780691138114
• eBook ISBN: 9781400884773
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: Modern History
• Index: Literature

A bold new literary history that says women's writing is defined less by domestic concerns than by an engagement with public life

In a bold and sweeping reevaluation of the past two centuries of women's writing, At Home in the World argues that this body of work has been defined less by domestic concerns than by an active engagement with the most pressing issues of public life: from class and religious divisions, slavery, warfare, and labor unrest to democracy, tyranny, globalism, and the clash of cultures. In this new literary history, Maria DiBattista and Deborah Epstein Nord contend that even the most seemingly traditional works by British, American, and other English-language women writers redefine the domestic sphere in ways that incorporate the concerns of public life, allowing characters and authors alike to forge new, emancipatory narratives.

The book explores works by a wide range of writers, including canonical figures such as Jane Austen, Charlotte Brontë, George Eliot, Harriet Jacobs, Edith Wharton, Virginia Woolf, Willa Cather, Gertrude Stein, and Toni Morrison; neglected or marginalized writers like Mary Antin, Tess Slesinger, and Martha Gellhorn; and recent and contemporary figures, including Nadine Gordimer, Anita Desai, Edwidge Danticat, and Jhumpa Lahiri. DiBattista and Nord show how these writers dramatize tensions between home and the wider world through recurrent themes of sailing forth, escape, exploration, dissent, and emigration. Throughout, the book uncovers the undervalued public concerns of women writers who ventured into ever-wider geographical, cultural, and political territories, forging new definitions of what it means to create a home in the world.

The result is an enlightening reinterpretation of women's writing from the early nineteenth century to the present day.

CHAPTER 1

Adventure

IN A HAUNTING PASSAGE IN VIRGINIA WOOLF’S To the Lighthouse (1927), Mrs. Ramsay, one of the last great literary avatars of Victorian womanhood, settles in for a few precious moments of calm and reverie after an exhausting day of tending to children and houseguests and meals and plans to visit the lighthouse. She sits by herself, knitting, relishing the moment in which she “need not think about anybody”:

To be silent; to be alone. All the being and the doing, expansive, glittering, vocal, evaporated; and one shrunk with a sense of solemnity to being oneself, a wedge-shaped core of darkness, something invisible to others. … it was thus that she felt herself; and this self having shed its attachments was free for the strangest adventures … Her horizon seemed to her limitless. There were all the places she had not seen; the Indian plains; she felt herself pushing aside the thick leather curtain of a church in Rome. This core of darkness could go anywhere, for no one saw it.¹

In this novel, framed by plans for a journey and its delayed realization some ten years later, travel, adventure, and limitless horizons are pleasures out of reach for the profoundly domestic Mrs. Ramsay, save in fantasy. The circumscribed life of even this comfortable, well-off woman on the eve of the First World War renders travel an almost illicit mental pleasure, something undertaken when the family is asleep and chores are finished. And even then, Mrs. Ramsay does not imagine herself venturing into Rome or onto the Indian plains in the form of her physical self—in her own body—but rather in the invisible form of a “wedge-shaped core of darkness.” Invisibility lends her the freedom to roam and shields her from public exposure. To see and yet be unseen is the utmost she can conjure. Mrs. Ramsay will plan the expedition to the lighthouse, knit a long brown sock for the lighthouse keeper’s tubercular son, and try to cajole her husband and son into believing that the wind might change and the day become fine enough for a sail. She will not, however, live to see the plans come to fruition, let alone live to enjoy such a journey—and all that it stands for—herself.

For Woolf’s protagonist, as for the nineteenth-century heroines who came before her, home and travel, domesticity and adventure, private and public, represent the inevitable antitheses that framed their lives. Indeed, women’s writing was shaped by these oppositions and, more specifically, by a particularly charged dialectic of home and abroad. The pull of home generated both attraction and repulsion in women’s writing; the draw of public realms—whether in the form of adventure, travel, political debate, social engagement, wandering, or even exile—excited the imagination and helped to produce narrative energy, innovation, and sometimes impasse.

