University of Southern California Dissertations and Theses

Domestic topographies: gender and the house in the nineteenth-century British novel

(USC Thesis Other)

Domestic topographies: gender and the house in the nineteenth-century British novel

PDF

Download a page range

Download transcript

Copy asset link

Request this asset

Transcript (if available)

Content DOMESTIC TOPOGRAPHIES: GENDER AND THE HOUSE IN THE NINETEENTH- CENTURY BRITISH NOVEL by Elizabeth Palm Callaghan A Dissertation Presented to the FACULTY OF THE GRADUATE SCHOOL UNIVERSITY OF SOUTHERN CALIFORNIA In Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements for the Degree DOCTOR OF PHILOSOPHY (ENGLISH) May 2009 Copyright 2009 Elizabeth Palm Callaghan ii Dedication To my boys: Steve, Quinn, and Rowan iii Acknowledgements I am sincerely thankful for the funding I received during the writing of this dissertation. The Graduate School was generous in providing two years of Merit Fellowship, and the English Department embraced my project by giving me a Dissertation Fellowship. I am extremely grateful not only for the financial support but also for their faith and confidence in my work. This project would not have been realized without the intellectual collaboration and encouragement of many people. James Kincaid was tireless in his wisdom, wit, humor, and insight, and his comments and suggestions challenged and catalyzed many of my arguments. I am deeply grateful to my director, Joseph Boone, who has engaged me as a colleague and whose encouragement and guidance I have enjoyed from my first semester at USC. I want to thank him particularly for his attention to the details of my project, for his unflagging support, and for his intellectual rigor in both challenging and encouraging my arguments. I’d also like to thank my colleagues for their contributions to my growth as a writer and a thinker. To my cohort, Team Genesis, I offer many, many thanks for their brilliance, thoughtfulness, good humor, and advice. Thanks also to my fellow Victorianists, Leslie Bruce, Alice Villaseñor, Erika Wright, and honorary Victorianist Kathryn Strong for their generosity in reading my work, providing feedback, and freely offering their vast knowledge to my project. They are all outstanding scholars who provide me with a model for rigorous, engaging scholarship every day. Finally, I could not have written this dissertation without the love and encouragement of my family. Thanks to Quinn and Rowan for allowing Mommy to go to iv campus and to write; I hope that one day they will understand what their sacrifice allowed me to achieve. To my parents, Jack and Jenny Palm, and my sister, Carrie, I thank you for your love and patience as I pushed forward towards completion. And most especially, to Steve, whose undying support and love meant not only that I had time to finish, but that I believed I could as well. Your genius, kindness and humor inspire me every day. v Abstract Domestic Topographies examines the nexus between gender identity and the material conditions of the nineteenth-century British home. A new kind of literary investigation, a “gender topography,” allows for an examination of the intersection between struggles over shifting gender roles and identities, the cultural meaning of the home, and the representation of domestic space in the novel. Gender identity and domestic ideology are both produced by the material conditions of the middle-class house, but further, the very materiality and perception of domestic spaces changes as a result of reigning ideals of gender and home life. Chapter One begins by theorizing a new narrative development in the nineteenth century, a technique that produces a “narrative tour” of the house. Dickens’ David Copperfield illustrates the way this tour enunciates gender identities and relations, forcing David to learn to read properly and perform gender within the context of various kinds of homes. For women, this performance of gender relies upon increasingly visible housekeeping activities. Chapter Two analyzes Austen’s Emma and Oliphant’s Miss Marjoribanks, suggesting that as increasingly visible housekeeping activities became integral to middle-class identity, women developed new social and even political power through the management of their homes. This power, though, comes with the pressure to maintain a “proper” house in the face of its potential loss, and Chapter Three unpacks the core tension underlying the threat of domestic dispossession: for women like Anne Elliot in Austen’s Persuasion, Maggie Tulliver in Eliot’s The Mill on the Floss, and Sue Bridehead in Hardy’s Jude the Obscure, the Victorian home is both safe sanctuary and stifling prison. The project ends by analyzing the logical culmination of domestic anxiety: the haunted house story. By reading these narratives as part of the vi realist tradition, instead of as Gothic or sensational literature, we can see that stories of haunted houses express material anxieties over the gender politics that inform domestic ideology. Domestic Topographies, then, opens new space for addressing the production of gender ideals by focusing on the material conditions that affect and sustain concepts of nineteenth-century feminine and masculine identity. vii Table of Contents Dedication ii Acknowledgements iii Abstract iv Introduction: Domestic Topographies 1 Chapter 1: Touring the Victorian House 26 Chapter 2: Producing the Social through the House: 76 Emma and Miss Marjoribanks Chapter 3: “We must, in these days at least, live in houses”: 123 Middle-Class Women and the Loss of the Home Chapter 4: “Some horror seemed to meet me”: 187 Realism, Anxiety, and the Haunted House Tale Bibliography 234 1 Introduction: Domestic Topographies The house and its fictional representation become newly and differently important to the novelistic enterprise and fictional interests of the nineteenth century. As evidence of the growing significance of domestic space in the nineteenth-century novel, we might consider titles as symptomatic of the general trend. Much eighteenth-century fiction takes its titles from central characters; consider Defoe’s Moll Flanders (1722), Roxana (1724), Captain Singleton (1720), Colonel Jack (1722), and Robinson Crusoe (1719); Richardson’s Pamela (1740), Sir Charles Grandison (1753), and Clarissa (1748); Haywood’s Fantomina (1724), Idalia (1723), and Cleomelia (1727); Fielding’s Tom Jones (1749), Amelia (1751), and Joseph Andrews (1742); Burney’s Evelina (1778), Cecilia (1782), and Camilla (1796); or Smollett’s various “Adventures” of Roderick Random (1748), Peregrine Pickle (1751), Ferdinand Count Fathom (1753), and The Expedition of Humphrey Clinker (1771). 1 While this titling trend continued into the nineteenth century, 2 a new tendency developed as a large number of novels took the names of domestic spaces as their titles. Throughout the nineteenth century, authors employed titles such as Austen’s Mansfield Park (1814) and Northanger Abbey (1817); Edgeworth’s Castle Rackrent (1800); Trollope’s The Small House at Allington (1864), Framley Parsonage (1860), Castle Richmond (1860) and The Belton Estate (1865); 1 In addition, there are other titles derived from character descriptors, such as Lennox’s The Female Quixote (1752), Goldsmith’s The Vicar of Wakefield (1766), and Hays’s The Victim of Prejudice (1799). There are novels written during the eighteenth century with homes as titles, such as Sarah Scott’s Millennium Hall (1762) or Radcliffe’s The Castles of Athlin and Dunbayne (1789), but these kinds of titles are much more rare during this period. 2 Of course, character names as titles continued very strongly as a trend, with novels such as Bronte’s Jane Eyre (1847), Dickens’s David Copperfield (1850), Eliot’s Daniel Deronda (1876), or Gaskell’s Ruth (1853). My contention is additive, suggesting that in addition to this tradition a new trend developed in naming novels after important domestic spaces. 2 Dickens’s The Old Curiosity Shop (1840) and Bleak House (1852); Peacock’s Nightmare Abbey (1818) and Headlong Hall (1815); Meredith’s The House on the Beach (1817); Walter Scott’s Kenilworth (1821) and Castle Dangerous (1832); Gaskell’s The Moorland Cottage (1851); Oliphant’s A House in Bloomsbury (1894); George Eliot’s The Mill on the Floss (1860); Henry James’s The Other House (1896); or Mrs. Henry Wood’s Danesbury House (1860), The Red Court Farm (1868) and The House of Halliwell (1890). This new fashion in novelistic titling partially reveals a growing consideration to realism and the importance of setting, but it also suggests an increasing cultural and narrative attention to the role domestic spaces play in shaping character and creating story. In 1815, Jane Austen writes in Emma, “Ah! There is nothing like staying at home for real comfort” (Ch 32). The observation catches an emerging attitude towards the British house that gradually appeared in the novel during the nineteenth century. Increasingly, authors explored the newly intimate relationship between people and the dwellings they inhabited. Not always a space of intimacy, comfort and family identity, the material form of the British house underwent radical changes from the early modern period through the eighteenth century. During the Middle Ages homes for almost everyone in Europe often consisted of both work and living spaces, and these spaces were mostly undistinguished. However, by the late eighteenth century, the British home “acquired a position of social importance that it had never had before, or since. No longer a place of work as it had been in the Middle Ages, the home became a place of leisure” (Rybczynski 107). With this change in function, the materiality of the British house changed, as “the house was subdivided unto common rooms for dining, 3 entertaining, and leisure, but also included private rooms for members of the family” (110). Consequently, the home became a site for defining private life, for displaying and shaping both individual and familial identity. And, as work had moved out of the home, with men spending more time away from it, women increasingly became responsible for managing and maintaining residences. Rybczynski speaks to this change in deploying influence when he notes that “by the last quarter of the eighteenth century, the gentleman’s influence over the arrangement of the Georgian house was being eroded” in favor of the “growing influence of women,” an influence that necessitated in some degree their removal from the world of the community and the marketplace (117). Austen’s comment, then, was more radical than it may seem; the idea of the home as a singular place for comfort and the expression of one’s identity had only recently emerged. Developments in housing and the culture of home assumed significant roles in fictional accounts of home life, particularly in the novel. In particular, the novel began to reflect new developments in attitudes toward British houses; new narrative techniques for describing domestic space and thematic connections between gender identities and the home emerged within the novel. As Elizabeth Langland points out, many scholars “postulate an epistemic shift in early Victorian England…. [that] turned the house into a new kind of social space that renegotiated relations between men and women” (77); Helena Michie and Ronald Thomas argue for a “Victorian crisis of spatial division” centering on the “privatization of domestic space, gendering and regendering of rooms, buildings, and the activities imagined to take place inside them” (17, 11). The nineteenth-century house both produced and manifested gender roles in complex ways. For example, women’s departure to the “withdrawing room” after dinner demonstrates 4 the way house space was categorized by gendered activity as well as the fact that gendered rooms helped produce the roles they encoded. Women were generally considered unfit to participate in political and economic discussions, figured as the province of men, and therefore needed to leave the dining room when men settled into conversation, “withdrawing” literally and figuratively to another domestic space. However, this domestic gender segregation also produces gender roles: as Daphne Spain asserts, women’s dismissal to the parlour prevented them from hearing about “public” subjects, keeping them from participating in public debates while reifying their position in the private sphere. This reciprocity appears in diverse discourses circulating around the separate spheres doctrine, married women’s property law, domestic ideology, consumption, class distinctions and social etiquette, shaping not only the physical and social changes within the house but, more significantly, men’s and women’s relationship to this space. The nineteenth-century novel illustrates this complicated relationship between gender and the house, since it echoes changing cultural discourses surrounding the house and gender. In order to unravel the complex threads connecting the space of the house, gender identity and narrative form, Domestic Topographies proposes a methodology that takes the writing of domestic space as foundational to the novel’s form, plotting, and depiction of characters. A topographical approach to the novel reveals the ways that the cultural production of the space of home happens within narrative, where descriptions of the house suture gender to materiality and imbue the house with surplus meaning. That is, the nineteenth-century novel enunciates struggles over the ways in which space gets narrativized and gendered identities gather meaning through descriptions of the house. 5 Central to my argument is the idea that semiotics and physical space cannot be thought apart. Both the material objects that constitute the house as well as the material relations that create it, give it meaning, and contribute to the production of the gender identities of those who inhabit it catalyzed these changes in the novel. 3 The form of novelistic narrative evolves alongside significant transformations in the home. The house becomes centrally important to plot and setting, but the form of the novel itself also undergoes adaptations as it seeks to represent domestic space in its new manifestation. However, these two changes—thematic and narrative—were mutually constructing. To understand the ways that space shapes and is shaped by gender, we must pay attention to the narrative creation of the physical space of the nineteenth- century house. The relationship between the space of the house and the social structures of gender are reciprocal, 4 where gender roles not only helped to produce the distinct functions and gendering of rooms in the nineteenth-century house, but one where this spatial structure contributed to the production and reification of these roles. 5 As feminist geographer Doreen Massey notes, “It is not just that the spatial is socially constructed; the social is spatially constructed, too” (4). The house and gender are, in David Harvey’s 3 Gaston Bachelard famously explored the connection between intimate spaces and human psychology in his seminal The Poetics of Space (1958). Bachelard supports “taking the house as a tool for analysis of the human soul,” and his language here reveals his relatively ahistorical and phenomenological approach as he explores the human “soul” in general instead of the particularities of historically grounded identities (xxxvii, emphasis in original). While the foundation of my analysis mirrors Bachelard’s intimation that “setting is more than scene in works of art,… it is often the armature around which the work revolves,” since I am less interested “his argument that the house is a nest for dreaming, a shelter for imagining,” I don’t specifically use his work in the course of this dissertation (Stilgoe x, vii). 4 My argument depends on scholarly work that conceives of space as socially constructed, a long-standing critical paradigm that begins with Henri Lefebvre and The Production of Space (1974). 5 I am careful to avoid the trap of what Doreen Massey calls “spatial fetishism” here; therefore, I’m not suggesting that gender relations were created solely by the space of the house. Instead, I will argue that gender roles and the topography of the house have a complementary, not causal, relationship. 6 terms, complementary categories rather than mutually exclusive ones—the interdependence between the house and gender means that we cannot understand one without the other. Therefore, rather than read the house as working primarily in the service of novelistic setting or thematic support, we can understand it as having a narrative and thematic function in its own right. By focusing on the linguistic representation of the house, we can incorporate the role of the home in the construction of concepts of domesticity with an understanding of physical space as a function of narrative. The term “topography” emphasizes a focus on narrative while pointing to the means employed in investigating the space of the house. The term derives from the Greek topos, meaning place, and graphein, to write; topography, then, is literally the writing of a place, 6 or, as the OED defines it, the “science or practice of describing a particular place.” A gender topography lays bare the ways in which spaces become meaningful through gender and therefore helps explain how struggles over shifting gender roles produce the cultural meaning of the home. Not only are the physical features of the house, the “detailed description or delineation of the features of a locality” (OED), important to verisimilitude, but descriptions of the space of the home are central to its narrative function. The writing of the house during the nineteenth century simultaneously betrayed and constituted the structure of gender relations. The linguistic distinction between “house” and “home” is fundamental to the investigation of the house in the novel. The word “home” in this period carried the 6 I am indebted to J. Hillis Miller for his detailed discussion of the etymology of “topography” and its relation to narrative and description in Topographies (1995). 7 weight of much more than its denotation as “a dwelling-place, house, or abode” (OED). During the nineteenth century, the home became a state of mind intimately linked to women and celebrated by proponents of domestic ideology such as Ruskin, who wrote that for a “true wife,” home is not a building: “home is yet wherever she is” (43). The term “house” emphasizes a focus on the physical space of the domestic dwelling—its rooms, gardens, and overall structure. However, “domestic” allows this analysis to enter the critical conversation surrounding domestic ideology during the nineteenth century. 7 Using “house” combined with “domestic” permits an examination of the ideology surrounding residences from a different perspective, focusing specifically on the material space of the house and its connection to domestic ideology and the social structure of gender—that is, on what turns a dwelling into a nineteenth-century, middle-class home. The rise of domestic homekeeping manuals during the nineteenth century illustrates the cultural context for my analysis and suggests the complicated nexus 7 A number of critics have, in significant ways, contributed to a complicated understanding of the domestic and gender identity in the nineteenth century. Foundational to this conversation is Gilbert and Gubar’s Madwoman in the Attic: The Woman Writer and the Nineteenth-Century Literary Imagination (1979), which exploded the binary of identity between angel and madwoman circulating in nineteenth-century novels. In history, Davidoff and Hall’s Family Fortunes: Men and Women of the English Middle Class, 1780 – 1850 (1987) traces the production of a middle-class culture based in domestic ideology. Elizabeth Langland’s Nobody’s Angels: Middle-Class Women and Domestic Ideology in Victorian Culture (1995) takes on the image of the “angel in the house,” arguing that the Victorian wife “actually performed a more significant and extensive economic and political function than is usually perceived” (8). Desire and Domestic Fiction: A Political History of the Novel (1987) by Nancy Armstrong links developing feminine subjectivity rooted in the domestic realm to the consolidation of centers of political power and institutions. Sharon Marcus’s Apartment Stories: City and Home in Nineteenth-Century Paris and London (1999) compares the French and British traditions, and in focusing on the apartment house explores the meaning of the domestic in the nineteenth-century urban environment. Other scholars have focused more clearly on the material house; Judith Flanders’s Inside the Victorian Home: A Portrait of Domestic Life in Victorian England (2004) outlines the daily routines of a middle-class household, revealing the details behind the lives of mistresses of houses as well as the servants they oversaw. The Victorian Parlour: A Cultural Study (2001) by Thad Logan focuses specifically on the parlor and examines the codes of middle-class behavior inscribed there. 8 between women’s and men’s roles and the production of narrative. The nineteenth century saw an explosion of household manuals and cookery books that purported to teach largely middle-class women how to run a household. 8 But these manuals not only addressed themselves to women; they were often written by women, suggesting a new role and authority for the middle-class housewife, now the expert on burgeoning domesticity. 9 Mrs. Beeton’s Book of Household Management (1861), perhaps the best- selling and certainly today the most well-known, entered a marketplace full of books such as Eliza Acton’s Modern Cookery for Private Families (1845), 10 Eliza Warren’s How I managed my house on two hundred pounds a year (1864), 11 The home book; or, young housekeeper’s assistant, attributed to “a lady” (1829), and J. H. Walsh’s A Manual of Domestic Economy (1856), 12 whose title page claims Mr. Walsh was “assisted in various departments by a committee of ladies.” The necessity for middle-class women to generate household advice became so entrenched that some male authors took on female narrative voices while dispensing domestic guidance. Significantly, Alexis Soyer’s 8 Dena Attar claims that “the new type of domestic manual became necessary because of the changes in women’s domestic lives. The effects of industrialization, the growth of the cities, colonialism and a changing class structure mean that women of all classes were presented with new definitions of their roles…. The considerable work involved in maintaining… those standards of comfort, cleanliness, and behaviour which signified middle-class respectability fell almost entirely upon women” (12). 9 As Ruth Cowen notes, “a stream of domestic manuals and recipe collections had been produced since the middle of the 1830s, designed to assist the burgeoning middle-class population,” and the more practical, middle-class guides “tended to be written by women” (89-90). 10 Cowen claims that Acton’s book “took the [cookbook] genre to new heights, with its comprehensive scope and unprecedented accuracy” (89). 11 The fifth American edition of this book, published in 1866, claims on its title page, “Thirty-six Thousand Copies were sold in England the first year,” and Dena Attar notes that “Warren’s books evidently had a rapid sale and struck a chord” (20). 12 Attar calls this book “influential”; it remained in print from 1856 – 1890 with only “some minor revisions” (17). 9 Modern Housewife (1850), a household cookery book composed by the celebrity chef, 13 disguises its authorship with a narrative device that suggests that the recipes and household strategies contained in it come from a housewife named Mrs. B----. The introduction to Soyer’s book begins with a “gossipping [sic] conversation between Mrs. B---- and Mrs. L----,” where the device for the manual emerges. Mrs. L----, taken with the economy, elegance and efficiency of Mrs. B---’s meals and housekeeping, requests that her mentor send a number of recipes so that Mrs. L--- might “make a little journal” of Mrs. B---’s advice (6). The advice, then, comes not from the professional chef, but from a private conversation between two middle-class women, locating this knowledge in women’s material experience in the house. While these manuals demonstrate a need for a female authority to sanction domestic advice, they also dramatize the cultural and narrative struggle playing out between men and women over authority in the domestic sphere. The figure of Mrs. B--- inaugurates the narrative frame of Soyer’s handbook, but she quickly loses her place to her husband, whose voice is summoned forth to make the argument in favor of Mrs. B--- ’s expertise. In explaining to Mrs. L--- the fantastic nature of her domestic economy, Mrs. B--- retells “a conversation which occurred a few years ago between Mr. B--- and a friend of his,” where Mr. B--- convinces a male friend that his wife is solely responsible for the smooth and efficient household machinery (2). In this anecdote, Mr. B--- even calls for Mrs. B---’s “housekeeping book,” which she sends up to him because she is too 13 Alexis Soyer (1810 – 1858) is widely regarded as Britain’s first celebrity chef. He served as chef de cuisine at London’s Reform Club from 1837 – 1850, invented the first soup kitchen to relieve the Irish famine in 1847, and joined Florence Nightingale in reforming the cooking standards of the British army in Crimea. He is considered the model for the French chef M. Mirobolant in Thackeray’s Pendennis (1850). 10 busy in the kitchen making a “veal broth” for their sick son (3). Although she recounts the story, Mrs. B--- has effectively disappeared from the narrative; she’s not even available to provide the evidence of her competence in the form of the housekeeping book. This episode suggests the knotty web entangling models of gender performance and narrative production. Mrs. B---’s erasure must occur, paradoxically, in order to increase her authority in the domestic realm. She must be seen performing household tasks, such as overseeing the soup for her child, to engender narratively her expertise within the home. Moreover, by deflecting the praise of Mrs. B---’s work to another source, Soyer is able to draw a picture of a housewife who, in keeping with her proper role, remains modest and humble about her achievements. And yet, these activities also erase Mrs. B--- from the scene, therefore simultaneously heightening and diminishing her authority within the home. These thematic concerns result from the narrative frame, but the complexity is also symptomatic of the profound struggle over determining men’s and women’s roles in the home. While the book is written by a man, he creates two fictional female characters, one of whom serves as the expert from whom all domestic advice flows. 14 Once created, as I’ve shown, this female voice ventriloquizes the male voice of her fictional husband, but only a bit later, Mrs. B--- is literally silenced when her husband enters the scene. Directly Mrs. L--- comments, “here comes your husband, who will probably initiate me in your culinary secrets” (3). If this narrative strategy allows Mrs. B--- to seem modest, 14 Indeed, the complex balance between men’s and women’s authority on domestic matters played out in Soyer’s life, as well; both Ruth Cowen and Ruth Brandon suggest that Mrs. B--- was based on Soyer’s friend, Mrs. Baker, the woman who, with her husband, became friends with Soyer and who “resided in domestic harmony in St John’s Wood” (Cowen 166). Ruth Brandon claims that Mrs. B was “in reality a Mrs. Baker” and to whose house “Soyer, a friend of her husband’s, was a frequent visitor, and a great admirer of her efficient housekeeping” (148). 11 unable to boast about her own accomplishments, it also subtly reinforces a standard of feminine respectability that requires humility. Significantly, then, this example allows us to see how discussions of proper household management, authority within the home, and proper gender performances all become dramatized through narrative form. In addition to showing how men’s and women’s roles form significant parts of domestic narrative, but these manuals also reveal how housekeeping itself generates plot, producing a new kind of story that explodes into the nineteenth-century novel. In Soyer’s book, Mrs. B---’s “culinary secrets” become the raw material for the “little journal,” and her housekeeping becomes narrative. The manual’s recipes are punctuated by letters between Mrs. B--- and Mrs. L--- that expound upon techniques or connect anecdotes to specific elements of managing a house. More significantly, the text directly connects domestic duties with language and story, as Mrs. B--- claims, “Sauces in cookery are like the first rudiments of grammar, which consists of certain rules called Syntax, which is the foundation of all languages” (64). This conceit comparing cooking to language positions food preparation in particular and housekeeping in general as a kind of cultural grammar, one that can make meaning and tell stories about people and events. The Modern Housewife also conjures up the materiality of the house within its pages. As Mrs. B--- moves from section to section, she embodies herself in the text. Ending a chapter on nursery food and progressing into “Comforts for Invalids,” Mrs. B--- writes, “Having here terminated my remarks upon the Nursery, I shall leave this scene of romp and confusion to walk on tip-toe to the sick-room door, and carefully enter, without noise, into this mournful abode of human suffering and captivity” (32); in a similar gesture, as she moves from invalid recipes to a section on common culinary techniques, 12 she explains, “I shall therefore close the sick-room door to open the one of the parlor” (55). Mrs. B---’s narrative constructs a topography of the house as material artifact largely through these entrances into each room; simultaneously, she gives her own body material substance by describing her creeping walk into the sick-room and her physical action of opening and closing doors. The parallels between the house and the text are inseparable: to close the door of the house is to shut down a part of the text. The house itself here both generates and constitutes the story. While Soyer’s book offers the richest example of the narrative power of the house, many other contemporary advice manuals suggest the need to tell the story of the home. Eliza Warren’s popular book, How I managed my house on two hundred pounds a year (1864), gives advice to women in novelistic form; while the book is designed as a housekeeping guide, it takes the form of an autobiography recounting how the protagonist learns to run her home efficiently. 15 Nearly all the details of housekeeping generate dialogue, even diagrammatic lists of monthly or yearly expenditures. When the heroine of the book sits down with her husband to figure out their expenses for the year, she begs her husband not only to give her the paper, but to “[r]ead it out, Fred; I shall understand it better” (12). When he does, the list transforms from monetary notations on a page to a dialogue between Fred and his wife. He reads to her, ‘First come the— ‘Rent and taxes per annum . . . £ 25 0 0 ‘Coals, candles, and living for ourselves, our little one, and servant, 27 s. per week, or . . . £ 70 0 0 15 This style of manual became in itself a genre of advice book. Dena Attar names these books “domestic economy narratives,” and she explains that they “aimed to provide household hints on budgeting, cooking and childcare within the more or less realistic framework of a story with which readers could identify” (20). 13 ‘Wages for servant—only one, mind . . . £ 10 0 0’ (12) This list, a graphic representation of categories of household expense and their allocated funds, becomes a story within Warren’s book, as Fred explains what items get priority and later comments to his wife that the servant will be “only one, mind.” The novelistic form of the book as a whole relies on story in order to relate advice on keeping house, but even within this text, on a local level, the desire for plot turns non-narrative forms of information into dialogue or description. Just as the young wife cannot understand the accounting without narrative (“read it out”), Fred cannot communicate the workings of the home without creating a story. He cannot simply read the graph; meaning arises only when Fred turns the raw material of household requirements into a tale of proper management and middle-class moderation. 16 The least narrative form of household manual, the “miscellany,” a “varied compilation of recipes, medical lore, hints on etiquette and snippets of useful or merely curious information” (Attar 19), still relies on story in order to convey its information. While many entries in the miscellany are merely transcribed lists or recipes, 17 a large number augment this information with a kind of plot. The most popular miscellany, 16 Even prose manuals that don’t convey their advice through plot need anecdotes to impart their advice. Ann Taylor’s didactic book, Practical Hints to Young Females (1816), takes the form of a moral handbook, yet she frequently uses anecdotes to supplement her recommendations. In a section suggesting women match their housekeeping to their class level, Taylor recounts this anecdote: “A smart young couple were once passing the door of a tradesman to whom they owed a small sum of rather too long standing, when the creditor was heard to exclaim, ‘See how fine they are! they had better pay their debts.’ Now it happened that their finery had cost them nothing, for it was furnished by their kind but ill-judging friends; this, however, the tradesman could not know, nor do lookers on in general either know or care, how finery is obtained; but they do know whether situation and appearance correspond, and they make their animadversions accordingly” (31). While Mrs. Taylor advises women to keep to their station, her advice demands story to illustrate its meaning. The short tale enacts the process of housekeeping (here, an improper kind), and demonstrates the consequences of a misstep; these consequences can best be communicated through story. 17 For example, one entry in Philp’s Enquire Within merely lists personal names and their meanings. 14 Robert Philp’s Enquire within upon everything (1856), 18 relies frequently on anecdotes and explanations to create meaning within an entry. A recipe for “SPONGE CAKE” begins with this story: “A lady, or, as the newspapers say, ‘a correspondent upon whom we can confidently rely,’ favours us with the following simple receipt, which, she says, gives less trouble than any other, and has never been known to fail” (6). Significantly, the narrative form of this recipe figures its author as a respectable “lady,” suggesting that a woman serves as the authority on this homekeeping task. In a later entry giving a formula for a cream made with milk and sulphur that will “IMPROVE THE COMPLEXION,” the writer explains, A lady of our acquaintance, being exceedingly anxious about her complexion, adopted the above suggestion. In about a fortnight she wrote to us to say that the mixture became so disagreeable after it had been made a few days, that she could not use it. We should have wondered if she could—the milk had become putrid! A little of the mixture should have been prepared over night with evening milk, and used the next morning, but not afterwards. (11) In order to convey the information that the face cream be used within only a day or so of its production, the miscellany relies on a story; it needs narrative to construct meaning. Again, the main character in this anecdote is a lady, suggesting the ways that the production of narrative and the domestic realm itself depend upon women’s participation. Philp’s book, though, also explicitly figures the text as a residence, suggesting the essential dependence of cultural constructions of the middle-class home on narrative. 19 18 Philp compiled this book from previously circulated material in papers he published, such as the “Family Friend.” It’s unclear to what extent the material was actually generated by Philp (Attar 171); it seems likely that many entries would have been produced by women, following the custom of advice manuals. 19 Later in the century, Henry James will famously imagine the novel as a “house of fiction.” It is significant that his theory comes at the end of a century in which the importance of the house and its connection to narrative develop rapidly. Philp’s manual, though, isn’t fiction, and his metaphor performs different work than James’s. While James uses the house to convey an aesthetic theory, Philp’s metaphor 15 In his preface, Philp explains the function of his manual, commenting that “[l]ike a house, every paragraph in “ENQUIRE WITHIN,” has its number,-- and the INDEX is the DIRECTORY which will explain what Facts, Hints, and Instructions inhabit that number” (v, emphasis in original). Philp’s emphasis on his metaphor, evidenced through his italics, underlines its importance; he envisions the advice in his text actually speaking to his audience, as if the reader is in dialogue with information that lives in the book. This dialogic imagining makes this manual as narrative as its prose counterparts by placing readers in conversation with its counsel. He goes on to assert that ‘[b]ehind each page some one lives to answer for the correctness of the information imparted, just as certainly as where, in the window of a dwelling, you see a paper directing you to “ENQUIRE WITHIN” some one is there to answer you…. Well! there they live— always at home—knock at their doors—ENQUIRE WITHIN, NO FEES TO PAY!!” (v- iv). In searching for information in this miscellany, the reader becomes a visitor to a house; pursuing household knowledge itself turns out to be a domestic endeavor. Moreover, Philp’s slipping metaphors—first, the hints themselves are the inhabitants, later people imparting advice become the residents—suggest the complexity of the nexus between the house, those who inhabit it, and the practices that give it meaning. These exemplary advice manuals provide a background against which to situate changing treatments of the British house in the novel. Novels underwent a variety of thematic and narrative transformations at the turn of the nineteenth century, taking on suggests a formal connection between dwellings and story; structurally, Philp conceives of narrative as a place where story lives and the house as constituted by plots. 16 more domestic topics and developing new narrative strategies in order to represent the space of the home as well as domestic themes. Early novels written during the first half of the eighteenth century made little reference to the physicality of domestic spaces; neither did houses figure prominently into the plots of these novels. 20 Defoe’s Moll Flanders, which traces the abandoned and disadvantaged Moll’s search for a place in society, tells us little to nothing of the homes where Moll resides. During her childhood, Moll lives with her “Nurse,” a woman who runs a “little School” designed to teach poor women to “Read and to Work” (46). This woman’s house is never described; nor is any of the action that takes place in this space specifically located. In fact, even Moll’s use of the term House-Wife to describe her caretaker is disconnected from any kind of domestic space. As she collects various sartorial gifts from the ladies of the town, Moll notes that her Nurse “kept them for me, oblig’d me to Mend them, and turn them and twist them to the best Advantage, for she was a rare House-Wife” (52). Moll means by her description that the Nurse was expert at mending, spinning, linen-making, and other textile arts, and not that the Nurse runs a well-organized household. The only description of their home is that it is a “coarse Lodging,” and since the only actions we see the Nurse performing are related to her work, it is clear that Moll’s eighteenth-century definition of “housewife” has little in common with nineteenth-century images of the mistress of the house (46). Moll associates these “house” terms only with a specific type of work, not a particular 20 In “Gendering Rooms: Domestic Architecture and Literary Arts,” Cynthia Wall makes a convincing argument that Defoe’s Roxana has a clear “interest in defining and controlling formal interior space [that] is aggressively self-conscious” (354). However, even Wall admits that “[h]er story enacts a prelude to the gendering of rooms: she dramatizes the larger, constant, generally human desire to define and control space” (354, emphasis mine). Wall makes a conscious choice to characterize the places Roxana “orders” as “formal interior space,” without reference to specifically domestic space. Roxana (1724), though, stands as an anomaly and a precursor in its attention to architectural spaces during the period. 17 identity. Moreover, Moll’s movement from residence to residence rarely mentions an actual building. When her nurse dies, Moll “was just that very Night to be turn’d into the wide World” when suddenly, a new, “generous Mistress” sends “her maid to fetch me away,” and Moll continues “Here” until she is in her latter teen years (54-55). In fact, the narrative omits any reference to a dwelling, and it is left to the reader to assume that Moll has gone to live in an actual house. The house generally remains peripheral to narrative in the early eighteenth century, oftentimes not even necessary to provide setting for action. At the turn of the nineteenth century, though, the house’s role in novelistic narrative heightens. Many more novels were set in homes, and while homekeeping still figures little in plot, some rooms begin to take on narrative meaning. As an example, Maria Edgeworth’s Belinda (1801) features the house in important ways that anticipate its narrative value to come, although domestic spaces still remain incidental to the plot instead of integral to narrative movement. Belinda Portman, the novel’s titular heroine, comes to live with the fashionable Lady Delacour to be introduced to society and, ultimately, to find a husband. The growing intimacy of the space of home in this novel provides a metaphor for inner life, and yet, the metaphor is slight and not unique; the lady’s house isn’t privileged over other spaces as an important site of identity construction. The narrator of Belinda notes that “to be seen in public with lady Delacour, to be a visitor at her house, were privileges… and Belinda Portman was congratulated and envied… for being admitted as an inmate” (10). Being seen in public and sharing one’s home are syntactically equivalent markers of intimacy with Lady Delacour; the house holds no complex significance in producing or revealing inner life or identity. 18 Belinda begins to see a difference between lady Delacour’s character in public and private life, but the distinctions don’t consistently figure the house as private or individual space. Both aspects of Lady Delacour’s life manifest themselves in her house: “When her house was filled with well-dressed crowds… lady Delacour… shone the soul and spirit of pleasure and frolic. But the moment the company retired… the spell was dissolved” (11). Here, public and private both exist in one place, and it is not the nature of the space but what it contains that determines its status. 21 The plot of Belinda also hinges on the space of lady Delacour’s house, but in this case the “mysterious boudoir” that figures so prominently in the lady’s sordid past is only an effect of the plot, not productive of character or thematics. The boudoir contains the medicines the lady needs to treat her infected breast, a result of a wound she received in an inappropriately masculine duel she fought years earlier. Lord Delacour suspects that the boudoir hides some lover, whether the lady’s or Belinda’s, and the trouble over this room stems only from this mistaken interpretation of the place. That is, it’s not what Lady Delacour does with the space but what she does in it that matters. Narratively, Lord Delacour’s misinterpretation merely creates a diversion for the reader; here, it isn’t the space itself that is important but what it conceals. 21 Tita Chico argues in Designing Women: The Dressing Room in Eighteenth-Century English Literature and Culture (2005) that “[f]rom the novel’s beginning to its end, the text utilizes the dressing room trope as a metonymy for the dangerous effects of female embodiment and as an occasion for the production of narrative” (230). The room is an occasion for the production of narrative, a new development from earlier novels that ignored the significance of narrative house space, but it doesn’t itself produce story; that is, the boudoir has no particular story to tell since the lady could have hidden her medicines anywhere she had private access. The dressing room’s metonymy regarding the lady’s character anticipates, but doesn’t participate in, the nineteenth-century novel’s use of home spaces in order to produce identity. 19 By the middle of the nineteenth century, though, narrative representations of domestic space take on an entirely new character. Houses propel plot forward; instead of being symbolic or incidental to the plot, as lady Delacour’s mysterious boudoir is, spaces in the house and houses themselves now often drive narrative. Having, maintaining, and keeping a home become central to both character identity and story. In Gaskell’s North and South, the early crisis of the novel comes when Mr. Hale must leave Helstone and the family’s parsonage, and Margaret and her father search Milton for a new place to live. The two visit many places, and finally Margaret explains, ‘We must go back to the second, I think…. There were three sitting-rooms; don’t you remember how we laughed at the number compared with the three bed- rooms? But I have planned it all. The front room down-stairs is to be your study and our dining-room (poor papa!), for, you know, we settled mamma is to have as cheerful a sitting-room as we can get; and that front room up-stairs, with the atrocious blue and pink paper and heavy cornice, had really a pretty view over the plain…. Then I could have the little bed-room behind, in that projection at the head of the first flight of stairs – over the kitchen, you know—and you and mamma the room behind the drawing-room, and that closet in the roof will make you a splendid dressing-room…. I am overpowered by the discovery of my own genius for management. Dixon is to have—let me see, I had it once—the back sitting-room. I think she will like that. She grumbles so much about the stairs at Heston; and the girl is to have that sloping attic over your room and mamma’s. Won’t that do?’ (61) Unlike lady Delacour’s closet, which never appears in description and serves only as a marker of her dissolution, here the topography of the house appears in great detail, and it functions as an integral part of the plot. The story is the house and Margaret’s relation to it; Gaskell dedicates much narrative space to the search, the contemplation, and the procurement of a proper home. Moreover, characters’ relationships to spaces in the home become essential to their psychology and development. Here, Margaret’s interaction with the potential new abode dramatizes her dedication to her family and her ability to 20 manage a home; her experience also affords her the chance to develop a new kind of female agency and to become “overpowered” at the realization that she is capable of managing important domestic matters, and that this capability constitutes a kind of genius. Gaskell’s text is exemplary of the kind of attention to material domestic detail that flowers during the nineteenth century, representing not only changing conceptions of the ways gendered identity is produced, but also a new kind of narrative that both reflects and produces these identities. Exploring a gendered topography of domestic space allows us to tease out how the materiality of the nineteenth-century, middle-class house influenced gender identity and changed the ways narrative was constructed. My first chapter, thus, theorizes a new development in nineteenth-century fiction: the narrative tour of the house. Like Brontë’s narrator in Shirley (1849), who invites the reader to “Step into the neat little garden house… [and] walk forward into the little parlour” (6), many nineteenth-century narrators began to produce the domestic spaces of their respective novels through extradiegetic tours. The tour serves to illustrate a new gendered topography of the house and demonstrates the ways in which women’s identities get constructed through the spaces of the house. The tour creates these topographies by compartmentalizing and serializing space, juxtaposing various rooms and forcing the reader to experience them in relation to each other. As Foucault notes, the space of the house remained undifferentiated until the eighteenth century, when rooms took on specific functions and, consequently, gendering. This chapter connects this relatively new development in domestic space with the appearance of the narrative tour. Michel de Certeau argues that the tour is a speech act 21 that makes a trajectory through space, revealing the social relations that produce it. Through a close examination of Charles Dickens’ David Copperfield (1850), I argue that the narrative as well as thematic technique of touring functions as a “speech act” to enunciate the politics of gender relations within domestic space. The house, then, is much more than a metaphor for or reflection of characters’ personality traits; indeed, here, the narrative itself can been seen as a structure that mirrors the orphaned and displaced David’s search to find not only a place he can truly call home, but his own place within domesticity. More than a thematic support, the house and its tour figure structurally into the narrative, providing a framework for the progression of the autobiography. David’s evolution follows his progress through life, a journey that is both marked and created by his passage through different domestic spaces. Chapter Two expands on the idea of the narrative tour, exploring how the novel creates a public realm for women by reframing the questions around public and private space within the concept of the social. Through the lens of Hannah Arendt’s history of public and private domains from The Human Condition, a theory that has gone largely undiscussed within the separate spheres conversation, the house appears as the site where distinctions between public and private first break down and the two realms merge. Arendt proposes a vision of the social where “[t]he emergence of society—the rise of housekeeping, its activities, problems, and organizational devices—from the shadowy interior of the household into the light of the public sphere, has not only blurred the old borderline between private and political, it has also changed almost beyond recognition the meaning of the two terms and their significance for the life of the individual and the citizen” (38). Jane Austen’s Emma (1818) and Margaret Oliphant’s Miss Marjoribanks 22 (1866) demonstrate this emergence while complicating a unidirectional vision of the social, suggesting that the social arises out of both a publicizing of the domestic world as well as an intrusion of the public into family life. The increasing visibility of household activities—interior decoration, visiting, and menu planning, among others—emerge as sites for women’s agency. In producing housekeeping for public consumption, a project achieved through both individual women’s narrations of their household activities as well as the novel’s depiction of housekeeping, women create and participate in a social realm that functions on both public and private levels. Locating a kind of feminine agency within these housekeeping activities allows for a paradigm of gender organization that is based not on a binary distinction between public and private but on the concept of the social. In these novels, women achieve a social and, ultimately, political power through the management of a house. The novel and the social realm function reciprocally, as the novel narrates housekeeping in the same way that women perform it, for a public audience and in order to create society. As parallel phenomena, both the social and the novel then contribute to women’s authority within their households and the larger community. Chapter Three explores the dark side of managing a house: the possibility of its loss. This chapter asks what happens to middle-class Victorian women’s lives, their identities, when the home is lost? In staging this catastrophe, nineteenth-century authors threw the concept of home into crisis and thereby revealed a core tension underlying contemporary imaginings of domestic life: for women, the Victorian home is both safe sanctuary and stifling prison. While Chapter Two argues that control over a house promoted a kind of power for women, Chapter Three suggests that this control also put 23 tremendous pressure on them to maintain proper material and cultural conditions as well as to produce gendered identities appropriate for the private sphere. These responsibilities provided comfort and a sense of identity, but they also limited women’s choices and circumscribed their actions. The heroines of Austen’s Persuasion (1818), Eliot’s The Mill on the Floss (1860), and Hardy’s Jude the Obscure (1895), all demonstrate conflicted reactions to the loss of the home. While this loss often proves freeing, it unmoors basic female identity and leaves women with few resources. This chapter explores these thematic concerns but also suggests that this anxiety over the house changed narrative form itself. That is, the loss of the home structures the thematics of these novels at the same time that it produces a narrative obsession with clinging to domestic spaces, constantly and manically attaching characters and events to their domestic settings. While the plot can explore domestic loss, the narrative fights compulsively to hold on to the home. Perhaps more threatening than the potential to lose a home was the possibility of living in an unsuitable one—namely, one that is haunted. My final chapter tackles the domestic ghost story, arguing that these narratives express an inherent anxiety over the cultural signification of the space of the house. While many of the ghost stories circulating during the nineteenth century were written by women—up to seventy percent of them, by one estimate 22 —relatively little work has been done on a women’s tradition of the haunted house tale. Those critics who have studied the Victorian ghost story often read it as a reaction against realism, an outgrowth of the Gothic that was “resistant to 22 Lynette Carpenter and Wendy Kohlmar claim that as much as seventy percent of the ghost stories published in periodicals during the 1850s and 60s were authored by women. 24 mainstream literary influences” (Cox xix). A reading of Ellen Wood’s Featherston’s Story illustrates that the haunted house story actually participates seamlessly in the realist tradition, and that it is the very realism of the domestic settings and activities recorded in them that produces the tension manifested in the ghost. Through the figure of the haunted house, these texts express an inherent anxiety over both the cultural signification and the material possession of the space of the house, revealing a present danger within and to domesticity. The continual emphasis in Wood’s novella on the realism of the story both produces and reveals a specific kind of textual anxiety, one that revolves around the quotidian concerns of the domestic sphere. Far from a kind of Gothic, return of the repressed, fantastic angst, these texts express a material anxiety rooted in the economics of domestic life and a cultural concern over the gender politics located in the house. Economic worries are presented as haunting, inextricably linking ghostly fears to financial ones, thereby expressing the terror of economic ruin based in the figure of the house. Significantly, though, these economic worries are also wrapped up in political ones, for they revolve around the difficulty unsupported women have in earning money or maintaining a suitable domestic life. The hauntings underscore the true—perhaps “real”—terror many Victorian women face: the prospect of living unsupported. Supernatural experiences are psychically more manageable—that is, less terrifying—than the real problem of economic powerlessness. It is the nexus of realism and the supernatural domestic experience in these stories that creates an outlet for expressing important cultural, political and material anxieties. By viewing the haunted house story as consonant with and integral to the tradition of realism, we can more clearly see the ways in which the house, rather than the haunting, is the key element in domestic ghost stories. 25 By juxtaposing the materiality of the Victorian house with questions of gender politics, Domestic Topographies broadens the conversation surrounding domestic ideology beyond the traditional framework of the separate spheres doctrine and purely ideological concerns. Addressing the ways gendered bodies negotiate the space of the home opens new possibilities for redefining how we understand the circulation and deployment of Victorian concepts of domesticity, gender, and identity. 26 Chapter 1: Touring the Victorian House “[S]he was at leisure to feel a great deal of curiosity to see the house herself…. To Pemberley, therefore, they were to go.” ~ Jane Austen, Pride and Prejudice (1813) Elizabeth Bennett’s tour of Pemberley forms a key episode in the logic of Austen’s Pride and Prejudice. On a grander scale, the visit to view the home and its gardens participates in the common cultural activity of admiring gentry country houses; more intimately, Elizabeth’s appreciation of the house translates into increased desire for Mr. Darcy as “Elizabeth saw, with admiration of his taste, that it was neither gaudy nor uselessly fine; with less of splendor, and more real elegance” (182). Her observation also points to the paradigm of middle-class domesticity developing during the nineteenth century, where efficiency, comfort, moderation, and grace came to signify the most respectable dwellings and, metonymically, people. Notably, though, Elizabeth’s textual movement through Mr. Darcy’s home anticipates a new narrative technique arising in the nineteenth century, one in which a residence is depicted through a tour of its spaces. The importance of the house to Elizabeth’s relationship with Mr. Darcy materializes when she visits this place for the first time, imagining, “‘[a]nd of this place… I might have been mistress! With these rooms I might now have been familiarly acquainted! Instead of viewing them as a stranger, I might have rejoiced in them as my own’” (182). Her regret over the dismissed proposal lies in the home she has forfeited, not in the man she’s given up, and now that she’s viewed the place she cannot separate Mr. Darcy from his dwelling. After unexpectedly and awkwardly meeting Mr. Darcy at the end of the house tour, Elizabeth wanders through Pemberley’s gardens, yet “[h]er thoughts were all fixed on that one spot of Pemberley House, whichever it might be, where Mr. Darcy then was” 27 (187). Elizabeth’s fascination with this home suggests the rising significance of domestic space in mediating relationships between men and women as well as the growing importance of depicting domestic space within the pages of the novel. The visit to Pemberley serves as a prototype for what I am calling the “narrative tour” in nineteenth-century novels, a technique of rising consequence particularly where the house was concerned. Once the house became a central site for negotiating gender roles and class ideology, authors began representing this space in a new way, leading the reader through homes and, in the process, establishing a vision of proper middle-class Victorian domesticity. Many authors began producing domestic space through a description that leads the reader room by room through the house, instead of merely describing the location of its chambers. The textual signification of providing a “tour” of the home is glossed by Michel de Certeau when he opposes tours to maps and defines the tour as description of space in this way: “a circuit or ‘tour’ is a speech-act (an act of enunciation) that ‘furnishes a minimal series of paths by which to go into each room’…. it organizes movements” (119, emphasis in original). 23 The narrative tour organizes movements in order to produce meaningful space and through this space, identities. That is, the tour gives meaning to the rooms in a house not only by showing how to enter and exit, but who can enter or exit when, and what movements and activities are acceptable within each room. This narrative strategy produces space temporally, thereby incorporating the description of the house smoothly into narrative; but perhaps more importantly it creates a juxtaposition of spaces that highlights distinctions between different rooms and therefore marks the borders of places within the house. The narrative 23 de Certeau cites Linde and Labov in his definition of the tour and the map. 28 tour enunciates the house by producing its boundaries and by focusing attention on the practices that make each room what it is. Significantly, the practices that produce the substance of each room are the same ones that give meaning to the identities that reside there. That is, embroidering an ornamental stool happens in the parlor and helps designate that space as the parlor, and the subject who is working on the handicraft can be read as a Victorian lady not only because of the practice in which she is engaged but also because of the space that she inhabits. While the tour reproduces movement between spaces, it also reifies spatial separations, meanings, and therefore identities. The distinctions that the narrative tour constructs become not only productive of particular types of identities but destructive of the potential to integrate or change these identities. With the parlor taking on significance as a scene of middle-class leisure and femininity, it becomes harder for Victorian women inhabiting this room to escape the bounds of these identity markers. Likewise, those who don’t exhibit corresponding identities find it difficult to inhabit particular spaces in the house comfortably. Servants are barred from willfully using the parlor, and men are not expected to spend their free time in the parlor alone (uninvited by a Victorian woman or drawn in by her presence). The workings of the narrative tour first appear in the earlier part of the nineteenth century. Charles Dickens’ work provides a key test case, since he consistently used the narrative tour as a textual strategy, and many of his novels hinge on their characters’ relationships to houses. 24 These relationships, though, are not chiefly about connections 24 Consider a few key examples: Bleak House (1853), where the house provides much of the plot’s drive as well as a title for the novel; Great Expectations (1861), in which Satis House functions as an extension of 29 between the material and the psychological; rather, it is through relationships to the house that Dickens’s Victorian subjects determine and produce their identities. An important case in point: both David Copperfield and David Copperfield are obsessed with houses. David often ruminates on homes, at one point remarking, “When we passed through a village, I pictured to myself what the insides of the houses were like”; he uses the house as a trope when he describes Rosa Dartle as “dilapidated—like a house” (69, 252). These two examples are a few among many; as Neil Grill points out, “what David cannot stop himself from selecting out of a world of infinite choice are houses” (108). Grill focuses on “the link between houses and people” in David Copperfield, and it’s clear that Dickens uses the figure of the house to support his themes (109). However, the house is much more than a metaphor for or “reflection of specific characters” (109); indeed, the narrative itself can been seen as a structure that mirrors the orphaned and displaced David’s search to find not only a place he can truly call home, but his own place within domesticity. 25 David will discover through his relationship to the homes he inhabits his position in relation to the women he loves, and by understanding and learning their roles, he will develop a sense of his own identity. More than a thematic support, though, the house and its tour also figures structurally into the narrative, providing a framework for Miss Havisham’s character, a receptacle for history and an obstacle in Pip’s plot to win Estella’s heart; Dombey and Son (1848), which focuses great attention on the movement into the new house; and Little Dorrit (1857), in which Mr. Dorrit’s house is a fantasy, Mrs. Clennam’s becomes a heap of rubble, and the hero and heroine end their tale married and walking off into "the roaring streets" with no particular place to call home. 25 In “Cookery, not Rookery: Family and Class in David Copperfield” (1986), Chris R. Vanden Bossche comes closest to calling the novel a quest for a home when he notes that David’s search is for social legitimacy in the form of a middle-class family. He explores the “domestic and pastoral idylls of Blunderstone and Yarmouth,” and while he talks briefly about the boat-house in Yarmouth, he doesn’t focus on the connection between the material home and domesticity and gender roles. Neil Grill talks specifically about houses in “Home and Homeless in David Copperfield” (1980), but he focuses on these houses as metaphors for characters or background support for characterization. 30 the progression of the fictional autobiography, for David’s progress through life quite literally proceeds through a series of different domestic spaces, from his birth at Blunderstone Rookery to his marriages and his own home in London. 26 While many different domestic spaces appear throughout the narrative, a handful of the houses Dickens represents take on greater significance. These homes— Blunderstone Rookery, the Yarmouth boat-house, and the Spenlow and Wickfield homes—are presented more methodically, not only because the narrator provides more information about them, but because structurally their details are organized through a narrative tour. These tours are vitally important to David Copperfield, both thematically and narratively. In fact, the narrative tour lays the thematic and structural groundwork that underpins the entire novel. In 1958, Hillis Miller began a critical tradition of interpreting David Copperfield’s development as “the search for some relationship to another person which will support his life, fill up the emptiness within him, and give him a substantial identity” (152). And this explanation has stuck; as recently as 2003 Radhika Jones wrote in her introduction to the novel that David’s journey is about “his learning to love responsibly and prudently…. The real struggle in David’s plot is reserved for finding a suitable mate” (xvi). This interpretation usually focuses on the women with whom David spends his life, concluding that his relationship with each of them helps him to become the man he is by the end of the novel. Notably, though, each of the centrally important women in David’s 26 In using the terms “progress,” “development,” and “growth” to characterize David’s forward movement through life, I withhold any value judgment about whether this movement constitutes an “improvement” in his character or some kind of maturation. I mean only to indicate that David’s psyche is changing, developing in the sense that it is no longer what it was previously. 