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Content SEDUCTIVE FICTIONS:
REPRESENTATIONS OF FEMALE SEXUALITY IN THE NOVEL
by
Linda Anna Abbandonato
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 1992
Copyright 1992 Linda Anna Abbandonato
UMI Number: D P23162
All rights reserved
INFORMATION TO ALL U SERS
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a note will indicate the deletion.
UMI D P23162
Published by P roQ uest LLC (2014). Copyright in th e D issertation held by the Author.
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UNIVERSITY OF SOUTHERN CALIFORNIA
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This dissertation, written by
l-INPA A&lAKrt>OtJA-rO
under the direction of h.Ctf. Dissertation
Committee, and approved by all its members,
has been presented to and accepted by The
Graduate School, in partial fulfillm ent of re
quirements for the degree of
Ph. P.
p,
’<12 .
T)oiD £.33
D O C TO R OF PHILOSOPH Y
Dean of G raduate Studies
P ate January 1 3, 1992
DISSERTATION COMMITTEE
C hairperson
This is dedicated to my mother, who enabled
my access to a privileged world which she
deserved but was denied; and to the spirit
of women everywhere who empower themselves
through education.
Acknowledgments
I would like to thank my readers for their
insightful criticism and guidance: Jim Kincaid for his
brilliance and originality, Tania Modleski for
generously sharing her expertise in feminist
scholarship, and Hilary Schor for her perceptive
critique of the early drafts.
My special thanks are due to Paul Alkon for his
unfailing kindness and support, his readiness to give
sympathetic consideration to ail my ideas, and his
consistently helpful suggestions, even when I ventured
into theoretical terrains and critical perspectives
that differed from his own.
I also want to thank Kathy Kennedy and Claire
Peterson for helping me retype my dissertation; my
husband, Christopher, and my parents, for their
practical and emotional support.
iv
TABLE OF CONTENTS
DEDICATION ii
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS iii
TABLE OF CONTENTS iv
INTRODUCTION 1
CHAPTER is SEDUCTIVE FICTIONS 11
CHAPTER 2: WOMEN, THE NOVEL, AND THE PLACE
OF PLEASURE 76
CHAPTER 3: MAIDENS AND MAGDALENS, MERMAIDS
AND ANGELS: "WOMAN” AS FALLEN TEXT IN
MARY BARTON 121
CHAPTER 4: "KISS MY FOOT, SIR: MY FACE IS
FOR MOUTHS OF CONSEQUENCE": SEDUCTIVE
FICTIONS AND SEXUAL POLITICS IN
FAR FROM THE MADDING CROWD 244
CHAPTER 5: IMPERSONATING THE ANGEL:
MIRROR IMAGES AND MIMETIC FICTIONS IN
LADY AUDLEY'S SECRET 296
CHAPTER 6: "A VIEW FROM 'ELSEWHERE"1 —
SUBVERSIVE SEXUALITY AND THE REWRITING OF
HERSTORY IN THE COLOR PURPLE 370
BIBLIOGRAPHY 413
1
INTRODUCTION
[Wjhile Alice was sitting curled up in
a corner of the great armchair, half
talking to herself and half asleep, the
kitten had been having a grand game of
romps with the ball of worsted wool
Alice had been trying to wind up, and
had been rolling it up and down till it
had all come undone again; and there it
was, spread over the hearth rug, all
knots and tangles, with the kitten
running after its own tail in the
middle.1
Framed within theoretical discourses on ideology,
gender, narrative, and desire, this study investigates
the relationship between fictional representations of
female sexuality and cultural fictions of femininity.
By positing "woman" as an ideological construct, I
explore the ways in which various heroines both
exemplify the "masternarratives" of female sexuality
and resist and subvert them to tell their own
stories.2 A connection can be traced between sexual
and narrative empowerment; for if heroines are often
silenced through their sexuality, they can sometimes
exploit it to gain social power and narrative agency.
I will suggest that desire, which is a dynamic of
all narrative, is not only explicitly thematized in the
novel but works to secure women readers1 complicity
with its "ideal fictions" of femininity. I imagine a
symbiotic relationship between fiction, as an
orchestration of ideological positions, and the
subject, who is always positioned, but never fixed,
within ideology. Thus, every time we read a fictional
text we reconstruct or "rewrite" it; but because the
text makes available certain models of desire and
positions of identification, it engages our
subjectivity in its dynamic and also "rewrites" us.
Since novels traditionally unfold the heroine's story
within the paradigm of romantic love, the fulfillment
of the plot coincides with the heroine's marriage, if
the novel is "euphoric," or her death, if "dysphoric."
The terms are from Nancy Miller, who describes the
heroine's text as plotted within an ideologically
delimited space where the either/or closure reflects
"the conventional language of the sociolect" (xi), and
the "logic of seduction" determines the development of
the heroine's life. A clear implication of such a
plot-structure is that there is but a single mode of
self-fulfillment for the heroine; thus to the extent
that the logic of seduction affects readers too, novels
perform an ideological function by binding desire to
the cultural institution of connubial bliss, then
making it all or nothing, so that contradictions are
smoothed over or banished to a place beyond the ending,
3
and alternative structures of desire are suppressed. I
should immediately note that, as characters in
Charlotte Bronte novels and literary critics often
point out, this is not true of the wicked French but
only of the Anglo-American tradition; and even then it
is only primarily true of the English novel since the
American novel has a strong tradition of boy-heroes
running away from girls.3 Novels are, moreover, sites
of dissonant discourses and often displace their own
hegemonic voices; sometimes, like Alice and the black
kitten, the harder a novel tries to be tidy, the more
persistently the playfulness of its competing voices
will unravel it from within.
Although I have chosen to discuss cultural
representations of femininity in novels, and thus deal
with fictional heroines who are by any common-sense
standard "invented," I frame my textual readings with
the proposal that fiction and reality are not neatly
divisible; indeed, we can see fiction as a kind of
continuum in human consciousness. Of course, at one
level we all recognize a distinction between fiction
and fact: thus, however "real" Tess Durbeyfield may
seem to readers, we would probably concur that she was
never real in the same sense as Thomas Hardy, even if
we then concede that both character and author are
4
necessarily no more— and no less— to us than verbal
constructs. It is, however, my premise in this work
that reality is rooted in discursive practices; and
since language bears a metaphoric or representative
relation to its object, and reality is accessible to us
only through representation, it is in a sense always
(already) "constructed."
I will be suggesting that as subjects constituted
in ideology, we fictionalize our selves— our multiple
selves, though part of the fiction is our sense of a
unitary self or stable ego— for we live in an
"imaginary relation" to our "real conditions of
existence."4 My interest in the way that women are
"interpellated," or seduced into complicity with the
masterplots of female sexuality and femininity, has led
me to consider how desire is harnessed to specific
ideological codes.
Since I will be investigating fictional
representations of "womanliness" through certain
conceptual models, my first two chapters are
predominantly theoretical, engaging in a more abstract
and problematic way with the constructs that inform my
critical practice. Chapter One, "Seductive Fictions,"
traces connections between narrative, desire, and
ideology in our social plots of gender. Here I attempt
5
to unravel some discursive strands which I then reweave
into the knotty problem I began with: the inscription
of the feminine into masternarratives of sexuality, the
solicitation of the subject through desire. I begin by
discussing the significance of the narrative paradigm
in our systems of representation, and the circulation
of "woman" as a sign within them. Drawing on
psychoanalytic and post-marxist theories to explore how
an individual is shaped as a sexualized being in
society, I suggest that ideology performs a
fictionalizing function in its conscription of
subjects. With the acquisition of language, the child
enters a narrative world, an Oedipal plot of desire
which endorses the father's law. I consider
psychoanalytic theories of this process of
enculturation as examples of the stories through which
our culture "speaks" women's desire, thereby both
producing and policing it. By theorizing the
relationship between narrative and desire, I suggest
how the erotic pleasures of texts conscript women not
only into subjectivity but subjection.
Of course, ideology is not one-dimensional or
unitary (as it pretends) but an unstable formation
comprised of many conflicting discourses. Thus, as I
argue in Chapter Two, romantic fiction may both support
6
and subvert patriarchal scripts of femininity and
sexuality, and I trace some contradictions in the
ideological functions that romantic novels perform. On
the one hand it seems that they seduce female readers
into femininity by offering pleasurable identifications
and concealing women's social and economic
disadvantages beneath some flattering promises. On the
other hand, even when novels are plotted within the
romantic paradigm, they often dismantle its terms,
challenge the dream of perfect marital bliss as
dangerous and delusory, expose the feminine ideal as
untenable, and foreground their own strategies of
containment as ideological limits.
In the remaining chapters I consider four novels
as configurations of the complex questions I have just
outlined. The texts I have chosen seem to me to
foreground in various ways the issue of representation,
the constructedness of femininity, and the seductive
dangers of pleasure. In many respects, their heroines
mirror cultural images of femininity and exemplify the
masterplots of female sexuality; but, with varying
degrees of success, they also attempt to gain narrative
control and write themselves differently, thereby
testing the ideological boundaries of their own plots,
and, at best, creating counternarratives to challenge
7
the hegemonic stories. Three of my four readings are
in Victorian fiction; I approach these texts not just
as cultural documents of their own period but as
inherited stories which shape our own ideologies of
femininity and sexuality, for they foreground the
difficulties a woman experiences in "authorizing" her
own identity and attaining a narrative voice. The
final chapter, by way of inconclusion, opens up some
pertinent questions. How can women move beyond the
cultural plots of gender into which we are inscribed?
How can we resist seduction without relinquishing
pleasure? How can the woman's story be appropriated by
and for herself? I explore these questions through
Alice Walker's The Color Purple, which offers one
possibility for replotting the heroine's text within a
different framework of desire. The leap from Victorian
to contemporary African-American fiction is unorthodox
and surprising, but also illuminating, since women of
color writing today must, like Victorian women-writers,
work against a mainstream culture which marginalizes
them and places subtle prohibitions on their voices.
Having outlined the overall scheme of my argument,
I should acknowledge that sometimes, and especially in
the theory section, the strands reweave themselves
prematurely, sometimes they tangle themselves into a
8
knot, and sometimes the kitten runs away with the wool.
This is partly a problem with my skill at unravelling,
and partly a problem built into any critique of
ideology, especially a feminist critique which is
inescapably implicated in the discursive practices of
patriarchy— captive, to put it crudely, in a "man-made
language." So although I have a fantasy of being
Madame Defarge, who had a secret semiotic code whereby
she worked a checklist of executed aristocrats into her
knitting pattern, the most I can hope to do, as a
subject in partial collaboration with the ruling ‘
ideology, is to identify some of the ways in which
patriarchal culture displaces and effaces women as
subjects. Of course, even positions of resistance are
always in danger of being co-opted by hegemonic
culture. As Mary Poovey points out in Uneven
Developments. her critique of ideology may in the end
be seen as reinforcing the status quo— yet any
challenge is important as "an intervention that may
well disrupt processes already underway and that will
certainly become part of the cultural context by which
new meanings are produced" (23). There are many more
questions than answers in this study, and readers who
look for resolutions to the problems I have raised, and
the impasses I have identified in feminist thinking,
will invariably be disappointed. In the spirit of
Rasselas. the conclusion I have reached is one "in
which nothing is concluded" (148), and is meant to
suggest possibilities rather than solutions.
10
NOTES
Carroll 107.
2 "Masternarratives": the concept is Jameson’s,
from The Political Unconscious. He uses it more
generally, however, to denote the hegemonic discourse
of the ruling classes, and apparently without reference
to gender.
3 A classic and controversial study is Leslie
Fiedler's Love and Death in the American Novel■ For a
more recent (and thoroughly cross-cultural) engagement
with this topic, see Joseph Boone's Tradition Counter
Tradition. Note especially Boone's point that in the
traditional love plot, "the movement towards stasis, be
the resolution comedic or tragic, functions to
preclude, by repressing from the audience's overt
consciousness any dismantling of the social order, the
ideological grounds underlying the fictional construct"
(8) .
4 The quotations are from Althusser (162;178).
11
1
SEDUCTIVE FICTIONS
Masternarratives of Discourse
The world we live in is shaped like a story; or,
to put it another way, our systems of representation,
whether imaginative or intellectual, aesthetic or
scientific, are structured within a narrative paradigm.
This is more obviously true of some discourses than
others. History, for example, documents cultural
practices and events through direct narrative
presentation; and psychoanalysis documents a
collaborative venture between analyst and analysand to
reconstruct the story of an individual's life within
the framework of the Oedipal plot. Other discourses
bear a more implicit relation to narrative, so that it
takes a slight adjustment of perspective for their
plotting devices to be seen: for example, medicine,
which posits the body as text, and physical symptoms as
signs to be diagnosed or read in specific ways.1 So
pervasive is the narrative paradigm in our
epistemological structures— so deeply ingrained the
habit of making sense by making a story— that we might
consider narrative a fundamental component of human
12
consciousness. Fredric Jameson seems to suggest as
much in The Political Unconscious. since he takes "the
all-informing process of narrative . . . to be . . .
the central function or instance of the human mind"
(13) .
In our everyday lives, too, we are endlessly
engaged in narrative-making: both consciously and
unconsciously, in banal and inventive ways; in our
verbal exchanges, in our dreams and fantasies, in the
way we process information and sensory data, and above
all in the inner plotting of our own lives, where we
appear to ourselves as protagonists of a story. As
Juliet Mitchell suggests, this is "the way men and
women and children 'live' themselves in the world"
(15). Though the plot is constantly adjusted or led
into unforeseen directions, and complicated by memory
flashbacks and dreams of the future, it nonetheless
seems to follow a temporally linear track.2
Ultimately the cohesion and patterning of our story is
inseparable from our sense— or illusion— of self as a
controlling consciousness, a stable and self-contained
identity. So whether we are responding
half-consciously to an advertising icon, or
conversationally to the question, "How was your day?";
when we are listening to the news, imagining a meeting,
or asleep and dreaming, we are always actively involved
in the production of stories. Peter Brooks, whose work
on narrative and desire aroused and influenced my own
interest in this subject, makes an eloquent case for
the prevalence and significance of "plotting" in human
experience, and points out that it can be traced back
very far in our personal and social histories:
The narrative impulse is as old as our
oldest literature: myth and folktale
appear to be stories we recount in
order to explain and understand where
no other form of explanation will work.
The desire and competence to tell
stories also reach back to an early
stage in the individual's development,
to about the age of three, when a child
begins to show the ability to put
together a narrative in coherent
fashion .... Children quickly
become virtual Aristotelians . . . .3
Indeed, narrative-making of a kind probably begins
even earlier in infancy. If we provisionally define
narrative as a process of symbolization deeply
connected to desire— and I shall say more about this
later— we might consider the infant's hallucinations of
the breast, and ritual representation of the
mother-obj ect's absence and return in the Fort-da game,
as examples of early narrative activity stimulated by
desire.4 It seems as if to be human is to create
stories: "homo faber est" might well be rephrased
"homo faber fabularum est." No wonder that Barthes
14
claims narrative is "international, transhistorical,
transcultural; it is simply there, like life itself."5
Yet anything which is "simply there" may strike
us, in this era of doubt and deconstruction, as
altogether too natural to be trusted. It would be very
hard to prove Barthes's statement wrong, and in the
light of everything I have said so far about the
importance of narrative as a deep structure in human
consciousness, it would hardly be in my interests to
disagree with him. I will, therefore, proceed, but
with the caution that although we cannot imagine how
human consciousness and interaction could exist without
narrative representation, we should be wary of
conflating psychic formation with "life itself," that
is, nature. As Jameson puts it, "That the structure of
the psyche is historical, and has a history, is . . .
as difficult to grasp as that the senses are not in
themselves natural organs but rather the results of a
long process of differentiation, even within human
history" (62). Perhaps the most we can achieve by way
of historicizing the psyche is to show how narrative
and desire have been harnessed together in particular
formations at certain moments in history; thus it can
be argued, for example, that the Oedipus complex
15
structures desire in a specific way within the nuclear
family, which came into being with capitalism.
I would now like to direct your attention, Reader,
to my not-so-subtle irony in conflating "homo" with
"human" in the phrase "homer faber fabularum est"; for
I mean to suggest that our cultural discourses are
masternarratives which in various ways efface or
exclude women. History is an obvious example of the
way accounts of human culture are structured and
slanted: the sign itself advertises both its narrative
method and its masculine exclusivity.6 Traditional
history reflects the ideology of the ruling classes,
and has a humanist bias, positing "man" as an
autonomous individual— and one who evidently
circulates, at the discursive level, independently of
women in a single-gendered world.
Humanist ideologies have been effectively
challenged by both Marxist and psychoanalytic theories,
which re-present the human subject as radically
decentered, and determined by, or rather constituted
in, ideology. Thus in Jameson's view, the
fragmentation of the psyche, as theorized in
psychoanalytic discourse, can be interpreted as "the
sign of the dissolution of an essentially bourgeois
ideology of the subject and of psychic unity or
16
identity (what used to be called bourgeois
individualism)" (125). Despite such transformations in
our understanding of the subject and history— no less
than a "Copernican revolution," according to
Althusser— both Marxist and psychoanalytic accounts
still implicitly masculinize the subject and exclude
"woman" from the category "human," though in quite
contrary ways.7 Although Marxist discourse is
acutely conscious of the materiality of language and
its primary function in constituting the subject in
ideology, the existence of women is ignored at two
levels: in the use of masculinist language, and in the
failure to take account of specific differences in
social experience according to gender. Thus, to cite a
revealing example of linguistic indifference, Raymond
Williams invites us to consider an interesting but
improbable scenario when he describes man as "'making
himself' through producing his own means of life"
(Marxism and Literature 19).
A more alarming example of indifference to gender
can be found in Michel Foucault's History of Sexuality,
an otherwise revolutionary text in its
reconceptualization of sexuality as a technology
deployed by power. Foucault pays no attention to the
different social experience of historical women and
men, which makes all the difference to his utopian
celebration of "bodies and pleasures" (157). But the
question is, as Tania Modleski succinctly phrases it:
"Whose bodies, and whose pleasures?"8 To ignore the
specificity of gender, the different positions and
investments of women and men in relation to power, is
disingenuous. As Teresa de Lauretis points out in
Alice Doesn't. Foucault writes "as if the ideological
structures and effects of patriarchy had nothing to do
with history, indeed as if they had no discursive
status or political implications" (94) .
Let us consider a specific example: Foucault's
story of the "village halfwit" who "would give a few
pennies to the little girls for favours the older ones
refused him." The sexual commodification of little
girls is downplayed by the rhetorical devices: could
anything sound more innocent than "a few caresses," or
the "familiar game called 'curdled milk'"? (Foucault
31-2). I quote below de Lauretis's critique of this
account:
The rape and sexual extortion performed
on little girls by young and adult
males is a "bit of theatre," a petty
"everyday occurrence in the life of
village sexuality," purely
"inconsequential bucolic pleasures."
What really matters to the historian is
the power of institutions, the
mechanisms by which these bits of
18
theatre became, presumably, pleasurable
for the individuals involved, the men
and the women— former little girls,
proletarianized or not— who then became
complicit with those institutional
apparati. (Alice Doesn1t 94)
In Technologies of Gender, de Lauretis extends her
critique of Foucault and identifies the "blind spot" of
his work in the very refusal to recognize the body as
gendered. Foucault's liberation of the body from a
discourse that always insists on its sexualization may
have a counter-revolutionary effect, for a masculinist
bias is sustained beneath the rhetoric of neutrality.
This certainly seems to be de Lauretis's view, for she
argues that Foucault speaks from the "sociosexual
position . . . of the male or male-sexed subject" and
that "sexuality, not only in the general and
traditional discourse but in Foucault's as well, is
construed not as gendered . . . but simply as male"
(37). Since Foucault does not recognize reality
outside discursive practices, his indifference to
existing gender relations may, ironically, work to
uphold the very institutions that his deconstructive
theories undermine: thus, on Foucault's political
stance on the decriminalization of rape, de Lauretis
argues that "To release 'bodies and pleasures' from the
legal control of the state, and from the relations of
19
power exercised through the technology of sex, is to
affirm and perpetuate the present social relations
which give men rights over women's bodies" (37).
Conversely, the masternarrative of psychoanalytic
discourse focuses very explicitly on the gendered and
sexualized body as a signifying system, and identifies
the phallus as the signifier which determines and
inscribes the subject's place within the symbolic
order. Freud's story of the cultural construction of
gender, and Lacan's rewriting of that account within
the framework of poststructuralist linguistics, have
generated conflicting positions within feminist
discourse. Freud's theories of the castration complex
and penis-envy have traditionally been attacked in
Anglo-American feminism as prescriptive, but they have
also been defended— especially since Juliet Mitchell's
recuperative reading in Psychoanalysis and Feminism— as
descriptive. A more subtle critique has been developed
recently in feminist theoretical writings, influenced
by the work of French feminists, and since I will
consider the relation of feminism to psychoanalysis in
the next section of this chapter, I will just summarize
the argument here. Briefly, by predicating female
sexuality on a masculine paradigm, psychoanalytic
theory effaces the very question of femininity which it
20
posits as its central concern. "Woman" is inscribed so
prominently into psychoanalytic discourse that we may
be blinded to the actual eclipse, the displacement of
"women" from the story that purports to be about them.
I am borrowing the distinction between "woman" as
cultural representation, and "women" as historical
subjects, from de Lauretis's work in film theory; and
for the moment I want to take it for granted that such
a dichotomy is possible (although since I have so far
implied that subjectivity is constructed through
ideology, I realize that the category of "women as
historical subjects" has to be accounted for, and I
shall attempt this in my section on the subject and
ideology). According to de Lauretis, "woman" is "the
very ground of representation, both object and support
of a desire which, intimately bound up with power and
creativity, is the moving force of culture and history"
(Alice Doesn1t 13). She defines "woman" as a
"fictional construct, a distillate from diverse but
congruent discourses dominant in Western cultures
(critical and scientific, literary or juridical
discourses)" (15), and argues that the task facing
feminism is "to demonstrate the non-coincidence of
woman and women" (36; emphasis added).
Bearing in mind these useful definitions, I want
to extend to other cultural representations of
femininity the argument which I outlined above— i.e.,
that the psychoanalytic construct "woman," though
endlessly reduplicated discursively, eclipses or
displaces "women." In aesthetic (as in psychoanalytic)
constructs, femininity and female sexuality have been
conflated in the emphasis on the sexualized body, which
has become a powerful mental image in discursive
representations, as well as a concrete, visual image
which is endlessly recirculated and commodified through
films, photography and other art forms. Thus the
predominant cultural representation of woman is the
sexualized body, which is then taken to speak or
account for the woman: the woman as body. To refer
again to Alice Doesn1t— which in dealing with film
locates itself in a field where woman-as-image is most
widely and profitably distributed for conspicuous
consumption— a premise of the text is that in the
transformation of woman into spectacle, the female
spectator is divided against herself, caught between
"the look of the camera and the image on the screen,
[in] a place not represented, not symbolized" (38), her
subjectivity bound to a "double identification in the
process of looking at her looking" (69). As John
22
Berger has eloquently noted, "A woman must continually
watch herself. She is almost continually accompanied
by her own image of herself. Whilst she is walking
across a room or whilst she is weeping at the death of
her father, she can scarcely avoid envisaging herself
walking or weeping" (46). I note in passing the number
of novels which acknowledge this by showing their
heroines absorbed in their own mirror-images:
Gwendolyn Harleth; Bathsheba Everdene; Esther
Summerson; Lady Audley; and in different ways, Alice,
who went beyond and behind her own image, or, from a
more recent novel, The Color Purple1s Celie, who
discovers her own sexuality in a scene involving a
mirror-seduction and a narcissistic doubling of
self-image.
To return to my argument: film theory, by dealing
with literal images, has expanded and complicated our
ways of assessing the impact on women of cultural
images of femininity, especially in this visually
semiotic age; but the imaging of woman as body evolves
from a long representational tradition. In literature
we could certainly find many examples which predate the
novel; but what interests me is that with the emergence
of the novel— and I am thinking specifically of
Clarissa— the woman is presented as spectacle in a way
23
that has influenced the imaging of woman in literary
and filmic representation ever since. At the same
time, however, the very grounds of that representation
are called into question. Later in this chapter I will
refer to this dialectical process again by suggesting
that the novel as genre, especially the classic realist
text, performs a special function: it reproduces the
dominant ideology, seducing readers into complicity
with certain ideological codes and positions; but since
it is constituted from competing discourses, it often
accommodates subversive readings also.
Tracing Clarissa1s influence on popular culture
today, Dorothy van Ghent has argued that the "womanly
quality which Richardson has made attractive . . . is
an erotically tinged debility which offers,
masochistically, a ripe temptation to violence," and
moreover, this "love goddess" has become the prototype
for "expensive and debile models" on the covers of
Vogue, or for the covers of detective stories which
show women with "torn deshabille and rolling
eyeballs— to be vicariously ripped and murdered" (49).
Van Ghent doesn't mention movies but the point is
really too obvious to belabor. What I would argue,
however, is that the critique of the construct "woman"
is built into the novel because its very
constructedness is foregrounded.9 Thus Clarissa's
body is inscribed as the site of two conflicting
notions of womanhood: innocence and eroticism, the
Madonna-Putana polarization inherited from social and
religious discourses on women. There is nothing
"novel" about this, though as a convention it is
certainly novelistic. What Clarissa's story suggests
is that this construction of femininity is a masculine
one— Lovelace1s— and it is absolutely empowered by the
patriarchal system in which father succeeds to
father-lover. Cognizant as the heroine is of the
"non-coincidence" of woman and women in the masculine
representation of her self, she is nonetheless
powerless to resist it. When Lovelace plots to subject
Clarissa to "trials which will prove her to be either
woman or angel," it is precisely this non-coincidence
which is suggested: the impossible place, to echo de
Lauretis1s film theory, of female subjectivity, since
women are paradoxically captive in masculine
representations of "woman" and yet not represented
there. The novel also supports the exhibition and
encoding of Clarissa's body as an erotic text; but
again, by presenting this as Lovelace's fantasy,
Lovelace's wilful misconstruction of agitation and
trembling as arousal and tremulousness, the implication
25
is that "woman" is shaped to man's erotic (and
sadistic) needs— at once fetishized as object and
imaged as representation of masculine desire; embodied
on the site of his lack.
This raises some interesting questions about the
soliciting of female desire through cultural
representations of femininity. To begin with, we might
recall that, much to Richardson's chagrin, his
contemporary women readers often sympathized with
Lovelace, and thus in a sense against themselves; and
some took the interesting view that Clarissa should
marry her persecutor. That this is in fact the usual
course is suggested by Pamela. and the Harlequin
romances which follow its formula.10 Perhaps some
readers felt cheated of the proper ending. Moreover,
modern readers, too, often prefer Lovelace to Clarissa;
and certainly the recirculation of the Clarissa-myth in
film and fiction, the eroticization of woman as victim,
invites us to speculate. What are the positions of
desire, the forms of fantasy, which are available,
effective and popular in our culture? How do they work
to ensure our complicity with the ruling ideology, and
above all how do they solicit and constitute our
subjectivity as women? These are questions which I
plan to leave in abeyance for now but I will return to
26
them in the section on narrative and desire, and at
that point I will suggest that Richardson's frustrated
attempts to direct his readers' sympathies were
susceptible to failure because of the very means by
which narrative desire operates.
In this section I have attempted to show that
theoretical discourses, including those which have
informed and empowered feminist critiques of ideology,
can in turn be seen as masternarratives which displace
the feminine subject— either by ignoring femininity or,
conversely, by constructing it as object and
representation of masculine desire and subjectivity.
My shift towards imaginative fiction at the end of this
section reflects the overall direction of this project,
since I am mainly concerned with constructions of
femininity in literature, but my consideration of other
modes and methods of narrative representation is
intended to frame the discussions of the novels. What
I mean to emphasize by this is that imaginative fiction
does not exist in a special arena— the place of
fantasy, a place apart— but is a way of knowing; it is
both an epistemological structure, and a practice of
everyday life. Moreover, we can regard all discourses
as modes of fiction, and knowledge as a representation
or construction motivated by desire, the drive to tell
27
a story. The novel as a narrative form dramatizes
desire and makes it the subject as well as the dynamic
of its plotting, but desire is by no means its special
property, and it is far from unique as a seductive
fiction. I want to conclude this section with a
quotation from Hayden White which refers specifically
to history in terms of erotic pursuit and plotting, but
can, I think, be extended to other cultural discourses
too, and I would like to retain his suggestive words as
an echo in the writing which follows:
What is involved in the discovery of
the "true story" within or behind the
events that come to us in the chaotic
form of 'historical records'? What
wish is enacted, what desire is
gratified, by the fantasy that real
events are properly represented when
they can be shown to display the formal
coherency of a story? In the enigma of
this wish, this desire, we catch a
glimpse of the cultural function of
narrativizing discourse. (8)
Ideology and the Subject
28
It is not the consciousness of men that
determines their being, but, on the
contrary, their social being that
determines their consciousness.1 1
Ideology represents the imaginary
relationship of individuals to their
real conditions of existence.12
To begin with the second of these two much-quoted
statements: it suggests to me that ideology performs a
fictionalizing function. It operates by interpellating
individuals as subject-protagonists of an ideal fiction
of selfhood, where they (mis)believe in themselves as
free agents, though they occupy determined positions in
a plot not of their making. "Imaginary," a term
Althusser borrows from Lacan, bears the trace of
"image," and refers to the infant in the mirror stage,
who takes pleasure in its (mis)recognition of self as a
complete, separate, self-contained and "organic"
individual. Paradoxically, of course, this
consciousness is achieved only through the effect of
alienation from self.
By conflating this Lacanian notion with the more
common sense of "imaginary," i.e., that which is
produced in the imagination, it becomes possible to
argue that aesthetic fictions also offer subjects ideal
versions of themselves; that ideology operates
precisely by seducing individuals into pleasurable
identifications and positions of desire, and
suppressing their , , real, , (alienated) "conditions of
existence." I don't mean to imply by this a reversion
to the "vulgar" Marxist view of ideology as false
consciousness— the delusion contrived by the wealthy
minority to dupe the masses— but rather that ideology
is the fiction all subjects inhabit as truth. We can
compare its fictionalizing function with myth, which
denotes both a profound truth and a lie. Since it is
through the acquisition of language that the "human
animal" becomes a human subject, our relation to
reality is necessarily representational or symbolic,
and in that sense a fictional construct.13 But the
way we experience ideology is as truth, or nature.
Althusser claims that "It is in the 'Logos,1
meaning in ideology, that we 'live, move and have our
being'" (171). In his view, ideology "has the function
(which defines it) of 'constituting' concrete
individuals as subjects," so that the phrase
"ideological subjects" becomes a "tautological
proposition" (171). As long as ideology performs its
function properly, it is experienced as "obviousness"
and its status as representation is effaced; this is
why Althusser writes that "ideology is eternal. exactly
like the unconscious" (161). In other words, just as
ideology always exists as a principle of human culture,
suppressing contradictions and making certain cultural
practices seem so natural that they could not be
imagined taking any other form, so the unconscious
functions in individuals to uphold the law, by
banishing anarchic desires and allowing only culturally
legitimized ideas and wishes to be thinkable.
However, neither ideology nor the unconscious can
perform their policing operation with total
effectiveness. Societies are always in transition,
thus conflicting ideologies actually exist at any given
moment. Similarly, the individual subject always
retains the psychic residue of the preOedipal period,
and the unconscious cannot wholly contain taboo
desires, which escape in the form of dreams, jokes, and
so-called Freudian slips. Though on the surface
Althusser represents ideology as a totally
deterministic and inescapable, he also acknowledges— as
the very existence of the essay acknowledges — that
ideologies can be recognized as fictions by those who
do not live in their truth. In the sense that to enter
culture means to be constituted as subjects within its
structures of representation, we cannot step outside
31
ideology; but ideology takes particular forms depending
(ultimately) on its economic base. I find it helpful
to think of ideology in terms of Saussure's distinction
between "langue" and "parole": there must be "langue"
in order for society to exist, but individual speech is
a manipulation of the available codes. As a specific
ideological code breaks down and becomes visible to us
as a system of representation or fiction, we may be
able to choose not to recognize ourselves; we may be
able to ignore the voice that shouts, "Hey, you there!"
Maybe. The problem is that, as I suggested
earlier, ideology engages the subject at the level of
desire— and "desire" in the Freudian sense is "the very
dynamic of our being"— so that even when we are able to
disengage ourselves intellectually from the dominant
ideology, we may remain committed to its "truth" in a
much deeper place in our psychic structure than the
area allocated for rational, conscious thought.14
This is a problem which I will take up again in my
discussion of the place of pleasure.
Althusser analyses the means by which ideology
produces the class relations of capitalism and
reproduces its conditions of existence, thus securing
the material interests of the propertied class. My own
work relies on his model but applies it to an analysis
32
of ideology's effects in securing and maintaining
gender relations within patriarchy; thus I am positing
women as a class. This is not an unproblematic
proposition in current feminist thinking, so I am
obliged to set aside my argument at this point, and
take a detour to consider some contingent problems.
The ultimate effect will be to complicate, not
necessarily to clarify, my patterns of thinking; and
eventually I will rejoin my central argument, that
ideology is a seductive fiction, via a different
discursive thread.
yi-he • • Woman Question" in Contemporary Feminism
One objection to the notion of women-as-a-class is
that women are represented across the full range of
class positions. While my proposal would fit
comfortably enough into radical feminist politics, it
would be problematic in Marxist discourse, which tends
in any case to be "sex-blind.1,15 "Ideology and
Ideological State Apparatuses" is a case in point,
since it has no concern with the different ways in
which ideology conscripts women and men as
subjects— despite being influenced by Lacanian theory,
which deals with precisely that topic. Consequently it
33
ignores the double effect of that subjectivity on
women: subjected within patriarchal formations,
subjected within capitalist formations. Michele
Barrett, whose work in Marxist feminism redresses the
imbalance by centering on women, does not reject
outright the idea that women constitute a class, but
she does challenge it on the grounds that women's
relation to class is always dualistic.16
A second objection might be made that "women" as
posed in feminist discourse is far from being an
all-embracing term. Recent writings by lesbian and/or
women of color have legitimately protested their
exclusion from feminism, and revealed its blind spot to
be complicity in other forms of oppression: racism and
heterosexism.17 "Women" has thus become a suspect
term, one which authorizes a standard version of
womanliness— white, privileged, heterosexual— and
marginalizes anyone who doesn't fit the model. I will
take up in the implications of this in my reading of
The Color Purple in Chapter 6; for the moment I refer
to it as an example of the contradictions which
feminism has yet to work through. With the
reservation, then, that my category of women as a class
is a reductive term which suppresses the range of
sociosexual positions through which subjects are
34
formed, I am going to retain it since I believe that
whatever an individual woman's class, racial and sexual
affiliations may be, women as a gender share the
experience of oppression in patriarchal
societies— certainly in different degrees according to
their specific social conditions, but systematically
nonetheless.
A third objection could be made that if we see
gender as a social construct and an effect of
discourse, the category of "women" is logically
untenable since it posits femininity as essence. This
opens up the question of the relation between reality
and discourse, and my engagement with it is caught in a
contradiction. On one hand, I want to retain the
notion that reality is discursively produced and that
language, because of its representative relation to its
object, is a construction which "makes" rather than
interprets the real. On the other hand, the
deconstruction of linguistic concepts is unlikely, by
itself, to be an effective instrument of political
change, so that feminists who refuse self-definition as
feminists or even as women (for example, Julia Kristeva
and Monique Wittig) or who deny the importance of power
(for example, Luce Irigaray) place feminist theory in
an awkward bind. To accept that gender is a social and
discursive construct, not rooted in any biological or
natural truth, is to progress logically to the
conclusion that "To believe that one 'is a woman' is
almost as absurd and obscurantist as to believe that
one 'is a man'"; or to the provocative statement that
"Lesbians are not women."18 The deconstruction of
gender categories, or power, is potentially liberating,
but it also has the undesirable effect of making
political activism seem pointless or absurd: as
Michele Barrett puts it, "If there are no 'women' to be
oppressed, then on what criteria do we struggle and
against what?" (96). Kristeva, to be fair, does go on
to qualify the statement I quoted above, and stresses
the need to retain the category "women" for political
purposes:
I say almost because there are still
things to be got for women: freedom of
abortion and contraception, childcare
facilities, recognition of work, etc.
Therefore 'we are women1 should still
be kept as a slogan, for demands and
publicity.
Subsequently, however, Kristeva relocates her
argument in a more generalized notion of society as a
struggle between centralized and subordinate groups:
Call it woman or oppressed classes of
society, it is the same struggle and
never the one without the other.
36
Toril Moi quotes the sentence above as an example
of the "glib homologization" which weakens Kristeva1s
work; despite reservations, however, Moi praises the
"uncompromising anti-essentialism" of Kristeva's
theories of language and the subject, and celebrates
her idealism as inspirational;
Kristeva's vision . . . is one in which
the hierarchical closure imposed on
meaning and language has been opened up
to the free play of the signifier.
Applied to the field of sexual identity
and difference, this becomes a feminist
vision of a society in which the sexual
signifier would be free to move; where
the fact of being born male or female
no longer would determine the subject1s
position in relation to power, and
where, therefore. the very nature of
power itself would be transformed."
(172, emphasis added)
But Donna Landry, commenting on Moi commenting on
Kristeva, in the palimpsestic dialogue that comprises
feminist theory, brings utopian vision back to earth
with a bump, suggesting that "we might wish . . . to
question once again a global 'anti-essentialism' as a
post-structuralist piety not necessarily useful for
feminism. As Spivak has suggested, in this historical
moment, women may have to take 'the risk of essence' in
order to act politically and think really
differently . . ." (127). Meanwhile, Kristeva's faith
in the revolutionary power of avant-garde poetry has
even Toril Moi wondering "why it is so important to
show that certain literary practices break up the
structures of language when they seem to break up
little else" (171), and inspires Terry Eagleton's
mockery (ironically, in a book which sets out to
convince a skeptical English public of the political
character of art): "Will reading Mallarme bring down
the bourgeois state?"19
Although I have specifically cited Kristeva's
deconstruction of femininity, I don't mean to imply
that her work is more or less liberating or problematic
for feminism than anyone else's. While Kristeva can be
criticized for displacing or negating women as
historical subjects, Irigaray can be charged with
producing a thoroughly essentialist "de-reconstruction"
of femininity. Interestingly, both she and Kristeva
begin from a similar notion of "woman" as
non-represented or as negation in patriarchal
discourse, but while Kristeva goes on to hypothesize an
ungendered "sujet-en-proces" capable of multiple
positionalities in language, Irigaray deliberately
embraces the characteristics culturally and
pejoratively assigned to femininity: fluidity,
entrapment in the erotic body, illogicality, hysteria.