We know that many nineteenth-century women left travel memoirs—records of journeys to the Continent, Africa, or the Middle East—and that missionary work, exploration, scientific research, and projects of empire took women abroad in greater numbers than we often imagine. Mary Kingsley and Isabella Bird are well known for their intrepid travels and the texts in which they recorded their journeys, but other women travelers also left astonishing documents of adventure across the globe. The botanical illustrator Marianne North’s Recollections of a Happy Life, published in 1892, told the tale of her numerous journeys abroad—to Jamaica, Turkey, Egypt, Syria, Canada, and the United States—in pursuit of plant species to collect and draw. Mary Seacole, a Creole woman from Kingston, Jamaica, grew up “tracing upon an old map the route to England” and thought of herself as “quite a female Ulysses.”² Her wanderlust, coupled with the skills of tending the sick, which she learned from her “admirable doctress mother,” set her on a course to the Crimea in 1854. In Wonderful Adventures of Mrs. Seacole in Many Lands, published in 1857, she recounts her determination to reach Scutari, her unsuccessful struggle to persuade the War Office to accept her as a hospital nurse, and her eventual establishment of the “British Hotel” in Balaclava—a place where she welcomed, housed, healed, and provided supplies for soldiers. Anna Leonowens, born in India in 1831, sailed for Singapore and then Siam, where she tutored the king’s children and acted as his amanuensis. Her English Governess at the Siamese Court: Being Recollections of Six Years at the Royal Palace in Bangkok (1870) influenced a biography, Anna and the King of Siam, which in turn spawned a play and then a musical. The travels of Anna Jameson, Mary Shelley, Lady Eastlake, Harriet Martineau, and Frances Trollope may seem tame by comparison, but no voyages to Italy, America, and the Middle East in the early and middle decades of the nineteenth century were for the faint of heart.

If we are aware of these extraordinary journeys, we tend to bracket them in our notions of Victorian culture and to imagine such women as highly exceptional, to separate their experiences from the stuff of the nineteenth-century novel, in which women writers and characters are understood to have hewed closely to the subjects of domestic life, the bourgeois family, and private emotions. But the novel also reflected powerful impulses to escape the private realm of home and claim the wide world as woman’s turf. We can trace in the fictional narratives of writers like Jane Austen, Charlotte Brontë, and George Eliot the emergence of an iconoclastic strain that defied the social and literary expectations of their day and, in doing so, imagined a variety of departures from home ground. Consideration of these moments of departure—of setting sail—might prompt us to reconsider whether “domestic fiction” is a term that adequately describes women’s narratives. We offer here a portrait of women writers not as housebound, in either a literal or a figurative sense, but as authors of stories that are resolutely anti-domestic—stories of restlessness, wandering, adventure, and homelessness.

A number of phenomena have stood in the way of our seeing this body of literature as anti-domestic: some of these impediments are rooted in nineteenth-century bourgeois life and ideology, some in the pressures of the literary marketplace, and some in mythologies of the nineteenth-century woman writer and her presumed antithesis—the male adventurer. Middle-class women were constrained by the ideology of separate spheres, the notion, articulated by John Ruskin in his 1865 manifesto Sesame and Lilies, that woman was for the Home (the “place of Peace … the shelter … from all injury”) and man for the World (the place of “peril and trial”), woman for the hearth and man for business, governance, and the wide, if tainted, realm beyond domestic life.³ Social historians have demonstrated in recent years that the middle-class doctrine of separate spheres was just that—a doctrine, an ideology, a prescription—rather than a description of historical reality. That such prescriptions were effective and the social pressures they exerted powerful, we can’t deny (consider Mrs. Ramsay), but this is not the whole story. We now recognize that this fiercely articulated doctrine was as much an anxious response to the participation of women in public life as it was an accurate reflection of social patterns.