31 life is associated with a house, and each of these important houses is first presented through a tour. His early relationships with his mother and Peggotty, both maternal influences, are intimately connected with Blunderstone Rookery, while Peggotty’s identity is linked as well to her brother, Mr. Peggotty, and to his boat-house at Yarmouth. This second home is also connected to Little Em’ly, David’s first love interest who eventually develops into a sister-figure (Dunn 2). David’s two lovers, Dora and Agnes, are associated with their respective homes, Mr. Spenlow’s and Mr. Wickfield’s houses. And these four houses are the only ones presented in the novel through detailed tours of their domestic space. While some argue that David’s development is about his relationship to women, I am suggesting that his growth depends on his relationship to domesticity and gender roles, and this development is produced through his engagement with the material of home(s). Through his relationships with the important women in his life, David learns the importance of domestic space and stages his growth into a proper, conventional Victorian middle-class gender role through this acquired knowledge. By negotiating his connection to various women and the domestic spaces with which they are associated, David learns both to work out his desire for home and take on a proper identity. He learns through his relationships with his mother and Peggotty, Little Em’ly, Dora and Agnes and the spaces each woman inhabits how to situate himself within Victorian domesticity and what to value in a home. 27 It is not until this process of 27 Although I’ve mentioned David’s desire connected to these women, I do not intend to explore this concept independently of his desire for middle-class domesticity, nor do I propose a psychoanalytic reading. For an example of a Freudian interpretation of the novel, see Gordon Hirsch’s “A Psychoanalytic Rereading of David Copperfield” (1980) or Mark Spilka’s “David Copperfield as Psychological Fiction” (1959). 32 understanding the importance of a respectable, comfortable, appropriately gendered home is completed that David’s narrative can end. I. As David Copperfield begins his memoir, he notes his earliest remembrances. The first things he remembers are his mother and Peggotty, but the next most important memory is of Blunderstone Rookery, his house. His early emphasis on the importance of home in his memory sets up his relationship to domesticity as key to his growth. These three “characters”—Clara, Peggotty, and Blunderstone—are intimately entwined in David’s memory, whose immediacy David establishes through a first-person, present tense description of his childhood home that takes the form of a verbal “tour.” It is as if David is literally passing through the house room by room: On the ground-floor is Peggotty’s kitchen, opening into a back yard; with a pigeon-house on a pole, in the centre, without any dog; and a quantity of fowls that look terribly tall to me…. Here is a long passage—what an enormous perspective I make of it!—leading from Peggotty’s kitchen to the front-door. A dark store-room opens out of it…. Then there are the two parlors: the parlor in which we sit of an evening, my mother and I and Peggotty—for Peggotty is quite our companion, when her work is done and we are alone—and the best parlor where we sit on a Sunday; grandly, but not so comfortably. (25-26) The tour of Blunderstone Rookery closely associates these two important women in David’s life with the domestic spaces in which they are inscribed, creating a complicated triangulation between David, his mother(s), and the comfort of home life. That is, David’s relationship to these two women is mediated by values of class and gender as well as the material figure of the house; his connection to them can’t be explained 33 without reference to any of these elements. Each woman has a different, yet complementary, relationship to the house and participates in a different version of domestic ideology so that together, they produce a composite image of an idealized and unrealistic Victorian woman. At the same time, their identities are distinct and complete on their own, suggesting the impossibility of integrating two separate paradigms of middle-class Victorian woman. While Clara Peggotty is associated materially with the kitchen and ideologically with maternity (that is, she fulfills a material and emotional maternal function for David), Clara Copperfield resides materially in the parlor and ideologically in the figure of the “angel in the house”; their identical Christian names underscores their complementarity. These roles, the “angel in the house” and the “mistress of the house,” arise out of the associations these woman have to the home, and they deeply affect the way David views and relates to these women and helps to develop a sense of the proper domesticity that David will build on throughout his life. This first tour, then, lays the foundation for the themes and structure of David’s psychological progression. On one level, the house tour sets up the nexus between his mother, Peggotty, and the house that makes David appreciate both ornamental and functional feminine roles while simultaneously seeing both these roles as distinct. By leading the reader sequentially through Blunderstone, the tour creates a narrative progression while juxtaposing various spaces. The tour produces an opposition between the kitchen and the parlor—the only two rooms that David mentions in his tour—that suggests the importance both of these key spaces and the distinction between them. That is, the kitchen and the parlor form the heart of the home for David, and the difference between these two rooms produces the meaning of this home. For David, living a happy 34 home life requires the comfort and care that comes from Peggotty and the kitchen as well as the dangerous and unrealistic fantasy of beauty and entertainment found in the parlor and his mother. Peggotty, the Copperfields’ devoted and capable servant, functions as a surrogate mother for David, but the house tour reveals that in David’s view, her part in domestic life is always already colored by class issues. Although the reader has been introduced to Peggotty as the “servant-girl,” her working status solidifies when she is intimately linked with the kitchen. The kitchen belongs to Peggotty because of her gender and class; in both instances in the tour, the kitchen is described in the possessive case as “Peggotty’s,” emphasizing her role as material provider of domesticity and her circumscription within this room. Her social position becomes clearer by the juxtaposition of her kitchen and the parlor, where Peggotty’s company is clearly an anomaly. David feels the need to justify her presence in the parlor by explaining that “Peggotty is quite our companion,” suggesting a need to account for the incongruity of seeing a servant in the leisure room. Even in explaining Peggotty’s unique status, David reveals that she sits with the family “when her work is done and we are alone,” reminding the reader that she is still, in fact, a servant, not quite an equal member of the family. Furthermore, David’s comment reveals she can only sit in the parlor when the family is alone, for Peggotty, unlike Clara Copperfield, is not meant for public display. As a boy, David has already learned that Peggotty’s role in the house is only one part of an equation that equals home. The other part comes from his mother, who, in contrast to Peggotty, relates to Blunderstone in an entirely different, although complementary, way. She resides in the two parlors, both sites connected with femininity 35 and middle-class identity. 28 When we first hear of David’s mother, she already seems an “angel in the house”; Betsey Trotwood calls her “‘a wax doll’” and watches as Clara “sat down again very meekly, and fainted” when Betsey arrives for David’s birth (17, 19). The tour that David gives of Blunderstone places Clara in the parlors and nowhere else, reinforcing her position (both physically and ideologically) as the ornamental middle- class Victorian woman. Clara Copperfield “sits” in these rooms, an object for display and a subject for leisure. The interrelation of the material house and the ideology that places his mother and Peggotty in different spaces within it allow David to appreciate two different kinds of Victorian women while forcing him to see these two women as distinct representations of separate identities. While providing the thematics of David’s emotional development, the house tour also supplies a narrative structure for David’s psychology and his memory of his evolution. The first significant change in David’s emotional state, when he learns of his mother’s marriage to Mr. Murdstone, appears in relationship to Blunderstone Rookery, most thoroughly in two tours he takes of the house and his own bedroom. After meeting Murdstone in the parlor, David says, “I crept upstairs. My old dear bedroom was changed, and I was to lie a long way off. I rambled down-stairs to find anything that was like itself, so altered it all seemed…” (48). With familial relations thrown into turmoil by 28 In The Victorian Parlour, Thad Logan explains that while the dining room, study, and library were masculine spaces, the parlour was a feminine one where the middle-class woman had to "manipulate effectively the signifiers available to her in the realm of decoration and consumption in order to 'utter' the existence of a family, to articulate its distinct being in the social world" (93). The room is a site for expressing both femininity and middle-class status. Likewise, Judith Flanders explains in The Victorian House: Domestic Life from Childbirth to Deathbed that the parlour or drawing-room was a status indicator and place from which a woman "governed her domain" (131). 36 the addition of the Murdstones, David seeks a connection with the house. Instead, he finds an altered relation to Blunderstone as a result of his new position in relation to his mother, which in turn is reflected in his reassigned bed chamber. David mediates the changes he perceives in his mother through the house because he cannot read his relationship to her without it. He focuses all his anxiety on the differences he sees in Blunderstone, using this tour of the house to enunciate his new relationship to his mother; Blunderstone provides the material structure that allows David to narrate the pain of losing his mother to Murdstone. “So altered it now seems,” since now Clara sits in the best parlor regularly, and even more devastating is David’s discovery that his bedroom, the most intimate personal space in the house, has been moved from “a closet within my mother’s room” to “a long way off” (26, 48). Some of these changes are material ones— his new bedroom, his mother in the best parlor—but it is only by seeing the changes in the material house that he understands his symbolic position within the home has changed. Moreover, David learns viscerally that an ornamental woman is meant for public exhibition; David can no longer spend private time alone with his mother in their shared bedroom but must view her, like others, in the parlors. This change suggests to David that a middle-class wife must be removed from the daily cares of the house and provide only display value to the home. These alterations serve as both markers of and triggers for the change in David’s psychology, for they represent and create a further disconnection from his mother. The tour he takes—up to his room and then rambling through the house—produces and reflects this evolving mental state. When David returns to his room, he sits down to think, and here the narrative hints at the tension at the core of the home. He remembers, “I thought of the oddest 37 things. Of the shape of the room, of the cracks in the ceiling, of the paper on the wall, of the flaws in the window-glass making ripples and dimples on the prospect, of the washing-stand being rickety on its three legs, and having a discontented something about it” (49). None of these thoughts is particularly odd, though, considering the importance of David’s relationship to the house. He notices now the “cracks,” the “flaws,” the “rickety” washing stand and its “discontented” aspect. For the first time, David sees both the house and home life as imperfect, and this new perspective makes him discontented. The fragility of his position in relation to his mother throws David into a tailspin, and the very details of his new room reel before him as he tries to grasp at some connection to the new space to which he’s been relegated. While David sees that his own position in the house is precarious, the narrative has suggested that the gender roles that produce the house underlie this instability. By using the house as a kind of narrative blank slate, David can speak the pain and confusion of being separated from his mother and exposed to the tensions that surround the images of the women he loves. The house also provides a framework and perspective for David’s mind that is most obvious when his access to the house is restricted. During his imprisonment in his bedroom, a punishment Murdstone metes out because David cannot repeat his lessons, David’s relationship to the house becomes confused since he cannot tour as he used to. Although he is allowed to “walk in the garden for half an hour and no longer” each morning, he spends the rest of his time confined to his room, where time and space become unreal because of his loss of domestic reference points, his loss of the ability to move between different places at different times. He notes, 38 The length of those five days I can convey no idea of to anyone. They occupy the place of years in my remembrance. The way in which I listened to all the incidents of the house… the uncertain pace of the hours…the return of day, noon, afternoon, evening, when the boys played in the churchyard, and I watched them from a distance within the room… all this appears to have gone round and round for years instead of days, it is so vividly and strongly stamped on my remembrance. (60 – 61) It is not only retrospectively that David feels the fluidity of time; he explains that while he was experiencing his imprisonment, he would wake at night “thinking it was morning, and find that the family were not yet gone to bed” (60). In a well-regulated Victorian household, the events of the day would be linked strongly to time and space, 29 and David is unable to make sense of his world without access to the various places in the house. The absence of a tour, here, underlines the importance of movement between domestic spaces for the quotidian functioning of a Victorian subject. Moreover, it demonstrates the interdependence of time and space for the narrative itself: David cannot produce a coherent story without the familiar markers of daily moments and places within the home. Without being able to tour the home, David cannot conceive of the progress of the day. Through these tours, David shows how he marks his movement through life in terms of his relationship to domestic space; he structures his evolution narratively by connecting his changing mind to episodes that involve the house. 30 The growth David experiences is structured by the material house, but its content depends largely on the gender roles David observes by witnessing the way his two 29 See Judith Flanders and Thad Logan on the importance of time in the Victorian household. Judith Flanders notes that "the time at which household tasks were performed became as much a part of an orderly life as the routines themselves.... Time was to be 'laid out' carefully, as money was. To waste time was every bit as reprehensible as to waste money" (232). 30 See Kristina Deffenbacher’s dissertation, The Housing of Wandering Minds in Victorian Cultural Discourses for an argument that posits the house as the most pervasive metaphor for the organization of the Victorian psyche. 39 “mothers” fit into its space. Peggotty, intimately aligned with the kitchen in the initial tour of Blunderstone, appears as the cornerstone of private life for David; she functions as both a surrogate mother but also as the main caregiver in his life. Materially, Peggotty provides everyday necessities for David—food, drink, psychological support, and love— since his “childish” mother is too “inexperienced and girlish” to provide them (53). When Peggotty bids farewell to David on his way to Salem House, she not only “squeeze[s]” him in a tight embrace, she also gives him “some paper bags of cakes… and a purse” (63); when she writes to him at Salem House, she sends a “comfortable letter… and with it a cake in a perfect nest of oranges, and two bottles of cowslip wine” (88). All that Peggotty gives to David is figured in material terms. She provides food, money, and wine, and the love she gives is described in bodily terms of hugs and comfort. In these instances, Peggotty’s emotional functions are linked metonymically to material ones, underlining the physicality of her maternity, opposed to the immaterial and decorative femininity that David’s mother presents. This physicality ultimately harkens back to Peggotty’s place in the kitchen and her class status. While Peggotty is a Victorian woman, she has none of the qualities of the “angel in the house.” And though she is continually relegated to the physical, she is also characterized as a maternal figure, a woman upon whom David relies for much of his comfort. With Peggotty, then, David learns the importance of domestic care, and yet he also learns that this type of caregiving is both outside of and antithetical to decorative femininity. Peggotty does provide emotional support to David that seems to lie outside material functions, but even these episodes reinforce what the house tour has laid out: Peggotty’s identity is wrapped up in the concrete domesticity of the kitchen. While it is 40 Peggotty who comes to console David during his imprisonment at Blunderstone and she whom he often thinks of when he daydreams of comfort, David still views Peggotty as a servant. As he seeks comfort while traveling to Salem House, David notes, “I resigned myself to thoughts of home and Peggotty” (70). This revelation gets at the complex way that David views his closest ally: he cannot divorce Peggotty from her status as servant and her connection to the kitchen, and yet he values her for her caregiving. David thinks of both home and Peggotty, and while singling her out may emphasize the comfort she brings to him, it also separates her from the concept of a middle-class home. Thinking of home and Peggotty insinuates that these two are different entities—while Peggotty may provide domestic support for David on many levels, she does not represent the totality of home for him. In contrast to Peggotty, Clara Copperfield lives in the parlor, creating a reciprocal relationship in which David cannot conceive of either entity—the parlor or his mother— without the other. As a child, David remembers “dancing about the parlor” with her (27), and he knows that the parlor is always where she’s to be found. When David returns home from Yarmouth to his mother’s new marriage, Peggotty takes him first into the kitchen, a clue to David that something is wrong. David explains that Peggotty “led me, wondering, into the kitchen; and shut the door. ‘Peggotty!’ said I, quite frightened. ‘What’s the matter?’ (47). David’s entrance into the kitchen, where he knows he will not find his mother, panics him. He reads the changes he will soon face at home solely through the room he has entered, intuitively understanding that by going into the kitchen he is presently barred from seeing his mother: “‘Where’s mama?’…. Why hasn’t she come out to the gate, and what have we come in here for?’” David’s sense that both 41 Clara herself and his relationship to her have changed is right: as soon as Peggotty explains that Clara has married, she takes David “straight into the best parlor” to greet his mother (48). In fact, after her marriage to Mr. Murdstone, Clara’s middle-class feminine identity becomes even more distinct as the Murdstones demand, as previously noted, that she sit in the best parlor more frequently. She is even more circumscribed by her domestic space, relegated more tightly to the private, since she is not allowed to meet David at the gate—a liminally public space—to welcome him home. The Murdstones control their household by controlling the space within which its members move, and in so doing they manage to control identities. Murdstone reveals as much when he tells Clara that he married “an inexperienced and artless person” with the goal of “forming her character,” and it becomes clear that he intends to keep her as an ornament, a kind of display object whose duties lie only in sitting beautifully in the parlor and partaking of the occasional handicraft. The few housekeeping duties Clara may have performed before (and we suspect Peggotty did most of them, anyway) are stripped from her with her house keys and given to Miss Murdstone. Her remaining duties exist in form only— her opinions are all based on Miss Murdstone’s, and when she presides over David’s lessons it is only “nominally” (55). David hates the Murdstones and what they do to his mother, but at the same time their spatial influence strengthens Clara’s position as the ornamental Victorian angel and therefore helps shape David’s appreciation for a proper woman as a decorative one, laying the ideological groundwork that will lead to his desire for Dora. 42 Clara Peggotty and Clara Copperfield, then, participate in two opposing paradigms of Victorian womanhood, and through their characterizations and spatial positioning Dickens reveals the contradictions inherent in the ideal of middle-class Victorian womanhood. 31 David reinforces the complementarity between the two Claras when he compares the two as a child: “I thought [Peggotty] in a different style from my mother, certainly; but of another school of beauty, I considered her a perfect example. There was a red velvet footstool in the best parlor, on which my mother had painted a nosegay. The ground-work of that stool, and Peggotty’s complexion, appeared to me to be one and the same thing. The stool was smooth, and Peggotty was rough, but that made no difference” (28). This juxtaposition drives home both the similarities and differences between Peggotty and Clara, emblems and victims of gender stereotypes. The stool, a symbol of David’s mother not only because of its soft beauty but also because of the handicraft she’s painted on it, once again connects Clara to the parlor and feminine delicacy. While Clara is “smooth,” Peggotty, the material, maternal figure is rough, and although David says that makes no difference (they are both mothers and women to him), he still notes the difference—he can’t escape from it. The tension between these two roles—and their construction as antithetical to one another—will come to plague David and his relationships later in life. David has already learned the requirements of middle-class gender roles and the intricate ways they are connected to house positions. However, David the Author also subtly undermines the viability of these roles as ideals. Not only can no one woman fulfill all the divergent 31 Susan Thurin also points out the way that the novel divides “sexual attractiveness and domestic abilities,” two elements that the conventional heroine exhibited, between characters, but she attributes these qualities to Dora and Agnes, respectively, not to the two Claras. 43 requirements of female gender roles (for it takes both Peggotty and Copperfield to make a complete Clara), but even these women can’t fulfill the ideal of their particular roles without difficulty. While Peggotty is certainly capable of carrying out her maternal duties, these duties keep her squarely in a servant’s role. For Clara, her confinement in the spaces of angelic womanhood finally destroys her. While David can see these two distinct roles, at this point he cannot reconcile them by seeing that they are part of the same paradigm of home, and he certainly cannot recognize the untenability of these archetypes in real life. Later, David will dismiss Peggotty’s role as a part of domestic life as he chooses Little Em’ly and Dora, copies of his mother who represent, as Clara does, only part of the ideal Victorian woman, as his objects of domestic affection. The house serves in these early instances to reinforce David’s sense of the rules of private life, but narratively it also structures David’s development and provides a link between his changing psychologies. Blunderstone not only marks David’s mentality but occasions its development as well. David records his psychological development through his memories of this house, noting when he begins to have different feelings about it. As he opens his life with his aunt, Betsey Trotwood, he feels that “a remoteness had come upon the old Blunderstone life” (188). At this point, the values of comfort and leisured femininity that he developed at Blunderstone have been challenged by other paradigms of home, from the Micawber’s house to Betsey Trotwood’s cottage. David refers to his childhood in this passage, yet the main adjective he uses to modify the term “life” is Blunderstone, therefore directly connecting this period to this specific home. In fact, the only way the reader knows he is talking about his childhood is through a process of association: it’s an “old” life, so it must be in the past, and it’s a life that not only 44 occurred in the material space of David’s childhood home, but in the representational space of Blunderstone domesticity. 32 David’s comment demonstrates that he marks his growth and progression through life in terms of his relationship to the house. Not only will David no longer be living at Blunderstone, but the affective associations with this place are changing, and his relationship to home life begins on a new track. This narrative structuring means that the house also functions as both a source and a location for memories, a place where thoughts of the past can be deposited as well as a marker in the narrative for these recollections. Blunderstone provides David the author a concrete space to attach to his memories in order to demonstrate not only his state of mind as a child, but the adult psychology that evolves from these thoughts. The house is a fitting receptacle for these memories since most often they are connected directly to it. Recollections of his mother, for example, can’t be separated from her position in the parlor. When he comes home from his first term at Salem House, the school to which Mr. Murdstone sends him, David notes, “God knows how infantine the memory may have been, that was awakened within me by the sound of my mother’s voice in the old parlor, when I set foot in the hall” (101). The narrative construction of David’s memory is complex; in referring to a time in his childhood, he notes how he then reflected on an earlier, “infantine” reminiscence of his mother, all the while recalling back from an adult perspective these two separate childhood episodes. What remains constant, though, is the house as a site. No matter how David’s psychology changes, he can always connect it to 32 Here I’m using Henri Lefebvre’s categories of space to tease out the complexities of David’s relationship to the house. Material space represents “experienced space”: the physicality of walls, doors, houses. Representational spaces refer to “lived space” and the emotions that we attach to certain spaces, such as feelings of security and warmth sitting by the fire. See Lefebvre’s The Production of Space (1974), p. 33. 45 the materiality of his childhood home. However, this materiality is always already wrapped up in the ideology of the home—it is not only the old parlor that he remembers (and all the associations of blissful days with his mother and Peggotty) but his mother’s voice in the old parlor. It is both the materiality of the house as a constant framework for memory and the emotional connection Blunderstone provides to his mother and Peggotty that makes it an appropriate structuring device for David’s narrative reflections. II. While the Blunderstone house and tour give the reader a glimpse into the early development of David’s private identity, the Yarmouth boat-house provides his first challenge to this model. When David visits the Peggotty family at Yarmouth, the house merits a tour upon David’s first introducing it. After describing the outside, David takes the reader through the inside, closely following the kind of tour he took when he first visited. If it had been Aladdin’s palace, roc’s egg and all, I suppose I could not have been more charmed with the romantic idea of living in it…. It was beautifully clean inside, and as tidy as possible. There was a table, and a Dutch clock, and a chest of drawers, and on the chest of drawers there was a tea-tray with a painting on it of a lady with a parasol…. The tray was kept from tumbling down, by a bible…. On the walls there were some common colored pictures, framed and glazed, of scripture subjects; such as I have never seen since in the hands of pedlars, without seeing the whole interior of Peggotty’s brother’s house again, at one view…. All this, I saw in the first glance after I crossed the threshold—childlike, according to my theory—and then Peggotty opened a little door and showed me my bedroom. It was the completest and most desirable bedroom ever seen—in the stern of the vessel… (38) As other critics have noted, the tour of this house supports Dickens’ description of the Peggotty household’s character as domestic idyll, a model for happy familial relations 46 and home life. 33 But it also provides a structural framework on which David can mark his psychological development as well as the progression of the narrative itself. This tour, more than any of the others, really reveals David’s childhood mind, but it also demonstrates the ways in which his perspective, and therefore his concept of home, becomes layered as he moves through his life. The tour here displays David’s mentality at the time by moving from object to object and recreating the way he saw the house and, therefore, his feelings as a child. The boat-house provides a material object that David the narrator can use to reflect and illustrate his youthful perspective. When he first sees the boat, David recalls how “charmed” he was with the “romantic idea of living in it,” emphasizing his youthful perspective on the house. He refers specifically to The Arabian Nights, a collection of medieval middle-eastern stories particularly popular during the nineteenth-century 34 and specifically significant to David, who reads The Arabian Nights in his little library and who becomes a kind of Scheherazade himself at Salem House, both key episodes in his childhood. His tour of Mr. Peggotty’s household begins with this reference and the childlike captivation that David experiences in visiting the boat. David even specifically notes his point of view when he was taking the tour for the first time, explaining that when he saw it all, he was “childlike, according to my theory” (38). He emphasizes that 33 Specifically, Natalie McKnight interprets the Yarmouth house as a “fanciful house” that “offers a romantic, adventurous, playful, snug setting for an ideal, if non-traditional, family” (177). Chris Vanden Bossche goes even further, calling the boat-house David’s “fundamental emblem of the domestic idyll, ‘the perfect abode’” (34). 34 English editions of the Nights multiplied during the nineteenth century, with several translations directly from the Arabic (Forster (1802), Scott (1811), Torrens (1838), Lane (1839-41)), plus an illustrated Pictorial Penny Arabian Nights' Entertainments in 1845. Andrea Allingham notes that Dickens probably read the six-volume Scott edition of 1811. 47 his impressions were those of the Child David, using Mr. Peggotty’s house as both an indication and element of the creation of his childhood psyche. That is, on one hand, the ship-house functions as a mirror-object that allows David to reflect the mind of his youth; his “childlike” mind is revealed when it perceives the house as fanciful. On the other, this passive “seeing” is really an active “looking,” a constructive activity that simultaneously forms his views of domesticity while David constructs a certain image of home life in Yarmouth, based largely on his relationship with little Em’ly. The tour itself provides a starting point upon which the narrator will build in illustrating his development in relation to the material and ideological house. The child’s view will be layered upon and changed with each additional visit to the boat-house. David sets up this structure within this early tour, demonstrating how the narrator will link the various stages of his domestic identity by connecting his first experience with the Yarmouth house with his later life and with his adult psychology, noting that the paintings in Mr. Peggotty’s cottage were “such as I have never seen since… without seeing the whole interior of Peggotty’s brother’s house again, at one view” (38). His projection of thoughts about the house into the future adds not one but two extra layers to his psychology at that moment—on top of the first layer of his childhood psyche, when he first saw the Peggotty household, he adds a midpoint psychology, when David may have seen paintings that reminded him of this home, and then a final viewpoint, as David the Author’s mind recalls all of these events from a future point. This layering illustrates all at once the palimpsest that is David’s psychology—early moments create later moments that recall these earlier moments and make David’s identity seem continuous. 48 Significantly, the layering of David’s mind is connected to the house, emphasizing the importance of domesticity in creating his psyche. When David returns to Yarmouth the first time, he builds on his initial impressions by reminding the reader of his previous experience. He describes the house only in terms of his first visit, noting that “[i]t looked just the same, except that it may, perhaps, have shrunk a little in my eyes,” a description that depends solely on the prior passage for its content (126). No new information appears here; instead, the details about the house, that it was “the same” or had possibly “shrunk,” are all relative to the earlier description provided in the tour. This episode places further importance upon the original house tour, since the reader must return again to that passage for any real information, and it also makes explicit the way in which David’s mind and narrative are layering one experience upon another in order to create deeper impressions. Moreover, the mental and narrative energy David expends in re-describing and thinking about the Yarmouth house underlines the importance of houses in general to his psyche. Before this second visit, David reports to Steerforth on the wonder of Yarmouth, focusing solely on the house itself. He tells Mr. Peggotty that he will bring Steerforth to Yarmouth “to see your house,” and claims “[y]ou never saw such a good house, Steerforth. It’s made out of a boat!” (98). In this scene, David doesn’t remark on any of the inhabitants of the boat, only the dwelling itself, revealing the extent to which this material form lives in David’s mind, and, moreover, the extent to which the kind of life he lives at Yarmouth is defined by the materiality of the house. However, David’s second encounter with the Peggotty household suggests that this materiality gains meaning from another aspect of his experience there: his relationship with Little Em’ly. 49 While the boat-house looks the same from the outside, David notes that when he goes inside, it “did not impress me in the same way,” adding that “[p]erhaps it was because little Em’ly was not at home” (127). In fact, much of what David interprets as the house’s charm comes from Em’ly, revealing that what makes the house a home in David’s eyes is little Em’ly herself. Other critics have pointed out that the house’s snugness comes from its status as a boat, a fanciful dwelling that pleases precisely, as David says, because it “had never intended to be lived in on dry land” (37). 35 And it’s clear that the “charm” and “captivation” of the boat, for David, lies in its oddity. However, I am arguing that the domesticity of the boat, what makes it a home for David, lies in little Em’ly’s presence there. The first mention of the house as “snug” comes just as David is sitting by the fire with Em’ly on a seat “just large enough for us two” (40). It is the coziness of being close to Em’ly, a child who will soon reproduce the standards of ornamental femininity that David valued in his mother, that signifies domestic bliss to David. David also cites comments from other characters that support his feeling that Em’ly makes the boat-house a home. Later in the novel, Mr. Omer comments to David that “[Em’ly] has made a home out of that old boat, sir, that stone and marble couldn’t beat,” single-handedly attributing the domestic quality of the ship house to Em’ly (371). Even Mr. Peggotty, who knows the realities of domestic living in the boat-house, comments that little Em’ly “‘has been, in our house, what I suppose… no one but a little bright-eyed creetur can be in a house’” (267). On one level, Mr. Peggotty’s comment 35 In particular, McKnight argues that it is the house’s “theatricality in the face of very real threats that enhances [its] coziness” (173) and that in the Yarmouth dwelling “Dickens advocates the importance of imagination and creativity in building a happy home” (172). 50 reinforces the image of Em’ly as a beautiful Victorian ornament; “bright-eyed” and “little,” no one but she can infuse the boat with the comfort of home. But his ambiguity gets at one of the key paradoxes in little Em’ly’s position as homemaker—she doesn’t really do anything domestic. Mr. Peggotty “supposes” no one else could fill Em’ly’s role, but he also struggles to name exactly what it is she does. What is important for the construction of this home is what Em’ly can “be,” not “do.” Like Clara Copperfield before her, Em’ly’s domesticity is purely visual—she is the image of the angel in the house. David’s image of little Em’ly, constructed by his interpretations of her as well as the interpretations others share with David, not only positions her as a Victorian “angel,” but also defines domestic happiness in terms of this angelic passivity. David admits that he “made a very angel of her. If… she had spread a little pair of wings and flown away before my eyes, I don’t think I should have regarded it as much more than I had had reason to expect” (44). While he positions Em’ly as a literal angel, David also reads her as a figurative angel in the house, linking most of his happiness in Yarmouth to his experiences with her. When he remembers his first visit there, he thinks of how the two “sat, lovingly, on our little locker side by side;” he remembers reading to the unconventional family “with little Em’ly by my side” (44 – 5). Virtually all David’s memories of repose and happiness in the boat-house require Em’ly sitting passively by his side, just as he remembers his mother, Clara, reduced to an immobile, sitting object. In fact, whenever David is in the house at Yarmouth, Em’ly is sitting quietly by him. Within the house during this first key visit, David never records Em’ly speaking at all, and the only activity he describes comes upon David’s arrival, when she “wouldn’t let me 51 kiss her… but ran away and hid herself,” an action that achieves passivity in its very performance (38). Em’ly’s running away to hide herself takes her off the stage, prevents her from acting within the scene and reproduces feminine modesty, a core value for the decorative Victorian woman. While Em’ly is active with David on the flats of Yarmouth, she is always inactive while in the boat-house. As Em’ly grows up, she does begin to perform some domestic chores, but the narrator is vague about this work, noting only that “[s]he had tasks to learn and needle-work to do” and never portraying Em’ly performing these “tasks” (129). The only work she is pictured doing is needlework, an activity that easily fits into the middle-class paradigm of the passive, obedient, leisured lady. 36 David explains that during this visit, “[t]he best times were when she sat quietly at work in the doorway, and I sat on the wooden step at her feet, reading to her” (129). While Em’ly is working in these scenes, her work figures as a kind of leisure, and her “quiet” manner allows the emphasis to be on David’s reading, not her own activity. Once again, Em’ly is next to David, demonstrating that the contentedness David experiences as domestic harmony at Yarmouth is dependent upon having a beautiful, submissive woman by his side. Em’ly’s position as the passive angel reinforces what David has already learned about domesticity from his mother: the ornamental angel doesn’t perform significant and recognizable domestic work. Like Clara Copperfield and later, Dora Spenlow, Em’ly never runs the household. His worship of little Em’ly leads him to fantasize about 36 Thad Logan explains that handcrafts like needlework underwrote a complicated structure of class, since they were valued partially because they demonstrated that a woman had leisure time to produce them. While needlework bridged all classes (we often see Peggotty with her “work-box with Saint Paul’s upon the lid” (378)), the vagueness of the narrator’s description of Em’ly’s needlework leaves it in question. 52 marrying her and later contributes to his choice to marry Dora, another leisured ornament. Yet David’s early experiences with Peggotty, and his contact with her type of active and productive femininity, seem to haunt him, helping him to realize subconsciously that his fantasy of a marriage with the decorative but incapable Em’ly would not work in practice. When he and Em’ly accompany Peggotty and Barkis on their wedding trip, David imagines marrying Em’ly, “going away anywhere to live among the trees and in the fields,… children ever, rambling hand in hand through sunshine among flowery meadows, laying down our heads on moss at night…” (133). In David’s vision, the two never live in a house—they can only live among nature because his relationship to Em’ly does not address the realities of domestic life. With no one to manage a home, David can only imagine the two “children ever,” without responsibility, living in a Utopian nature that doesn’t require maintenance for its upkeep. The Yarmouth house’s coziness is so reliant on Em’ly’s presence that once she leaves, the boat is never the same. Mr. Peggotty must keep the boat open in order to keep Em’ly’s memory alive—to shut up the boat would be to condemn Em’ly, since she and the house are, in some ways, interchangeable. Em’ly’s image as pure Victorian ornament is destroyed once she engages with Steerforth, not only because she has exposed her sexuality, but more fundamentally because she has chosen to act; she steps beyond the bounds of passive ornament. 37 As a result of Em’ly’s loss of innocence and angelic status, the house surrenders its domestic aura of familiarity as well. As much as Mr. 37 Mary Poovey argues that “the link between vanity, domestic misery, and sexual infidelity emerges in relation to… David’s childhood sweetheart, Little Emily” (95). My contention, though, is that Em’ly’s ornamental identity (which I would not term “vanity”) actually produces domestic bliss, in David’s eyes. In fact, Em’ly’s choice to run off with Steerforth destroys her decorative status; it is not implicated in her position as the angel in the house. 53 Peggotty might want the boat to “look, day and night, winter and summer, as it has always looked,” its very character, like Em’ly’s, is irreparably damaged as a result of her fall (384). After wandering through Europe looking for Em’ly, Mr. Peggotty remarks that his old home is virtually unrecognizable: “I never could have thowt the old boat would have been so strange,” he tells David upon one of his returns (490). When Mr. Peggotty comes to visit David and Dora while searching for Em’ly, David thinks of “the picture of his deserted home, and the comfortable air it used to have in my childish eyes of an evening when the fire was burning, and the wind moaning round it, came most vividly into my mind” (595). David takes the reader back to the psychic landscape of his childhood and emphasizes his changing relationship to this site of domesticity; his eyes were “childish” precisely because they viewed the boat as “comfortable” in Em’ly’s presence. When he finally realizes that the domesticity he constructed as a child is gone forever, the idyllic boat-house becomes a wasteland. When David comes to visit the house “before it was locked up,” he too notices the difference; where once “to hear the wind getting up out to sea… was like enchantment,” now “the wind, though it was low, had a solemn sound,” due primarily to the change that has occurred in little Em’ly (40; 615). Without her presence, the boat can no longer be a home. And once the Peggotty family leaves for Australia, the boat must be lost forever. Although the house will ostensibly be let to other renters, Mr. Peggotty comments that “‘’[t]is like to be long,’” and in terms of the narrative the boat is lost forever as a house (615). With Em’ly’s fall and final departure, the house loses its domesticity and drops out of the narrative entirely. The early experiences David has at Yarmouth lead him to idealize an innocent and naïve vision of home that requires only ornament and hides the work required to 54 maintain it. Significantly, though, for Dickens, David provides a microcosm of society, suggesting that this kind of femininity—unproductive, unreasonable and finally, untenable—forms one core of middle-class, Victorian femininity. Dickens here hints at the fundamental problem at the heart of middle-class domestic ideology: maintaining a respectable home requires significant female work, and yet this work must always be hidden behind a veneer of ephemeral leisure and passivity. While Clara Copperfield withers away under an extreme form of middle-class respectable femininity, Em’ly’s active choice to become Steerforth’s lover destroys her status as the domestic ornament. Both of these models end in devastation, and yet David’s appreciation of the decorative wife leads him directly to Dora, the quintessential domestic ornament with no capacity for work. With David’s past associations between domesticity and women, it seems inevitable that he marry someone like Dora who emulates both of his early loves: Clara Copperfield and little Em’ly. In the end, she will imitate their fates as well, for Dora’s inability to act will manifest itself in the fragility that will kill her. The principles that suggest comfort and coziness spring from the idea of the angel in the house, a contradictory philosophy whose groundwork is laid in the very first tour of the Yarmouth boat-house, and whose effects will continue to play out as David visits a new house, the home of his future wife, Dora Spenlow. III. Dora Spenlow’s childhood home is a third space that David recreates through a tour and that helps give a sense of progression to the narrative and its themes, but Dora’s example will finally drive home to the reader, if not David himself, the unsustainable 55 nature of the ideal feminine ornament. When David arrives to spend the weekend, he takes the reader on a tour of the Spenlow property. There was a lovely garden to Mr. Spenlow’s house…. There was a charming lawn, there were clusters of trees, and there were perspective walks that I could just distinguish in the dark, arched over with trellis-work, on which shrubs and flowers grew in the growing season. ‘Here Miss Spenlow walks by herself,’ I thought. ‘Dear me!’ We went into the house, which was cheerfully lighted up, and into a hall where there were all sorts of hats, caps, great-coats, plaids, gloves, whips, and walking-sticks. ‘Where is Miss Dora?’ said Mr. Spenlow to the servant. ‘Dora!’ I thought. ‘What a beautiful name!’ (329-330) The very specific kind of materiality that David encounters in his first look at the Spenlow home indicates the family’s respectability through a particular kind of middle- class consumption. The house is surrounded by both a “lovely garden” and a “charming lawn,” an indication that this house participates in the domestic ideal that held “the keeping of a good garden, like the upkeep of the interior, [as] evidence of an upright household” (Preston 205). 38 Once inside, David characterizes the home as “cheerful,” but only because it is “lighted up,” another indication that the Spenlow’s have enough income to spare on either candles or kerosene. 39 That the hall is filled with an abundance of outerwear indicates that the Spenlows own extra coats and hats and are sartorially fashionable, as well. David emphasizes the abundance by commenting that there were “all sorts of” clothing, suggesting the idea of luxury and disposable income. The 38 Rebecca Preston notes further that “amateur horticulture was promoted as… a domestic pleasure” and that “this was just as true of the ‘middling sort’” (196, 205). Moreover, David locates Dora in this space, further connecting the home’s proper domesticity to Dora’s presence since “all sorts of gardening were then thought appropriate activity for women, for ‘a genuine love for flowers promotes the love of home’” (Preston 205). 39 The source of the Spenlows’ light was likely candles or kerosene, since kerosene was “at mid-century the main fuel” (Flanders 208). The relative novelty of gas in a home in 1850 would likely have merited specification. However, the brightness of the home still connotes a certain amount of wealth, considering that “candles were expensive, and oil was both expensive and dangerous” (Flanders 208). 56 invocation of whips points to leisure time and the money required to keep a horse (or horses). The "great-coats," which are "heavy overcoat[s] of generous size," require large amounts of fabric (Picken 66). This clothing, along with the walking sticks and whips, also suggests that the Spenlows’ private behavior follows middle-class norms, for they not only take walks but bring along the proper accoutrements in order to walk in style. Upon his first entrance, then, David reads the Spenlow residence as an ideal home largely because of its loyalty to middle-class standards of domestic consumption and taste. In fact, this consumption is exactly what produces the intangible sense that the house is a home—cheerful lighting, charming lawns, fashionable clothing—and reveal that David’s appreciation relies heavily on middle-class standards of taste and respectability, both grounded in proper consumption. 40 These standards, though, produce and are produced by corresponding models for gendered behavior, particularly feminine ones. And, significantly, the other associations David emphasizes in his tour of the Spenlow house are those that relate to Dora. Because David’s relationships to houses are so emotionally charged and influenced by their associations with the women that inhabit them, he cannot re-present homes without simultaneously re-presenting the women that he links with them. Moreover, he cannot describe these places without revealing an emotional attachment that is connected to his feelings about these women. At this point in the narrative, David hasn’t yet met Dora, but he associates the house with her even before he’s gotten inside, imagining the gardens 40 Proper consumption was key to constructing a respectable home. Thad Logan notes that “[c]ommodities in Victorian England worked exceptionally well to articulate social meaning,” concluding that decorating a house with consumer goods “creates a social identity for the family while establishing an intimate environment for the members of the household” (92, 94). 57 as the place where Spenlow’s daughter walks. While the appropriateness of the house’s landscaping plays a key role in David’s appraisal of the home, Dora’s intuited presence in the gardens also gives the scenery its charm. Although this focus on Dora’s association with the house may indicate David’s feelings at the time—specifically, as some critics have argued, his predisposition to fall in love with her 41 —it more clearly shows the ways in which David constructs “home” through the display of an ornamental woman. In fact, David explicitly refers to the decorative aspect of Dora when he comments on her name as a “beautiful” one. While David may be predisposed to fall in love with Dora, he is also predisposed to read her as a decorative angel, and therefore, based on his experiences with his mother and Little Em’ly, as the key to the hominess of the Spenlow house. In spite of this initial tour, perhaps the most interesting fact about David’s association with Dora is that, of all his female relationships, it is the least mediated through the tour of the house. Since Dora becomes David’s first wife, it would seem appropriate for her to represent a kind of home for him. However, the cottage they share is one of the few residences that isn’t described in any detail whatsoever. When he moves into this new abode, David writes, “[w]e have removed, from Buckingham Street, to a pleasant little cottage very near the one I looked at, when my enthusiasm first came on” (523). Although he is not yet married to Dora when he first moves in, at no point within the narrative are there tours of either the inside or the outside, and the absence is a significant one. Instead of a tour, David provides a brief and disjointed list of some of the elements of the cottage, describing “a beautiful little house…, with everything so 41 In particular, Chris Vanden Bossche points out “David’s determination to fall in love with [Mr. Spenlow’s] daughter before he has even met her” (37). 58 bright and new; with the flowers on the carpets looking as if freshly gathered, and the green leaves on the paper as if they had just come out; with the spotless muslin curtains, and the blushing rose-coloured furniture, and Dora’s garden hat with the blue ribbon” (524 – 5). This list of trappings differs from the tour and sets up the new Copperfield cottage through a descriptive list, not a narrative movement through time and space. As a result, the dwelling appears more as disordered with household items that fail to come together as a home; the description of the cottage refuses to tell a temporal story of space and produce meaning. And this “refusal” of story relates to one simple fact: Dora, David’s “child-wife,” is unable to run a household, and chaos arises in the cottage as a result of a lack of housekeeping. Her incapacity to manage a home first becomes apparent when the couple searches for furnishings for the new cottage. Dora, who has previously been associated with luxury spending through the description of her family home, continues to engage in consumption that might suggest a kind of class status but provides little of practical use. David notes that, “when we go to see a kitchen fender or meat-screen, Dora sees a Chinese house for Jip, with little bells on the top, and prefers that” (523). Dora chooses a decorative object over a practical (and, arguably, necessary) purchase, and in the process she reveals that she cannot execute the pragmatic functions of a Victorian housewife. Simultaneously, she emphasizes her own ornamentality through her preference for the useless dog house, an item, like Dora, that exists only for its decorative value. 42 Once the 42 Elizabeth Langland argues that one “aspect of [Dora’s] managerial debacle [is] her inability to display their status adequately” (Nobody’s Angels 85). However, while Langland suggests that Dora’s mismanagement equates to a loss in class status, I am arguing that Dora knows too well how to display 59 pagoda is established in the cottage, its unsuitability becomes more evident, with “everybody tumbling over Jip’s Pagoda, which is much too big for the establishment” (525). Not only does Dora fail to make effective purchases for her home; her choices actually hinder the institution of a respectable dwelling for the married couple. 43 Dora continues to demonstrate her lack of skill by buying improperly or wastefully. She buys a fish for David that he relates “was too much for two” and “more than we can afford” because Dora can neither judge portion size nor understand household budgeting. The Copperfields’ home management proves both exceedingly wasteful and completely ineffective; David comments with wonder on the “extensive scale of our consumption of [butter]” as well as the “wonderful fact… that we never had anything in the house” (534). David doesn’t realize during his marriage, though, that the reason behind their “scrambling household arrangements” lies in Dora’s status as inert decoration (539). Her position as ornament solidifies even before their marriage, when she models her wedding attire for David, and Dora’s aunt tells David emphatically that “Dora is only to be looked at, and on no account to be touched” (525). Like Clara Copperfield before her, Dora is meant only to give visual pleasure, not to perform household tasks. All of Dora’s attempts to “‘be good’” and fulfill the role of mistress of the house fail precisely because she has been trained only to be seen, not to act. As a consequence, her labor can’t be genteel middle-class status, by purchasing objects that suggest only leisure and ornament and that help to disguise the work of running a household. 43 Dora’s misjudgment plays into a specifically Victorian fear about women’s control over household consumption. Logan claims that “femininity, decoration, and consumption were profoundly interwoven in Victorian cultural imaginary,” but that this connection produces an “anxiety about the ability of women to make responsible choices in the marketplace…. [T]heir relation to commodities was thought to require discipline in order to restrain their natural extravagance” (83, 90). 60 hidden and will always conflict with the middle-class display of leisure. When Dora makes tea for David and Traddles, David comments that “it was so pretty to see her do, as if she were busying herself with a set of dolls tea-things, that I was not particular about the quality of the beverage” (537). While making tea is a household ritual meant to be displayed, Dora’s qualities as a visual object overwhelm her childlike practical skills and thus spell out domestic failure. The beauty of her ritual in many ways dooms the quality of her work. Dora’s attempts fully to manage the home involve elaborate displays of labor, as David explains: “First of all, she would bring out the immense account-book, and lay it down upon the table, with a deep sigh…. Then she would take up a pen, and begin to write, and find a hair in it. Then she would take up another pen, and begin to write, and find that it spluttered” (538). Dora’s “heavy sigh” combined with excess amounts of trouble—pen after pen after pen—highlight the work she is doing and portray it as nearly unbearable to her. Significantly, David frames this portrait with his confession that “[s]ometimes, of an evening… I would lay down my pen and watch my child-wife trying to be good” (538). His voyeurism locks Dora into a visual economy and dooms her work to failure, for watching his wife perform household work—and committing it to narrative, no less—establishes an irreconcilable tension in the standards surrounding leisure and work in middle-class domestic femininity. It would seem, then, that the absence of a narrative tour here is more than an oversight: without a housekeeper, the material space of the house actually doesn’t exist. After his wedding, David emphasizes this illusory quality of his new home, “the house— our house—Dora’s and mine,” explaining “I am quite unable to regard myself as its master. I seem to be there, by permission of somebody else” (524). Indeed, David never 61 feels in control at this house, since he has no one to play the complementary role of mistress to his master. Without housekeeping abilities, Dora is not a complete woman; she is merely a child. And without housekeeping, a house is not a home. The house and women are mutually constituting: without keeping a house, a Victorian woman’s identity cannot be complete, and without a woman’s care, a Victorian house cannot become a home. Dora herself sums up the connection between material house, housekeeping, and woman as she argues with David over her household incompetence: ‘Oh, you cruel, cruel boy, to say I am a disagreeable wife!’ cried Dora. ‘Now, my dear Dora, you must know that I never said that!” ‘You said I wasn’t comfortable!’ said Dora. ‘I said the housekeeping was not comfortable.’ ‘It’s exactly the same thing!’ cried Dora. And she evidently thought so, for she wept most grievously. (531) Dora, childish, inexperienced, and, in David’s view, innocent, knows better than David that it is exactly the same thing. David’s life with Dora is like the life he imagined with Little Em’ly; while he dreamed of living out of doors and without a house with Em’ly, he ironically achieves this state of homeless living with Dora, in a union he describes as a “fairy marriage,” where the house no longer exists because it is not kept (525). But though David spends little narrative energy on describing the physicality of his house with Dora, he does write significant passages about material houses during this period. All the narrative domestic energy here, however, is spent on another female figure important to David: Agnes Wickfield. In fact, during his marriage to Dora, when David has finally given up expecting his wife to manage their home, he daydreams about “the contented days with Agnes, in the dear old house,” revealing early on that his attachment to Agnes cannot be separated from the home she manages (581). 62 IV. Unlike the other house tours, the tour of Mr. Wickfield’s house is stretched out over several pages, interspersed with the introduction of several key new characters (Uriah, Mr. Wickfield, and, of course, Agnes). This textual strategy allows for a detailed focus on the house itself and also positions each character in relation to it. When David first sees the house, he goes on at length with a description of the exterior, already setting up that it was “quite spotless in its cleanliness” (191). Because such cleanliness is a result of Agnes’ housekeeping abilities, as with the Spenlow house, the connection between the two cannot be read without attention to David’s later relationship with Agnes. While there is no mention of Agnes in this initial tour until she appears, there are plenty of details about the tidiness of the house, perhaps an even more important marker of Agnes’ presence in David’s mind. The tour begins on the outside of the house, and the first character both David and the reader encounter is Uriah Heep: At length we stopped before a very old house bulging out over the road…. It was quite spotless in its cleanliness. The old fashioned brass knocker on the low arched door, ornamented with carved garlands of fruit and flowers, twinkled like a star; the two stone steps descending to the door were as white as if they had been covered with fair linen; and all the angles and corners, and carvings and mouldings, and quaint little panes of glass, and quainter little windows, though as old as the hills, were as pure as any snow that ever fell upon the hills. When the pony-chaise stopped at the door, and my eyes were intent upon the house, I saw a cadaverous face appear at a small window on the ground floor (in a little round tower that formed one side of the house), and quickly disappear. The low arched door then opened, and the face came out. It was quite as cadaverous as it had looked in the window… (191) While the other house tours established physical details all at once, within the space of a paragraph or two, the Wickfield house tour takes pages and is fused with the introduction of new characters and plot developments. This first section not only begins to set the 63 scene for Agnes and her housekeeping abilities, but also introduces the central villain of the second half of the novel, Uriah Heep. The house tour functions efficiently here since it places each new character in a relationship with the house that reveals much about their identities and their function within the plot—which is to say, the ways their stories intersect with the Wickfield home. Uriah appears when David is outside of the Wickfield residence, and Uriah himself spends the majority of his time outside of the house, holding the pony-chaise’s horse, a fitting place for the man who destroys the domesticity of this dwelling. Uriah, the “cadaverous,” self-serving manipulator, is also associated here with the “round tower,” which David later realizes is the office where Uriah works. His “circular room” (193) is juxtaposed to the rest of the house, with its “angles and corners” that create the snug recesses and “quaintness” that provides some of the charm of this home. 44 From the start, the tour establishes Uriah as an outsider who exists in contrast to everything comfortable about the Wickfield home, an effect achieved by placing Uriah in certain spaces within (and, in his case, without) the house. The house tour, then, functions narratively to introduce characters by establishing them within their respective domestic spaces. The reciprocity between house and identity extends beyond the metaphorical, producing a metonymic relationship where the slippery roundness of the tower and Uriah’s manipulative deception are mutually reinforcing; Uriah’s residence in the tower makes it all the more sinister, and its unusual and uncomfortable characteristics help produce Uriah’s malicious personality. 44 A book published a bit later than David Copperfield suggests the commonness of the idea of angles, corners, and nooks as a metaphor for the coziness of British home life. John Timbs publishes Nooks and Corners of English Life, Past and Present, in 1867, and his preface states that “Pictures of the Domestic Manners of our forefathers, at some of the most attractive periods of English History, form the staple of the present volume” (iv). 64 As they enter the house, the narrative tour continues, tracing David’s footsteps as he and Betsy progress throughout the house to conduct their business. We got out; and… went into a long low parlor looking towards the street…. Opposite to the tall old chimney-piece, were two portraits: one of a gentleman with grey hair (though by no means an old man) and black eyebrows, who was looking over some papers tied together with red tape; the other, of a lady, with a very placid and sweet expression of face, who was looking at me. I believe I was turning about in search of Uriah’s picture, when, a door at the farther end of the room opening, a gentleman entered, at sight of whom I turned to first-mentioned portrait again, to make sure that it had not come out of its frame. But it was stationary; and as the gentleman [Mr. Wickfield] advanced into the light, I saw that he was some years older than when he had had his picture painted. …[W]e went into his room, which was furnished as an office, with books, papers, tin boxes, and so forth. It looked into a garden, and had an iron safe let into the wall; so immediately over the mantel-shelf, that I wondered, as I sat down, how the sweeps got round it when they swept the chimney. (191-192) This next section of the tour not only introduces Mr. Wickfield but also continues to hint subtly at Agnes’ presence. Mr. Wickfield’s placement within the tour is suspended between two rooms: the parlour, where his portrait hangs permanently, and his office, where he conducts his business. Significantly, though, this section begins to demonstrate the ways description and action are conflated within the narrative. For David, physical surroundings produce narrative as much as actions do. The physical aspects of the house provide background material within which David can construct a story; the room creates a setting for the introduction of Wickfield, and the paintings provide further insight into character. We see immediately from the portrait’s “papers tied together with red tape” that Wickfield must be involved with the law, and this furnishing also provides the initial description of Wickfield’s appearance. These functions are not unique to either David Copperfield or Charles Dickens; many, if not most, authors use setting in order to set a 65 scene or to support character development. In this passage, though, the alternation between plot action and description draws attention to the importance of the house setting to the story’s progression. Because the narrator keeps returning to descriptions of the house during the course of significant plot developments (e.g., the search for a school and boarding house for David), the reader can never forget where the characters are physically situated. As well, it becomes obvious that each character resides in his or her own area of the house, since it requires movement through the residence in order to meet them. The characters do not come to us; we must go to the characters and see them in their respective places within the house. But the descriptions in this house tour do even more than provide setting and character support. In this case, the descriptions actually generate narrative for David; that is, the house itself creates stories in David’s mind. While looking at the iron safe in Wickfield’s wall, David muses, “I wondered… how the sweeps got round it when they swept the chimney.” For David, the house doesn’t merely support the action taking place within it; it generates its own narratives and stimulates creativity. Describing the house is an active process of creating, not a passive one of recording. What better device to underscore this activity than the narrative tour, which forces both the reader and the narrator to move actively through the house and the narrative itself? After meeting Wickfield, David is left in his office while the lawyer and Betsey go in search of a boarding house for David. When they can’t find a suitable one, all agree that David should reside at the Wickfield residence, and they proceed to complete the tour of this house. 