She recuperates displacement and exclusion as positions
38
of strength and resistance (because beyond power), and
subverts masculine discourse by weaving a mocking
commentary into the body of the psychoanalytic text,
claiming that the only way "to work at 1 destroying1 the
discursive mechanism" is the "one 'path' . . .
historically assigned to the feminine: that of
mimicry. We must assume the feminine role
deliberately" (This Sex Which Is Not One 76; emphasis
in text). Irigaray uses performative language as a
mode of protest, a means of subverting the logic and
authority of masculine discourse, and it is politically
correct to do so, since it reminds us that language,
like ideology, pretends to be transparent and
value-free while it is deeply patriarchal. Yet the
question remains whether such this strategy can have
much currency outside a readership already converted to
French feminisms, or whether it can effectively be
connected with any kind of feminist political practice.
Indeed, it is questionable whether deconstructive
theories of the subject can have the same implications
for those who have traditionally held power and
privilege, and those who have traditionally been
marginalized. Again, a potentially liberating
discourse can also function as a masternarrative that
reinforces the status quo. Henry Louis Gates has
39
commented wryly that when women and black men enter the
academy, suddenly there is no subject any more.20 De
Lauretis has suggested that Derrida, by "displacing the
question of gender onto an a-historical, purely textual
figure of femininity" displaces also the "reality— the
historicity— of gender onto this diffuse, decentered,
or deconstructed (but certainly not female subject,"
and claims that the denial of "sexual difference (and
gender) as components of subjectivity in real women" is
also a denial of "the history of women's political
oppression and resistance, as well as the
epistemological contribution of feminism to the
redefinition of subjectivity and sociality . . . .1 1 In
de Lauretis's view, "this kind of deconstruction of the
subject is effectively a way to recontain women in
femininity (Woman) and to reposition female
subjectivity in the male subject, however that will be
defined"— hence her contention later on that "if
Derrida can occupy and speak from the position of
woman, it is because that position is vacant and, what
is more, cannot be claimed by women."21
We need to be skeptical of the impact which the
deconstruction of gender can have in transforming
social structures; the revolutionary potential of
discourse remains unrealized unless it is translated
into concrete political actions, and one problem with
dissolving the category "women" is that resolutions or
indeed revolutions can be achieved at a theoretical
level which have no effect on cultural practice. The
possibility that deconstructive and other kinds of
feminist theory will become disengaged from action is
made much more likely by the increasing sophistication
and difficulty of its discourse: despite Irigaray's
utopian fantasy of women disrupting the dominant
sociocultural economy, the question for me is whether
any genuine social changes can occur when feminist
theories circulate in such a narrow economy of
exchange, so elitist and subtle have they become.
Moreover, some French feminism courts the risk of being
read as an endorsement of the most misogynistic
discourses on women: note, for example, Irigaray's
problematic claim that "ex-stase," the self-abnegation
of mysticism and martyrdom, is the special privilege of
women, as subjects negated in patriarchal culture; or
Catherine Clement's celebration of the hysteric.22
Such writings set out to redress women's disempowerment
by redefining it, but this can be interpreted as
embracing powerlessness, which could only be effective
in the theoretical arena, at the level of rhetoric.
Referring to Irigaray's disavowal of power, Moi
comments that "Feminism is not simply about rejecting
power, but about transforming the existing power
structures .... To be 'against' power is to not to
abolish it in a fine, post-1968 libertarian gesture,
but to hand it over to somebody else" (148); and
Showalter, in The Female Malady, cautions against the
romanticization of madness, which is, as her book
argues, in social practice the very opposite of
rebellion.
Again my own discourse is slipping between
conflicting notions: the idea that reality is
discursively produced (which taken to its extreme means
that there is no reality prior to discourse), and the
dichotomy I imply between reality and discourse in my
dismissal of some theories of the subject as
rhetorically legitimate but politically ineffectual.
This relates to the double bind of feminism, which
seeks to redefine power, but needs to stake a claim to
it first. A similar contradiction can be traced in
feminism's need to demonstrate that gender is a
socio-discursive construct, while holding on to the
notion of women's solidarity. Perhaps a way out of the
dilemma is to recall the quotation from Marx that forms
the epigraph to this section; consciousness is, after
all, determined by social, which is to say material and
42
economic, existence. Discourse doesn't make meaning in
a vacuum but has value precisely because it is embedded
in already-existing social structures and practices.
As Janet Wolff reminds us, "Discourse and systems of
representation should not simply be recognized in their
constitutive roles, but also seen as themselves
constituted" (134). She criticizes Lacan's followers
for insisting on the primacy of the signifier and the
independence of the signifier, which in her view runs
the risk of giving language "total determining power."
Wolff concedes that "we have no access to any 'real'
world except through the systems of representations
which enable us to conceive of it," but adds:
It is disingenuous to conclude from
this that signs, or signifiers, have
free play in constructing the
world .... The hypostatisation of
discourse is, in the end, as
illegitimate as the hypostatisation of
the 'essential human subject' or of the
'transcendental signifier'. (45)
It is consistent with the Marxist theories I have
cited so far to retain a notion of "the real" as beyond
discourse, though only accessible through discourse;
thus for Jameson, for example, our cultural
masternarratives inscribe themselves in texts and in
our thinking about them, but history itself is never a
text or masternarrative, even though it is accessible
43
only in textual form. Although Althusser writes that
we cannot actually step outside ideology— that it has
no outside— he argues that through "science" we can
develop a critique of ideology, which implies some
possibility of grasping the real. Keeping in mind de
Lauretis*s notion of the "non-coincidence" between
historical women and the construct "woman," I would
suggest that it is precisely in the contradictions in
the ideological discourses we inherit as women that we
can experience such a non-coincidence, and that this
allows us, if not to escape the ideological domain, at
least to observe the ways in which it fails to make
sense, fails to "appeal." Consider, for example, the
following statement from Macherey:
Existence comes to the individual in
the form of a very primitive illusion,
a true dream, which sets up a certain
number of necessary images: man,
liberty, the Will of God. (60)
Women as historical subjects both participate in
this "illusion" (Macherey*s term for ideology23) as
expressed here, and fail to recognize themselves in its
precise images; compare Althusser's discussion of the
speculary relation between the subject and the Subject,
which makes perfectly coherent sense for a male
subject, but not for the female, who cannot see herself
mirrored in a (culturally male) God, except by
44
suppressing her subjectivity as a woman. Note also the
way that Althusser frames his discussion of Marx's
humanitarian aims:
'Man' is a myth of bourgeois ideology:
Marxism-Leninism cannot start from man.
It starts 'from the economically given
social period': and at the end of its
analysis, when it 'arrives', it may
find real men. These men are thus the
point of arrival [of Marxist
analysis] .... (Essays in Self-
criticism 52; emphasis in text)
But not real women, who are always beside the
point, or in psychoanalytic discourse, trapped at the
place of departure. To the extent that both Macherey's
and Althusser's definitions of ideological apparatuses
are written in definitively masculine terms, they also
rhetorically participate in ideology's project to
subordinate femininity while suppressing gender
differences.
Women are trained in the habit of making masculine
identifications, as Judith Fetterley pointed out some
years ago in her discussion of reading as an
immasculating habit, and this principle can, of course,
be extended to cultural texts in general, not just
"fiction" in the narrow sense. There is a
contradiction and thus a potential for resistance,
perhaps buried but by no means dead, in every woman's
response to cultural texts, which as ideological
representations both engage her subjectivity and
displace it. Catherine Belsey has written very clearly
on the fundamental incompatibility between the
subject's self-perception and relations with the real:
[W]omen as a group in our society are
both produced and inhibited by
contradictory discourses. Very broadly,
they participate both in the liberal
humanist discourse of freedom,
self-determination and rationality and
at the same time in the specifically
feminine discourse offered by society
of submission, relative inadequacy and
irrational intuition. The attempt to
locate a single and coherent
subject-position within these
contradictory discourses . . . can
create intolerable pressures. One way
of responding to this situation is to
retreat from the contradictions and
from discourse itself, to become
'sick' .... (65-6)
A more self-empowering response, as Belsey goes on
to suggest, is to become a feminist. But as noted
earlier, the problem with feminism is that it too
participates in contradictory discourses, positing at
one extreme a radical separatism, with "women"
considered a self-evident category very much opposed,
in a double sense, to men; and at the other extreme, a
denial of the existence of gender as anything other
than a discursive effect, but concomitant with this a
tendency to conflate political with linguistic
revolutions.24 As I write, I am reminded of Alice's
annoyance when it is put to her that she is a construct
of the Red King's dream. Later, when she returns to
the world where she is distinctly Alice, a real little
girl in a world of normality, she is able to entertain
the notion of existing as a figure in a dream, and even
wonders who did the dreaming: "[iJt must have been
either me or the Red King. He was part of my dream, of
course— but then I was part of his dream too!" (208).
Beyond the looking-glass she has entered a
deconstructive world where accepted representations of
reality are denaturalized or turned crazily inside out,
and conventional codes are unraveled through verbal
play. What Alice discovers there she brings back to
the empirical world in the form of questions, but the
idea that she may not exist is counterbalanced by the
contextual situation that it is Alice, not the Red
King, asking the questions at the end. Without trying
to tie Alice down to too concrete a representation, I
like to think of her stout self-assertion in refusing
to be merely a part of the Red Kingls dream, combined
with her ability to intellectualize the notion, as a
suggestion that women can use what they find in the
deconstructive world to transform their existence in
the material world. To live in both worlds at once is
a logical contradiction which feminism needs to
embrace; the danger is that some theories may get
trapped behind the looking-glass and be contained
there, made safe because they never make it back into
the historical world of existing power relations. To
recapitulate, I am suggesting that feminism needs to
perform a contradictory function, at one level engaging
in discussions of the subject as radically decentered
and discursively engendered, and at another level
holding firmly to the category of women as historical
subjects oppressed in very material ways. My
dissertation straddles both feminist ideologies and
attempts, not to resolve or navigate the conflict
between them, which would be impossible, but at least
to chart it.
I have somewhat exaggerated the tendency of theory
to divorce itself from the material world; most
theorists do in fact acknowledge the existence of "the
real" outside discourse, and thus do not take to its
extreme the argument that reality is discursively
produced. Although it is true that society "cannot be
read off the empirical world or reconstructed from
subjective experience," as Barrett puts it (36), this
is not to argue (nor does she) that the empirical world
has no reality. Moreover, as I pointed out earlier,
our sense of incongruence between subjective experience
and ideological representations is important in
uncovering the role of ideology in subjecting women to
subordinate positions in patriarchy. I like Barrett's
defence of radical feminism's "irreducible core of
truth and anger," even while recognizing its
incompatibility with Marxist social analyses. Although
she sets out to affirm the importance of ideological
struggle and the role of discourse, she is careful to
gualify the notion that "discourse itself must be the
site of a struggle," and argues:
[T]here is a world of difference
between assigning some weight to
ideological struggle and concluding
that no other struggle is relevant and
important. The relief with which the
intellectual left has seized upon these
ideas as a justification and political
legitimation of any form of academic
work is itself suspicious and alarming.
(95)
Even when theory (theoretically) acknowledges
the material world, it can disengage itself from it in
more subtle ways, and if we take Foucault's definition
of power but consider it for a moment as analogous with
ideology— power producing multiple discourses on
sexuality and also creating its own points of
resistance— we may entertain the depressing thought
that the abundance of feminist discourses on female
sexuality and femininity may reflect no more than the
49
co-optation of resistance by power. Deconstructive
feminism, the most potentially subversive, may also be
the most easily contained, partly because of the
esoteric nature of its difficult concepts, and partly
because by locating political struggle so decisively
within the theoretical arena, it may fall into the trap
of complacency and ineffectuality.
Bearing in mind these reservations, I return to
my central thesis that ideology and fiction are
comparable or even collapsible terms, and I want to
trace Althusser's definition of ideology, with which I
began, back to its Lacanian influences.
The Oedipal Plot
How does the "human animal" take up a position
in our cultural plots of gender? Lacan takes Freud's
theory of enculturation and resituates it in the
framework of post-structural linguistics. In his
account, the subject is formed through a configuration
of the structures of desire, language, and the law,
because the child's entry into language coincides with
the Oedipal moment in which the father forbids incest.
At this point the unconscious is formed as a repository
for unwanted desires; and Freud's notion of the split
50
in the psyche is enmeshed, in Lacanian theory, with
Saussure's discovery of the split in the sign. The
subject is thus conceived as decentered, displaced, and
unstable, moving across a range of possible
identifications. Positing itself as an "I” in social
discourse, the child creates a fissure in its own
consciousness, severing the "I" that speaks from the
"I" represented in speech. Its subjectivity is
constructed within the primordial linguistic structure
(the Symbolic Order, the rule of patriarchy) and is
intrinsically displaced, since "I" is a sign without
positive meaning, representing a position within
discourse that is variable and differential.
Lacan's famous diagram of the identical doors
labeled "Ladies" and "Gentlemen" is devised to
illustrate the arbitrariness of the signifier, but it
can also be taken to suggest the very different
ideological worlds which the subject enters according
to gender. Although gender, like the signs on the
doors, is no more than an arbitrary and fictional
construct, the subject is forced to pass through those
doors and take up a position if it is to function
within the Symbolic Order. In doing so, she or he
enters a pre-plotted role and is written into a
specific sexual script.
51
Freud's account of enculturation begins with
the prohibition against incest as enforced through the
castration complex. At first Freud hypothesized
parallel roles for infants of both sexes in the Oedipal
rite of passage, but subsequently enriched his theory
by acknowledging the greater complexity of the Oedipal
process for the girl, who doesn't simply become her
mother's rival but is obliged to abandon her as
original love-object. She concurrently abandons her
formerly active (which Freud terms "masculine")
libidinal drive. The penis becomes the coveted marker
of sexual difference and desire, and its possession or
lack positions the subject within masculine (active) or
feminine (passive) social roles. Underscoring Freud's
recognition that gender categories are socially
produced, Lacan shifts the discourse further away from
physical or biological characteristics and firmly into
the realm of the symbolic, conceptualizing the phallus
as the signifier of positive value which girls as well
as boys seek, and fail, to possess— with the difference
that boys can identify with phallic power whereas girls
are alienated from it. Desire itself is predicated on
a ceaselessly shifting signifier, a lack which can
never be fulfilled. Thus desire is always a matter of
representation or fantasy; and as one desire becomes
52
fulfilled another must be fictionalized to take its
place. The original object of the drive, the mother,
becomes "other" in this process of symbolization, and
takes whatever shape desire needs to create lack anew.
To sum up: the infant's entry into culture is marked
by its subjection to certain laws: the Law of the
Father, which prohibits incest (and ensures exogamy) in
patriarchal societies; the laws governing desire; and
the laws of language which disperse the subject across
a range of positions and prevent the formation of a
unitary "ego" except as a fiction which the subject
retains of itself. Lacan's account, then, stresses the
centrality of the family in engendering individuals as
subjects in patriarchal cultures. The family belongs
in both sections of the base-superstructure model,
since it literally reproduces subjects and constructs
their subjectivity through ideological formations and
gender asymmetries. The successful inscription of
subjects as feminine or masculine, as "Ladies" and
"Gentlemen," suppresses the polymorphous perversities
of the infant and reinforces heterosexuality as a
cultural institution. The unconscious in this scheme
has a fundamental ambivalence; its existence upholds
the symbolic order (thus Jameson can speak of "a
politics of the unconscious") but what it
53
contains— imperfectly— is the anarchic drives, the
dissident desires, of the pre-Oedipal phase. Like the
walls of a prison, it both upholds the law and embraces
lawlessness.
Gender divisions and heterosexuality of course
appear to be rooted in nature rather than cultural
practices, and this ideological effect is reproduced in
our aesthetic fictions. Terry Eagleton describes art
as "an element in that complex structure of social
perceptions which ensures that the situation in which
one social class has power over the others is either
seen by most members of the society as 1 natural' or not
seen at all" (Marxism and Literary Criticism 5). The
positionalities of desire and gender produced through
the Oedipal process function to support the family
structure in which they take place, and these
ideological effects are powerfully reduplicated In
classic realist texts, novels which makes heterosexual
desire and union parallel with the plot's dynamic and
closure, support the domination of men over women as
"natural," and project the myth of happy families
beyond their ending. Joseph Boone examines the
ideology of romantic love in a wide range of novels,
and argues:
54
Ideological "solutions1 1 to social
contradictions become, in a profound
sense, the "resolutions" offered in
traditional fiction. For the classic
mode of realist narrative is also a
system of representation working to
naturalize, or recuperate, the image of
"reality" that it creates in the form
of a coherent, intelligible
whole .... [N]ovelistic structures
therefore undertake a mission analogous
to that of society's dominant
ideological structures. (8)
The Freudian-Lacanian account of the subject's
formation through ideology is apparently deterministic,
as I have suggested; but of course subjects are
imperfectly inscribed, and "ideology" is not a
monolithic force in society hut can be best understood
as a dominant force which tries to preserve its own
hegemony through "strategies of containment," in
Jameson's phrase. Thus the ideological sanctioning of
heterosexual desire is contradicted by the range of
sexual scripts and behaviors which are actually
available; the subjection of little women in (or to)
their "femininity" is challenged by the existence of
feminist discourse and the possibility of resistance.
Psychoanalytic theory itself helps us to understand how
such alternative modes and codes of behavior come into
existence. While it analyses the enculturation and
engendering of subjects as an ideological operation, it
also provides the model whereby we can see ideology as
a decentered formation barely smoothing over its own
ruptures and contradictions. Ideology— like the
fictional text and the human subject— functions through
an illusion of organicism, self-sufficiency and
completeness, but is really unstable and always prone
to disruption from within. Just as the psychoanalyst
uncovers the "truth" of the human subject by
investigating the unconscious, so the critic uncovers
the "truth" of the text by attending to its gaps and
limits:
[T]he book is not self-sufficient; it
is necessarily accompanied by a certain
absence, without which it would not
exist . . . for in order to say
anything, there are other things which
must not be said. Freud relegated this
absence of certain words to a new place
which he was the first to explore, and
which he paradoxically named; the
unconscious. To reach utterance, all
speech envelops itself in the
unspoken .... Can we make this
silence speak? (Macherey, 85-6)
Ideologies become visible to us, though with an
effort, as they begin to break down; it becomes
possible for us to recognize their fictional status as
representations of reality, and the novels I have
chosen for my textual readings suggest this by
foregrounding their own fictionality in various ways.
Michele Barrett observes that "co-existing with a
pervasive popular ideology of romantic love are the
56
brutal facts of rape, domestic violence, pornography,
prostitution, a denial of sexual autonomy and
horrifying practices such as clitoridectomy" (42). But
we have inherited a long tradition of feminist
discourse which enables us to perceive the ideological
effects of romantic fantasy, of feminine subjectivity,
and of the engagement of the latter by the former.
(Perception is not, needless to say, the same as
resistance, merely the condition of its possibility.)
A greater challenge still, and one beyond the
scope of this study, although I mention it because it
is implied in the quotation from Macherey, is to make
visible the prevailing ideology, which is of course
transparent or we would recognize it. Ideology sets
the limits of what is thinkable, (im)poses questions of
a certain kind; and the most we can do to grasp it as
ideology is to mark those limits as boundaries. As de
Lauretis suggests:
[T]he task of critical discourse . . .
[is] to seek out contradictions,
heterogeneity, ruptures in the fabric
of representation so thinly
stretched— if powerful— to contain
excess, division, difference,
resistance; to open up critical spaces
in the seamless narrative space
constructed by dominant cinema and by
dominant discourses .... (Alice
Doesn’t 29)
In Technologies of Gender she extends this
argument by imagining the possibility of an alternative
representation of gender. Using the metaphor of
"space-off," which in cinematic terms refers to "the
space not visible in the frame but inferable by what
the frame makes visible," de Lauretis proposes that
there is a movement in feminist discourse "between the
representation of gender (in its male-centered frame of
reference) and what that representation leaves out, or,
more pointedly, makes unrepresentable" (26). The
possibility of moving beyond our present ideological
limits is presented as "a view from elsewhere" (26).
This is an intriguing suggestion to which I will return
in my final chapter.
To recapitulate my argument so far: I propose
that we are subjects produced through ideology, which
like all representations is a story or fiction— not an
illusion but a way of knowing. Macherey describes the
literary text as a "world of language" (46); I am
proposing that we inhabit a world of words in which
ideological structures take narrative forms, not only
in aesthetic fictions but in the very process of
becoming human. Through the acquisition of language,
the child enters a narrative world; its subjectivity is
"engaged in the cogs of narrative and indeed
58
constituted in the relation of narrative, meaning and
desire" (Alice Doesn't 106). Participation in
narrative is "natural" (itself a social construct, of
course) in the sense that to live in human culture, is
to be a product of that culture. The child takes up a
position in the symbolic order according to gender,
which is another "fictional" or discursive construct;
but since discursive concepts are embedded in
historical and cultural practices, and representations
are not free-floating inventions but historically
determined and determining. gender-divisions cannot be
dismantled at the level of language alone.
Psychoanalytic theory explains how the subject is
conscripted into a patriarchal culture which
legitimizes only certain modes of desire, and it thus
suggests that in accepting our feminine or masculine
roles, we become subjects in a pre-determined plot.
However, it also allows us to see how an ideological
system is really a decentered and unstable formation
which constantly struggles to preserve its dominance
through an ideal fiction or being a unitary truth or
"nature." At any given moment, then, a number of
subject positions may be available; and if we cannot be
agents of our own destiny, at least we can, in Janet
Wolff's phrase, make "situated choices" (24).
Narrative and Desire
59
Finally, by drawing together some arguments from
Brooks and de Lauretis, I want to consider the nature
of desire in narrative and the way it engages the
feminine subject. Reading for the Plot and Alice
Doesn1t were published in the same year. What divides
their common interests very sharply is the question of
gender: Brooks assumes a male reader and his model of
textual eroticism is distinctly masculine, while de
Lauretis specifically investigates the positionalities
of desire available to women readers and spectators.
According to Brooks, "desire is not merely the
motor-force of the plot— it is the very motive of
narrative," thus the narratologist needs "a dynamic
model of psychic processes . . . pertinent to the
dynamics of texts" (36). He draws on Freud's theory of
the death instinct— the organism's drive towards
stasis— to account for narrative's fulfillment in
closure; for "the desire of the text is ultimately
desire for the end . . ." (52), and plot can be seen as
"the internal logic of the discourse of mortality"
(22). An intriguing connection can be made with Joseph
Boone's description of "the movement toward stasis in
the canonical love-plot" (8) and his argument that the
60
"fatal knot" of wedlock protects the text's "ideal
vision of unchanging love from interrogation by
strangling the possibility of more narrative ..."
(17). Perhaps we can consider the knot fatal in
another sense too, as Eros and Thanatos converge in a
double consummation and climax. Elsewhere Boone has
noted that the seduction plot "makes its audience
complicit in a textual design of mastery and submission
that is necessarily ideological" (102). Mastery and
submission: the twin components of the sadistic act.
Though Freud at first considered sadism one of the
perversions, he subsequently realized it was a
displaced manifestation of the death instinct; once
again, I would suggest, the death instinct is bound to
Eros in the dynamic of the text.
De Lauretis speculates that sadism is "the causal
agent, the deep structure, the generative force of
narrative" (103). Taking Laura Mulvey's claim, "Sadism
demands a story," as her starting-point, she works
through a complex investigation of sadistic desire in
narrative to the conclusion that "sadism demands a
story or story demands sadism, however one prefers to
have it" (13 4). What especially interests me in her
account is her integration of a structuralist analysis
of the Oedipus myth with the story of femininity
narrated by Freud. She draws on the work of Greimas
and Lotman, which reduces the semantic structure of
mythical narrative to "the movement of an
actant-subject towards an actant-object" (112), the
dramatis-personae to two (hero and antagonist-obstacle)
engaged in a primary conflict, and narrative functions
to a simple chain: "'entry into a closed space, and
emeryence from it1" (Lotman, quoted in Alice Doesn1t
118). Lotman goes on to define this closed space as "a
grave, a house, a woman," and entry as "death,
conception, return home." De Lauretis takes up the
implications of this for the female subject:
In this mythical-textual
mechanics . . . the hero must be male,
regardless of the gender of the
text-image, because the obstacle,
whatever its personification, is
morphologically female, and indeed,
simply, the womb .... (119)
Concluding from this that narrative discourse
places the reader in certain portions of the plot
space, de Lauretis argues that in the Oedipus myth,
"each reader— male or female— is constrained and
defined within the two positions of a sexual difference
thus conceived: male-hero-human, on the side of the
subject; and female-obstacle-boundary-space, on the
other" (121). The question which emerges from this is:
how do women and men, as "already socially constituted"
62
subjects, take up positions of identification in
narrative?
In my previous discussion of Clarissa. I suggested
that there may be something inherent in narrative
structure which causes readers to side with Lovelace.
As the archetypal seduction plot, Clarissa plays out a
drama of sadomasochism at the explicit level of the
action; its hapless heroine-victim is imprisoned and
persecuted, and forced into a masochistic role, even
threatening at one point to plunge a pair of scissors
into her spectacular bosom. This prolonged account of
ritualistic torture and suffering is presented through
a predominantly-doubled narrative perspective:
Lovelace's and Clarissa's, persecutor and victim.
Sadomasochism thus becomes a dialectical principle of
the plot, offering alternative positions of
identification in an erotic dynamic of pleasure and
pain. In Freud's essay, "A Child is Being Beaten," we
will recall that the subjects of the phantasies
oscillated between sadistic and masochistic roles. But
de Lauretis's argument that the basic structural
component of narrative is one of mastery and
submission— the conquest of the (female) actant-object
by the (male) actant-subject— implies that readers,
regardless of gender, may "inevitably" take up the
63
sadistic position of identification. In the case of
Clarissa or other seduction plots, this would mean that
women readers are divided against their sex, their
subjectivity engaged through the structures of
narrative in a dynamic of sadistic desire. This
situation is reinforced by the institutionalized
practice of reading for meaning; to probe, pursue, or
penetrate the truth, to assert a single or
authoritative meaning for the text, represents an act
of mastery and is in that sense is a sadistic
practice.25
To complicate the question of narrative
identification a little further, we can turn to Kaja
Silverman's theory of femininity as produced through
masochism. In her classic reading of The Story of 0 as
a paradigmatic text of female subjectivity, she argues
that "the structuration of the female subject begins
not with our entry into language . . . but with the
organization of her body." Silverman claims that
discursive practices construct the woman as body, match
her psychic self or "inferiority" to that bodily
construction, and mark out the body as text which bears
cultural meanings. O's body is the material object of
ritualistic torture and violation; the whippings
inflicted on it represent "a very precise and important
64
signifying function" since they inscribe "signifiers"
in the shape of traces or marks, which then make her
body "'readable' through a system of writing" (337).
0 thus functions as "the effect or distillate of the
power exercised upon her body," a power wielded by the
brotherhood or "discursive fellowship" at Roissy. O is
debarred from discourse while she undergoes a psychic
structuration based on pain and subjugation, but
eventually is given "certain linguistic formulae which
in turn equip her with the baggage of masochistic
desire" (340). What has 0, a rather repellant
construction of "woman" in a pornographic tale of
masochism, to do with "women" as historical subjects?
The connection is made by Silverman at the level of
discourse: just as O is prevented from being a
speaking subject through the possession and writing of
her body as text, so are female subjects silenced by
the discursive practices which theorize femininity
through the body. Thus Silverman concludes:
Histoire d'O is more than O's story.
It is the history of a female subject
— of the territorialization and
inscription of a body whose involuntary
internalization of a corresponding set
of desires facilitates its complex
exploitations. (346)
But what does 'O' stand for? Is it a zero on
which other figures can be inscribed by the "masters?"
Is it O for Other, or O for Object? Or perhaps O is
the female Oedipus, the one whose existence is negated
in the Freudian account of the female subject whose
sexuality is theorized within a masculine frame. I
want to return to de Lauretis's theories of narrative
and desire via an enigmatic quotation from Silverman.
Noting that O's psychic structure is produced through
the torture of her body, Silverman argues:
[T]he whiplashes which crisscross her
body construct her as an object to be
maltreated. By asserting O's
compliance with abuse, the marks bring
that compliance into existence ....
[T]he secret they purport to reveal is
a consequence of the revelation. O
herself notes a few lines later that
her "secret" did not depend on her
alone. Actually . . . her 1 secret1
does not depend on her at all. but on
the discourse by means of which she is
first inscribed and then read. (332,
emphasis added)
Secrets, in Freudian psychoanalysis, are sexual.
What is O's secret, the secret of feminine desire? (Is
it, indeed, the secret of the sisterhood of mysterious
women brought together in de Lauretis's chapter: the
Sphinx, the smiling Mona Lisa, and Cixous's Laughing
Medusa?) Male analysts have the answers. Lacan, for
example, states confidently that "you have only to go
and look at Bernini's statue (of Saint Theresa) in Rome
to understand immediately that she's coming, there's no
doubt about it" (Feminine Sexuality 147). Lacan very
properly states his qualification to express such an
opinion, for "There is woman only as excluded by the
nature of things which is the nature of words, and it
has to be said that if there is one thing they
themselves are complaining about at the moment, it is
well and truly that— only they don't know what they are
saying, which is the difference between them and me"
(144). Women cannot give the answer, since they did
not, could not, pose the question "What do women want?"
and are rhetorically prevented from answering it. This
is how Freud phrases the question in "On Femininity":
Throughout history people have knocked
their heads against the riddle of
femininity . . . Nor will you have
escaped worrying over this
problem— those of you who are men; to
those of you who are women this will
not apply— you are yourselves the
problem. (118)
As Shoshana Felman comments; "To the extent that
women 'are the question,' they cannot enunciate the
question; they cannot be the speaking subjects" (quoted
in Alice Doesn1t 111), and de Lauretis points out:
What Freud's question really asks,
therefore, is "what is femininity— for
men?" In this sense it is a question
of desire: it is prompted by men's
desire for woman, and by men's desire
to know . . . While Oedipus is he who
answers the riddle poses by the Sphinx,
Freud stands in both places at once,
67
for he first . . . defines the question
and then answers it. (111-2)
But if we apply structuralist narratology to
Freud's story of femininity, we may conclude that "if
her story again turned out to be his story .... it
may be less Freud's doing that the work of Lotman and
his 'text-generating' mechanism . . ." (125).
Recasting the Oedipus narrative in terms of another
myth, an overtly romantic one, de Lauretis argues that
the girl's journey brings her to the dormant role of
Sleeping Beauty, passively awaiting discovery by the
Prince Charming who has been promised her as the goal
of his journey. The girl's biological destiny is
subordinated to the boy's; what is important is "the
fulfillment of the promise made to 'the little man' of
his social contract, his biological and affective
destiny . . . his desire" (13 3). The basic components
of narrative structure entrap the girl in the Oedipus
myth in the position of actant-object;
The myth of which she is presumed to be
the subject, generated by the same
mechanism that generated the myth of
Oedipus, in fact works to construct her
as a "personified obstacle"; similarly
the narrative transforms a human child
into a womb, "a cave," "the grave," "a
house," "a woman" . . . . (13 3)
Similarly, Freud's story of female sexuality, his
appropriation of the myth of Oedipus, inscribes the
68
female subject as a personification of an obstacle to
be overcome, a terrain to be possessed. We can see
that identification and desire become extremely
problematic and ambivalent questions: for example, in
the script of femininity, what is the girl's incentive
to take up her role as sexual subject? Do women
readers occupy a double and divided position in
relation to narrative, identifying with the masculine
actant-subject yet also required to identify as
subjects and against themselves with the
object-obstacle-space marked out for femininity? Is
there perhaps a residue of preOedipal bisexuality or
"masculine" activity in the woman's relation to Oedipal
narratives of desire? Should we develop a theory of
the bisexual reader? And if so, can a woman merge this
position with reading as a woman, as a man (in
accordance with her cultural or academic training) and
as a feminist? Can these multiple reading
positionalities exist together, or do they cancel each
other out? And finally, if narrative is essentially
sadistic, is the woman's complicity engaged, as Kaja
Silverman's work suggests, in a masochistic dynamic of
desire?26 Certainly de Lauretis seems to suggest as
much when she argues that while sex may be forced upon
a woman, desire is coercive is much more subtle ways:
69
a woman must either consent or be
seduced into consenting to femininity.
This is the sense in which sadism
demands a story or a story demands
sadism . . . hence the continuing
significance for feminism of a
"politics of the unconscious," for
women1s consent may not be gotten
easily but is finally gotten . . . as
much by rape and economic coercion as
by the more subtle and lasting effects
of ideology, representation and
identification. (134)
We may well object that the conflation of rape
with narrative representation is an exaggeration, or a
levelling out, of two very different degrees of
coercion or violence; but to the extent that femininity
is discursively produced, and as body, we can consider
compulsion to be a consistent element in the relation
between femininity and desire, whether we are talking
about material bodies, or narratives which construct
and inscribe the female subject as sexualized body,
engaging and thematizing feminine desire. If narrative
is complicit with prevailing ideologies of femininity,
seducing women at every level into subjugated positions
(through its deep structure, through its dynamic of
desire, through its binding of fantasy to specific
images of feminine gratification), then perhaps one way
to resist its power is to disrupt narrative pleasure.
At least, this has been attempted in feminist
film-making; and we can compare it, as a practice, with
70
modernist experimentation with narrative form, or with
Brecht's principle of alienation in the theater. The
idea is to defamiliarize what appears to be natural; to
reveal that the camera is not an "eye" which passively
observes the world but an instrument which selectively
visualizes and frames it. Similarly,the realist
fictional text doesn't reflect but constructs reality,
and, like ideology itself, presents its own
constructedness as truth, common sense, and
inevitability. But in imagistic, avant-garde film, as
de Lauretis has noted, the images cannot be disengaged
from narrative since they are "already, from the
beginning, implicated with narrativity and
overdetermined by its inscription of the movement and
positionalities of desire"; similarly, I would argue,
the aesthetic and ideological aims of the fragmented
plots and the temporal discontinuities of modernist
literature are defeated by our sense-making habits,
which are so deeply ingrained as to be instinctive.
Thus, for example, we piece together the shards of
images in The Wasteland until we have a synthesized
version that makes "sense," makes a story. What I am
suggesting is that there is no escaping the dynamic
movement and shape of narrative, since we can overcome
any aesthetic attempt at disruption, and recuperate
71
narrative in its more familiar form. Our narrativizing
tendencies, therefore, seem complicit with ideology.
Another problem with the attempt to destroy
narrative pleasure is that feminine desire can scarcely
be solicited through unpleasure. so it cannot be an
effective way to rewrite the script of femininity and
female sexuality. For de Lauretis, an alternative
framework of desire may be constructed through the
"interruption of the triple track by which narrative,
meaning and pleasure are constructed from [Oedipus's]
point of view," and the answer is not to be
"anti-narrative or anti-Oedipal" but "narrative and
Oedipal with a vengeance" (157). In my final chapter I
return to this guestion, with a textual example which
shows that the Oedipus myth can be rewoven, and desire
and female subjectivity can be rewritten in a feminist
framework.
Through this abstract theorizing of desire and
narrative, I have tried to formulate questions which
have an important bearing on this study, though I don't
pretend to resolve them. Given the dynamic of desire I
have outlined here, the question remains whether the
erotic pleasures of the text can be recuperated for
feminism, and I will be taking up this issue again at
the end of the next chapter.
72
NOTES
1 See, for example, Susan Sontag, Illness as
Metaphor. or Douglas Crimp, Ed. AIDS: Cultural
Analysis. Cultural Activism.
2 As Mitchell points out, the temporal sequence of a
person's life is actually, in psychic existence,
conflated into a single temporal dimension where past
is always present.
Freud was listening to the recollected
history of his patients, he
reconstructed infantile life from the
fragmentary stories the patient told in
which time past and time present are
one. We read the history of the person
backwards— as it is always essential to
do; but in retelling it, he describes
it as a march forwards, a process of
development where it is in fact a
multi-level effort of construction. It
is the crucial acquisition of the story
of his life that a person is undergoing
at the Oedipal moment .... [T]he
person does develop and change
sexually, but not with ruthless
sequential logic, and never so that the
past is 'past' .... (14-15).
3 See Brooks (3). Where Brooks' interest differs
very much from my own is in his assumption of a male
reader and his consequent description of textual
erotics in distinctly masculine terms. Brooks's work
is of course very much influenced by Barthes, whose
theory of the text as an "erotic zone," especially in
The Pleasures of the Text, has engendered a new
critical practice.
4 See especially Beyond the Pleasure Principle.
5 See Barthes, Image. Music. Text (79).
6 Here I am using "history" in the traditional
sense, not the Marxist sense of "the real" as I mean it
elsewhere.
73
7 Althusser describes Freud, Nietzsche and Marx as
"'Natural' children in the sense that nature offends
custom, principles, morality and good breeding: nature
is the rule violated, the unmarried mother, hence the
absence of a legal father" (196).
8 Seminar in the English Deparmentment at the
University of Southern California, Fall '89.
9 Here I am following Terry Castle's reading, in
Clarissa's Ciphers.
10 See Modleski's chapter on Harlequin Romances in
Loving With a Vengeance.
11 See Marx: "A Contribution to the Critique of
Political Economy."
12 Althusser: Lenin and Philosophy (171).
13 This uncompromising term is Mitchell's in Female
Sexuality (5).
u Jameson, 65.
15 The term is Heidi Hartmann's; cited in Barrett
(8) .
16 As Barrett points out, "It would be difficult for
anyone to argue . . . that the qualifications and
skills imported to a girl at a major independent school
would in any sense 'equip' her for a place in the
division of labor that was subordinate to that of a
working-class boy who left school at the minimum age
with no formal qualifications" (139).