In salient mythological, literary, and critical traditions, woman is habitually associated with the subject of home, man with the enterprise of travel and adventure; woman perennially imagined as Penelope, man as Ulysses (Karen Lawrence gives the insistent title Penelope Voyages to her important study of women’s travel in the British literary tradition); and the woman who dares to venture forth understood as both dangerous and endangered.⁴ Paul Zweig’s suggestive meditation, called The Adventurer (1974), on the literary history and meaning of adventure stories, from the Odyssey to T. E. Lawrence’s Seven Pillars of Wisdom, makes the following claims:

The adventurer’s essential triumph is masculine. His gift is to bind the binder, to outwit and defeat the mysterious identities of woman. The woman he defeats expresses the bewitching domesticity of the house, the space of the community—which is immobile, predictable, fenced off against the amoral potencies of the extra-human world. She presides over the safe breathing-space of human—that is, social—needs. Woman rules the home, and home is where the arts of man are nourished.⁵

Drawing on Ruskinian rhetoric, Zweig suggests that woman is precluded from taking the role of adventurer in myth and literature and that, furthermore, she is the very thing—the “binder,” in his term—man wishes to escape when he becomes one. And it is not woman as individual or even lover that the adventurer seeks to escape but rather woman as she expresses the “bewitching domesticity of the house”: woman, that is, as mother.

The generic division Zweig points to here lays out the long-standing association between the sexes and their respective literary ventures. Homer, the “Gawain poet,” Cervantes, Henry Fielding, Walter Scott, Robert Louis Stevenson, Joseph Conrad, and T. E. Lawrence all wrote adventure stories in which their heroes are engaged in “extraordinary” exploits at the margins of culture, in flight, in one way or another, from the spirit of home—and women. By contrast, the bourgeois novel, a product of eighteenth- and nineteenth-century female and male authors, gives us individuals, placed within “the framework of the ordinary,” who are “essentially conservative” and “move, not too energetically, in a solid world of relationships.”⁶ The extraordinary world of adventure and the ordinary “world of relationships” are contiguous but don’t overlap; the true bourgeois novel cannot be an adventure story; and women are irrevocably tied to home as both authors and characters.

Zweig has an interesting psychoanalytic reading of the adventure paradigm that might help explain certain persistent misrepresentations of women’s writing. If woman is home for the male adventurer, the spirit that presides over, protects, and personifies home, she is both to be desired—or idealized—and to be rejected or escaped. She is permanent, immobile, “fenced off.” This form of projection onto woman—the need to imagine her as propelling men and offspring outward and yet also drawing them back home—extends as well to the literary forms women have historically favored. In our collective imaginations, woman cannot be uncoupled from “domestic fiction,” for it defines the sensibility and form of writing that men eschew when they adopt the mode of adventure, and that subsequent generations of writers, whether male or female, seek to overturn when they separate themselves from the weight of the literary past.

One such rebel against the maternal past was Virginia Woolf, who sought to “think back through [her] mothers,” to reconstruct and celebrate the often eclipsed literary traditions they had built so heroically and with so few resources but also to throw off the inheritance that might not suit a new way of being and writing. Perhaps the most influential source for understanding the nineteenth-century woman writer as domestic novelist is Virginia Woolf’s A Room of One’s Own. Woolf’s indispensable text, which inaugurated the enterprise of feminist literary criticism in the 1920s, uses a number of fictions and fictional figures—Mary Seton, Judith Shakespeare, Mary Carmichael—in order to make the argument that women had historically been denied the material and psychological conditions necessary to becoming a writer. Another of Woolf’s fictions is the nineteenth-century woman writer herself: schooled narrowly in the ways and emotions of the middle-class sitting room, confined to the domestic sphere, sheltered from and ignorant of “the world,” denied the freedom to travel, and, as a consequence of all this, wedded to the novel as a form of writing that could be undertaken—actually written—in the common sitting room and could also use to advantage women’s “training in the observation of character” and “the analysis of emotion.” Some of us know the passages by heart: Jane Austen never got to ride in an omnibus through London or lunch by herself in a shop; “experience and intercourse and travel” were not granted Charlotte Brontë, and so her books would be “deformed and twisted,” her genius never expressed “whole and entire”; and the extraordinary works Villette, Emma, Wuthering Heights, and Middlemarch were “written by women without more experience of life than could enter the house of a respectable clergyman.”⁷