66 We accordingly went up a wonderful staircase; with a balustrade so broad that we might have gone up that, almost as easily; and into a shady old drawing- room, lighted by some three or four of the quaint windows I had looked up at from the street: which had old oak seats in them, that seemed to have come of the same trees as the shining oak floor, and the great beams in the ceiling. It was a prettily furnished room, with a piano and some lively furniture in red and green, and some flowers. It seemed to be all old nooks and corners; and in every nook and corner there was some queer little table, or cupboard, or bookcase, or seat, or something or other, that made me think there was not such another good corner in the room; until I looked at the next one, and found it equal to it, if not better. On everything there was the same air of retirement and cleanliness that marked the house outside. Mr. Wickfield tapped at a door in a corner of the paneled wall, and a girl of about my own age came quickly out and kissed him.… This was his little housekeeper, his daughter Agnes… She had a little basket-trifle hanging at her side, with keys in it; and looked, as staid and as discreet a housekeeper as the old house could have.… [She] proposed to my aunt that we should go upstairs and see my room. We all went together; she before us: and a glorious old room it was, with more oak beams, and diamond panes; and the broad balustrade going all the way up to it. I cannot call to mind where or when, in my childhood, I had seen a stained glass window in a church. Nor do I recollect its subject. But I know that when I saw her turn round, in the grave light of the old staircase, and wait for us, above, I thought of that window; and that I associated something of its tranquil brightness with Agnes Wickfield ever afterwards. (193 – 194) In this final section of the tour we meet Agnes Wickfield, whose presence has been foreshadowed throughout with references to her housekeeping. Like the Yarmouth boat- house, the Wickfield home connotes snugness with its “old nooks and corners,” queer and quaint details. But unlike Mr. Peggotty’s abode, this house’s domestic qualities are directly attributed to Agnes’s housekeeping. David saw Em’ly’s presence as one of the cornerstones of the Yarmouth house’s hominess, but here he sees Agnes’s substance as the origin of her house’s domesticity. Everything in the drawing-room has an “air of retirement and cleanliness” that can be traced to its mistress, the “staid” and “discreet” housekeeper with a basket of keys at her side. In Brooksian terms, this tour creates a 67 “repetition with a difference”: both Em’ly and Agnes are responsible for creating a feeling of home in their houses, but Agnes’s active creation of domestic bliss adds a new layer to the creation of place: it takes a woman (or girl) like Agnes to make a home, and the narrative tour reveals Agnes not only to be the creator of this home’s tranquility, but indeed makes her the agent who completes the narrative tour itself. David solidifies Agnes’s association with the house by connecting her to another architectural element: the stained glass window. As before, here the description of the house generates narrative for David, even if it is in the form of a fuzzy memory that he can’t place. But this passage also embeds Agnes in the house by transforming her into one of its timeless, tranquil fixtures, static, objectified, and unreal. For the moment, Agnes becomes a part of the house, fixed in the “grave light of the old staircase,” perpetually leading David on a tour of the house and adding her “tranquil brightness” to the atmosphere of its space. He continues to think of Agnes as the peaceful essence of the Wickfield home throughout the novel, suggesting that “my old association of her with the stained-glass window in the church” foretold her “sacred presence in my lonely house” once Dora has died (641). David’s elision of Agnes and the house hints early on at the key to Agnes’s position as ideal Victorian woman; as the vision in the stained glass window, she achieves a kind of display status, yet the nature of this display is more complex than Clara, Em’ly, and Dora’s identities. For Agnes’s femininity exhibits selfless dedication instead of conspicuous ornament; where Dora and her progenitors called attention to their beauty for its own sake, Agnes’s visual qualities always spring from the traits that produce her housekeeping: care for others, neatness, and selflessness. 68 However, even Agnes, the woman that the text positions as the most “proper” Victorian woman and the one it deems most appropriate for David, manifests contradictions and tensions within her gender role. The narrative must balance Agnes’s necessary status as ornament with her obvious active work, and therefore Agnes becomes the frozen, illusory image in stained glass even as she leads the tour through the Wickfield home. Most significantly, though, the narrative tour itself works to reconcile the conflict between activity and ornament; after all, the tour exists to turn description into viewing, to produce display. Therefore, as Agnes leads this tour, she is simultaneously paralyzed by it in the stained glass window, and all her work in keeping the house becomes an exhibition itself, taking attention away from her work and re- instating display as the cornerstone of Victorian domesticity and womanhood. The unique narrative structure of this tour—descriptions of setting interspersed with plot development and character introductions—both heightens the importance of the house tour and provides a model for narrative progression that emphasizes the importance of domesticity to this novel in particular and textual movement in general. David’s movement through the house actually moves the plot forward, but this narrative movement is not simply a matter of alternating between description and action. The descriptions of the Wickfield house are themselves forms of action; David’s experience of the physicality of the house produces narrative as much as characters’ actions do. Moreover, the progress of the tour parallels David’s forward movement in the novel. The quiet corners and nooks in the drawing-room are not only background tapestry; they necessitate a story that David tells about the value of queerness and the delight in discovery. The tour’s advancement from outside to inside and from low to high also 69 produces a plot that begins on the street, moving inside into the parlour on the ground floor, ascending to the drawing room on the second floor and ending with David’s room on the third floor. This development reads like a metaphor for David’s advancing movement through life—an exile from domesticity who looks for a home, and after false starts, finally finds it with Agnes, moving from low (at his lowest, in the workhouse to which Murdstone sends him) to the heights of the accomplished gentleman author. In this important tour, the house becomes a microcosm for both David’s life and the narrative itself. While providing an important thematic metaphor for David’s domestic journey, this tour also exposes the complications in the way narrative functions. Over the course of David’s first experience with this home, he moves forward within the house but also backtracks, alternating between rooms and the characters they contain. After moving from outside with Uriah, to the office with Mr. Wickfield, and then to the drawing-room and his bedroom with Agnes, he returns to the drawing-room, enters the dining room, returns again to the drawing-room, leaves the house again to wander on the streets, and finally ends this long section by re-ascending to his new bedroom. While David starts outside on the ground floor and ends inside, three floors up in the most personal room in the house, the bedroom, this tour does not progress linearly. It takes several reversals and much movement back and forth to lead David to his ending point, his bedroom. The tour unsettles a linear model of narrative and demonstrates the way narrative progression is rarely straightforward, revealing the necessary textual complexities required of the novel. The repeated return to the drawing-room also functions thematically by making this room the centerpiece of the house and of David’s experiences within it. The 70 drawing-room is certainly Agnes’s domain; she appears magically from one of its corners, and since we never see her own bedroom, it’s almost as if she lives perpetually in a nook there. A traditionally female space, the drawing-room makes sense as the center of Agnes’s life. This is less true of David, whose life at this point is full of education and study, which he conducts in his bedroom. We might expect to see more description of his “airy old room,” where David ostensibly spends much of his time “sturdily conning my books” (199). Yet, in this tour and in later scenes, most of the action in the Wickfield house takes place in the drawing-room. This emphasis on the central female room in the house is also central to David’s identity; while he is getting an education in order to prepare for a career, he is also learning about home life and experiencing a new form of domesticity, where the mistress of the house also runs it. Overall, the Wickfield house functions narratively to help David organize his story. The importance of domesticity, represented by the houses David encounters, becomes even more obvious as David conveys the progress of his life, a temporal process, to the reader with a spatial marker, the house. Upon leaving the Wickfield residence for London, David explains that he had to take his “parting from the old house, which Agnes had filled with her influence…. The days of my inhabiting there were gone, and the old time was past” (243). Leaving the house signifies a notable change in David’s course; it is not just that his residence there was “gone,” an entire period, “the old time,” is gone as well. By leaving this physical space, David leaves a temporal space as well, and he marks this movement through the figure of the house. His rhetorical choice reveals the importance of home to the way David envisions his life. He organizes his life spatially, not chronologically, for he categorizes the periods of his life by which 71 house he lived in at the time. While talking with Agnes some time after he has left Canterbury, David thinks, “Conversing with her, and hearing her sing, was such a delightful reminder to me of my happy life in the grave old house she had made so beautiful” (320). Again, David associates the house with Agnes, and her presence with the beauty of the house. But he also associates this period of his life most strongly with the Wickfield house. He remembers not just his happy life, but his “happy life in the grave old house.” Among all the descriptors that David could choose to refer to this period—his life in Canterbury, his time at Dr. Strong’s school, for example—he settles on the house he lived in as the period’s key modifier, demonstrating in the process that he organizes his thinking about his life around the figure of the house—and, moreover, that the figure of the house is always produced through the figure of a woman. While the house serves to indicate forward temporal movement, it can also re- vision the past. Once David has established himself at the Wickfield residence, he notes that “there was such an influence in Mr. Wickfield’s old house… I began to feel my uneasiness softening away. As I went up to my airy old room, the grave shadow of the staircase seemed to fall upon my doubts and fears, and to make the past more indistinct” (199). The house, already proven to be a repository for memory, also has the power to change those memories. Living in an idealized Victorian home allows David to erase his more dismal domestic memories, actually transforming his past. Significantly, though, the uneasiness that David refers to here is his fear that the boys at Doctor Strong’s school will discover his decidedly un-domestic knowledge of prison, the streets, poverty and homelessness. What makes David feel more secure is having a traditional middle-class 72 house to return to, supposing that this new form of domesticity conforms to what the other boys have experienced. While David learns a new form of domesticity at the Wickfield home, it will take him some time to come to the conclusion that what makes this household a home is Agnes. As the initial tour of this house suggests, Agnes and the Wickfield home are mutually constructive—that is, Agnes as Victorian woman wouldn’t exist without the home, and the house wouldn’t be the home it is without Agnes. Not only does David connect the feeling of the house with Agnes’s presence, he also rhetorically elides the difference between Agnes and her home. In a conversation after David’s departure for London, Agnes tells David “that the house had not been like itself since [David] had left it.” More important than this comment, though, is David’s reaction, when he claims that “I am sure I am not like myself when I am away…. I seem to want my right hand, when I miss you” (238). David subtly slips from talking about the house to talking about Agnes; when Agnes says the house isn’t the same without David, she implies that he makes the house what it is. David responds that he isn’t the same without the house, suggesting that the house makes him who he is and setting up yet another model where house and resident are mutually constituting. However, David then comments that he misses Agnes, not the house, a slip that ends up equating Agnes and the Wickfield residence. In reality, then, it is not the house that makes him who he is, but Agnes. Yet these two entities are so inextricably linked, David can’t make these comments without including both of them. He can slide from the house to Agnes because for David, they are essentially one and the same. 73 The language David uses to describe both the Wickfield house and Agnes most often connotes a nearly religious peace – the house is “grave” and “solemn,” and Agnes is “tranquil” and “staid.” After David’s engagement to Dora, he writes to Agnes, all the while “cherishing a general fancy as if Agnes were one of the elements of my natural home. As if, in the retirement of the house made almost sacred to me by her presence, Dora and I must be happier than anywhere” (411). The house is sacred to David because Agnes is sacred; David refers to her as his “good angel” (311, 430). This description demonstrates one of the key contradictions in the image of domesticity that David creates around Agnes, a contradiction that lies at the heart of the tension between activity and ornament: Agnes’s active housekeeping is always hidden. While evidence of her work is always present, David rarely paints her performing these tasks. By hiding the work that Agnes does, David not only connects this vision of domesticity to ones he’s created before, he also conforms closely with domestic ideology of the period that refused to acknowledge the presence of work in the private sphere. David’s earlier models for home life, based on his experiences with his mother, Little Em’ly and Dora, depended upon a beautiful but passive woman creating the atmosphere of home. His new model, based upon his experiences with Agnes, is not much different: Agnes fulfills this central role, and while David sees that she is directly and actively responsible for keeping the house, he effaces the work she performs by rarely portraying it. In fact, he actively constructs Agnes’s work as silent and invisible, writing that “[w]herever Agnes was, some agreeable token of her noiseless presence seemed inseparable from the place.… I knew who had done all this [housework], by its seeming to have quietly done itself” (430). Agnes provides a conventional solution to the contradiction that David 74 encounters, since she incorporates the competent housekeeper with middle-class feminine passivity. In fact, the woman David portrays in Agnes conforms perfectly to Victorian standards; women were supposed to keep the details of the household to themselves to avoid, as Judith Flanders argues, forcing recognition of work within the private sphere. Agnes’ tranquility participates in the discourse of domestic ideology, where, as Ruskin puts it, “the true nature of home… is the place of Peace” (91). However, this peacefulness is also David’s way of incorporating his previous domestic ideals with his new one. While earlier in his life, David merely repeated his mother’s model of domesticity with Little Em’ly and Agnes, his narrative finally achieves a repetition with a difference in Agnes, who adds invisible housekeeping to the image of the angel in the house. Her work’s invisibility allows the repetition to be an addition, instead of a qualitative change in the kind of woman David admires. 45 The complex houses and narrative of house tours in David Copperfield reveal not only the key thematics and structure of this Bildungsroman, but also the deep significance of the house in David’s vision of his life. Dickens uses tours of houses in several other novels as well, including, among others, Wemmick’s castle in Great Expectations and Dombey’s renovated house in Dombey and Son. This phenomenon is not unique to Dickens, either; many narrators, like Brontë’s narrator in Shirley (1849), who invites the reader to “Step into the neat little garden house… [and] walk forward into the little parlour” (6), create the domestic spaces of their respective novels through these tours and 45 While Elizabeth Langland argues that, until Agnes, David has not realized that “the competent housekeeper is the angel,” I’m suggesting that David never learns this lesson (Nobody’s Angels 87). In fact, David’s erasure of Agnes’s housekeeping allows him to continue to see these two roles, housekeeper and leisured ornament, as mutually exclusive. In Langland’s terms, David’s omissions do “[remystify] the domestic hearth angel,” but they do so quite simply, by avoiding the question of women’s household work at all (87). 75 imbue the house with increasing significance. What is compelling about the tour as device is that it creates both a thematic and structural framework that, I am arguing, serves to illustrate a new gendered topography of the house and the importance of this topography for Victorian identity and narrative. Chapter two will continue to explore these domestic issues, arguing that, while the house limits and circumscribes women’s identity choices, having a measure of unchecked control over a home provides nineteenth-century women like Emma Woodhouse and Lucilla Marjoribanks with an agency they might otherwise not enjoy. 76 Chapter 2: Producing the Social through the House: Emma and Miss Marjoribanks Mrs. Beeton’s Book of Household Management opens with two curious analogies between the private space of home and the public space of commerce and politics. First, in her preface, Isabella Beeton reveals her motivation for compiling this volume of advice for contemporary housewives, noting that “[m]en are now so well served out of doors,— at their clubs, well-ordered taverns, and dining-houses, that in order to compete with the attractions of these places, a mistress must be thoroughly acquainted with the theory and practice of cookery, as well as be perfectly conversant with all the other arts of making and keeping a comfortable home” (3). In Beeton’s estimation, the household arts are a matter of struggle with the public world; the mistress must “compete” with public institutions for the attention of her husband, much as her husband likely competes in the marketplace to make a living. The analogy suggests the public side of private homekeeping: the standards and examples set by public displays of domesticity are what condition the rules of home life. Moreover, the mistress, that paean of private life, in fact relies significantly on knowledge of the public realm to perform her household duties. Second, and perhaps even more remarkable, is the analogy with which Mrs. Beeton opens the handbook itself: “As with the COMMANDER OF AN ARMY, or the leader of any enterprise, so is it with the mistress of a house” (7, capitals in original). This simile suggests several possible connections between the private life of home and the public arena. Certainly, the housewife’s role in the home parallels the roles of significant leaders in public life as she serves as the household’s head. However, the comparison also gives weight to the job of mistress—as important as the commander of an army is, 77 “so is it” with the chatelaine. In comparing the two roles, Beeton manages to publicize the role of mistress; she (and her work) should be acknowledged just as a military leader must. Coupled with Beeton’s analogy in the preface, this correspondence, at the very least, indicates that in the home, the public and the private cannot be analyzed apart from each other. Moreover, these parallels illustrate the public side of private life, underlining the fact that the business of the home is a very public business indeed. Discussions of nineteenth-century women and the house have generally been dominated by a distinction between public and private spaces, an analytical tool that has been hotly contested over the past several decades. Many recent critics have challenged the fact that “the separate spheres framework has come to constitute one of the fundamental organizing categories, if not the organizing category of modern British women’s history” by arguing that “there is often no clear demarcation between the male/public realm and the female/private realm, and thus binary oppositions dissolve” (Vickery 299, Elbert 1). In this chapter, I propose to build on this recent scholarship by abandoning the separate spheres framework in an attempt to discover the ways in which nineteenth-century middle-class women participated in diverse aspects of their communities through the management of a household. I argue that the house provides a fruitful site for exploring a paradigm of gender organization in the nineteenth-century novel that is based not on a binary distinction between public and private but on the concept of the social. For my analysis, the social represents the nexus of the public and the private, incorporating both and not reducible to either. Using the history of public and private domains that Hannah Arendt presents in The Human Condition, a theory that 78 has gone largely undiscussed within the separate spheres conversation, 46 I propose to read the house as a site where distinctions between public and private first break down and the social is produced. Arendt argues that with the modern age comes the invention of the social, which is “neither private nor public, strictly speaking,” and she defines this realm as “the admission of household and housekeeping activities to the public realm” (45). Indeed, Arendt claims that “[t]he emergence of society—the rise of housekeeping, its activities, problems, and organizational devices—from the shadowy interior of the household into the light of the public sphere, has not only blurred the old borderline between private and political, it has also changed almost beyond recognition the meaning of the two terms and their significance for the life of the individual and the citizen” (38). The social appears when the activities related to family maintenance gain enough importance to be seen and discussed in public. As a result, the public realm, which Arendt defines through its traditional, Classical history in Ancient Greece, becomes less about individual political action and more about collective community activities. While Arendt argues that the social has devoured both the political and private realms, it seems that the political has not disappeared as much as it has become only one of many possible arenas of action, “a function of society” that is only one part of the social realm (33). She goes on to claim that because society expects certain behaviors from its members, it therefore normalizes them. She no longer sees a public realm where one can distinguish oneself through 46 In fact, the only critic I’ve found that mentions the idea of the “social” is Denise Riley, and while she discusses the concept in Am I That Name? (1988), she never mentions or cites Hannah Arendt. 79 political action, but “the utter extinction of the very difference between the private and public realms, the submersion of both in the sphere of the social” (69). Arendt’s theory of the social is notoriously amorphous, and scholars have defined and interpreted it in diverse ways. Among these varying readings of Arendt’s work, though, one interpretation of the social remains constant: its negative aspect as the element that “keeps us from our lost freedom” because it requires conformity (Pitkin 52). Hanna Pitkin traces the history of the idea of the social in Arendt’s work, concluding that its definition evolves in layers throughout her scholarship. Pitkin associates the social with the myth of the Blob, the all-consuming monster, as a force that “is best seen not as an objective fact but as a matter of attitude and outlook,” and then as an attitude that “is characterized by individual isolation and consequent helplessness, loss of reality and natural pleasures, and meaninglessness” (56, 78). Likewise, Seyla Benhabib defines the social as “an amorphous, anonymous, uniformizing reality” (95). Both critics interpret Arendt’s references to housekeeping on a large scale, linking them to the growth of capitalism and a market economy; Pitkin writes that “the rise of the social, then, seems to mean the development of a complex economy…. When what used to be called housekeeping goes large-scale and collective” (54), and Benhabib explains that one of the definitions of the social is “the growth of a capitalist commodity exchange economy” (95). I intend to interpret Arendt’s discussion of the role of housekeeping in the social more literally and microcosmically. That is, I believe that viewing the rising visibility of “household and housekeeping activities” at a local level, where women use the maintenance of a house as a way to create community and gain agency, opens up a new positive space within what Arendt calls the social, helps explain the complex gender 80 power dynamics that surround the house, and recovers Arendt’s theory for a feminist purpose, reclaiming her reputation from the disparaging remarks of critics who have categorized her, as Adrienne Rich once did, as “a female mind nourished on male ideology” (qtd. in Honig 2). In my analysis, I will define the social as the process of making domesticity, domestic functions, and housekeeping public. That is, whenever a woman performs household duties for viewing, when she keeps house or pursues domestic activities not for the private enjoyment of her family but precisely for others in the community to see, she is creating the social. The chatelaine literally makes housekeeping public, allowing and encouraging the community to witness the smooth running of a home in order to relate to others in society. Far from inactive objects of observation, women who participate in the social can be seen as actors. Central to the production of the social, then, is this act of being seen, of making the activities of the home, and therefore the activities of the women who perform them, visible. The production of the social, therefore, provides women a platform on which to engage in public realms. It gives them an arena within which to communicate and interact with others, and it provides common ground among women as well as between women and the imposing social world. Whereas Arendt bemoaned this common ground as a conformity that threatened individuality, I would like to argue that conformity has a positive side, creating solidarity among women and providing them with tools for gaining agency. The production of the social in my argument then results in society, which I define as the complex interactions between people within a community. Arendt seems to use the terms “society” and “social” interchangeably, but I will distinguish between the two; the social is the 81 performance of domestic functions for others’ viewing, while society is the network of relationships that is created when multiple women participate in the social. Jane Austen’s Emma and Margaret Oliphant’s Miss Marjoribanks are uniquely situated to reveal the production of society while also complicating conventional wisdom about Arendt’s vision of the social. Throughout their reception histories, the two novels have been casually compared based mainly on their heroines’ personalities. Q. D. Leavis rediscovered Miss Marjoribanks in the 1960s, and in her introduction to a new edition of Miss Marjoribanks she compares Oliphant’s work to Austen’s Emma. While the two novels follow similar plot lines, each containing a young, single, and motherless protagonist who runs her father’s house and participates in the social realm, Leavis contrasts the title characters’ personalities, arguing that “Emma is… a basically conventional girl, but spoilt…. Lucilla is very different: with a ‘mind made to rule’” (17). The tendency to compare Emma and Miss Marjoribanks and the two heroines continues with the Colbys’ seminal volume, The Equivocal Virtue: Mrs. Oliphant and the Victorian Literary Market Place (1966). Again, the personalities of the two women serve as the center of this comparison: “Lucilla Marjoribanks is the spiritual grand-daughter of Jane Austen’s Emma Woodhouse” (65). While these comparisons are not without merit, what is perhaps more striking in the novels are the uncanny resemblances between the heroines’ relationships to houses and domestic space. These two characters can, in fact, be read as case studies for examining nineteenth-century middle-class women’s relationships to the home and their engagement with the social. Both Emma and Miss Marjoribanks participate in both public and private spheres—indeed, they both elide the distinctions between these two arenas—by virtue of their status as unmarried mistresses 82 of houses. These single women enjoy unique privileges, but they also illustrate the ways in which many nineteenth-century middle-class women gained social power through managing a home. As these two novels feature heroines who are unmarried (and therefore not subject to a husband’s demands) yet who are also mistresses of houses, they present singular situations that, because of their singularity, make all the more graphic the ways women could use their homes in order to produce the social. The privileges and agency derived from managing a house, that is, are unobscured in these two novels by the presence of a husband whose power would overwhelm the women’s own. In fact, the issue of visibility lies at the heart of the connection between the public and the private, for by being observed, Victorian woman are able to decrease their position as “ghosts,” a term Vanessa Dickerson uses to describe the invisibility of Victorian women’s lives. 47 By using their houses, housekeeping, and the authority they derive from their status as chatelaines, these two protagonists can emerge into their communities and help create the social realm in which they then participate and whose functions they can also manipulate. While I will discuss the unique privileges these single women enjoy, I am also arguing that their situations in fact provide a window into the social power that many nineteenth- century married women wielded through the exercise of house management. However, because the woman’s gaining of control over a house was a common by-product of a middle-class marriage, houses and husbands are often mixed up in a tangled web of 47 Dickerson’s argument in Victorian Ghosts in the Noontide: Women Writers and the Supernatural (1996) is that “the ghost corresponded more particularly to the Victorian woman’s visibility and invisibility” because these women are “[r]obbed of place, of space, of substance” (5, 4). She goes on to claim that “the Victorian woman paled in the real, the material, the business world” (4). 83 relationships that obscures the degree to which household management served as women’s avenue to social power. These two texts provide a clearer picture of the importance of the house and housekeeping in creating society by showing how two single women achieve authority more easily through their less restricted access to the realm of the social. Both Emma Woodhouse and Lucilla Marjoribanks hold a unique position within the middle-class social hierarchy as unmarried young women who run substantial households; both have stepped into this role as a result of their mothers’ untimely deaths. While their assumption of the role of chatelaine follows nineteenth-century logic, even within these novels characters express uneasiness about the supposedly unchecked power this role confers. Their situations, however uncommon, are certainly not unique, yet there are subtle hints throughout both texts that reveal an anxiety about young single women running a house. This anxiety speaks to the privileges and opportunities being a chatelaine offered. In Emma, Mr. Knightley expresses his unease with Emma’s access to power, noting that “Ever since she was twelve, Emma has been mistress of the house and of you all” (23, emphasis mine). If his comment subtly illustrates his disapproval of Emma’s sphere of influence, it also pointedly links being mistress of the house to being mistress of human beings in general, and indeed, Emma proves this equation to be true. Miss Marjoribanks, more experienced and cunning than Emma, clearly understands both this power and the anxiety it can produce. She freely chooses her chaperone, Mrs. Chiley, an old woman and good friend, because she will not interfere with the younger woman’s plans. She tells her father, Dr. Marjoribanks, “I must have a chaperone, you know…. I don’t say it is not quite absurd; but then, at first, I always make it a point to 84 give in to the prejudices of society” (51). By seeming to limit her power, she avoids losing any of her agency. She even foresees the rector’s attempt to force a duenna on her and manipulates him into withdrawing his suggestion. Both novels, then, set up a sense of anxiety early on that is directly related to the unusual amount of power that these women protagonists wield within their societies, a power that derives from their management of a house and that allows them to manipulate societal expectations and norms. More generally, these narratives support the idea that control over a house confers agency and privileges by representing discussions where marriage is conflated with gaining a house. In Emma, Mrs. Weston’s marriage is described as beneficial for her because she now has “a house of her own”; Mr. Knightley remarks on “‘how very acceptable it must be at Miss Taylor’s time of life to be settled in a home of her own’” (3, 5). Part of the comedy in this scene derives from Mr. Woodhouse’s misunderstanding about Miss Taylor’s position. He scoffs at the idea that she would want to be settled in her own place, exclaiming, “‘A house of her own! but where is the advantage of a house of her own? This is three times as large’” (3). Mr. Woodhouse either doesn’t see or doesn’t choose to acknowledge the advantages of a woman’s having control over a domestic space; he recognizes only the literal level, comparing the two houses by size. Certainly, Miss Taylor desires to be “independent” and to leave her servile status as a governess behind, but her marriage promises more than a rise in rank since she gains control over a house. In fact, in the early discussions of the new Mrs. Weston’s situation, there is little acknowledgement of any feelings she might have for Mr. Weston. This is not to say that she doesn’t have any, but that other characters agree that gaining a house is 85 a key benefit to marrying. When Mrs. Weston imagines that Knightley is courting Jane Fairfax, she tells Emma, “‘perhaps the greatest good he could do… would be to give Jane such a respectable home’” (146). Mrs. Weston, coming from a similar situation and having recently gained a home through her husband, understands that the “greatest good” for an unmarried, houseless woman comes from gaining a household to run and therefore the ability to participate in the social. Emma’s plans for Mr. Elton also reinforce this economy, since she wants to play match-maker for Elton and Harriet precisely because he “has fitted up his house so comfortably that it would be a shame to have him single any longer” (7). Why waste a cozy little house on a man when a woman could benefit from running it? Indeed, it would be shameful not to provide the house with a mistress, and reciprocally, not to give a woman a chance at some level of independence. And when Mr. Elton finally chooses his wife, Miss Bates tells everyone that “‘mother is so pleased! She says she cannot bear to have the poor old Vicarage without a mistress’” (112). Emma herself comments that “Miss Hawkins perhaps wanted a home, and thought this the best offer she was likely to have” (176). Significantly, it is only the female characters in the novel who connect Elton’s marriage to the house, who insist that the rector’s house is in need of female authority, and who point only to the acquisition of a housekeeper as a motive for Mr. Elton marrying. The women see clearly that having control over domestic space provides important advantages for their sex, an advantage that both texts will reveal lies in creating a social realm. In Miss Marjoribanks, the marriage stakes are the same—the spatial exchange of houses is paramount. One way that one of Lucilla’s suitors, Mr. Ashburton, tries to decide whether or not to propose is by walking through his house and imagining Lucilla 86 there: “The more Mr. Ashburton tried to think of her [Lucilla] as in possession here, the more the grim images of the two old Miss Penrhyns [his great-aunts] walked out of the darkness and asserted their prior claims” (461). His inability to conjure up an image of Lucilla presiding over his home, Firs, foreshadows the fact that the two won’t marry and subtly acknowledges that marriage is at least as much about property relations as it is about love. Moreover, in his fantasy the reason he cannot bring Lucilla to Firs is because two other women already claim it; in spite of their status as ghosts, Ashburton’s great- aunts still maintain control over their (former) dwelling. The centrality of a home to marriage crosses class barriers, as well; indeed, its importance seems even more profound for a working-class woman like Barbara Lake, the drawing teacher’s daughter. While her first objective in seducing Mr. Cavendish is to take revenge on Lucilla, her desire for him soon anchors itself to her longing for a nice home. Her attraction to him is passionate, but also practical: “To be sure, what she wanted was to be Mrs. Cavendish, and to have a handsome house and a great many nice dresses” (120), and, as the narrator explicitly notes, “it is to be feared that his house and his position in society… were more to her than Mr. Cavendish” (111). First and foremost, Barbara Lake is house-shopping in looking for a husband. 48 While these supporting characters in Emma and Miss Marjoribanks contribute to the sense that gaining control over a house is beneficial for women, the main characters 48 The importance of a certain kind of respectable home appears quite strongly in Barbara’s story. Not only does she value Mr. Cavendish for his residence, she is also portrayed as homeless because she doesn’t live amongst the middle classes in Carlingford. At Lucilla’s request, Barbara shows up at one of Lucilla’s evenings in order to sing a duet with the hostess, and Mr. Cavendish questions Lucilla on Barbara’s origins: “I wonder if it would be indiscreet to ask where Mademoiselle Barbara comes from, or if she belongs to anybody, or lives anywhere…. It is clear to me that you keep her shut up in a box” (91). Barbara’s working-class status prevents her from being read within domesticity—if she doesn’t live in a house of a certain class, then she must not live anywhere at all. 87 solidify the argument further. These two title characters, Emma and Miss Marjoribanks, choose temporarily to remain single precisely because they already have houses under their control; they don’t need to marry, since a main objective in matrimony is the acquisition of a home that will allow them to create a social realm. Emma tells Harriet, “‘If I were to marry, I must expect to repent it…. I have none of the usual inducements of women to marry…. I believe few married women are half as much mistress of their husband’s house, as I am of Hartfield’” (55). Emma does acknowledge love as an “inducment” to marry in her conversation with Harriet, but her focus on the house as well marks it as equally important in a decision to wed. Lucilla Marjoribanks refrains from early marriage as well, telling everyone repeatedly that her mission in life is to “be a comfort to dear papa” (15). This excuse allows her to remain single, but the narrator suggests Lucilla’s true reasons for not marrying: she already has a house to control. Lucilla’s real dream is to reorganize society in Carlingford, and while she could accomplish her goal after marrying, she realizes that there was a great difference between the brilliant society of London, or of Paris, which appears in books, where women have generally the best of it, and can rule in their own right; and even the very best society of a country town, where husbands are very commonly unmanageable, and have a great deal more of their own way in respect to the houses they will or will not go to, than is good for that inferior branch of the human family. (15) Immediately after this revelation, Lucilla tells her friend, “I don’t think I shall marry anybody for a long time” (15). She understands that, for her, a husband is superfluous, since she already has a house under her control, and he can only get in the way of her agency. The narrator even suggests that this theory is true for all women by qualifying Lucilla’s impression that metropolitan women have more power with the admission that 88 Lucilla gets this information from books. The caveat throws Lucilla’s positive image of married city women into question, relegating it to a fantasy she derives from novels and thereby solidifying the idea that all women might welcome the agency a house imparts without the complicating influence of a husband. In fact, both novels couple the heroines’ choices not to marry with discussions of the difficulties that come with gaining a husband. Mr. Knightley points out the fact that women must do as their husbands wish, telling Mrs. Weston that she is “very fit for a wife” because she is well-educated on “‘the very material matrimonial point of submitting your own will, and doing as you were bid’” (23). The fitness of a wife depends upon her ability to curtail her wishes and accept the wishes of her husband. While submitting one’s will makes up one aspect of matrimony’s compromises, another comes from the additional duties a wife must take on—housekeeping as well as catering to her family’s needs. Mrs. Elton learns of these marital complications after she marries, telling Emma, “‘I begin now to comprehend that a married woman has many things to call her attention. I believe I was half an hour this morning shut up with my housekeeper’” (180). While running the household is a desirable complication for many women, Mrs. Elton hints that there are other duties that require her attention that may decrease her ability to pursue her own interests in the social. Oliphant’s comments on the difficulties that come with marriage are even more explicit. Lucilla herself pities married women: “‘So many of you poor dear people have to go where they like, and see the people they want you to see,’ Miss Marjoribanks added, fluttering her maiden plumes with a certain disdainful pity in the very eyes of Mrs. Centum and Mrs. Woodburn” (105). With these observations, Lucilla’s “maiden” choice 89 not to marry appears more strategically motivated. She clearly understands the limitations marriage places on one’s ability to create and participate in a social realm. The choice of whose domestic space to share—who to visit, who to invite, and even whether or not to visit at all—is not always one’s own within a marriage. And according to the married women in the novel, Miss Marjoribanks’ remarks are quite accurate. Mrs. Chiley, one of Lucilla’s closest allies, thinks to herself that “in marriage it is well known that one never can have everything one wants” (191). While Mrs. Chiley’s comment generalizes about the compromises having a husband requires, Lucilla’s aunt, Jemima, and Mrs. Woodburn explain the matter in more detail and connect the difficulties of marriage to Lucilla’s choice not to wed. Aunt Jemima says to Lucilla, “‘You have not married now, because you have been too comfortable, Lucilla. You have had everything your own way, and all that you wanted, without any of the bother…. I was married at seventeen—and I am sure I have not known what it was to have a day’s health— ’” (348). Having everything her own way depends largely on having a house and the ability to create sociality by managing it according to one’s own wishes, inviting who she wants and using the house’s resources as she wishes. Mrs. Woodburn, too, connects Lucilla’s continuing status as an unmarried woman with her level of comfort, reinforcing the idea that one weds in order to achieve this comfort. Mrs. Woodburn “was struck with a pang of envy. If Miss Marjoribanks had married ten years ago, it might have been she now who would have had to stand trembling with anxiety and eagerness among the falling snow…. Lucilla did not marry because she was too comfortable, and, without any of the bother, could have everything her own way” (367). What Mrs. Woodburn and Aunt Jemima see Lucilla having is agency within her house, having her “own way” in 90 redecorating the drawing-room, having her evenings, and running the household as she pleases. Without a husband, Lucilla has none of the “bother.” Hence, Mrs. Woodburn realizes that “it would be very foolish of Miss Marjoribanks to marry, and forfeit all her advantages, and take somebody else’s anxieties upon her shoulders, and never have any money except what she asked from her husband” (368). While these women don’t directly mention the house in their comments, their emphasis on Lucilla’s comfort coupled with descriptions of Lucilla’s management of her home suggest that the privileges of having “a house of her own” are at the root of her choice to remain single. 49 But electing to remain single is a complicated choice, since culturally, without a husband, both Lucilla and Emma are read as dependents, lacking control over their destinies. The difference between dependence and “independence,” though, is complicated by the significance of the house. Both novels explore the nexus between marriage and house by highlighting the common description of married women as independent. While the term here means not to be subject to a parent’s authority, because the choice to wed most often involved the choice to control a household, a marriage did indeed confer a certain kind of independence and agency. Mr. Knightley points out to the Woodhouses that Miss Taylor’s decision to marry was hardly a decision at all, since “when it comes to the question of dependence or independence!” (5)—and he need not even finish his sentence, the conclusion is so self-evident: a woman must always choose 49 Andrea Kaston Tange sees Lucilla’s unique ability to organize society through her house as a result of the fact that “she can read the desires of the community and give them what they want before they know they want it” (173). I’m suggesting that Lucilla’s “talent,” while significant, is not that extraordinary; what allows Lucilla to seem to have unusual power is the fact that she has no husband and is therefore more visible within society. While Tange argues that “[Lucilla] comes across to everyone within the narrative as almost magically more adept at those skills than anyone else in town,” many women in the novel read Lucilla’s success as simply a result of her freedom from marriage (173). 91 to become independent through the acquisition of a house through marriage. Miss Marjoribanks expands this vision, though, questioning the level of independence marriage brings and bringing us back to the unique situation of our two heroines as single chatelaines. The narrator plays on the Victorian idea that marriage alone makes one independent and emphasizes the importance of marriage to society. Lucilla “had things a great deal more in her own hands than she might have had, had there been a husband in the case to satisfy; but notwithstanding, she had come to an age when most people have husbands, and when an independent position in the world becomes necessary to self- respect. To be sure, Lucilla was independent; but then—there is a difference, as everybody knows” (336, emphasis in original). Lucilla would clearly get along fine on her own, but cultural convention won’t consider her independent until she is married. The narrator shows the liminal space that Lucilla inhabits by pointing out that in reality, she is independent because she runs a household and in the true sense of being able to do what she likes, but she is not “independent” in the conventional eyes of the world or general precepts of feminine adulthood, because she hasn’t yet entered the ranks of marriage. And by qualifying the fact that there’s a difference between Lucilla’s kind of independence and marriage with the ironic tag “as everybody knows,” the narrator throws into question whether or not there really is a difference. The quote is tongue-in-cheek, but it also questions the cultural convention that would require Lucilla to participate in the marriage plot to maintain her “self-respect.” While Emma and Miss Marjoribanks don’t own the houses they run, they are still able to derive agency from their control of households. By using their housekeeping to participate in public life, they create the social and participate in society. While Emma 92 illustrates these activities more subtly, Miss Marjoribanks, published fifty years later, makes the case more explicitly and demonstrates how creating the social can influence even the traditionally political sphere. In Emma, arguably Austen’s most domestic novel because of its focus on the village of Highbury and the life that goes on in its houses, control over Hartfield allows Emma to manipulate society by creating a social realm where the house and housekeeping are visible functions. While the preponderance of the action in Emma takes place within houses—Hartfield, Randalls, Miss Bates’ house, Donwell Abbey— most recent criticism focuses on the few scenes that take place outside of domestic space (the ball at the Crown, the expedition to Box Hill). 50 Reading the scenes that occur in domestic space, however, allows for an exploration of Emma’s special relationship to the house. Indeed, it is Emma’s unique status as an unmarried domestic manager that allows her to participate more fully in community life and to manipulate the social fabric of Highbury. Like other women, she is able to use the physical spaces of her house to invite certain people in (Harriet, Mr. Elton) and exclude others (Jane Fairfax). However, as a single woman, her power extends further as she can even enter public spaces on her own. As mistress of the house, she is able to create social gatherings to entertain and distract her father that then allow her to engage in social activity without him. While I am arguing, as many others do, that Emma tries to manipulate the social world around her, I am less interested in whether she’s successful or not than in exploring the importance of 50 In fact, a recent issue of the Romantic Circles Praxis Series is focused only on the Box Hill episode: it contains 6 articles that all analyze the Box Hill episode in profound detail. 93 the house to her endeavors. Emma demonstrates that participation in society, and further, the production of the social, depends upon access to and control over domestic space. Emma’s work in creating the social through her management of Hartfield is subtle, largely because Austen’s style is spare in architectural descriptions of Hartfield’s interior spaces. But while explicit settings are not often described, it’s relatively easy to deduce where most scenes occur, and most of the daily occurrences happen at Hartfield. By paying closer attention to Emma’s actions within and concerning her house, we can develop a sense of the ways she creates a social realm around her. She, like other women, invites others into Hartfield and chooses on her own whom to include and exclude. However, unlike many other married women and in spite of occasional suggestions from her father, Emma is able to do precisely what she wants. When Isabella and John come for a visit, we learn “Mr. Knightley was to dine with them—rather against the inclination of Mr. Woodhouse…. Emma’s sense of right however had decided it; and… she had particular pleasure… in procuring him the proper invitation” (64). Emma decides when and with whom she wants to assemble a group, subtly manipulating her father into acquiescing. And this power gives Emma “particular pleasure,” not only because of her fondness for Mr. Knightley but also because she has decided it on her own. Moreover, Emma can help create the social by participating in community life in Highbury because she has control over a home. As Emma reconsiders Jane Fairfax’s situation and realizes that Jane’s “prospects were closing,” she decides to “show her kindness” and promptly “resolved to prevail on her to spend a day at Hartfield” (255). Emma’s method of reconciliation is to invite Jane into her own space, largely because she 94 has control over a house that she can use as a resource. Her invitation, though, creates a new link in local society through the social. When she learns of Jane Fairfax’s illness, she “called the housekeeper directly, to an examination of her stores; and some arrow- root of very superior quality was speedily dispatched to Miss Bates with a most friendly note” (256). She uses the assets of her home, which are at her disposal, to communicate with Jane, and although the arrow-root is sent back and Emma never really develops a bond with Jane, the fact that she has the resources at her disposal and uses them in an attempt to produce a variation in the social realm around her demonstrates her agency. Emma is also able to use Hartfield’s resources to send a hind-quarter of pork to Miss Bates (110). Significantly, Mr. Knightley is the only other character explicitly described sending food to the Bateses; Miss Bates thanks him profusely for sending apples, rambling that “‘Jane and I are so shocked about the apples!…. To think of your sending us all your store apples’” (159). These parallel incidents position Knightley and Emma similarly in the community, both active agents who participate in charity to the needy and make decisions about the use of their properties’ resources. By making these acts parallel each other, the narrator subtly gives Emma and Knightley comparable levels of authority, illustrating the power that Emma derives from managing a house. Emma also gains two kinds of privileged privacy through her management of Hartfield: she is able to be both alone with others and to be alone by herself, creating great depth to the society in which she participates. Because she can invite whom she wishes to Hartfield, she is able to provide diversions for her father that allow her to pursue her own interests alone. The narrator describes how Mr. Woodhouse, “[n]ot unfrequently, through Emma’s persuasion,… had some of the chosen and the best to dine 95 with him… [and] there was scarcely an evening in the week in which Emma could not make up a card-table for him” (11). Ostensibly, Emma manages house in order to please her father (much as Miss Marjoribanks’s stated goal in life is “to be a comfort to dear papa”), but the outcome of her management is more freedom for herself as well as a more complex social realm as she spends time alone with others. When Mr. Weston arrives pleading for Emma to come see Mrs. Weston, he seems concerned that she might not be able to get away from the house: “Can you come to Randall’s at any time this morning?—Do, if it be possible” (257). Mrs. Weston wants specifically to see Emma “alone,” and with Mr. Woodhouse at Hartfield, private conversation might be difficult. Although Emma might not be able to have the privacy she wants at Hartfield, she is able to manipulate the workings of the household in order to achieve privacy in whatever way she can. Emma doesn’t question the possibility of leaving immediately, and by “settling it with her father, that she would take her walk now,” she is able to get out of the house to a private interview with Mrs. Weston. Jane Fairfax provides the negative example of the achievement of privacy—because she has no home and has to live with Miss Bates, she cannot easily be alone, either by herself or with others. When Jane leaves Mr. Knightley’s, Emma protests at her walking home alone, but this is one of her only chances for privacy. She exclaims to Emma, “‘Oh! Miss Woodhouse, the comfort of being sometimes alone!’” (238). Emma knows exactly what she’s talking about, too, thinking, “‘Such a home, indeed!’” (238). She realizes that it is Jane’s home life that prevents her from having any privacy, but it is more than the character of her home that is of import here. It is precisely because Jane doesn’t have control over her domestic space 96 that she must rely on others, thereby losing some agency and access to certain types of spaces and sociality. The connection between Emma’s housekeeping and her social work happens on a narrative level as well. As she makes her plans for Harriet, “forming all these schemes” to improve her, Emma loses track of her housekeeping markers. She doesn’t even realize when the supper table is set. This initial conflict between Emma’s management of the house and manipulation of social reality would seem to indicate that the two are opposites—that Emma can’t both run a house and run society. However, as soon as Emma realizes the table is set, her domestic work improves while she contemplates her social work. She’s so excited about the prospect of something social to do that she did “all the honors of the meal” with “real good will” and “an alacrity beyond the common impulse” (14). Narratively, the two sides of Emma’s work—domestic and social— become intertwined, not only connecting these two realms but making Emma’s meddling seem more palatable because it is grounded in domesticity. Emma’s matchmaking and self-improvement plans for Harriet are a combination of work that is appropriate to nineteenth-century ideals of woman and to her desire to have more power over her life and the social realm around her. By using the space of her house, Emma not only gets acquainted with Harriet but also manages to improve the latter’s social standing. She embarks upon her schemes for raising Harriet’s social level by “inviting, encouraging, and telling her to come [to Hartfield] very often” (15). Harriet sees that the space of Hartfield has a power, telling Emma that “while I visit at Hartfield… I am not afraid of what anybody can do.” Emma also acknowledges that Harriet needs the social standing of the space of Hartfield to be 97 respectable, telling her, “‘I would have you so firmly established in good society, as to be independent even of Hartfield and Miss Woodhouse’” (18). In this early stage of Miss Smith’s social makeover, the only way to be publicly established is to be in the space of Hartfield. However, the relationship between these two women is reciprocal, too, because while Harriet Smith needs Hartfield to improve her, Emma notes that “she was quite convinced of Harriet Smith’s being exactly the young friend she wanted—exactly the something which her home required” (15). Not only Emma, but Emma’s home needs Harriet in order to create a social realm. Despite Austen’s winking irony—we know Harriet is the “wrong” friend—the statement also reveals a truth: if, on one level, Harriet is just another housekeeping task for Emma, a way of making her domestic life more comfortable, on another level she is also an avenue to creating society for Emma. Not only can Emma add the people she wants to public life in Highbury, she can also use Harriet as a matchmaking pawn. Emma realizes that taking on Harriet is the perfect project since “[i]t would be an interesting, and certainly a very kind undertaking; highly becoming her own situation in life, her leisure, and her powers” (14). Harriet’s improvement is both appropriate, since it agrees with nineteenth-century ideas about women’s proper realm, and desirable, since it allows Emma to flex her “powers” and influence social life in Highbury. Emma explicitly uses the domestic space under her control to facilitate her matchmaking, but she also pursues these projects by making domestic functions public in order to create a social ground where she can manipulate people. As she attempts to bring together Elton and Harriet, Emma turns the drawing she makes of Harriet into a public event so that Elton might interact with and gaze upon Harriet. Emma draws the 98 portrait in her parlour, and “she gave [Mr. Elton] credit for stationing himself where he might gaze and gaze again without offence; but was really obliged to put an end to it, and request him to place himself elsewhere” (29). Both the drama and Emma’s agency in this scene come from her manipulation of her domestic space as well as her performance of a domestic function in public. By effectively placing Elton in various spaces in the parlour, Emma produces the drama she seeks, creating social connections between people (albeit not the ones she intends). The portrait progresses with the same audience each day, and when it is finished, an entire social group has formed in order to view it. Mrs. Weston, Mr. Woodhouse, Mr. Knightley, Emma, Harriet and Mr. Elton all discuss the portrait and, particularly, the production of this portrait, giving them all a domestic function to discuss and creating a social realm among them. The quest to improve Harriet and find her a husband aren’t the first social tasks Emma has taken on. Even before the action of the novel begins, she has presumably had a successful go at matchmaking. Emma claims that she arranged to get Mr. and Mrs. Weston married by continually inviting Mr. Weston to Hartfield. She tells Mr. Knightley, “‘If I had not promoted Mr. Weston’s visits here, and given many little encouragements, and smoothed many little matters, it might not have come to anything after all. I think you must know Hartfield enough to comprehend that’” (6). Emma explicitly alludes to the house when she claims responsibility for the Weston marriage, and she also reminds Knightley that the space of courtship, “Hartfield,” required Emma’s added influence and manipulation in order to bring the relationship to fruition. While Emma is presumably referring to her father as an obstacle to Miss Taylor’s marriage, her comment also emphasizes the role that the actual house plays in creating this marriage 99 and in creating sociality at all. However, here Emma is also trying to demonstrate that she has influence where it matters. Mr. Knightley, ever the critical observer, denigrates both Emma’s claim to success and the endeavor itself when he exclaims, “A worthy employment for a young lady’s mind!” Further, he questions Emma’s influence, asking, “why do you talk of success? where is your merit?—what are you proud of?” (6). He implies not only that match-matching is not a worthy pursuit, but that Emma’s efforts are much less influential than she thinks. In contrast, Emma reveals that matchmaking, just one aspect of her creation and participation in the social, is one way for her to use her mind productively. She rebuts Knightley’s criticisms by putting forth yet another matchmaking scheme, this time to find a wife for Mr. Elton because he “has fitted up his house so comfortably that it would be a shame to have him single any longer” and, significantly, because “this is the only way I have of doing him a service” (7). Emma realizes that she can use her domestic management for social ends and maintains, in the face of Knightley’s trivialization, that these tasks are worthy of her intellect. Indeed, in this light, Mr. Knightley is hardly the moral center of the novel but an obstacle to women’s agency and the creation of the social. 51 He belittles the social realm itself and doubts that Emma would have agency to affect her world at all. From the perspective I have developed here, however, one sees that Emma is fighting against the conventions of her culture, embodied in Mr. Knightley, that refuse to acknowledge the importance of the social and women’s part in its creation. 51 Many critics read Knightley as either a moral center or the voice of Austen in Emma. Mark Schorer equates Knightley with the author, describes his character as “moderate and sound, balanced and humane,” and claims that “it is he who makes Jane Austen’s demand that awareness and conduct be brought into the relationship which is morality” (105; 108; 110). George Levine writes that “Knightley… virtually always gets it right…. Knightley advises Emma appropriately on every important issue” (“Box Hill”). 100 In the end, although Emma ultimately accedes to the traditional marriage plot and marries Mr. Knightley, she never gives up the management of her domestic space since Mr. Knightley agrees to move in at Hartfield. The narrator emphasizes this anomaly, noting, “[how] very few of those men in a rank of life to address Emma would have renounced their own home for Hartfield!” (307). Austen’s insistence here reminds the reader of the importance of Emma’s house to her identity and her agency; her happily ended marriage plot cannot include a new home since without Hartfield, Emma is no longer herself. Most of Emma’s social power comes from her status as mistress of Hartfield, and therefore she must end her narrative journey with this aspect of her life intact. While Emma deals mainly with the limited aspects of social and domestic life in a small town, Miss Marjoribanks demonstrates how the social encompasses domesticity as well as more global parts of society, and Oliphant’s metaphors demonstrate the convergence. As Isabella Beeton did before her, throughout the novel Oliphant compares managing a house to running a country, making reference to the relatively new science of political economy and playing with multiple definitions of the term. Lucilla often attributes her skill in housekeeping to her having taken a course in political economy at school, a course which she requested, telling the headmistress “you will let me learn all about political economy and things, to help me manage everything” (11). Traditionally, political economy referred to the management of the household of the State, so Lucilla’s 101 education in it connects her social performance with more global concerns. 