17 See, for example, Moraga and Anzaldua, eds: This
Bridge Called mv Back; essays by Barbara Smith and
Deborah McDowell in The New Feminist Criticism, edited
by Elaine Showalter; and Gloria Hull et al., But Some
of Us Are Brave.
18 The first statement is from an interview with
Kristeva, "La femme, ce n'est jamais ca," in Tel Quel
59 (1974) 19-24; qtd. in Moi, 163. Tne second is from
Monique Wittig, "The Straight Mind," in Feminist Issues
(Summer 1990), p. 110.
19
See Eagleton, Literary Theory (109).
74
20 The suggestion was made by Gates during a
conference on African-American Literature at Claremont
College, 1988.
21 De Lauretis, Technologies. pp. 24 and 32.
22 See Irigary, Speculum and Clement, "The Guilty
One," in The Newly Born Woman (3-57).
23 In Macherey's account, we live in the flow of
ideology or "illusion." Fictional texts "set to work"
or transform illusion in such a way that they become
more than delusions; rather they have a special kind of
truth because they reveal the gaps and incoherences of
ideology through their aesthetic limits.
24 Feminism has, of course, forced certain changes in
linguistic usage, but whether social power structures
have really changed as a result remains a dubious
question.
25 Of course, I don't mean to deny the many
alternative reading models that are actually available,
ranging from Judith Fetterley's strategy of resistance
(which I practice quite aggressively in my own
criticism) to Patrocinio Schweickhart's notion of
reading as intimate connection and the dissolving of
ego-boundaries. But my point is that we are still
trained and made to "prove ourselves" in the dominant
tradition of critical mastery.
26 Freud's essay, "A Child is Being Beaten," posits
sadomasochism as a dialectical principle which allows
multiple and reversible positions of identification.
Theories of masochism take up the implications of this
in different ways, and the analysis of positions of
desire and identification has become increasingly
intricate. See, for example, Deleuze, who points out
that masochism is a contract negotiated by the
"victim," and posits masochism as a mode of feminine
empowerment, an endorsement of the mother's authority:
"The masochist experiences the symbolic order as an
intermaternal order in which the mother represents the
law under certain prescribed conditions; she generates
the symbolism through which the masochist expresses
himself .... [The father] is deprived of all
symbolic function" (56). In his view, "It is not a
child but a father that is beaten" (58).
75
For discussions of male masochism which oppose or
modify Laura Mulvey's emphasis on the masterful male
gaze, see Silverman's "Masochism and Subjectivity,"
which represents the spectator's position as
masochistic, regardless of gender; or Gaylyn Studlar's
"Masochism and the Perverse Pleasures of the Cinema,"
which connects masochism with a return to the
pre-Oedipal phase. See also Modleski's The Women Who
Knew Too Much, which engages theories of male sadism
and masochism in a dialogue with each other, and
considers the implications for the female spectator.
76
2
WOMEN, THE NOVEL, AND THE PLACE OF PLEASURE
The Novel and Women
The novel has, from its beginnings, been
associated with women, even if their active involvement
in its invention and development has been largely
suppressed in our literary histories and
canon-formation. Ian Watt, for example, notes that
"the majority of eighteenth-century novels were
actually written by women," but is quick to add that
"this had long remained a purely quantitative assertion
of dominance" (298).1 Those damned mobs of scribbling
women rushed to participate in the proliferous
production of romantic fantasies: "four thousand and
seventy-three novels are now in the press from the pens
of young ladies of fashion," comments The Times.
mockingly, in 1796 (quoted in Lawrence Stone 284).
Stone, like Watt, dismisses these novels as "pulp
literature," and perhaps many were; but the automatic
assumption is troubling, since it evades any
consideration of the ideological criteria which inform
aesthetic judgments. By now, it is a well-rehearsed
argument that while women writers continued to be
77
productive and sometimes popular and highly praised
throughout the nineteenth century, few have survived a
cultural screening mechanism which works to recuperate
and reinforce patriarchal hegemony. As Germaine Greer
has noted, "almost uninterruptedly since the
Interregnum, a small group of women have enjoyed
dazzling literary prestige during their own lifetimes,
only to vanish without trace from the records of
posterity."2
Ironically, Greer herself is guilty of a certain
cultural chauvinism when she writes so mockingly about
popular romances and their readers in The Female
Eunuch. Feminist critiques of romantic fictions
usually adopt a satirical tone to denote the
superiority of critic and reader, and distance both
from the embarrassing, even inadmissible possibility
that such fantasies may be appealing. Tania Modleski
suggests that this discomfort "seems to manifest a
defensiveness which has not been felt through ....
[T]he critic turns against her own 'worse' self, the
part of her which has not yet been 'liberated' from
shameful fantasies" (Loving 14). Modleski argues that
the contemporary "feminine" genres with which her own
work engages— soap operas, Gothic novels and Harlequin
romances— have rarely been given serious attention, not
just because mass culture is considered inferior, but
also because these particular forms of it are
primarily enjoyed by women. Conversely, popular
"masculine" genres which are just as crudely-written
and cliche-ridden, such as the detective novel,
sometimes command respect: "The temptation to elevate
what men do simply because men do it is, it would seem,
practically irresistible" (12).
I want to extend Modleski1s argument to the novel
as a genre, since it has traditionally been considered
inferior: doubly despised, I would suggest, because of
its association with women, and its connections with
mass culture. Of course, it also belongs in the domain
of "high art"— but note that defensive efforts to make
the novel more "respectable" depend upon its elevation
through other genres: for example, Fielding's "comic
epic poem in prose," or Woolf's enrichment of narrative
style through poetic distillation, or Joyce's
resituation of the novel within the framework of
classical epic. Residual Bloomsbury snobbery about
novels can be traced also in critical practice, which
traditionally considers reading for the plot a "low
form of activity" (Brooks 4). Interestingly,
eighteenth-century complaints about the novel sound
very much like twentieth century complaints about
television: both media are accused of corrupting taste
and values, promoting escapism, and soliciting
unprofitable investments of time. In 1773, The Lady1s
Magazine complained that novels and romances "tend to
vitiate the taste" of their female readers; in 1799 The
Ladv1s Monthly Museum describes a (fictional) young
lady's compulsive reading: "The maid is generally
dispatched to the library two or three times in the
day, to change books," and claims that "a continued
repetition of such reading seems, by infusing false and
romantic notions, to injure rather than to improve the
natural feelings of sensibility" (quoted in Stone
283-4), a theme taken up by Jane Austen in Northanaer
Abbey and Sense and Sensibility. Like television, the
novel is a product of technological revolution, and one
ideally suited to modern urban society since it
transmits culture in the home.3 Watt has argued that
the very uniformity of print enables the reader to
enter a state of rapt absorption: "ceasing to be
conscious of the printed page before our eyes, we
surrender ourselves entirely to the world of illusion
which the printed novel describes" (198). This world
seems rather the effect of perception than construction
to the reader whose imagination is deeply engaged in
the text. We can see a connection between the novel's
80
power to alter the reader's consciousness, and its
ambivalent status as literary genre: it can be an
instrument that sharpens the intellect, or an opiate
that dulls the senses. On the one hand, as Watt
argues, "it is capable of unrivalled subtlety in the
exploration of personality and personal relationships";
on the other hand, "far from extending psychological
and moral awareness," it can be degraded into a
"popular purveyor of vicarious sexual experience and
adolescent wish-fulfillment" (202). We may pause at
that last statement, and wonder at the severity of
Watt's tone, which echoes the disapproval of the
journals quoted above. Is there perhaps a certain
erotic frisson in the young ladies' self-abandonment to
the pleasures of the text, and in their voracious greed
for more of the same? Is there a hint of alarm at the
multiply-orgasmic potential of the female
pleasure-seeker, at the insatiability of the young
ladies' appetites? Is this why they need be so sternly
admonished for their self-indulgence and coarseness?
Again, we return to the intriguing problem of pleasure;
but I want to defer my discussion of it until I have
considered the novel's relation to social change, and
some historical reasons for its special engagement of
women's subjectivity.
81
In my exploration of these questions, I find that
economics keeps resurfacing as a recurrent theme, a
causal agent. In the previous chapter I referred to
the the Marxist view that cultural productions are
determined by economic forces; the novel is an
excellent example. As many critics have noted, its
evolution coincides with the development of capitalism,
the concomitant rise of the bourgeoisie, urbanization
and industrialism, and the slow trend towards
democratization. Bakhtin claims the novel is a genre
born of this "new world," which is the modern world,
and has "an indeterminacy, a certain semantic
open-endedness, a living contract with unfinished,
still-evolving contemporary reality . . ." (7). In his
view, the novel is carnivalesque: its roots lie in
"low" cultural forms, it bears a parodic relation to
other genres, and is essentially, in its
"ventriloquation" of social dialects (each with their
own ideological character) a "revolutionary discourse."
Language is conceptualized as a dynamic site of
political struggle, a clash between centripetal forces
(the language of the dominant ideology, which strives
to be unitary) and centrifugal (disruptive) forces, the
languages of oppositional groups. The novel is
uniquely able to "orchestrate" the polyglot languages
82
of social heteroglossia, and is thus, for Bakhtin, the
proletarian genre par excellence, opposing hegemonic
discourse by exploiting the plenitude of language and
the overdeterminacy of meaning. Bakhtin does not
consider the politics of the novel in relation to
feminism, but we may recall Virginia Woolf's attractive
proposal, in A Room of One1s Own, that plebeian and
"unofficial" art forms— the fairytales, anonymous
ballads and folklore which according to Bakhtin
constitute the novel's sources— were probably produced
by women. Moreover, parodic or mimetic voices have
been used by women writers, including male
"impersonators," long before the notion of ecriture
feminine was born; and the history of the novel is a
history of feminist struggle, the attempt to infiltrate
and imbricate patriarchal culture with languages
expressing feminine sensibility. As Boone points out,
"The ideal of a genre that is potentially
non-canonical, inherently multivocal, and profoundly
invested in the ideological dismantling of a unitary
worldview is, of course, also a feminist dream ..."
(4) .
But the novel's potentiality, in practice, is
realized in paradoxical ways. It can accommodate both
subversive and reactionary readings; and we may account
83
for this by recalling that the specific social
revolution historically connected with the novel is
capitalism, however ' ’proletarian" the genre may be in
the Bakhtinian sense that it creates a forum for the
disenfranchised. After all, yesterday's revolution is
today's dominant rule; and we should not feel surprised
that this "beggar-king" of genres became "the arbiter
as well as champion of conventional bourgeois values
and literary tastes," although even now the novel
disguises "its innate rebelliousness under the sign of
respectability ..." (Boone 4). Thus, to appropriate
Boone's terms, the novel is at once "traditional" and
"countertraditional"; it has been chosen by the most
conservative writers to express the most conventional
platitudes, but it has also been used as a medium for
covert or explicit protest. To take examples that
connect with my interests in this study: in its
representations of women, the novel may set up
conformist constructions of femininity, but it also
undermines them (for example, through the dual heroines
of Vanity Fair, or the contradictory heroines of
Hardy's fiction). Similarly, it performs an
ideological function by harnessing desire to the social
institution of marriage, but it also threatens social
order by legitimizing passion as an anarchic force
84
which overrules rational behavior, becoming the
absolute principle by which fictional lovers live.
Bakhtin's theories of the novel are very useful in
enabling us to understand its paradoxical nature, the
liberating potential that lies in the interplay of its
polyglot languages, which release multiple, dissonant
meanings, and force the official discourse to compete
for dominance. The optimism of Bakhtin's vision,
though, must be somewhat dampened when we consider that
hegemonic culture can take protean forms, and resistant
movements can be co-opted and recontained within the
dominant ideology. As Jameson points out:
So the slave religion of Christianity
is transformed into the hegemonic
ideological apparatus of the medieval
system; while folk music and peasant
dances find themselves transformed into
the forms of aristocratic or court
festivities .... (86)
And so feminist protest is subdued and
reintegrated into patriarchal culture. An unambiguous
example in my own investigation is the critical
reception of Mary Barton. which is consistently,
despite its title, read as John Barton's story, and its
revolutionary discourse "heard" only insofar as it
relates to the working-class male; thus the novel's
challenge to conventional constructions of female
sexuality is glossed over and neutralized. Returning
85
to Jameson, I would like to relate his words to the
earlier quotation from Germaine Greer:
In the aesthetic realm . . . the
process of cultural "universalization
[which implies the repression of the
oppositional voice and the illusion
that there is only one genuine
'culture'] is the specific form taken
by what can be called the process of
legitimation in the realm of ideology
and conceptual systems. (87)
Ultimately, the revolutionary potential of the
novel may be less a question of its agency— its
"orchestration" of heteroglossia— and more a question
of the multiple reading positionalities produced by its
complexity, its collision of discourses, its inability
to contain its own contradictions. As feminists, we
can construct a subversive discourse for the novel by
choosing a particular reading strategy: we can
foreground the querulous voices or ideologemes of the
text; we can disrespect the text and read it against
the grain; and we can develop a deep suspicion of
institutionalized readings which may recuperate
patriarchal values and eclipse the countercultural
possibilities of the text. There is another, much more
practical sense in which the novel can be seen as a
revolutionary or democratizing force; it made narrative
pleasure available to those who were literate but
excluded from more prestigious art forms because they
86
lacked a training in the classics. The group
predominantly affected was women (who would continue to
be debarred from this masculine privilege, as Woolf was
to lament of her own generation in A Room of One1s
Own). Moreover, technological advances in the printing
press made literature economically available on a wide
scale: novels were still prohibitively expensive, but
circulating libraries, which charged "threepence for
the usual three-volume novel" (Watt 43), gave a much
greater section of the public access to fictional
texts. Thus novel-reading became a popular activity
among women from a wide range of social classes, from
the aristocracy to servants, as Ian Watt, Lawrence
Stone and Samuel Richardson, to name a few, have
pointed out. Primarily, though, it was the
recreational resource of upper-class and newly-leisured
bourgeois women, who were largely confined to the home
and needed novels to counteract the monotony of their
days. There is a real pathos in Lady Mary Wortley
Montague's request for more novels: "I doubt not that
at least the greater part are trash, lumber, etc.
However, they will serve to pass away the idle time";
and Mrs. Thrale, from a lower social class, describes
herself as "driven . . . on literature as her sole
resource" (both cited in Watt 44). As a direct result
87
of economic changes under capitalism, many more women
were forced into passive social roles and became
dependent upon novels as an escape route; and so
supplies increased to fill this new demand.
Economic factors also influence the social
construction of the feminine ideal at this time. The
bourgeois wife who does not work is reduced to a sign;
as her labor-value becomes redundant, her symbolic
value increases proportionately.4 She becomes private
property, the possession that signifies her husband's
worth, and as such, must belong exclusively to him.
Christopher Hill has argued that "in the world of
capitalist relations, expensive goods must not be
shop-soiled or tarnished."5 Chastity, a recurrent
theme in eighteenth-century fiction, seems a matter of
material as well as spiritual concern. A single lapse
is enough to ruin a woman, even when the "sin" takes
place without her consent (for example, Clarissa) or in
ambivalent circumstances (Tess). Fallen women are
condemned in novels to replicate their sin,
commodifying their bodies as cheap and common property,
since they have forever lost the hallmark of purity
which makes a woman precious as private property.
Watt argues that in the eighteenth century, there
was a "tremendous narrowing of the ethical scale, a
88
redefinition of virtue in primarily sexual
terms .... [W]ords such as virtue, propriety,
decency, modesty, delicacy, purity, came to have the
almost exclusively sexual connotations which they have
since very largely retained" (157). At the same time,
these were words which applied much more crucially to
women than to men; the double-standard of morality is
prominent and generally accepted, so that even a
morally conservative man like Samuel Johnson could
discriminate between a man whose "chief merit consisted
in resisting the impulses of nature," and a woman, for
whom "chastity is the principle by which she is taught.
When she has given up that principle, she has given up
every notion of female honour and virtue, which are all
included in chastity."6
Furthermore, the preservation of chastity was not,
by itself, enough; the exaggerated appearance of
chastity was even more important, thus, paradoxically,
a woman had to display her own modesty and virtue, her
adherence to the feminine ideal. As Mr. Villars
cautions Evelina, "[N]othing is so delicate as the
reputation of a woman: it is, at once, the most
beautiful and most brittle of all human things"
(Evelina 164). But note Modleski's comment on the
double bind this creates, "for once women are aware of
being suspected, they must try to make themselves look
innocent, and of course,in manipulating appearances,
they forfeit the very possibility of innocence" (52).
To look chaste, the woman must take care where she
looks. Under constant scrutiny, as object of the gaze,
the virtuous woman is always vulnerable to sexual
appropriation, and protects herself by never being
(observed to be) the subiect of the gaze. Although the
heroine of romantic fiction looks to love and marriage
for self-fulfillment, she must not be seen to be
looking; like 0, she may not raise her eyes to men's
faces, for fear of acting immodestly and becoming a
subject of illicit sexual desire, above all for fear of
actincr willfully, since sexual repression does not
affect erotic behavior alone, but has much wider social
implications, reinforcing subjugation or the surrender
of will (which is to say, desire) as the very condition
of femininity. If "virtue" has been narrowed, as Watt
says, to sexual definitions, chastity, by contrast, is
much more than a question of sexual ethics; on the
contrary, it defines female sexuality. And here the
inevitable slippage between "sexual" as denoting
gender, and "sexual" as erotic, has full ideological
weight, as "chastity" not only symbolizes but works to
secure loss of will-fullness as the womanly ideal.
90
Once again prohibited from being agents of their own
desire, women's bodies become the property of men,
objects passively circulated, as Levi-Strauss has
suggested in The Elementary Structures of Kinship. in
the patriarchal economy of exchange. The odd semantic
doubleness of the word propriety, which refers both to
property. or something owned, and properness. or moral
rectitude, makes perfect sense when the reference is to
women1s chastity.
Novels encode and reinforce through their
representations of women the laws of propriety which
govern, and must be seen to govern, feminine
behavior— most notably an "immunity," in Watt's phrase,
"from sexual feeling" (164). But novels also protest
the denial of female desire, and the concomitant
emphasis on appearances which, paradoxically, makes
genuine artlessness impossible. Elizabeth Gaskell's
fiction, for example, frequently dramatizes the
heroine's effort to live within the narrow and
contradictory social construction of womanliness: in
Wives and Daughters, she shows the pain and confusion
which results when preserving the guilty "secret" of
female sexuality involves actual deception. The novel
begins with all the "rigmarole" of a child's story:
"In a country there was a shire, and in that shire
91
there was a town, and in that town there was a house,
and in that room there was a bed," and so on; but this
story of the conventional little girl, awake but afraid
to arise from her conventional "little white dimity
bed," exposes the impossible place of the conventional
fictional heroine, who is a child-woman. She is
expected to be as sexually naive as a child but also
responsible and thus "knowing." Molly suffers deeply
in her struggle to conform to these conflicting
demands. The little white dimity bed becomes a symbol
of loss in this Bildungsroman: the loss of innocence,
integrity and reputation, and above all the loss of
trust, since Molly discovers the world's treachery in
its readiness to assume her immorality from
appearances.
So far I have discussed mainly the symbolic and
ideological links between property and chastity; but,
of course, there is also a pragmatic and material
connection to be made. Watt suggests that in practice,
"strictness in sexual relations tends to coincide with
the increasing importance of private property— the
bride must be chaste so that her husband can be sure
that It is his son who will inherit" (158). This is
certainly the view expressed by Engels, who argues that
property is the direct cause of moral corruption and
92
women's oppression (though, with rather delightful
optimism, he concludes from this that proletarian women
must be liberated). The romantic relation which
regulates fictional plots is defined by Engels as
"sex-love," and claimed to be the rule only among the
proletarian classes; among property-owning classes, a
double sexual standard prevails since monogamy is an
essential marital ideal for the wife, but not the
husband. Engels condemns such double standards: the
social hypocrisy of insisting on chastity for women
while condoning "hetaerism" for men has the effect of
"proclaiming once again the absolute domination of the
male over the female sex as a fundamental law of
society . . ." (76). For Engels, only through the
abolition of the family as primary economic unit can
the imbalance of power be redressed.
But of course there is a world of difference
between our subjective experience of social systems,
and the historical reality which a Marxist analysis
such as Engels' enables us to conjecture. As I have
already argued at some length, ideology structures
human desire and reproduces cultural laws through the
unconscious. The discourse of sexuality is anchored in
the social institutions of marriage and the family, and
if I describe romantic love as a "mythology," I do not
93
mean to suggest that it is a delusion, a "false
consciousness," so much as a truth of psychic
representation: it becomes, particularly for women, an
ideal fiction to live by, the true principle of
self-realization. In Ray Bhaskar's words:
People do not marry to reproduce the
nuclear family, or work to sustain the
capitalist economy. Yet it is
nevertheless the unintended consequence
(and inexorable result) of, as it is
also a necessary condition for, their
activity. (Quoted in Barrett 36.
It is through the operations of ideology that we
are induced to reproduce these patriarchal structures
of relations; through cultural discourses we come to
"know" ourselves and experience desire. Literature, as
Terry Eagleton has argued in Criticism and Ideology, is
a complex reworking of ideological codes, thus it, too,
contributes to the construction of our subjectivity and
the shaping of our desire. The relationship between
the woman as textual representation and the woman as
historical subject is a subtle and productive one.
Interestingly, these are not new recognitions; nor did
the notion that (erotic) desire is socially and
discursively created begin entirely with Foucault. I
quote at some length from Lawrence Stone1s commentary
on love and the novel:
94
According to contemporaries, the growth
of marriage for love in the eighteenth
century was caused by the growing
consumption of novels .... The
result of massive exposure to this pulp
literature was clear enough to
contemporaries. Thanks to notions
imbibed from this reading, young people
fell headlong into the arms of whoever
took their fancy .... In 1792 The
Bon Ton Magazine warned its female
readers that under the influence of
romanticism, 'women of little
experience are apt to mistake the
urgency of bodily wants with the
violence of a delicate passion.1 . . .
Anthropological studies of the many
societies in which sentiment is unknown
tend to support La Rochefoucauld's
observation that 'people would never
fall in love if they had not heard of
love talked about.' It is a product,
that is, of learned cultural
expectations, which became fashionable
in the late eighteenth century thanks
largely to the spread of novel-reading.
(284— 286)
This cultural cultivation of passion is clearly at
odds with the feminine ideal of passionlessness; female
desire is at once incited and suppressed, and the
conventional heroine must show extraordinary
self-restraint in subduing her feelings. The conflict
is often played out in the heroine's body, which
becomes a text in its own right: debarred from
speaking her desire, the heroine tends to sink into
psychosomatic decline, expressing the torture of
extreme but frustrated passion through the derangement
and fever of bodily sickness— for example, Gaskell's
95
Molly Gibson; or better still, Jane Austen's Marianne.
Sense and Sensibility takes as its fictional theme the
effect of fiction in creating and validating romantic
love as the essential passion and principle of life;
this is shown to be a dangerously naive illusion, and
Marianne is savagely disabused of her romantic notions.
As I have argued, the novel is a site of
contradiction. It reproduces ideological constructions
of femininity but also challenges them. It sets up
chastity and submission as feminine ideals, but at the
same time stimulates desire by.representing romantic
love as the condition of happiness; and although this
desire is largely recontained by the anchoring of love
to marriage and the family, it also threatens, as Boone
suggests, "to spill over the boundaries, rather than be
a mainstay, of accepted literary and social structures"
(4). Fiction is complicit with ideology in insisting
on "the unquestioned, and monolithic, centrality of
romanticized marriage as the ultimate signifier of
personal and social well-being" (66), and its "thematic
or narrative patterns, contained by a common point of
origin in the connubial ideal, will repeat the
ideological maxims necessary to promote the illusion of
sexual hierarchy as the basis of societal, and
ultimately fictional, order" (67). But fiction also
challenges this world-view, either directly and
consciously, or indirectly in the failure to contain
its own oppositional voices. Earlier I cited Gaskell,
traditionally known as the most "feminine" and
submissive of writers, as a subtly subversive voice
protesting the enforced subjugation of women in the
repression of sexuality; and we might bear in mind Mary
Poovey's argument, in The Proper Lady, that the very
act of writing places women in a place of conflict,
since the raising of the feminine voice is in itself a
breach of propriety, a most "improper" act.
Jameson, building on L^vi-Strauss's theories of
cultural production, argues that ideology "is not
something which informs or invests symbolic production;
rather the aesthetic act is itself ideological . . .
with the function of inventing imaginary or formal
'solutions1 to unresolvable social contradictions"
(79). Of course, these aesthetic "solutions" sometimes
fail. But to complicate things further, Jameson
stresses that the notion of art as ideology is
inherently ambivalent, since (and here he follows
Kenneth Burke) "a symbolic act is on the one hand
affirmed as a genuine act . . . while on the other it
is registered as an act which is 'merely' symbolic, its
resolutions imaginary ones that leave the real
97
untouched . . ." (81). Romantic fictions are good
examples of aesthetic resolutions of contradictions in
the real social world; while in social reality,
marriage is an institution which legitimizes the
economic and legal oppression of women, in the novel
(and as a fantasy of the collective unconscious) it is
promoted as a feminine heaven-haven. Before I pursue
this argument further, I want to make it clear that
although so far I have discussed ideology largely in
terms of the eighteenth and nineteenth century novel,
my comments are applicable to contemporary society too.
Despite the social transformations that have occurred
over time, the much-improved position of women in the
work-force, in the law, and so on, we still live off
the legacy of past ideologies, and they continue to
shape us as social subjects.7
I want to take up Jameson's discussion of art as a
"symbolic resolution," and return once more to an
historical investigation of the novel's special appeal
for women, since its immense and immediate popularity
suggests that it addressed a major cultural anxiety.
Partly, of course, its popularity can be explained by
the fact that for virtually the first time in
literature, it privileged women1s social experience,
making their inner consciousness the focus of textual
attention, elaborating in loving detail the domestic
concerns, the emphasis on personal relationships, which
define a woman's life. But the proliferation of
romantic fictions can be traced to specific,
economically-based social changes. As Watt and Stone
have noted, the economic relations of capitalism gave
marriage a greater significance for women at this time.
The conjugal rather than extended family became
established as the primary social unit, which meant
that wives moved away from the shelter of the parental
home and into the unfamiliar domicile of a man who
might be a virtual stranger— a domain which,
incidentally, Ruskin would pretend was ruled by the
wife as domestic "queen,"8 but which in every
customary (and usually legal) sense belonged, like the
wife, to the husband. No doubt the prominence of the
Gothic novel at the turn of the century reflected a
very real fear of Bluebeard in his den. If wives were
in a precarious position, single women were worse off;
with the rise of industrialism, they were "no longer
positive economic assets to the household" (Watt 14 5)
since their domestic skills— spinning, weaving,
etc— were now redundant. Thus women became much
dependent upon husbands— but, ironically, at precisely
the time when finding a husband was very difficult, due
99
to an imbalance in sex ratios, which dramatically
increased over the next century.
As a result of the shortage of suitable
males . . . there developed in the
eighteenth century a new and
troublesome social phenomenon, the
spinster lady who never married, whose
numbers rose from under five per cent
of all upper-class girls in the
sixteenth century to twenty to
twenty-five per cent in the eighteenth
century .... As Moll Flanders
complained, "the market is against our
sex just now." . . . In 1851, there
was a surplus of three hundred and
sixty-five thousand women over men, and
from the 1800s to the 1840s, the
periodical literature of the day was
more than usually filled with articles
discussing, "What shall we do with our
old maids?" (Stone 380-381)
It seems that Victorian women, if not eighteenth
century women, had a greater chance of being captured
by terrorists, and so on, than getting married. The
problem of spinsterhood is a recurrent theme in
fiction: from Moll Flanders to The Odd Women.
unmarried women struggle to support themselves in a
social system which had no place for them. Some
heroines enjoy a brief spell of financial independence
but need to be rescued from sudden impecunity by the
usual course of marriage (for example, Anthony
Trollope's Miss Mackenzie, or Mrs. Oliphant's Miss
Marjoribanks); for others, the ignominy of spinsterhood
proves fatal (for example, Edith Wharton's Lily Bart).
100
Very few fictional spinsters live as happily and
autonomously as the ladies of Cranford, and even here
there is private heartbreak at the missed opportunity
for marriage. The paradigm for the novelistic happy
ending is found in Jane Austen's romantic comedies,
where the heroines find both emotional and financial
security in the husbands for whom they were clearly
destined all along, despite the blocking agents of
prejudice, pride and poor advice which delay but cannot
destroy the match. Given the long novelistic tradition
of the desirability and economic necessity of marriage,
Ursula Brangwen's exchange with Gudrun, in the opening
pages of Women in Love. has all the bravado of
blasphemy:
"(0)h, if I were tempted, I'd marry
like a shot. I'm only tempted not to."
The faces of both sisters suddenly lit
up with amusement. "Isn't it an
amazing thing," cried Gudrun, "how
strong the temptation is not to!" They
both laughed, looking at each other.
In their hearts they were frightened.
(8; emphasis added)
Marriage, then, became a special source of anxiety
for middle-class women in the eighteenth century, and
its recirculation as a narrative theme— in fiction,
film, television drama, and so on— suggests that it has
remained so ever since. (Note, for example, the
revival of the Gothic in films made after the war, as
101
husbands, now virtual strangers, returned to their
former homes.9) Marriage was both desired, as a
sanctuary of economic and emotional security, and
dreaded, because of its potential to be the very
opposite. Above all, it was dreaded because it might
not happen after all and then how was a woman literally
to live? In this social climate, economic incentives to
marry became a brutal reality, which often worked
against the dependent woman, since it was the man who
could afford to hold out for the richest prize. Pamela
turns this around by drawing on the Cinderella myth,
the story of a woman1s material gain and social
ascendancy through marriage; this supplies the formula
for popular romances even today and, we might note, it
supports the conventional sexual hierarchy as not only
acceptable but desirable. A contemporary women's
magazine sets out its plot requirements as follows:
The girl in the story should be a
secretary . . . the boyfriend must be
elevated above her socially— he could
be the son of the boss, an advertising
executive, a student or a
serviceman . . . or a young doctor.
The story had to have a happy ending,
there was to be no mention of religion
or race, and lovemaking must be
restricted to a kiss.10
Other novels, though, both before and after
Pamela. tell a different story, which is probably
102
closer to the truth. Successful fortune-hunters were
more likely to be men, since the marriage-market was so
unfavorable to women. Thus Moll Flanders laments her
lack of a dowry; Wollstonecraft1s Maria states without
resentment that her lover was paid a substantial sum as
an inducement to marry her; Wilkie Collins's Laura
Fairlie is desired more for her beauty or goodness but
for her money; and so on. Examples are abundant
throughout the history of the novel. Moreover, there
are many counter-traditional fictions— Maria. Roxana
and The Tenant of Wildfell Hall, to name a few— which
graphically represent the fate of women whose legal
existence is suspended in marriage, and whose fortunes
are thus squandered by profligate husbands.
Since in social reality marriage was so firmly
tied to monetary matters, it seems that the vast
numbers of novels which idealized romantic love must
have functioned in part as compensatory fictions,
seductive mythologies which concealed the real
contradictions of many women's social existence: their
enforced dependency, their vulnerability, their
powerlessness under the law; not to mention the
unmentionable— the physically fatiguing and
life-threatening problem of multiple pregnancies, which
represents the only "use-value" which upper-class wives
had. In the fictional ideal, romantic love soars in a
world of its own, far above the realm of commerce in
which, it seems, marriage contracts were actually
negotiated. Some novels create a fantasy-world in
which sentiment is untainted by materialism, the
heroine's intrinsic worth is unrelated to her cash
value, and the danger that the door marked Paradise
Hall may lead into Dombey's house is concealed by the
polite firmness of narrative closure. But the novel as
genre is in this respect, as in many others, both
supportive and subversive of ideology; so it is also
true that other, more cynical novels, for example Jane
Austen's, attack romantic wish-fulfillment as
dangerously naive and delusory. Moreover, even the
most conventional romantic fiction can be read
subversively, by foregrounding its "strategies of
containment," the gaps and silences which expose its
ideological limits.
Yet romantic mythology remains a powerful cultural
and ideological force, and evidently time, and
feminism, cannot wither it. We live in a society
steeped in sentimentality; love is a dominant theme of
popular music, film, television serials, radio shows,
magazine articles and fiction, and so on. If marriages
only last five episodes in soap operas, perhaps it is
104
not with the aim of reflecting social reality but
rather so that we can have the pleasure of hearing
those romantic pledges over and over again. Women's
desires, as Rosalind Coward has written, are constantly
solicited, and romantic love is everywhere commodified.
We may want to connect this with the observation that
the more ubiquitous the breakdown of the conjugal
family unit in modern society, the more insistently the
ideology of the family is promoted— especially in TV
commercials, which as the art forms of capitalism have
a particular investment in keeping the ideal of the
nuclear family alive and flourishing. In the end it
hardly matters that we don't live in a Leave it to
Beaver world, or in a romantic paradise of perfect
love— what matters is that these become the ideal
fictions we live by.
If we have not succeeded in liberating ourselves
from "shameful fantasies"— the cultural solicitation of
feminine desire in a patriarchal script of sexuality
and socialization, which works to reshuffle feminist
gains, and thus continually resituates us in the same
subordinate positions— it is not because we lack
conscious awareness of the operations of ideology, but
because we have not yet been able to challenge the laws
105
of ideology on their own terrain: in the structures of
desire, in the site of the unconscious.
The Place of Pleasure
We return to the problem of pleasure, which
refuses to be postponed any longer. In the section
entitled "Narrative and Desire," I argued that although
the deep structure and dynamic of narrative performs a
seductive, ideological function, by "subjecting" women
through the engagement of their desire, narrative
"unpleasure" could not provide a viable feminist
alternative. This argument can be extended to
narrative content also; for however "reactionary" the
pleasures of romantic fictions may be, we need to
acknowledge their power. Modleski has attempted to
carve out a place for them in feminist thinking— not
just by recuperating the vengeful and resistant
counterplots hidden beneath the orthodox surface of
popular women's genres, but also by taking the
pleasures seriously as temporary solutions to
intolerable social conditions. She suggests, for
example, that romances allow woman (object of the gaze)
to escape from her sense of always watching herself by
proffering "the state of self-transcendence and
106
self-forgetfulness promised by the ideology of romantic
love" (Loving 37); seduction fictions in one sense
empower the heroine since the rake spends all his time
obsessively plotting her corruption; and soap operas
relieve women's isolation by creating a fantasy of
community, an extended family. Even more importantly,
their formal characteristics— decentered and
fragmented— suggest a "feminine" aesthetic paradigm.11
Some critics have argued that denial of pleasure
is a major flaw in feminist thinking. According to
Cora Kaplan, A Vindication of the Rights of Women sets
the scene for sexual prohibition. Wollstonecraft's
argument is deeply compromised since she locates it
within Rousseau's model of female inferiority. While
she challenges his assumption that gender
"characteristics" are innate rather than socially
constructed, and certainly disagrees with his
educational prescriptions, she retains his belief in
women's excessive sensibilities and thus sees her sex
as easily corruptible. Kaplan accuses Wollstonecraft
of missing the real point about women's liberation,
which is that "it is male desire that must be
controlled and contained if women are to be free and
rational" (48).12 When Wollstonecraft makes women
culpable for debased eroticism, and insists that they
107
must cultivate reason to free themselves from the
slavishness of their sensuality and passion, she "sets
up a heartbreaking condition for women's liberation— a
little death, the death of desire, the death of female
pleasure" (Kaplan 39) .
But if desire is culturally shaped, and if women
are conscripted into femininity through models of
fulfillment that support patriarchal power, it is
understandable that feminists should regard erotic
pleasure with such deep suspicion. As I suggested at
the end of Chapter 1, narrative desire, like cultural
scripts of sexuality, may entice the female subject
into self-division and disempowerment. But how do we
resist seduction without relinquishing pleasure? In her
critique of Wollstoncraft, Kaplan warns of the dangers
of writing the patriarchal ideology of female chastity
into the feminist script. Because we are embarrassed
by our complicity in "shameful fantasies," and the
conflict we experience in resisting seductive
mythologies of romantic love and "femininity," we may
concur all too readily with the denunciation of
"adolescent wish-fulfillment" and "vicarious sexual
experience" which I quoted earlier from Watt.
In my view we need to take wish-fulfillment very
seriously, especially if we consider it from the
108
psychoanalytic perspective; rooted in infancy rather
than adolescence, it is the drive, the very dynamic, of
the individual's life. I am not suggesting that women
should simply surrender to escapist fantasies and thus
passively accept the painful and contradictory social
conditions which made them necessary in the first
place. But the quandary, as I see it, is that we can't
simply refuse the plots of desire and fulfillment
currently available within patriarchal culture, and
deny the importance of the pleasure-principle. The
challenge facing feminism is to develop its own
language of seduction and to engage women's desire in
alternative codings of pleasure. Rather than banishing
pleasure, we need to privilege it and increase its
availability by discovering alternative ways of
experiencing it.
In the tradition of the novel, as I have argued,
women's self-realization is bound narrowly to the
ideology of connubial bliss. Boone points out that
"until very recently the only female bildungsroman has
been a love-plot," and thus "the climactic event of
marriage confers on the heroine her entire personal
identity . . ." (74). Alternative heroines' texts do,
of course, exist, but they usually represent the single
life in terms of deprivation and hardship. The
109
spinster survives but can scarcely be said to live; the
dreariness of her existence is signified in her
lack-lustre complexion, her thin and prematurely
withered body. Some heroines (for example, Anne
Elliott; Margaret Mackenzie) are rescued from this
depressing condition by a charitable turn of the plot,
and their womanly bloom is rekindled; but other
fictional spinsters turn to hard liquor to restore a
glow to their cheek, or take a certain grim
satisfaction in supporting themselves slightly above
starvation level.13 If the fictional alternative to
marital bliss is the misery of the old maid's
existence, romantic ideology is reaffirmed rather than
challenged.