At this last point the mind boggles just a bit, and Woolf, to her credit, anticipates our reaction: yes, she adds, George Eliot did live in sin with a married man for decades, but she lived in seclusion, “cut off from what is called the world,” in Eliot’s own phrase.⁸ When we consider that Charlotte Brontë, an unmarried clergyman’s daughter from Yorkshire, twice lived abroad in Brussels and traveled numerous times to London, especially after the deaths of her sisters, and that Eliot journeyed to the Continent almost yearly between 1854, when she began living with George Henry Lewes, and 1880, when she died, and had a more cosmopolitan frame of reference—both intellectually and socially—than any other major Victorian novelist, we know that Woolf is up to something. That something, as we’ve already said, is fiction making, expressly for the purpose of defining her predecessors as a phenomenon against which to define herself and her own modernist work. For A Room of One’s Own is, among other things, a manifesto for new kinds of women’s writing, in which, according to Woolf, the writer has forgotten that she is a woman and so writes without grievance or consciousness of her sex.

Woolf seeks to both reconstruct a tradition and mark that tradition as limited and constraining, and in so doing she creates a myth about the nineteenth-century woman writer that has almost indelibly distorted our view of her. To portray her predecessors as sheltered and housebound creatures and to overlook, whether deliberately or not, the heroic and public-facing impulses of their fiction is to set the stage for Woolf’s own literary project. Lily Briscoe, the “new woman” artist of To the Lighthouse, represents the generation that will succeed Mrs. Ramsay, adoring and mourning her but also rebelling against Victorian imperatives of marriage and realist aesthetic practices alike. Lily’s painting of Mrs. Ramsay, completed as the novel ends and Mr. Ramsay, James, and Cam finally reach the lighthouse, takes the form of abstraction—a bold line in the center of her canvas, a shape akin, perhaps, to the dark wedge of Mrs. Ramsay’s reveries. Lily, like Mrs. Ramsay’s daughters, who sit at their mother’s table brewing “infidel ideas … of a life different from hers; in Paris perhaps; a wilder life; not always taking care of some man or other,” thinks back through but also effaces her “mothers.”⁹ Lily and the Ramsay girls appear as less murderous versions of the hypothetical journalist in Woolf’s essay “Professions for Women,” who feels the need to kill off the phantom that looks over her shoulder as she sits down to write a review of a novel by a “famous man.” This maternal phantom, the “Angel in the House,” interferes with the journalist’s critical task because the older woman exemplifies sympathy and unselfishness: “She excelled in the difficult arts of family life. She sacrificed herself daily.” This matricidal imperative, Woolf tells us, “was found to befall all women writers at that time. Killing the Angel in the House was part of the occupation of a woman writer.”¹⁰ Though Woolf, who was among the most acute critics of her predecessors’ writing, especially in her essays and reviews, could separate the Angel from the woman novelist, she cast them both as sister members of a generation that needed to be—and would be—superseded.

Of course, the Angel in the House hovered over the nineteenth-century woman writer herself, sometimes in the form of advisers and reviewers, sometimes as an internalized voice counseling self-effacement and calculated obscurity. Reviewers tended to judge a woman’s work by moral rather than aesthetic or literary standards and, as Elaine Showalter puts it, to “focus on her femininity and rank her with the other women writers of her day, no matter how diverse their subjects or styles.”¹¹ Patterns of moralistic reading and public squeamishness about ethical infractions against feminine propriety in women’s writing helped to make women novelists vigilant about protecting their privacy and preserving their images as genteel and unworldly creatures. One author of the domestic image of the nineteenth-century woman writer was, then, the nineteenth-century woman writer herself. Minimizing the scope and ambition of her work, Austen referred to herself as a miniaturist, painting on a piece of ivory just two inches wide. In A Room of One’s Own Woolf remarks that Eliot asked not to have any visitors at the Priory unless she invited them herself, as if to suggest that she saw few people and preferred to see even fewer. In her “Notice” to new editions of Agnes Grey and Wuthering Heights in 1850, Charlotte Brontë insisted that their authors, her sisters Anne and Emily, were reclusive, retiring, refined, and, by extension, chaste, implicitly ignorant of...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication Page
• Contents
• Preface
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction: The Peripatetics
• Chapter 1. Adventure
• Chapter 2. Emancipation
• Chapter 3. Pioneers
• Chapter 4. War
• Chapter 5. Politics
• Chapter 6. Multinationals
• Conclusion: Promised Lands
• Notes
• Suggestions for Further Reading
• Index