52 When Mr. Cavendish praises her first evening gathering, “her statesmanlike views, and her conception of politics,” Miss Marjoribanks laughs and explains, “‘Oh, you know, I went through a course of political economy at Mount Pleasant’” (90). For Lucilla, knowledge of political economy equates directly to success in the domestic realm; housekeeping is housekeeping, whether you are managing a home or a country. While Oliphant’s metaphors equating housekeeping to ruling a country or military exploits are traditionally read as ironic and mock heroic, I would argue that these images actually deepen the significance of Lucilla’s domestic endeavors and demonstrate that her housekeeping is as vital as traditionally masculine undertakings like politics or war. 53 Metaphors that connect government, political economy, and managing the house play on both the domestic and political connotations of these words. The narrator notes that “[i]t is true that Lucilla has her household well in hand, and possessed the faculty of government to a remarkable extent” (123). The faculty of government denotes her ability to supervise her home, but it also connotes political government and lends greater significance to her domestic endeavors. Lucilla, her housekeeping, and social interactions in general are 52 Adam Smith, in An Inquiry into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations (1776) defines political economy as “a branch of the science of a statesman or legislator” that “proposes to enrich both the people and the sovereign” (Introduction to Book IV). 53 Elizabeth Langland argues, “[u]nlike the effect of the mock heroic where the foolish pretentions of a contemporary figure are exposed by being measured against the grandeur of a heroic past, this technique unsettles common assumptions and makes conventional distinctions appear facile” (Nobody’s Angel’s 157). While I agree with Langland that these metaphors “[link] social belief with control of social policy,” my contention is that this technique also heightens the importance of social policy, likening it to political policy (157). Andrea Kaston Tange also comments on the tradition of reading Oliphant’s metaphors as mock-heroic; her interpretation is that these tropes “demonstrate that the position Lucilla occupies as a respectable, middle-class, domestic woman makes a mockery of her talents, which deserve a far wider scope” (174). Again, my argument differs slightly from Tange’s reading in that I see these comparisons suggesting that, in fact, the domestic does encompass a wider scope, and that Lucilla’s machinations are quite central to social and political life in Carlingford. 102 often described in military or political terms; she is “an accomplished warrior” and an “adventurous general” who can engage in “a simple reconnaissance” and produce a “brilliant and successful capture” (33, 38). At her dinner parties, conversation consists of one player “launch[ing] a shaft,” another “parrying,” “a passage of arms,” and even a “challenge” to Miss Marjoribanks that is, we are told, “meant to lead to a lively little combat” (148 – 9). These military metaphors contribute to the overall sense that social drama and the creation of a social realm is a profoundly important undertaking. The strong metaphors that color the novel are not the only indication that the social bears a heightened significance in this narrative; Oliphant enlarges the concept of society by suggesting that the social and society incorporate other traditionally masculine aspects of culture: politics and business. Creating the social is just as much a business as running a doctor’s career and just as political as being an MP. However, whereas men might have more experience with these traditional public functions, when it comes to the social, Oliphant claims this territory for women. The narrator maintains that “in delicate matters of social politics, one never expects to be understood by Them [the gentlemen]” (101, emphasis in original). Community interactions here constitute politics, and in fact the workings of this system are complex and “delicate.” Lucilla’s work in creating society around her is also categorized as business; when she decides to make a match between Mrs. Mortimer and the Archdeacon, she realizes “she had never yet had any piece of social business on so important a scale to manage, and her eyes sparkled and her heart beat at the idea” (213). Describing matchmaking as a “business” increases its public significance and its gravity. Unlike Emma, whose attempts to create marriages are dismissed and criticized, Miss Marjoribanks’s matchmaking is important “business.” 103 Before she can make matches, though, Lucilla must produce the social and society within her hometown. When Lucilla Marjoribanks takes over her father’s house, it’s clear that she wants first and foremost to create society in Carlingford, and that she views this objective very sincerely: “Lucilla felt more and more that she who held the reorganization of society in Carlingford in her hands was a woman with a mission” (18). To Lucilla, this mission is “more important than anything else” (93). In fact, redecorating and reorganizing are even more important than courtship, so for Lucilla the marriage plot gets diverted and relegated to the background. When her cousin Tom attempts a proposal, she responds by telling him, “I have really something of importance to do” and claims he is trifling— marriage is less important that setting up the house (73). Like Emma, Lucilla has no intention of marrying at a young age, but Lucilla’s pledge to remain single differs in that she views marriage as a hindrance to her very specific and lofty goals. Just as Tom’s proposal causes Lucilla “for the first time in her life a certain despair,” Mr. Cavendish’s attentions also create an obstacle to the reorganization of society. Miss Marjoribanks believes that marriage “would, indeed, to tell the truth, disturb her plans considerably,” and therefore Mr. Cavendish’s attentions are characterized as “a certain vague and not disagreeable danger” (80). Lucilla is expectedly flattered by his gallantry, but she sees clearly that the complication of a suitor is a “little cloud which arose… over Miss Marjoribanks’s prosperous way” (93). Unlike the heroine of the traditional marriage plot, Lucilla views potential suitors as annoyances, dangers and obstacles to her mission to reorganize society. As a result, she becomes the object of several failed marriage plots, but she also attains an unusual agency because of her access and control over a house. 104 Not only does Lucilla see the dangers of marrying, she also realizes the potential for creating the social through her less restricted use of her house. Her inspiration is contrasted with the shortsighted attitudes of other women in the novel. While Lucilla furiously plans for the redecoration of her drawing-room and the menu for her dinner parties, her peers complain about and lament their lots as domestic managers. Mrs. Centum tells Lucilla, “‘anyone who has a lot of children and servants like me to look after, finds very little to laugh at,’” viewing her household duties as burdens to be borne instead of opportunities to be seized (41). Barbara Lake, the drawing master’s daughter who dreams of marrying Mr. Cavendish, thinks “it was a little hard upon a young woman of a proper ambition, who knew she was handsome, to fall back into housekeeping, and consent to remain unseen and unheard” (37). Barbara’s class limits her more than Lucilla’s, but her reliance on her beauty instead of actions she could pursue keeps her from prospering within the logic of the narrative. Barbara considers herself to be ambitious and views housekeeping as an obstacle to her ambition, yet Lucilla is more ambitious than any other character and uses her house and housekeeping to her advantage in order to gain agency and be both seen and heard. Mrs. Mortimer, too, sees her house as an obstacle rather than a resource. In her house, she feels “like a creature in a cage, helpless, imprisoned, miserable, not knowing what to do with herself” (204-5). Mrs. Mortimer, like Barbara, is partially a victim of her class, but the narrator is also careful to lay some of the responsibility on Mrs. Mortimer herself. Compared to Lucilla, who is always depending upon her own resources to manage her life and her house, Mrs. Mortimer cannot do anything for herself. The narrator explains, 105 A little house in a garden may look like a little paradise in the sunshine, and yet feel like a dungeon when a poor woman all alone looks out across her flowers in the rain, and sees nothing but the wall that shuts her in, and thinks to herself that she has no refuge nor escape from it—nobody to tell her what to do, nothing but her own feeble powers to support her…. Any reasonable creature would have said, that to be there in her own house, poor enough certainly, but secure, and no longer driven lonely and distressed about the world, was a great matter. But yet, after all, the walls that shut her in, the blast of white, sweeping, downright rain… and the burden of something on her mind which by herself she was quite unable to bear, was a hard combination… (205) Twice the narrator asserts that a “reasonable” person would be happy to have her own house in a small garden, emphasizing Mrs. Mortimer’s lack of appreciation and insight and again reinforcing the importance of having control over a house. Mrs. Mortimer is poor, to be sure, yet it is her “feeble” resources and her dismissal of housekeeping as a tool that continues to keep her in despair. While Lucilla looks forward to bearing mental burdens on her own and rejoices in the chance to tackle a challenge, Mrs. Mortimer longs for someone to tell her what to do. As a result, Mrs. Mortimer can’t take advantage of her resource, her house, and participate in the social realm. Lucilla, though, is well- suited to create the social precisely because she sees the potential agency that housekeeping brings her. Not only does Lucilla want to be the creator of Carlingford society, she is the only one well-suited to the task. The narrator points out that the “social condition” of the town prior to Lucilla’s return was “utterly chaotic” because no one was capable of organizing it (19-20). While the narrator outlines several men who might be expected to head social life in the town, they are all unqualified because they don’t have significant women in their lives. The Rector Mr. Bury “was utterly unqualified” because “Mrs. Bury had been dead a long time, and the daughters were married,” and his sister Miss Bury has no sense 106 of society. Likewise, Dr. Marjoribanks “gave only dinners, to which naturally, as there was no lady in the house, ladies could not be invited” (20). The implication from each of these situations is that a woman is needed to create society, not only in order to include both genders in its workings but also because the production of society is a task (and privilege, I am arguing) designated to women in nineteenth-century England. However, like the men, the other women in Carlingford come up short as societal leaders. The ladies are characters “from whom something might justly have been expected in the way of making society pleasant” precisely because they are women and are therefore considered fit for the job. The two main candidates, Mrs. Centum and Mrs. Woodburn, are all the more likely to head social life because they had “the most liberal housekeeping allowances” (20). Here, the narrator specifically links the production of social life with housekeeping, going on to suggest that a single woman who is a housekeeper is an even more perfect candidate. For while these two married women are contenders, they are “either incapacitated by circumstances (which was a polite term in use at Carlingford, and meant babies)”—an occupational hazard for a married woman— “or by character” (20). Lucilla contains the perfect combination of elements to lead the creation of society: her house, her status as a single woman, and her driven character. “In short,” the narrator confesses, “you might have gone… house by house, finding a great deal of capital material, but without encountering a single individual capable of making anything out of it” (21). I will push this concept even further by suggesting a double meaning here of “single”—there is neither one individual nor an unmarried one, the ultimate candidate to reform social life in Carlingford. Until, of course, Miss Marjoribanks arrives. 107 Lucilla is not only perfectly suited by her situation, but also by her personality, which Oliphant’s narrator portrays through metaphors and imagery. As many other critics have pointed out, Lucilla is consistently described as a monarch, the ruler of society in the town. However, for my argument what is particularly significant about these metaphors is that they are rarely gendered female, and, in fact, are sometimes gendered male. Lucilla is most often described as a “sovereign,” and references to her “reign” abound. 54 Twice the narrator dubs her a “monarch” (261, 417), twice a “ruler” (17, 41), and once, even, a “dictator” (30). These metaphors are all conspicuously gender neutral, leaving open the possibility that as the head of Carlingford society, Lucilla has agency beyond the traditional avenues open to a woman. In fact, several times the monarch imagery turns masculine, associating her, if only momentarily, with a more traditional kind of state power. When she arrives to take over her father’s house, “she felt like a young king,” and as she considers Barbara Lake’s inappropriate behavior at her Thursday “evenings,” she betrays “the far broader and grander anxiety of an accomplished statesman, who sees a rash and untrained hand meddling with his most delicate machinery” (26, 100, emphasis mine). The metaphor is extended and solidified by the narrator’s use of the masculine pronoun, continuing the illusion that Miss Marjoribanks functions not only on the level of other men, but in a political capacity. These metaphors suggest that Lucilla’s production of the social and participation in society, both of which occur through domesticity, parallel political and public involvement and make her agency gender-neutral. 54 References to Lucilla’s “reign” and her status as “sovereign” occur seven times each (7, 11, 18, 28, 105, 315, 318; 28, 31, 99, 255, 274, 411, 479). 108 Lucilla is described as a queen twice in the novel, yet these instances tend to support the idea that Lucilla’s power is not merely “feminine.” The first instance occurs when Lucilla contemplates marrying Cavendish, whom everyone suspects might become the next MP. Ultimately, Lucilla decides that marriage to Cavendish at this point in her career would be an obstacle, but along the way she considers that “[t]o marry a man in his position would not, after all, be deranging her plans to any serious extent. Indeed, it would, if his hopes were realized, constitute Lucilla a kind of queen in Carlingford” (81). Without a husband, Lucilla is an androgynous ruler, but if she marries Cavendish she places herself into the gender binary, becoming a queen instead of a ruler. To be sure, a queen is also a leader, especially one like Queen Victoria, who reigned during the production of this novel. At the same time, though, Ruskin’s description of women’s domestic roles in “Of Queen’s Gardens” (published in 1865, just a year before Miss Marjoribanks in 1866) complicates the term “queen,” removing much of its political significance. 55 The second time Lucilla is described as a queen comes through Mrs. Chiley. She explains Miss Marjoribanks’s position in the town to Mr. Cavendish, telling him, “She is queen now in Carlingford, you know” (168). However, this metaphor arrives through the mouth of a character, whereas the narrator makes most of the other comparisons. As a result, the characterization of Lucilla as queen here reads more as Mrs. Chiley’s own perspective than a true description of Lucilla’s status. 55 Several critics have explored the connection between Miss Marjoribanks and Queen Victoria and Ruskin’s Sesame and Lilies. For an excellent study that pursues both references, see Melissa Schaub’s “Queen of the Air or Constitutional Monarch?: Idealism, Irony, and Narrative Power in Miss Marjoribanks.” 109 Having the reorganization of society as her goal, Lucilla knows exactly where to begin: with the house. In fact, the introduction of her renovated drawing-room is “the real beginning of her great work in Carlingford” (81). Her first actions upon returning to the house concern this drawing-room; she takes stock of its décor and “verified all the plans she had already long ago conceived for the embellishment of this inner court and centre of her kingdom” (27). Before she even begins the redecoration, Lucilla “converted the apartment from an abstract English drawing-room of the old school into Miss Marjoribanks’s drawing-room, an individual spot of ground revealing something of the character of its mistress” (28). Lucilla is skilled in manipulating space in order to gain agency, and this first step reveals her process: by adapting domestic space to suit her, Lucilla manages to gain control not only of the space itself, but of the events that will take place there and of her self-definition within that space. The changed drawing-room demonstrates Lucilla’s prowess statically, by “revealing something of the character of its mistress,” but also dynamically, through the process of redecoration. The largesse of Lucilla’s personality and intelligence, her “original mind,” appears as she deftly “harmonized the rooms” (31; 28). When Tom and Dr. Marjoribanks find Lucilla in the drawing-room after dinner, she is “in the act of pacing the room—pacing, not in the sentimental sense of making a little promenade up and down, but in the homely practical signification, with a view of measuring, that she might form an idea of how much carpet was required” (44). Here, Oliphant lays bare the practical side of housekeeping and literally makes household functions public. The narrator feels compelled to explain that Lucilla isn’t participating in traditional, “sentimental” domestic acts; she is very much engaged in managing the house. Tom assumes that Lucilla is contemplating a lover—he 110 (mis)reads her through the lens of the traditional domestic narrative, one that often centers on a marriage plot. Again, the narrator disabuses the reader of these notions: “there was no fellow at all in the case, unless it might be Mr. Holden, the upholsterer, whose visits Miss Marjoribanks would have received with greater enthusiasm at this moment than those of the most eligible eldest son in England” (44). Indeed, Lucilla knows very well what she is about, and it has little to do with landing a husband. Instead, she is planning the reorganization of two connected entities: her drawing-room and the social life in Carlingford. During this scene, the narrator often draws attention to the public nature of Lucilla’s housekeeping. As she contemplates colors, she muses aloud to Tom and her father, “There is a great deal in choosing colours that go well with one’s complexion. People think of that for their dresses, but not for their rooms, which are of so much more importance” (46). Having studied political economy, Lucilla knows that the management and manipulation of domestic space yields more control than the manipulation of one’s person. Unlike Barbara Lake, who knows she is “handsome” and therefore feels that she should be above housekeeping, Lucilla seizes the opportunity to control her household in order to create a social realm around her that allows her access to public life on many levels. The creation of this realm, which occurs, according to Hannah Arendt, through the publication of domestic functions, depends on Lucilla. The narrator comments that Lucilla’s weighing the options for colors in the drawing-room, “which a timid young woman would have taken care to do by herself, Lucilla did publicly, with her usual discrimination” (46). Here, it is easy to read the narrator as sarcastically poking fun at Lucilla, who is straightforward, bold, and anything but discriminating in the traditional 111 sense. However, Lucilla is discriminating—that is, shrewd and astute—when it comes to managing her household, and her public explanation of the importance of the redecoration of her parlour begins to create an atmosphere where all of Carlingford anticipates the revelation of this new social scene. After her detailed preparations, society does look forward to seeing it. As the remodeling comes to a close, “most people were very anxious to see the drawing-room, now it had been restored” and “the curiosity of Carlingford was excited to a lively extent” (78). The Browns, Lucilla’s neighbors whose amateur photo studio gives an obscured view of the Marjoribanks house, get several new visitors, as “[m]any people even went so far as to give the Browns a sitting in their glass-house, with the hope of having a peep of the colour of the hangings at least” (78). The women of the town deliberate over what color the decorations are, and Lucilla, always on guard and continually creating social atmosphere through suspense, “did her best to keep up this agreeable mystery” (79). The redecoration also provides the community, particularly the women, a center over which to connect. All of Lucilla’s preparations add up to an atmosphere where “all the world contemplated with excitement the first Thursday which was to open this enchanted chamber to their admiring eyes” (79). Her house provides a common topic of gossip that begins the process of creating a social realm in Carlingford, one that depends on the public discussion of private domestic workings for its foundation. Of course, the introduction of the new drawing-room and the evenings Lucilla holds in it are a huge success, and once the social has been created through her redecoration, Miss Marjoribanks continues to produce and reproduce it by manipulating her domestic space. On the second evening, she realizes that she must do something 112 new; at her first party “they wanted to see the drawing-room,” but now Lucilla must continue to create the social anew. On this Thursday, she finds that the room is so crowded that people are spilling out onto the landing, a “gay but disorganized dominion” (99). She “re-established order, and, what was still more important, made room,” deftly manipulating her domestic space and creating a better community experience through the use of her house (99). Lucilla is thrilled with the success of this evening precisely because its focus was not the new renovations. She has used her house explicitly to begin the creation of a social realm, and now that it has begun, she continues to use the house in a more subtle form to maintain her social world. Once Lucilla has established a social realm around her, she continually works at producing and reproducing it, but she also moves within this realm and influences others. By specifically manipulating the space of her house, she is able to manage the way others view her as well as some of the events of her life. After being snubbed by Mr. Cavendish, Lucilla “recognized the importance of the occasion” of her next Thursday evening party, knowing that everyone would be watching her since “all her friends were thinking [the party] would be rather trying to Lucilla” (122; 125). She realizes the party needs to be something special in order for her to maintain influence over society; she must prove to her community that she isn’t discouraged because of a betrayal by a potential suitor. She first decides to serve a new dish at dinner, but then “the brilliant idea struck her of adjourning to the garden in the evening” (126). Her two new ideas for the party depend upon public housekeeping and the artful management of the house space. Moreover, her new ideas consume Lucilla so that the problems arising in her marriage plot become insignificant. Nancy, Miss Marjoribanks’s housekeeper, feels a 113 sympathy for Lucilla that provides Lucilla with the opportunity to have her new dish prepared; when Mrs. Chiley comes to visit in order to comfort Lucilla over the betrayal, “Miss Marjoribanks’s thoughts at that moment were full of the garden, and not in the least occupied with those more troublesome matters which procured for her Mrs Chiley’s sympathy” (126). For both Miss Marjoribanks and Emma, housekeeping and the creation of the social allow them to exit the marriage plot for a while, yet this choice also means that they participate in failed marriage plots along the way—Emma with Frank Churchill, and Lucilla with Mr. Cavendish, Archdeacon Beverly, and Mr. Ashburton. Both of Lucilla’s new housekeeping elements bring her success on this most important evening; the new dish is received with delight and “when things were at this crisis, and all eyes directed to Lucilla… Miss Marjoribanks made that proposal of adjourning to the garden, which was received with so much applause” (132 – 33). This Thursday evening illustrates not only Lucilla’s deft management of her house and the ways this management gives her agency and influence, but it also confirms that Lucilla’s social maneuvers are an integral part of creating society in Carlingford. That night, the narrator explains, there was “a larger assemblage than usual to watch the little drama, and how Lucilla would behave” (130). The personal is directly connected to society here, and Lucilla’s actions are particularly interesting to the community. Ever up to the challenge, Lucilla welcomes this scrutiny and responds to it by relying on her domestic talents. Lucilla manages to punish her disobedient suitor and impress the community she has created by carefully managing her household for the public. The way she presents her housekeeping for the “assemblage” is key, and as a result of this staging she makes Cavendish look the fool while shoring up her control over the community of Grange 114 Lane. Even when Cavendish arrives, Lucilla carefully directs the use of the drawing- room space; instead of greeting him when he appears, she forces him to walk through the empty space of the room in order to reach her, turning him into a spectacle of shame. He is forced to walk “all the length of the room up to Lucilla through the unoccupied space which exposed him so mercifully on every side…. The Balaclava charge itself, in the face of all the guns, could have been nothing to the sensation of walking through that horrible naked space” (130 – 131). The narrator insists on the significance of this domestic space, suggesting both its power and, as Lucilla presides, her part in its creation. At this point, Miss Marjoribanks continues to produce society as well as assert some authority over aspects of her community. If Lucilla is successful in publicly shaming Mr. Cavendish, the various courtships in which she is involved remain hopeless, doomed from the start, not only because Miss Marjoribanks desires to remain single—although she would marry a man who could advance her mission, for all her protestations—but also because Lucilla’s very consciousness privileges domestic work over marriage plots. Although the narrator explains generally that “her large mind was incapable… of confining itself, unless with a very good reason, to one sole subject” (203), what Lucilla often can’t get out of her mind are domestic duties and reflections on the house. She can concentrate singly on these issues, as when she is refurnishing the drawing-room or planning her parties, but when she thinks about potential suitors, her thoughts need to be tempered—or structured—by reference to a home. When the Archdeacon arrives in Carlingford, Mrs. Chiley has already positioned him as a mate for Miss Marjoribanks. Lucilla plans her garden party, and “[w]hile she had the seats placed in the garden… and chose the spot for a little 115 illumination… Lucilla permitted herself to speculate a little about this unknown hero” (129). It is only while considering the spatial planning of her garden party that Lucilla can even allow herself to daydream about a potential male suitor. Men have already been situated in the narrative as means to achieve property, and the structure of Lucilla’s consciousness suggests further that men and houses are nearly interchangeable. For Lucilla, a suitor can only be considered in relation to the house; domestic organization structures both Lucilla’s life, as it allows her to create a social realm around her, and her psyche. Later, after introducing the Archdeacon to Mrs. Mortimer, Miss Marjoribanks wanders through Mrs. Mortimer’s garden, speculating on the relationship between the two and the aborted proposal that Lucilla believed was coming from Beverley. The narrator comments that “[a]s these thoughts went through her mind, Miss Marjoribanks could not help observing that the branches of the pear-tree… had come loose from the wall, and were swaying about greatly to the damage of the half-grown pears,—not to say that it gave a very untidy look to that corner” (203). As she waits for the tête-à-tête to conclude, she “went on with what she was thinking; and she made one or two remarks of the same description in a parenthesis as she made her tour” (203). Particularly when Lucilla is contemplating a potential spouse, she needs to connect those thoughts with house considerations and home management. The domestic is part of Lucilla’s identity, and when she walks around Mrs. Mortimer’s garden, which she designed herself, “every step she took round the garden restored her more and more entirely to herself” (202). It’s as if thoughts of marriage distance Lucilla from her true identity, and while her focus on domesticity and community end up derailing many of her marriage plots, she is able to pursue her mission and reorganize society in her town. 116 Like Emma, Lucilla also uses her house as a tool for matchmaking. Once she has discovered the truth about the Archdeacon, Mr. Cavendish, and Mrs. Mortimer’s pasts, she sets about bringing a reconciliation and an engagement entirely through a careful manipulation of her home. She views the confrontation between Mr. Cavendish and Mr. Beverley as a job to be done, and as part of her mission and “social business.” The narrator in this case uses legal metaphors for Lucilla’s work, describing her interrogation of Mrs. Mortimer as the creation of a “brief” and Mrs. Mortimer herself as the “witness” (214). While Miss Marjoribanks performs like an attorney, the content of her business lies in the social realm that she has largely created. In preparation for the fateful evening gathering, Lucilla receives the Archdeacon in her house and uses her knowledge of its daily routine in order to fuel his fury. After planting seeds of doubt in his mind, she manipulates him into leaving out of fear of meeting others. When the doorbell rings, Lucilla hints that others have come for luncheon, even though she “knew perfectly well that it was only the baker, but it could not be expected that the Archdeacon should be similarly initiated into the secrets of the house” (223 – 4). Lucilla knows the details of her household but also knows that the Archdeacon is ignorant of them, and can therefore use her housekeeping as a tool to manipulate the Archdeacon’s actions. What is unique about Lucilla’s social work, though, is that she influences not only the cultural life of the community but its political life as well. The second “fytte” of Lucilla’s story concerns her foray into political organizing, and her manipulation of the election for MP. Even Lucilla realizes that her new project is something different, for as she feels the excitement of the coming struggle, “the conviction burst upon her that she was striking out a perfectly new and original line” (340). In fact, Lucilla’s originality 117 works on two levels, since she is participating in the traditionally male realm of politics and doing so with unconventional tactics. When Miss Marjoribanks discovers that Mr. Chiltern has died, she has a sudden intuition that Mr. Ashburton should be the man to replace him. The narrator notes that “Lucilla was not of very marked political opinions… but she said after, that it came to her mind in a moment, like a flash of lightning, that he was the man” (337 – 8). This beginning to Lucilla’s political career already marks it as different: whereas men traditionally debated political views and issues (as represented by Mr. Ashburton’s initial approach to his campaign), Miss Marjoribanks focuses on the character of the candidate, following her intuition about who should be elected. Her campaign follows the same logic, and while most men scoff at her suggestions at first, in the end, they are swayed and ultimately elect Mr. Ashburton to Parliament. Lucilla has managed not only to sway the political process but to introduce a new logic into it. While Lucilla introduces a new strategy into the campaign, she also easily manipulates the traditional field of politics, judging rationally and seeing through Mr. Cavendish’s emotional appeals. She attends to the two candidates’ speeches “candidly and impartially” and realizes that Mr. Cavendish’s piece is “pathetic and sentimental,” and “that appeal to sentiment was nothing more than what is generally called humbug” (358). Contrary to all Miss Marjoribanks’s exhortations that “‘I don’t understand politics,’” she comprehends quite clearly the traditional campaign tactics and chooses deliberately to undermine them (363). Lucilla successfully uses the organizational devices that run her household—the logic of choosing fashionable colors, or of making guests comfortable—as a framework for Ashburton’s campaign. She can play with the men on their field yet also introduce a new kind of social strategy into politics. 118 Lucilla’s strategy to influence the election depends upon her access to and control over her house. When she first meets Mr. Ashburton in the street, she begs him to come in and uses her drawing-room as the site of their first conference. It is during this conference that Lucilla’s campaign begins in earnest, with her choice of colors for the candidate’s ribbons. While Mr. Ashburton observes Lucilla being “absurd,” she is actually cleverly linking him to her social prowess by designating her colors—including the green of her redecorated drawing-room—as his own. She also immediately turns the gatherings in her home towards promoting her candidate, professing her opinion that “the thing was not to consider Whigs nor Tories, but a good Man. And Major Brown, who had come with his daughters, echoed this sentiment so warmly that Mr. Ashburton was entirely convinced of the justice of Miss Marjoribanks’s ideas” (343). Luncheons and social visits now turn towards political discussions. But while Mr. Ashburton comes to agree with Miss Marjoribanks’s definition of a good candidate, he still can’t fathom a campaign based on sociality instead of politics. Lucilla works her ideas on multiple levels, instead of just a political one. Mr. Ashburton is concerned with speeches and committees, but Lucilla focuses on the social realm of casual conversation, gossip, and fashion. She excites the young people who “liked the idea of wearing a violet-and-green cockade,” and wins over others with her talk of the goodness of the candidate. Significantly, though, Lucilla’s audience is often female, and “in no cases had votes,” but their importance is not lost on Miss Marjoribanks, who, “with instinctive correctness of judgment, decided that there were more things to be thought of than the electors” (344). Her focus on the domestic side of electioneering—discussions held at gatherings in 119 homes, the fashion of the candidates ribbons—proves a successful formula for winning the election for MP. Ultimately, like Emma, Miss Marjoribanks marries, but also like Emma, she does so on her own terms. Significantly, she marries her cousin Tom Marjoribanks, a weak- willed man who will not interfere with Lucilla’s designs, and as a result keeps her name (and nominal identity) intact. It is surprising to Lucilla, but not to the narrator, who declares, “[i]f there could be any name that would have suited her better, or is surrounded by more touching associations, we leave it to her other friends to find out; for at the moment of taking leave of her, there is something consoling to our own mind in the thought that Lucilla can now suffer no change of name” (496). Moreover, she gains her namesake house, Marchbank, through this marriage, and she fully intends to use it for her own purposes. Lucilla’s grand designs about reforming the village surrounding Marchbank depend upon her control of this property, and they reveal that in spite of her marriage, Lucilla will continue to produce the social and create society. 56 56 As I have argued, because Miss Marjoribanks and Emma are single until the very end of their stories and therefore their actions are not obscured by a husband’s, their social performance and, indeed, roles as creators of the social are more visible. However, even married women could and did participate in the social, using the same techniques these characters do in order to have some sway over their environment and create society around them. After all, Mrs. Elton organizes the Box Hill party, deciding to make the journey without the anticipated Sucklings, inviting the guests and getting to visit a site she longed to see. And while Mrs. Elton tries to take her power a bit too far, even offering to invite Knightley’s guests to the strawberry picking, Knightley’s response demonstrates that married women did have a similar agency. Mrs. Elton comments to Mr. Knightley, ‘…But consider;—you need not be afraid of delegating power to me. I am no young lady on her preferment. Married women, you know, may be safely authorized. It is my party. Leave it all to me. I will invite your guests.’ ‘No.’—he calmly replied.—‘there is but one married woman in the world whom I can ever allow to invite what guests she pleases to Donwell, and that one is…. Mrs. Knightley;—and until she is in being, I will manage such matters myself.’ (231 – 232) Mrs. Elton positions married women as more powerful in this regard than single women—they can be “safely authorized.” Mr. Knightley, although he would be loath to admit it, agrees with her, since he admits that he would allow his wife to take care of the invitations as well. In spite of the fact that Mr. 120 Hannah Arendt points out in The Human Condition that the novel is the “only entirely social art form” (39). She also hints at, although she doesn’t thoroughly discuss, the role narrative plays in creating the social: “The most current of such transformations [of private things into public] occurs in storytelling and generally in artistic transposition of individual experiences” (50). And, indeed, both novels reveal this theorem to be true as the texts draw parallels between social life and literary production. While Emma is often portrayed as the mistress of the house (and, as Knightley so pointedly observes, “of you all”), she is also positioned as mistress of language. She cleverly manages the story that surrounds Harriet’s collection of riddles, and when reading Mr. Elton’s contribution, she becomes “quite mistress of the lines” (46). Moreover, Emma herself characterizes the riddle, perceived as an overture to a proposal of marriage, in literary terms, telling Harriet, “[i]t is a sort of prologue to the play, a motto to the chapter; and will soon be followed by matter-of-fact prose” (48). The play and the chapter here serve as metaphors for the real life social interactions Emma expects between Mr. Elton and Harriet: a romantic proposal and happy married life together. Likewise, in Miss Marjoribanks, Barbara Lake’s knowledge of men is constructed as a literary encounter, for while “Barbara has never as yet had a lover,… she had read an unlimited number of novels, which came to nearly the same thing” (85). Experiencing social interactions and reading about them are functionally equivalent. Further, when the confrontation between the snubbed Lucilla and the flirtatious Mr. Cavendish occurs, Lucilla’s guests came “to Knightley refuses Mrs. Elton this agency, their exchange illustrates that married women did, indeed, have the ability to control aspects of their household, and through the social, their lives. 121 watch the progress of the little drama… for, after all, society would be excessively tame if it were not for these personal complications, which are always arising, and which are so much better than a play” (130). By suggesting that the community’s social machinations are “better than a play,” the narrator not only equates these two entities as similarly literary but also suggests that the social is more literary than a drama. The similarities between social life and novelistic production position Lucilla and Emma, then, as “authors” in the sense that they “plot” the social trajectory of their environments. Each novel attests to these roles by subtly characterizing the heroines as social narrators and their activities as inherently literary. Emma’s role as storyteller appears most clearly when she almost literally authors Harriet’s response to Mr. Martin’s first letter of proposal. Emma manipulates Harriet into refusing Mr. Martin with constant references to the writing of the rejection, exclaiming, “I certainly have been misunderstanding you, if you feel in doubt as to the purport of your answer. I had imagined you were consulting me only as to the wording of it” (32, emphasis in original). The extended discussion about both the content and the style of Harriet’s response to Mr. Martin draws attention to the construction of the social through writing, and it positions Emma as the ultimate author of this writing. Mr. Knightley proves the connection when he chides Emma, “‘You saw her answer! you wrote her answer too. Emma, this is your doing’” (38). While Emma did not literally write the response, in terms of the plot Emma is responsible; she is the author of this social interaction, and she takes delight in her production. Making plots, as she tells Mr. Woodhouse, “‘is the greatest amusement in the world!’” (6). For Miss Marjoribanks, the “one thing in the world more than another which contented Lucilla” is plotting, mapping out stories and directing them to their ends: 122 “It did her heart good to take the management of incapable people, and arrange all their affairs for them, and solve all their difficulties” (207). The figure most aligned with the job of directing the lives of others is the novelist. In fact, the novel and the social function reciprocally. That is, the novel in general and the domestic novel in particular provide examples of the social, since by narrating housekeeping events they automatically make these events public. As domesticity becomes more visible through the novel, women also develop their participation in the social. The novel narrates housekeeping in the same way that women perform it, for a public audience and in order to create society. As parallel phenomena, both the social and the novel then contribute to women’s agency within their households. Having control over a house gave nineteenth-century, middle-class women definite authority and agency over their environment. But this control also has a dark side. Within the often tumultuous middle-class economics of nineteenth-century Britain, the possibility of losing one’s house always loomed. In the next chapter I will explore the thematic and narrative motif of the loss of the house as an expression of female anxiety over identity, agency, and position within the gender and social hierarchy. 123 Chapter 3: “We must, in these days at least, live in houses”: Middle-Class Women and the Loss of the Home Isabella Beeton, the well-known arbiter of Victorian domesticity whose work we’ve already encountered, laments in her popular domestic guide Household Management (1861) that “we must, in these days at least, live in houses” (30). It’s an odd sentiment coming from one who almost single-handedly codified and disseminated the standards of middle-class domestic ideology that circulated in nineteenth-century Britain. Clearly, Isabella Beeton understood the importance of the house and its rituals as well as anyone, yet in spite of—or perhaps because of—this understanding, Beeton wishes on some level to be unburdened, to lose her house. Mrs. Beeton’s livelihood depended on homes, and yet she still seems to long for another time, one where people might have the option not solely to live in houses—not to participate in the rituals and cultural responsibilities that come with home life. Her comment speaks to a significant tension underlying notions of the domestic during this period. While the middle-class home formed the cornerstone of British social identities, the very real possibility of its loss produced and revealed something deeper: a conflicted sense of the home as both a safe sanctuary and a stifling prison. The trope of the loss of the home appeared with surprising frequency in the nineteenth-century novel. 57 During a period of profound attention to the materiality of and beliefs enshrined in the home, many authors chose to dramatize what amounts to a 57 In addition to the novels I discuss in depth here, consider Thackeray’s Vanity Fair (1847-8), where the Sedleys lose their home as a result of their bankruptcy; Gaskell’s North and South (1855), where the Hales must leave the parsonage; Emily Brontë’s Wuthering Heights (1847), which dramatizes repeated losses of both Thrushcross Grange and Wuthering Heights; Hardy’s The Woodlanders (1896), where Giles Winterbourne loses his home because of his lease; or Dickens’ Bleak House (1852-3), where the loss of the title property is threatened throughout. 124 tragedy for the middle-class family. What happens to one’s life, one’s identity, when the home is lost? I’d like to suggest that in staging this catastrophe, nineteenth-century authors threw the concept of home into crisis and as a result, they revealed a core tension underlying contemporary imaginings of domestic life. The home, it turns out, proves both comforting and confining, particularly for Victorian women. While control over a house promoted a kind of power for women, it also put tremendous pressure on them to maintain the material and cultural conditions necessary for the home’s proper maintenance as well as to produce gendered identities appropriate for the private sphere it encompassed. These responsibilities provided comfort and a sense of identity, but they also limited women’s choices and circumscribed their actions. In turn, the women in the novels I will examine all have ambiguous reactions to the loss of the home: while this loss often proves freeing, it unmoors basic female identity and leaves women with few resources. This chapter examines these thematic concerns but also suggests that this anxiety over the house can be felt in narrative form itself. That is, the loss of the home structures the thematics of these novels at the same time that it produces a narrative obsession with clinging to domestic spaces. While the diagetic plot can explore domestic loss, the extradiagetic form of the narrative fights compulsively to hold on to the home. The trope of the loss of the house evolved throughout the nineteenth century. Jane Austen’s Persuasion (1818) provides an early example of domestic dispossession. At this time, values and beliefs about home life were coalescing around concepts of morality, the division of the sexes, and attitudes towards appropriate consumption, and the plot of Austen’s novel dramatizes this very transition. Anne Elliott loses the aristocratic Kellynch-hall, but her story proves the value of this loss as she gains the 125 opportunity to participate actively in what will become middle-class private life. At mid- century, Maggie Tulliver, the heroine of George Eliot’s The Mill on the Floss, struggles vigorously against the responsibilities and gender regulations that now permeate the middle-class home. By the time Maggie appears on the scene, Isabella Beeton’s handbook for housekeepers was already well-known, and it had entered a marketplace replete with advice books that detailed how to create a respectable home. 58 The codification of home life creates a tension for Maggie: she longs to escape the confines of restrictive gender roles, and yet, when she does remove herself from the home, she feels vulnerably disconnected and unstable. Maggie’s choices are few, and her fight against the values associated with home life leaves her homeless, friendless, and, finally, dead. By the end of the century, women’s tenuous position within the home had undergone more and more thorough scrutiny, whether through fictional representations like Eliot’s or political and social discussions surrounding the Married Woman’s Property Act (1867), or the “New Woman” or the “Woman Question.” In spite of the attention Hardy pays to women’s issues, Jude the Obscure’s Sue Bridehead grows directly out of Maggie Tulliver, and she also is forced to fight against the same cultural mandate that she live in a proper home and perform her gender role faithfully. While Sue suffers a parallel fate to Maggie—she ends with a living death, her soul crushed by the weight of the home and its 58 The Mill on the Floss appears in 1860, amongst a number of already popular household advice manuals. What would become Mrs. Beeton’s Book of Household Management started appearing as a monthly supplement to The Englishwoman's Domestic Magazine in 1859, finally published as a book in 1861. Other popular manuals were Johnstone’s The Cook and Housewife's Manual (1826), The Female’s Friend and General Domestic Advisor (1837), The Housewife’s Guide (1840), Acton’s Modern Cookery for Private Families (1845) and Soyer’s Modern Housewife (1850), which “presents its culinary and domestic advice in the form of letters exchanged between two fictional women friends” (Humble xv). There were also dictionaries and encyclopedia detailing the duties of the household, including Webster’s An Encyclopaedia of Domestic Economy (1844) and Merles’ The Domestic Dictionary (1842). 126 values—it is through her struggles that Hardy explores and questions the fundamental structure underlying the home and family: heterosexual marriage. 59 While all three of these texts show how discussions about domestic life changed throughout the century, their trajectories consistently grapple with the tension for women at the heart of the home. Protagonists like Maggie and Sue desire more freedom to act in their lives and locate this freedom in an escape from the house, yet they all discover that this freedom is elusive, transitory, or unattainable. These female protagonists demonstrate that the power of domestic ideology extends beyond the home and structures their interaction with the whole of the world. Perhaps no single principle marked the solidity and sense of purpose of the middle classes in nineteenth-century Britain more than domestic ideology, a notoriously slippery concept. As R. J. Morris notes, “the creation of a home centered life style of domesticity…. [was] given a central place in the creation of middle-class identity” (26). As the prior chapters have illustrated, domestic ideology clearly helped constitute the new forms of a central middle class. In mounting this argument, I follow the arguments of Linda Young, who, warning against a materialist reading of class as solely economically determined, asserts that what she calls the culture of “gentility” actually produced a sense of participating in middle-class life. The basis of my readings, likewise, lie in Young’s main claims that “for the middle class, the aspirational forms of gentility constitute the very substance of class as experience, relationship, and power” 59 In the late eighteenth century, Mary Wollstonecraft suggests that marriage might be detrimental to women’s freedom, claiming, ‘[t]he obedience required of women in the marriage state [degrades them]; the mind naturally weakened by depending on authority, never exerts its own powers, and the obedient wife is thus rendered a weak indolent mother” (72). The authors I’m discussing in this chapter are not the first, then, to examine critically the connections between gender roles and marriage, but they do triangulate these concepts with the home in a new way. 127 and that “[b]elieving like the middle class, performing like the middle class, consuming like the middle class, constituted agents as the middle class” (29, 20). However, I argue that beliefs, performance and consumption all occurred largely within the space of the house. Domestic ideology, then, forms the foundation for the new concept of gentility, and therefore it is one’s participation in and performance of the values and beliefs about respectable home life that helps form one’s class identity. While Young defines genteel culture as “self-control of the body…; self-control of the spirit and emotions;… control of the self in public; and control of the environment,” I suggest that the gentility of the middle classes stems largely from the values that surround behaviors and display in the home. 60 In order to consider oneself genteel, one must first and foremost have a house to live in; this house, then, must be turned into a home through proper consumption and display of household goods and strong adherence to gender division. Both of these requirements are consistently read as moral obligations. This middle-class “style” of domesticity was deeply rooted in complex ideas about gender identity; indeed, as Davidoff and Hall point out, “the home was strongly associated with a form of femininity which was becoming the hallmark of the middle- class” (25). In my reading, the weight of maintaining this particular middle-class status falls heavily on the shoulders of women. While men needed a respectable job and strong work ethic and were obligated to provide the economic means to consume, these elements were not sufficient to produce a special middle-class identity. The bulk of the work of performing class identity happens in the home, the site of female action and 60 I will use the terms “genteel” and “gentility” throughout the rest of this chapter in Young’s sense, not as a marker of upper-class or noble identity, but as an ideology that promoted particular activities and performances within the homes of the middle classes. 128 agency. Women participated in gentility through the maintenance of their own bodies and the sartorial representation of their respectability, but even more importantly, women’s actions within the home could mark a family as solidly middle class. Advice manuals on household management directed women in etiquette, providing proper care to others, social rituals such as calling, and appropriate consumption. As Linda Young points out, “wealth alone was no longer the determinant of access. Knowing which item to acquire from among many emerged as another test” of one’s gentility, and this knowledge rested largely, if not solely, with women (19). In short, “women undertook vitally necessary work as managers of class relations and agents of public representation of status” (Young 25). The performance of gentility, then, rested for the most part with women, rendering the pressures surrounding maintaining class status their burden as well. While the rituals of the house provided a platform on which families might build and perform their gender and class identities, the material instability of the middle-class home constantly threatened these identities. That is, an unstable economic climate coupled with increasing pressures to maintain and display a respectable home worked together to create an environment where the threat of losing one’s home was omnipresent. The material instability of middle-class status arose mainly from two sources: volatile economics as well as increasing inequality among the middle classes themselves, and both elements provided “a source of status and economic anxiety” (Morris 45). 61 The irony of this situation lies in its circularity; while engaging in genteel 61 Morris notes that fluctuations in the economy during the nineteenth century both in Britain and globally “threatened and promoted a constant exchange of people between social classes” (55). He suggests that even periods of apparent affluence (such as the 1820s) were likely no more stable than during the rest of the century. He also argues that “the most important [class and economic] tensions lay within the top third of 129 behaviors allowed for families to enter the middle classes, it was the very performance of domesticity that threatened this class status. For the need to maintain a household that displayed middle-class standing required a significant level of consumption; at the same time, implementing gentility required adhering to a theory of separate spheres that removed female labor from the marketplace, thereby diminishing potential income. All in all, “to be part of the middle classes was to be part of a group which, in terms of economic, social and cultural authority, had enormous and growing power but, for the individual, the position was one of great vulnerability in the face of the insecurities of the body and the insecurities of those structures called ‘the economy’” (77). However, this materiality was not the only, or even the most terrifying, threat to one’s class position. Because membership in the center of the middle classes depended more heavily on behaviors than finances, it was a family’s (in)ability to enact their cultural capital that more profoundly threatened their acceptance in bourgeois circles. In order to qualify as respected members of the middling classes, families needed to provide tasteful and abundant trappings of home life without revealing a financial struggle to do so. The emphasis on behavior that overshadows financial concerns emerges subtly in Mrs. Beeton’s Book of Household Management, perhaps the most popular guide to domestic life in the nineteenth century, selling over 60,000 copies during its first year of publication and nearly two million less than a decade later (Humble vii). As Nicola Humble points out, the book “errs on the side of frugality;” its author strives to balance questions of economy with suggestions for demonstrating prosperity and suggests that the income earners…. the ‘battle’ was not between the rich and the bulk of the labouring class… but between the top 10 per cent and the next 25 per cent” (45). 130 this balance depended upon middle-class women’s skillful exercise of taste. The very quality of the women running the household can save the family from either falling into working-class patterns or running into debt. Mrs. Beeton advises her readers on these issues, explaining, The elegance with which a dinner is served is a matter which depends, of course, partly upon the means, but still more upon the taste of the master and mistress of the house. It may be observed, in general, that there should always be flowers on the table, and as they form no item of expense, there is no reason why they should not be employed every day. (367) Solid finances were requisite to provide respectable dinners, but monetary concerns are secondary to the skill and taste of the members of the household. And, given the family structure that leaves nearly all of the responsibility for managing the home to women, the burden of balancing “means” and “taste” falls consistently to women. While Mrs. Beeton attempts to teach taste, here suggesting that flowers can increase the elegance of the table, she also implicitly suggests that a woman’s success relies on her inherent judgment and expertise. She notes that “[m]uch can be done in the arrangement of a supper-table, at a very small expense, provided taste and ingenuity are exercised” (387, italics in original). Her emphasis on “taste” and “ingenuity” redoubles the demands on the housewife, creating pressure on women to manage carefully the finances with which they are provided and to deftly maximize the potential for middle-class display. This obligation to balance middle-class status with the realities of a precarious economic environment, coupled with the financial instability of the middle classes, erupted in an anxiety expressed both thematically and narratively in novels through the trope of the loss of the house. Throughout the century, the desire for a respectable home, 131 the material manifestation of a family’s class status, collided with the realities of middle- class economics, resulting in narratives wherein characters confronted the pinnacle of failure: the loss of their homes. This privation terrifies on two levels: materially, the loss of the house meant a loss of the physical and symbolic center of domesticity, of the processes of performing middle-class identity, including housekeeping, calling, and consuming. 62 Psychologically, this dispossession also suggested a loss of respectability that threatened the very ideology of middle-class identity. Ultimately, this threat destabilized gender identity and contributed to the novel’s development of a kind of narrative obsession with clinging to the house, whether by locating action there or reinstating its evicted inhabitants, throughout the nineteenth century. The women in these plots of dispossession offer complex insights into Victorian domesticity, suggesting the limits of this middle-class ideology and challenging the meaning of the loss of the home. I. The plot of Jane Austen’s Persuasion grows out of the loss of the house, as the ancestral home, Kellynch-hall, is stripped from the Elliot family and they are forced to let the house as a result of Sir Walter and Elizabeth’s mismanagement. While the Elliots are members of the baronetage, the loss of their property threatens this already slightly dubious status and, along with Anne’s eventual marriage to Captain Wentworth, suggests their slide into the middle classes. Significantly, though, it is the loss of Kellynch-hall 62 Morris explains that “consumer goods…. not only delivered daily use and value but also…. created the opportunities and stage sets upon which the values of politeness, domesticity and piety were acted out” (49). 132 that provides a narrative motor for the text and allows Anne to shape her identity and her destiny. The struggle between an aristocratic vision of property and arranged marriage and a middle-class ideology of home and companionate marriage plays out amongst the women of the novel. Anne Elliott, the ideal domestic heroine, values the “virtues” of a middle-class home over the importance of an aristocratic title, refusing to perpetuate the family’s class legacy by marrying Mr. William Elliott, her cousin and next in line to inherit Kellynch. This marriage would firm up the family’s membership in the gentry and protect the Elliott family’s slightly shaky aristocratic honor and home. However, Anne bases her refusal on William’s questionable character: “The charm of Kellynch and of ‘Lady Elliot’ all faded away. She could never accept him…. Her judgment, on a serious consideration of the possibilities of such a case, was against Mr. Elliott” (168, 106). Anne appreciates the intangibility of domestic virtues and can, therefore, recognize the value of home as more than property or an “estate,” a marker of aristocratic status— who can, in fact, appreciate the home as it is envisioned by middle-class ideology, as the site of true love between husband, wife and family. The “charm” of membership in the gentry is negated by Mr. Elliott’s immoral character, a sign that he cannot participate in the moral respectability required of the genteel. In reworking the loss of the house into a struggle over true domestic virtue and gender identity, Austen highlights the cultural anxieties located in the home. However, her revision cannot completely contain these anxieties, and as a result, Anne ends up as no other Austen heroine has: happily married and homeless. From the start, Anne’s character contrasts with those of her sisters, Elizabeth and Mary. Both Elizabeth, the eldest and still unwed daughter, and Mary, who married into 133 the marginally aristocratic Musgrove family, value social rank over personal relationships and have little to no skill in managing a household. When Anne learns the full extent of the debt at Kellynch, she consults with Lady Russell, her maternal surrogate and adviser, about the “scheme of retrenchment” that could relieve the Elliotts’ financial burdens. While Elizabeth, the current mistress of the house, “had finally proposed these two branches of economy: to cut off some unnecessary charities, and to refrain from new- furnishing the drawing-room,” Anne’s suggestions “had been on the side of honesty against importance. She wanted more vigorous measures, a more complete reformation, a quicker release from debt, a much higher tone of indifference for every thing but justice and equity” (8, 9). Elizabeth, the mistress under whom the debt had accrued, suggests measures that would not affect the extravagant style of living the Elliotts had been pursuing; her measures don’t reduce expenditures at all, they merely limit new expenses. Moreover, Elizabeth’s suggestions belie “the Christian aspect of humility and kindness… which marks genteel charity,” illustrating her indifference to charitable ideals (Young 24). Her desire to cut off “unnecessary” charities paints her as self-serving and petty, while Anne remains firmly on the side of “honesty.” Anne stays true to Mrs. Beeton’s advice that economy never “degenerate into parsimony and meanness,” suggesting her alignment with bourgeois morality over aristocratic “importance” (Beeton 9). Anne disregards the requirements of aristocratic rank and wants only to relieve the family of its disreputable debt, much as do the solidly middle-class Tullivers in The Mill on the Floss. The Musgrove daughters reinforce the fact that Anne is unlike those who value aristocratic rank when one of them, “after talking of rank, people of rank, and jealousy of rank,” tells Anne, “‘all the world knows how easy and indifferent you are about [rank]’” 134 (Austen 31). Yet Anne is not indifferent; she is merely sensitive to a different ideology, one that values honesty, charity, and frugality over political and social status rooted in bloodlines. Austen’s use of the term “indifferent” creates the appearance that Anne’s concerns are moral, thus enacting the erasure at the heart of middle-class identity: it is the very appearance of indifference to rank that produces the social class that Anne represents. Moralizing the behaviors that constitute gentility not only naturalizes the corpus of practices that mark one as middle class, it reinforces the fundamental belief in achieving one’s position through hard work and integrity, the “promise that good or at least correct behavior would achieve the reward of higher status” (Young 15). 