Villette represents a more successful bid for
female independence, and is often cited as the feminist
text par excellence, a systematic rewriting of the
canonical plot; but it sets up a model of repression,
since Lucy Snowe resolves to inhabit a pleasureless
world, and the novel offers no compensations for the
failure of its promise of love. Paul Emmanuel's fate
is left suspended, but in a more important sense it is
sealed and sealed off, since the fantasy of the lover's
return becomes a text in Lucy's imagination and can
exist only there; M. Paul ceases to be "real," and the
110
illusory nature, the very fictionality of the romantic
dream, is underscored. Villette performs an important
function in undermining certain cultural conventions:
it resists the ideology of romantic love; it privileges
resilience and resourcefulness over beauty and
delicacy, as the ideal qualities of a heroine; and it
engages in complex ways with questions about gender and
identity. I would argue, however, that Villette cannot
be a "satisfactory" feminist alternative to the love
and marriage plot, since satisfaction is precisely what
it withholds. Renunciation of sensuality and
sensibility, the suppression or freezing of desire,
becomes the touchstone of Lucy Snowe's existence, as
her name implies; and the substitution of work for love
can hardly be described as an alternative mode of
self-fulfillment when we consider how thoroughly Lucy
despises her students. Moreover, she loses not only
romantic love but any possibility of close human
connection: she cherishes a general dislike of her own
sex, despite a certain erotic frisson in her relations
with Minevra Fanshawe; and she has contempt for the
country in which she is exiled. The novel sets up some
very bleak conditions for women's independence; the
narrowness of Lucy's existence, her intense isolation,
above all her puritanical refusal to "indulge" herself
Ill
in pleasure, may seem, in the end, not merely
unappealing but unacceptable. The cost of autonomy is
an absolute adherence to the principle of self-denial.
What has Lucy Snowe to do with feminism today? How
does this fictional representation of the independent
woman connect with current constructions of femininity
and sexual identity? What are the costs of autonomy for
us? I would argue that we run the risk of negotiating
our independence through a sexual economy of exchange;
the price of "liberation" may be exacted through the
narrowing of possible pleasures. Of course, I don't
mean that we suffer or gladly embrace anything like
Lucy Snowe's degree of deprivation; but it is troubling
that a repressive mechanism is still at work in
feminist discourse on sexual practices and orientation.
Somehow we need to disengage female sexuality from the
paradigm of the patriarchal text.
The romantic novel, as I have argued, reproduces
patriarchal ideology by authorizing heterosexual
desire, leading to marriage and the reproduction of the
family, as the standard model. Other modes of
sexuality are suppressed in varying degrees in the
ideological-fictional world; women's alternative to
marriage is chastity; men are tacitly permitted greater
(hetero)sexual freedom; but homosexuality, though it
112
cannot be contained, is denied. In Carol Vance's
words:
Our ability to think about sexual
differences is limited . . . by a
cultural system that organizes sexual
differences in a hierarchy in which
some acts and partners are privileged
and others are punished. Privileged
forms of sexuality, for example
heterosexuality, marriage and
procreation, are protected and rewarded
by the state and subsidized through
social and economic incentives. (19)
As Vance comments, this hierarchical system
functions smoothly only if sexual nonconformity is kept
invisible. An important project of feminism, then, is
to make the invisible visible; to topple the dominant
ideology by placing the unorthodox and the marginalized
at the center of the discursive and cultural stage.
Thus feminist theory constructs gay sexuality, both
women's and men's, as a powerfully subversive threat to
social order? Eve Sedgwick, for example, develops
L&vi-Strauss's theory of male bonding through the
exchange of women, and argues that homophobia is
incited to suppress recognition of the homosocial
contract on which patriarchal domination depends.
Irigaray's coining of the word "hom(m)osexualit^" plays
on a pun to suggest a similar notion: a society built
on a masculine economy of sameness, which homosexual
relations threaten to expose. Gayle Rubin engages with
113
Levi-Strauss's theories, but from the angle of
lesbianism, which is more explicitly and directly
subversive still. Pointing out that the patriarchal
system of exchanging women depends upon
institutionalized or "compulsory heterosexuality,"
Rubin asks a very pertinent question: "What would
happen if our hypothetical woman not only refused the
man to whom she was promised, but asked for a woman
instead?" The implications of this have been taken up
and developed in the feminist work on lesbianism which
follows; most notably by Adrienne Rich, who constructs
lesbianism as a revolutionary political position, and
extends its accessibility to all women by
conceptualizing a "lesbian continuum," which ranges
from sisterly solidarity to radical separatism.
Rich's model of lesbianism, while it has the
disadvantage of being somewhat vague, is at least broad
enough for any feminist to fit into it, regardless of
her actual sexual practices. The concept of political
or "intellectual" lesbianism is very promising as a
non-conformist strategy, given that we are conscripted
into patriarchal ideology through our sexuality. But
heterosexual feminists can hardly fail to be
uncomfortable about the incongruity of embracing
lesbianism as an political policy while embracing men
114
as a personal sexual preference. Identifying a
repressive mechanism at work here, Kaplan complains
that "women who 'go with men' are considered
collaborators" and that their pleasure is "necessarily
tainted" (52). In my view, feminism is much more
heterosexist than Kaplan acknowledges; she does,
however, draw attention to the danger of creating a new
breed of "fallen women," stigmatized for enjoying
politically-incorrect pleasures. And, after all, the
legislation of desire is hardly compatible with the
discourse of liberation.
Sexual identity is, I would argue, as contingent
and unstable as any other kind of human identity, and
individuals rarely fall as neatly into rigid categories
as we like to believe. As Vance points out, sexual
orientation is potentially mutable and thus
unpredictable in an individual's lifetime. Moreover,
while in one sense we may "know" what we like, there is
an element of self-censorship in this, since sexuality
is at another level unknowable. In our fantasies,
dreams and unconscious drives, we are all probably much
more polymorphously perverse than in our sexual
practices, certainly more than we may be willing or
able to recognize. Paula Webster argues that we have
devised a "list of taboos [which] marked off more and
115
more unacceptable terrain." Thus we reimport the
patriarchal doctrine of "purity," and all its
consequential inhibitions of female desire, to the
feminist text:
As we disclaimed any identification
with, or interest in, these fantasies
and activities, that part of the
pedestal, supposed to protect our
innocence and insure our purity, was
rebuilt .... What kind of women
would we be, if we desired to break any
of the taboos that domesticated our
sexuality, leaving us deprived but
safe? Even daring to speak about what
we might like seemed dangerous. Could
we be thinking unfeminist thoughts?
( 3 8 6 )
Somehow we have to free sexuality from the
political implications that we were right to discover
there; until we can find a way out of this
contradiction, we may perhaps need to behave
perversely, illogically and strategically, and make
them an issue only when it suits us. Rather than
privileging one sexual behavior over another as
"politically correct," it might be more productive, of
pleasure and power, to embrace diversity and pluralism.
As Vance suggests:
[S]exuality may be a particularly
unpromising domain for regulation
[since it] remains fluid and
ever-changing, evolving through adult
life in response to internal and
external vicissitudes: flexible,
anarchic, ambiguous, layered with
116
multiple meanings, opening doors to
unexpected experience. The connections
of both sexual behavior and fantasy to
infancy, the irrational, the
unconscious, is a source of both
surprise and pleasure. (22)
And subversive drives, we might add. It is
because of this highly disruptive
potential— sexuality’s resistance to the laws of
ideology which operate through this very terrain, its
survival and flourishing in many "aberrant" forms
despite the cultural imposition of a sexual norm— that
we should cherish "jouissance" as a liberating power.
I see sexuality, then, as another "fiction" or
cultural production, full of contradictions which
unsettle the smooth surface of the dominant or
"natural" version, and emerge in the variety of
individuals' experience. Vance suggests that women's
experience is, in fact, our "deepest text," for in
spite of all the discourse on women's sexuality, our
actual fantasies and desires have almost consistently
been ignored. This is as true of some kinds of
feminism as of patriarchal discourse, since both have
tried to police desire; but in women's actual
experience, diversity is the norm. Cora Kaplan cites
the writing on the wall of a women's restroom as
evidence of both pluralism and prohibition:
117
About the means of arriving at pleasure
there was plenty of disagreement; if
anything, that cubicle was a telling
reminder that there has never been a
single femininity, and that within
feminism sexuality and the meaning of
pleasure have most frequently been the
site of anger, contradiction and
confusion .... (56)
It is, of course, important to keep anger alive,
to retain an oppositional position within mainstream
culture, and criticize the repressive representations
of femininity, the seductive ideological fictions, we
find there. But the feminist movement has to be a
movement towards as well as from; and the way there may
be to acknowledge the complex and contradictory nature
of erotic drives. In Carol Vance's words:
Feminism must put forward a politics
that resists deprivation and supports
pleasure. It must understand pleasure
as life-affirming, empowering, desirous
of human connection and the future, and
not fear it as destructive, enfeebling
or corrupt. Feminism must speak to
sexual pleasure as a fundamental right,
which cannot be put off to a better or
easier time. (24, emphasis added)
There is an urgent need for feminism to counteract
the seductive fictions of patriarchy with some utopian
fictions of its own, and I will return to this question
in my final chapter. Meanwhile we are caught in a
contradiction, suspended between our conscious need to
resist the dangerous pleasures of patriarchal culture,
and our unconscious surrender to their potent promises
of self-fulfillment. This is an uneasy place of
compromise; yet we cannot afford to postpone the
experience of pleasure until desire can be structured
differently and a new politics of the unconscious can
be defined— or else, like the White Queen, we may find
ourselves telling Alice: "The rule is, jam tomorrow
and jam yesterday— but never jam to-dav.1 1
119
NOTES
Watt's seminal work firmly establishes Richardson
as the father of the novel. Women writers are,
incidentally, placed almost entirely outside the scope
of his study; Aphra Behn is briefly mentioned, Fanny
Burney is acknowledged as having some talent, Jane
Austen and George Eliot are named as writers who
challenged the "masculine prerogative" but excluded on
historical grounds. Inevitably this leaves the
impression that the novel is consumed by women,
produced and authorized by men.
2 Greer, cited in Showalter (1977), p. 11.
Important texts dealing with this issue include Ellen
Moers, Literary Women; Showalter, A Literature of Their
Own; Gilbert and Gubar, The Madwoman in the Attic;
Tillie Olsen, Silences; and of course Virginia Woolf's
classic text, A Room of One's Own.
3 See especially Alvin Kernan for a full engagement
with the revolutionary effects of new printing
technology.
4 In a loaded sense, of course, she is nothing but
labor-value.
5 Hill, 331. See also Joseph Boone, Tradition.
Counter Tradition, chapter 2.
6 Boswell, 3 05.
7 Michele Barrett points out, for example, that
while few families today depend only upon male wages,
we retain the nineteenth century ideology of the male
breadwinner, and this determines attitudes towards
women's waged work. (See especially p. 77-8).
Nineteenth century ideologies of femininity
prevail in the legislation of sexuality and women's
reproductivity; and above all in certain notorious rape
trials which have blamed the victim and made her
responsible for male morality.
8 Ruskin, "Of Queen's Gardens."
9 See, for example, Modleski's discussion of Gothic
films in Loving With a Vengeance.
120
10 This advice to a free-lance writer of fiction
is cited in Greer 214.
11 Compare Boone's comments on Cranford. in
Tradition. Counter Tradition 295-304.
12 Unfortunately, the moral code which makes women
responsible for men's sexual misbehavior proves
particularly tenacious. Novels like Tess of the
D'Urbervilles or Ruth have challenged the hypocrisy of
forgiving the man and condemning the woman, but the
ethic of innate feminine guilt has remained with us, as
modern-day rape trials sometimes reveal.
13 See Gissing, The Odd Women.
I 121
(
3
MAIDENS AND MAGDALENS, MERMAIDS AND ANGELS:
"WOMAN" AS FALLEN TEXT IN MARY BARTON
i
In my reading, Mary Barton poses a riddle. What do
c
the following have in common: Frankenstein's monster, a
Manx cat, a Mermaid, and a dead scorpion that
mysteriously comes to life? And what is the connection
between these strange creatures, all represented in the
• novel, and another, extra-textual being that insists on
i
! joining them in my imagination: a dog dancing on its
i
hind legs?
The fantastical elements of Marv Barton have been
overlooked, even though the conventional love-plot is
spun into a web of allusions to the more ancient
‘ stories of chivalric romance, classical legend,
| fairytales and folklore. Though these literary traces
' are largely ignored, the plot of romantic desire is of
course fully acknowledged, but generally considered
subordinate to the overtly political plot. Most
I * •
] critical discussions emphasize Mary Barton's social
! realism, and place it decisively in the group of
i
I
i industrial novels produced in England during the 184 0s.
i
' I have no quarrel with this, since one of my interests
lies in the discomfort Gaskell experienced as a speaker
!
i
i
in the public forum, the "Condition of England" debate;
but I do have reservations about the tendency to
privilege realism over romance (which sometimes blurs
recognition that both are, equally, literary
conventions or forms of fantasy), and to privilege John
Barton's story over Mary's, (which implies that the
private plot of desire has no legitimate place in this
new fictional terrain, and thereby marginalizes the
heroine within her own text).1 On the other hand, it
is easy to see how this could happen. While more
conventional nineteenth-century romantic novels focus
inward, on the psychological development of the heroine
and her intimate relationships within a narrow,
middle-class circle, Mary Barton relocates the literary
paradigms of romantic love to the laboring-class
community and engages in an explicit confrontation with
class politics. Though the novel can be perceived,
like those more narrowly-focused romantic fictions, as
questioning social doctrines of femininity and
redefining feminine passion, its marriage plots are
filtered through a different lens, which may distract
us from the urgency of its challenges to bourgeois
ideologies of gender and the domestic ideal which
supports them. The predominant critical focus on the
novel's overt class discourse has shifted its feminist
politics into the shadows of a subtext— though in my
reading, John's story is actually the pretext for
Mary's. As Nancy Armstrong has argued: "The terms and
dynamics of sexual desire must be a political
language .... [L]iterature concerned with women and
the vicissitudes of sexual love is no less political
than literature that deals with men and the official
institutions of the state" (Ideology 2). And Raymond
Williams, (who unfortunately overlooks Gaskell in his
critique of the industrial novels), suggests that "an
intensity of desire is as much a response, a deciding
response, to the human crisis of that time as the more
obviously recognizable political radicalism" (English
Novel 61). Since public affairs are generally taken
more seriously than private ones, however, and Marv
Barton incorporates both, the love plot's claim to
political status often goes unnoticed.
But at this point my concern is not so much to
validate Mary's plot as to suggest that the
distinctions between social realism as a literary
convention, and the "real," sometimes become blurred in
critical responses to the novel. It is as if the
abundance of naturalistic details, the authentic
descriptions of working-class life, become so absorbing
that other features "disappear": not just the
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importance of the love-plotf or the magical elements
associated with it, but the very fictionality of the
text. Gaskell deals so meticulously with material
conditions— self-consciously modeling her writing upon
Defoe because of "the healthy way in which he sets
objects not feelings before you" (Gaskell Letters
420)— that the novel easily lends itself to
reconstruction as a Marxist critique, and its strength
in this respect oddly limits critical responses. There
is a great temptation to treat the novel as documentary
rather than aesthetic fiction, since its social and
historical references are fully authenticated by other,
non-fictional records.2 But novels are, after all,
imaginative responses to contemporary conditions, and
differ from the "factual" documentation of (say) the
blue books or other official reports. This is not to
say that historical records are more "true" than
literary texts, since both are modes of discursive
representation and in that sense "fictions," as I
argued in Chapter 1. My point is, rather, that
specific codes and expectations apply to different
discourses, and more things go on in a novel than we
can possibly expect to "find" (or invent) if we treat
it as relatively unmediated social history.
Largely overlooked, then, in my opinion, is Mary
Barton's literariness; its working-class characters are
shaped by novelistic conventions, and their suffering
has certain symbolic implications because of this
fictional status. Of course I don't mean to deny the
historical reality of the oppression which Mary Barton
describes, nor to detract from its author's serious
social purpose in "telling the truth."3 Still, for
all its realism, the novel is not in the end "real" but
a "symbolic resolution," in Jameson's term, or a formal
representation; and its allusive symbols, intratextual
references, and playful humor, tend to be negated in
the critical emphasis on its historical accuracy.
Moreover, despite its harrowing account of suffering,
or even the "fault," which Gaskell perceived, "of their
being too heavy a shadow over the book" (GL 42), Mary
Barton involves an investment in pleasure, most
probably for the writer as well as the reader. Even if
that pleasure is sometimes closer to the "pleasure in
despair" (MB 3 07) which Jane Wilson finds in her son's
unjust arrest, other kinds are available. Not least is
the element of romance which is woven into the
fictional fabric, counterbalancing the grim perspective
of realism with fanciful flights of fantasy which are,
in turn, as potentially subversive as the political
plot: the fabulous and monstrous creatures named my
riddle, for example, seem to me quite delicately-
Dickensian in their parodic significance. The romantic
plot is enmeshed into this world of romance, indeed
lies at its heart, for we are shown that libidinal love
is full of mystery and has the potential to transform
and spell-bind. We are alerted to this co-existing
world of romance as early as the Preface, where we are
told that the narrator, seeking a story, "bethought me
how deep might be the romance in the lives of some of
those who elbow me daily" (387). Among that faceless,
numberless, ordinary, downtrodden mass of humanity,
there exist individuals who possess the power of magic.
Alice is one example: a saintly witch, perhaps
descended from her namesake in Scott's Bride of
Lammermoor. she lives beneath the ground in a
miraculously clean cellar-room, "festooned with all
manner of hedge-row, ditch, and field plants, which we
are accustomed to call valueless, but which have a
powerful effect either for good or for evil" (51).
Initiated into the secrets of the countryside, Alice
knows how to make potions, "delicate little messes of
broth," to cure the sick. An exile in the city, she
belongs to the ancient world of folklore and country-
custom; and as she lies dying, she is spirited away to
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the Cumberland of her childhood, losing all cognizance
of her actual surroundings as she retreats further into
memory and fantasy. Alice's masculine counterpart is
Job, a curiosity-shop character, "a little wiry-looking
man, who moved with a jerking motion, as if his limbs
were worked by a string like a child's toy" (76). He,
too, comes from an ancient world, of Merlin and magic:
his eyes, which "absolutely gleamed with intelligence"
are so "keen . . . you felt as if they were almost
wizard-like"; he inhabits a room "not unlike a wizard's
dwelling," decorated not with herbs, this time, but
with other items essential to sorcery: "impaled
insects," "weird-looking creatures that sprawled around
the room in their roughly-made glass cases" (76-7).
With his "cabalistic books," "mysterious instruments,"
and "strange language"— the technical terms which Job
"pattered down . . . like hail on a skylight," he
appears to Mary like a "fortune teller," and though
"Margaret had said he was not . . . she did not know
whether to believe her" (79).
Mary and Margaret have their own magic; they are
mermaids, with deceptive powers of self-transformation.
They are also, as mermaids often can be, dangerous to
men. Since I discuss Mary's sexuality in a separate
section, I will focus for the moment only on Margaret,
128
who is in any case the more mermaidenish of the two,
even though, unlike Mary, she is "so commonplace, until
her singing powers were called forth" (79). Her voice
enchants the sailor Will, who knows a marvel when he
meets one, for he travels to exotic shores, has
witnessed "the wonders of the deep" (198), tells tall
tales of flying fish and cats without tails, and knows
someone who saw a real mermaid. Though Job remains
cynical, Will takes pains to enlighten him:
It stands to reason th' sea hereabouts
is too cold for mermaids; for women
here don't go half-naked on account o'
climate. But I've been in lands where
muslin were too hot to wear on land,
and where the sea was more than
milkwarm. (198)
In such a hot climate an experienced sailor might
expect to find "mermaids, and sharks, and such like
perils." The mermaid of Jack Harris's account is as
"beautiful as any of the wax ladies in the barber's
shops." Having swum up from the deep sea "to warm
herself," she sits on a rock, "sunning herself" and
sexily combing her hair. While "beckoning" to the
sailors with one hand, "with the other . . . she held a
looking-glass." She is the perfect picture not only of
feminine narcissism but also of alluring eroticism to a
lonely sailor, even down to the detail of her "bright
grass green hair," for "when first we get sight of
129
land, there's no colour so lovely as grass green"; and
she is perhaps sexually aroused herself, for she is
heard "puffing, like a creature come up to take
breath," or like "folks in th'asthma." The mermaid's
panting is comically echoed in Job's deliberate, "very
audible puffs" of his pipe, "as if the story were not
worth listening to," and in Mary's urging will on,
"breathlessly." The sailors mean to capture the
mermaid, as a "fair prize . . . as good as a whale in
ready money," but are foiled in their attempts to sell
her body:
"[W]hether it were she grew frightened
of their fowling pieces . . . or
whether it were she were just a fickle
jade as did not rightly know her own
mind (which seeing one half of her was
woman, I think myself was most
probable), but when they were only
about two oars' length from the rock
where she sat, down she plopped into
the water, leaving nothing but her
hinder end of a fish tail, sticking up
for a minute, and then that disappeared
too." (200)
Because of its precise ambivalence, this is a
brilliant paradigm of cultural perceptions about female
sexuality, and the fear that apparently requires it to
be so stringently controlled.4 We are as puzzled by
the mermaid's behavior as the sailors, (though their
own rapacious and profiteering motives are clear
enough). Could her provocative posing signify a
130
genuine sexual invitation, or is it rather, as myth
would have it, a sinister form of fatal attraction? Is
she actually afraid of their phallic weapons, or is her
sudden disappearance just coquettish? Who, in this
fantasy, really has the power? The story resists
interpretation, since there is no way to know whether
the mermaid is really deadly or the sailors "merely"
construct her so. But constructions of female
sexuality are productive as well as restricting, and
whether the men fear her destructive desire or just the
tyranny of their own, these questions are in the end
irrelevant. The point is that the mermaid is perceived
as dangerous, and she and the sailors adjust their
behavior accordingly. She can exploit her prized
beauty and hypothesized powers to gain advantage over
men, or she can plummet to the depths of the ocean to
evade capture. The men can attack her with guns but
would prefer to bind and sell her than kill her. The
fishy, phallic tail that she displays at the end, in
that wonderfully insouciant gesture, is another graphic
encoding of ambivalence in this fishily phallic tale.
It seems to me an apt image for the way that
masternarratives of female sexuality are fashioned on
the masculine model of desire. Moreover, it suggests
all the sorcery and duplicity traditionally associated
131
with female sexuality— the half-woman, half-monster
that abounds in our legends— as well as the real or
imagined powers ascribed to woman, who apparently must
be controlled in case she dispossesses the man of the
phallus, talismanic symbol of his potency.5 In her
study of nineteenth-century representations of women,
Nina Auerbach summarizes the mermaid's position thus:
Mermaids . . . submerge themselves not
to negate their power but to conceal
it . . . . [The mermaid] is a creature
of transformations and mysterious
interrelations . . . Fathomless and
changing, she was an awesome threat to
her culture. The social restrictions
that crippled women's lives . . . were
fearful attempts to exorcise a
mysterious strength. (71-3)
Auerbach argues that demonology and angelology are
paradoxically connected since woman is figured through
such polemical extremes, and "has no home on earth, but
only among divine and demonic essence." Though
"angelic motion had once known no boundaries" (64), the
angel of the house is frozen into her domestic space,
constant and immobile, in direct contrast to the
slippery, mobile, mutating mermaid; yet the one can
easily metamorphose into its opposite, as we can
observe in Will's perceptions of Margaret. After
completing his story of the "Mermaidicus," Will is
initially angered by Job's skeptical disbelief, but so
132
mollified when his subsequent account of the flying
fish is credited that he offers a dried specimen as a
peace token. In exchange, Job makes a gift of his
grand-daughter Margaret, by asking her to perform; and
she now becomes a siren whose song captures the sailor
in a binding spell:
[The] young sailor sat entranced;
mouth, eyes, all open, in order to
catch every breath of sound. His very
lids refused to wink, as if afraid in
that brief proverbial interval to lose
d particle of the rich music that
floated through the room. For the
first time the idea crossed Mary's mind
that it was possible the plain little
sensible Margaret, so prim and demure,
might have power over the heart of the
handsome, dashing, spirited Will
Wilson. (202)
It is Will's turn now to be aroused to the point
of breathlessness. Later, as he gathers the courage to
declare his love, we are told that "It was Margaret's
angelic voice that had entranced him, and which made
him think of her as a being of some other sphere"
(225). But which sphere? we may wonder. Is she angel
or demon? When the song is over, and "as soon as he
had taken breath (a long deep gasp of admiration),"
Will offers to bring Margaret a Manx cat, a "tail-less
phenomenon" which, he boasts, "captivates some people
uncommonly."
133
In contrast to the Mermaid which is half-tail, the
Manx cat has no tail at all. As Will puts it: H,They
look as queer, and out o' nature as flying fish, or— 1
he gulped the words down that should have followed"
(203). For Job, what is "out o' nature" is defined
differently than for Will, and defies belief; though
himself a wizard-like creature,deeply intrigued by the
world's wonders, Job acknowledges only those which can
be properly classified in scientific language. But a
liberating kind of imaginative truth is suggested by
Will's tall tales, an affirmation of the mythic,
illogical and the non-rational. In contrast to Job,
who is logic-bound and sees writing as a way of
preserving order— "to him [it] was little more than an
auxiliary to natural history; a way of ticketing
specimens, not of expressing thoughts" (406)— Will is a
fiction-maker, with allegiances to the author; there
are utopian and subversive possibilities in his
inventiveness, and in his willingness to believe in
things that strangely go against nature. A woman who
exceeds her culture's representations of femininity may
become such a creature: half-monster, freakish, "out
o' nature" (203)— but only because nature is in turn a
fiction, a discursive construct evoked to support the
dominant ideology.
To return to my riddle, I propose that the
fabulous and frightening creatures I listed— the Manx
cat, the mermaid, the dead scorpion that returns to
life, Frankenstein's monster, the dog that dances on
its hind legs— are all perversions of nature, and
metaphors for those who resist or reverse cultural
constructions of gender. The Manx cat is a castrated
counterpart to the mermaid, who, for all her seductive
power, is weirdly dispossessed of her feminine sexual
organs below the waist.6 Frankenstein's monster, an
unnatural and abandoned child associated by the
narrator with the subversive masses who "rise up to
life" (219), has become a powerful feminist symbol for
the woman who "seeks the power of self-articulation"
(Gilbert and Gubar 70). The scorpion, preserved in a
bottle as object of the gaze, is a nightmarish parody
of Snow White in her glass coffin.7 Both creatures
are miraculously restored to life; the scorpion,
however, turns out to be dangerously unaffectionate,
and is thus promptly boiled, pickled and recontained
within its transparent prison. Like Frankenstein's
monster, it is an object of hatred whose powers are
feared to be deadly once fully unleashed.
The dog dancing on its hind legs is, of course,
Johnson's famous description of the woman preacher— one
135
who exists but against all rules of nature. But, like
any one of this bizarre menagerie, it might represent
the woman writer: like the Manx cat, she is
symbolically castrated; like the mermaid or siren, she
seduces with her song; like Frankenstein's monster, she
seizes the power of speech from her creator to tell her
own story;8 and, like the scorpion, she may seem
safely contained but her hidden energies, once woken,
are unpredictable and dangerous.
Having solved the riddle, for the present, we will
move for a while into a fuller exploration of the
woman-as-writer, before returning to Marv Barton and
its representations of femininity, romantic ideology
and female desire. But the creatures of the riddle
will, I hope, haunt the pages which follow, even though
I defer further specific discussion of romance, legend
and fairytale until the last section of this chapter.
Elizabeth Gaskell: an improper woman?
So far, I have spoken of the woman-writer as a
dangerous, subversive feminist; but these are not terms
traditionally applied to Elizabeth Gaskell. Critics
usually tend to fictionalize Mrs. Gaskell as the
charming heroine of a Victorian domestic plot. Even
136
Coral Lansbury, whose critical readings otherwise
sharply oppose conventional perceptions of Gaskell,
begins by telling a romantic tale of an "admirable
match" between "a remarkably handsome young man,
intelligent and learned," and a bride whose "wit
matched her beauty" (5). The legend flourishes most
fully and famously in Lord David Cecil's account:
The outstanding fact about Mrs. Gaskell
is her femininity .... [S]he was
all a woman was expected to be:
gentle, domestic, tactful,
unintellectual, prone to tears, easily
shocked . . . the typical Victorian
woman. (197-8)
Although immediately after her death Gaskell was
eulogized— with the generosity that obituaries usually
display— as "the most powerful and finished female
novelist of an epoch singularly rich in female
novelists" (Athenaeum Review. November 1865), nine
years later the emphasis had shifted from power to
propriety: "[T]here is no purer author in modern
times," writes G.B. Smith in 1874 ;9 and Cecil's
characterization, stressing sense and sensibility
rather than intellectual endowment, can be traced
throughout the critical tradition. Ranking Gaskell
with other contemporary women writers, Cecil concludes:
In the placid dovecotes of Victorian
womanhood, [Eliot and Charlotte Bronte]
were eagles. But you have only to look
137
at a portrait of Mrs. Gaskell,
soft-eyed beneath her charming veil, to
see that she was a dove. (152)
The comparison doubly confirms the inferior status
of "femininity," since the imposing stature of Eliot
and Bronte can be explained by their being "misfits,"
i.e., freakish and unwomanly women; at the same time,
Gaskell, so visibly feminine, lacks proper authority,
and need not be taken seriously when she ruffles her
feathers over a social injustice or two. Mary Barton
"sinned generally against the truth in matters of fact,
either above the comprehension of its authoress or
beyond her sphere of knowledge," claims the Manchester
Guardian in 1847 (quoted in Pollard, 41); compare
Cecil's comment, a century later, that the industrial
novel requires "an understanding of economics and
history wholly outside the range of her Victorian
feminine intellect" (235). Even Gaskell herself can be
said to concur; at least, this is the obvious way to
read the statement, "I know nothing of Political
Economy, or the theories of trade," in the Preface to
Mary Barton. In Cecil's view, Gaskell is ill-equipped
to work outside her proper sphere, the domestic and the
pastoral; Mary Barton "gave scope neither to the
humorous, the pathetic nor the charming," and, worse
138
still, involved foreign emotions, "masculine and
violent ones" (235).
Cecil's is a representative voice in a critical
tradition that constructs Gaskell as charming but
intellectually deficient, graceful but shallow, and so
on. Why the anxiety to keep Gaskell so firmly in her
secondary place? One explanation, which I touched on
above, is that patriarchal ideology here operates
visibly through traditional literary criticism. The
division of literature into "major" and "minor"
leagues, combined with the emphasis on Gaskell 1 s
"femininity," both replicates and supports the social
division of individuals into a gender-based hierarchy?
after all, the eagles in the dovecote are misfits.
Unlike the less socially-conventional writers with
whom she is compared— unmarried and childless, they are
already alienated from their culture's official
construction of femininity— Gaskell is one of the few
Victorian writers whose name begins with "Mrs." to have
survived this century's cultural screening mechanism;
nonetheless, the emphasis on her conformist femininity
has effectively kept her in a subordinate place, not
only in the mainstream but even in the feminist
tradition.10 My interest is not in defending
Gaskell's right to be considered the equal of her
139
contemporaries but rather in noting a bias in the
formation of the feminist canon also. It is as if only
those who resist the domestic myth have anything
important to say about it. But a quite different
critique of the construct "woman" is possible from
someone who lived so fully within its boundaries, and
succumbed to the seductive fictions of her patriarchal
world. As Kathleen Tillotson suggests, Gaskell "always
combined something of the serpent's wisdom with the
dove's innocence" (2 05-6); and critics' tendency to
trivialize her perhaps reflects a need to contain
certain challenges posed by her writing— challenges
which may be all the more alarming in being
articulated, not from the borders, but from the heart
of Victorian society's most precious plot of domestic
and maternal fulfillment. Gaskell based her identity
as a writer very firmly on her identity as mother.
"When you are forty, and if you have a gift of being an
authoress you will write ten times as good a novel as
you could do now, just because you will have gone
through so much more of the interests of a wife and
mother," she wrote to an aspiring author in 1362 (GL
69 5);11 yet in her correspondence and in her fiction
we can trace a sense of profound self-division, the
140
difference between the ideological construction of self
and her experience of it.
For, of course, the "woman" of Victorian discourse
is as deeply fissured as the "self" of Lacanian
discourse; as Mary Poovey reminds us:
[Despite] repeated invocations of the
domestic ideal, and despite the
epistemological centrality of woman's
self-consistency to the oppositional
structure of Victorian ideas, the
representation of woman was also a site
of cultural contestation. (9)
While "woman" can of course be deconstructed in
various ways, Poovey traces a radical split in "the
persistence in the domestic ideal of a historically
specific and antithetical image of woman . . . as Eve,
'Mother of our Miseries'"(9). The abundance of debates
in the nineteenth century about womanly nature, as well
as the demarcation of separate spheres for women and
men and the ideological weight attached to such
concepts as the "family" and the "hearth," perhaps
betrays an anxiety to anchor what constantly threatens
to slip away.12 We may wonder whether the excessive
emphasis on Gaskell's femininity, in traditional
critical discourse, can be seen as part of ideology's
project to fix, define and hierarchize; after all, if
Gaskell can be made to sustain her culture's
representation of ideal femininity— in contrast to
141
indelicate Emily, rebellious Charlotte or graceless
George— the terms of the opposition disguise the
instability of the construct.
Whatever the ideological basis for traditional
constructions of Mrs. Gaskell, my own position in
ideology and history compels me to invent her
differently. In my version, Elizabeth Gaskell inhabits
a feminist plot, and is less interested in defining
than in questioning and disrupting; she likes to test
the limits of plot-boundaries, both in her own fictions
and in those produced by her culture. Though she
cannot step outside the ideological formations of her
own culture and history, she acknowledges their
contradictions and makes some of them visible in her
fiction. In subtle and intricate ways she challenges
social constructions of gender; for example, she does
indeed represent motherhood as a moral touchstone, but
she builds it into a critique of the patriarchal social
structure. The men, in her fiction, are redeemed by
becoming mothers.13
The setting for my Gaskell plot is not the
dovecote, the drawing room or the idealized countryside
of Cecil's version, but Manchester, the "shock city" of
the nineteenth century. Elizabeth Gaskell, walking the
streets of the city during the years of its most rapid
142
and traumatic growth, might have bumped into the young
revolutionary, Friedrich Engels (whose Condition of the
Working Class in England in 1844 was published in
Germany in 1845, the year that Gaskell began writing
Mary Barton). Gaskell, like Engels, must have seen
(and smelled) plenty to disturb her, and a sense of
outrage drives the political plot, but that she was
"easily shocked" seems improbable. The Manchester
ghettoes that she describes so familiarly in Mary
Barton could be completely avoided by the squeamish,
according to Engels:
The town itself is peculiarly built, so
that someone can live in it for two
years and travel into it and out daily
without coming into contact with a
working-people * s quarter or even with
workers, that is, so long as he
confines himself to his business or to
pleasure walks. (45)
As readers, we may have thought to avoid such
scenes ourselves; the title "Mary Barton" invites us to
take a pleasure walk. We are like Jem, who goes to
Mary's house seeking love but uses the pretext of
visiting John, and is thus "fairly caught in his own
trap" when Mary disappears and John commences a lengthy
political lecture; we, too, thought we were entering
the world of private desire but find ourselves instead
in a double-plot where romantic dreams are disrupted by
143
the social critique, forcing us to confront some
unpalatable truths. Constrained by novelistic
conventions, Gaskell nonetheless manages to describe,
precisely and graphically, the squalor she found on
those streets:
[W]omen . . . tossed household slops of
every description into the gutter; they
ran into the next pool, which
overflowed and stagnated .... You
went down one step even from the foul
area into a cellar in which a family of
human beings lived .... After the
account I have given of the state of
the street, no-one can be surprised
that on going into the cellar inhabited
by Davenport, the smell was so foetid
as almost to knock the two men down.
(98)
Engels, publishing for a different audience,
describes the streets in slightly more explicit terms:
In one of these courts there
stands . . . a privy without a door, so
dirty that the inhabitants can pass in
and out of the court only by passing
through foul pools of stagnant urine
and excrement. (49)
Steven Marcus is free to put it more explicitly
still, and to comment on the symbolic significance of
such living conditions:
[M]illions of English men, women and
children were virtually living in
chewed. The immediate question seems
to have been whether they weren't
drowning in it . . . . And that
substance which suffuses their lives
was also a virtual objectification of
their social condition, their place in
144
society; that is what they were.
(Engels 185)
We can see Mary Barton as part of a larger reform
movement— as one item in a vast collection of texts,
ranging from poetry to fiction to pamphlets to
privately-commissioned reports to blue books, all
designed to awaken the consciences of the privileged,
and, in many cases, to shock them into consciousness of
the squalor and suffering on which their good fortunes
were built. Or we may see Mary Barton as committed to
revolution rather than reform; certainly some of
Gaskell's contemporaries considered it an inflammatory
book. Gaskell professed astonishment: "I had no idea
it would have proved such a firebrand," she claimed (GL
37), and consistently protested her innocence:
[M]y intention was simply to represent
the view many of the work-people
take .... No-one can feel more
deeply than I do how wicked it is to do
anything to excite class against class;
and the sin has been most unconscious
if I have done so. (GL 36)
But is there a shade of disingenuousness in this
protest? After all, Gaskell was writing Mary Barton
during a politically and economically volatile decade,
and to undertake to speak the consciousness of the
working-class at this moment in history— to "give
utterance to the agony . . . [of] this people" (MB
37)— is inevitably to engage in a class conflict which
was perceived, at the time, as potentially
revolutionary. Violence was already inscribed into
Manchester's recent past— the 1819 Peterloo Massacre
was "about as close to unadorned class warfare as
England was to get" (Marcus: Engels 15)— and Gaskell,
taking up residence in the city in 1832, witnessed its
worst years of depression, and the most active phase of
Chartist agitation there. She weaves historical
incidents into her fiction that connect fortuitously
with the current moment: for example, John Barton's
account of the workers' 183 9 march to London to present
their petition, and their subsequent despair at the
government's brutal indifference, offers an oblique
commentary on the dispersal of marchers and the
rejection of the third Chartist petition in 1848, the
year of Marv Barton's publication. Gaskell's sense of
timing was shrewd? she badgered Edward Chapman several
times about the publication date, recognizing that "the
tenor of my tale is such as to excite attention at the
present time of struggle on the part of work people to
obtain what they esteem their rights" (GL 54). On the
other hand she wants her political insight to be fully
acknowledged: she declares publicly in the Preface
that her revelations of Manchester life preceded
146
current interest in such affairs, being "completed
above a year ago" and prior to those "events which have
so recently occurred among a similar class on the
Continent" (i.e., revolutions in France, Italy and
Austria); and she insists privately to Chapman that her
novel was "no catchpenny run-up" on those events (GL
58). While Gaskell would later comment, with comic
dismay, that people called her a "socialist and
communist" (GL 108), her expressed sympathies for the
working-classes may accommodate a more radical
interpretation than she was prepared to admit.14 Marv
Barton seems intended to serve as a pacifistic bridge
between alienated classes; nonetheless, despite
Gaskell's dread of conflict and desire to avoid it, her
novel can be seen as articulating the threat of
violence that Gaskell explicitly condemns in her
correspondence. The Preface warns us that "at
present . . . lips are compressed for curses, and . . .
hands clenched and ready to smite"; then slyly points
out that this representation "has received some
confirmation" from the revolutions in Europe. John
Barton, cherishing a bitter hatred for the rich, looks
forward to retribution, which he imagines in spiritual
terms: 111 [W]e are to live . . . as separate as Dives
and Lazarus . . . but I know who was best off then,'
147
and he wound up his speech with a low chuckle that had
no mirth in it" (45) ; but the very finality of the
vengeance he anticipates is echoed in the physical
threat that concludes Engel1s study:
Then, indeed, will the war cry resound
through the land: "War to the palaces,
peace to the cottages!"— but by then it
will be too late for the rich to
beware. (298)
Driven by despair and, oddly, by conscience into
an act of assassination, Barton is so sympathetically
portrayed that he seems not to be morally accountable;
many critical accounts build on this suggestion,
romanticizing Barton as Byronic hero, even to the
degree that his act of murder is seen as selfless,
"motivated by love as innocent . . . as Jem's love for
Mary" (Stoneman 81). It is no great distance from this
possible narrative position to the explicit endorsement
of criminal actions that Engels expressed during those
same years:
And he among the surplus who has
courage and passion enough openly to
resist society, to reply with declared
war upon the bourgeoisie to the
disguised war which the bourgeoisie
wages upon him, goes forth to rob,
pluck, murder and burn! (Condition 87)
"Surplus" is an interesting word-choice; this
dehumanizing conception also circulates in nineteenth
century discussions of the uneven ratio of the sexes
148
and the consequent social problem of unmarried women:
see, for example, W.R. Greg's 1862 essay, "Why Are
Women Redundant?" which posits monogamous marriage as
"the despotic law of life" and single women as the
problem to be solved. the evil and anomaly to be cured"
(440). There is more than a discursive connection
between the status of the unemployed laboring classes,
of either sex, and the status of single women, whether
working class or bourgeois (the latter being socially
prohibited from employment). Both groups, becoming
superfluous in the capitalist social formation at this
time, pose the threat of lawlessness: literally,
through crime; symbolically, through the "great social
evil" of prostitution (or, more subtly, through the
independence of women who resist domestic ideology and
become self-supporting).15 Later I will argue that
Mary Barton makes implicit connections between the
social rebellion of the unemployed activist who turns
to crime, and the social/sexual rebellion of the fallen
woman who turns to prostitution.16 For now I will
just note that both subversive subjects are compressed
into the fictional framework, threatening to transgress
conventional boundaries. Indeed, even without
apparently condoning political assassination and
149
prostitution, the novel trespasses into forbidden
territory, as Lansbury points out:
The prohibition against overt sex is
easily comprehended. There was,
however, another kind of censorship
that is not easily appreciated today.
Any discussion of trade unions and
strikes in fiction was prohibited,
unless that discussion was voiced in
the most condemnatory terms .... It
was as though the Combination Acts of
1799 . . . lived on in the pages of
literature long after their repeal.
(10-11)
Given the doubly-dangerous nature of her material,
it is not surprising that Gaskell was "almost
frightened by [her] action in writing it" (GL 67), but
in spite of the hostility directed at her— "Some people
are very angry," she lamented in 1849 (GL 70)— she
would remain committed to provocative treatment of
controversial subjects, and her self-justification in
Mary Barton's Preface— "I have tried to write
truthfully"— was to become the refrain of her literary
career. (See Hilary Schor's perceptive and detailed
discussion of Gaskell as teller of unpalatable truths.)
Ruth aroused a storm of protest for its emphasis on the
purity and piety of a fallen woman: "Of course, it is
a prohibited book in this, as in many other
households," admitted Gaskell (GL 221); and though she
would later suffer deeply from the press's
150
condemnation, complaining, "I have been so ill; I do
believe it has been a Ruth fever," (GL 150), she shows
her characteristic courage and integrity when she
writes: An "unfit subject for fiction" is the thing to
say about it; I knew all this before; but I determined
notwithstanding to speak my mind out about it; only now
I shrink with more pain than I can tell you from what
people are saying, though I would do every jot of it
over again tomorrow" (GL 221). The Life of Charlotte
Bronte instantly generated the threat of lawsuits and
public retractions had to be made (by her husband
William; Elizabeth had gone abroad, hoping to avoid the
inevitable onslaught). In Sylvia 1s Lovers Gaskell
would return to the subject of tyranny nd rebellion,
through her sympathetic portrayal of Daniel Robson,
hanged for rioting against the lawful thugs of the
Press Gang.
It seems a long way from this Elizabeth Gaskell,
the closet-revolutionary— or at least the scandalous
troublemaker— to Cecil's soothing picture of the
"perfect Victorian woman." But actually the
conventional, decorous woman is certainly there, as a
mask, a self-constructed and necessary fiction; Gaskell
hated becoming the "object of the gaze," and is
concerned to represent herself publicly (when public
151
appearances become absolutely necessary) as an orthodox
figure. Her relationship with the narrator of Marv
Barton is an intriguing one, and has been largely
oversimplified by critics who conflate the author with
her dramatized narrative persona. The teller within
the tale irritates us with her dislocating shifts of
sympathy, and her attempts to disassociate herself from
the workers' perspective: for example, she tellingly
contrasts the way in which times of recession are
experienced by the masters and the workers:
Large houses are still occupied, while
spinners1 and weavers1 cottages stand
empty .... [T]he shops for
expensive luxuries still have daily
customers, while the worker loiters
away his unemployed time . . . thinking
of . . . the wailing children asking in
vain for enough of food . . . [and] of
the dying life of those near and dear
to him. (59)
But the narrator subsequently denies the reality
of the worker's feeling that "he alone suffer[s] from
bad times":
I know that this is not really the
case; and I know what is the truth in
such matters: but what I wish to
impress is what the workman thinks and
feels.
Then she adds insult to injury by falling back on
a self-justifying bourgeois cliche about the workers'
152
profligacy, though nothing in the novel supports its
truth:
True that with child-like improvidence,
good times will often dissipate his
grumbling, and make him forget all
prudence and foresight. (60)
Such banal statements surely convince nobody; but
that, I would suggest, is why they there are. If we
imagine the narrator not as the direct authorial voice
but as a character in her own right, a personification
of the bourgeois perspective, her comments are
self-undermining because they expose their own pitiful
inadequacy. Lansbury argues that through the
"discordance of tone between the fervent sincerity of
the characters and the bland narrative commentary"
(10), we learn to distrust the teller and judge by the
tale. Lansbury1s explanation for this "mealy-mouthed
and platitudinous" mediator is that the "incorrigible
material" of the novel demands such pseudo-placatory
interventions.
I find this account appealing, since it fits my
construction of a writer who dared to say more than she
was always willing to admit, and oscillated between
nonconformity and decorum. Though Gaskell commented,
after Ruth. "I must be an improper woman without
knowing it," (GL 223), she also claimed that "Miss
153
Bronte . . . puts all her naughtiness in her books, and
I put all my goodness .... [M]y books are so far
better than I am that I often feel ashamed of having
written them and as if I were a hypocrite" (GL 228).
The difference between the private "self" that we read
into the Gaskell Letters, and the narrator of Marv
Barton. is striking. The writer of the letters is
aminated, outspoken, playful, and irreverent. The
narrator of Marv Barton seems weighted down with the
Sunday School piety and propriety that Gaskell, a
Sunday School teacher, was reprimanded for lacking.17
Behind the apologetic statements of Marv Barton we can
construct a self-assertive and politically radical
character. For example, the prefatory statement that I
quoted earlier— "I know nothing about Political
Economy"— can be explained as "culturally-induced
diffidence" (Stoneman 43), and recent feminist
scholars, for example Stoneman and Schor, have
presented evidence to suggest its untruthfulness. We
may read this apparently modest statement quite
differently, however; not as a disclaimer of
pretensions to know, but as an firm renunciation of
Political Economy's pretensions to explain. "I know
nothing" in this sense becomes a disavowal of theories
which reduce human beings to abstract labor. Marv
154
Barton creates individual characters out of the masses,
"knowable communities," in Raymond Williams’ phrase
(The English Novel 14). Unlike the verbal constructs
of economic theory, Elizabeth Gaskell's seem to live
and breathe; in our emotional responses to them, in our
imaginative sympathy, there lies a powerful critique of
the theoretical system that the narrator cannot— will
not— understand.
We read in the Preface that the novel is intended
to voice the workers' suffering; but to speak for the
workers is to speak against the "masters," in a double
sense. A feminist challenge to patriarchal authority
is embodied even in the existence of the text; I refer
to the well-known argument that the woman-writer defies
all strictures of propriety by her act of authority.18
In effect, she resists the masternarratives of
femininity by taking charge of her own story. Through
her fictional account of speaking desire— which
entangles the story of a woman's struggle to become the
legitimate subject of desire, with the story of the
workers' struggle to become legal (i.e., enfranchised)
subjects— Gaskell implicitly takes up the position of
desiring subject, and indirectly protests her own legal
non-status as a married woman. As Elaine Showalter
suggests, protest fiction is often a useful cover for
155
defiance since it Mtranslated the felt pain and
oppression of women into the championship of mill-
workers, child-laborers, prostitutes and slaves,"
thereby converting anger into "an acceptable form of
feminine and Christian expression" (Literature 28).
Later I will argue that Gaskell writes a critique of
sexual politics between the lines of her direct
confrontation with the politics of economics and
industrialism. Like other middle-class women writers
of her generation, Gaskell was caught in the conflict
between wanting to speak in the public forum, and
dreading the recognition that would follow. She tried
to conceal her identity behind a masculine pseudonym,
though she was advised that her novels would sell
better if "known as the works of a lady."19 Women
writers may have been more popular, but public
preference is no guarantee of respectability; the
dominant construct of femininity, as self-abnegating
and modestly silent, casts a reproachful shadow over
women's literary successes, prompting them to fear fame
and choose anonymity. During the speculation about the
writer of Marv Barton. Gaskell resorted to various
strategies to deflect suspicion from herself, even
fuelling the false rumors that reached her.20 She
complained to her publisher that "praise to one's face
156
is a greater impertinence than blame; and either with
reference to a book published anonymously, a most
underbred thing," and resolved not to write again, for
"le jeu ne vaut pas las chandelle" (GL 71-2). She
zealously guarded her privacy for the rest of her life:
" Pray burn any letters, I am always afraid of writing
much to you, you are so careless about letters," she
wrote to Marianne Gaskell in 1854 (GL 274) ; and though
several hundred letters survived, the missing links of
correspondence— for example, letters between her and
her husband— suggest that other family members complied
more conscientiously with her wishes than her eldest
daughter. Gaskell scrupulously censored her own
letters in the Life (see Margaret Ganz 25) and refused
to give any information to aspiring biographers,
declaring: "I do not see why the public have any more
to do with me than buy or reject the wares I supply to
them" (GL 761).
"To buy or sell": the terms remind us that
Gaskell the writer is very much engaged in commercial
transactions— another embarrassing breach of propriety
for a lady, especially when we pause to consider
exactly what is being sold. Given the theories of
textual pleasure that we have inherited from Barthes
and others, we may wonder about the writer's
157
relationship to those libidinal energies by which texts
seem to seduce their readers. Models of textual
eroticism tend to slide over the question of human
agency, as if the dynamics of desire are contained
within the text. But given this construction of
reading as a displaced erotic pursuit, we can, of
course, logically posit the act of writing as an act of
seduction. To be a woman writer is to be in some sense
fallen; as Showalter suggests, the male pseudonym,
"like Eve's figleaf . . . signals the loss of
innocence," the burden of shame (Literature 19). And
if writing itself is a symbolically sexual act, its
commodification can only compound the writer's guilt
since she is effectively selling the erotic pleasures
of the text to the public, just as the prostitute sells
the erotic pleasures of the body.
In both cases the pleasure originates and
terminates in the buyer, who begins from a point of
desire and looks for a way to heighten and gratify it.
The body of the text, the body of the prostitute, are
the objects through which pleasure-seekers experience
their own fantasies and sensations, but as if "given"
by an external source. Though in one sense its agents,
neither writer nor prostitute can, strictly speaking,
create the pleasures derived from the respective
158
"bodies" they proffer for consumption, but each plays
an essential but ambivalent role in an economy which is
both commercial and libidinal. One the one hand, they
solicit desire and seem to control the form of its
expression; on the other hand, becoming public
property, they are subjected to the pressures of the
market-place, and the shape of desire has to be cut
according to the taste of the consumer. The need to
suit public tastes became fully apparent for those
Victorian writers who published in serial form, and
adjusted their material according to reader response.
I want to suggest that Gaskell's identity as a
writer is built on this sense of self as "fallen," not
just because her writing expresses desires forbidden to
a woman in her culture, but also because its
commodification underscores her impropriety; and her
conformist self— the decorous, maternal, feminine
Mrs. Gaskell— needed to be all the more carefully
erected since it was built on an ideological faultline.
As a literary figure, Gaskell embodies the radical
split which Poovey (as I noted earlier) traces in the
woman of the domestic ideal: that is to say, the
dichotomy between the virtuous and fallen woman can be
located also in the woman-writer, who is more
marketable as a "ladv." But to complicate matters
159
further, there are other contradictions in our cultural
constructions of the writer, and I want to make a
momentary detour, to trace some of these in more detail
before considering their impact on Gaskell.
We still tend to suppress recognition of
literature as a market-centered commodity, and to think
of the writer in Romantic terms— as a gifted individual
with higher truths and values to teach us— even though
marxist scholarship has helped us see writers as
"inscribed" through the linguistic structures of
ideology, and literature as a collective rather than
individual enterprise, constructed from the discourses
and modes available at that historical moment, and
dependent upon the material conditions of its
production. The Victorians inherited similarly
conflicting notions of the writer. Their more
recently-articulated Romantic version of writer as
visionary stood in sharp opposition to an earlier
literary figure: the eighteenth-century Grub Street
hack, who came into existence, as Alvin Kernan argues,
because of technological advances in the printing
presses. If the "gentlemen-amateurs" were provoked by
the "professional scribblers" into literary elitism,
what reinforced their snobbery was the cultural need to
160
deny the commodification of literature and any
consideration of the material factors that shape it.
In Uneven Deve1opments Mary Poovey offers a useful
perspective on the communal pretense that literature is
"above" economics. To summarize her position: Poovey
argues that there is a subtle connection between the
Victorian demarcation of a separate, domestic sphere
for women, and the perception of literature as a
privileged cultural site. Through the domestic ideal,
gender constructions are established as natural, and
appropriate distinctions made between different kinds
of labor: "paid versus unpaid, mandatory versus
voluntary, productive versus reproductive, alienated
versus self-fulfilling" (10). These binary oppositions
function to support and consolidate the power of
bourgeois men, protecting them from competition not
only from women but from working-class men too, who are
promised, in exchange for their expropriated labor, the
compensatory fictions of the domestic idyll, the
home-as-castle. Certain "border-cases" which Poovey
explores, such as Caroline Norton's battle for custody
of her children, reveal the notion of non-alienated
labor to be illusory, since as mother Norton is as
alienated from the "production" of her "labor" as any
factory worker, and as wife she is even alienated from
161
herself, being persona non gratis in the eyes of the
law. The literary man represents another such
border-case, because, while "the increase in supply and
demand positioned the literary man and literary labor
at the heart of the mushrooming capitalist economy"
(13), the cultural association between writing and
wisdom disguises literature's connection with the
market place:
The literary man— and the
representation of writing in
particular— therefore became the site
at which the alienation endemic to all
kinds of labor under capitalism
simultaneously surfaced and was
erased . . . [T]he construction of
literary labor as the exception that
mitigated the rule of alienated labor
had as one of its critical components
the reinforcement and appropriation of
another representation of non-alienated
labor— the image of women1s domestic
labor as a non-alienated expression of
a selfless self. (13-14)
Bearing in mind Poovey's analysis, we may consider
the implications for women's invasion of the literary
market-place; for the woman writer threatens to
collapse all the boundaries marked out by the
segregated domestic sphere, and to expose the
capitalist structures hidden beneath the idealization
of literary and domestic labor.
For Gaskell, literary and domestic labor were
always sensed as in conflict. Even though, as I
162
suggested earlier, she perceived her writing self as
enriched, perhaps engendered, by her experience of
mothering, she found that living in the domestic plot
of feminine fulfillment inevitably curtailed her
literary potential. "If I had a library like yours,
all undisturbed like yours, how I would write! . . . I
would outdo Rasselas in fiction! But you see everybody
comes to me perpetually," she lamented to Charles
Norton (GL 489). Though she had no room of her own,
her husband evidently did; resentment surfaces in the
complaint that "Wm. too busy to be agreeable to my
unfortunate visitors .... [I] was writing away
vigorously at Ruth when the Wedgwoods, Etc. came: and
1 was sorry, very sorry to give it up my heart being so
full of it, in a way which I can't bring back" (GL
2 05). Rejoicing in a temporary reprieve from domestic
responsibilities and routine, she imagines feminine
freedom as gender-reversal ("Nature intended me for a
gypsy-bachelor; that I . am sure of . . .") and playfully
invents for herself a masculine plot of adventure and
aggression: "[D]on't be surprized [sic] if you hear of
a rising of the weavers, headed by a modern
Boadicea . . . Your affectionate bachelor" (GL 301).
On the other hand, she is at her most demure and
conventional in her advice to the unknown, would-be
163
writer: "When I had little children I do not think I
could have written stories, because I should have
become too absorbed in my fictitious people to attend
to my real ones" (GL 694). Actually, her third
daughter was three years old when Gaskell began Marv
Barton. and her youngest was born mid-novel. Such is
the power of domestic ideology, however, that Gaskell
seems to believe her own words. In another letter we
can observe her struggle to navigate a position among
conflicting ideologies of self. She begins by stating
the orthodox view: "One thing is pretty clear, Women.
must give up living an artist's life if home duties are
to be paramount"; but she then undercuts this social
wisdom by being "sure it is healthy" (emphasis added)
for women to have the "refuge" of art "when too much
pressed upon by daily small Lilliputian arrows of
peddling cares . . . ." J.A.V. Chappie reads this as
affirming that Gaskell's "conscious priorities were
clear and consistently developed," even if "a shade
disingenuous . . . or self-deceived" (Elizabeth
Gaskell: A Portrait in Letters 127), but I read rage
between the lines. Far from embracing the paradoxical
principle of feminine self-fulfillment through
self-abnegation— the code she was held to
exemplify— Gaskell acknowledges, I think bitterly, that
164
the domestic ideal fails for the woman at its center,
since its success is contingent upon her sickness.
Eventually Gaskell's troubled attempt to reconcile her
feminine and feminist desires slides into generalities
which she perceives as incoherence:
. . . assuredly a blending of the two
is desirable. (Home duties and the
development of the Individual I mean),
which you will say it takes no Solomon
to tell you but the difficulty is where
and when to make one set of duties
subserve and give place to the
other . . . . [M]y grammar is all at
sixes and sevens I have no doubt but
never mind if you can pick out my
meaning ....
Solomon is an interesting authority to evoke:
after all, it was he who threatened to cut the baby in
half— surely the ultimate image of horror for a mother
who feels guilty at questioning, or even neglecting,
her maternal duties. The problem is that maternity and
authorship are both conceived as vocations which serve
a higher purpose. "I do believe," writes Gaskell
earnestly, "that we have all some appointed work to do.
Which is our work; what we have to do in advancing the
Kingdom of God." Nonetheless the mother-writer is
caught in a double-bind: for if domestic and literary
labor are rhetorically aligned in cultural
representation, they are, conversely, experienced as an
impossible contradiction by the Victorian literary
165
woman. Gaskell continues: "First we must find out
what we are sent into the world to do, and define it
and make it clear to ourselves (that's the hard part)
and then forget ourselves in our work ..." (GL 68).
But which work, if both are "God-appointed"? or if the
feminine self inscribed by the dominant ideology is so
deeply opposed to the authorial self which feels
equally "true" or natural?
This essentially Romantic notion of literary work
as "inspired" is, like the domestic myth, an
ideological fiction; its partial truth is represented
as the whole, and its intricate relationship with the
economic base obscured. Gaskell refers again to
Romantic aesthetics when she lamented that "no-one
seemed to see my idea of a tragic poem" in Marv Barton;
the truth of emotion seems to be her moral touchstone.
Writing as a bereaved mother, she connected her own
loss with the suffering of the Manchester poor, one of
whom allegedly asked her, "with tears in his eyes" if
she had "ever seen a child clemmed to death."21 In
the passional source of her fiction, in her political
sympathies and high moral purpose, in her privileging
of working-class dialect (that is, a literary version
of it), and in her self-perception as speaking on
behalf of the common people, Gaskell is positively
166
Wordsworthian. At the same time she participates fully
in the commodified "culture industry" and has to
confront the implications of writing for profit, which
often delight but occasionally disturb her. Gaskell at
first makes business negotiations in an awkward and
confrontational style; we can conjecture that she was
far too embarrassed to address this indelicate subject
with her customary ease and self-command. On the other
hand, as her literary career flourished and she outgrew
her suspicion that she was "swindling" her publishers
(GL 70), she developed a better sense of her financial
worth, and grew much bolder and more direct in her
wheeling and dealing. There is a great distance
between the decorous wife of the early days, who was
gratified at being promised some of her twenty pounds,
payment for a short story, which "William . . .
composedly buttoned . . . up in his pocket," (GL 70),
and the independent writer at the peak of her career,
who earned two thousand pounds for Wives and Daughters.
financed numerous adventures abroad for herself and her
daughters, and even succeeded in buying a house without
William's knowledge— this at a time when wives could
not open bank accounts. Part of the mortgage was paid
by her publisher, as an advance on future stories (see
GL 583); the contract is appealing as a symbol of her
167
self-established authority, for Gaskell literally wrote
her way into a house, a domestic sphere of her own
choosing. Though married women were, according to Mary
Poovey, "the paradigmatic case of human property in
Britain" at this time (Uneven Developments 75), Gaskell
was emboldened to enter the literary market-place and
turn her fiction into property, not only figuratively
but physically, substantially. Although, as a
lady-writer, she may have felt shame at her own
impropriety, she was rewarded with power: autonomy,
access to the symbolic order, and the economic
privilege which allowed her to bestow gifts upon her
family.22 Moreover, however initially sensitive she
may have been to the implications of writing for money,
Gaskell admits its motivating power with a frankness
worthy of Moll Flanders: for example, "I am writing
away, but I hate my story, because I am not to have
more money for it, I believe" (GL 572).
The correspondence between Gaskell and Dickens, as
her editor, is fraught with tensions which betray the
ideological conflicts I discussed above. Publishing in
serial form forced Gaskell to confront the unromantic
conditions of literary production in the culture
industry, which made writing into forced labor rather
than the "spontaneous overflow of powerful feelings."
168
She suffered very much under the strain of meeting
deadlines and specific length requirements, and often
exasperated Dickens by disregarding both; moreover,
writing was physically, not just mentally, laborious— a
fact we easily overlook now. "1 believe I've been as
nearly dazed and crazed with this c— , d— , be h— to
it story as can be," she complained of North and South.
"I've been sick of writing, and everything connected
with literature and improvement of the mind . . . I
have had to write so hard that I have spoilt my hand"
GL 222). She claimed to have been trapped by "a
half-promise . . . to Mr. Dickens which he understood
as a whole one," and seemed to blame him for her
"despair" about working out the plot, "because of
course in this way of publishing it, I had to write
pretty hard without waiting for the happy leisure
hours . . . Every page was grudged me .... I was
compelled to desperate compression" (GL 225). Yet it
is clear that Dickens loyally stood by her, continuing
to admire and solicit contributions, even though the
"dreary business" of North and South threatened the
success of Household Words: "I am sorry to hear of the
Sale dropping, but I am not surprised. Mrs. Gaskell's
story, so divided, is wearisome to the last
degree .... Never mind! I am ready . . . to
169
shoulder the wheel," he wrote to his sub-editor Wills
(The Letters of Charles Dickens Vol 2: 596). Though
Dickens sometimes took the risk of offending Gaskell
with his editorial interventions and suggestions, he
generally tended to use a flattering, teasing approach
which reveals all the ambivalence of the power-relation
between publisher and writer. "Can't you— won't
you— don't you— ever mean to write me another story?"
he wrote winningly after "Lizzie Leigh" (Letters 2:
220), and assured her that "I receive you, ever, (if
Mr. Gaskell will allow me to say so) with open arms"
(457). When Gaskell kept him waiting for installments
of Cranford, he reproached her familiarly: "O what a
lazy woman you are, and where is that articlel" (380).
Most telling, though, is the famous letter that begins,
"My dear Scheherazade— For I am sure your powers of
narrative can never be exhausted in a single night, but
must be good for at least a thousand nights and
one . . . ." The flirtatious tone implies all too
knowingly the eroticism of the writing act, and the
writer's consummate skill in the arts of arousing
excitement and postponing climax; perhaps it is also a
veiled threat, since Scheherazade, we recall, spun her
stories to avoid execution. I imagine that Gaskell
might well have felt uneasy at receiving such a letter.
170
And the hostility hidden in Dickens' playfulness erupts
in a private comment to Wills: "Mrs. Gaskell,
fearful— fearfulI If I were Mr. G. O Heaven how I
would beat her!"23
Gaskell was impatient to escape from this literary
relationship with Dickens, even trying to buy her way
out of her contractual obligations to him (see GL 418).
Though she would continue to publish in serial form
after severing her connection with Dickens, it was
under his editorial direction that she was for the
first time disabused of the Romantic notion of
literature as an organism that developed at its own
pace, and forced into a production-line mentality.
Dickens also made her aware of other implications of
writing for money. I think his seductive solicitations
struck a nerve, by insinuating the sexiness of writing
and the "fallen" state of the woman who did it for
profit. He made it impossible for Gaskell to think of
her work as the natural expression of an innocent self.
Moreover, she perhaps conjectured, as I do, that
Dickens differed from their contemporaries in seeing
her as composed more of demonic than angelic essences.
His "dear Scheherazade" is not the Angel of the House
but a siren, and Dickens subtly uses her own
weapons— charm, seductiveness— against her in the
171
struggle for authorial control. No wonder Gaskell was
so anxious to elude his grasp. However, the
ideological contradictions which surfaced in their
relationship can also be traced in the fiction, and in
the ensuing discussion of Marv Barton I will have cause
to return to them.
Maiden, Mother and Magdalen:
"woman" as palimpsestic text
To whom shall the outcast prostitute
tell her tale! Hers is the leper-sin,
and all stand aloof, dreading to be
counted unclean. (Marv Barton 2 07)
Mary Barton concerns the desire to speak, and the
speaking of desire, when both are culturally
prohibited. The conflicting impulses towards reticence
and confession, the need to keep hidden and the
compulsion to tell, are suggested from the beginning;
the novel was conceived, we are told, "through
circumstances that need not be more fully alluded to."
These prefatory words are at once self-revelatory and
self-concealing; they invite us to hear a secret, then
refuse to tell, even politely implying that it is none
of our business. Like the mermaid enticing the
172
sailors, the statement beckons us over and then
plummets to the depths of a private world.
What this suggests is not the inhospitality of the
narrator so much as the difficulties inherent in the
act of speaking at all. At multiple levels the novel
suggests the riskiness of finding a voice, when silence
and speaking have equally dangerous consequences. Many
of its characters, like Esther, or John Barton, are
"soul-compelled" to tell their stories; resolutely
resisting the imposition of silence, they insist upon
their right to an audience. Others, like Mary, are
under legal compulsion to declare before a "multitude"
what "feminine shame" decrees should be kept most
hidden (390). Silence can kill: the song of the
Oldham weavers testifies to it, ("Oi've howden my tung
till oi've near stopped my breath . . . /Hoo's fully
resolved t'sew up meawth an' eend" (72)), and Jem's
refusal to speak in his own defence almost leads to a
hanging;24 but what is spoken can also have terrible
power to sentence and convict, such as garrulous Jane
Wilson's unwitting incrimination of her son. "It looks
like his [gun]," she says obligingly to a disguised
policeman. And she continues naively: "[A]y, it's his
sure enough. I could speak to it anywhere . . ."
(273)— only later realizing the awful truth that "If my
173
words are to kill my son, they have already gone forth
out of my mouth and nought can bring them back" (339).
Mary, by contrast, knows the strategic value of holding
her tongue, having already learned to "conceal
much . . . in obstinate silence" to gain her freedom;
having her wits about her, in spite of being her
mother's daughter, she knows enough to burn the
"tell-tale" paper that would implicate her father, and
commands her aunt: "'You will not tell. You never
will tell' . . . in a tone so sternly earnest, as
almost to be threatening" (296). For Mary, the
conflict between the burden of secrecy and the
obligation to tell is played out most painfully:
charged with narrative responsibilities, she must
rewrite the official murder-plot constructed by the
prosecution, but without revealing the truth. Thus she
is caught in an appalling bind between the fatal
consequences of silence and the fatal consequences of
disclosure. "How can I tell?" she cries out, in an
"agony of terror," as Job wonders out loud who the
murderer could be (305, emphasis added); and her
anguished question, brilliant in its word-play, has
resonant implications throughout the text.
The desire to tell— or the telling of
desire— involves a concomitant concern with plots and
174
plotting, and to read Marv Barton as an investigation
of the woman's story is to become entangled in these
issues. I will be trying to show how Gaskell's
manipulation of various narrative structures and
conventions betrays the constructedness of "woman" and
the narrow range of social and narrative positions
available to her. As Bakhtin argues, the novel is made
up of many literary fragments, including the "oral"
forms of fairy-tale, folklore and ballad; and we can
trace the outlines of many competing fictions in Marv
Barton, which blur into each other like the images on a
multi-dimensional postcard.
Primarily, as I have argued, desire is plotted
along a double axis, through the respective public and
private stories of John and Mary Barton. The novel is
usually considered "broken-backed"25 and criticized
for its failure to integrate these two plots. Actually
I think this a misdiagnosis; while Marv Barton does
indeed sustain fractures— or rather, dislocations, as I
suggested elsewhere— they are not necessarily to be
found in the obvious place, the romantic-political
distinction. "Dismemberment" would be a better word
still for the structural incoherences of the text; Marv
Barton's aesthetic principle might be Frankenstein's
monster, that creature of many parts, all stitched
175
together but with the seams on the outside. Within the
main structural scheme of the double-plot, the novel
disintegrates at times into "formal eclecticism."26
However, the private and public plots seem meticulously
interwoven, even down to the detail of the Valentine
which is sent by Jem, inscribed by Mary with Samuel
Bamford's protest poem, then used by John as wadding
for the gun that traps the lover in a crime-of-passion
plot— while the real, political plot goes undetected.
The common perception of the double-plot as a
structural failure perhaps reflects the bias that
Rosemarie Bodenheimer traces generally in the criticism
of social-problem novels, an assumption "that a private
plot line cannot contain public issues" (6). In Marv
Barton the lovers' plot and the political plot are
symmetrically patterned, as Arthur Pollard argues:
Public and private themes counterpoint
each other in contrary progress. The
opposition of masters and men moves
blindly, inexorably, to tragedy and
death, whereas the personal history of
Jem Wilson and Mary Barton proceeds
through difficulty and misunderstanding
to love and happiness. (43)
The inverse configurations of each plot can be
clearly seen as they reach their climactic confessions;
ironically, Mary declares her private love in a public
trial, while John admits his crime to a private
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audience instead of the open court. Through these
narrative reversals, the sexual politics of the novel
can be reconstructed. Mary demands an increasingly
larger share of the action, a wider scope for her
energetic drive; as Sally Leadbitter tells her, "You’ve
set up heroine on your own account, Mary Barton" (426).
When Mary usurps the protagonist's role from her
father, the explicit political theme is displaced by
the implicit feminist ideology, and the workers' cause
becomes the woman's cause.
Mary is not the only female character to intrude
on the hero's space and struggle for narrative agency;
her aggression is prefigured in the story of her aunt
Esther, and both women rebel against the sanctioned
script of feminine passivity. Unfortunately, as Mary
discovers, a heroine's attempt to write herself
differently is constrained by textual history, or
limited by the range of pre-existing plots; for a brief
space she flourishes as the daring protagonist of an
adventure tale— the lawyer speaks of the "gallant tar
brought back from the pathless ocean by a girl's noble
daring" (395)— but then she literally collapses into
the feminine role of passivity, silence and
self-effacement.
This notion of pure womanliness is exemplified by
Alice, (despite her potential witchiness), and also, in
her fleeting presence in the novel, by Mrs. Mary
Barton. Alice, we recall, lives by a Biblical text of
resignation; she never acts upon her lifelong desire to
revisit her beloved childhood home,but yields meekly to
every circumstance that prevents her.27 According to
Alice, you cannot plot your own script, for "the Lord
is against planning. When1er I plan overmuch, He is
sure to send and mar all my plans, as if He would ha'
me put the future into His hands" (117). Consequently
she resolves to repress her desires, to "put a bridle
o’er my tongue and my thoughts too" (193). This
religious doctrine of passivity and submission to the
Lord's will can become an excellent patriarchal pretext
for keeping the oppressed— women and the working
class— in their socially-circumscribed place. We see a
secularized version of it in Mrs. Mary Barton's
relationship with her husband. She enters the novel
weeping and doesn't stop until she dies; John Barton
explains her grief by relating his quarrel with Esther,
but his wife is denied any narrative opportunity to
tell her own story, and Esther's voice is also, at this
stage, muted, since all we have is John's version of
events. Thus Esther's character is represented through
178
his misogynistic text, of woman's vanity and the sexual
frailty that necessitates her submission to paternal
authority. But, as Poovey notes, such protective
attitudes are based on a notion of "women and their
'services'" as property: (she cites, for example, the
law that "gave a father an interest in respect of his
daughter's chastity" (Uneven Developments 76); and we
can see Esther's escape from John's control as a
significant, if tragic, act of sexual rebellion.
From John's account, we learn that Esther was "so
puffed up that there was no holding her in. Her spirit
was always up, if I spoke ever so little in the way of
advice to her . . ." (43). Subsequently we are able to
judge how delicately that "little . . . advice" is
framed: "Esther, I see what you'll end at . . . you'll
be a street-walker, Esther, and then, don't you go to
think I'll have you darken my door" (43). These
prophetic words are, of course, borne out by the
development of the plot; but we may still question
John's narrative integrity in his construction of
events, and suspect that the way he exercises domestic
authority has a great deal to do with Mrs. Barton's
distress. We may even wonder about the intensity of
John's feelings towards Esther; he refers all too
frequently to her pretty features, observes that Esther
179
is young enough to be his wife's daughter, laments that
"beauty is a sad snare" (but for whom?) and, after
acknowledging that Esther was a "farrantly lass," he
adds, "'more's the pity now' . . . with a sigh" (43).
The biggest problem with Esther, though, is not
that she is so bewitchingly pretty but that she answers
back. Unlike Mrs. Barton, who weeps silently and cries
out in the pain of childbirth but never makes a verbal
protest— for, as John claims, "Mary can't abide words
in a house" (43)— Esther speaks her resistance, and
pretty sharply too. How did she develop such
spiritedness? John knows the answer to that, and how
to avoid the problem in future:
That's the worst of factory work, for
girls. They can earn so much when work
is plenty, that they can maintain
themselves anyhow. My Mary shall never
work in a factory, that I'm determined
on. (4 3)28
Industrial life seems to have generated a new
breed of people, and the change in social behavior is
observable in the "loud-talking" factory girls, with
their "buoyant step," their "independent manner," and
the "acuteness and intelligence of countenance, which
has often been noted in a manufacturing population"
(41),29 Esther, originally a country girl, has picked
up their self-assertive ways, though not their
180
street-wisdom. Mysteriously, though, after leaving
John's house she becomes more feminine: "quieter, and
more woman-like? more gentle, and more blushing, and
not so riotous and noisy" (44). In love, and pregnant,
Esther disappears, fabricating a false fiction of
family reconciliation to cover her tracks? Mrs. Barton
dies, allegedly from "some shock to the system" (56)
for which John knows who to blame? and we do not
actually meet Esther in person, so to speak, until the
plot has advanced three years and she melodramatically
enters John Barton's fictional world on a dark and
storMy night, a woman "of no doubtful profession" in
all her "faded finery." She stops John in the
"darkness visible" of a badly-lighted street by
touching his arm and whispering, "I want to speak to
you." In the context her words are steeped in sexual
innuendo, and John first swears at her— then,
recognizing her, attacks her in a frenzy of "passion"
(169) .