63 These early indications that Anne conforms more closely to genteel standards bloom into distinguishing character traits as a result of the initial catalyst of the text: the loss of the Kellynch estate. Without this loss, the narrative suggests that Anne would have remained in the shadows both in and of her home; when the action moves out of the ancestral residence, Anne can become the narrative’s central focus. Because she is not first-born and she is not interested in promoting the family’s rank, Anne is constantly overlooked by the members of the family who cling to their class standing and view Kellynch primarily as a status symbol. At home, Anne “never seemed considered by the others,” and yet, when she must leave, she gains the opportunity to act in other domestic spaces and to display and promote a self worth “consideration,” a self who performs 63 This battle between ideas of family worth versus individual value had been going on for centuries. Julian Markels sees this struggle even in the early modern period, suggesting that King Lear depicts “the historic overthrow of corporate feudalism by competitive bourgeois individualism” (1). However, in the nineteenth century, the struggle becomes uniquely tied to the home. 135 gentility without the shadow of Kellynch’s aristocratic heritage constraining her maturation into a commendable middle-class heroine. At Uppercross cottage, her sister Mary’s family home, Anne exists outside of the economy of rank that Mary so actively courts and therefore operates without concerns of status. Mary’s dedication to achieving primary position, to being considered important at the Uppercross Manor House, usurps her domestic instincts until she, unlike Anne, sees status and the home as antagonistic. When dining at the mansion house, “she did not see any reason why she was to be considered so much at home as to lose her place” (31). Being “at home”—that is, wrapped in domesticity—for Mary means losing one’s position of rank. As a result, Mary refuses family duties, leaving a void Anne can fill with her instinctual desire to create a warm, nurturing environment through providing care and comfort. When Anne’s nephew falls from a tree, she is able to nurse him when his mother, Mary, cannot. Mary, too concerned with her own pleasure and appearances of rank, hopes to dine at the “Great House,” declaring to Anne, “‘I am no use at home’” (38). And, indeed, Mary’s focus on her position within aristocratic circles makes her useless in the domestic sphere; only Anne sees that “‘[a] sick child is always the mother’s property, her own feelings generally make it so’” (38). The “general” rules Anne refers to here are bourgeois ones that promote maternal attention and retreat into the home; her suggestion that a mother’s “feelings” lead her to care for her child naturalizes the notions of feminine care. Ultimately, Anne stands in for Mary in the house and nurses her nephew herself, engaging a pleasure that is constructed as largely domestic. While her nursing duties do remove her from a potentially awkward meeting with Captain Wentworth, it is clear that Anne also appreciates the opportunity to be useful in the home. 136 She “had ere long the pleasure of seeing them set off together in high spirits,” and she “was left with… many sensations of comfort” precisely because “[s]he knew herself to be of the first utility to the child” (39). Anne’s pleasure comes from being useful to both the Musgroves and their child, and yet the narrative positions Anne’s attention to family as more acceptable than Mary’s social striving when Anne reflects, “They were gone, she hoped, to be happy, however oddly constructed such happiness might seem” (39). Mary’s pleasure is “constructed,” suggesting that the concerns of the gentry are comparatively artificial and socially produced while naturalizing middle-class devotion to family and home. Anne’s dedication to the comfort of others remains, and she judges that Mary’s happiness in seeking social interaction while neglecting her responsibilities at home is an odd kind of happiness indeed. During the pivotal crisis of the novel, Louisa Musgrove carelessly and selfishly seeks amusement, resulting in her fall as she playfully jumps off the harbor wall at Lyme Regis. In the aftermath, Anne ably cares for others, a demonstration that helps land her Captain Wentworth as a husband. Ironically, because she is not tied to Kellynch-hall, Anne is able to move between houses, from Captain Harville’s seaside home to Uppercross cottage and the “Great House,” and therefore she obtains more opportunities to perform domestic duties—and more importantly, to perform it for a wider audience— than she would have at her family residence. When Louisa first falls, Anne is the only woman among the group who is able to act, and, in fact, she functions more calmly and ably than any of the men. Mary screams and clutches her husband while Henrietta faints, aping an aristocratic model of female helplessness through inaction and fainting spells. Anne, in stark contrast to these women, holds Henrietta and directs the men to care for 137 Lousia, telling Captain Benwick to aid Captain Wentworth and explaining, “Rub her hands, rub her temples; here are salts,-- take them, take them” (74). She is always positioned to provide care; she exhibits proper consumption by not only knowing how to use salts but also carrying them with her. Anne, too, suggests they send for a doctor, and it is clear that everyone looks to Anne as the most capable actor in this emergency: Anne, attending with all the strength and zeal, and thought, which instinct supplied, to Henrietta, still tried, at intervals, to suggest comfort to the others, tried to quiet Mary, to animate Charles, to assuage the feelings of Captain Wentworth. Both seemed to look to her for directions. “Anne, Anne,” cried Charles, “what is to be done next? What, in heaven’s name, is to be done next?” Captain Wentworth’s eyes were also turned towards her. “Had not she better be carried to the inn? Yes, I am sure, carry her gently to the inn.” (75) Although this scene happens on the Cobb and not within a home, the actions Anne takes are decidedly domestic: nursing the fainted Henrietta, directing the care for Louisa, comforting the men, and ultimately, directing the action back to a home as the Harville’s invite them to their house as an alternative to the inn. At this moment, Anne is positioned as the head of the household and can act authoritatively as she cannot within her own home. The progression of clauses separated by commas emphasize Anne’s capability and the way she juggles multiple duties, with “strength and zeal, and thought,” she “attends” to Henrietta, “tries” to comfort others, “quiet” Mary, “animate” Charles, and “assuage” Captain Wentworth’s guilt at not catching Louisa. And, as the text concentrates its attention on Anne, the characters direct their rapt attention to her performance, both men “look[ing] to her for directions,” and Captain Wentworth’s eyes, perhaps the most significant gaze here, “were also turned towards her.” She becomes 138 central, the focus of all eyes, moving from the margins of aristocratic society to the center of domestic life. The repetition of Charles’s questions serves as a marker of his loss of control and contrast with Anne’s calm, positioning men as incapable and figuring care for others as largely feminine. Other critics have located the meaning of Louisa’s fall in the contrast it provides to Anne, demonstrating that “Anne is strong while Louisa is only childish and willful” (Butler 227). Within the framework of the marriage plot, this assessment functions beautifully, allowing for the change in Wentworth’s affections from Louisa to Anne. However, by reading Persuasion as an allegory about the threat of losing one’s house and as a struggle between aristocratic and middle-class ideologies of home, we can see the activity on the Cobb as an opportunity for Anne to engage in and promote a genteel focus on home and family as a particular kind of femininity. Freed from the formalities of aristocratic life at Kellynch and a requirement to defer to her sisters, Anne takes control and performs domesticity more ably than any other character. Moreover, upon the Cobb, Anne is able to stage the feminine rituals of home before an audience, thereby proving her worth as the head of a middle-class household. Upon returning to Uppercross to break the news of their daughter’s fall to the Musgroves, the opportunity for Anne to engage the home grows, for at the mansion house the domestic void is truly felt. Here, the lack of a capable manager provides a place for Anne to prove herself and the worth of the ideology she embodies. At the mansion- house, “she had the satisfaction of knowing herself extremely useful…, both as an immediate companion, and as assisting in all those arrangements for the future” (79). Anne revels in the chance to be useful, both as a companion and in formulating plans for Louisa’s continuing care back at home, services that no one else can offer. Other 139 characters remain either consumed with rank and ritual or unskilled in running a household, allowing a space for Anne to demonstrate single-handedly both her attention to care and comfort and the benefits of engaging in this feminine behavior. Having demonstrated her allegiance to gentility through her skillful caregiving and household management, Anne promotes middle-class mores with her preference for certain houses, now illustrating the proper stage on which genteel behavior should be performed. In fact, Anne misses Kellynch simply as a childhood home and only laments the loss of this house because of the opprobrium the loss casts on her father and sister as financial managers. When Anne goes back to Kellynch to see the Crofts, she finds she has no power of saying to herself, “These rooms ought to belong only to us. Oh, how fallen their destination! How unworthily occupied! An ancient family to be so driven away! Strangers filling their place!” No, except when she thought of her mother, and remembered where she had been used to sit and preside, she had no sigh of that description to heave. (83) Anne feels that “Kellynch-hall had passed into better hands than its owners’,” and she feels no allegiance to the house as a result of her “ancient family” and social rank. She has “no power” to regret the loss of this ancestral residence, suggesting not only that she values the new gentility that now reigns there but also reminding us of Anne’s loss of agency when she was tied to this home. Anne locates the meaning of the house outside of the economy of social status, instead valuing Kellynch for the memories it contains and the comfort it provided, here embodied in the figure of her mother. Her mother would “sit and preside,” engaging in a femininity that controlled the household but that also prevented Anne from acting. 140 This preference for the elements of a house glorified by comfort, care, and coziness also leads Anne to value alternate dwellings within the novel. For Anne, “how much more interesting to her was the home and the friendship of the Harvilles and Captain Benwick, than her own father’s house in Camden-place” (82). The Harvilles’ home functions as the most ideal domestic space in the novel, and it is significant that this home is merely a lodging-house with “rooms so small” they can barely accommodate all the Harvilles’ visitors. What strikes Anne, though, is precisely the way this house represents middle-class ideology. 64 Though its rooms are cramped, they provide “pleasanter feelings which sprang from the sight of all the ingenious contrivances and nice arrangements of Captain Harville, to turn the actual space to the best possible account” (66). This home conjures up pleasant “feelings” instead of detached admiration for ostentation; the captain’s decorations are “ingenious” and “nice,” a term that encompasses a litany of denotations such as respectable, refined, cultured, appropriate, virtuous, decent, proper, and in good taste—all adjectives that describe the values of gentility (OED). The Harvilles also maximize the space they have, practicing what Isabella Beeton preaches when she adjures, “[m]uch waste is always prevented by keeping every article in the place best suited to it” (56). The Harville home is noteworthy because of its snugness and the “picture of repose and domestic happiness it presented,” and this ideal middle-class domesticity supersedes concerns about the size or 64 While the rank and file of the British Navy may not have been middle-class, its officers fit this social class description much more closely. In fact, Tim Fulford argues that depictions of naval officers in the nineteenth century tended to posit naval officers as models of “gentlemanly masculinity” based in “manners and morals tested in (military) action, rather than inherited by birth” (186). He argues that in Persuasion, “Austen’s navy redefines gentility in terms of professional activity and discipline” (189). While Fulford suggests that “[t]he gentry, Austen suggests, has been renewed by the careers that its less wealthy sons have taken up” (190), I am arguing that Austen posits a new social strata as a model for virtuous behavior: the middle classes. 141 status of the house. Notably, one aspect of these lodgings that particularly registers with Anne is the way it not only betrays but highlights the Captain’s profession; the house’s décor is “more than amusing to Anne: connected as it all was with his profession [and] the fruit of its labours” (66). The domestic trappings are “more than amusing” to Anne because they produce delight, but this pleasure figures as more than just whimsy; underneath Anne’s amusement lies a serious admiration for the kind of lifestyle this home signifies. The Captain’s profession helps locate him in the middle class, and for Anne, this marker of his social status also makes his home particularly appealing. In spite of the consistent thematic support for a move from aristocratic to middle- class values of home, Persuasion reveals an anxiety surrounding this movement. Austen reworks this cultural anxiety over the loss of the home into a battle between class-based visions of the home and positions the loss as productive of a new, more constructive kind of domesticity. Yet the anxieties arising from the potential loss of the home cannot be completely contained, and in Persuasion they overflow into a narrative obsession over locating action within houses. While the novel’s plot demonstrates the triumph of middle-class gentility over aristocratic condescension, the text cannot avoid employing narrative techniques that compulsively position its characters and action within specific domestic spaces. That is, as the thematics work to loosen Anne from her traditional domicile, the narrative simultaneously grasps more tightly to the concept of location and must carefully associate various elements of the plot with their respective homes. Once Anne has been fully removed from Kellynch and established at Uppercross cottage, the narrative continually works both to locate characters within domestic space and to connect characters to their homes. Chapter nine begins by positioning Captain 142 Wentworth, who “was come to Kellynch as to a home,” though “he had intended, on first arriving, to proceed very soon into Shropshire,” where his other brother resides. The text specifies not only where the Captain now lives, but also where he intended to stay, and then notes that “It was soon Uppercross with him almost every day” (49). Within two paragraphs, the Captain is connected to three different domestic spaces, as if this insistent positioning can help steady the unmooring the text experiences when the Elliotts lose their home and when the thematics make a transition from aristocratic to middle-class values. Charles Hayter, soon to be Henrietta’s fiancé, appears here, too, and he is described through his home as well, since he “lived at his father’s house, only two miles from Uppercross” (49). In fact, Charles’ position in relation to his home propels his story, since “a short absence from home had left his fair one unguarded by his attentions,” opening up a space within the plot for the tensions between multiple suitors. The constant narrative drive to identify characters through their houses even opens this novel, with the introduction of “Sir Walter Elliot, of Kellynch-hall,” immediately pointing to his property as an important—perhaps the most important—marker of identity. The text clings to the act of locating its characters in precise spaces because its main character, Anne, cannot yet be comfortably situated within a home; she is, as Tony Tanner points out, a “girl on the threshold, existing in that limboid space between the house of the father which has to be left and the house of the husband which has yet to be found” (Tanner 232). However, whereas Tanner sees this liminal space situated between father and husband, I am arguing that Anne’s liminality derives from her movement between classes. Anne cannot be located within a house because she no longer belongs 143 in the aristocratic one she has left, and the text struggles to negotiate a way for her to enter the genteel world it seems to promote. In the end, in spite of the happily-concluded marriage plot, Anne’s movement from the gentry to the middling classes remains troubling because she fails to win that ever-important prize: a house of her own. Instead of entering a desired domestic space, like Elizabeth Bennet’s Pemberley and Emma’s Hartfield, Anne is only barred from homes, without any productive options. Anne “had no Uppercross-hall before her, no landed estate, no headship of a family,” and while the text here positions Anne precariously in the middle classes by barring her from aristocratic houses, it finally cannot conceive of an alternative space for her (166). She has perhaps traded land for sea, but the text gives no clear indication what Anne’s conjugal residence will be like. While Mrs. Croft, the admiral’s wife, assures us that “the happiest part of my life has been spent on board a ship,” Anne’s new husband Wentworth claims, “I hate to hear of women on board, or to see them on board; and no ship, under my command, shall ever convey a family of ladies any where, if I can help it” (47, 46). And so, we leave Anne in uncertainty, with neither house nor boat as a clear place of residence. Persuasion successfully promotes the middle-class domestic ideology it illustrates, but it cannot completely revise the anxieties circulating around the loss of the house through this promotion. This early example of the apprehension surrounding the stability of the house will grow into a complex vision of the nexus between class, gender and home, as we shall see next in Eliot’s The Mill on the Floss. 144 II. George Eliot’s The Mill on the Floss offers a vision of the instability of the middle-class home that extends Austen’s representation, using the loss of the house to reveal an anxiety over the conflicts inherent in an ideal of gentility and the difficulties women find negotiating its limitations and pervasiveness. Here, the dispossession of home materializes in the fate of the Tullivers, a middle-class family that struggles throughout the novel to maintain its social status. The Tullivers offer a vision of one version of the Victorian middle-class family precisely because their economic and social status remain slightly unclear. The family’s income level and Mr. Tulliver’s occupation as a miller have little to do with their social class; what makes the Tullivers quintessentially middling is their constant struggle to live culturally as members of the middle classes. They possess plenty of “the common element that unified the middle class wherever it lived[:] the desire, and some capacity, to live genteely” (Young 36). They have an image of genteel life, but what marks the middle classes is a constant struggle to achieve a version of this image. The novel depicts several distinct domestic losses, all of which concern Maggie Tulliver quite personally: the first, a preemptive loss when Maggie chooses to run away from home; the second, a material loss due to Mr. Tulliver’s reckless litigiousness; and a third, a perceived moral loss due to Maggie’s distance from conventional middle-class Victorian womanhood. For Maggie, these losses figure ambiguously in her life; they free her from some requirements of certain Victorian gender paradigms, and yet she discovers that this freedom is often hollow and lonely—and finally, for Maggie, deadly. 145 Throughout the reception history of The Mill on the Floss, critics have read Maggie’s demise as a narrative failure for Eliot. Early criticisms focused on Maggie’s choice to elope with Stephen Guest, such as Swinburne’s claim that “the hideous transformation by which Maggie is debased—were it but for an hour—into the willing or yielding companion of Stephen’s flight…. is the patent flaw,… the flagrant blemish, which defaces and degrades the very crown and flower of George Eliot’s wonderful and most noble work” (165). Later scholars took issue with the incongruence of the final flood; U.C. Knoepflmacher suggests that the problem with the final tragedy is that Maggie’s boat ride with Stephen, her “one act of willfulness… is unrelated to the cataclysmic circumstances of her death,” and that “had the flood occurred at the time of Maggie’s and Stephen’s escape… a logical connection between her willfulness and her denial of ‘irreversible laws’ might have been established” (519). The suggestion here is that Maggie’s demise, in order to be believable and thematically coherent, must be related to her poor, impulsive choice to escape with Stephen. All of these critiques, though, depend upon reading Maggie’s decisions as a choice for something, a result of her unrestrained passion. By reading Maggie’s actions not as a positive choice but as a rejection of the concept of home, we may better understand these potentially anomalous events. That is, when Maggie goes with Stephen, it is not to join him but to escape the restrictions of quasi-genteel home life and the unmooring she experiences when she loses her childhood home; when she dies in the flood, her fate represents the only option left for a woman who cannot assimilate herself into the requirements of bourgeois striving. And indeed, the narrative frame of the novel establishes a deep concern with the concept 146 of domesticity that supports reading Maggie’s destiny largely as a result of her relationship to the home. The novel sets up a structure for its plot with narrative interventions that suggest both the comfort and confinement of home and the pervasive threat of losing it. These breaks, where the speaker addresses the reader either directly or indirectly, allow the narrator to underline the subtle messages building in the diegesis and frame the plot within a larger community. The opening of the text lays a foundation not only for this narrative style but also for a vision of bourgeois gentility that is based on its duality and its fragility. In the introductory chapter, the extradiegetic musings of the narrator envision the entire problem of the novel in a detailed tableau. The first-person narrator dreamily imagines Dorlcote Mill, explaining, “I have been pressing my elbows on the arms of my chair and dreaming that I was standing on the bridge in front of Dorlcote Mill” (55). The fanciful atmosphere appears in the idealization of the narrator’s description of the scene she is imaginatively witnessing—one that conforms to well-established standards of home life. The house is “pleasant to look at,” and “the chill damp season adds a charm to the trimly-kept, comfortable dwelling-house, as old as the elms and chestnuts that shelter it from the northern blast” (53 – 54). The home at the mill is comfortable and well- maintained, living up to the paradigm of diligent housekeeping and comfort that marks the middle-class house. The “chill damp season” provides the necessary contrast that marks the house as sheltering and warm. The cover provided by the trees secludes the house from the rest of the world, and the rush of the water from the river “[shuts] one out from the world beyond” as well (54). This home is appropriately removed from the 147 public realm, well-established (“as old as the elms”) and properly-kept. The actors in this scene, too, play the traditional roles of private life. The man returning home is an “honest waggoner” who “is thinking of his dinner,” a man displaying an attention to home in the form of his evening meal; he is diligent and hard-working enough, though, to finish his work before dining. Even his horses, with their “patient strength,” display “all the more energy because they are so near home,” suggesting that they are fortified by the proximity of this domicile (54). And yet, the fact that the narrator is in a state of reverie suggests that what she reports is also a phantom world that may not exist in reality. Because it may be a phantasm, the picture conjured up is already rooted in the fragility of an ideal. Even within this dream world, though, the duality and fragility that will come to characterize the homes of the novel arise. As the narrator looks at the homestead, she notices that “the clouds are threatening,” and in a moment of foreshadowing, the river menaces the home as it “half drowns the grassy fringe… in front of the house” (54). While the waggoner longs for his dinner, he realizes that it is “getting sadly dry in the oven at this late hour,” and the reliable, industrious horses are reproachful that “he should crack his whip at them in that awful manner” (54). All is not perfection, even in this dream world of idealized domestic life; dinner will not satisfy, the waggoner is merciless, and the house itself is threatened from above and below. Perhaps most significant to the further development of the plot is the little girl standing outside of the house. She is engaged in watching the mill wheel, but the narrator notes that “[i]t is time the little playfellow went in, I think; and there is a very bright fire to tempt her” (55). The hearth and its “bright fire,” a most canonical and traditional 148 symbol of home, should “tempt” her, but the girl remains suspended in time outside the house, shut out from both the home and the mill. In fact, the fireplace engages the discourse of comfort and safety, but it simultaneously invokes the rigid gender roles that are produced by the philosophy that separates the home from the marketplace, the hearth from the mill. In this one image, then, of a little girl poised before the fire that should “tempt” her to (re)join the world of the home, resides the core of the problem dramatized by this novel: the comfort and confinement of a middle-class woman’s life in the Victorian house. Ultimately, there is no indication that the little girl does enter the home, and the narrator’s “I think” preserves this ambiguity; the girl is left suspended between the mill, a symbol of the marketplace and more masculine work, and home, the traditional purview of certain women under the doctrine of separate spheres. She is “rapt” with the workings of the wheel, paying little real attention to the fire. This initial portrait frames the rest of the novel with a sense that domesticity itself is not only a dream, but one that contains within it both a solace and a menace—a dream that constantly threatens to turn into the nightmare of the lost home. Even after moving beyond the narrative device of this initial dream, Eliot’s narrator continually returns to the question of lost homes throughout the novel, repeatedly bringing the anxiety over the material instability of the house to the surface. The most notable instance comes at the beginning of the fourth book, a short section which chronicles the “humiliation” and toil that come with recovering from Tulliver’s losses. In a book of only three chapters, nearly all of the first deals with abstract notions of household history. After contrasting the “poetic” ruins of castles to the “dismal remnants of commonplace houses,” the narrator ruminates over the sordidness of much of human 149 life, a symbol for which she finds in “angular skeletons of villages… [that] oppress me with the feeling that human life—very much of it—is a narrow, ugly, groveling existence…. I have a cruel conviction that the lives these ruins are the traces of were part of a gross sum of obscure vitality” (362). Even impoverished lives contain more poetry than a middle-class existence, for “that primitive rough simplicity of wants… gives its poetry to peasant life” (362). In fact, the narrator asserts here that it is precisely middle- class home life that is “prosaic”; there is nothing “beautiful, great, or noble” to be found in this form of domesticity. While the narrator focuses specifically in this passage on the “little trace of [Christian] religion” she sees in these bourgeois drones, what she identifies as their “moral notions” rooted in “hereditary custom” coincides clearly with what I am here calling domestic ideology: a desire to “have the proper pall-bearers and well-cured hams at one’s funeral,” “thorough scouring of wooden and copper utensils,” a “general preference for whatever was home-made”—in short, this moral code consists of “revering whatever was customary and respectable,” which means following the laws of bourgeois gentility. The narrator declares here that life in the genteel home, at first painted as a kind of idealized realm, oppresses and inflicts pain upon its adherents. Moreover, this kind of existence is meaningless; its lack of poetry, its banality conflict directly with its idealization, another symptom of the tension at the core of the home. And, most significantly, it is only the loss of these middle-class houses—empty, “hollow-eyed” homes—that suggests to the narrator these truths about domestic life. In fact, the narrator claims that “[t]he suffering, whether of martyr or victim, which belongs to every historical advance of mankind, is represented in this way in every town and by hundreds of obscure hearths” (363). The image of the lost and ruined home serves as a focus for 150 this section because it allows the narrator to universalize the sufferings of the Tulliver family, but it also suggests the ubiquitous vulnerability of the middle-class home. All the houses in the imagined deserted villages once held vibrant domestic spaces, and yet inevitably they all fall to ruin. With the idea of the lost house ever-present in the narrative’s consciousness, the plot of The Mill on the Floss focuses on Maggie Tulliver, the heroine whose fate plays out the ramifications of the duality and fragility of the ideals that produce and sustain the middle-class Victorian home. Maggie will experience three separate losses of her home in the short span of her life, each episode building upon the last to produce a complex picture of the consequences of standards of middle-class respectability on gendered identity. From Maggie’s earliest attempts to shake loose of the home she feels confines her, to her death while searching for the house from which she has been barred, Maggie negotiates her gender role largely through her relationship to the Mill and its absence. The duality of the middle-class residence manifests itself in Maggie, who is both attracted to and repelled by it. Her house provides a comfortable safe haven where she locates the relationships dearest to her, particularly her connections to her brother and her father. And yet, the house also localizes and concretizes the stifling standards she is required to pursue as a respectable Victorian woman. It is at the mill that Maggie must curl her hair, keep her dress clean, and engage in domestic tasks like needlework instead of reading “not quite the right book for a little girl” (67). Maggie’s first appearance in the text finds her “wanderin’ up an’ down by the water” instead of spending her time inside the house engaged in housework (60). Mrs. Tulliver calls her in and requests her to “‘[t]ake [your bonnet] upstairs, there’s a good gell, an’ let your hair be brushed, an’ put 151 your other pinafore on, an’ change your shoes—do, for shame; an’ come an’ go on with your patchwork, like a little lady’” (61). All of the female requirements of gentility assault Maggie once she enters the house—she must perform genteel femininity, with the proper clothes, hair, and shoes; she must engage in household tasks that contribute to the home economy but that also suggest leisure; and she must do all this “like a little lady,” specifically and deliberately in order to produce a genteel identity. The materiality of the house cannot be underestimated here, for it is by properly participating in the physical aspects of the home that Maggie can produce a respectable feminine identity. The text illustrates the power of the material with the Dodson women, Mrs. Tulliver’s sisters. All of these women fetishize the material goods associated with the home in order to generate their identities, and they all attempt to impose this behavior on Maggie. When Mrs. Tulliver is first introduced in the narrative, she engages in housework as she “drew a bright bunch of keys from her pocket, and singled out one, rubbing her thumb and finger up and down it with a placid smile, while she looked at the clear fire” (58). The house keys, a fundamental image of the mistress of the house, move here from pragmatic to symbolic; Mrs. Tulliver caresses her keys as she looks at the other core symbol of the snug home, the fire. This attention to the materiality of the house appears in the other Dodson women, as well; in fact, “there was in this family a peculiar tradition as to what was the right thing in household management and social demeanour,” nearly always focusing on the material, whether it be “particular ways of bleaching the linen, of making the cowslip wine, of curing the hams and keeping the bottled gooseberries” (97, 96). Significantly, though, social demeanor for these women means engaging in a particular kind of fetishizing, which appears most clearly at Aunt Pullet’s 152 home, where the simple act of viewing a newly-arrived bonnet becomes the subject of intense ritual. Mrs. Pullet must take her sister, Maggie and Lucy to “the best room,” which requires a trip to a first room, where “with a melancholy air” Mrs. Pullet unlocks a wardrobe which contains the key to the “best room” (148). Once this key has been retrieved, “they went in procession along the bright and slippery corridor…: it was really quite solemn” (150). Aunt Pullet then unlocks another wardrobe “with a melancholy deliberateness which was quite in keeping with the funereal solemnity of the scene” (150). The ritual and gravity of the hat viewing, portrayed here through a narrative tour, suggest to both the reader and Maggie that the proper materials of home are, literally, deadly serious; the funereal tone of the scene coupled with Aunt Pullet’s fear that she “may never wear it twice” underlines the magnitude and importance of engaging with household objects (151). By suggesting that the production of a properly gendered identity results from interacting thoroughly with the goods of the home, the Dodson women suture the materiality of the home to the production of identity. In the process, the comforts of home—good food, a cozy bed—become infused with the stifling requirements of genteel behavior. Whether she practices it properly or not, Maggie learns the importance of this fetishization and begins to play with it on her own. In so doing, she gives life to the internal conflicts of this kind of domesticity through her retreats to the attic. She uses this upper floor as both an escape from the limitations of the material and a reinforcement of its comforts. Maggie wants to shake free of the restraints she associates with her house, but she also longs to be accepted within it, on her own terms. Early in the novel, Mrs. Tulliver scolds Maggie for not living up to the image of a proper Victorian lady of 153 her class. Maggie wants to join her father to retrieve Tom, in itself an inappropriate journey for a young girl, but moreover, “the morning was too wet… for a little girl to go out in her best bonnet” (78). The more significant infraction, though, is Maggie’s refusal to participate in feminine grooming rituals. She douses her hair with water “in the vindictive determination that there should be no more chance of curls that day,” and then she escapes to her “favourite retreat,” the attic, itself a liminal space within the house (78). Significantly, though, Maggie’s retreat is still contained within the home, and it is her preferred escape only “when the weather was not too cold;” Maggie yearns to break from the boundaries of domestic life but still seeks the comfort that these confines provide. Maggie uses the physical house itself to “[fret] out all her ill-humours,” as she “talked aloud to the worm-eaten floors and the worm-eaten shelves and the dark rafters festooned with cobwebs” (78). She is drawn to an area that falls short of respectability, with its “worm-eaten” structure and “cobwebs,” a place that has been overlooked by standards of housekeeping. And yet, Maggie is still attracted to a domestic space; she escapes within the house instead of leaving it behind. In this way, Maggie fetishizes the attic as a more ideal domestic space because of its unconventionality, but in so doing still gives symbolic meaning to part of the home. The space of a house is not ideologically engaged, though, until it is inhabited, and therefore Maggie introduces a key resident into the attic: here she keeps a “Fetish… which she punished for all her misfortunes” (78). Her doll reproduces both thematically and narratively the process of domestic fetishization. While keeping a doll models the structure of care in which a proper bourgeois Victorian girl should engage, Maggie’s treatment of her fetish suggests a conflicted relationship to these standards. The Fetish is 154 “the trunk of a large wooden doll, which… was now entirely defaced by a long career of vicarious suffering,” for Maggie punishes the doll for her own misfortunes by “grinding and beating the wooden head against the rough brick of the great chimneys that made two square pillars supporting the roof” (78 – 79). The doll, a figure meant to train young girls in domestic and gender roles, has been completely disfigured, reversing the economy of care. Here, Maggie inflicts pain on her charge instead of nurturing it, destroying the doll with the house by grinding its head against the structure of the dwelling in an enactment of the destructive power of the domestic for women as well as a rebellion against the roles the home requires Maggie to fulfill. And yet, after mutilating the fetish, Maggie consoles it, falling back into the role of caretaking as she tries to “comfort it, and make believe to poultice it when her fury was abated” (79). It seems that it is only by defacing this surrogate child that Maggie can, if only temporarily, embrace a caretaking role. In this one relationship, Maggie manages to both reject and embrace the behaviors required of her as a middle-class Victorian woman. She longs to leave the stifling parlor, ignore her hair and neglect those who require her care, and yet when she takes a step in this direction, the domestic paradigm that has been inculcated in her by her mother and aunts makes her miserable and forces a return. These early passages foreshadow the difficulties Maggie will have negotiating the material losses of the home and set her up for a continual struggle against the requirements of gentility. Maggie’s tortured relationship to the house and her role within it is recapitulated in a succeeding scene in which she flees to the attic, this time after an argument with Tom. That disagreement results from Maggie’s failure in caregiving: forgetting to feed Tom’s rabbits. After being berated for her domestic incompetence, Maggie again turns to 155 the structure of the house for comfort, as she “laid her head against the worm-eaten shelf,” relying on the deteriorated aspects of the house for solace (88). She takes “pleasure in the hollow resonance that came through the long empty space of the attic,” enjoying the physical and ideological distance from the ideals she’s expected to fulfill. As she realizes that tea-time, a classic household ritual, approaches, she decides “she would stay up there and starve herself—hide herself behind the tub and stay there all night, and then they would all be frightened” (89). But if Maggie chooses to exempt herself from this ceremony in an attempt to assert her own moral economy, her desire to be loved and accepted by her family soon overwhelms her. Her need to be accepted wins out, overpowering her desire to escape the confines of home: “then the need of being loved, the strongest need in poor Maggie’s nature, began to wrestle with her pride and soon threw it” (89). She longs for Tom to come and ask her to join the family, but she is finally willing to humble herself and join them outright. The war within Maggie between asserting her own personality and bowing to domestic ideology rages even during her childhood. This war only escalates as Maggie matures and experiences other kinds of homes. These encounters not only demonstrate to Maggie that gentility is only one kind of home life among many; they also suggest that domestic ideology is fragile and in constant need of policing. The text dramatizes the instability of the Tulliver’s social status by the contrast it provides in the Mosses. Mrs. Moss, as Mr. Tulliver’s sister and Maggie’s aunt, sits in close relation to the Tulliver family, and the fact that she and her family are “poorly off” constantly threatens the Tulliver’s middle-class status. The respectability of the Moss household is always in question, both diegetically and extradiegetically; while 156 the Tullivers comment on the disheveled state of the Moss children and home, the narrator herself also depicts them as shabby. They live within a “hollow farmyard, shadowed drearily by the large half-timbered buildings, up to the long line of tumble- down dwelling-house standing on a raised causeway;” the Moss children are compared to “chickens whose mother has been suddenly in eclipse behind the hen-coop” (139). Mr. Moss is unshaven and “had the depressed, unexpectant air of a machine horse”—he is, almost literally, a work horse (141). The family’s depiction as animals and the chaos of their home life situates them in a working-class milieu and provides a contrast with the semi-genteel Tulliver household. This disarray, though, figures as “dreary” and “hollow,” increasing the threat to the ordered, snug, and pleasant middle-class home. The proximity of the Moss home to the Tulliver’s, standing within a few miles of each other, also brings the potential for middle-class failure into focus. In fact, the Mosses’ financial troubles literally threaten the Tulliver household, since the loan Moss has taken from Tulliver prevents Tulliver from paying off his debts upon losing his lawsuit with Pivart. While the Moss home provides an example of the failure to achieve gentility, ironically, for young Maggie it also offers the only place where she is freed from stringent requirements of femininity. Whereas at home Maggie is constantly in trouble for not conforming to the ideal of a little lady, “Maggie always appeared in the most amiable light at her aunt Moss’s: it was her Alsatia, where she was out of the reach of law—if she upset anything, dirtied her shoes, or tore her frock, these things were matters of course at her aunt Moss’s” (139). Here, in a more working-class household, Maggie escapes the “law” that requires her to control the presentation and movement of her body 157 at home. These early experiences give Maggie a sense of another kind of home, where imminent loss creates a fluidity in gender expectations. The idea that a change of class might free her leads Maggie to actively choose to escape the house. In the first of three experiences in “losing” her home, Maggie makes an active attempt to escape the Mill by running away to the gypsies, hoping that leaving home will free her from constant pressure to conform to genteel femininity. This escape is deeply bound up in class considerations, for it wouldn’t be an escape without crossing class lines; Maggie couldn’t, for instance, merely run to her Aunt Glegg’s house. In this passage, Maggie chooses to leave her house, but, like her escapes into the attic, in the end this loss does not satisfy. Tom, who fully embraces the Tulliver’s efforts to maintain the standards of gentility, believes that Maggie’s disappearance means she “was gone home… it was what he should have done himself under the circumstances” (167). The circumstances of Maggie’s flight, her “fierce thrust” that lands her cousin, “poor little pink-and-white Lucy,” in the mud and dung, makes visceral Maggie’s infractions against proper femininity. Throughout the novel, Tom represents an unflagging dedication to the separate spheres doctrine and middle-class morality; even from this early point, he sees nothing troubling at home, partially because, as Maggie will point out later, he is a man and has freedom to act outside the house. Maggie’s intention here, though, is “not so simple as that of going home”—she means to run away to the gypsies, which “seemed to her the only way of escaping opprobrium and being entirely in harmony with circumstances… to live in a little brown tent on the commons” (168). Tom’s solution, a return to home, proves simple because it means blindly conforming to genteel expectations, and yet, more than simple, Tom’s idea is no solution at all since it reinstalls 158 Maggie within the very economy that stifles her. Maggie’s action is more complex because it requires that she forge a new path outside of the house. Her plan specifically requires that she renounce her home and live “in a little brown tent;” it is precisely the lack of a house that appeals to Maggie and that she considers will free her from the “opprobrium” she incurs as a result of her inability—and, truly, refusal—to conform to middle-class gender roles. 65 When Maggie arrives at the gypsy camp, though, her escape proves disappointing: Maggie actually saw the little semicircular black tent with the blue smoke rising before it which was to be her refuge from all the blighting obloquy that had pursued her in civilized life. She even saw a tall female figure by the column of smoke—doubtless the gypsy-mother, who provided the tea and other groceries: it was astonishing to herself that she did not feel more delighted. (171) Maggie has left “civilized life,” for that was precisely the point. Yet as the reality of an impoverished and foreign life dawns on her, Maggie’s conflicted relationship to the standards that suffocate her reappears. As Maggie speaks with the gypsy mother, she “thought her very agreeable, but wished she had not been so dirty” (172). At this moment, Maggie faults the gypsy woman for her dirtiness, the same domestic infraction Maggie has been accused of and an ideal from which Maggie hopes to escape. But Maggie’s entrenchment in gentility prevents her from entirely renouncing it. Her desire to be the “queen” of the gypsies, furthermore, illustrates that she constructs her identity 65 Deborah Nord suggests that Maggie’s escape to the gypsies illustrates the way she is figured as racially different and “underscores the moral and racial drama of dark and light femininity” (104). While Nord acknowledges Maggie’s disappointment that “the Gypsies have a camped in a lane rather than on a common,” she doesn’t analyze the role of the absent home in Maggie’s desire to stay with the nomadic gypsies (104). 159 through class hierarchy, that she cannot conceive of her identity outside of the framework of class, and she enjoys when “the gypsies saw at once that she was a little lady, and were prepared to treat her accordingly” (172). Although Maggie is a child with an uneven education whose “thoughts generally were the oddest mixture of clear-eyed acumen and blind dreams,” her desire to escape the confines of gentility while maintaining the benefits of middle-class status reveal more than a childish misunderstanding of the way the world works. The conflict arising in Maggie’s first experience in losing her home sets up a continuing duality between desire and dislike that Maggie experiences even more deeply as she matures. Even in her gypsy escape, Maggie clings to the rituals of home in order to create a scene of comfort for herself. Frightened at the unfamiliar gypsy housekeeping, Maggie thinks, “Everything would be quite charming when she had taught the gypsies to use a washing-basin and to feel an interest in books” (172). As hard as Maggie may try to free herself from the home that confines her, she brings its standards of behavior with her wherever she goes, and she cannot escape the discipline of her own mind. She wrestles with the desire to lose the trappings of her middle-class femininity. When the gypsy girl snatches Maggie’s bonnet, Maggie claims, “‘I don’t want to wear a bonnet… I’d rather wear a red handkerchief, like yours.’” Yet Maggie must struggle to distance herself from the bonnet, and she consciously works to show no emotion over losing it: “Maggie was determined not to show any weakness on this subject, as if she were susceptible about her bonnet” (173). The very fact that Maggie must hide her dismay demonstrates that she is vulnerable, suggesting that as soon as Maggie severs her connection to genteel femininity, she longs for a return. 160 While these incidents with the gypsies work on a more subtle level, Maggie herself realizes something of the difficulties of her middle-class home and boldly establishes in her visit with the gypsies the duality that she feels at the heart of it. The old gypsy woman questions her reasons for running away, inquiring, “‘Didn’t you live in a beautiful house at home?’” (173). Implicit in this query is the idea that a beautiful house would automatically equate to a happy life, but Maggie dispels this idea immediately by replying, “‘Yes, my home is pretty… but I’m often very unhappy’” (173). In fact, the beautiful house and all it imprisons are precisely what makes Maggie unhappy. The loss Maggie experiences with the gypsies comes through her own agency, and when this escape proves fruitless, she easily reinstates herself at the Mill. However, the second removal from the house distances Maggie from middle-class dwellings more permanently. The central event of The Mill on the Floss is the material loss of the Tulliver home and land, an event precipitated by Mr. Tulliver’s defeat in his lawsuit against Pivart. Structurally, this episode marks the beginning of Maggie and Tom’s maturity, since as a result “the golden gates of their childhood had for ever closed behind them” (270), and it also becomes the driving force for much of the rest of the novel. This motivator, though, works mostly for Tom’s benefit as he becomes singly focused on paying off his father’s debts and regaining the house. For Maggie however, this loss figures more ambiguously. While Tom worries about the disgrace his father has brought upon the family and Mrs. Tulliver mourns giving up her household things, Maggie is preoccupied with people and distances herself from the forfeiture of material possessions. When Maggie reports the results of the lawsuit to Tom, she exclaims, “‘O Tom, he will lose the mill and the land, and everything. He will have nothing left’” (266). 161 Significantly, Maggie frames the dispossession solely as her father’s, noting that it is his, seemingly unaware of her own place in the tragedy. While she, too, will have nothing left, for Maggie this privation also means a potential to act outside of the home and to escape from the confines of bourgeois gentility. Not surprisingly, the extended Tulliver family reads the loss of the home as emblematic of a fall in class status, and the repercussions of this descent manifest themselves in new household behaviors. Aunt Glegg pronounces that as a result of the failure, Maggie “must make up her mind to be humble and work; for there’ll be no servants to wait on her any more—she must remember that. She must do the work o’ the house, and she must respect and love her aunts, as have done so much for her” (293). One of the key requirements of gentility—that a house employ at least one servant— evaporates after the tragedy. 66 Moreover, Maggie will no longer be able to participate in a leisure economy; she must now do all the work of the house. Aunt Glegg sees a deeper entrenchment in the domestic sphere for Maggie, and the kind of work that Aunt Glegg envisions for her is exactly the kind that Maggie despises, misunderstands, and at which she fails. 67 While Aunt Glegg sees the solution to Maggie’s situation in more household work, Maggie looks for possibilities outside the home. At first, she imagines working together with Tom, and she tells him that “if [Dominie Sampson] had taught me book- 66 Linda Young notes that “the employment of servants [was] the critical signifier of the levels within the middle class, and indeed its lower threshold…. The labour of servants was not only functional, but also semiotic” (54 – 55). Clearly, Aunt Glegg engages both these registers; she is warning Maggie not only that she must now physically perform household tasks, but that she will also be “humbled” mentally and socially as a result of the loss of the status symbol of the servant. 67 Throughout the novel, Maggie fails at feminine tasks, including caregiving (with Tom’s rabbits and her doll, for example) and maintaining her body and clothing. Her mother refers to Maggie’s household skills, lamenting, “‘I’m sure the child’s half a idiot i’ some things’” (60). 162 keeping by double entry and after the Italian method, as he did Lucy Bertram, I could teach you, Tom’” (318). 68 While her thought is hypothetical reverie and she claims that she was “only joking,” Maggie’s suggestion demonstrates that she imagines herself as an actor on something larger than the private stage. Still circumscribed by the impossibility of participating in the marketplace herself, Maggie imagines the next best thing—acting as a sort of puppet-master for Tom. And yet, even this limited opportunity is no opportunity at all—it is, after all, merely a joke, a frivolous suggestion that is enough to make Tom feel “justifiably severe” as tells Maggie that she “‘should leave it to me to take care of my mother and you, and not put yourself forward’” (319). Clearly, some of Tom’s irritation comes from what he sees as Maggie’s airs of superiority, but his comment also hinges on his views of middle-class gender roles. The women of the family, Maggie and her mother, are not expected to and are prohibited from acting in order to save the family’s home and honor. His desire to keep the women in his family fixed in place mirrors the vision of the middle-class woman as decorative ornament represented in Clara Copperfield, Little Em’ly, and Dora Spenlow. However, Maggie cannot restrain herself from helping: she not only determined to work at plain sewing, that she might contribute something towards the funds in the tin box, but she went in the first instance in her zeal of self-mortification to ask for it at a linen-shop in St Ogg’s, instead of getting it in a more quiet and indirect way, and could see nothing but what was entirely wrong and unkind, nay, persecuting, in Tom’s reproof of her for this unnecessary act. ‘I don’t like my sister to do such things,’ said Tom, ‘I’ll take care that the debts are paid, without your lowering yourself in that way.’ (386) 68 Maggie refers here to Sampson, the schoolmaster in Walter Scott’s Guy Mannering (1815) who teaches young Lucy Bertram accounting. 163 Maggie’s choice of employment fits squarely in the private sphere; what Tom clearly objects to is Maggie’s refusal to submit to middle-class domesticity. Standards of genteel femininity required that women refrain entirely from participating in the marketplace, so Tom’s first protest is against Maggie’s working openly at all and contributing “funds” to the family’s savings. More important, though, is Maggie’s indiscretion about her work, allowing the community to see her “lowering” herself to participate in work outside of her home. This reckless disregard for respectable behavior fuels Tom’s reproof. Indeed, even the narrator hints that Maggie’s actions are rash and socially unacceptable by inverting the syntax of this passage. The text first presents the fact that Maggie “could see nothing,” implying that Maggie is blind to the impropriety that she has committed. The passage goes on to note that Maggie judges something—at this point, the reader doesn’t know what—to be “entirely wrong and unkind, nay, persecuting.” Since the only antecedent to Maggie’s dismay is her own action in seeking work, the reader naturally begins to assume that Maggie herself begins to see the unseemliness of her endeavors. It is only after this implication has been narratively planted that the speaker reveals that it is Tom’s condemnation that feeds Maggie’s indignation. With the loss of the house, Maggie sees an opportunity to act outside the home, and yet even these actions prove controversial. The loss of the home has created only a false opportunity to escape gentility that places Maggie at odds with her family. Maggie’s conflict with Tom over her relationship with Philip Wakem allows her to verbalize her futile struggle for empowerment as a result of losing their home. After Tom declares that Maggie must no longer meet Philip, he scorns her for her actions, contrasting them to his own allegiance to their father. Maggie states directly the problem 164 the house represents. Tom is in a different position than she is: “‘Because you are a man, Tom, and have power, and can do something in the world’” (450). Maggie defends her choices by drawing Tom’s, and the reader’s, attention to the fact that her actions are circumscribed, and since she cannot participate in public life, she must therefore act privately as best she can. Tom readily admits that Maggie lacks agency, and suggests that since she can do nothing, she must “submit to those who can” (450). As if to reinforce Maggie’s powerlessness, Tom directly leaves “to fulfill an appointment with his uncle Deane, and receive directions about a journey on which he was to set out” (451). Maggie, for her part, must retreat “up to her own room to pour out all that indignant remonstrance, against which Tom’s mind was close barred, in bitter tears” (451). Maggie’s claim that she is imprisoned by her role in the home is reinforced diegetically on the level of the plot, as Tom leaves to “do something in the world” while Maggie must return to the house to sit idly in her room. In a final blow to Maggie’s potential for extra- domestic action, Wakem declares to Philip that Maggie’s actions regarding the “family quarrels” are insignificant: “We don’t ask what a woman does—we ask whom she belongs to” (542 – 3). Maggie’s deeds aren’t legible outside of the home. As long as the Wakem/Tulliver feud is read on a public scale, Maggie’s actions don’t signify. Maggie anticipates that losing the house would eliminate her responsibilities both to the house and to standards of gentility and allow her to act on a more public stage; her duties to middle-class decorum would be annihilated in the face of the need for economic survival. Yet what Maggie discovers as Tom clings to genteel morality is that even losing the house doesn’t allow her any more freedom because the loss always anticipates a possible return. What Maggie gains here, though, is an open acknowledgement of the unspoken 165 assumptions that fuel gender paradigms within gentility—cold comfort for Maggie’s character, but a significant advancement for the narrative. And yet, in spite of these initial failures, Maggie continues trying to divorce herself from a home and therefore act outside of the bounds of the house. After her father’s death, Maggie goes into service as a teacher in a school because she wants her freedom, not only from her family but from the requirements of genteel housekeeping. Lucy explains that “[Maggie] has been in a dreary situation in a school since uncle’s death because she is determined to be independent, and not live with aunt Pullet” (472). 69 Narratively, Maggie’s lack of agency appears in her inability to articulate her desires herself—her desire to be independent is always reported by another. In the first case, Lucy explains that Maggie chose to take her situation, and soon after, in a conversation between Tom and Maggie, he tells her, “‘I must leave you to your own choice. You wish to be independent—you told me so after my father’s death’” (503). Significantly, Maggie is always silent on the question of her independence; others speak for her and declare her desires, narratively demonstrating the complex position Maggie holds— desirous of being independent, but unable even to articulate this desire within the text. Maggie is silenced on this issue precisely because her desires and their subsequent actions lead her away from the realms of the home and genteel femininity. Tom explains this tension: 69 A. S. Byatt points out in her notes to the text that, in the original manuscript, Aunt Pullet was a replacement for Aunt Glegg, arguably the most ornery of the aunts (668). I suggest that the change Eliot made clarifies the fact that Maggie simply doesn’t want to live in a middle-class home, for whatever objections might have been raised over living with Aunt Glegg and her superior manner, most of these disappear with Aunt Pullet. The only objection arising from living with Aunt Pullet comes from participating in the rituals of gentility, which Aunt Pullet holds in high regard. 166 You know I didn’t wish you to take a situation. My aunt Pullet was willing to give you a good home, and you might have lived respectably amongst your relations until I could have provided a home for you with my mother. And that is what I should like to do. I wished my sister to be a lady, and I would always have taken care of you as my father desired, until you were well married. But your ideas and mine never accord, and you will not give way. Yet you might have sense enough to see that a brother, who goes out into the world and mixes with men, necessarily knows better what is right and respectable for his sister than she can know herself. (503 – 4) Tom’s emphasis here is on respectability and female inaction—he repeatedly avers that his concern is that Maggie live “respectably,” that she “be a lady,” and that he knows “what is right and respectable.” Underneath his anxieties lies genteel domesticity; his focus on “respectability” is really a focus on what is acceptable for a middle-class woman, one who is a “lady.” And what is acceptable is inaction, on several levels. Maggie is expected to avoid working outside of the home, so the fact that she actively sought out and took a “situation” reflects poorly on her social status. However, Maggie is also expected passively to rely on her family, and especially her brother, to make her decisions for her. By choosing action—in fact, by choosing at all—Maggie has damaged her position in the middle classes, and perhaps more importantly for Tom, her family’s reputation as well. For Maggie, the loss of the house figures ambiguously enough that when Tom finally regains the Mill, Maggie refuses to return to it. She prefaces her decision by telling Philip Wakem, “‘I can’t live in dependence—I can’t live with my brother—though he is very good to me. He would like to provide for me—but that would be intolerable to me’” (527-8). The house, in fact, equates to dependence for women. As a child, Maggie’s relationship to her brother centered on their residence; she declared that 167 “‘When [Tom] grows up, I shall keep his house, and we shall always live together,’” and Tom himself “meant always to take care of [Maggie], [and] make her his housekeeper” (81, 92). This triangulated relationship between Maggie, Tom, and the house becomes more tortured as the siblings grow into adulthood because Maggie’s relationship to home has changed. The connection between Tom and Maggie is so dependent upon its context within the house that as Maggie’s denial of the ideals of gentility grows, her relationship with Tom necessarily deteriorates. Tom is a veritable symbol of the rules of Victorian morality and gender paradigms, policing the separate spheres, demonstrating that he is “literate, numerate, and respectable enough” to be considered a “bright young [man] with the middle-class cultural capital of education and the aspiration to make money”—in short, the quintessential genteel man (Young 58). Maggie, though, questions the very values that underpin Tom’s identity. The material loss of the Mill allows Maggie a chance to escape domesticity, and she cannot imagine returning to it as a subordinate to Tom. Once Tom has secured the Mill, Philip reminds Maggie that “The Mill will soon be your brother’s home again,’” but at this point, Maggie has gained enough independence and courage to deny the coercive if seductive power of home, responding to Philip, “‘Yes—but I shall not be there” (563). She willingly chooses not to subordinate herself to the ideology of women’s domestic incarceration embodied in Tom’s ethos of home, and yet, like Anne Elliott, Maggie can only renounce; she cannot actively choose a house, just as Anne Elliott ends her story without a home. This decision troubles Maggie’s entire family, who see Maggie’s choice to opt out of bourgeois gentility as a slight to their family, not only because it removes her from the domestic economy but because it threatens their own middle-class identities. Without 168 being tied to a home, Maggie risks losing middle-class status and bringing her own family’s reputation down with her. Aunt Pullet refuses to provide Maggie with any household accoutrements while she works as a teacher, and beneath her ostensible reasoning that linens would not be useful to Maggie “in service” lies a retributive motive that seeks to punish Maggie for her transgressions. Aunt Pullet explains, ‘I’m not going to give Maggie and more o’ my Indy muslin and things, if she’s to go into service again, when she might stay and keep me company, and do my sewing for me, if she wasn’t wanted at her brother’s.’ ‘Going into service’ was the expression by which the Dodson mind represented to itself the position of teacher or governess, and Maggie’s return to that menial condition, now circumstances offered her more eligible prospects, was likely to be a sore point with all her relatives, besides Lucy. Maggie in her crude form, with her hair down her back and altogether in a state of dubious promise, was a most undesirable niece; but now, she was capable of being at once ornamental and useful. (575) In fact, it is because Maggie refuses to perform household tasks for Aunt Pullet that she is punished by a withholding of linens. The Dodson clan clearly sees Maggie’s choice as rooted in class issues, since they view her governess position as “service,” and therefore Maggie as a kind of servant. The position places her in a “menial condition,” one that both lowers her social status and puts her closer to the bottom of the class hierarchy. Perhaps most offensive in Maggie’s choice is the fact that it is, truly, a choice; the family sees that she now has more “eligible prospects,” and judges her decision to be even more aberrant because she doesn’t need to make it. When Maggie first chose a “situation,” the loss of the Mill created an environment where this choice figured logically in the economy of the house; without a home, Maggie needed not only a place to go but also a source of income. And while Tom refused to condone her work because it affected her 169 middle-class status, he still accepted it. However, the return to the home eliminates the necessity of Maggie’s work, and now her choice becomes illegible within the grammar of gentility. In fact, the text suggests that Maggie’s previous inability to conform is less offensive than her present decision to deny the rules of respectable femininity. Maggie’s transgression, though, goes beyond her active choice to remove herself from the home; it also limits the domestic resources of the Dodson clan. Now that Maggie is a relatively accomplished young woman, one who is both “ornamental and useful” like Agnes in David Copperfield, her departure drains household resources from the family. Although Maggie seems to have made peace with her decision to leave home, her resolve does not last. When she imperils her reputation through her near elopement with Stephen Guest, her confidence is shaken and she returns to the Mill only to be shunned and to lose her home again. Significantly, Maggie’s return is staged outside of the mill house, and important actions are punctuated by references to the house itself. The chapter is entitled “The Return to the Mill,” although Maggie herself believes that she is “returning to her brother” (612). In fact, a return to Tom is synonymous with a return to home; his blind faith in gentility positions him metonymically in the place of home itself because Maggie sees Tom “as the natural refuge that had been given her” and because the narrative figures Tom as a place of safety for Maggie (612). His rejection of her, then, is the same as if her home were rejecting her. Maggie herself makes this connection as she approaches Tom: “‘I am come back to you—I am come back home—for refuge’” (612). Tom speaks for himself, his family, and the family home as he tells Maggie, “‘You will find no home with me…. I wash my hands of you for ever. You don’t belong to me’” (612). Maggie doesn’t belong to Tom, and she also doesn’t belong to her house; as a 170 kind of reinforcement of this fact, as soon as Tom declares Maggie banished, “[t]heir mother had come to the door” (612). The text punctuates Tom’s denial of Maggie with a reference to the dwelling, juxtaposing his banishment with a view of the house that underlines what Maggie is being denied—access to a middle-class residence. Tom still clings to the structure of gentility since he wants to provide financially for Maggie, but his obstinacy about Maggie’s return to the Mill proves that the relationship between the house and moral respectability can’t be separated. He tells Maggie, “‘If you are in want, I will provide for you—let my mother know. But you shall not come under my roof’” (614). Tom’s final denial of Maggie’s access to a middle-class home is accentuated by his movement, as he “turned and walked into the house” (614). At this moment, the house and Tom become one—the physical structure and the living manifestation of the ideology pervading it—and as Tom disappears inside, Maggie is forever shut out from both the materiality and the philosophy of home. The ensuing search for a suitable dwelling dramatizes the impossibility of Maggie, as a woman desirous of independence, ever finding a genteel home of her own. Maggie first suggests going to “Luke’s cottage,” the home of the Tulliver’s head miller, clearly a working-class space, indicated by its owner’s career, its designation as a “cottage,” and the fact that Luke’s wife “exhibited her hospitality in bread and treacle” instead of cakes, butter and preserves (83). The possibility of going to one of the Dodson women’s homes is one that Mrs. Tulliver “hardly durst” pursue; at this point, there are no middle-class lodgings available for Maggie, and she must look only outside her class community. Finally, she ends up at Bob Jakin’s, the working-class, childhood friend of the Tulliver siblings who has made a good living as a packman and purchased “one of 171 those queer old houses pierced with surprising passages” (499). The “queerness” of Bob’s house speaks to its unsuitability as a middle-class abode. Throughout the novel, Bob is painted as Maggie and Tom’s social inferior, whether through his heavy regional accent, his illiteracy, or his innocent worship of Maggie from afar. Although Bob has achieved financial success, he does not rise above his working-class roots, precisely because he doesn’t have the necessary taste to consume appropriately and perform gentility. Living in this house, then, represents another fall in class status for Maggie. However, unlike earlier in the novel, when Maggie idealized a way of life outside of middle-class standards, she now clearly understands that her position affords her no freedom and in fact imprisons her even more. She remains shut up in her room at the Jakins’ for long periods, and the narrative implies that she spends nearly all her time “sitting in her lonely room” (644). Even this confining existence finally becomes impossible for her, when Dr. Kenn ends her employment as a governess for his children, and she realizes that “[s]he must be a lonely wanderer; she must go out among fresh faces, that would look at her wonderingly…. There was no home” (646). This last blow finalizes the loss of the home for Maggie—she will never have a place within the physical or social middle-class home. At the last, her desire to escape from the requirements of gentility proves fruitless and reinforces the dualistic portrait of domesticity developed early on in the novel: a middle-class home imprisons and confines women, and yet, without one, these women have no other recourse. Maggie concretizes Mrs. Beeton’s lament: she must, in these days, live in a house, and without one, she is doomed to wander. 172 And, indeed, Maggie is doomed, for the novel climaxes with a flood that sweeps away both Maggie and Tom. This final episode stages the crucial problem at the heart of The Mill on the Floss: the house is central in Victorian life and identity, and yet, for women, finding a way to balance their own freedom with genteel femininity is elusive. When the flood finally comes, it sweeps Maggie out of her lodgings with Bob Jakin and away from that temporary home, inspiring her to struggle furiously to return to her childhood house at the Mill. As she floats with “no distinct conception of her position”— a perfect metaphor for Maggie’s amorphous class status at this point in the novel—she declares, “‘O God, where am I? Which is the way home?’” (651). Maggie’s exclamation speaks to her inability to place herself without the anchor of or attachment to a home, much as Anne Elliott’s marriage leaves her homeless. In desperation, Maggie seeks to return to the Mill that she once sought to escape, unable to divorce herself from the house that has provided her only solid identity. As the flooding water carries Maggie along, she wonders repeatedly, “the Mill—where was it?”, and when she finally finds it, even then she cannot determine its nature (653). She wonders, “the house stood firm: drowned up to the first story, but still firm—or was it broken in at the end towards the Mill?” (654). The house, the emblem of domestic ideology, cannot materialize for Maggie, and she glimpses it only as a fragmented, ungraspable entity. Maggie is left ultimately unable to reconcile what the house is because of her conflicted relationship to middle-class gender roles. Finally, Maggie and Tom are drowned in their attempt to escape from the crumbling Mill. The brother and sister cannot escape from the domestic ideology that divided them, and the only way they can reunite is in death. 173 III. In Hardy’s Jude the Obscure, a century’s worth of genteel standards weighs on both Sue Bridehead and the narrative itself. While Sue and Jude don’t have the monetary means to be considered middle-class, Jude’s life goal is to rise above his working class origins, and consequently he works continually to participate both economically (through earning income) and symbolically (through the more genteel profession of Christian scholarship, marriage, and householding) in the culture of gentility. While Sue resists much of what Jude seeks, her connection to Jude exposes her to his struggles to achieve middle-class status through relationships to different homes they encounter and the attitudes with which they inhabit them. Ultimately, the constant loss of various homes illustrates to Sue and Jude the elusiveness of gentility and the sacrifices it requires. As other scholars have noted, the narrative progresses through its spaces cyclically with “repetitions of the characters’ previous difficulties, reenacted in a new location or situation” (Prentiss 179). Perhaps more striking, though, are two abandoned houses that continually reappear in the text, reminding the reader and the characters of the emptiness of the concept of home. Many of the most significant moments in Jude’s history are punctuated by reference to the Brown House, an old abandoned home close to both Marygreen and his Aunt Drusilla’s cottage. From the start, the Brown House appears uninhabited; it never displays tenants of any kind and always stands alone, a material house that never grows into a home. It is upon the roof of the Brown House that Jude first glimpses Christminster early on in the novel, and his last encounter with Sue Bridehead occurs just by “the crest of the down by the Brown House” (470). These two moments mark the beginning and end of Jude’s aspirations. However, the Brown House 174 reappears throughout the novel as well, a constant reminder of the emptiness of the ideals that produce “home” as well as the tragedies private life inspires. Jude slowly learns that the Brown House has been the site of numerous domestic tragedies connected to his family. The widow Edlin tells Jude and Sue of their ancestor who “was hanged and gibbeted on Brown House Hill,” a punishment for attempting to steal his child’s corpse from his estranged wife in order to bury it in a family plot (350). The story comes “on the eve of the solemnization” of Jude and Sue’s marriage, a ceremony that never takes place as a result of the aversion Sue holds towards marriage and home life, and the appearance of the story at this juncture provides the final impediment to their official union (350). Significantly, though, a central player in this “exhilarating tradition” is the Brown House itself; in fact, the site is the only player that both Jude and Sue are familiar with, since they know nothing of this ancestor and the widow provides no names. What connects the two to the legend is the Brown House itself; Jude remarks that he “‘know[s] where the gibbet is said to have stood, very well,’” although he’s never heard the tale (349). The reappearance of the Brown House, then, marks the text, a reminder of the role of the house in the novel’s tragedies. The Brown House also connects more directly to Sue and Jude’s families as the site of the dissolution of the marriage of Jude’s parents. Aunt Drusilla explains that “the hill by the Brown House barn” was the place where these two “had their last difference, and took leave of one another for the last time” (116). After this parting, Jude’s mother drowned herself and Jude, only a baby, moved with his father to the south. Although the house does not belong to the couple, its appearance at the disintegration of their marriage sutures the concept of a material house to the conflicts arising within the home. 175 Moreover, the fact that Jude’s relatives were always outside of this house foreshadows the difficulties Jude and Sue will have engaging with a respectable home. The repeated introduction of the Brown House not only serves as a reminder of the materiality of the house, but also marks family tragedies and therefore indicates that the house, though not necessarily the cause, is always present for the production of these misfortunes as well as a lasting reminder of what once happened in them. The second abandoned house whose image recurs throughout the text is the cottage into which Jude and Arabella move after their first marriage. The reappearance of the cottage, though, triangulates house and domesticity with marriage, suggesting the complications that marriage introduces into home life. The house first appears when the two marry, and its condition represents the instability of their hurried union and their economic status. Jude chose the house so that they might gain profits from a vegetable garden and keeping a pig, since “the prospects of the household ways and means are cloudy,” and this cottage is consistently characterized as “lonely” in spite of a newly-wed couple living there (104, 105). The loneliness of this “hut” foreshadows its fate as the two abandon it when their marriage dissolves, Jude returning to lodgings and Arabella emigrating to Australia. Although the cottage’s function in the plot effectively ends here, this house continues to appear as a sign of domestic and marital dissolution, just as the Brown House does. As Sue and Jude return to Aunt Drusilla’s deathbed, they pass the old cottage, and Jude tells Sue, “‘That’s the house my wife and I occupied the whole of the time we lived together. I brought her home to that house’” (247). Sue compares this home to the school-house where she resides with Phillotson, and the parallel evokes a kind of domestic misery. Both Jude and Sue’s marriages are wretched, yet the narrative 176 locates this unhappiness directly in the house. The question of marriage partners gets elided as the two discuss the emotions they situate within their homes. Jude explains to Sue not that he was unhappy with Arabella, but that he “was not very happy there, as you are in yours” (247, emphasis mine). The house here stands in for marriage, again intimating that the two are interchangeable and that the creation of a home depends upon both these elements. By the end of the novel, the old cottage appears once more, this time after the newly-widowed Arabella returns to Alfredston. As she passes “the lonely house in which [she] and Jude had lived during the first months of their marriage,” Arabella suddenly declares that Jude is “‘more mine than hers!’” (386). This reaction, catalyzed by Arabella’s sight of the house and leading Arabella to question Sue’s “right” to Jude, depends on the middle-class assumption that a shared home life implies an indissoluble knot, reinforcing the tangled web that knits together house, marriage, and domestic ideology. The novel is preoccupied with showing its characters escaping houses or unable to find them in the first place because of the long shadow cast over the concept of home by heterosexual marriage itself, the unquestioned bedrock of middle-class domestic ideology. Whereas Persuasion and The Mill on the Floss grappled with the confines of gender roles prescribed by gentility, Jude the Obscure questions the very structure underlying these roles: heterosexual marriage. In so doing, the novel shows the ways in which marriage is dependent upon the figure of the house and therefore implicates the house itself in perpetuating heterosexuality and the gender models it requires to function. Jude himself accepts, at least at first, the nexus of home and marriage that underpins life in a house, and in his striving to attain middle-class status, he unwittingly perpetuates the 177 connection that Sue will attempt to confront. While Jude loves Sue desperately, he dreams more of a time when he can enter the middle classes through genteel ideals, declaring, “were I in a position to marry her, or some one, and settle down, instead of living in lodgings here and there, I should be glad!” (219). Without a house, Jude experiences a kind of dislocation in his identity—he is “unsettled”—and like Maggie Tulliver before him, he is doomed to wander. The narrator claims that what Jude “really meant was simply that he loved [Sue],” and yet, what appears as important here is the acquisition of a home of one’s own—it doesn’t necessarily matter who Jude marries, as long as he positions himself as a husband and moves from lodgings into a house that he can call home. While Jude seems unaware of the gender paradigm that dictates the terms of his class dream, Sue clearly understands how the house requires strict gender behaviors and provides their material foundation. As Jude dreams of settling down, Sue declares marriage “only a sordid contract based on material convenience in householding” (270). She notices that the marriage contract she attempts to undertake with Jude requires that both parties state “‘Dwelling at’ – ‘Length of Residence,’” as well as “‘District and County in which the Parties respectively dwell’” (348). These connections to materiality are, in part, what repulse Sue; she reads the necessity of a house to a marriage as so constricting to her desired independence that she refuses to sanction it. What this means for her, then, is that she cannot either marry or live in a house in good conscience, since the two are so deeply involved in the perpetuation of imprisoning gender roles that would tie her to the house and bar her from choosing her own identity. Sue believes that the house is so powerful that it destroys love, and therefore she refuses to participate in any 178 of its manifestations for fear that her relationship with Jude would irreparably change. When she pronounces to Jude her horror at the thought that she be “‘licensed to be loved on the premises by you,’” the awfulness of this image lies not only in the license itself, a “Government stamp” that deadens the spontaneity and spirit of love, but also in the fact that it binds their love—and Sue herself—to the “premises” (323). The tortured syntax leaves Jude the actor as a mere afterthought, and the license and the premises as the main subjects of the sentence. Besides prescribing restrictive gender roles, domestic ideology ties one to a location and further confines one’s identity. Sue’s bird-like nature cannot abide being trapped, and therefore in marriage and the home she ends up less a nested bird and more a caged animal. 70 It is this confluence between material houses and amorphous gender roles that leads Sue to abandon her homes repeatedly in an attempt to escape from the ideology that constructs them. Without any material power to challenge the dogma that confines her, Sue turns on the physicality of the house in the hopes that she can escape ideology by escaping materiality. Sue Bridehead grows out of Maggie Tulliver; she is unconventional like Maggie, wants to “be more independent,” and she, too, struggles valiantly with the gender roles assigned to her (152). Sue’s struggles, though, engage her more fiercely with the materiality of the house. While Maggie seeks metaphorical and partial escapes from the home, Sue’s aversion to home life forces her physically out of the various 70 Bird imagery attends Sue throughout the novel, suggesting the fine line between being “nested” and “caged.” For Sue, her retreat into the closet at Phillotson’s house creates a “little nest for herself,” and yet when her husband intrudes upon her, the closet becomes a “lair” (283). When Sue agrees to marry Jude, she sighs, “‘The little bird is caught at last!’’ yet Jude challenges this interpretation by responding, “‘No— only nested’” (333). Sue’s participation in domesticity can only be on her own terms; when she is forced to conform to middle-class standards, Sue’s nature gets perverted. 179 houses she inhabits. Even before her experiences with marriage, Sue is loath to remain in a house; at the Training School, Sue “got out of the back window of the room in which she had been confined,” escaping to Jude’s care (197). Further escapes follow, often through the window of a house; these flights suggest Sue’s desperation, but they also point to her profound aversion to the structure of homes that pushes her to use them unconventionally—a window for a door, a closet for a bedroom—and ultimately, to flee from them. While living with Phillotson Sue most violently struggles against the house, as a result of her repulsion both to her husband and to the social standards of respectability that coerced her into marrying him. For Sue, it is more than her marriage that pains her; the house itself imprisons her and forms a physical manifestation of the ideology that places her there. She tells Jude that her home with Phillotson “is so antique and dismal that.… I feel crushed into the earth by the weight of so many previous lives there spent,” and Jude himself sees that “[t]he centuries did, indeed, ponderously overhang a young wife who passed her time here” (263, 267). Sue’s aversion to Phillotson forms a large part of her desire to escape his house, the Old-Grove Place, but the crushing weight of the physical home itself clearly plays a role in her need to leave. Before fleeing this home, Sue tries to transform both the house and the gender paradigm that has formed it by living in it unconventionally. She first moves into “a large clothes-closet, without a window” that fills the space under the stairs, but Phillotson’s shock at her choice of “lair” forces her to make a compromise, persuading Phillotson to agree to her request “to live in your house in a separate way” (287, emphasis mine). Sue’s detachment from domesticity manifests itself in her inability to assimilate her identity into the home; for Sue, the house 180 belongs only to Phillotson, and she is a stranger within it. Sue pleads to live apart from Phillotson within the home, and in this request she seeks to reorder the functions of the house and, as a result, turn domestic ideology on its head. By living “apart” from Phillotson and yet within the same house, Sue revises gender roles both materially and ideologically. She now wields more material power by residing exclusively in the bedroom the two once shared, and she also dictates the terms on which she will participate in domesticity. And yet, this revision is short-lived. A mere two paragraphs after Phillotson agrees to the arrangement, it falls apart; the house itself cannot abide the transgression that Sue has attempted. As Phillotson retires to bed, it is as if the house forces him to return to his proper place, for “though he now slept on the other side of the house, he mechanically went to the room that he and his wife had occupied when he first became a tenant of the Old-Grove Place, which since his differences with Sue had been hers exclusively” (289). His mechanical manner comes literally from his fatigue, but metaphorically his actions represent the mechanism of respectability—he is so rooted in conventional gender roles and concepts of home that his instinct draws him to the room he believes he should occupy with his wife. The consequences of these actions are serious for Sue; upon Phillotson’s entrance, she leaps once again from the window and falls, “a white heap,” to the gravel below (289). While Sue is not seriously harmed, the event makes an important comment about Sue’s desperate aversion to the distribution of power that produces a respectable home, and even Phillotson realizes “the significance of all this” (290). Sue’s repulsion to her husband comes largely from her disgust at his physical being, but this disgust manifests itself in a deep aversion to the material space of 181 the house they share, suggesting an important identification between marriage and the home. Her jump marks the end of her residence with her husband as he agrees to let her go to live with Jude. Phillotson’s acquiescence would seem to be the answer to Sue’s difficulties, since she is now free to live “unconventionally” with Jude. However, like Maggie before her, what Sue soon learns is that losing one’s home rarely brings with it a freedom from the gender roles that arise from its standards. Although her husband has let her go freely, Sue still views herself as “a fugitive from her lawful home,” and like Maggie Tulliver she cannot completely divorce herself from the conventional gender roles that permeate her society and her psyche (300). In fact, when she first reaches Jude, she refuses to live with him in a domestic arrangement, requiring that he get her a separate hotel room and baffling Jude in the process. While Sue’s refusal can be read as an aversion to the physicality of sexual relations, throughout the novel she clearly expresses a bodily desire for Jude, and here she confesses to him that when he kissed her, she “didn’t dislike you to” (305). What prevents Sue from fully committing to her relationship with Jude is, paradoxically, both her unwilling entrenchment in traditional domesticity as well as her determination to fight against it. She refuses Jude because she feels indebted to Phillotson as his “lawful” wife, and Jude presses her on this fact, telling her, “under the affectation of independent views you are as enslaved to the social code as any woman I know!” (305). And yet, while Sue struggles with her unconventional position, she also realizes that in submitting to Jude’s terms, she re-enters the confines of the structure of home, merely with a more-desired partner. In fact, Sue requires that the two live separately, and a year later they are still living “in precisely the same relations that they 182 had established between themselves when she left” Phillotson (321). Sue’s choice to live apart and yet with her lover represents a repetition without a difference as she reproduces the choice she makes at the Old Grove Place and reinforces the liminal space she inhabits both materially and ideologically, existing both within and without the traditional spaces of home, beholden to the conventional views that tie her to her first husband yet refusing to commit herself again to the limits of a traditional home arrangement with Jude. After Father Time arrives, Sue and Jude add their own children to the mix, and yet they still refuse to commit to living in a traditional residence. The family wanders endlessly, moving from lodgings to lodgings until the standards of respectability end their unconventional, liminal lifestyle. In fact, it is the very unconventionality of their family arrangement that precipitates the novel’s central tragedy and sends Sue reeling back to a respectable home. As the group enters Christminster, looking for lodgings, they are repeatedly turned away because of their status as a family—at first, because of Sue’s pregnancy, and then, because of the children. The family discovers that without a house of their own, they are viewed as troublesome and securing lodgings becomes increasingly difficult. Ultimately, they must agree to split up, and even then Sue’s status as an unmarried, pregnant mother leads the landlady to refuse her staying for more than one night. It is the family’s lack of a house that suggests to the landlady that they are not respectable, for when Sue admits to their “wanderings,” the landlady then questions her marital status. Without a house, the couple cannot even be read as married, and the family therefore cannot be respectable participants in middle-class domesticity. Sue’s choice to avoid marriage effectively bars her from living in a house, suggesting the ways in which the concept of home depends upon heterosexual marriage. The family cannot 183 find lodgings as a group, and even their makeshift, separate accommodations fall apart once their unconventional family situation becomes clear. And, ultimately, it is their difficulties with lodgings that contributes to Father Time’s murder and suicide that destroys everyone’s lives. Father Time’s last conversation with Sue reveals the destructive forces inherent in the conventions of gentility. He realizes that the family encountered difficulty precisely because of their unconventionality, but he reads the unconventionality in quantitative, not qualitative terms. The narrative notes that “[t]he failure to find another lodging, and the lack of room in this house for his father, had made a deep impression on the boy;—a brooding undemonstrative horror seemed to have seized him” (406). The horror Father Time feels stems partly from their lack of a home; he cries to Sue, “No room for us, and father a-forced to go away, and we turned out tomorrow,” bemoaning their homelessness and questioning Sue as to its origins, concluding that it is because of the children that the group cannot find a good lodging (407). Father Time admits that if “there had been room for him [Jude]…. it wouldn’t matter so much,” suggesting that their lodgings form part of his despair. And, indeed, the note he leaves after he commits the murder of his siblings and his own suicide, “Done because we are too menny,” suggests that the deaths are partly a result of the family’s difficulties in finding a suitable house within which to live. For Sue, the traumatic shock occasioned by the tragic deaths of her children, stemming from their lack of a home, throws her back into the traditional femininity that finally produces her living death. The consequences of Sue’s revolt against the standards of home are as dire as those that attend Maggie; while Maggie loses her life, Sue experiences a living death, 184 losing all her children and returning to a conventional, abhorred marriage that crushes her spirit. In her return, Sue realizes the importance of the house to her position within society; she doesn’t want Phillotson to meet her at the train but “wished, she said, to come to him voluntarily, to his very house and hearthstone” (439). Her reinstatement as Phillotson’s wife is staged carefully within the house; as she arrives, she “lifted the latch of the dwelling without knocking,” and she finds Phillotson “in the middle of the room, awaiting her” (439). The narrative meticulously situates these two characters—key figures in domesticity—within positions in the house, and this initial action focuses on their movement within the space of the house even before the two engage with each other. What must be reconciled here is the relation these two have to the house; only then can their relation to each other make sense. Sue’s “homecoming” functions less as a return to her first husband than a return to the despised house, and indeed, since she lives with him in the same asexual manner as before, the importance of her action lies in her restoration to the residence. Sue’s struggles with her place in the home materialize now in her efforts to fill the role she has chosen, as wife and housekeeper. As the Widow Edlin arrives one night, Sue “was muddling helplessly in the kitchen, for she was not a good housewife, though she tried to be, and grew impatient of domestic details” (474). Sue persists, though, in order to “discipline” herself; she tells the widow, “I have scrubbed the stairs since eight o’clock. I must practice myself in my household duties. I’ve shamefully neglected them!” (474). Sue’s insistence belies her revulsion to women’s domestic obligations, but her efforts demonstrate that Sue’s nature is at odds with the duties she is expected to perform. In the end, Sue’s soul deteriorates as she forces herself into a role she had always fought against. Her attempts to separate herself 185 from homes and their ideologies eventually result only in despair and a return to conventional home life. Jude’s attempts to gain a house fail just as thoroughly, and he ends his life still shut out from gentility, living in lodgings with Arabella. In fact, his final moments punctuate the failure of his meaningless pursuit as he expires, forsaken by Arabella and alone in (physically and metaphorically) empty lodgings. As Arabella leaves him to attend the parade, the narrator notes that “[t]he house was empty,” and when Jude awakes and needs water, “[n]othing but the deserted room perceived his appeal” (484 – 5). The emphasis on Jude’s loneliness and abandonment within his lodgings erases some of the focus on Arabella’s selfishness and cruelty and repositions the house itself as Jude’s antagonist. The empty room hears his appeal, containing within it years’ worth of desire for a genteel home, and it remains silent. In the final vision of Jude’s lifeless body, we see that “Jude was lying on the bedstead at his lodging covered with a sheet, and straight as an arrow” (489). Upon Jude’s death, the narrator specifies the corpse’s location within this house as a final reminder of Jude’s failure to achieve his earliest goal: a movement into the middle classes through a home of his own. Ultimately, Jude’s failure suggests the profound tragedy of the middle-class home: it promotes an ideology of meritocracy within which it is nearly impossible to win. Beginning with Austen’s text, the ideal of gentility implies that with hard work and proper behaviors, a middle-class home is attainable. By naturalizing its requirements as moral choices, proponents of the genteel attempt to erase the concept of class, insinuating that one’s birth and breeding are unimportant and that one’s proper choices are pivotal. The experiences of the characters in these novels, though, belie this vision. Anne Elliott 186 discovers that being a model middle-class woman leaves her homeless; Maggie Tulliver’s desire for self-definition forces her from the home and bars any possible return; Sue Bridehead finds that her society literally refuses to let her live outside of a respectable home. And finally, we see that the ideology of gentility that supports and produces the middle-class home crumbles from within, for the very components that constitute it, such as feminine caregiving and leisure, or the fetishization and economy of goods, prohibit its adherents from succeeding. Women cannot provide unlimited care and yet appear leisured; they cannot economize goods that they must also fetishize. This conflict underwrites the larger tension for women at the heart of the house: the comfort and security that a home provides to one’s identity simultaneously circumscribes one’s individuality. The result of these inconsistencies is the fantasy and terror of losing one’s home as novelists wonder, along with Isabella Beeton, whether they must, after all, live in a house. 187 Chapter Four: “Some horror seemed to meet me”: Realism, Anxiety, and the Haunted House Tale Nineteenth-century fiction abounds with ghosts. They are found in nearly every genre, from novels of social realism, like Dickens’ Bleak House, where the ghost of a former Lady Dedlock walks the terrace at Chesney Wold, to Gothic novels like Brontë’s Wuthering Heights, where Catherine’s ghost scratches at the window, begging to be let in, to novels of sensation, like Wilkie Collins’ The Woman in White, where reading Anne’s appearance as ghostly is preferable to acknowledging insanity. While these ghosts play supporting roles in the novels they inhabit, apparitions figured more centrally in the popular Victorian piece, the ghost story. Walter Scott is usually credited with writing the first modern ghost story, “Wandering Willie’s Tale,” in 1824, but these stories became increasingly popular in periodicals throughout the period, particularly during the second half of the century. In fact, Michael Cox and R. A. Gilbert claim that “[g]host stories… were as typically part of the cultural and literary fabric of the [Victorian] age as imperial confidence or the novel of social realism” (x). This last comment illustrates one of the enduring critical difficulties of the ghost story—it is, like the ghost itself, amorphous, allusive, and a bit scary. Cox and Gilbert here can only define it by what it’s not—it is as important as the “novel of social realism” but nothing like it. In fact, the ghost story produces a kind of generic crisis for critics, since its content tends toward the fantastic while its style remains verisimilous and realist. Northrup Frye illustrates this problem by claiming that “ghosts have been, ever since Defoe, almost entirely confined to a separate category of ‘ghost stories’” (50). The ghost story has no generic home; it stands apart as a “separate category,” and yet to this point it 188 hasn’t merited its own genre classification. As a result of this generic confusion, many critics read it solely in terms of content, analyzing it through the lens of a fantastic literary genre such as sensationalism or, more frequently, the Gothic. These analyses usually establish the origins of the ghost story tradition squarely in the Gothic. Lynette Carpenter and Wendy Kolmar, who attempt to trace an American women’s tradition of supernatural fiction, claim that [f]rom the Gothic, women ghost story writers inherited a context for describing what Kate Ferguson Ellis calls ‘the failed home’ (ix), and a precedent for addressing issues that could not be confronted openly…. From the female Gothic, they inherited a series of themes and images—of women victimized by violence in their own homes, of women dispossessed of homes and property… (10) The analogy seems pertinent and helpful; we can see the haunted house rising out of shadowy Gothic castles and the question of the ghost’s reality growing out of the mysteries of Gothic plots. And yet, most of these scholars admit that the Gothic cannot fully explain the complexities of the Victorian ghost story, particularly the haunted house tale. Many analyses start from Gothic origins, noting that the ghost story goes beyond Gothic conventions but rarely leaving this generic frame of reference. Jack Sullivan, in his Elegant Nightmares, a seminal text focusing specifically on the Victorian ghost story, embodies this generic tension when he notes that “the modern ghostly tale is as much a reaction against the Gothic as an outgrowth of it” (5). The ghost story is both Gothic and beyond-Gothic, yet there are no terms available to describe that which contradicts or builds upon the Gothic. Susan Schaper, too, notes that most explorations of haunted house stories are in the context of the female Gothic, yet she argues, as Sullivan does, 189 that they are a reaction to it, even though she still reads these stories in Gothic terms. Some scholars go as far as to categorize the ghost story as “anti-Gothic.” Lyn Pickett locates the origins of the ghost story in the “gothic romance” (in a chapter, tellingly, entitled “Sensation and the fantastic in the Victorian novel”) but notes that with Dickens begins a “new kind of ‘anti-Gothic’ ghost story with a contemporary setting, in which the supernatural erupts into the ordinary, everyday world” (197). Michael Cox and R. A. Gilbert propose a “distinct, anti-Gothic character of the Victorian ghost story,” contending that “the Victorian ghost story was typically domestic in tone and inclined to blur the boundaries between fact and fiction” (x). It is clear that there is something un- Gothic, something beyond the Gothic embedded in the Victorian ghost story, and yet an articulation of this difference remains elusive. What is significant here, though, is the largely unspoken connection between the ghost or haunted house story and domestic realism. 71 The “anti-Gothic” in these analyses is never named, only described: a “contemporary setting,” a representation of “the ordinary, everyday world,” a text that is “domestic in tone.” What these critics describe is precisely domestic realism. What happens, then, if we read the Victorian ghost story not in terms of its fantastic content, but focus instead on its style, aesthetics, and narrative? When we attend to these formal aspects of the text, a new picture arises: the ghost story appears undeniably realist. Several critics have noted, in passing, the affinities that the ghost story has with realism, yet none have used the lens of realism to 71 Vineta Colby coined this sometimes contested term with Yesterday’s Woman: Domestic Realism in the English Novel. 190 analyze the ghost story. 72 In spite of clear links to the domestic realm, these scholars connect this domesticity to the Gothic instead of to the “new field of the domestic” appearing in realism (Levine 10). My analysis takes up the narrative and aesthetic questions overlooked by earlier critics in order to demonstrate the ways in which the ghost story in general and the haunted house story in particular participate in—are, in fact, integral to—the realist tradition. It is not simply, however, that the stylistic elements of the haunted house story follow the conventions of realism. The content, the story itself, is, I argue, undeniably realist. From a feminist perspective, we can read even the appearance of the ghost through the lens of realism. Instead of viewing the ghost as a metaphorical return of the repressed, or as evidence of the more spiritual nature of women, I propose reading the ghostly occurrences in these stories as representing the real, embodied experience of Victorian women. The haunted house tale demonstrates precisely through its realism that Victorian domesticity is haunted. Moreover, taken as realist texts, it is clear these stories rehearse the anxieties central to realism more openly than the “sprawling realism” of more canonical writers. It is the very realism of the domestic settings and activities recorded in them that produces the narrative and thematic tension manifested in the figure of the ghost. Through the trope of the haunted house, these texts express an inherent anxiety over both the cultural signification and the material possession of the space of the 72 One critic, Julia Briggs, has emphasized the importance of realism in the ghost story, noting that in analyzing the ghost story, it is right to “emphasiz[e] realism and the importance of a convincing portrayal of everyday life.” However, she attributes the genre’s realism only to the creation of atmosphere: “By failing to establish a familiar world they [authors of ghost stories] risk forfeiting our sense of fear” (18). She, like others, reads the Victorian ghost story within the context of nineteenth-century rationality and science, finally equating it with “other forms of fantasy” that are concerned with “the mystery of the mind within” (23, 22). 191 house, revealing a present danger within and to domesticity. Viewing the haunted house story as consonant with and integral to the tradition of realism exposes the problematic of realism as a genre and thus the ways in which the house, rather than the haunting, is the common factor in all of these texts. Reading the haunted house story through the lens of realism accomplishes several goals. First, this reading recovers the haunted house tale, a frequently dismissed category of text, as central to the canonical tradition of realism often seen as the primary literary genre of the Victorian period. However, including these stories in the realist tradition also clearly reveals the tensions inherent in this genre, demonstrating the difficulty of representing reality that haunted Victorian writers. What I call the “ghost event,” one of the fundamental elements of the haunted house story, lays bare the inadequacy of realism to portray what is real since the truth of this event is always in question. The ghost decenters the authority of the text, suggesting that it is not only the reality of the ghost that is always in question—the ghost casts doubt upon all of reality, intimating that nothing can be adequately represented through realism. Finally, seeing the haunted house story as realist allows for a thematic reading that attends to the political, economic, and social issues that these tales address. Like the canonical novels of social and domestic realism, the haunted house story has important things to say about the lives of Victorian women and the state of Victorian domesticity. My vision of realism grows out of the ideas of two influential theorists of the genre: George Levine and Elizabeth Deeds Ermarth. These critics’ ideas, taken together, paint a profound picture of the subtle workings of realist texts and the complexities of the genre that speak to the questions I’m raising through the haunted house story. Levine’s 192 The Realistic Imagination (1981) argues that realist texts are in search of a world of certainty; realism does not naively assume that the material world can be unproblematically represented in narrative, but instead “struggle[s] to make contact with the world out there,” to “embrace the reality that stretched beyond the reach of language…. in the name of some moral enterprise of truth telling” (8; 12; 8). Far from believing that language can represent unmediated reality, the realists in Levine’s argument were acutely aware of the insufficiencies of language yet they “strained to be extrareferential” through the conventions of realism (15). The attempt to be faithful to experience allowed realists to claim a “special authenticity” for their works, and this authenticity forms a part of the “deeply moral… quest for the world beyond words” (12). Levine’s argument will be important to mine on several levels. Not only do I use Levine’s descriptions of the conventions of realism to demonstrate how the haunted house story participates in this genre, I also argue that this sub-genre of realism makes even clearer the importance of truthfulness and authenticity, the morality of the realist project, and the ways in which both of these elements are at the core of the representation of domestic experience. Authenticity proves integral to writing about the domestic while being authentic requires representing the world of domesticity. For my purposes, the realist project that Levine posits, a moral quest to represent “the ‘ordinary’” in narrative, depends upon Elizabeth Deeds Ermarth’s theory of consensus. In Realism and Consensus in the English Novel (1983), Ermarth argues that “fictional realism is an aesthetic form of consensus” directly related to perspective developed in the visual arts during the Renaissance (ix). Just as painters use a single vanishing point to produce a kind of perspective and to establish verisimilitude, the realist 193 author uses an omniscient narrator, 73 a “Nobody” who contains multiple perspectives “that converge upon the ‘same’ world” in order to create verisimilitude through a “presence of depth” and a homogenous “medium of perception” (x, 20-21). Ermarth’s thesis leads her to suggest that realism depends deeply on abstractions; as she notes, realism’s focus on quotidian details “is governed by a belief that they reflect laws of human behavior accessible to everyone and universally applicable” (33). The multiple perspectives of the omniscient narrator gives the reader a “proper distance” with which to “find the form of the whole” within the details, a narrative discovery of the forest from amongst the trees. My argument revises Ermarth’s theory of multiple perspectives within the omniscient narrator as well as her focus on the abstract laws and truths that realism supposedly attempts to convey. I want to suggest that what the haunted house tale reveals is that the omniscient narrator that “produces a sense of perspective that is not personally constrained” (Levine, “Review” 357) isn’t enough to produce consensus; because the narrative “Nobody” is just that, a nobody, he/she lacks a kind of personal authority that comes with being materially connected to the plot. The omniscient narrator in the haunted house tale is often supplemented by personal perspectives that vouch for the reality of what the omniscient narrator recounts, demonstrating that the representation of reality demands a perspectival consensus that goes beyond the one Ermarth posits as residing within the omniscient narrator. Because of the unbelievable nature of the 73 I use the term “omniscient” here for the sake of clarity, in spite of the fact that Ermarth notes that the “intersubjectivity” that she posits in the third person narrator is “not omniscience… but the extension to infinity provided by inclusive consensus” (76). I have chosen to keep the term omniscient because it clearly describes a tradition of narration that is otherwise more unwieldy to describe. Ermarth chooses to use “past-tense narrator,” but since this term cannot distinguish between first and third person narrators, it is not useful for my discussion. 194 ghostly plot elements, the other, personal perspectives that form a part of haunted house narratives lend credibility to the omniscient narrator, providing a personal responsibility that the detached, “invisible and dematerialized” narrator doesn’t have. What I am suggesting is that what Ermarth sees as an obstacle to consensus, that is, “particularity and individual distinctiveness,” actually forms an integral part of it (64). However, while the haunted house tale shows that a greater multiplicity of narrative perspectives is required to produce consensus, it also reveals that, ultimately, this consensus can never be achieved. In spite of, perhaps because of, an attempt to provide unlimited information about the appearance of the ghost, the question of its reality is never answered. The reader is always left to decide for herself whether or not the ghost is real. What the haunted house tale demonstrates, therefore, is that narrative consensus is always already doomed. In order to represent ghostly events fully, there must be agreement between subjective (personal) and objective (omniscient) perspectives, and yet these two are always at odds. 74 Significantly, though, this inability to know whether consensus has been achieved lies at the heart of the tension within realism and creates a narrative motor for the haunted house story and, I will suggest, all realist texts. Ellen (Mrs. Henry) Wood’s Featherston’s Story provides an interesting case study that helps illuminate not only what’s at stake in the genre of realism, but how these realist concerns are deeply connected to thematic concerns over the meaning of Victorian house and home. The novella is both representative and oddly unique; the text adheres to 74 Srdjan Smajic touches on the tension between objective and subjective in “The Trouble with Ghost- Seeing: Vision, Ideology, and Genre in the Victorian Ghost Story” (2003). His argument focuses on vision, claiming that the ghost story asks “where precisely (if anywhere at all) to draw the line between objective and subjective perception in general, between optical fact and optical illusion” (1110). 195 traditional haunted house conventions, but it also provides a complexity unusual for a ghost story due to its long length. 75 First published as a part of the Johnny Ludlow series of stories, Featherston’s Story was the only one of these to be issued separately, in 1889. It then appeared in the Fifth Series in 1890. The story concerns the Preen sisters, Lavinia and Ann (often called Nancy), both British spinsters who each find themselves with a small income of seventy pounds per year following the death of a relative. They decide to move to France together, combining their incomes and hoping to stretch their money on the continent. There, they reunite with a childhood friend, Mary Carimon, who helps them find an affordable and suitable house to rent. In spite of an unexplained terror that Lavinia feels upon first entering the house, the sisters take Le Petit Maison Rouge for a five year term, and all seems well until Ann Preen falls in love and elopes with Captain Edwin Fennel, a charming but disreputable man with a mysterious past. Lavinia’s distaste for Fennel is clear from the start, yet she is forced to let him move into Le Petit Maison once he marries her sister. Economic troubles bedevil the three immediately after the marriage as it becomes obvious that Fennel wants the sisters’ money to pay his gambling debts and support his profligate and rather extravagant lifestyle. In the midst of this turmoil, Lavinia starts seeing apparitions of the still-living Fennel when she returns home to the Petit Maison alone at night. These apparitions terrify her and she becomes certain that Fennel means her some harm—especially after a mesmerist tells Nancy that 75 The vast majority of Victorian ghost stories were short stories published in periodicals. Featherston’s Story was not the only novel-length ghost story, but texts of this length were much rarer. Walter Scott attributes the short length of the ghost story to the impossibility of sustaining the tension manifested in the ghost, claiming that the ghost story “is… of a character which it is extremely difficult to sustain” and that “it is evident that the exhibition of supernatural appearances in fictitious narrative ought to be rare, brief and indistinct…. The first touch of the supernatural is always the most effective, and is rather weakened and defaced, than strengthened, by the subsequent recurrence of similar incident” (62, 63). 196 “there is some evil element pervading your house, very grave and formidable” (81). Once Lavinia decides to leave the house, taking her seventy-pound allowance with her, she falls gravely ill after drinking some liqueur served to her by Fennel. She manages to recover, but quickly experiences a relapse and dies, leaving her sister both devastated and seventy pounds a year richer as a result of her inexplicable demise. Not long after Lavinia’s death, Fennel begins to act strangely, suffering from “fits of terror” and more than once jumping in fright at something unseen to others. It isn’t until Nancy herself sees Lavinia’s ghost that she suspects that Lavinia has been haunting Fennel. After several sightings of Lavinia’s ghost, Nancy’s health deteriorates so rapidly that Featherston, the British doctor from Lavinia and Nancy’s hometown, is called in to treat her. Featherston, along with one of the Preen sisters’ distant relatives, concludes that Lavinia was poisoned by Fennel, but they lack any proof with which to charge the man. After one last visit from Lavinia’s welcoming spirit, Nancy dies, leaving Fennel to flee to South America while the Preen’s money is subsumed back into the family. This novella, like other ghost stories, clearly follows the aesthetic traditions of realism, striving for verisimilitude in the portrait of daily life and presenting a middle- class, domestic milieu. However, the text also engages the realist project on thematic and narrative levels as well. The struggle of the realist project to, as George Levine puts it, “make literature appear to be describing directly not some other language but reality itself,” becomes painfully evident in the veridical convention of the haunted house tale— that is, in its persistent and insistent need to represent itself at “true.” The relationship between realism and reality in the haunted house tale is, as Cox and Gilbert point out, a “complex one” (xvi). They note that in the ghost story, “the notion of ‘authenticity’ was 197 often used by writers to bridge the worlds of fiction and supposed fact…. writers frequently made use of an appearance of fact to enforce the illusion of authenticity” (xvi). This convention appears liberally in Featherston’s Story, where Johnny Ludlow, the narrator, continually impresses upon his reader the veracity of his story, opening the narrative with the claim that “this account… is a perfectly true one” and closing by noting that “[i]t is a curious history…. But I repeat that it is true” (3, 204). These assurances of the authenticity of the narrative appear throughout the story, reinforcing the realist level of the text by focusing the reader’s attention on the veracity of the story. The reason for this emphasis on veracity remains elusive if the ghost story is read solely as a genre apart from realism—either as an offshoot of the Gothic, as sensational literature, or as an anomalous tradition. Resituating the ghost story within the realist tradition, though, allows us to read this insistence upon authenticity within the context of realist conventions. It then becomes clear that the “complex” relationship between fact and fiction seen in the ghost story emanates from its fidelity to realism. The very struggles of realism—the claim to a “special authenticity” that Levine theorizes and the search for consensus in perspective—are at the heart of the ghost story. 76 Featherston’s Story literally claims a special authenticity, a fidelity to real life that can come only from a narrative style that includes a particular, personal narrative perspective as well as an omniscient one. The assurances of authenticity come in the form of a direct address to the reader, a convention that Levine attributes to realism, describing it as “a continuing tradition of self-consciousness in realistic fiction” (15). However, whereas Levine cites 76 Several contemporary writers attempted to explain the ghost story’s fascination with veracity. M. R. James claimed that “some degree of actuality is the charm of the best ghost stories; not a very insistent actuality, but one strong enough to allow the reader to identify himself with the patient” (qtd. in Cox xviii). 198 instances of direct address that “cajole” and “warn” the audience about the ordinariness of realism, the direct addresses in Featherston’s Story warn the reader about authenticity and believability (Levine 17). That is, this narrator cautions the reader that, while its plot may seem fantastic, the ghost story should be perfectly believed. Both canonical and “ghostly” realism, then, share an anxiety over the believability of their texts; the traditional realist worries that her story may seem too banal, while the haunted house realist worries that her tale is too fantastic. What unites these texts is an anxiety over the question of the real—what constitutes realism is a vivid uneasiness over the textual presentation of the real. This concern leads the narrator of Featherston’s Story, like other canonical narrators, to use a convention of realism in order to claim that the text faithfully represents reality, and these direct addresses come from a first-person narrator who expands the scope of narrative consensus that Ermarth posits as integral to realism. The first-person narrator who weaves in and out of Featherston’s Story relies upon another element of realism that also grows out of concerns about veracity. Two disparate conventions work together to present a voice that is both all-knowing and personally responsible for the truth of the story. The narrative is ostensibly narrated by Johnny Ludlow, who opens by telling the reader that he has “called this Featherston’s story, because it was through him that I heard about it—and, indeed, saw a little of it towards the end” (1). After this short framing paragraph, though, the bulk of the narrative is told in third person, switching between limited and omniscient perspectives and reintroducing Johnny briefly in significant places throughout the text. The introduction of Johnny Ludlow allows readers to feel the tale is connected to people in 199 the “real” world, both Johnny and the doctor Featherston. 77 Johnny’s assertion that he both heard about and saw elements of the story reproduces (and reinforces) a kind of knowledge that is believable because connected to a personal authority. 78 The quick move to a third person narration, however, tempers this kind of personal, subjective truth with a more objective one, allowing readers to experience the progression of the plot through the kind of consensus that Ermarth finds in the “Nobody” narrator. By combining these two techniques, the narrative merges two kinds of narrative authority/reality and constructs the real as both complete and “true” because both objective and subjective. Towards the end of the novella, Johnny Ludlow’s persona returns with a vengeance, explaining, And now I come into the story—I, Johnny Ludlow. For what I have told of it hitherto has not been from any personal knowledge of mine, but from diaries, and from what Mary Carimon related to me, and from Featherston. It may be regarded as singular that I should have been, so to say, present at its ending, but that I was there is as true as anything I ever wrote. The story itself is true in all its chief facts; I have already said that; and it is true that I saw the close of it. (180) Because so much of the story to this point has been told in third person, this personal narrator must remind the reader who he is with “I, Johnny Ludlow,” and in this one 77 By the Fifth series, Johnny Ludlow and the doctor Featherston would have been well-known to readers. Johnny appears for the first time in 1868 in a piece Wood wrote for The Argosy. When Featherston’s Story was published, she was already on her “Fifth Series” of Ludlow stories. 78 Julia Briggs posits a more technical explanation for the appearance of Johnny Ludlow as a narrator: “By the mid-nineteenth century, when magazine stories were much in demand, frameworks were often built round a group of them so that they might subsequently be published in book form…. The construction of elaborate frames round ghost stories [is] something of a feature of the later nineteenth-century form” (38). While this necessity is likely applicable to Featherston’s Story, allowing it to be included in the Johnny Ludlow series, it cannot account for the multiple intrusions of the Ludlow narrator in the heart of the narrative. The explanation also does not change the effect the first person narrator creates in conjunction with the omniscient narrator. 200 phrase the narrative dramatizes its uniquely plural narrative form—written in first and third person simultaneously. Moreover, this passage draws attention to the multiple perspectives that have produced the full account, noting that the facts have come from extra textual documents as well as the testimony of more than one player in the story. Significantly, Johnny reveals that nothing he has related has resulted from his own “personal knowledge,” and in so doing he subtly undermines the claims to authenticity he simultaneously makes. He asserts that “the story is true in all its chief facts,” and yet he admits that he has not experienced any of these facts and therefore can’t vouch for them. This tension underlines the importance of multiple perspectives in creating a “real” narrative with claims to authenticity. And Johnny is fierce in his claim to authenticity, characterizing the story as true no less than three times in the last two sentences of his direct address. The extra-textual documents that Johnny refers to are the Preen sisters’ diaries, and these sources provide a third perspective as the first and third person narratives prove insufficient to provide all the facts. The narrator reveals early in the text that “both sisters kept a diary. But for that fact, and also that the diaries were preserved, Featherston could not have arrived at the details of the story so perfectly” (28 – 29). Periodically, entries from these diaries form parts of the narrative, providing not only plot development but also the sisters’ unique perspectives on what is happening to them. These diary entries not only represent a particular kind of authority—we get key plot elements directly from those who experienced them—but they also produce a different kind of narrative consensus, one that relies on the multiple perspectives inherent in the Nobody narrator as well as embodied, personal perspectives. The reader receives 201 information from multiple perspectives: Johnny Ludlow, the omniscient narrator, as well as both Lavinia and Nancy Preen. The inclusion of these material perspectives works to alleviate the “price” that Ermarth sees the omniscient perspective exacting, “the price of estrangement from the particulars of experience and from the actual present—the price, in a word, of disembodiment” (85). In fact, the narrative is not completely disembodied; the personal perspectives augment the omniscient perspective and anchor it to the material world. However, in so doing, the text also draws attention to the disembodiment of the third person narration, demonstrating that it is insufficient in providing a complete consensus of perspectives because it does lack a material aspect. Moreover, the inclusion of the diaries participates in the text’s attempt to balance objective and subjective perspectives, attempting to create a consensus among different types of narrative authority. From both an objective and subjective point of view, the details of the story remain the same. In fact, the narrator reinforces this consensus when he recounts the events surrounding the mesmerist party. He notes that “[s]omething occurred during the evening that was rather remarkable. Miss Preen’s diary gives a full account of it, and that shall be transcribed here. And I, Johnny Ludlow, take this opportunity of assuring the reader that what she wrote was in faithful accordance with the facts of the case” (73 – 74). The remarkable event happens when Nancy has her “future cast,” and the mesmerist seems to indicate that Fennel is an evil presence in the house. Significantly, the mesmerist’s fortune is presented as completely authentic and veracious; in fact, the only element of the ghost story that is left in doubt is the “ghost event” itself—the question of whether or not Lavinia’s ghost appears to Fennel. The desire for consensus here is powerful. The text combines both the omniscient narration, which 202 opens this quotation, with the first-person narration of both Lavinia’s diary and Johnny Ludlow’s voice as he reminds us that he is in fact recounting the story. But Johnny also personally vouches for Lavinia’s story, a curious position since Johnny didn’t experience these particular events in any way. In fact, we end up with a tautological circle posing as consensus: Johnny gets his information from Lavinia’s diary, and then assures us that the facts in the diary correspond with the truth, a truth he must have come to know only through the diary. Here, the narrative unconsciously rehearses the problem that resides at the core of realism. The narrator insists on the narrative’s veracity precisely because he can’t prove it to be veracious. The question of what is real becomes elided on the surface while simultaneously creating a tension inherent to the ghost story and symptomatic of realism as a genre, illustrating that the need for narrative and perspectival consensus is always greater than the text can provide. The insistence on the truthfulness of the supernatural events in the story (save the appearance of Lavinia’s ghost) goes beyond these episodes with Lavinia’s diary. When the narrator recounts Lavinia’s first fearful entry into her house, he addresses the reader, saying, “I must beg the reader to understand that this is no invention. Devoid of reason and unaccountable though the terror was, Lavinia Preen experienced it” (60). Again, the narrative insists on the veracity of an event that seems both unlikely and inexplicable, in the process revealing the pervasive anxiety over representing the real. Moreover, when Lavinia first sees Fennel’s apparition, the narrator specifies that “she saw, or thought she saw, Captain Fennel” (65). The narrator gives the reader two choices—either the apparition existed in material reality or it existed in Lavinia’s mind, but either way, the 203 apparition existed. 79 The important question here is not whether it existed in material or mental reality, but what it forebodes for the Preens. Much like the insistence upon the truthfulness of Lavinia’s terror, this passage insists that there is something significant happening at Le Petit Maison Rouge. The choice of explanations focuses the important question not on whether the event is probable, but what explanation for the event is most truthful, most revealing about Victorian domesticity. In fact, even Lavinia leaves the explanation open to either possibility, telling Mary Carimon that she experienced a “‘first surprise of seeing him there, or fancying I saw him there’” (68). When Lavinia tells Mary Carimon about the apparition, Mary expresses confusion, and Lavinia responds, “‘You mean, I suppose, that you cannot understand the facts, Mary. Neither can I’” (68). The experience was, for Lavinia, completely real, independent of its source—what she reports she saw is entirely factual because it was real for her. Perhaps more importantly, though, the narrative positions the experiences as real for the reader as well, supporting Lavinia’s first-person perspective with more objective perspectives. Lavinia’s own words attempt to frame the episode as immune to contradiction, and the text itself provides the perspective of an omniscient narrator who corroborates Lavinia’s story. Moreover, the text allows the reader to “see” the apparition, supporting Lavinia’s reading of her experience with the truth the reader can register with her own eyes: “[h]e was standing just within the front-door… staring at [Lavinia] with a fixed gaze” (65). The end result is an episode that protests too much: the text tries desperately to achieve consensus, to merge objective and subjective perspectives, but in the end draws more 79 The question of whether apparitions are material fact or optical illusion is explored thoroughly in Smajic’s article on ghost-seeing. 204 attention to this lack of consensus and the tenuousness of questioning what is real than it manages to hide. Ultimately, what arises as important in this incident is Lavinia’s assessment of the truth behind her experience. She concludes that “some ill awaits me from that man” (69). And finally, Mary Carimon comes to accept the apparition, avoiding entirely the question of whether it is material or mental: “I don’t doubt that you do see this spectre…. And I think… that it has come to warn you of some threatened harm,” she tells Lavinia (103). Mary validates Lavinia’s experience through her belief, but she refuses to decide what the source of the apparition is. Instead, she focuses on what is important in the haunting: its warning about the dangers to Lavinia and her domestic realm. As I have shown to this point, the ghost story rehearses the underlying anxieties within realism by highlighting problems with consensus and dramatizing the question of how to know what is real. However, the anxieties produced by this narrative struggle for consensus also parallel a thematic struggle within these stories to define the meaning of domesticity and to express fears of domesticity’s collapse. Thematically, the ghost story represents women’s anxieties in relation to the house as well as a struggle over defining what is real. Within the house, these struggles converge upon the issue of the integrity of the Victorian home. During a period when the house “articulate[d] social status,” living in and presenting a respectable home became an extension of one’s middle-class identity. 