Esther's entry into the narrative once again
foregrounds the suggestion that domestic brutality
keeps women bound and muted. We tend to lose sight of
it in the first part of the book, where John is set up
as hero of the political plot. All his finest
qualities flourish in that public role: his generosity
181
and tenderness towards the Davenports, his unwavering
moral principle in refusing union assistance when
others need it more, his "rough Lancashire eloquence
arising out of the fullness of his heart" (220), his
recklessness in championing his brothers' cause— in
these respects John is marked out as exceptional and
admirable. In his private role, however, as a family
man, John is capable of ignoble and cruel actions,
which are curiously overlooked by most critics, though
it seems to me that his heroism is deeply,
significantly flawed by his complicity in patriarchal
tyranny over women. It is particularly ironic that he
repulses Esther when she begs to be heard, since this
duplicates a recent experience of his own; "Thou*It
speak at last," he was reassured as he set off for
London with his fellow delegates, only to be crushed by
the government's refusal to acknowledge their
grievances. Yet he, in turn, responds to Esther with
verbal and physical violence: he "gripped her arm" and
"dragged her" to the light; "roughly held the face she
would have averted" and "shook her with passion." When
Esther begs, "Oh, mercy! John, mercy! listen to me for
Mary's sake," he is apparently incensed to the point of
strangling her: "In vain did her face grow deadly pale
round the vivid circle of paint, in vain did she gasp
182
for mercy." After cursing her for killing his
wife— though we recall that literally, Mary died in
childbirth, impregnated, as it were, to death— John
"flung [Esther], trembling, sickening, fainting,"
against the lamp-post, where she "lay in her weakness,
unable to rise" (170). The policeman who arrives on
the scene reads her contextually and arrests her, in
her "half-unconscious state," for "disorderly
vagrancy"— (though ironically Esther behaves like a
perfect Victorian lady by fainting)— whereupon she is
locked up for a month. Thus she is silenced, not only
by John but also by the very figures of authority
responsible for repressing the workers in London, where
John was struck by a policeman as he approached the
Houses of Parliament (144).
It is the second time that John has set the police
upon Esther; after her elopement he asked a constable
to track her down, and now, though she is the victim of
his violence, he causes her to be imprisoned. The
oppressed becomes the oppressor, as John aligns himself
with the law, and replicates along gender lines the
victimization which he has endured within the class
system. His savage temper makes Mary's home life so
miserable that he almost drives her into the plot of
seduction that he fears for her:
183
He seldom spoke, less than ever; and
often when he did speak they were sharp
angry words . . . Her temper was high,
too, and her answers not over-mild; and
once in his passion he had even beaten
her. If Sally Leadbitter or Mr. Carson
had been on hand at that moment, Mary
would have been ready to leave home for
ever. (161)
Though John is subsequently haunted by the memory
of Esther's "form . . . lying prostrate in
helplessness," the sincerity of his repentance is
questionable, since he turns his anger instead upon
Mary, who he wishes "were not so like her aunt, for the
very bodily likeness seemed to suggest a possibility of
a similar likeness in their fate" (172). He does not
strike Mary again, but the threat is always implicit,
and she learns to inflict upon herself the pain of
repressing her own voice: for example, John "upbraided
her . . . till she had to bite her lips till the blood
came, in order to keep down the angry words that would
rise in her heart. At last her father left the house,
and then she might give way to her passionate tears"
(173). A dutiful daughter, Mary blames herself for her
father's violence— "how provokingly she had looked and
spoken"— and clings to her fictions of benevolent
paternalism: "how much her father had to bear; and oh,
what a kind and loving parent he had been, till these
days of trial" (161), but we may remain skeptical about
184
this.30 Early in the story, for example, when Mary
resists the idea of going into domestic service "with
all the force of her strong will," we are told: "What
that will might have been able to achieve had her
father been against her, I cannot tell" (61, emphasis
added)— which suggests that even our narrator cannot
speak of the consequences when the daughter's desire is
opposed to the father's. And since Mary cannot bear to
acknowledge her abhorrence at her father's guilt, or
the threat to family ideology if the benevolent father
and murderous patriarch are the same, he becomes a
bifurcated figure in her imagination:
[I]n her delirium, ay, mingled even
with the most tender expressions of
love for her father, was . . . a dread
of him as a blood-sledder, which seems
to separate him into two persons— one,
the father who had dandled her on his
knee, and loved her all her life long;
the other, the assassin, the cause of
all her trouble and woe. And if he
presented himself before her while this
idea of his character was uppermost,
who might tell the consequence?
(emphasis added, 413)
Full of a sense of "filial duty," Mary stoutly
represses the connection between the father's domestic
tyranny and the act of murder, which is represented in
the narrative as politically motivated and impersonal
(even if, beneath that construction, we can see Barton
as a reverse Oedipus, a symbolic slayer of sons). But
185
though the father's guilt is banished to the "awful
forbidden ground of discourse," Mary's imagination
insists on the dreadful, inadmissible truth as she
pictures herself "toiling at some work, long after
houses were shut and folks abed; he, more savage than
he had ever been before .... At such times she
could have cried aloud with terror, at the scenes her
fancy conjured up" (421). In Mary's resolve to "endure
all imaginable terrors, although of daily
occurrence . . . [and] patiently bear all wayward
violence of temper," we see her ultimate acquiescence
to the social doctrine of feminine submission, which
here takes an extreme form in her masochistic
willingness to be murdered sooner than refuse her
daughterly role. This betrays a master-slave dialectic
at the heart of the relation between the sexes, and it
can be traced also in the representation of conflict
between masters and men.
Tyranny, it seems, begins at home; we may read the
novel as an implicit critique of the patriarchal
structure of the family which is replicated in the
work-force and supports social injustice. In the
account of sexual exploitation that Esther gives at
last, and in the many symbolic alliances between her
and John Barton, the shared grievances of both
186
disenfranchised groups— the laboring class and
women-as-a-class— are underscored. John's identity
strangely metamorphoses into Esther's as the novel
progresses; both are outcasts, for example, guilty of a
"leper-sin," and if Esther walks in John's footsteps,
finding herself at one point "standing just where the
murderer had been but a few hours before" (289), he
becomes, like her, a night-wanderer who watches from
the shadows. Reduced to a "foot-fall," a "form," "a
haunting ghost," a "wan, feeble figure" (413), he
shares her sense of self as monstrous, and her impulse
"to hide . . . with the other obscene things of night"
(289). John becomes an opium addict, Esther an
alcoholic, in the need for disconnection from their own
stories:
"Such as live like me could not bear
life if they did not drink. If we did
not drink, we could not stand the
memory of what we have been, and the
thought of what we are, for a day,"
said [Esther], shuddering and glaring
round with terrified eyes". (213)
This self-erasure culminates in their burial in
the same grave, "without name, or initial, or date"
(465), at which point Esther's identification with
Barton is completed and their exiled status endorsed.
Though both are debarred from authoritative
speech, John and Esther are "soul-compelled" to tell
187
stories of exploitation, and to expose the inadequacy
of the "cash-nexus" as a basis for social/sexual
relations. John, as union man, speaks on behalf of the
collective body, protesting the workers' dispossession
of their rights as the capitalists accumulate property
through the labor of those who have none. He
criticizes the laissez-faire economy which posits
workers as commodities, to be bought when it suits the
masters and discarded when superfluous. The masters'
"'objectification' of human relations" extends into the
erotic economy also, where women are indifferently
regarded as sexual property, "fair game" available for
their employers' gratification.31 This is a text
partly played out on Esther's prostituted body, and
partly incorporated into the story she insists on
telling, for she rightly perceives that Harry Carson,
the factory-owner's son, plans to get the object of
his desire, the factory-worker's daughter, at a bargain
price. Unfortunately, because Esther has been oddly
suspended from narrative time during her month's
incarceration, she has no idea that the paradigm of the
seduction plot has changed; moreover, she mistakenly
projects onto Mary (as I argue below) her own naivete
in blindly loving her seducer. (Esther's story is such
a clich£: he was a handsome officer who "promised me
188
marriage. They all do," then deserted her and her
child.) Hoping to avoid a repetition of her own
destiny, Esther indirectly sets into motion the
melodramatic crime-of-passion plot constructed by the
prosecution; her intervention leads to the fight,
observed by the policeman, that casts all suspicion on
Jem. Carson, of course, is already cast in a classic
melodramatic role, the villainous seducer of the
hapless young virgin. Jem, ordinarily a steady chap,
also has a streak of melodrama in him: during the
quarrel he turns into a Heathcliff, "grinding his
teeth" in the "livid paleness of his anger . . . till
he looked ghastly" (23 0); and we may hear the echo of
his threat to Mary that "[Y]ou'll hear of me as a
drunkard, and may be as a thief, and may be as a
murderer. Remember! . . . it's your cruelty that will
have made me what I feel I shall become" (175).
It is ironic, given her motive, that Esther's
narrative intervention places Mary in such sensational
circumstances; but appropriate enough that it engulfs
the lovers in the genre of tragic melodrama, since this
is the fictional world Esther derives from (with one
important qualification, which I will discuss below).
Though generally seen as a realistic portrayal, Esther
is in my view wholly a creature of self-consciously
189
literary conventions; she not only speaks in stage
rhetoric but performs for her audience in wonderfully
stylized ways. For example,the dense descriptions of
her manner, in her brief encounter with Jem, seem like
stage directions. Detaining her audience with her
"firm" but "trembling" grasp, she insists that she
"will have the relief of telling" the "agony of the
past" (210). Her voice runs through the full gamut of
expressive possibilities; we hear her "pleading," her
"wild vehemence, amounting almost to insanity," her
"thrilling earnest" tone that "rose . . . to the sharp
pitch of agony," her trick of describing happiness by
"sinking her voice into a plaintive, child-like
manner," and her "accents of deep despair" (212-3).
Jem evidently suspects this tendency towards
self-dramatization, for when Esther "began to cry a
little . . . [Jem] cut her short by his hoarse, stern
inquiry" (212). Esther sustains her performance to the
end of the scene, for her exit speech is brilliantly
theatrical in its diction and rhythm, and in its varied
tonal possibilities, from the bitter mockery of its
opening, and the contextual suggestiveness of "if you
want me, come at night," to the pathos and bathos of
its conclusion;
190
She laughed strangely. "And do you
think one sunk so low as I am has a
home? Decent, good people have homes.
No, if you want me, come at night, and
look at the corners of the streets
about here. The colder, the bleaker,
the more stormy the night, the more
certain you will be to find me. For
then," she added with a plaintive fall
in her voice, "it is so cold sleeping
in entries, and on door-steps, and I
want a dram more than ever." (214)
Esther's speech, like Mary's at moments of high
drama, is remarkable for its grammatical precision, but
more so for its self-proclaiming artifice. If to
speak, in this fictional world, is in some deep sense
to speak of desire, then it is absolutely right that
Esther's style should be so performative.
After all, she no longer acts upon spontaneous
desire but makes her living by feigning sexual interest
in the clients she "seduces" or solicits for a living.
As John says: "Esther, I see what you'll end at, with
your artificials . . ." (43). She performs a
ritualized drama of sexuality, (cleverly suggested by
the identical ways in which she stops Jem and John,
both of whom think she is soliciting), and its fakeness
is signalled in her stylized speech and striking poses.
Her glamor, too, is conspicuously token, its tackiness
all too obviously displayed in the "faded finery,"
"gauze bonnet, once pink, now dirty white," and the
191
"gay-colored barege shawl," now "draggle-tailed" (168).
The portrayal of Esther announces its own
constructedness by drawing on all the representational
cliches of the fallen woman; note, for example, the
following comment from William Acton, eminent Victorian
medical spokesman on prostitution;
It is a little to absurd to tell us
that the 'dirty, intoxicated slattern,
in tawdry finery and an inch thick in
paint'— long a conventional symbol of
prostitution— is a correct figure in
the middle of the nineteenth century.
If she is not apocryphal, one must at
least go off the beaten path to find
her. (27)
Yet, in his attempt to set the record straight,
Acton too falls back on the conventional rhetorical
strategies, which clearly have a strong hold on the
cultural imagination. He begins with a series of
sensational questions: "Who are those fair creatures,
neither chaperones nor chaperoned, those somebodies
whom nobody knows, who elbow out wives and daughters in
the parks and promenades and rendezvous of fashion?"
We move from these Duessas of high society, dangerous
pollutants in attractive packages, to those like Esther
whose corruption is more easily recognizable: "Who are
those painted, dressy women, flaunting along the
streets and boldly accosting the passersby?" Then we
observe the lowest strata of the sexually fallen, those
192
"miserable creatures . . . frpm whose misery the eye
recoils, cowering under dark arches ..." (ix).
Who are those creatures? is a question that we can
most pertinently cast back on Marv Barton; for Esther,
as the archetypal fallen woman, is in a sense the
Everywoman of Victorian culture, a figuration of the
female carnality that paradoxically underpins its angel
ideology: the clay feet of the saint on her pedestal.
The social construction of the ideal woman positions
her in an impossible place where her sexuality is
always to be feared and denied; for in order to be
"woman" she must cease to be human and become angel;
and she has to be mother and virgin at the same time.
The stylization of Esther's representation foregrounds
the constructedness of that ideal woman also. But this
is to anticipate my discussion of Mary, and I want
first to consider Esther's literary connection, perhaps
a surprising one, with another fallen sister— the
inventive and incorrigible Moll Flanders.
For there is a trace of Moll in the novel— as if
she has left faint footprints on Esther's tale; and
though Moll inhabits a "euphoric text" (Miller, xi), a
jauntier narrative of adaptation to the vicissitudes of
the plot, and eventual triumph, her mode is, I think,
the obverse of the tragic melodrama in Mary Barton. Of
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course, Esther's maudlin self-representation stands in
emphatic denial of this; yet, like Moll, Esther moves
easily and lightly through a picaresque world, and
lives out a fantasy of freedom denied to her
housebound, angel sister. Esther may shiver on cold,
rainy nights, but the "Butterfly," as she is known, can
come and go as she pleases; and her unrestricted
mobility in those nocturnal wanderings contrasts
invitingly with Mary's sense of entrapment. Though she
frequently expresses her distress at being a social
outcast, Esther, like Moll, has the camaraderie of the
criminal underworld and seems to have experienced more
kindness among them than in her family and romantic
relations.32 Moll plans to be a "gentlewoman," Esther
a "lady"; both women have some bargaining power in
their exceptional beauty, but their romantic impulses
get in the way of their material ambition, and they
spoil their chances by falling in love. Moll, a woman
of many disguises, has a preference for dressing as a
bourgeois gentlewoman— a self-representation in which
she seems genuinely to believe, as Arnold Kettle has
suggested.33 Esther treads in Moll's footsteps when
she borrows the respectable costume of a domestic
housewife, "a black silk bonnet, a printed gown, a
plaid shawl . . . which had a sort of sanctity to the
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eyes of the street-walker, as being the appropriate
class of that happy class to which she could never,
never more belong" (292)34 and takes pleasure in
reinventing herself as a mechanic's wife, "impos[ing]
upon Mary with her tale of happy respectability."
Adapting her diction accordingly, Esther speaks here in
a quite different register from her usual maudlin tone,
though again she overplays her part:
Oh! Mary, my dear! don't talk about
eating! We've the best of everything,
and plenty of it, for my husband is in
good work. I'd such a supper before
came out, I could not touch a morsel if
you had it. (294)
Domestic fantasy evidently has a powerful appeal
for Esther; she imagines "how she would work, and toil,
and starve, and die if necessary— for a husband, a
home— for children" (292). But we have been into the
Davenports' home, and know that dying for your children
is no solution to poverty. Besides, so many abandoned
children are scattered through the pages of this novel
that we can only be thankful Esther did not add to
their numbers. She is surely self-deceptive in
clinging to that fantasy of doing things differently,
since she took the only practical course open to her
when she went onto the streets. Perhaps Esther is torn
by guilt for refusing to lie down and die, when any
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self-respecting tragic heroine would choose starvation
over sexual corruption. The Exemplar is Clarissa, but
Victorian literature is full of anoretic women, whose
renunciation of sensuality is suggested in their
suppression of bodily appetite. As Elaine Showalter
argues, "The self-sacrificing Victorian heroine . . .
acted out the most extreme manifestation of the
feminine role, flaunting her martyrdom, literally
turning herself into a 'little woman; and she
suggests that this starvation is an attempt to "become
the incorporeal Victorian angel" (129). Esther, on the
other hand, chooses a mode of resistance which not only
connects her with the.political plot— for their
struggle against clemming drives the workers into
activism— but is deeply subversive in its literary
significance.35 She decisively rejects the code of
renunciation that her culture cherishes as the feminine
ideal, and her repentance is an unconvincing as Moll's:
note that Esther delights in recalling her three years
of unmarried bliss, and politely declines Jem's
invitation to go home with him and be saved. Esther
follows Moll Flanders, an altogether subversive
fictional model, in establishing a relatively
autonomous position for herself within the narrow
sphere of power available: she makes her body an
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economic counter in the business of sexuality. This is
entrepreneurship of a limited kind, but at least it is
survival; and without wishing to deny the degrading
conditions of prostitution, I do want to point out that
its relations of exploitation and power are quite
subtle and complex. Judith Walkowitz suggests that
though on the surface, "prostitution seemed to operate
as an arena of male supremacy, where women are bartered
and sold as commodities . . . in reality, women often
controlled the trade .... Prostitutes were still
not free of male domination, but neither were they
simply passive victims of male sexual abuse" (31).
Esther, walking the streets of the city, moves
independently, and seems safe from the menace of (say)
Nancy’s brutal Bill Sikes. That danger, as we have
seen, is more likely to be found at home.
John's violence is, of course, no more than a
harsh enforcement of the father's law, which domestic
ideology upholds beneath its flattering representation
of the wife as "queen" of her little sphere. But the
prostitute's exile, out on the streets, symbolizes her
lawlessness, and underscores the failure and emptiness
of the domestic ideal.36 In Auerbach's words, "she
came to embody everything in womanhood that was
dangerously, tragically and triumphantly beyond social
197
boundaries" (150). Moreover, as an outcast Esther is
oddly empowered— enabled to move invisibly and thus to
take control of the gaze, as she notes "the haunts and
habits of many a one who little thought of a watcher in
the poor forsaken woman" (207) . Finally, her
prostitution can be seen as an inherently subversive
act because it openly interprets the laws by which
respectable societies operate: the bartering of women.
Thus, though primarily a tragic figure of sexual and
economic exploitation, Esther alarmingly endangers
those institutionalized nineteenth-century notions of
angels and the home as their proper sphere.
Consequently, perhaps, Esther is removed to a safe
distance for much of the tale of Manchester life; yet
her presence haunts the text. Inscribed into the
contradictory construct of the ideal Victorian woman,
one of whose "constitutive characteristics," in
Poovey's words, is the "contradiction between a
sexless, moralized angel and an aggressive, carnal
magdalen" (11), Esther's shadow dogs the footsteps of
the young women in this novel, threatening always to
expose the obscene obverse of the pure angel. "Woman"
is figured as a palimpsestic text in Mary Barton. in
the magical metamorphosis of the Barton women into each
other: for at her death the first Mary merges into her
198
daughter Mary; and the second Mary, is always on the
verge of becoming her fallen aunt Esther, though
ultimately she is reborn as her own mother. Meanwhile
Esther, too, undergoes a metamorphosis, becoming Mary's
mother in one of the most strange and powerful "ghost"
scenes in literature, where the dead for an instant
returns to the living in palpable form (MB 286-7). In
this series of transformations, the fissured identity
of "woman" is played out in all its complexity and
ambivalence, even down to the name the heroine is
christened with: is she Mary the Virgin-Mother or Mary
the Magdalen? Is she angel or demon? for in the end,
it seems, she must "choose" between them. But this is
also a text about a woman's powerlessness to write her
own identity, for the heroine is imprisoned by the
gaze: judged by appearances, she is entrapped in other
people's contextual readings, and fears their
condemnat i on.
As Mary attempts to plot her own narrative, we are
always aware of the danger that her story might develop
into Esther's. In Mary's imagination, Esther embodies
the fulfillment of a feminine fantasy, the social
privilege that a pretty and ambitious girl can win for
herself: for Mary "had early determined that her
beauty should make her a lady . . ." (62). The
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seductive fiction steals, like a Satanic whisper, into
Mary's childhood consciousness, when her aunt says, "in
a coaxing sort of way, 'Mary . . . what should you
think if I sent for you some day and made a lady of
you?'" (44) ; and the plot takes shape through the
romances which "Miss Simmonds' young ladies were in the
habit of recommending to each other" (122). Mary seeks
a private solution to poverty, which flagrantly
contradicts her father's struggle for a public solution
through political reform. But Mary's dream of marrying
Carson reflects a hunger for power that is greater than
her longing for riches or romance. Hers is an Eve-like
craving that is only secondarily connected with
sexuality or material pleasures; her fantasy of
showering gifts on her father is not merely altruistic,
and may even be subtly vengeful. After all, the rank
of lady is one she "coveted all the more for her
father's abuse"— a nicely ambivalent phrase, in which
"abuse" refers contextually to "rank" but also suggests
the father's abuse of his daughter, and, more
subversively, her abuse of him— the agency can be read
both ways. John, we have learned, "never could abide
the gentlefolk" and has a particularly low opinion of
the "do-nothing lady . . . screeching at her pianny all
afternoon, and going to bed without having done a good
200
turn to any one of God's creatures but herself" (45-6);
yet Mary means to pamper her unwilling father "with
every comfort she could devise . . . till he should
acknowledge riches to be very pleasant things, and
bless his lady-daughter!" (122). Though the narrator
describes this as "the best . . . the holiest" of
Mary's plans, its hidden appeal lies in the reversal of
authority, and the father's enforced appreciation of
his daughter's goodness; compare Mary's anticipation,
"when scolded . . . of the day when she would drive up
to the door in her own carriage, to order gowns from
the hasty-tempered yet kind Miss Simmonds." That
softening retraction, "yet kind," may puzzle readers;
after all, we see no evidence of it, though plenty of
Miss Simmonds' pennypinching, hardhearted, ruthless
ways. Its effect, I think, is to signal the restraint
which Mary imposes on her own resentment at being
exploited, just as, later, Mary will deny her father's
brutality by insisting on his extreme benevolence.
For Mary, understandably, cannot bear the reality
of her demeaned social position— the essential
powerlessness of being a girl, and working-class, thus
in lifelong, double-subjugation to oppressive figures
of authority. And so she suspends recognition,
whenever possible, of the indignities she has to
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endure. In her longing to be esteemed, she takes
refuge in consolatory fictions about her present rank,
and plots her future elevation through marriage. Mary
chooses the dressmaking trade because it accommodates
her pretenses at gentility: she "must never soil her
hands, and need never redden or dirty her face with
hard labour" (62 ), Miss Simmonds* shop is on "a
respectable little street," and "the workwomen were
called 'her young ladies'" (63). Though Mary must work
"without remuneration," beginning at six and finishing
at an unscheduled time, she is satisfied with these
slave-labor conditions because they are presented in
such ladylike terms: her recompense, after two years,
is "to dine and have tea, with a small quarterly salary
(paid quarterly because so much more genteel than by
week), a very small one, divisible into a minute weekly
pittance" (63) . And as she sits and sews, from dawn to
dusk and beyond, she weaves secret fantasies of the
future, imagining the "pomps and vanities awaiting her"
when she becomes Harry Carson's wife.
Esther sees the danger of these fictional glosses
on reality. Contrary to Mary's makebelieve, her chosen
profession is quite disreputable; Ivy Pinchbeck points
out that "immorality among dressmakers . . . was
proverbial" (310) , and Esther hints at this notoriety
202
when she says, "I found our Mary went to learn
dress-making, and I began to be frightened for her; for
it's a bad life for a girl to be out late at night in
the streets . . (211). The note of moral
dubiousness is struck again in Mary's susceptibility to
being commercially exploited as spectacle: for
example, her beauty makes her "desirable as a
show-woman" (63) , and, as the "fatal Helen" in the
sensation-fiction of Carson's murder, she promises to
be "quite an attraction to customers. Many a one would
come . . . just to catch a glimpse at [her] ..."
(335).
Mary's delusions about the inherent respectability
of her trade make her vulnerable— but even more
pernicious is her marriage-plotting, in which I suspect
she is altogether less innocent. While Esther believes
Mary to be dangerously bound to a Cinderella-fantasy,
dazed and dazzled by her lover, we are given several
hints that Mary sees her situation, with perfect
clarity, as a Pamela-plot. Her behavior invites
cynical interpretation, though the narrative to some
degree protects her from it, by avoiding direct
presentation of her meetings with Carson, except for
the occasion when she breaks off their connection. We
know that until that point she enjoyed clandestine
203
walks with him every day and listened "with a blush and
a smile" to his "sweet, honeyed words" (160), but her
responses have otherwise been concealed behind a
narrative ellipsis. In other words, Mary gets herself
into a compromising situation, but we are not allowed
to watch and "cannot tell" how guilty she is.
According to Pollard, "Gaskell insists we know from the
start that Mary is a better girl than her behavior
might suggest" (55) ; but I think the more pertinent
question is: What if she's a "worse" girl? It seems
to me that Mary is fairly calculating in her choice of
Harry Carson, who was "not beloved, but favored by
fancy. A gallant, handsome young man; but not beloved.
Yet Mary . . . tried to think of him as her future
husband, and above all, tried to think of herself as
his future wife" (80). This is not a portrait of
someone swept away by passion, or sweetly influenced by
romantic tenderness. In my view, Mary knows she is
playing a game with high stakes, even if she
underestimates her personal risk. She and Harry Carson
engage in a sexual/textual conflict, each manoeuvering
to bind the other to a narrative-design shaped by
self-interest.
Thus Mary performs a Pamela-role, though with a
greater degree of awareness than her literary ancestor;
204
Pamela's artlessness, after all, just may be genuine,
however suspect it has seemed to readers from the
eighteenth-century onwards, whereas Mary's conduct has
enough of stealth about it to suggest her sense of
culpability. Her meetings with Carson, we recall, are
"stolen" (160) and, by a strange moral sophistry, she
refuses to see her lover during her father's absence
from home, though John is in any case kept ignorant of
the whole affair. Mary's bid for social independence
involves her in a sexualized struggle for narrative
mastery: for, while Mary is determined to situate
herself in the "euphoric text" which Pamela represents,
Carson is equally intent on writing her into a
"dysphoric text," the seduction plot. Both texts are
initially constructed from the same components, and
overlap for a while, but develop in different
directions from the moment when the heroine's virtue is
tested and she proves either chaste or corrupt. In
Mary Barton we see the lovers' arrival at that moment
of indefinition: with the plot trembling on the brink
of uncertainty, Mary tries to compress it into the
framework of marriage-fiction while Carson is equally
intent on driving it into a story of sexual conquest.
Esther's intervention is an attempt to arrest the
development of Carson's plot; and it fails, as we have
205
seen. But there is another, more successful
intervention, and thus the contest for narrative
domination is halted. Her eyes opened to the gravity
(!) of her danger, Mary discovers that "she had
hitherto been walking in grope-light towards a
precipice" (177), but whether she would have fallen
remains a question in perpetual suspense. Mary's moral
outrage at Carson releases her from the burden of
guilt: "It was a relief, to gather that the attachment
was of that low, despicable kind, which can plan to
seduce the object of its affection . . . She need not
be penitent to such a plotter!" (183). Yet the
seduction plot has been set in motion, and Mary cannot
escape its momentum so easily, as I will argue.
First, though, we need to consider the successful
narrative intervention to which I just referred. It is
Jem's, of course; for he comes straight from the world
of chivalric romance and claims the bond of "true
love," which proves too powerful to ignore. He sets
himself up as hero by crossing the "perilous bridge"
(90) in a daring act of rescue. He performs incognito,
and though the watching crowd must wait to discover his
identity, Mary, in fatalistic recognition, "knew it
before" (91). The erotic connotations in the
description of the flames— "infernal tongues . . .
206
licking the black walls with amorous
fierceness" (90)— set the scene for Jem's next act of
chivalry, "the service to be done for [Mary's] sake"
(211), which is to rescue her from the destructive
sexual appetite of Harry Carson. Jem's nobleness of
spirit is proven when he overcomes his bitter jealousy,
resolving to "serve [Mary], although she loved him not;
to be her preserving angel, through all the perils of
life; and she unconscious all the while" (216). And
though at this stage he means no more by it than to
persuade Carson to do the right thing and marry Mary,
Jem's magnanimous promise is fully honored in his third
act of chivalry, his readiness to die an unsung hero:
for he refuses to plead innocent in court, and insists
that the legal fiction of his guilt remain intact.
"[Mary] will think I have murdered her lover; she will
think I have caused the grief she must be feeling. And
she must go on thinking so" (383). In fact, poor Jem
is an unsung hero all round; critics take little notice
of him, reserving the hero's title for John. Yet, as
John acknowledges, "the meanest thing I ever did [was]
to leave thee to bear the brunt" (433); and Carson's
death is not John's moral responsibility alone, since
his fellow-activists also pledged to murder. In
bearing their collective guilt, Jem is Christ-like— a
207
comparison suggested in his first act of potential
martyrdom, when he walks through the flames with a body
draped across his shoulders, like a shadowy figure of
Christ carrying the cross. Christian and courtly-love
values come together in Jem's chivalrous acts; he
embodies the true principle of caritas, which contrasts
tellingly with Mary's self-aggrandizing visions of
herself as a bountiful lady bestowing charitable gifts
upon her acquaintances.
It is not by speaking to Harry, in fact, that Jem
saves the lady from a fall, but (though he doesn't
realize it) by his act of speaking his love to Mary,
which effectively "calls" her to her proper fictional
mode. In the context of her relationship with Harry
Carson, Mary set out to be a thoroughly "modern"
heroine, her origins in the novel-as-genre: for it is
in Pamela that the Cinderella-myth takes such a
capitalistic and class-conscious shape, revealing the
economic incentives behind marriage and at the same
time painting an idealizing, romantic gloss on the
heroine's mercenary motives. But when Jem first shapes
his heart into words, Mary is locked, against her will,
into a different, more traditional narrative destiny
from the one she has contrived for herself. She tries
to resist his expressions of ardor, for though "she had
208
known the tale they told for many a day . . . still she
wished he had not put it so plainly" (12 0); but, once
spoken, the claims of romantic love simply cannot be
denied: "One little hour ago, and all was still
unsaid, and she had her fate in her own power . . . but
the occurrence an hour ago . . . had unveiled her heart
to her; it had convinced her she loved Jem above all
persons and things" (176). Mary relinquishes all
desire to be a bourgeois lady, dismissing "ease and
luxury" as "hollow vanities . . . now she had
discovered the passionate secret of her soul" (177).
She becomes, instead, a lady of a far more aristocratic
kind— as Jem says, "by right of nature" (216), but also
by literary connection, when she is enfolded into the
paradigm of chivalric romance.
"Nature" has indeed distinguished her from the
common horde, stamping her with the hallmarks of fine
breeding— though bearing in mind the renowned ugliness
of the English aristocracy, we might find it more
plausible to think of Mary as a fairy-princess than a
blue-blooded cousin of Tess. Certainly her beauty has
magic, mythical qualities: her mouth, "scarlet as the
winterberries . . . contrasted finely with the clear
paleness of her complexion where the eloquent blood
flushed carnation at each emotion"; and without the
209
assistance of Maybelline or L'Oreal, she is blessed
with the extraordinary combination of "black eyelashes"
(so long they "lay on the delicate cheek") and "masses
of golden hair" (153). Mary seems to belong to a world
quite other than the Manchester slums she was born
into— and a fictional mode quite distinct from the
social realism to which the novel is conventionally
confined. This is confirmed by comparing her with
"sallow, unhealthy . . . careworn" and blind Margaret
(66), more typical of urban girls of their class. Note
Basch's comments, for instance, on the deformities of
seamstresses in 1841:
Undernourished, overworked, unhealthy,
this mode of life exposed a seamstress
to all kinds of illnesses, from swollen
ankles and asthma to tuberculosis,
blindness or spinal curvatures. Of the
669 patients in the North London
Ophthalmic Institute, 81 were
needlewomen. (124)
Physically, Mary is remarkably unscathed by the
trials of poverty and the hazards of her trade.
Yet, once again, the discordant note is struck,
the hint of fallenness in the description of her
unblemished loveliness. Heroines' faces are texts to
be decoded, as Shakespeare's Olivia satirically points
out, not accidental combinations of arbitrary features,
such as "item, two lips, indifferent red; item, two
210
gray eyes, with lids to them; item, one neck, one chin,
and so forth" (Twelfth Night I.v.248-50); and Mary's
"eloquent blood," the flush in the cheek, not only
speaks of the refined sensibility of the delicate lady,
but also betrays "the passionate secret of her heart,"
her heightened erotic desire. In this respect Mary is
closer kin to Clarissa Harlowe than to Pamela— Clarissa
who was so angelic and yet so nightmarishly near to
being Clarissa Harlot, and whose ready blushes can be
interpreted as signalling her maidenly innocence but
also her extreme susceptibility to sexual arousal.
Ironically, in her clandestine relationship with
Carson, which threatens to make a fallen woman of her,
Mary seems devoid of desire. But the moment when she
recognizes her proper narrative sphere and her symbolic
place as courtly lady is marked by a sexual awakening
so intense that it shakes Mary to the core and shatters
conventional Victorian notions of ladylike
propriety.37 Driven to distraction at the fear that
she has lost Jem forever by rejecting him, Mary sobs,
"I could bite my tongue out when I think on it . . .
and now I'd do anything— I would indeed" (189). She
will keep that promise; but far from permitting her to
bite out her tongue, the plot will demand from her a
public avowal of her "heart's secrets" (390)— a
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performance. if you will, powerful enough to discredit
the legal fiction of the rival lovers' quarrel, and for
which Mary is paid "the price of her strange services
as witness" (422).
Giving this testimony proves deeply distressing,
not only to the heroine but also to contemporary
reviewers, one of whom objected to "the gratuitous
declaration of love . . . in the open court— a feeling
which the circumstances of the time would rather have
led her to suppress, and the unreserved display of
which on such an occasion we regard as the worst
conceived and least rational incident in the story"
(The Prospectus Review February 1849, quoted in
Rubenius 117).
The same reviewer also complained of the
"unnatural combination of the two elements" that make
up Mary's character:
Take away the extraneous addition, and
leave us the genuine Mary Barton, the
simple-hearted and faithful mistress of
Jem . . . the first pure
conception .... But to this is
prefixed . . . a character of quite
another hue, which is out of harmony
with it; and the discrepancy between
the two involves consequences in the
development of the story, which forms
the chief drawback in its impression of
naturalness and probability. We refer,
of course, to Mary's flirtations with
Mr. Carson, and her strange ignorance
212
of her feelings towards Jem.
(Rubenius, 78)
This commentary is very revealing, both in its
perceptiveness and its blind spots which we, from
another historical/cultural vantage point, find it
easier to identify. There is indeed a split in Mary's
character, which she senses herself after belatedly
discovering her passion for Jem: "It was as if two
people were arguing the matter; that mournful,
desponding communion between her former self, and her
present self" (176). We can define that split in
several ways: as the division between innocence and
experience; as the virgin/magdalen fissure in woman's
social identity; or as the heroine's sense of
fragmentation as she is dispersed across competing
plot-lines, existing in the "two elements" of different
fictional modes. But we may pause uncomfortably at
certain assumptions the critic makes, in particular the
notion of what is "unnatural," or the discussion of
"naturalness and probability" which pretends to refer
to aesthetic conventions but is really concerned with
moral ones; and, despite its no-nonsense tone, the
review betrays the alarming complexity and fragility of
cultural ideals of femininity. In a sense, of course,
Mary is perfectly unnatural, composed of literary
213
essences which advertize themselves as such;
nonetheless, Gaskell defended her as more realistic
than conventional, idealized Victorian heroines, and
was sorry that "people are angry with her just because
she is not perfect" (GL 78). But, then again, perhaps
Mary is not so much unnatural as denaturalizing,
revealing the constructedness of "womanly nature," the
phrase so frequently evoked, then as now, to support
the status quo. While the reviewer makes a semantic
connection between "natural" and "ideal," so that the
natural woman refers to the angel and Mary1s
imperfections are perceived as improbable, the flaws in
her character not only make her more plausible— as
Gaskell suggests— but also more deeply deconstructive.
For she is an uncomfortable reminder that the
dichotomous notions of female "nature"— the virgin and
the whore— are not separate categories applied to
entirely distinct groups of women, but embodied,
paradoxically and painfully, in "woman" as cultural
construct. And how does a "natural" woman, in this
case not an ideal but a "real" or historical woman,
connect to all of this? Perhaps, like Elizabeth
Gaskell, she wonders if she could be an "improper woman
without knowing it"— an unnerving anxiety that we can
trace in her heroine's representation, for long after
214
Mary has escaped Mary Carson's seduction plot and the
tragic destiny of the fallen woman, the shadow of the
whore is shackled to her heels.
As Mary moves into the romantic-chivalric plot,
that uneasy connection is sustained with the narrative
that could have been, the fall that might have
happened. For a while she tries to submit to a text of
"womanly patience" which the narrator officially
endorses:
Maidenly modesty (and true love is ever
modest) seemed to oppose every plan she
could think of for showing Jem how much
she repented her decision against him,
and how dearly she had now discovered
that she loved him. She came to the
unusual wisdom of resolving to do
nothing, but try to be patient ....
(177)
"Ridiculous 1" I once scrawled in the margin at
this point, full of twentieth-century arrogance and
impatience at such a nambypamby decision. But perhaps
there is a hint that Elizabeth Gaskell thought so too,
since the decision is not allowed to stand. Mary's
first plan is to show her change of heart in "natural
actions . . . even if she had to wait for years." This
is what proper heroines are supposed to do, after all;
like Persuasion1s Anne Elliott, they must fade and
droop before they can admit their error and speak of
their desire. Note, however, that Mary's daydream of a
215
"happy ending . . . however distant" (178) is
accompanied by the sound of bells— factory bells!—
which I take to be a satiric comment on the
impracticality of such hopeless romanticism. For Jem
is gone to Halifax, which is "all the same to [Mary's]
heart as the Antipodes; equally inaccessible by humble
penitent looks and maidenly tokens of love" (189)— and
now to whom shall the repentant maiden tell her tale?
Jem cannot see the subtle signs by which Mary hopes to
convey her love, his mother dislikes her far too much
to notice them and "patience seemed of no avail . . .
Mary's cry was ever the old moan of the Moated Grange"
(205).
As we see, "ever," for Mary, does not last so
long— she has too much vigor to play Marianna and watch
the slow decay of time. Chafing, as always, against
the bonds of her geographically and linguistically
straitened woman's-worId, she says to Will; "I wish I
were a boy, I'd go to sea with you" (244). "I wish I
could sing," she says to Margaret, looking at the gold
sovereigns the siren is paid for her song (191).