80 The integrity of the home encompasses both the materiality of economics, a 80 During the mid- to late nineteenth-century, the importance of respectability in the middle-class home manifested itself in debates about taste. The eruption of discourse about decoration focused heavily on 205 known entity, as well as something harder to grasp—the middle-class morality of the home. The variable question of middle-class taste surrounding the house created an environment that complicated the question of what is real in the house. Taste, a clear marker of respectability, combines two elements that created anxiety within the Victorian home: economics (both class and finances) and morality. This anxiety expresses itself in the haunted house tale in general and Featherston’s Story in particular. The women in Featherston’s Story attach a cultural significance to their domestic spaces that is rooted in, but also exceeds, the economic. When Lavinia and Nancy reach Sainteville and discuss their prospects for a home with the Carimons, Lavinia points out, “‘We want to make [our income] do well; not to betray our poverty, but to be able to maintain a fairly good appearance’” (9). Here, Lavinia claims that their desire to “do well” doesn’t come from a desire to look wealthier than they are, but rather from a desire to “maintain a fairly good appearance.” Certainly, this appearance is partially class- based; the sisters want to maintain a hold on their middle-class status, and in order to do so they must use their household finances to best advantage. However, their wish is also rooted in a desire for a specific kind of “respectable” domestic life, one that the sisters hope to find in this “fresh, clean town, with wide streets, and good houses and old families” (7). This kind of domesticity appears at the town market, where Lavinia’s heart improving and disciplining middle-class taste so that a decorated home revealed a family’s respectability. Aesthetic and design reformers such as Ruskin and William Morris expressed the “confluence of morality and aesthetics that defines the mid to late nineteenth-century discourse on design in Britain” (Logan 56). In this atmosphere, presenting a respectable home is paramount, but the elements that create respectability are in flux and difficult to define. I’m arguing that as discourse on what constituted respectable taste grew, so did the anxieties surrounding keeping a respectable home, and these anxieties manifested themselves in the haunted house tale. 206 was taken “by storm” by the “delicious butter, the eggs, the fresh vegetables, the flowers and the poultry,” and it is reinforced at Mary Carimon’s “gala dinner,” where they all ate [a] small cod, bought by Madame Carimon at the fish-market in the morning, with oyster sauce. Ten sous she had given for the cod, for she knew how to bargain now, and six sous for a dozen oysters, as large as a five-franc piece. This was followed by a delicious little fricandeau of veal, and that by a tarte a la crème from the pastrycook’s. She told her guests unreservedly what all the dishes cost, to show them how reasonably people might live at Sainteville. (9) The description of the quality of the meal is intertwined with the description of its cost— a clear suggestion that respectable housekeeping and financial anxiety are inextricably connected. The size of the oysters is compared to the size of a piece of money, implying a connection between their quality and an economic measure, and the fact that Madame Carimon speaks “unreservedly” with them about the price of her meal intimates that domesticity cannot be separated from finances. However, what strikes the women about this dinner, too, is the quality that Madame Carimon is able to put into it. Her meal provides a model of the perfect domestic production, one that is both economically sound and morally respectable. What is only hinted at in these economically-inflected conversations, though, is an intangible quality to domestic comfort that is wrapped up in the question of integrity. The integrity of the Victorian home has both material and intangible aspects: it requires sound household finances as well as high moral standards. The domestically-minded women in the story, mainly Lavinia and Mary Carimon, both experience intuitions about the house the Preens will come to inhabit that are both conventional to the haunted house story as well as revelatory of the kind of moral values that these women associate with a domestic setting. When M. Carimon first suggests the Petite Maison Rouge as a home 207 for the Preen sisters, Mary’s reaction is vague yet foreboding. She “did not seem to know quite what to think. She looked at her husband, then at the eager faces of her two friends; but she did not speak” (12). Her first verbal reaction to the suggestion comes after the narrator explains the “unlucky” history of the house—after a happy and prosperous family grew up there, a succession of tenants had left it as a result of their financial situations or death. Significantly, though, this history is not the ultimate threat to the Preens’ home—in fact, the house’s past plays no role in the further development of the plot. The sole purpose of narrating this history lies in setting up the importance of integrity and creating a sense that there’s an intangible element to domesticity. After the reader discovers this history, Mary tells her husband Jules, “‘I fear our good friends here would find it dull…. It is in so gloomy a situation, you know, Jules’” (15). While Mary expresses a kind of ambiguous hesitation over the house, here connecting it to the gloomy “situation” which Jules reads only as its “confined yard,” Jules brushes off her anxiety, asking, “‘If your house is comfortable inside, does it matter what it looks out upon?’” (16). Jules believes that the material comfort of a house is the only significant contributor to domestic comfort, but Mary’s and later Lavinia’s feelings about the house suggest that these women locate positive domesticity in a more intangible sense of the moral comfort and cheer that a house possesses. Lavinia’s first reaction upon entering this house both forebodes the terrors she will find there and reveals another sense in which this house is constructed as morally inappropriate for domestic comfort. As Lavinia begins to step into the house, “no sooner had she put one foot over the threshold than she drew back with a start, somewhat discomposing the others by her movement” (17). She tells the others, “‘Something 208 seemed to startle me, and throw me backward!... Perhaps it was the gloom of the passage; it is very dark” (17). Lavinia uses the same term as Mary to describe the sudden feeling of horror she received upon entering; later, she explains to her sister and Mary that she found the house “[g]loomy, with a peculiar gloom, you understand. I’m sure the passage was as dark as night” (20). She suggests that both of these women “understand” the kind of “peculiar” gloom that Lavinia is referring to here; she equates it with darkness, a darkness that seems to be both physical and moral. Lavinia goes on to explain that this gloom made her feel that “some horror seemed to meet me and drive me backward…. it turned me sick with a sort of fear; sick and shivery” (20). In a more canonical analysis of this text as ghost story, both Mary and Lavinia’s forebodings would be read as evidence of their intuition, of their participation in an alternative form of epistemology that stems from their status as women—angels in the house. However, both women use traditional logic to explain their feelings—here, Lavinia insists that her feeling likely came from the darkness of the passage—and neither seem to participate in an alternative, spiritual epistemology. That is, these forebodings are not about a different way of knowing but about knowing a different thing, knowing a sense of integrity that is essential for a comfortable home. 81 The narrator comments that the sisters should have 81 The epistemological argument, in which women’s experiences with ghosts are supposedly evidence of their more spiritual qualities, is well-traversed ground. For example, Vanessa Dickerson claims that supernaturalism allowed women writers to explore the spirituality they had been saddled with as angels in the house; Carpenter and Kolmar argue that women protagonists in ghost stories replace rationality with sympathy in their interactions with ghosts. While these analyses have been fruitful, I am arguing that these stories are concerned less with ways of knowing than types of knowledge. The women in Featherston’s Story are at least as logical as their male counterparts. Lavinia, for instance, constantly reads her own experiences with logic; after her initial fright at the Petite Maison Rouge, she reasons, “ ‘I had still the glare of the streets and the fiery red walls in my eyes which must have caused the house passage to look darker than it ought. That was all, I suppose…’” (20). She processes her experiences completely logically, but 209 taken this “feeling” as a sign that the house wasn’t “fit” for them, questioning why “that horror, which fell upon Lavinia as she was about to pass over the door-sill, [might not] have served her as [a warning]?” (21). Indeed, the entire narrative reads as a cautionary tale for its audience, suggesting that such knowledge about domestic comfort is far more important than economics. The narrator admits that people rarely pay attention to the “situation” of a house, rhetorically asking “But who regards these warnings when they come to us? Who personally applies them? None” (21). Yet the outcome of the story and the mere existence of the warning means that there is a way to evaluate the possibility of domestic comfort, and that this evaluation must rely on the integrity of the home. The concrete threat to the Preens’ home also comes from both an economic and a moral source—the financially irresponsible and morally degenerate Edwin Fennel. When Lavinia suspects Nancy and Fennel have eloped, she does all she can to find out about “his family, his fortune, his former life, his antecedents,” and to her dismay she discovers not only that he’s insolvent—he “lives upon his wits, perhaps,” as Major Smith describes it—but he is also immoral, having been forced out of service in India after being “detected, in short—of cheating at cards” (41, 40). Both of these aspects of his situation cause Lavinia to wonder “what sort of a home Captain Fennel meant to provide for Ann” (41). She reads Fennel’s problems in domestic terms, applying them only to the question of the kind of domestic life that her sister will have. Importantly, her use of the term “home” suggests the necessarily dual nature of the integrity of domestic life to which any what she processes, the knowledge she arrives at, concerns specifically domestic questions that speak directly to Victorian women. 210 wise woman must attend—the finances of the house she might inhabit as well as the comfort and respectability she would enjoy as a result of the moral environment fostered there. Lavinia soon realizes that she cannot refuse to receive Nancy and Fennel at the Petite Maison since both Lavinia and Nancy have signed the lease to the house. Her realization plays a key role in her terror as well, since she is powerless to evict the evil entering her home, and yet she cannot leave the house because she is bound by law to carry out the term of her lease. The position Lavinia thus finds herself in represents an important source of domestic anxiety for Victorian women—they are responsible for the integrity of their homes, yet they don’t have the legal authority to police these homes. Fennel’s residence with the two sisters appears clearly as a financial measure; Lavinia feels sure that “the gallant ex-Captain Fennel had married Ann Preen just to have a roof over his head” (46), and indeed, he intends to use the sisters’ income for his own monetary gain. It is his insistence on economics, regardless of domestic respectability, that produces a threat to the integrity of the Preens’ home. And it is Lavinia’s powerlessness against this threat that creates domestic terror. The financial threat that Fennel poses to the morality of the Preen household gets expressed clearly and directly throughout the narrative. Lavinia repeatedly tells Nancy that she “found difficulty enough” in meeting expenses with the three living at the Petite Maison, and Nancy herself often tries to alleviate the problem, noting that when the couple goes abroad Lavinia “will be spared our housekeeping” (55). However, the anxiety produced over Fennel’s threat to domestic respectability can only manifest itself in the supernatural. Domestic respectability is, in fact, a ghost—it is both real and unreal, depending on who may or may not see it. When the Fennels leave Sainteville, Lavinia 211 begins “to experience a nervous dread at going into the Petite Maison Rouge at night” (58). Significantly, the dread she feels is expressly linked to the space of the house; the narrator explains that “it came on with… little reason” since “Lavinia this night had not a thought in her mind of fear or loneliness, or anything else unpleasant” (59). The dread she feels, then, doesn’t arise from anything preying on her mind, not even the financial troubles that are plaguing her household. The terror she experiences is a direct result of her interaction with the house, and she continues to feel it every time she enters the empty house alone at night. It isn’t until the prospect of the Fennels returning home arises that a source is linked to this terror. The day she receives a letter from Nancy announcing the Fennels’ imminent return, Lavinia returns from a “very pleasant evening” with the sisters Bosanquet, and as she stands at her door the old fear came over her. Dropping her hands, she stood there trembling. She looked round at the silent, deserted yard, she looked up at the high encircling walls; she glanced at the frosty sky and the bright stars; and she stood there shivering. But she must go in. Throwing the door back with an effort of will, she turned sick and faint: to enter that dark, lonely, empty house seemed beyond her strength and courage. What could this strange feeling portend?—why should it thus attack her? It was just as if some fatality were in the house waiting to destroy her, and a subtle power would keep her from entering it. Her heart beating wildly, her breath laboured, Lavinia went in; she shut the door behind her and sped up the passage. Feeling for the match- box on the slab, put ready to her hand, she struck a match and lighted the candle. At that moment, when turning round, she saw, or thought she saw, Captain Fennel. He was standing just within the front door, which she had now come in at, staring at her with a fixed gaze, and with the most malignant expression on his usually impassive face. Lavinia’s terror partly gave place to astonishment…. [W]hen she looked again he was gone. (65 – 66) 212 At last, the terror of the passage solidifies into a figure—that of Edwin Fennel, the most significant threat to Lavinia’s domestic space. The descriptions of Lavinia’s return substantiate that the cause of Lavinia’s fear resides in Edwin’s presence in her house. As she returns and stands outside of the house, she doesn’t yet fear but only anticipates her fear. She looks around at the “silent, deserted yard,” yet the loneliness of the exterior of the house doesn’t bother her. She sees the “high, encircling walls,” yet a sense of confining claustrophobia never occurs to her. These foreboding descriptions don’t, in fact, foreshadow the horror to come, but instead they serve as a foil to what is really at stake. Lavinia is not scared of everything, or, for that matter, anything except the threat to home that she locates in the very tangible, “real” presence of Edwin Fennel. It isn’t until she enters the house that she turns “sick and faint.” When she does enter, it is the atmosphere of the house—its distance from comfort and safety—that strike her. Initially, she reads her fear as coming from “that dark, lonely, empty house,” from exactly a lack of domestic respectability and comfort. However, once she’s inside, this lack becomes a presence as Edwin Fennel appears. The amorphous fear that had been assaulting Lavinia is now connected to the main threat to her domestic life: Edwin Fennel’s disregard for the integrity of the home. Significantly, while the threat to the Preens comes only from Edwin Fennel, the danger is consistently located in the house. By aligning the threat with the household, the text sutures the economic and moral threat that Fennel poses to the question of domesticity and women’s identity. The women cannot understand Fennel’s threat outside of the grammar of the house. Lavinia’s fear begins and ends with her entry into the house at night, and while she sees Fennel’s image and can therefore associate him with this 213 terror, it still affects her relationship with her own home. She dreads entering the house at night and even declines some invitations in order to avoid the fear. When Lavinia tells Nancy of her experiences, Nancy questions her, “‘What could there have been in the house to frighten you?’” (71). Lavinia is powerless to answer this question, because the threat to the integrity of the home remains unspeakable, and Lavinia warns Nancy to “not speak of it again at all to any one” (72). The mesmerist’s reading most clearly demonstrates the ways in which Fennel’s threats as a source of terror contaminate the house itself. When Nancy gets her fortune read, Signor Talcke, the mesmerist, tells her that “‘[t]here is some particular form of terror here…. It seems to be in the house” (79). As Nancy reveals Lavinia’s fear of entering the house alone at night, the mesmerist responds, “If a feeling of that sort assailed me, I should never go into the house again,” said the signor. “But how could you help it, if it were your home?” she argued. “All the same. I should regard that feeling as a warning against the house, and never enter it…. Pardon me, madame—may I ask whether there has not been some unpleasantness in the house concerning money?... It does not appear to lie precisely in the want of money: but certainly money is in some way connected with the evil.” (80 – 81) Although Signor Talcke goes on to explain that the evil comes from “an enemy,” the bulk of his reading focuses on the house itself, locating the evil within it. Curiously, the fortune-teller doesn’t suggest that the sisters get away from the enemy pursuing them, only that they leave the house. The evil, then, can’t be divorced from the house—there is no way to rid the home of its evil; they must vacate the house entirely to escape. The mesmerist also suggests that the evil within the home is connected to money, although he 214 specifies that the problem lies in something more than just a lack of money. This assessment describes the problem of integrity that Fennel presents to the Preen household: his profligate ways not only threaten the financial stability of the household, but his reckless spending also menaces the morality of the home. It is not just the drain on the household expenses, the “want of money,” that poses evil to the home, but the immorality of Fennel’s spending and debt that produces an “unpleasantness.” The immorality cannot be escaped; it threatens to ruin the integrity of the home, and therefore the sisters must leave the Petit Maison in order to keep their good name and financial feasibility intact. Leaving the house is, in fact, what Mary Carimon ultimately advises Lavinia to do, further reinforcing the importance of domesticity in the construction of terror for Lavinia. When Lavinia tells Mary of the second appearance of Fennel’s apparition, Mary is quick to advise Lavinia: “Were I you, I should get away from the house…. I should leave at once” (103 – 104). Lavinia sets the date to leave for after Easter, and Mary reiterates, “You must leave the house, Lavinia…. I should leave at once; before Easter” (104 – 105). Her insistence repeatedly reinforces the idea that the terror lies within the house. While it’s true that Fennel resides there, the fact that Lavinia cannot evict him is the ultimate horror—a horror rooted firmly in the reality of Victorian domestic life and laws. As a woman, Lavinia’s only choice is to leave her house—and yet remain responsible for paying its rent—leaving her both homeless and beholden to a house. The difficulties surrounding the Preen household are always both rooted in economics as well as exceeding it. As Vanessa Dickerson points out, many later nineteenth-century women ghost story writers “wrote supernatural tales strongly 215 preoccupied with money and murders committed for that money” (138). While it is true that in these tales, “the focus is not so much on the spiritual condition of the character as on that character’s preoccupation with the disposition of the material,” I am arguing that this preoccupation goes beyond the “desire for money [that] transforms the demure angel into a fury the male can barely control” (139). In fact, Lavinia never appears as a fury; she is constantly and consistently beleaguered with the pressures of the materiality of a home, finally deciding that she must leave because “the anxieties in regard to money matters are wearing me out; they would wear me out altogether if I did not end them. And there are other things which urge upon me the expediency of departure from this house…. I cannot speak of them” (110). Not only is Lavinia not in a “fury” over the economics of the household, she is altogether worn out over them. Financial concerns drain her energy and, in the end, literally take the life out of her. Moreover, though, Lavinia demonstrates that these anxieties are not uniquely material; she is preoccupied with both the materiality of “money matters” as well as the “other things” that Edwin Fennel brings to her home, an immorality that, in the context of the domestic, is unspeakable. These “other things” are beyond description on two levels—Fennel’s lack of respectability is intangible and therefore difficult to locate, but the act of speaking of his corruption would in itself produce the immorality it describes. Even when Lavinia learns of Fennel’s ignominious past, the narrative is loath to speak of it. Major Smith tells Lavinia that “something very disagreeable occurred” and that “the affair was hushed up,” adding “‘I don’t much like to mention it’” before finally revealing that Fennel is a cheat (39). Smith’s unwillingness to name Fennel’s act reveals a palimpsest of respectability attached to Fennel’s financial activities. Not only would speaking of 216 Fennel’s cheating bring disrepute upon Fennel, it might, in fact, tarnish Major Smith’s reputation, and he is therefore unwilling to mention it. Jules Carimon literally shuts down the topic of immorality when Mary suggests to him that Fennel might have killed Lavinia. As soon as she hints at the possibility, Jules quickly responds: “‘Mon amie, tais toi,’ said he with authority. ‘Such a topic is not convenable…. It is dangerous’” (173). The immorality Mary speaks of is much more serious than cheating at cards, and yet Jules chooses to use the term “convenable,” a French word that means “suitable” or “proper.” Merely speaking of another’s immorality leads to more disrepute, creating an environment where wrong-doing is unspeakable and the concept of respectability becomes paramount. Moreover, when one cannot even speak of the corruption of others, it becomes even more difficult to maintain the respectability of the home. Without speaking of immorality, women lack the ability to identify or rectify it, and therefore lack the power to do their duty in policing the integrity of their homes. Nancy, too, illustrates the financial and moral nature of integrity. When Lavinia announces her imminent departure from the Petite Maison, Nancy begs her to stay, explaining, “We could not do at all without you and your half of the money” (111). Lavinia, throughout the text portrayed as an ideal housekeeper, provides both aspects of a Victorian domestic duality, since she brings in money and dispenses it respectably. As the recipient of her annual seventy-pound income, Lavinia provides the material means for running the household; this is why the Fennels cannot do without her “half of the money.” However, as the Petite Maison’s housekeeper, Lavinia creates comfort and the appearance of morality integral to domestic integrity; this is why the Fennels cannot do without her person. Significantly, Nancy places Lavinia, not her money, first in 217 importance to the household, yet the two remain yoked together as the keys to domestic life. The solidity of the material is always both implicated in and productive of the morality of the home. It is no surprise, then, that it is the threat to both the materiality and respectability of the Petite Maison that drives Lavinia to leave it. Significantly, though, it is her decision to leave the domestic realm that ultimately kills her. It is not until Lavinia decides to take both her role as housekeeper and her income away that Fennel acts on his murderous thoughts. Moreover, Lavinia’s own attention to the domestic moral code provides the access Fennel needs to kill her. While her neighbors invite Lavinia to dinner on her last Sunday, she objects, explaining that “[i]t is my last Sunday at home, and I could not well go out and leave them [the Fennels]” (115). She could go out, but it would not be “well” for her to do so, and her likeable and respectable friends see “the force of the objection” (115). It is at this Sunday dinner that Lavinia is first poisoned through a glass of chartreuse to which Fennel sometimes “treated” the sisters. Ironically, it is Lavinia’s participation in a ritual that represents domestic comfort and tranquility that initiates her demise. 82 The final blow is struck when Nancy brings Lavinia a cup of arrowroot that Fennel has poisoned, and once again, the text uses a common domestic remedy as the vehicle to bring about Lavinia’s death. 83 It is both Lavinia’s participation in and attempt to leave the domestic that strips her of her identity through death. 82 Chartreuse was (and is) a French liqueur named after the French monastery, the Grand Chartreuse, where it was formerly produced. The fact that Fennel “treated” the sisters to this drink speaks to its cultural status as a slightly more elegant drink. 83 Mrs Beeton presents recipes for arrowroot in her Household Management, illustrating its centrality in housekeeping. She reports “Miss Nightingale’s” recommendation “that arrowroot is a grand dependence of the nurse…. as a restorative quickly prepared” (Ch 39). 218 But Lavinia’s death is not the end of the story. Lavinia’s ghost returns, ostensibly to haunt Fennel, yet for this event the text uniquely refuses to provide either perspectival consensus on or empirical confirmation of the event. In fact, Lavinia’s haunting of Fennel is the only event in the story that is never verified through narrative consensus. The appearance of Lavinia’s ghost, the central and climactic event in the story, remains the one event that the text refuses to corroborate. We do not get Fennel’s point of view on the apparition, and neither do we see the ghost haunt Fennel through the narrative. Fennel’s specter, which appeared to Lavinia, appears to readers as well; however, when Lavinia’s ghost first seems to appear, readers never get a description of the apparition. Moreover, the narration focuses mainly on Nancy’s perspective, with only one significant turn to the point of view of Fennel, the character who actually experiences the ghost. Nancy had taken off her gown, and was standing before the glass about to undo her hair, when she heard [Fennel] leave the parlour…. She heard him lock up the spirit bottle in the little cupboard below, and begin to ascend the stairs, and she opened her door wider, that the light might guide him, for the staircase was in darkness. Captain Fennel had nearly gained the top, when something—he never knew what—induced him to look round sharply, as though he fancied some one was close behind him. In fact, he did fancy it. In a moment, he gave a shout, dashed onwards into the bedroom, shut the door with a bang, and bolted it. Nancy, in great astonishment, turned to look at him. He seemed to have shrunk within himself in a fit of trembling, his face was ghastly, and the perspiration stood upon his brow. (136) Nancy’s perspective bookends Fennel’s experience, and all we get of Fennel’s point of view ends at the moment when he ostensibly sees the ghost, as the narrative switches back to Nancy’s perspective. Two important phrases here give insight into Fennel’s 219 viewpoint, yet they also refuse to confirm Fennel’s experience. The text shows Fennel’s actions from the outside, noting that he turned around “as though he fancied some one was close behind him,” an observation that comes from an external, third-person perspective. This description is then modified with a brief foray into Fennel’s point of view, as the narrative claims that “he did fancy it.” The choice of the word “fancy” here is telling. It contains within it two potentialities: either Fennel believed that he saw something, or he imagined that he did. The definition of “fancy” allows for Fennel either to “suppose [him]self to perceive,” in which case, like Lavinia, he thought he saw, or to “imagine” the ghost (OED). However, one important possibility is missing here—the possibility that he did, indeed, see something. When Lavinia experiences Fennel’s apparition, the choice of explanations includes both Lavinia’s actually “seeing” or “thinking she saw” Fennel. However, in the case of Lavinia’s ghost, the text refuses to weigh in on the reality of Fennel’s experience, providing only a moment of pure first- person point of view that is disconnected from the other narrative viewpoints in the text. The story refuses to give Fennel the possibility of actually seeing something, leaving his experience even more in question. It is at the very moment when Fennel’s perspective is needed for consensus that the text withholds it, preventing consensus and undermining the representation of reality. After this brief description of Fennel’s perspective, we see the text’s actions through Nancy’s eyes as she attempts to interpret Fennel’s actions. When Fennel “pulled her back with a motion of terror, and put his back against [the door],” Nancy reads Fennel’s actions: “This meant, she thought, that he knew a thief was there” (137). While it is clear from Fennel’s confusion that something more than burglary is transpiring, the 220 text refuses to shed light on what Fennel thinks he has seen. The addition of Nancy’s perspective, though, creates a dissonance in the narrative as multiple explanations for Fennel’s experience unfold side by side—the mystery of what Fennel actually saw remains, while the reader is certain that the explanation that Nancy provides cannot account for Fennel’s terror. As the narrative continues to read Fennel through Nancy— the narrator channels her perspective as it notes that “[Fennel] appeared to be listening”—it draws attention to the multiple readings of this bedtime experience and therefore undermines the potential for narrative consensus (137, emphasis mine). The appearance (or not) of Lavinia’s ghost provides both thematic and narrative tension. On the level of plot action, the characters question Fennel’s “fits,” and the reader wonders whether Lavinia haunts Fennel. On the level of narrative, though, the ghost creates tension as the text refuses to merge multiple perspectives into one story. The events surrounding the appearance of the ghost always have multiple potential explanations that never resolve themselves. As a result, the narrative points clearly to the subjectivity of real experience and leaves the reader with the sense that the desire to confirm objectively, through consensus, subjective experience will always be doomed to failure. The text is powerless to represent reality precisely because reality itself is slippery. In fact, the later narrative perspectives only create more confusion over whether Fennel has seen a ghost and thwart the potential for narrative consensus. As Fennel falls asleep, Nancy overhears his thoughts voiced out loud: “‘It must have been all fancy,’ she more than once heard him mutter to himself” (138). Nancy’s observation of Fennel’s anxiety suggests that he has seen something more, and yet the reader’s knowledge arrives third-hand—through the omniscient narrator’s report that Nancy has heard Fennel stating 221 that he believes he has just imagined or “fancied” something. The narrative creates layers of perspective here as it has before, but this time, the layers work to dispel consensus instead of producing it. The next morning, Nancy speaks with Flore about Edwin’s fright, reporting on his “state of terror” and explaining that he had wondered whether Flore could have followed him up the stairs. Flore’s perspective once again adds to the confusion over Fennel’s experience as she asks, “‘And why should he show terror if he thought it was me?’” (139). Her comment casts doubt onto yet another explanation for Fennel’s fits and becomes yet another obstacle to consensus. The multiplicity of perspectives that cannot agree on one sequence of events inhibits the kind of consensus that fictional realism requires, thereby producing an instability within the narrative as the reader gleans that the text simply cannot provide enough perspectives to reproduce reality. The second incident of Edwin’s “fright” goes further in challenging a consensus in perspective, adding a salon full of guests to the mix of narrative perspectives. With several visitors at the Petite Maison, Edwin Fennel goes alone to fetch a book and some dominoes from the bedrooms. As he returns, [h]earing, as he thought, some one close behind him, almost treading, as it were, upon his heels, and thinking it was Flore, he turned his head round, intending to tell her to keep her distance. Then, with a frightful yell, down dashed Captain Fennel the few remaining stairs…. It was the yell which had frightened the company in the salon…. Captain Fennel swept past Charley into the salon, and… his terrified face looked livid as one meet for the grave…. “Oh! He must have seen the thief again!” shrieked Nancy. “Shut the door; bolt it!” called out the stricken man. (143 – 44) 222 Once again, the narrative follows Fennel’s perspective just up to the moment when he sees the apparition, then switches quickly to another perspective (here, that of those in the salon looking at his performance). These shifts leave the question of what Fennel has seen open to interpretation. We get Fennel’s perspective when he descends the stairs as the narrative channels his thoughts: he heard someone behind him, thought it was Flore, and turned to chide her for crowding him. The narrative leaves readers on the cusp of apprehending the ghost, however, since at the moment Fennel does turn around, the perspective switches to an external report of Fennel’s fall and then to the visitors in the salon who are “frightened” by Fennel’s shout. These narrative shifts once again leave the apprehension of the ghost in question, in spite of the fact that we’ve seen multiple perspectives on the event. The fact that the text does provide a moment of Fennel’s point of view, just before his terrifying experience, highlights the narrative’s lack, the omission surrounding the apprehension of the ghost. The text stubbornly refuses to provide more of Fennel’s perspective; even after the fright, as Fennel provides an explanation for his odd behavior, the narrator suggests that Fennel was “conscious, perhaps, that something must be said to satisfy the inquisitive faces around him” (144, emphasis mine). The narrator admits, with this “perhaps,” that he is merely speculating on Fennel’s state of mind, and in so doing draws attention to the fact that consensus is again impossible—we can only guess what happened in reality since the text is incapable of providing an answer. While the introduction of Lavinia’s ghost begins with this kind of perspectival slippage, the narrative endeavors to resolve this tension with attempts at consensus that always fall short. These efforts not only fail to bring solidity to the reality of the ghostly 223 events, they also draw attention to the impossibility of doing so and to the conflict inherent in the very idea of perspectival consensus: a multiplicity of perspectives means a multiplicity of explanations of an event. This multiplicity creates an excess that always remains apart from the singular explanation that the text may eventually agree upon, thereby demonstrating the tenuousness and arbitrariness of narrative reality, that it is only one possibility among many. In Featherston’s Story, the longing for consensus begins with a disembodied perspective that is reported by the third-person narrator. As Fennel’s “fits” of terror continue, the narrator wonders, “What was it that he was scared at? An impression arose in the minds of the two or three people who were privy to this, that he saw, or fancied he saw, in the house the spectre of one who had just been carried out of it; Lavinia Preen. Nancy had no such suspicion as yet” (146 – 7). Again, a multiplicity of perspectives arises as the omniscient narration adds the perspective of several people connected with the Preens to its own. The third-person narration constructs itself as entirely knowledgeable and objective through two devices: the use of the past tense and the addition of “as yet.” The past-tense narration constructs the text as complete precisely because it has already happened—the past is knowable in a way that the present and future are not. 84 Moreover, the qualifying phrase “as yet” adds to the sense of omniscience, indicating that the narrator knows not only what Nancy’s thoughts are, but what they will become in the future of the story. The opinion of “two or three people” 84 Past-tense narration is at the heart of Ermarth’s definition of realism, as she notes that “a realistic novel… can only be written in the past tense” (88). However, she doesn’t focus on the past tense’s ability to allow for complete knowledge. Instead, Ermarth argues that past-tense narration disembodies the narrator, because “standing forever in a continuous actual present that has no concreteness or measurable change and consists only of remembering, the narrator has no perceptible identity” (85). I agree with Ermarth, but I am also suggesting that the past-tense creates the condition of omniscience, allowing for a perspective that can encompass everything, since everything has already happened. 224 appears to be more subjective, since they are “privy” to the events and are therefore personally connected to the narrative. However, the multiple perspectives here still cannot resolve into consensus or certainty. Even as the narrative tries to explain what is happening to Fennel, it provides multiple options: he “saw, or fancied he saw,” Lavinia’s ghost. Although the language here shifts—now we have the possibility that Fennel actually experienced something with the addition of “saw”—the uncertainty still remains as the narrative provides two explanations for Fennel’s fright. Utilizing the fiction of both objective and subjective perspectives, the narrative is still no nearer to discovering what is real and resolving into consensus. The question of whether or not Lavinia’s ghost has returned becomes more complicated as Nancy becomes involved in the sightings. One night, “Nancy lighted the candle in the kitchen, and then fancied she saw some one looking at her from the open kitchen-door. It looked like Lavinia. It certainly was Lavinia. Nancy stood spell-bound; then she gave a cry of desperate horror and dropped the candlestick” (150). In this case, we get both the detached third-person and limited third-person perspectives as the narrator recounts Nancy’s actions and then switches to her perspective. There appears to be more certainty that Nancy has seen the ghost, since she thinks, “It looked like Lavinia. It certainly was Lavinia.” However, these thoughts belong to Nancy’s perspective, and the third-person narrative still cannot corroborate her experience with either an objective comment that the ghost has appeared or a description of the ghost itself for readers to experience. As a result, we merely get an active manifestation of the “saw, or thought she saw” construction—we see Nancy either seeing, or thinking she sees, but we cannot determine which of the two is “real.” The narrator continues to leave the question of the 225 ghost unanswered in the aftermath of Nancy’s vision. As she recovers the candlestick, “Nothing was to be seen then. The apparition, if it had been one, had vanished” (150). The narrative perspective is ambiguous at this point, since the question of whether “it had been one” may be either Nancy’s or the narrator’s thought. This confusion in perspectives adds to the uncertainty registered in the text. Not only do we not know whether an apparition has manifested itself, we don’t even know whose opinion is being expressed. Ambiguity surrounds both who is narrating and what is being narrated; in a profound sense, the question of whether representing the real through realism is a possibility at all becomes the “ghost,” as it were, in the machinery of fictional realism itself. Perhaps most significantly, though, the narrative uncertainty surrounding the ghost begins to seep out into the events surrounding it. The next morning, Nancy receives a visit from Mary Carimon, and Nancy tells her of her ghostly encounter. Mary, “listening gravely, took, or appeared to take, a sensible view of it” (151). At this point, the narrative cannot provide any conclusive statements about the ghost or people’s reactions to it. The anxiety over discovering what is real has become more powerful than the narrative. At other points in the text, descriptions of characters’ states of mind are given as indisputable, yet once the instability of the ghost becomes part of the narrative, other aspects begin to unravel as well. The narrator cannot discover whether Mary’s external demeanor accurately represents her internal state of mind, and in this moment of uncertainty the text again dramatizes the core tension of realism—whether textual representation can reproduce reality. The representation of reality in general becomes questionable once the uncertainty of the ghost emerges. 226 Nancy’s second encounter with Lavinia’s ghost solidifies the reality of the apparition, yet the ultimate question of the viability of realism remains tenuous. As Nancy prepares for bed, she suddenly saw some figure before her at the end of the passage. It stood beyond the door of her own room, close to that which had been her sister’s. It was Lavinia. She appeared to be habited in the silver-grey silk already spoken of. Her gaze was fixed upon Nancy, with the same imploring aspect of appeal, as if she wanted something; her pale face was inexpressibly mournful. With a terrible cry, Nancy tore into her own room…. And in that moment a revelation came to Ann Fennel. It was this apparition which had been wont to haunt her husband in the house and terrify him beyond control. (155) At last, the reader perceives the apparition as the narrator provides an objective, third- person perspective on the ghost’s interaction with Nancy. The description of the ghost’s gaze and face comes not from Nancy herself, but from the omniscient narrator, providing objective corroboration that the ghost has appeared. However, uncertainty still remains over the central and crucial mystery of the novella: whether or not Lavinia haunts Fennel. While Nancy experiences a “revelation” that Lavinia’s ghost “had been wont to haunt her husband,” because Fennel’s perspective remains obscured, the reader can never be certain. Nancy’s perspective insists on the reality of Lavinia appearing to Fennel, but conflicting perspectives from the omniscient narrator and those characters who insist on the impossibility of an apparition undermine her certainty. Again, though, the uncertainty surrounding the ghost begins to infect other parts of the narrative, suggesting that anxieties over what is real can never be fully contained. Although the appearance of the ghost is clearer in this last example, the narrative instability previously associated with the apparition now transfers to other things about 227 the ghostly encounter, so that there is never complete certainty about what happens. Lavinia “appeared to be habited in the silver-grey silk”; it seems Lavinia appears more clearly, yet we still cannot tell quite how she is dressed. In addition, the look on her face poses two uncertainties—it was “as if” she wanted something, but what she might want, and whether, indeed, she wants anything at all, is unclear. As soon as the reality of the ghost becomes more solid, other aspects of the narrative lose solidity, displacing the uncertainty from one narrative element to another. Ultimately, we see that in spite of efforts, in spite of multiple perspectives and an omniscient narrator, the narrative cannot assure us of everything—and indeed, perhaps it cannot assure us of anything. The question of whether or not Lavinia’s ghost has come back finally resolves itself in a suggestive comment from the narrator. He explains of Nancy and Edwin Fennel, “That the spectre of the dead-and-gone Lavinia did at times appear to them, or else their fancies conjured up the vision, was all too certain” (159). In typical fashion, the narrative leaves the question open, mocking its suggestion that this conclusion is “certain.” The assurance that either the Fennels saw or imagined Lavinia’s ghost is no certainty at all—the question still remains as to whether their experiences were reality or imagination. The text seems to register this tension with the phrase, “all too certain.” This ironic choice of words suggests that the explanation is not, in fact, certain—the excess of conviction in being “too” certain implies a passionate desire for a confidence that is lacking. The insinuation that the ghostly appearances are beyond certainty reveals more about the need for answers than the quality, or truth, of those answers. This final attempt at consensus is undermined both by the excess of the phrase “all too certain” and the multiple possibilities that the text provides, creating tension in the narrative between 228 the desire for consensus and the continuing mystery surrounding the apprehension of the ghost. As I have argued above, the narrative instability surrounding the apprehension of the ghost and its haunting of the Preen house parallels thematic concerns over the fragility of domesticity. The text fuses questions surrounding Fennel’s fits to the house, cueing the reader that the indeterminacy of the ghost also applies to domesticity. When Nancy has her “revelation” that Lavinia appears to Fennel, the narrator specifies that the ghost haunts Fennel “in the house.” This superfluous modifier reinforces the importance of the house to the haunting; it is, perhaps, as equally important where the encounters take place as whether they occur at all. Later, when Nancy tells Mary Carimon her belief, she says, “That’s what Edwin used to see; I know it now; and he became unable to bear the house. I seem to read it all as in a book, Mary” (156). Significantly, Nancy claims it was the house and not the ghost that Fennel was unable to bear. The linguistic slippages that equate the haunting with the house not only reveal that the haunting hinges on questions of domesticity, but they also privilege the house over the haunting, suggesting that we should pay more attention to questions of domesticity than those of the paranormal. The uncertainty surrounding realism I have registered in the narrative manifests itself thematically as the uncertainty of domestic integrity. Both times that Fennel experiences a fright, the ostensible material explanation for his terror is, tellingly, an economic one. In the first case, Nancy’s initial reaction is to suspect a thief is in the house—and to worry that “‘Lavinia’s silver—my silver, now” is in danger of being stolen (137). The silver’s importance works on several levels, since it not only represents part 229 of a household’s wealth, it also symbolizes the ability to perform properly the rituals of domestic life. Even after Lavinia’s death, the anxieties that pervade the house continue to revolve around household finances and the need for domestic integrity. After Fennel’s second fit, the question of a thief arises again, this time more substantially. Fennel’s plea to lock the door seems to the visitors in the salon to “have reference to keeping out some nefarious intruder, such as a thief” (144). Both Nancy and Charley Palliser question Fennel about this ostensible intruder, prompting Fennel to retort, “‘I saw no thief; there has been no thief in the house that I know of’” (145). Fennel’s defensiveness over the question of theft arises precisely because if there is a crook in the house, it is Fennel himself. Moreover, the constant equation of ghostly encounters with questions of economic immorality hints at the reasons for the haunting, again linking the tenuous nature of both the ghost and domestic economics. It is as difficult to catch a ghost as it is to catch the domestic thief, Edwin Fennel. The intense focus on economics underscores what is really at stake for these women—the morality of the middle-class home. Flore connects the ghost directly to both middle-class morality and domesticity when she expresses her opinion that Fennel is ‘…no good. He will never come back to stay at the house so long as there is in it—what is there. He dare not; and I would like to ask him why not. A man with the conscience at ease could not be that sort of coward. Honest men do not fly away, all scared, when they fancy they see a revenant.’ (168) Once again, the question of whether Fennel truly sees the ghost arises, since Flore claims only that Fennel “fancies” he sees Lavinia. Yet what is important here are the connections Flore makes between all the key elements of the haunted house story— 230 domesticity, morality, and the ghost. She demonstrates how the ghost serves as a marker of domestic morality, “honesty,” working as a litmus test of one’s respectability. Fennel is no good precisely because of his double connection to the ghost. Not only does his flight from the house demonstrate that he is a coward, a significant middle-class character flaw, it also reveals something more sinister—that Fennel has a reason to fear the apparition. Clearly, Fennel harbors a secret, and has therefore doubly trespassed on middle-class morality, since he is not honest and he has done wrong. Lavinia’s apparition, then, is able to expose three levels of immorality in Fennel: cowardice, dishonesty, and wrong-doing. Significantly, though, the house functions as both an indicator and a casualty of Fennel’s wickedness. The house is integral to exposing Fennel’s immorality, since it is his departure from the house that forces others to question his integrity. However, the house is also the site for and victim of his behavior; his excessive spending and his attempts to appropriate Lavinia’s and Nancy’s allowance placed the maintenance of the Preens’ home in jeopardy and demonstrated a disregard for the housekeeping tasks that Lavinia performed. His financial dishonesty itself was immoral, yet it also led to further sins—most egregious, of course, is Lavinia’s murder. What the house and its haunting show, then, are the ways in which economics threaten the domestic realm as well as the ways in which economic conditions are inextricably linked to middle-class morality. The most crucial discussion of respectability comes when Fennel suggests that he and Nancy leave the haunted Petit Maison without paying the balance of their lease. Nancy, portrayed up to this point as a rather silly and stupid woman, refuses to default, stunning Fennel into a reappraisal of his wife. Edwin Fennel explains to Nancy that they 231 cannot leave the house “‘[u]nless we made a moonlight flitting of it, my dear…. You may see it is the only thing to be done, and you must bring your mind to it’” (160). Nancy’s response is swift and firm as she tells Edwin, “‘That I never will…. Never by me’”; she replies to Edwin with “firmness” and is “strong in her innate rectitude” (160). In fact, when Fennel threatens to “order” Nancy to “obey,” Nancy responds with her own threat, telling Fennel, “‘I should go in to Monsieur Gustave Sauvage [the landlord], and say to him, “We were thinking of running away, but I cannot do it; please put me in prison until I can pay the debt”’” (160). Fennel’s shock over Nancy’s resolve is a result of her being “hitherto… tractable as a child,” yet what Fennel has never experienced is Nancy’s proper desire to remain respectable: “he had never tried her in a thing that touched her honour, and he saw that the card which he had intended to play was lost” (161). Nancy’s proper respectability is contrasted to Edwin’s immorality here, not only through his unscrupulous suggestions, but by the metaphor of cards, the game at which Fennel cheated and first revealed his corruption. Fennel sees the respectability of the home as a game, and one at which he can freely cheat. Nancy’s refusal redeems her feminine identity, for although she isn’t a good housekeeper, she now works to maintain the integrity of her home, acting as a proper Victorian woman should. Her response reveals an “innate rectitude” that compensates for her lack of domestic skills and reclaims her for Victorian womanhood. This final confrontation with Fennel marks the beginning of the end for Nancy. Once she has actively protected both her domestic morality and therefore her feminine identity, her physical decline begins. Nancy’s only escape from her poor domestic choices—namely, marrying Fennel and refusing to acknowledge his depravity—lies in 232 death. Nancy’s evident middle-class respectability, manifested through her attention to the home, allows her to be pardoned, and Lavinia appears to her one final time to suggest this redemption. Nancy tells Johnny Ludlow, “ ‘I believe I have seen her for the last time. The house has, also, I fancy…. And so it is over at last…. [t]he distress and the doubt, the terror and the pain. I brought it all on; you know that, Johnny Ludlow. I feel sure now that she has pardoned me’” (203). Nancy, as a Victorian woman, bears responsibility for maintaining the home, and her introduction of Fennel threatened the fragile financial and moral stability of the Petit Maison. It is only by reaffirming her devotion to maintaining the integrity of this home that Nancy can redeem herself. The house, too, has been freed from Lavinia’s haunting, and the way Nancy constructs the house as a victim itself of the sordid affairs occurring there demonstrates the centrality of the figure of the house to Victorian domesticity. But while the house has “seen her for the last time,” Lavinia, too, has finally disburdened herself of the responsibilities of the Victorian home. Not until Nancy has ensured the integrity of the Preen sisters’ household, and metonymically, then, their own integrity, can Lavinia finally rest. The uncertainties I’ve registered in the haunted house story demonstrate the ways in which realism itself is narratively unstable, a condition that makes realism a perfect vehicle for expressing thematic anxieties inherent in Victorian culture. However, these instabilities are by no means unique to the haunted house story, nor are they unusual for a realist text. Many canonical novels contain similar moments of narrative ambiguity, demonstrating the ways in which realism works through and against its own tensions. The haunted house story provides a privileged site for exploring these tensions, though, because of its inherently questionable events. The anxiety over the ability to both 233 represent and to read reality lies at the heart of both the haunted house tale and the realist project. 234 Bibliography Allingham, Andrea Gayle Holm. “Defending the Imagination: Charles Dickens, Children's Literature, and the Fairy Tale Wars.” 18 November 2000. The Victorian Web. University Scholars Program, National University of Singapore. 23 January 2005 <http://www.victorianweb.org/authors/dickens/pva/pva25.html>. Arendt, Hannah. The Human Condition. Garden City, N. Y.: Doubleday, 1959. Armstrong, Nancy. Desire and Domestic Fiction: A Political History of the Novel. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1987. Attar, Dena. A Bibliography of Household Books Published in Britain, 1800 – 1914. London: Prospect Books, 1987. Austen, Jane. Emma. New York: W. W. Norton & Company, 2000. ---. Persuasion. 1817. New York: W. W. Norton & Company, 1995. Bachelard, Gaston. The Poetics of Space. 1964. Boston; Beacon Press, 1994. Beeton, Isabella. Mrs. Beeton’s Guide to Household Management. 1861. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000. Benhabib, Seyla. “The Pariah and Her Shadow: Hannah Arendt’s Biography of Rachel Varnhagen.” Feminist Interpretations of Hannah Arendt. Ed. Bonnie Honig. University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 1995. 83 – 104. Brandon, Ruth. The People’s Chef: the Culinary Revolutions of Alexis Soyer. New York: Walker and Company, 2004. Briggs, Julia. Night Visitors: The Rise and Fall of the English Ghost Story. London: Faber, 1977. Brontë, Charlotte. Shirley. 1849. New York: Oxford University Press, 1998. Butler, Marilyn. Jane Austen and the War of Ideas. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1975. Carpenter, Lynette, and Wendy Kolmar, eds. Haunting the House of Fiction: Feminist Perspectives on Ghost Stories by American Women. Knoxville : University of Tennessee Press, 1991. Chico, Tita. Designing Women: The Dressing Room in Eighteenth-Century English Literature and Culture. Lewisburg: Bucknell University Press, 2005. 235 Cohen, Monica F. Professional Domesticity in the Victorian Novel: Women, Work and Home. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998. Colby, Vineta. Yesterday’s Woman: Domestic Realism in the English Novel. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1974. Colby, Vineta and Robert A. The Equivocal Virtue: Mrs. Oliphant, and the Victorian Literary Market Place. Hamden, Conn.: Archon Books, 1966. Cowen, Ruth. Relish: The Extraordinary Life of Alexis Soyer, Victorian Celebrity Chef. London: Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 2006. Cox, Michael, and R. A. Gilbert. The Oxford Book of Victorian Ghost Stories. New York : Oxford University Press, 2003. Davidoff, Lenore, and Catherine Hall. Family Fortunes: Men and Women of the English Middle Class, 1780 – 1850. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1987. De Certeau, Michel. The Practice of Everyday Life. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1984. DeFoe, Daniel. Moll Flanders. 1722. London: Penguin Books, 1989. Dickens, Charles. David Copperfield. 1850. New York: Barnes and Noble Classics, 2003. Dickerson, Vanessa D., ed. Keeping the Victorian House: A Collection of Essays. New York: Garland Publishing, Inc., 1995. ---. Victorian Ghosts in the Noontide: Women Writers and the Supernatural. Columbia: University of Missouri Press, 1996. Dunn, Richard J., ed. A Routledge Literary Sourcebook on Charles Dickens’s David Copperfield. New York: Routledge, 2004. Edgeworth, Maria. Belinda. 1801. Ed. Kathryn Kirkpatrick. London: Oxford University Press, 1994. Elbert, Monika M. “Introduction.” Separate Spheres No More: Gender Convergence in American Literature, 1830 – 1930. Tuscaloosa and London: University of Alabama Press, 2000. 1 – 25. Eliot, George. The Mill on the Floss. 1860. New York: Penguin Books, 1979. 236 Ermarth, Elizabeth Deeds. Realism and Consensus in the English Novel. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1983. Flanders, Judith. The Victorian House: Domestic Life from Childbirth to Deathbed. London: HarperCollins, 2003. Foucault, Michel. “The Eye of Power.” Power/Knowledge: Selected Interviews and Other Writings, 1972 – 1977. Ed. Colin Gordon. New York: Pantheon Books, 1977. 146 – 165. Frye, Northrup. Anatomy of Criticism: Four Essays. 1957. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1990. Fulford, Tim. “Romanticizing the Empire: The Naval Heroes of Southey, Coleridge, Austen, and Marrayat.” Modern Language Quarterly 60:2 (June 1999): 161-196. Garnett, Robert R. “Why Not Sophy? Desire and Agnes in David Copperfield.” Dickens Quarterly 14.4 (1997): 213 – 231. Gaskell, Elizabeth. North and South. 1855. Ed. Patricia Ingham. London: Penguin Books, 1995. Gilbert, Sandra M. and Susan Gubar. Madwoman in the Attic: The Woman Writer and the Nineteenth-Century Literary Imagination. New Haven: Yale University Press, 2000. Grill, Neil. “Home and Homeless in David Copperfield.” Dickens Studies Newsletter 11 (1980): 108 – 111. Hardy, Thomas. Jude the Obscure. 1895. New York: Penguin Books, 1985. Harvey, David. The Condition of Postmodernity. Oxford: Blackwell, 1989. Hirsch, Gordon. “A Psychoanalytic Rereading of David Copperfield.” The Victorian Newsletter 58 (Fall 1980): 1 – 5. Honig, Bonnie. “Introduction: The Arendt Question in Feminism.” Feminist Interpretations of Hannah Arendt. Ed. Bonnie Honig. University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 1995. 1 – 16. Humble, Nicola. Introduction. Mrs. Beeton’s Guide to Household Management. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000. 237 Jones, Radhika. Introduction. David Copperfield. By Charles Dickens. New York: Barnes and Noble Classics, 2003. xiii – xxiv. Knoepflmacher, U. C. George Eliot’s Early Novels: The Limits of Realism. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1968. Langland, Elizabeth. Nobody’s Angels: Middle-Class Women and Domestic Ideology in Victorian Culture. Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1995. ---. Telling Tales: Gender and Narrative Form in Victorian Literature and Culture. Columbus: Ohio State University Press, 2002. Leavis, Q. D. Introduction. Miss Marjoribanks. By Margaret Oliphant. London: Chatto & Windus, 1969. 1 – 24. Lefebvre, Henri. The Production of Space. Trans. Donald Nicholson-Smith. Oxford: Blackwell, 1991. Levine, George. “Box Hill and the Limits of Realism.” Romantic Circles Praxis Series. Ed. William Galperin. February 2000. University of Maryland. 10 August 2005. <http://www.rc.umd.edu/praxis/boxhill/levine/levine.html> ---. The Realistic Imagination: English Fiction from Frankenstein to Lady Chatterley. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1981. ---. Review of Realism and Consensus in the English Novel by Elizabeth Deeds Ermarth. CLIO 29 (Spring 2000): 357. Logan, Thad. The Victorian Parlour. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001. Marcus, Sharon. Apartment Stories: City and Home in Nineteenth-Century Paris and London. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1999. Markels, Julian. Melville and the Politics of Identity: From King Lear to Moby Dick. Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1993. Massey, Doreen. Space, Place, and Gender. Minneapolis : University of Minnesota Press, 1994. McKnight, Natalie. “Playing House: The Poetics of Dickens’s Domestic Spaces.” Dickens Quarterly 20.3 (Sept 2003): 172 – 183. 238 Michie, Helena, and Ronald R. Thomas, eds. Nineteenth-Century Geographies: The Transformation of Space From the Victorian Age to the American Century. New Brunswick, N.J. : Rutgers University Press, 2003. Miller, J. Hillis. Charles Dickens: The World of His Novels. Cambridge, Mass: Harvard University Press, 1958. ---. Topographies. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1995. Morris, R. J. Men, Women, and Property in England, 1780-1870 : A Social and Economic History of Family Strategies Amongst the Leeds Middle Classes. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005. Nord, Deborah Epstein. Gypsies and the British Imagination, 1807 – 1930. New York: Columbia University Press, 2006. Oliphant, Margaret. Miss Marjoribanks. 1866. New York: Penguin Books, 1998. Picken, Mary Brooks. Dictionary of Costume and Fashion, Historic and Modern. 1957. Mineola, NY: Dover Publications, 1999. Pickett, Lyn. “Sensation and the Fantastic in the Victorian Novel.” The Cambridge Companion to the Victorian Novel. Ed. Deirdre David. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001. 192 – 211. Pitkin, Hanna. “Conformism, Housekeeping, and the Attack of the Blob: The Origins of Hannah Arendt’s Concept of the Social.” Feminist Interpretations of Hannah Arendt. Ed. Bonnie Honig. University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 1995. 51 – 82. Poovey, Mary. Uneven Developments: The Ideological Work of Gender in Mid- Victorian England. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1988. Prentiss, Norman D. “The Tortured Form of Jude the Obscure.” Colby Quarterly 31:3 (September 1995): 179 -193. Preston, Rebecca. “‘The scenery of the torrid zone’: Imagined Travels and the Culture of Exotics in Nineteenth-Century British Gardens.” In Imperial Cities: Landscape, Display, and Identity. Ed. Felix Driver and David Gilbert. Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1999. 194 – 211. Ruskin, John. Sesame and Lilies. 1865. Ed. Deborah Epstein Nord. New Haven: Yale University Press, 2002. 239 Rybczynski, Witold. Home: A Short History of an Idea. New York: Viking Penguin, Inc., 1986. Schaper, Susan E. “Victorian Ghostbusting: Gendered Authority in the Middle-Class Home.” Victorian Newsletter 100 (2001 Fall): 6-13. Schorer, Mark. “The Humiliation of Emma Woodhouse.” Jane Austen: A Collection of Critical Essays. Ed. Ian Watt. Englewood Cliffs, N. J.: Prentice-Hall, Inc., 1963. 98 – 111. Scott, Walter. “On the Supernatural in Fictitious Composition.” Foreign Quarterly Review 1 (1827): 60 – 98. Smajic, Srdjan. “The Trouble with Ghost-Seeing: Vision, Ideology, and Genre in the Victorian Ghost Story.” ELH 70 (2003 Winter): 1107-35. Smith, Adam. An Inquiry into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations. 1776. Adam Smith Institute. 1995. 8 January 2009 <http://www.adamsmith.org/smith/won-b4-intro.htm> Soyer, Alexis. The Modern Housewife, or Menagere. 1850. New York: D Appleton & Co, 1872. Spain, Daphne. Gendered Spaces. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1992. Spilka, Mark. “David Copperfield as Psychological Fiction.” Critical Quarterly 1 (1959): 292 – 301. Stilgoe, John R. Introduction. The Poetics of Space. By Gaston Bachelard. Boston: Beacon Press, 1994. Sullivan, Jack. Elegant Nightmares: the English Ghost Story from Le Fanu to Blackwood. Athens : Ohio University Press, 1978. Swinburne, Algernon Charles. “A Note on Charlotte Brontë.” In George Eliot: The Critical Heritage. Ed. David Carroll. London: Routledge, 1971. Tange, Andrea Kaston. “Redesigning Femininity: Miss Marjoribanks’s Drawing-Room of Opportunity.” Victorian Literature and Culture 36 (2008): 163 – 186. Tanner, Tony. Jane Austen. Cambridge, Mass: Harvard University Press, 1986. 240 Taylor, Ann Practical Hints to Young Females, on the Duties of a Wife, a Mother, and a Mistress of a Family. 1816. Boston: James Loring, 1826. Thurin, Susan. “The Relationship Between Dora and Agnes.” Dickens Studies Newsletter 12.4 (1981): 103 – 108. Timbs, John. Nooks and Corners of English Life, Past and Present. London: Griffith and Farrar, 1867. Vanden Bossche, Chris R. “Cookery, Not Rookery: Family and Class in David Copperfield.” David Copperfield and Hard Times. Ed. John Peck. New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1995. 31 – 57. Vickery, Amanda. “Golden age to separate spheres? A Review of the Categories and Chronology of English Women’s History.” The Historical Journal 36 (1993): 383 – 414. Wall, Cynthia. “Gendering Rooms: Domestic Architecture and Literary Acts.” Eighteenth-Century Fiction 5.4 (July 1993). 349 – 372. Walsh, J. H. A Manual of Domestic Economy. London: Routledge & Co., 1856. Wollstonecraft, Mary. A Vindication of the Rights of Woman. 1792. Ed. Carol H. Poston. New York: W. W. Norton & Co., 1988. Wood, Ellen. “Featherston’s Story.” Johnny Ludlow: Fifth Series. London: Macmillian and Co., 1901. Young, Linda. Middle-Class Culture in the Nineteenth Century: America, Australia and Britain. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2003.