"Many's the time . . . that I longed for your beauty,"
is Margaret's response. Brief statements from the
heart, they encapsulate the different escape-plots
available to young men and women of her class, and
216
connect suggestively with A. Maude Royden's argument
that a woman's sexuality was her usual, but risky,
route to independence:
The boy who runs away to sea is in
comparatively little danger. His
feminine equivalent is in great danger.
There are few openings in life for her,
and the very qualities of vitality and
enterprise which make her run away
render her perilously attractive. 8
Like Elizabeth Gaskell, Mary sees feminine freedom
in terms of gender reversal, and envies Margaret her
unusual mobility as a singer: "You've been quite a
traveller, Margaret, for sure!" (188). Margaret's
tour, in actuality confined to a few northern towns,
does indeed seem to have taken her "half o-er the
world," since she bumped into the elusive Jem in remote
Halifax. Through her singing, the only legitimate way
a woman can raise her voice in this novel, Margaret is
gifted with powers of expression that bring her
financial reward— like the woman-writer; (and the
parallels are underscored through the songs, which
reiterate the romantic/political themes of Mary
Barton). Fantasizing about herself at one point as the
grand lady of one of her songs— "And ye shall walk in
silk attire/An' siller hae to spare" (138)— Margaret
unwittingly connects her own dreams of prosperity with
Mary's schemes to trade on her beauty; the lyrics
217
concern a woman who betrays true love for a wealthy
marriage, and make Mary uncomfortable enough to request
"something a bit more new, for somehow I never quite
liked that part about thinking o' Donald mair" (138).
Margaret, like the Scheherazadean writer, engages in
seductive "recitals" for profit; and so the tinge of
impropriety, Esther's shadow, darkens her character
too, prim and proper as she is. The price paid for
each performance, a half-sovereign, even links her with
vulgar Sally, who is given "sundry half-sovereigns"
(132) for her role as procuress in the seduction plot.
It is as if any bid for social independence threatens
to turn into that same nightmarish path to the
precipice, whatever the direction taken. This is the
impasse met by the active woman.
And Mary is galvanized into action by the subpoena
which summons her to participate in the prosecution's
story, the legal fiction of Jem's guilt. She has to
reinvent the plot, in a double sense, since she becomes
a chivalric adventurer in her own right. If the hero
must prove himself worthy of the lady, the lady, in
this case, reciprocates by delivering him from the
draconian law: she will construct a redeeming fiction,
or, in that word of such magical resonance, an "alibi,"
which she will call upon Will to present. Thus Mary
218
breaks the mould of the chivalric plot and reshapes it
differently, though it still seems always on the verge
of dissolving into the story of a woman's fall. She
embarks, like Jem, on a perilous journey— and hers is
not just physically hazardous but also "perilous" in
Royden's sense, since there are constant references to
her moral danger. Fired into "boldness" by the
necessity of saving Jem, she refuses to allow anyone
else the role of rescuer: "She longed to do all
herself; to be his liberator, his deliverer; to win him
life . . . by her own exertions" (312); and she
fulfills her fantasy of running away to sea,
appropriately garbed (to Sally's disappointment) with
"a little black silk handkerchief just knotted round
her neck, like a boy" (334) . But the symbolic
gender-reversal doesn't save her from being read as a
woman, that is by appearances, and with automatic
suspicion. Note that Jem, coincidentally, in his
"feminine" role of captive awaiting rescue, is judged
by the same code, his degenerescence apparent to some
of the audience in "the marks of Cain on his
countenance" (385).
Arriving in Liverpool, Mary is remarkably at home
on the streets, finding her way around the strange city
"with the savoir-faire of a town-bred girl" (345).
219
Such instinctive knowledge implies that the streets are
her natural habitat; and throughout the Liverpool
scenes, the shadow of the prostitute threatens to rise
up and engulf her as never before. The doubleness of
the narrative, or of the construct "woman,1 1 is played
out to the full; as the Mary of the chivalric plot
proves her honor by performing feats of extraordinary
courage, the Mary of the Magdalen subtext looms large
in the perceptions of everyone around her, so that
nobility is always countermatched by notoriety. We
have been prepared for these scenes by the many
references linking Esther with Mary, and the innuendo
hidden even in such innocent remarks as Jane's
complaint that Mary has not visited for a while; "Jem
has often wondered if he should know you, if he met you
on the street" (163).
When Mary becomes a vagrant in Liverpool where, in
Charlie's knowing words, "there's traps about for young
women at every corner," the cumulative weight of all
the previous comments makes it seem that a recurring
nightmare is about to come true.
Mary's "fluttered and excited appearance" first
arouses a certain "prejudice" in Will's landlady, who
"suspected some love affair, and, perhaps, one of not
the most creditable kind" (346). Mary can barely say
220
what she wants— her "voice seemed choked up in her
throat"— and again, after the drama of pursuing Will
over the open sea, she discovers she is voiceless when
she tries to communicate her mission to his captain.
As if in anticipation of the semiotic collapse she will
suffer after the trial, "her throat was dry; all
musical sound had gone out of her voice, but in a loud
harsh whisper she told the men her errand of life and
death" (358). After the boatmen have shouted her story
across the water, she names herself as its author— "Say
I'm Mary Barton"— an act of boldness which apparently
provokes the captain into calling her "a disgraceful
name," one which rhymes, perhaps, with the
"speaking-trumpet" through which he yells it (358) .
The urgency of the chase, the strain of speaking,
leave Mary dazed and bewildered: "independently of
their nautical language, a veil seemed drawn over her
mind, and she had no clear perception of anything that
passed" (359). In her struggle to "tell the truth"
without betraying her secret knowledge, Mary finds
herself constantly misconstrued, as if an improper
woman keeps materializing, in nightmarish intervention,
between the words she frames and the way she is heard:
Her very words seemed not her own, and
beyond her power of control, for she
221
found herself speaking quite
differently to what she meant. (359)
Back on shore, Mary begins "meekly to unpin her
shawl” and offers it "mutely," in part-payment for the
boatfare. It is a symbolic disrobing, suggesting both
the emotional nakedness she will undergo to redeem Jem,
like a modern-day Lady Godiva, and her helpless sexual
submission, now that she is on the streets, without
shelter or money, or memory to keep her connected with
sanity: "She strove to remember where Will had lodged,
but she could not; name, street, every thing had passed
away, and it did not signify; better she were lost than
found" (361). These could be Esther's words; but Mary
is saved from that destiny by the boatman, who acts
with rough paternal benevolence: he declines her
shawl, warns her that "pier-head's no place for a young
woman to be standing on, gape-saying," and takes her
home to his wife, with the gruff words, "Come with me,
and be d— d to you" (361-2). (Though by going with
him, d— d she won't be.)
There is a tiny but telling echo of Will's
mermaid-story, in the way the boatman presents Mary to
his wife, like some strange creature caught at sea:
[H]e looked at Mary with the most
satisfied air imaginable,
half-triumphantly, as if she were the
captive of his bow and spear, and
222
half-defyingly, as if daring her to
escape. (376)
Her moral integrity is questioned yet again in the
doubtful welcome Mrs. Sturgis gives her, first
commenting that "thou'rt not fit to go out into the
street," and the next minute speculating that "thou'rt
a bad one; I almost misdoubt thee, thou'rt so pretty"
(377). Mary's conspicuous good looks make her
vulnerable always to such cynical readings, but the
allusion to the "Mermaidicus" story reminds us that the
"danger" of female sexuality can be constructed in
contradictory ways, and we can never quite tell whether
a desirable woman poses more of a threat to herself or
to others. For the parents of Mary's lovers, the
answer is perfectly clear: Mr. Carson thinks of her
with repugnance as a "fatal Helen" (388) while Jane
Wilson denounces her as a "Dalilah who had lured (Jem)
to his danger" and a "vile, flirting quean" (282). She
also implies, in the speech quoted below, that Mary is
a seductive sorceress, a deadly siren, and a demonic
angel:
Is it not enough to have robbed me of
my boy with thy arts and thy
profligacy, but thou must come here to
crow over me— me— his mother? Dost
thou know where he is, thou bad hussy,
with thy great blue eyes and yellow
hair, to lead men onto ruin? Out upon
223
thee, with thy angel's face, thou
whited sepulchre. (281)
There is far more ambivalence, however, in John's
description of beauty as "a sad snare," and in the
sailors' attempt to bind the mermaid, which is
comparable to Carson's action in detaining Mary by
force while calling her a "little witch," as if she in
turn holds him captive.
Female sexuality seems to be so awesome a force
that it is put on trial in the public court, along with
murder. The painfulness of this scene is suggested in
the narrator's attempt to dissociate herself from it:
"I was not there myself; but one who was told me that
her look . . . was like . . . Guido's picture of
Beatrice Cenci'" (389)— an intriguing suggestion, under
the circumstances!39 The episode raises questions
about women's relationship to the "truth" of
patriarchal language, especially the hard,
authoritarian discourse of the law, which is used here
to probe and dissect the subtle essences of a woman's
sensuality, the delicate membranes of her heart. Mary
is long accustomed to silencing her emotions— even at
her dead mother's bedside she "almost crammed" the
clothes in her mouth "to keep down the choking sobs"
(56)— and so she is appalled at the intimate confession
224
she must make when the barrister asks whether Jem or
Harry Carson was the object of her desire:
And who was he, the questioner, that he
should dare so lightly to ask of her
heart's secrets? That he should dare
to ask her to tell, before that
multitude assembled there, what woman
usually whispers with blushes and
tears, and many hesitations, to one ear
alone? (390)
There is a sense of violation here— of naked
emotional truth flinching from raw exposure— which may
seem like exaggerated sensitivity on Mary' s part,
until we remember the disapproval of the Atheneum
reviewer I quoted earlier. What this suggests is the
severity of the prohibition placed on feminine passion,
or at least on its verbalization. Shaping feelings
into words proves an enormous burden for Mary, who
tends in any case to use more sensuous and indirect
modes of expression, a physical suggestiveness rather
than language, to show "heart's sympathy" of even the
most innocent kind; for example, she comforts
Mrs. Davenport through "broken sentences" murmured in a
"gentle," "musical" voice, and by her "sweet,"
"angelic" face (111); and Jem by her "soft hand's
touch" that "thrilled through his frame, her silvery
voice . . . whispering tenderness in his ear" (119).
This body-language Jem understands very well, for in
225
another scene he registers Mary's presence "by the sure
instinct of love, by which almost his body
thought ..." (123) . But when Jem asks her to marry
him, her clear words of rejection cut through that more
delicate and suggestive language, displacing its truth
with a travesty: "I will always be your friend but I
can never be your wife," (175), so that her subsequent
silence, "from deed and violent emotion," is mistaken
as confirming her refusal and, choosing "the certainty
of despair," Jem makes his desperate and precipitous
exit. At the trial, under the extraordinary pressure
of her lover’s imminent execution, Mary suddenly sees
her opportunity to retract that ruthless rejection by
declaring her love in equally explicit terms; though
she shrinks at first from revealing her emotions
through the cold, hard logic of the lawyer's questions,
she resolves on impulse that "there would be no
feminine shame to stand between her and her avowal,"
and so casts caution to the winds. Her love, she
insists, is "above what tongue can tell," but she
nonetheless announces it several times over, in a
lengthy and passionate speech, before stammering to a
halt:
"[I] loved James Wilson . . . above all
else on earth put together; and I love
him now better than ever, though he has
226
never known a word of it till this
minute . . . . [H]e had not been out
of my sight above a minute before I
knew I loved— far above my life . . .
[I]f the gentleman asks me which I
loved the best, I make answer, I was
flattered by Mr. Carson . . . but James
Wilson I— "
She covered her face with her hands, to
hide the burning blushes, which even
dyed her fingers. (391)
In the subtle oscillation between "tongue-telling"
and wordlessness, there lies a suggestion that women
have a different connection with language, a way of
making silences speak where words fail. The semantic
doubleness of "telling"— counting as well as
verbalizing— connects with Jem' s fear that Mary will
die "just when he knew . . . the untold treasure he
possessed in her lovei" (404), and perhaps also with
the "jewel" which Mary finds in the existence of an
alibi, for though she "cannot all at once ascertain the
value," she knows it will lead "like a silken clue" to
"some bower of bliss" (311) ,40 These references, and
the trial scene itself, seem deeply imbued with sexual
suggestiveness; note that after hearing of Mary's
desire for him, Jem "now stood erect and firm" (392).
Mary, on the other hand, begins "losing all command
over herself," her "composure . . . giving way" (392).
227
At this point Mary enters a state of mental
derangement, the first symptoms of which we saw
immediately after the sea-chase. Now the courtroom,
"heaving and whirling," is swept away on "billowy
waves," and into this surrealistic nightmare comes her
father, "calling on them to be silent, and listen to
him"; then, "for a brief second, the court stood still,
and she could see the judge, sitting up there like an
idol . . . and Jem, opposite, looking at her, as if to
say, am I to die for what you know your— " (393). The
narrative plays brilliantly upon the notion of an
unspeakable secret, an unnameable truth, which on the
surface refers to John Barton's guilt, though a more
subversive interpretation of the secret, as feminine
desire, is easily accommodated by the text. It is as
if, by breaking the dreadful taboo and speaking in the
public court of desire, the passion "above what tongue
can tell," Mary crosses the boundaries of sexual
repression and shatters the image of femininity. Found
guilty of sexual misconduct, she is punished by losing
her place in the symbolic order. She becomes a
linguistic outcast or excommunicate, banished to the
"ghastly, spectral world of delirium" where "no words
could reach her" (401) . Yet, by a strange irony, her
innocence is confirmed by the enormous cost of her
228
confession— a less virtuous woman would not suffer such
pain. Trapped in the paradox of a ducking-stool trial,
she is condemned equally by her innocence or her guilt.
Mary's madness is exhibited in loss of linguistic
control. It begins with "low quick mutterings" which
catch Job's attention, and ours too, for their play
upon truthtelling and madness— "'I must not go mad, I
must not, indeed. They say people tell the truth when
they're mad; but I don't. I was always a liar" (394);
and she progresses to "passionate cries" which rise to
a "wild pitch of agony" (401-2). As if breaking
through the sexual code leads to the release of all
forbidden emotions, Mary shows an unprecedented
aggression towards Job, "turning sharp round on him,
with upbraiding, for his eavesdropping, on her lips,"
but next moment "throwing up her arms with wild
energy," shrieking aloud and falling into convulsions.
By the time the trial is over and Jem seeks out Mary
rather than his possessive mother, he finds his
silvery-tongued Angel now sounds like querulous
Jane— or worse, Crazy Jane.41 Job comments sadly on
the contrast between this shrewishness and her former
dulciloquence:
How strange her voice sounds! Screech!
screech! and she so low, sweet-spoken,
when she's well! (402)
229
Despite the slight Cordelia-allusion, Mary is
drawn rather from feminine, fragile Ophelia, the major
iconic figure of romanticized madness in the nineteenth
century, according to Showalter. The bawdy songs and
obscene allusions of Ophelia's "mad-scene" suggest the
erotic energies that could be unleashed once the
barrier of repression is broken.42 The sole witness
to Mary's dementia is her lover Jem (except for
Mrs. Sturgis, who "alternately tended and wept,"
perhaps at the evidence that Mary is "a bad one" after
all); and Jem alone knows that there is method in
Mary's madness, her "ravings" having their own
"peculiar meaning or reference, intelligible to his
mind," though he is "pledged to preserve this secret"
(402). Again, the obvious reference is to the father's
guilt, but given the breaking of the prohibition on
desire that precipitated Mary's mental collapse, we can
conjecture that those ravings are also, like Ophelia's,
of a sexual nature, and that her dementia takes the
form of erotomania. Jem's "untold treasure" has been
exchanged for one who may remain a "poor gibbering
maniac all her life long" (404) ; there is a frightening
doubleness in this representation, a notion of woman as
shapeshifter, capable of metamorphosing between the
extreme states of purity and ugly depravity. Like
230
other madwomen in Victorian literature, especially
Bertha Mason with her grovelling, bestial behavior,
Mary's dementia suggests the demonic energies beneath
the angel's calm, the filthy monster inside the lady.
She is "Una [in] the wilderness" (302); but false
Duessa seemed as fair.
When Mary is first "possessed of her terrible
knowledge," she "almost prayed for the blessed
unconsciousness of death or madness" (311); and we see
that both wishes are granted her. Chapter 33, which
deals with Mary's sickness, is prefaced with the
death-song from Cvmbeline ("Fear no more the heat o’
th’ sun") which naturally sets up readers' expectations
that Mary is going to die. And effectively she does;
she undergoes a rebirth, entering a consciousness like
"a lately-born infant's" (415), absorbed in childish
wonder at the colors and objects in her room. She
smiles at Jem "as a baby does when it sees its mother
tending its little cot; and continued her tender,
infantine gaze into his face as if the sight gave her
much unconscious pleasure" (416). Mary is suspended in
this Edenic state of innocence for a while, but "by and
by" her expression changes to "a look of memory and
intelligence" and, turning "bright rosy red . . . she
tried to hide her head n her pillow" (416). From this
231
point on Mary is perfectly submissive, "softer and
gentler than she had ever been," and so verbally
subdued that "it seemed almost a trouble to her to
break the silence with the low sounds of her own sweet
voice" (418). In the happy-ever-after scene that ends
the novel, the family grouping, as Stoneman has noted,
"curiously effaces" Mary, whose life now becomes "as
private as her mother's" (85) . We are given a tableau
vivant of the family romance, in which daddy is of
course the hero at the center— "Clap hands, daddy
comes"— and Mary is displaced by Jane, not only in baby
Johnnie's regard but perhaps also in Jem's, who
comments: "The old woman has twice the spirit of the
young one" (456).
The narrator's "intrusions" are never more obvious
than in the closing scenes of the novel: "I see a long
low wooden house, with room enough to spare ....
The glory of the Indian summer is over all, making the
heart leap at the sight of its gorgeous beauty . . . At
the door of the house stands Mary, watching for the
return of her husband from his daily work; and . . .
smiling" (465) . The shift to present tense, the active
visualization of the scene, signal to readers that we
are engaged in the process of making up stories. The
final chapters run through a series of inventive
232
fictions, mythic resolutions to insoluble problems.
Many critics have complained about the false and
didactic ending to the political plot— Carson's
reconciliation with John, and his conscientious
engagement in industrial reform, after witnessing a
little girl's forgiveness of the rough boy who pushed
her over. Both episodes are certainly corny enough to
embarrass most readers.
But this sickly implausibility is quite pointed;
the narrator lets us know that she is spinning a yarn.
We are in a world of make-believe, about as solid as
Mary's pretence at being a lady when she works as a
seamstress. The little girl is no human creature but a
"fairy-child," a "lovely-little creature decked out in
soft-snowy muslin," who "fluttered along" on
"fairy-feet." The boy, too, is straight out of the
pages of Hans Christian Anderson, a "giant,"
intimidated by a threat no less than a policeman, "the
ogres of our street" (437-8); and the child's blood,
"making those scarlet marks so terrible to children,"
is more talismanic than realistic. The scene is also a
tiny cameo of male-female relations; and, like John who
throws Esther on the ground, the violent boy is
oppressed in turn by the bigger bully of the law. But
the moral of the fable— that sinners are reformed when
233
their trespasses are forgiven, that "the lad will mind
and be more gentle for the time to come" because the
child "put up her little mouth to be kissed by her
injurer"— is somewhat undermined being framed as a
fairytale.
Romantic love also has fairytale qualities; Mary
Barton seems to posit it as mvth. which paradoxically
means both "truth" and "lie." Love is magic, and can
immobilize, transfix or transform: for example, by
merely mentioning Mary, you can freeze Jem in his
tracks: "The spell of her name was as potent as that
of the mariner's glittering eye. 'He listened like a
three year old child'" (208). Love can take shape as a
visible aura: "around the young couple there was a
radiant atmosphere— a glory of happiness" (431).
Will's love for Margaret, who has "entranced" him,
(202), is "a golden thread . . . interwoven even now
with the darkness of his sorrow” (406). When crushed
by Mary's rejection, Jem is smitten with loss of
speech, becomes "like a girl," and an automaton:
"[H]is body's come but . . . he's left his heart behind
him. His tongue I'm sure he has ..." (197). But
Mary's declaration of love casts a fairy-spell on Jem's
vision of the future, creating a phantasmagoria of
light and color:
234
[Sjuddenly, athwart this gloom which
made life seem such a blank expanse of
desolation, there flashed'. . .
exquisite delight .... And Life,
now full of tender images, suddenly
bright with exquisite promises, hung on
a breath, the slenderest gossamer
chance .... [P]hantoms of what life
with her might be . . . made him almost
gasp and reel . . . .1 1 (399)
The sweet fiction that is offered to us at the end
is a distillation of the romantic myth— a tiny drop of
pure bliss caught and suspended, like a little
curiosity in a bottle held up for our delight: what "I
see" announces itself as a vision— of new beginnings
and Edenic innocence, the "garden" and the "orchard"
relocated to a clearing among "primeval trees," the
"cottage," hinting at English charm, refashioned into a
"long low wooden house, with room enough, and to spare"
(465).
But is there room enough to spare for a room of
one's own? Spirited Mary is such a shadow of her
former self at the end, and I keep wondering about some
earlier suggestions that Jem, this most
self-sacrificing and "feminine" of men, is also a man
to be feared: Mary "can see" that he is "rather savage
at times" (120), we witness his fantasies of murdering
her, for in his "guilty longing for blood . . . [he]
would rather Mary were dead, cold in her grave, than
235
that she should be another's" (215), and even his
protective tenderness implies the possibility of an
oppressive vigilance to come: "(T)hou'rt not fit to be
trusted home by thyself" (4 31).
The ending of the novel is about escape: from the
industrial evils of England, from the quagmires of
political economy, from the taint of criminality that
forces Jem and Mary into exile. He is turned away from
the foundry, she is on public record as an improper
woman— "You can't hide it now, Mary for it's all in
print," says Sally (426). There is even, as Gallagher
argues, escape from narrative responsibility. Coral
Lansbury suggests that "emigration was always an
admission of failure, at the same time as it held out
the promise of a better life" (22); and Mary Barton is,
I think, an honorable admission of defeat which points
to the impossibility of winning rather than the
inadequacy of the writer to her task. You can sail as
far as the continent of the Americas— "at t'other side
of the sun," according to Alice— yet you cannot escape
the inequitable relationship between women and men,
which is written into the marriage contract and into
the structure of marriage plots. Moreover, Mary is
entrapped not just in the physical space of the home
but in the metaphorical space of the domestic ideal; as
236
snugly caught in the ideology of "natural" law, the
split construct of the feminine ideal, as Aeriel in the
rift of the cloven pine. Even the other side of the
sun may not be far enough to escape that.
237
NOTES
1 Gaskell herself claimed: '"John Barton’ was the
original title of the book. Round the character of
John Barton all the others formed themselves; he was my
hero, the person with whom all my sympathies went" (GL
42). We may question critics' eagerness to take this
statement at face-value. (For exceptions, see Easson
73 and Schor 21.)
2 See also Patsy Stoneman, who objects to the
oversimplification of fiction as a reflection of
reality in the criticism of Francoise Basch, Patricia
Beer and Jenni Calder.
3 I discuss Gaskell's emphatic defence of
"truth-telling" on page 149. See also Schor for a full
and engaging discussion of women's relationship to
language, authority and truth.
4 Significant works dealing with the need to control
female sexuality include Gilbert and Gubar's Madwoman
in the Attic. Auerbach's Woman and the Demon, and
Showalter's Female Malady.
5 Gilbert and Gubar suggest that monster
incarnations betray a male fear of women's duplicitous
arts and their ability to steal (or seduce) male
energy. (Madwoman. p. 70.)
6 Note the reappearance of that strange creature,
the Manx cat, in Woolf's Room of One * s Own (13).
7 According to Gilbert and Gubar, woman actually
becomes the glass coffin in the spatial imagery of
women's writings. (Madwoman, p. 71.)
8 As Stoneman reminds us: "Articulacy is the goal
of the 'infant'" (74). For other powerful readings of
Shelley's novel, see Gilbert and Gubar's Madwoman
221-47; Ellen Moers' Literary Women 91-99; and James
Kincaid's "Tripping on the Tongue."
9 George Smith, "Mrs. Gaskell and her Novels,"
Cornhill Magazine, xxi (Jan— June 1874): 212. The
Athenium Review article is quoted in Gerin, x.
238
10 With a few exceptions, such as Anna Rubenius's The
Woman Question, scholars have only quite recently begun
to unearth the subversive, feminist possibilities in
Gaskell's work. Gallagher, Schor, Lansbury and
Stoneman, all cited in this chapter, give the most
powerful readings in current Gaskell criticism.
11 See Showalter on "motherly fiction," Literature.
71, and Schor on matriarchal authority, 38-54.
12 The "veneration of the fireside" (Altick 1970, 7)
is a Victorian cultural symbol used to powerful effect
in Marv Barton; the breakdown of the family, under
economic duress, is suggested in contrasting references
to the "delicious glow of the fire" (53) in prosperous
days, and the "comfortless" hearth of poverty, where
John sits in an opium-stupor, though "there was not
even the dumb familiar home-friend, a fire" (161).
13 Examples of this role-reversal include John
Barton's tender nursing of the Davenports; Jem's
maternal vigilance over the delirious Mary; Frank, who
was "as tender" towards his feverish wife, Job's
daughter, "as any mother could ha' been" (14 6); and the
comic-pathetic efforts made by Job and Jennings to
nurture their orphaned baby granddaughter, which
include "the ou'd bearded chap thinking he'd make
hisself like a woman just by putting on a woman's cap,"
in the hope of pacifying the screaming child with that
soothing power which women mysteriously possess. See
also Stoneman on the significance of maternal fathers
in the novel.
14 See Schor's discussion of Gaskell's "innocence."
15 The "solution" proposed for both evils is the
same: exile. Criminals were transported: unmarried
women were urged to emigrate to the colonies. See, for
example, W.R. Greg's plan for disposing of half a
million "surplus" women in this way. Contemporary
feminists responded sharply: Jessie Boucherett, for
example, recommended sending the men instead, "Thus
many of our superfluous women would be enabled to find
work" ("Provisions for Superfluous Women" in Butler
30); and a letter to The Examiner referred satirically
to "the very tempting offers of the newspapers, held
out as bait to us, fairly to ship ourselves off to Van
Dieman's land, on the very delicate errand of husband-
hunting; and having safely arrived at the 'Land of
239
Gosher,' jump ashore, with a 'Who wants me?'" (quoted
in Pinchbeck 2 00).
16 Engels, too, associates social and sexual
rebellion; see Condition 144-5, and also Marcus's
illuminating discussion of this position in Engels
220-225. Marcus is careful to point out that "the
structure of crime reproduces the structure of existing
social arrangements fully as much as it protests
against them" (222). Compare Judith Walkowitz's
observation that prostitutes still operated within a
"class-stratified and patriarchal society" (31).
17 See, for example, discussions by Stoneman and
Schor.
18 Classic texts include Showalter, Gilbert and
Gubar, and, more recently, Poovey's The Proper Ladv.
19 Letter from William Howitt, acting as her literary
agent, in R.D. Waller, ed. Letters Addressed to
Mrs. Gaskell From Famous Contemporaries (Manchester
1935) 5-6. Quoted in Gerin 83.
20 Gaskell wrote to Catherine Winkworth in 1848:
By the way, Emily was anxious to know
the name of the person who wrote "Mary
Barton" (a book she saw at Plas
Penryhn) and I am happy in being able
to satisfy her Eve-like craving.
Marianne Darbishire told me it was
ascertained to be the production of a
Mrs. Wheeler, a clergyman's wife, who
once upon a time was a Mrs. Stone, and
wrote a book called "The Cotton Lord."
Marianne gave me many proofs which I
don't think worth repeating, but I
think were quite convincing." (GL 3 0).
21 M. Hompes, "Mrs. E.C. Gaskell," The Gentleman's
Magazine. Quoted in Pollard, 36.
22 Note that Mary Barton also fantasizes about such
largesse.
23 Quoted in Hopkins, 27.
240
24 No-one should know better than Jem the legal
implications of "Qui tacit consentire"; for when Mary
fails to respond to his marriage proposal, he whispers,
"Mary, they say silence gives consent . . ." (175).
His legalistic interpretation is appropriate since love
is literally placed on trial in the novel.
25 The term is Lansbury's, though not the opinion.
She, like Schor and Stoneman, sees the double-plot as a
device for interrogating received plots of gender.
26 See Cathy Gallagher for the first extensive
discussion of the value of Marv Barton's formal
inconsistencies. Gallagher traces three modes in the
novel: tragedy, melodrama and the domestic tale.
Though I disagree with her tendency to privilege John's
story over Mary's, hers is nonetheless an illuminating
discussion which signals a turning-point in Gaskell
criticism.
27 But see Coral Lansbury's excellent, subversive
reading of Alice's dialogue at the tea-party (Mary
Barton 67-9), and her suggestion that Alice has no
intention of going home because it would force her to
acknowledge that the rural idyll she so cherishes is
merely a sentimental fabrication (pp 15-16) .
28 Alarmingly, John's opinion is shared by Mary's
future husband, as Alice reveals:
I wish our Jem could speak a word to
th' Queen about factory work fer
married women. Eh! but he comes it
strong, when once yo get him to speak
about it. Wife o'his'n will never work
away fra' home! (165)
Jem's resolve may be traced to the fact that his
querulous, garrulous mother was a factory girl until
she "cotched her hip" on an unboxed wheel— his mother
who has the temerity to say in court: "If Jem is taken
from me . . . I cannot say 'His will be done.' I
cannot, my lord judge, oh, I cannot" (387).
My conjecture is that Mary Barton was written by
another woman who could not say "Thy will be done."
Note the narrator's angry tirade against the "trite,
worn-out, hollow mockeries of comfort . . . the
exhortation not to grieve over an event 'for it cannot
be helped'" (301). The novel can be read as an
implicit attack on religious ideology, (at least
241
insofar as the latter legitimates patriarchal authority
or the "lord's will").
29 Compare this with Engels's argument that while
agricultural workers were "intellectually . . . dead"
and "comfortable in their silent vegetation," the
industrial revolution was responsible for "forcing
[workers] to think and demand a position worthy of men"
(Condition 4).
30 Mary's sense that she is to blame for her father's
violence may be traced to the Victorian ideology, most
famously expressed by Ruskin, that women were
responsible for "influencing" men's moral development,
hence women's extreme social value (which somehow
justified their lack of economic and legal power).
Note Harriet Martineau's scornful comment on the notion
of woman's "virtual influence . . . her swaying the
judgment and will of man through the heart . . . One
might as well try to dissect the morning mist" (205).
When Mrs. Barton dies, we are told that "One of the
good influences over John Barton's life had departed
that night. One of the ties which bound him down to
the gentle humanities of earth was loosened ..."
(58); but what we have already learned about John makes
this claim— and the notion of women's power as moral
guardians— seem nonsensical.
31 See Marcus's discussion of the "'objectification1
of human relations" in The Other Victorians, especially
129-134.
32 For example, the landlady shows more hospitality
to Esther than her own kin (463).
33 Kettle 59.
34 That this may not really be true, but another
representational cliche, is suggested by the comments
of Acton and Mayhew. Acton insists that prostitution
as a "transitory state, through which an untold number
of British women are ever on their passage" (49), and
that "by far the larger number . . . return sooner or
later to a more or less regular course of life" (39).
Note also his claim that "if we compare the prostitute
at thirty-five with her sister, who perhaps is the
married mother of a family, or has been a toiling slave
for years in the overheated laboratories of fashion, we
shall seldom find that the constitutional ravages often
242
thought to be necessary consequences of prostitution
exceed those attributable to the cares of a family and
the heart-wearing struggles of virtuous labour" (39).
Compare Mayhew, who argues that "It is a vulgar
error, and a popular delusion, that the life of a
prostitute is as revolting to herself, as it appears to
the moralist . . . on the contrary, investigation and
sedulous scrutiny lead us to very different
conclusions. Authors gifted with vivid imaginations
love to portray the misery that is brought upon an
innocent and confiding girl by the perfidy and
desertion of her seducer" (212) , and quotes a
prostitute who claims, "I could marry tomorrow, if I
wished" (217).
35 In this context, note that gluttony is the prime
motivation in Kitty's pathetically comic account of why
she became a prostitute:
I buy things to eat; I can't eat what
mother gives us . . . Pies and sausage
rolls," said the girl,smacking her lips
and laughing. "Oh! my eye, ain't they
prime— oh!" "That's what you went gay
for?" "I'm not gay," said she sulkily.
"Well, that's what you let men fuck you
for?" "Yes." "Sausage-rolls?" "Yes,
meat-pies and pastry too." fMv Secret
Life, qtd. in Marcus, Other Victorians
107) .
Note also John's neighbour's complaint that "we've been
clemmed long enough, and we donnot see whatten good
they'n been doing if they cannot give us what we're all
crying for sin* the day we were born" (Mary Barton.
128, emphasis added). From a Freudian angle, this has
as much to do with love and desire as mere physical
nourishment, and it underscores my suggestion that
resistance to starvation has more than literal
significance in the novel.
36 Victorian feminists pointed out that notions of a
"proper sphere" for women were ironic and insulting for
those who were homeless. For example, Josephine Butler
warns "you mothers who are living at ease in your
pleasant drawing-rooins, with your tender darlings about
you," that the domestic ideal is eroded by "those
social forces which are at present driving whole armies
of little girls" into prostitution" (xix), and refers
to the "cruelty" of the domestic ideology which
enforces dependence upon men (xxix).
243
37 The suddenness of Mary's desire for Jem might be
explained by W.R. Greg, who believed women's sexual
passion to be dormant unless specifically aroused
("Prostitution," 486-7)— in contrast to Acton, who
thought that "the majority of women . . . are not very
much troubled with sexual feeling of any kind . . . The
best mothers, wives, and managers of households, know
little or nothing of sexual indulgence. Love of home,
children, and domestic duties, are the only passions
they feel" (Functions and Disorders. 2 00). Note,
incidentally, a hint of masochism In Mary's passion,
which springs up after Jem's "threatening despair" and
taking her hand "forcibly" (175), and is increased by
his "seeming neglect," for which "she only loved him
more and more" (253).
38 A. Maude Royden, Downward Paths: An Inquiry into
the Causes Which Contribute to the Making of a
Prostitute. quoted in Walkowitz, 21.
39 Beatrice Cenci had her despotic father murdered.
Note my previous suggestion that there are hints at the
daughter's revenge in Mary's most altruistic wishes for
John.
40 Foster gives a fine analysis of the "silken clue"
passage (147).
41 See Showalter's discussion of "Crazy Jane," Female
Malady (11-17).
42 This cultural dominance is traced by Showalter,
Female Malady 10-20. More generally, she discusses the
attempts of Victorian psychiatrists to manage women's
minds through the regulation of their sexuality, and
includes a quotation from Henry Maudsley that is of
suggests how shocking sweet ladies could be: "We
have . . . to note . . . how often sexual ideas and
feelings arise and display themselves in all sorts of
insanity . . . so that it seems inexplicable that a
virtuous person should ever have learnt . . . so much
obscenity of thought and feeling" (75).
244
4
"KISS MY FOOT, SIR: MY FACE IS FOR MOUTHS OF
CONSEQUENCE:" SEDUCTIVE FICTIONS AND SEXUAL
POLITICS IN FAR FROM THE MADDING CROWD
A contemporary reviewer of Far From the Madding
Crowd complained of the heroine's inconsistency:
[W]e can never make up our minds
whether Bathsheba Everdene is intended
to be a lady or the opposite ....
The truth is, she is sometimes
presented to the reader in one aspect,
and sometimes in the other, just as it
suits the author's convenience.1
If the critic's irritation betrays nervousness, it
is understandable; for in refusing the binary
ideological positions available to her, Bathsheba
refuses to be put in her womanly place. Social
constructions of femininity are carefully set up but
subsequently undermined, and "womanliness" is
denaturalized. From a feminist perspective, more than
a century later, we may be willing to judge Bathsheba
more magnaminously; we can be heartened by the notion
that she is neither a lady nor the opposite, and
delight in those textual twists and turns that the
contemporary reviewer found so irksome. By examining
"woman" as ideological construct, the novel connects
with an important concern of current feminist theory.2
This is not to say that Far From the Madding Crowd
is unequivocally feminist— though "problematically
feminist" might be a good way to describe it. The
novel shifts its ideological ground with unsettling
frequency, embracing extremely contradictory points of
view, questioning all but endorsing none. Disembodied
narrative voices draw on our cultural hordes of
misogyny, inviting the reader's complicity in
man-to-man generalizations about women; but these are
juxtaposed against a radical feminist consciousness
which springs to the surface in many of Bathsheba's
speeches, and is embodied explicitly, if ambivalently
and erotically, in her person. "Woman" is encoded in
Hardy's fiction as the source of sexual/textual desire.
As readers, we are forced to confront the relentlessly
phallic nature of our engagement with the text: like
the fictional lovers, we pursue and attempt to possess
an enigmatic heroine who heightens desire by evading
capture. Bathsheba performs the contradictions of the
text, representing its conflicting ideologies of
femininity; for, paradoxically, her very strategies of
resistance and empowerment are identical with the
flirtatious practices of the coquette. The narrative,
too, provokes curiosity but denies satisfaction,
mimicking Bathsheba's pattern of flight and evasion by
246
vanishing into an elliptical vortex at crucial moments
in the plot. Just as Bathsheba challenges, contradicts
and resists readerly constructions— her lovers' as well
as ours— so the narrative overtly displays its
incoherences and resists critical mastery.
In this chapter, I will argue that Far From the
Madding Crowd explores the relationship between
fictionality and femininity, representing "womanly
nature" itself as a social fiction or ideological
construct. The novel narrates a woman's attempt to
escape these cultural constructions of femininity.
Bathsheba is a heroine torn between her feminist
consciousness and her patriarchal conditioning;
determined to retain her unusual position of power as a
property-owning woman, she is nonetheless deeply
susceptible to the mythologies of romantic love that
shape women's self-perception, and cannot resist her
interpellation into the ideological role they define
for her.3 Far From the Madding Crowd is another
abortive story of the woman of property— the story that
keeps beginning to be written but characteristically
turns itself midway through into the more traditional
account of feminine dependence, of woman as property.4
Bathsheba is potentially the heroine of a different
kind of narrative, but the ideological constraints of
the love-and-marriage plot operate too forcefully upon
her fictional world. I will argue that Bathsheba"s
desire to be the heroine of a romance leads her to an
inevitable destiny— feminine surrender to patriarchal
authority and its construction of the womanly ideal.