Abstract (if available)

Linked assets

University of Southern California Dissertations and Theses

Conceptually similar

PDF

Between good girls and vile fiends: femininity, alterity and female homosociality in the nineteenth-century British Gothic novel

PDF

Dress and deception: women's dress and the eighteenth-century British novel

PDF

Believing in novels: Evangelical narratives and nineteenth‐century British culture

PDF

Outlaw mothers: marital conflict, family law, and women's novels in Victorian England

PDF

The curious life of the corpse in nineteenth-century English literature and culture

PDF

Fictions of health: medicine and the ninteenth-century novel

PDF

Archiving the absence: female infanticide in nineteenth-century British India

PDF

Going beyond the victory garden: War, gender, and women of national concern

PDF

Dollplay: narrative rituals in nineteenth-century Britain

PDF

Roguish femininity: gender and imperialism in the nineteenth‐century United States

PDF

Women readers and the Victorian Jane Austen

PDF

Romancing the bomb: Gothic terror and terrorism in late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century literature

PDF

Between homes: moving house in the Victorian novel and popular culture; and, Heroine (poems)

PDF

The haunted frontier: troubling gothic conventions in nineteenth-century literature of the American west

PDF

Infectious feelings: disease, sympathy, and the nineteenth-century novel

PDF

Fictions of reference: character and language in nineteenth-century British literature

PDF

Examining the representation of modern women in 20th century modern Chinese fiction: the search for self in comparison of works by women authors Ding Ling and Eileen Chang

Asset Metadata

Creator Callaghan, Elizabeth Palm (author)

Core Title Domestic topographies: gender and the house in the nineteenth-century British novel

School College of Letters, Arts and Sciences

Degree Doctor of Philosophy

Degree Program English

Publication Date 04/20/2009

Defense Date 02/26/2009

Publisher University of Southern California (original), University of Southern California. Libraries (digital)

Tag domesticity,gender,nineteenth-century,novel,OAI-PMH Harvest

Place Name England (countries)

Language English

Contributor Electronically uploaded by the author (provenance)

Advisor Boone, Joseph Allen (committee chair), Banner, Lois (committee member), Kincaid, James R. (committee member)

Creator Email bpcallaghan@gmail.com,ecallagh@usc.edu

Permanent Link (DOI) https://doi.org/10.25549/usctheses-m2095

Unique identifier UC164821

Identifier etd-Callaghan-2705 (filename),usctheses-m40 (legacy collection record id),usctheses-c127-226556 (legacy record id),usctheses-m2095 (legacy record id)

Legacy Identifier etd-Callaghan-2705.pdf

Dmrecord 226556

Document Type Dissertation

Rights Callaghan, Elizabeth Palm

Type texts

Source University of Southern California (contributing entity), University of Southern California Dissertations and Theses (collection)

Repository Name Libraries, University of Southern California

Repository Location Los Angeles, California

Repository Email cisadmin@lib.usc.edu