By tracing some of the allusions which impinge on the
central tale of the woman and her three lovers, I want
to suggest that Bathsheba's story is interpolated into
a diverse range of fictions— literary, mythic and
folkloric— which comprise a cultural tradition of
romantic mythologies. Bathsheba's vulnerability to
these mythologies is exposed as each of her lovers
attempts in turn to reshape the narrative of her life
to suit his desires; and in the lovers' linguistic
practices— which reveal varying degrees of male
control, from gentle persuasion to tyranny— the
connection between language and masculine power is
explicitly affirmed. Silenced by her alienation from a
language she cannot use, effaced by male-authored
representations of herself, Bathsheba converts both
silence and invisibility into a position of strength;
and in exploring this, I will return to the question of
sexual/textual desire which I outlined above. In the
last part of my chapter, I will propose that the novel
not only questions "femininity" but proceeds to
248
dissolve gender stereotypes altogether at precisely the
point where they seem most sharply defined; and finally
I will suggest that if the novel cannot rewrite the
conventional marriage plot, it at least displaces the
conventional ending by redefining romantic love within
a new paradigm.
As a fiction in part about fiction-making, Far
From the Madding Crowd questions not only the nature of
woman but also the nature of story. It bears the
traces of other writings— shadow-tales which delicately
shade our perception of the plot. This is, of course,
a claim that can be made of any narrative, but Far From
the Madding Crowd is unusually self-conscious in its
textual references, and moreover the sheer archetypal
simplicity of the story magnifies its relationship with
other myths. Penny Boumelha, noting the overt
textuality of Hardy's fiction, claims that the literary
allusions, in conjunction with formal experimentation,
produce a multiplicity of narrative perspectives
through which various ideological positions can be
confronted and interrogated:
[I]t is through the manipulation of
this structure of perceptions— the
woman's, the narrator's, the desiring
man's, those implied by Biblical or
literary parallels or allusions— that
the novels throw into question those
generalizations and aphorisms which
249
bear the weight of contemporary
ideologies of femininity and of the
womanly nature.5
In the web of allusions spun around the central
plot, Christian and pagan myths are interwoven. If
Gabriel is a Pan who can "pipe with Arcadian sweetness"
and Bathsheba is an Ashtoreth or a Venus, the Christian
pastoral myth of origins is implied in their connection
with Adam and Eve— at the most ideal moments of their
relationship, Gabriel and Bathsheba becomes partners in
tending to the world of nature. Theirs is indeed a
fallen world, but paradise lost becomes paradise
regained by the end of the novel, and the sharing of
labor seems to have a spiritual significance which
reaches back to Milton. Other Biblical echoes inhabit
this Garden: Gabriel is rescued by Bathsheba from a
Noah's Ark; later, Christ-like, he will carry a
shepherd's crook and perform miracles by curing sheep
which are beyond the power of any ordinary human's
salvation. Although his last name, Oak, is so stolidly
English, "His Christian name," as Hardy rather
pointedly tells us, "was Gabriel", and he is thus
associated (perhaps a little facetiously) with all the
glory and grace of the archangels. Even in a
non-Christian age, a name as astonishing as Bathsheba
loudly proclaims its Old Testament source. In 2 Samuel
250
11-12 we are told how the rich King David "took the
poor man's lamb," Bathsheba, from Uriah; but the
ancient story of male sexual appropriation and
possession (which addresses only the wrong to Uriah) is
rewritten in Far From the Madding Crowd to dramatize
the woman1s suffering.6
Far From the Madding Crowd has many folkloric and
fairytale elements (signs of a thriving oral tradition)
which deal with universal themes of love, sex and
betrayal, but are interwoven with the specific
narratives that the community tells about its
individuals. For example, we learn that Bathsheba was
an ugly duckling: "Their daughter was not a pretty
chiel .... Never should have thought she'd have
growed up such a handsome body as she is" (112).
Snatches of songs supply lyrical variations on the
story of Troy's treachery, subtly evoking a whole
ballad tradition of unfaithful soldiers and betrayed
brides: the first human sound that Bathsheba hears
when she wakens from her night's sojourn in the woods
is the chorus "With my ra-ta-ta and my rum-tum-tum"
(362); and at the harvest supper, she prophetically
sings "The Banks of Allen Water."
The folkloric references are the communal
expression of a folk-consciousness or proverbial wisdom
251
which is prized highly in this novel. The Wessex
peasants have an excellent capacity for interpreting
and recreating narrative situations. Gossip, the
social discourse of the community, acquires the
authority of print and the status of truth, even when
it is purely speculative: William, for example, pieces
Fanny's story together with perfect accuracy and
claims, "There, ma'am, that's it, in black and white"
(132). Bathsheba turns to the community whenever she
needs information, and it is almost always reliable.
Hardy shows the community constantly engaged in the act
of making narratives, reinforcing social cohesion by
incorporating individual histories into its narrative
domain. The inhabitants of Weatherbury are virtually
one step ahead of the plot, so quickly and intuitively
do they discern the events of people's lives; but their
curiosity is motivated by concern, not malice (with the
exception of Pennyways, whose ill-will makes him an
outsider); and though it is impossible to insulate
one's private affairs from community discussion and
judgment, this strikes an optimistic note in the
novel— the society which builds fables about itself,
celebrating the marriages, mourning the deaths and
minding the business of its members, is essentially
alive and healthy. In the best tradition of romantic
252
comedy, Far From the Madding Crowd reaffirms social
regeneration, but makes the community itself an actor
in the drama.
Of the many literary allusions in this novel,
those to Shakespeare are conspicuous. Susan Beegel
points out that the romantic situation, the "beautiful
woman courted by three men" has a parallel in The
Merchant of Venice, and notes that "The intensity of
Boldwood1s jealousy more than once leaves Bathsheba
frightened for her own life. Small wonder she is not
interested in reading Othello when Liddy suggests it"
(210). The famous lines from Macbeth. "Full of sound
and fury/ Signifying nothing," are associated by our
cynical narrator with the language of lovers, which
implies that Gabriel's very reticence is the proof of
his sincerity. It is in its genre that the novel can
be most suggestively related to Shakespeare: this is a
romantic comedy which ultimately celebrates reunion and
rebirth, but the happy ending is shadowed by the
preceding tragedy and the sharp vein of cynicism is
sustained throughout. The novel, like many of
Shakespeare's plays, foregrounds genre itself as an
ambivalent question and thus makes us conscious of the
interpretative choices we make in constructing a
reading of the text. In choosing to see Far From the
Madding Crowd as comedy, I am of course privileging
those features of the text which support a comedic
structure— though traditionally it has been seen as a
"tragedy of reduced expectations."7 If a particular
romantic comedy can be singled out as an influence, I
would suggest Twelfth Night. since events nearly take a
tragic turn (because of jealous Orsino's threat to
murder his rival lover, Cesario) and because the
celebratory tone of the ending is marred by Malvolio's
continued ill will. This is of course a very general
parallel, but interestingly an exchange in the novel
suggests that Hardy may indeed have had this play at
the back of his mind: Pennyways, attempting to tell
the bereaved heroine that her husband is actually
alive, writes: "Who's the fool now?" This echoes
Feste's attack on misplaced grief, when he chides
Olivia for mourning her spiritually reborn brother, and
concludes the insistent verbal play on "fool," in which
accusations of foolishness are bandied back and forth,
with the words: "The more fool, madonna, to mourn for
your brother's soul being in heaven. Take away the
fool, gentlemen" (I,v, 65-70).
The Medieval tradition of chivalric love is
suggested in Gabriel's devoted service to
254
Bathsheba,despite the pragmatic explanations he
invents:
But man, even to himself, is a
palimpsest, having an ostensible
writing and another beneath the lines.
It is possible that there was this
golden legend underneath the
utilitarian one: "I will help to my
last effort the woman I have loved so
dearly." (302)
Like Sir Gareth, whose nobility was hidden beneath
his scullion guise, and whose loyalty to his lady
endures in spite of her contempt for his rank, Gabriel
waits patiently for his true princeliness to be
recognized. It is through a direct appeal to the
chivalric code that Bathsheba wins him permanently to
her side: "Do not desert me, Gabriel," writes the
damsel in distress, after dismissing him from her
service. If George the dog is an extension of his
master, as the novel frequently and humorously
suggests, he was probably named after the mythical
George, the most famous rescuer of distressed damsels,
whose name is, of course, as quintessentially English
as Oak.8 (Fortunately it was the dog and not the man
who got the name, for a letter that ended "Do not
desert me, George" would have considerably less
aesthetic appeal than that which addresses Gabriel.)
255
A whole range of romantic fictions, from
fairytales to highbrow literature, demonstrably affect
Bathsheba's conduct. She cannot resist the mythology
of romantic love, and her vision of herself is
inevitably influenced by the female role models of
sentimental fiction. Liddy, who also reads love
stories, encourages Bathsheba in her romantic
fantasies, for Liddy, too, dreams of being a princess
on a pedestal: on hearing that Bathsheba has actually
declined a proposal of marriage, Liddy unintentionally
supplies a wonderful parody of popular romances:
How sweet to be able to disdain, when
most of us are glad to say, 'Thank
you.' I seem to hear it: 'No, Sir— I'm
your better,' or 'Kiss my foot, sir; my
face is for mouths of consequence.'
(126)
Bathsheba's literary choices have symbolic
significance. When she becomes an unhappy exile in her
own attic, she makes a conscious decision to shape her
life in the direction of comedy, not tragedy; in
rejecting The Maid's Tragedy, The Mourning Bride and
other "dismal books" in favor of Love in a Village,
Maid of the Mill and the Spectator. Bathsheba is
refusing to identify with tragic victims of love.
But she is not able to resist the appeal of
sentimentality. Bathsheba's feelings about romantic
256
love, marriage and sex are quite ambivalently
presented. The narrator tells us at one point: "Diana
was the goddess whom Bathsheba instinctively adored."
This may initially seem a preposterous claim to made
about a woman as physically uninhibited as
Bathsheba— after all, she even dares to ride
a-straddlel— but actually there is an odd truth in it.
Bathsheba longs to be the heroine of a romance, and
such stories always end innocently, at the point of
happy-ever-afterness that eclipses such realities as
sex, multiple pregnancies, the claustrophobia of
lifelong commitment, the discovery of mutual loathing,
and other threatening possibilities which may follow
the wedding ceremony. As Bathsheba listens to
Gabriel's first proposal, she almost surrenders to the
magic of the tale he spins. He represents her to
herself as the heroine of a fiction of domestic bliss:
"You shall have a piano in a year or
two .... And one of those little
tenpound gigs for market— and nice
flowers, and birds — cocks and hens, I
mean ..." continued Gabriel, balanced
between poetry and practicality . . .
"And a frame for cucumbers — like a
gentleman and lady." (79)
This becomes irresistible to Bathsheba, especially
when Gabriel proposes the delightful scheme of
validating their story in print:
257
"And when the wedding was over, we'd
have it put in the newspaper list of
marriages." "Dearly I should like
that!" (79)
Subsequently, however, Bathsheba is repelled by
the prosaic homeliness of what seems to Gabriel a
charming vision of closeness and security:
"And at home by the fire, whenever you
look up, there I shall be— and whenever
I look up, there will be you." (79)
At this point in the novel, Bathsheba is incapable
of appreciating the unadorned simplicity and sincerity
of Gabriel's style. It is ironic, then, but not
surprising that she is wooed by Troy's cliches, and
thereby gains a husband who brutally tells her, a week
after the wedding: "All romances end at marriage"
(330).
Yet one of the contradictions in Bathsheba's
character is that she half-suspects this herself. In
response to Gabriel's first proposal, she announces
that she wants the wedding but not the husband and
although, as Gabriel later says with blunt truth,
"That's a terrible wooden story," it does suggest a
certain recognition on Bathsheba's part. She is
perfectly able to discriminate between the wedding and
the marriage; and she regrets that "a woman can't show
off that way by herself." (Ironically, both of
258
Bathsheba*s weddings are private affairs: it is only
within the context of work that she is able to realize
her exhibitionistic fantasies: returning from the Corn
Exchange, she complains: "[I]t was as bad as being
married— eyes everywhere!" (142).
What makes Bathsheba so interesting to a feminist
reader is the way she represents the very real dilemma
of any woman whose consciousness exceeds her
ideological "self," and who thus experiences a profound
self-division. Bathsheba sincerely enjoys her own
independence, and we might note that even when most
infatuated with Troy, she never quite relinquishes
economic control of their marriage; and yet she cannot
escape the seductiveness of a romantic ideology which
reduces women to positions of helplessness and
submission. When Bathsheba tells Oak, "I want somebody
to tame me: I am too independent and you would never
be able to, I know," she is flirtatiously challenging
him to do so, and half believes that she wants him
to— though of course she would be miserable if he
succeeded. She is miserable with Troy.
Quite torn between the pleasures of autonomy and
the promises of ideology, Bathsheba is almost swayed by
Boldwood's offer of marriage because he offers her the
chance to be a bourgeois princess-bride:
"I will protect you and cherish you
with all my strength .... You shall
have no cares— be worried by no
household affairs .... I cannot say
how far above every other idea and
object on earth you mean to me." (179)
"Idea"; "object"; Boldwood’s possessive love
would reduce Bathsheba to precisely those things. She
must consciously resist the romantic appeal of his
ardor, and she does discern eventually that the "rarest
offerings of the purest love are but a self-indulgence,
and no generosity at all" (181) . There is no room to
move on a pedestal, and for a woman as vigorous as
Bathsheba, the confines of the tiny, respectable shrine
Boldwood offers her would prove a living death.
Although she comes to realize this, Bathsheba still has
the problem of negotiating a position for herself in
society; and despite her resolute and independent
character, she is deeply susceptible to the mythologies
which define women's roles. Bathsheba cannot fully
know or control what she wants because she has been
"interpellated" and her subjectivity has been
ideologically constructed. Yet Bathsheba does have
some capacity for resistance: even when she most fully
surrenders to her sentimental dreams, at the point when
her sexual desire and her romantic longings become most
deeply entangled and intense, she has a double
260
consciousness which reveals to her the folly of her
actions. I understand the term "womanliness" below to
represent precisely the ideological position I have
just described: that is to say, a person who has
involuntarily surrendered to the potent promise of the
romantic myth:
Bathsheba, though she had too much
understanding to be entirely governed
by her womanliness, had too much
womanliness to use her understanding to
the best advantage. Perhaps in no
minor point does woman astonish her
helpmate more than in the strange power
she possesses of believing cajoleries
that she knows to be false ....
(243)
When the language of seduction is systematically
exploited by Troy, Bathsheba is unable to resist.
Symbolically, she loses her own mastery over language.
Although normally, according to our disrespectful
narrator, she is "that novelty among women one who
finished a thought before beginning the sentence which
was to convey it" (70) and is respected by the
villagers because "she can spaik real language and must
have some sense somewhere" (155), she loses linguistic
control as surely as she loses self-possession. When
Troy lures her into a conversation that she had
expressly resolved to avoid, she becomes inarticulate:
"No— that is— I have certainly heard
Liddy say they do, but — "
261
Never did a fragile, tailless sentence
convey a more perfect meaning. (226)
After Troy has rejected her, Bathsheba surrenders
entirely to her emotions, and "a vehement impulse to
flee from him . . . and escape his words at any price,
not stopping short of death, mastered Bathsheba now"
(361). This time she loses her voice altogether; like
Fanny, she is silenced by Troy's cruelty, but luckily
for our resilient heroine, this condition is not
permanent.
The best way to account for Troy's power is to
recognize that Bathsheba is ripe for exploitation by
him; he fills the lack created by her susceptibility to
romantic fantasy. Troy's flatteries are transparently
insincere, but this is precisely what makes them so
attractive to a female devotee of sentimental fiction.
His language is indeed artificial, as many critics have
complained; but judiciously and pointedly so. Troy is
never quite real and therefore Bathsheba can never
quite possess him, which must certainly intensify her
desire. He literally is a character from popular
romance, a scarlet soldier from a song, a demon lover
from a ballad; he doesn't even fit into history like a
real person, since "he was vulnerable only in the
present . . . With him the past was yesterday, the
262
future tomorrow: never the day after” (219). Troy's
verbal practices operate on a wholly mechanical basis:
between thought and word there is little meaningful
connection.
He spoke fluently and unceasingly. He could in
this way be one thing and seem another? for instance,
he could speak of love and think of dinner; call on the
husband to look at the wife; be eager to pay and intend
to owe (221).
Whether flattering women or insulting them, Troy
is equally absurd. Within the masculine world of the
barracks, he adopts the verbal stagger of the playboy,
and often sounds like an exaggerated echo of the
chauvinistic narrative voice: for example, "He had
been known to observe that casually that in dealing
with womankind the only alternative to flattery was
cursing and swearing .... 'Treat 'em fairly and
you are a lost man,1 he would say” (212) . His postures
are frequently preposterous, and Bathsheba is tacitly
aware of this; but she can no more resist his romantic
cliches (especially when he compliments her on her
beauty) than she can resist the sexual invitation of
his sword exercise. This is the other language by
which Troy wins her— to put it crudely, body language.
His virtuoso performance, the thrust and dexterity of
263
his sword play, literally enthralls Bathsheba. Her
spectacular symbolic orgasm, her enclosure in "a
firmament of light, and of sharp hisses, resembling a
skyfull of meteors close at hand" (240) leaves her
dizzy, "overcome by a hundred tumultuous feelings"
which are released in "a stream of tears" by the
unexpected tenderness of Troy's kiss.
The sword exercise, though, is precisely that: a
ritualized and choreographed sequence, a performance
which owes its masterful execution to technique and
dedicated practice. For Bathsheba, libidinal and
emotional drives combine in an intoxicating confusion.
What is for Troy a calculated seduction becomes for
Bathsheba an ungovernable passion; she abandons herself
to it and is overpowered. This "helplessness" is
initially willed, according to our narrator:
Bathsheba loved Troy in a way that only
self-reliant women love when they
abandon their self-reliance. When a
strong woman recklessly throws away her
strength she is worse than a weak woman
who has never had any strength to throw
away. (243)
Still, we should note that the concept of "will"
becomes problematic when we consider subjectivity to be
ideologically constructed; and if Bathsheba's female
identity is shaped by the self-serving romantic myths
of the patriarchy, the degree to which she voluntarily
264
relinquishes power becomes questionable. To what
extent can a woman resist her interpellation into the
symbolic order? In her self-abneqation Bathsheba
exemplifies the social ideal of femininity, and
becomes, in effect, a "true" woman. I would argue,
though, that Bathsheba is still capable of resistance
and survival; she saves herself from the masochistic
encounter with death that another heroine might desire:
Tess Durbeyfield, for example. Bathsheba's attic exile
proves to be a healing space, a haven where she can
rebuild her resilience. As I suggested earlier, in
choosing comedies to read, she symbolically represents
her own determination to resist suffering, and thus to
remain the heroine of a comedy. Bathsheba's stamina is
tested in subsequent episodes, but Hardy allows her to
survive. Death and sexuality are certainly connected
in this novel: as Beegel argues, "Bathsheba believes
her rival has eclipsed her through the simple expedient
of dying and she is right . . . Troy's passion smacks
of necrophilia, for his ideal woman is a dead woman"
(213). However, if this is true, Bathsheba refuses to
be the victim of such a desire, and may even turn the
tables by becoming a perpetrator: who knows what
happens behind the bedroom door when Bathsheba locks
265
herself in with Troy’s body and orders the household to
keep away?
Later in his career as a novelist, Hardy will play
a more sadistic game with his heroine: Tess is
tortured, her sufferings heightened intolerably as the
novel progresses; and she submits all too readily to
the punitive treatment of her two lovers, embracing
suffering because she has a tragic vision of the
universe. Tess1s story is foreshadowed, in Far From
the Madding Crowd. by the subordinated and elliptical
narrative of Fanny Troy. Poor Fanny is the ubiquitous
walking woman of Victorian fiction, wearily journeying
onwards until she reaches the destination of death.
Like Tess, Fanny is less a solid person than a
presence: a "form," a "little shape," "a mere shade
upon the earth"; she is reduced to a voice at one
point, and its "low, dulcet tone, suggestive of
romance" may remind us of Tess's "flutey voice"— a
soothing sound, never raised in strident protest. Tess
and Fanny suffer almost wholly in silence but except
for the traumatic loss of voice which I mentioned
earlier, Bathsheba*s silences are different— in part,
self-imposed, to be sure, (though we should bear in
mind the ideological constraints on the "self" that is
Bathsheba) but also imposed on others— which is to say,
266
she uses silence as a strategy, as I will demonstrate
below.
Fanny's story is a ridiculous joke to the soldiers
in the barracks: "Ho— ho— Sergeant— ho— hoi" is heard
from the quarters outside which Fanny has just stood,
pathetically reminding Troy of his promise to marry
her; and in Tess of the D'Urbervilles the story of a
seduced woman is greeted with hilarity by everyone but
Tess, for whom it is intensely painful.
What is it that prevents Bathsheba's story from
*
becoming Fanny's story, or Tess's? We could phrase the
question another way: what is different about the
Hardy who created Bathsheba and the Hardy who created
Tess? This is not a question I propose to answer by
inquiring into the personal circumstances of the
historical Hardy; nor do I mean to suggest that Far
From the Madding Crowd is a joyful novel: there are
pain and pathos here, and plenty of cynical voices,
including the final comment of Joseph Poorgrass, which
displaces the conventional happy ending. Still, in
comparison with the later novels, there is an
astonishing degree of optimism in Far From The Madding
Crowd; and to return to my question about the two
Hardys, what I want to consider is not why so much as
how they are different.
267
To begin with, Hardy keeps the story of Fanny Troy
outside the main narrative frame. Her tale is
elliptical not just because of the sexually repressive
climate that Leslie Stephen advised Hardy to heed,8 but
also because the tale of a female victim of deadly
sexuality, it seems, is less interesting to Hardy at
this point than the tale of the woman who survives.
One major difference between Tess and Bathsheba is that
the latter flirts with perfect self-awareness while the
former is oppressed by her own undesired desirability.
Despite the condescending generalizations, there seems
to be an imaginative sympathy for women in Far From the
Madding Crowd which has shifted into pity by the time
Hardy writes Tess; a subtle difference, but deeply
suggestive. A feminist consciousness is revealed in
Far From the Madding Crowd in such surprising phrases
as Bathsheba's "I hate to be thought men's property in
that way" (78) ; and I want now to discuss the
significance of Bathsheba's strategies for resisting
male domination, not just her lovers* but her readers'
too, for, in our reading practices, we are deeply
implicated in the "masculine" quest for mastery over
mystery.9
As I suggested earlier, Bathsheba is not only the
object of male desire and possession within the
268
fictional framework, but also the focus of readerlv
desire and possession since it is primarily her story
with which we are engaged, and her contradictory
signals which we try to interpret or reconstruct in a
meaningful pattern. At the beginning of the novel the
reader shares the position of the voyeuristic Gabriel
(though with the added complication that we are doubly
voyeurs, watching Gabriel watching Bathsheba).10
Gabriel observes Bathsheba in her most private
moments. As she surveys herself in the mirror,
indulging her narcissistic impulses, we sense the
frisson of the forbidden in the scene: Gabriel is
seeing what goes on in the intimacy of women's
bedrooms. His observation of Bathsheba1s behavior on
horseback is scarcely less revealing, or less
suggestive.
Watching Bathsheba on the wagon, at the beginning
of the narrative, Gabriel imagines that she is
inventing stories about herself: ". . . far off though
likely dramas in which men would play a part— vistas of
probable triumphs . . ." (55). However, this is "but
conjecture," the narrator warns us. Later, peeping
through a hole in the roof of the cowshed, Gabriel sees
enough of Bathsheba to arouse his curiosity, but not
enough to satiate it: he finds himself "drawing upon
269
his fancy" for the details of her features. This is
precisely our own position as readers: all my
speculations so far, for example, that Bathsheba
creates fictions for herself are "but conjecture"; and,
tantalized with partial glimpses of Bathsheba, we have
to rely on our own narrative strategies to fill the
gaps. At first, like Gabriel, we may have a sense of
control— and, as voyeurs, we indulge in a masculine
activity.1 1
Gabriel loses his masculine sense of control,
however,at the point when he introduces himself into
Bathsheba's narrative. Note that a textual metaphor is
used to describe her physical reality:
That the girl's thoughts hovered about
her face and form as soon as she caught
Oak's eyes conning the same page was
natural, and almost certain. (67)
Gabriel's self-consciousness is far more acute
than Bathsheba's: ". . . it was the man who blushed,
the maid not at all." Attempting to recover his
equanimity, he lets her know that he has watched her,
and now it is Bathsheba's turn to blush. There is a
further shift in the power balance— but not in the
direction Gabriel had hoped:
A perception caused him to withdraw his
own eyes from her as suddenly as if he
had been caught in a theft. (68)
270
Gabriel looks away; and when he turns back to face
her, she has vanished. He never quite regains the
voyeur's dominant position. Although he continues to
watch Bathsheba covertly for the rest of the novel, the
lesson he has learned is "the great difference between
seeing and possessing" (119).
We, like Bathsheba's lovers, are implicated in the
process of deciphering her character; and if we
consider her as a text, she forces us, as readers, into
a certain self-consciousness. The contradiction in her
behavior, and the ellipses in the narrative, ensure
that we becomes collaborative readers: in engaging
with the text, we become aware of our own
reconstructive activities. The patterns I trace in the
novel, the explanations I devise for the behavior of
its characters, and so on, reveal more about "me"
(another culturally and ideologically defined position)
than about Bathsheba, the text, or "Hardy." In any
case, Bathsheba flirts with the reader as surely as she
flirts with the male watchers and readers within her
fictional world: sometimes we feel certain of
possessing her and at other times we realize how little
we know. Furthermore, the object of our desire
disappears tantalizingly from view at crucial moments.
The most provoking (or provocative) ellipsis is the
271
week that Bathsheba spends in Bath: what happens
there? In writing on narrative desire, Peter Brooks
suggests that "Narratives both tell of
desire— typically present some story of desire— and
arouse and make use of desire as dynamic of
signification" (37). At the point when Bathsheba, our
object of desire, is transformed into an active subiect
of desire, she actually exits her own narrative in
pursuit of Troy, and is herself pursued by Gabriel, the
other members of the community, and the anxious gaze of
the reader— but she cannot be detained, and our
narrative perspective is too limited to follow her.
This incident, I suggest, effectively dramatizes the
patterns of flight and evasion which heighten curiosity
and the desire to capture.
Flight and evasion are flirtatious practices but
they are also self-protective strategies.12 We can
see Bathsheba's "skittishness" in two contradictory
ways: certainly she wants the satisfaction of making
men fall in love with her, but she also wants to guard
herself from them. One early indication in the novel
of Bathsheba's resistance is her refusal to pronounce
her name to Gabriel. Her dialogue is pert and she
succeeds in teasing Gabriel out of the masculine
272
selfpossession he has revealed in declaring his own
name:
"My name is Gabriel Oak."
"And mine isn't. You seem very fond of
yours in speaking so decisively,
Gabriel Oak." (71)
It is true that Bathsheba ends the dialogue with a
flirtatious challenge: "'Now find out my name,' she
said, and withdrew"; but it is also her full intention,
I believe, to disturb Gabriel's self-composure, and her
success is demonstrated when he later introduces
himself to Bathsheba's aunt, with touching humility, as
"Somebody." This is an inauspicious beginning for a
man who has come to propose to Bathsheba: that is, to
erase her name and superinscribe his own. He wants to
possess Bathsheba but she has so undermined his
certainty that he is no longer sure he possesses even
himself.
Bathsheba continues to unsettle him by flouting
the conventions of their shared signifying system,
through both language and gesture. For example, she
chases him across a field waving a white
handkerchief— a clear token of surrender— and reassures
him that her aunt's tale of the dozen suitors is merely
a fabrication; but subsequently the handkerchief is
converted into a symbol of conquest as Bathsheba rather
273
preposterously refutes Gabriel's "natural" (that is,
conventional) inference:
"Why, Farmer Oak," she said, looking at
him with rounded eyes, "I never said I
was going to marry you." "Well, that
is a tale!" said Oak, with dismay. "To
run after anybody like this and then
say you don't want him!" (78)
Bathsheba insists on being read in the way she
intended. not in the way she can most obviously be
interpreted; and this is the position she tries to
maintain (with less success) when Boldwood insists on
taking her flirtations seriously. Bathsheba's
exchanges with men may remind us of Humpty Dumpty's
with Alice:
"When I use a word," Humpty Dumpty
said, in rather a scornful tone,"it
means just what I choose it to mean
neither more nor less." "The question
is," said Alice, "whether you can make
words mean so many things." "The
question is," said Humpty Dumpty,
"which is to be master— that's all."
(Carroll 163)
Both Bathsheba and Humpty Dumpty insist upon an
autonomous use of language, thereby denying the shared
conventions through which language becomes meaningful
and ideas communicable and although this may initially
seem absurd, it has quite serious political
implications. If we are ideologically constructed
through language, we can only resist by dismantling and
274
defying the cultural codes by which we are constrained.
It is possible that Humpty Dumpty realizes this: after
all, he is a male egg, and, like the Lacanian
"hommelette" he becomes at the end of his story, he
represents sexual ambivalence, challenging the
polemical oppositions of "male" and "female" which are
prevalent in our language. Paradoxically, Humpty
Dumpty's statement is both authoritarian and anarchic:
he consciously proposes that what words mean is exactly
what their user intended, but he also supports a code
of individualism which legitimizes any use of language,
however subjective or idiosyncratic. Bathsheba's
position is not exactly the same, but it is equally
complex: she demands complete authorial privileges
over her own statements and gestures, but she is always
vulnerable to conventional readings, and often
capitulates under pressure. Gabriel, a verbal
pacifist, puts up minimal resistance to Bathsheba's
linguistic challenges: when he realizes that she has
declined his offer of marriage, he says: "Very
well .... Then I'll ask you no more," and preserves
a dignified silence on the subject. Boldwood, on the
other hand, bullies Bathsheba into accepting
responsibility for the conventional and not the
intentional meaning of her valentine. Boldwood applies
275
the most narrow reading codes, and is incapable of
recognizing the possibility of an undercutting,
humorous interpretation: we are told that as "a man
who read all the dramas of life seriously, if he failed
to please when they were comedies, there was no
frivolous treatment to reproach him for when they
chanced to end tragically" (171) . Bathsheba seems
quite afraid of the consequences of her own verbal
play. Her game was dangerous because it broke the
rules; and in acceding to Boldwood"s demands, she is
conscious of paying a penalty. Marriage to Boldwood
would be a repressive and dreary affair because it
would force Bathsheba into linguistic and social
conformity.
Bathsheba is distinctly aware that language
privileges the male: when Boldwood tries to tyrannize
through language, forcing er to repeat and qualify her
words until they approximate what he wants to hear, she
protests that language is too uncompromisingly
masculine to represent women's experience with any
truthfulness:
"I don't know— at least, I cannot tell
you. It is very difficult for a woman
to define her feelings in language
which is chiefly made by men to express
theirs". (412)
276
Women are not only excluded from full
representation in the language system, but are also
trapped and silenced by the way they use it. Note, for
example, that in framing his "proposal1 1 Boldwood gives
Bathsheba absolutely no room for refusal:
"If you can love me, say so, Miss
Everdene— if not don't say no!" (178)
Bathsheba cannot always resist such domineering
linguistic tactics, but she at least recognizes the
subtle source of her repression, and her story
documents a struggle to usurp the conventional, manmade
signifying system. Her refusal to give her name, her
linguistic flexuosity, and her awareness of the way
that language eclipses her own experience, all
represent a radical feminist position. Of course, I am
not arguing that Bathsheba is able or even willing to
maintain such a position consistently; as I suggested
earlier, she has a divided consciousness, colluding
with the patriarchal construction of "womanhood" and
simultaneously resisting that very identity. But her
behavior certainly implies that one method for
combatting the tyranny of language is to exploit
enigma. This is for Bathsheba a specifically feminine
strategy, a Sphinxian mode of communication between
women, and a shared, secret power. Not all women,
277
however, are as subtle as Bathsheba in reading against
the grain and between the lines. In despair, she asks
Liddy: "Can’t you read riddles? Aren’t you a woman
yourself?" (253). And for all her adroitness and sharp
insights, there is a point in the novel when Bathsheba
is almost defeated by male authority. She is
persecuted by Boldwood, who "could not read a woman"
and ignores any of the signs by which Bathsheba tries
to modify his narrow view of her; and she is shocked
into silence and immobility at the moment when Troy
returns to claim her. In this scene Bathsheba is
poised between two very different but equally dangerous
lovers; and Boldwood's tragic action is a merciful
resolution of the problem, at the expense of Troy's
death and his own incarceration. There is a wonderful
irony in the legal terminology which defines Boldwood's
imprisonment: "confinement during her Majesty's
pleasure." Boldwood's sentence depends upon the whim
of a woman: he is symbolically defeated by female
power, and for all his attempts to entrap Bathsheba, he
is the one to be confined and constrained at the end of
the novel.
I want now to pursue the claim I made earlier that
binary gender oppositions are ambivalently treated and
even dissolved in this novel. Bathsheba is an obvious
278
character on whom to center a discussion of this kind;
after all, by confronting patriarchal values, she
necessarily flouts the social code of femininity, and
this most "womanly" of women seems rather "masculine"
at times. There are many examples of this: as a woman
of property, Bathsheba exerts a cool authority over her
men; and as a woman with strong sexual and romantic
impulses, she daringly takes the sexual initiative on
several occasions— literally chasing Gabriel and Troy,
metaphorically pursuing Boldwood. In breaking the
principles of feminine decorum, Bathsheba becomes quite
alarmed at the "Amazonian picture of herself" which
Liddy gives her: "I hope I am not a bold sort of
maid— mannish?" Bathsheba asks, with "some anxiety."
Liddy's response is decidedly ambiguous:
"O no, not mannish: but so almighty
womanish that 'tis getting on that way
sometimes." (255)
In an equally paradoxical manner, Boldwood, that
most masculine of men, becomes quite "womanly." This
is a remarkable reversal since Boldwood represents the
heart of the patriarchy: he is the feudal lord of the
Weatherbury community, a deeply conservative man who is
determined to repress the woman farmer and make her his
exclusive property. Nothing reveals his patriarchal
values more clearly than his attitude to money: he
279
won't do business with Bathsheba because "it was
debasing loveliness to ask it to buy and sell, and
jarred with his conceptions of her" (168); but he tries
to sell her to Troy, to ensure her respectability— an
action so revolting that it makes even Troy appear in a
noble light. Boldwood here makes explicit a common but
suppressed practice of patriarchal society— the
transaction of women as objects of exchange between
men— and so foregrounds his own custodial role.
It is all the more surprising, then, that in his
attitude to love, Boldwood is as vulnerable to romantic
mythologies (which after all serve the patriarchy by
constraining women) as Bathsheba herself, and even
surpasses her in dependency upon romantic cliche.
After all, Boldwood was oblivious to Bathsheba's
charms— unlike any other male in the community— until
he received her valentine verse:
The rose is red
The violet blue
Carnation's sweet
And so are you.
A less inspired jingle can scarcely have been sent
on that Valentine's Day; but Boldwood's imagination and
libido are fired by the verse. Here we see an extreme
form of textual eroticism: without knowing who sent
280
the valentine, Boldwood nonetheless feels "the symmetry
of his existence to be slowly getting distorted in the
direction of an ideal passion" (149). His curiosity
has been piqued: in wanting to know the motive and
origin, or author, of the valentine, he experiences a
convergence of narrative and sexual desires.
Somebody's— some woman1s— hand had
travelled softly over the paper bearing
his name; her unrevealed eyes had
watched every curve as she formed it;
her brain had seen him in imagination
the while .... Her mouth— were the
lips red or pale, plump or
creased?— had curved itself to a
certain expression as the pen went
on— the corners had moved with all
their natural tremulousness: what had
been the expression? (150)
Thinking about this— obsessively— Boldwood is
reduced to a state of "nervous excitability." It is
less the woman than the literalization of woman-as-lack
which arouses him so much: this writing inscribes an
absence of presence, and so produces for Boldwood an
empty space, a cipher, which he can designate "woman"
and fill at his pleasure.
The vision of the woman writing, as a
supplement to the words written, had no
individuality. She was a misty
shape .... Whenever Boldwood dozed,
she took a form and comparatively
ceased to be a vision; when he awoke
there was the letter justifying the
dream. (150)
281
Even at this point in the narrative, Boldwood*s
passion verges on madness. As he reads and re-reads
the seal, "Marry Me," his eyes glaze over, becoming
"widespread and vacant"; his reflection in the mirror
seems indistinct to him, "insubstantial in form." The
valentine has taken possession not only of Boldwood's
imagination but also of his reason; all his subsequent
demands and reckless actions derive from this hackneyed
verse. Boldwood is in love with a verbal construct,
not a persona; like Bathsheba, he craves extravagant
promises and sentimental diction to fuel and fulfil his
passion, but he cannot acknowledge the treachery of the
language upon which his passion is founded. While
Bathsheba irresponsibly believes flatteries she knows
to be false, Boldwood moves a stage further into
self-deception, believing only the fiction he has
created for himself, and refusing to hear anything that
contradicts it. He cannot believe that the valentine
was sent in fun, yet he cannot believe that Bathsheba's
rejection is said in earnest. The dream-woman (quite
literally— she is formed in his unconscious, the site
of repressed desires) engendered by that silly verse
becomes for Boldwood a reality that eclipses all other
meaning; he allows his life to be ruled and ruined by a
romantic fantasy based on disembodied words.
282
Boldwood becomes more "womanly" in his emotional
dependency, and in the masochistic nature of his
passion. He offers suffering as testimony of his love,
and his "weakness" becomes the very strength by which
he forces Bathsheba into submission:
"You wouldn't let a dog suffer what I
have suffered, could you but know
it! . . . Be gracious and give up a
little to me, when I would give up my
life for you." (435)
At times he forces Bathsheba into a "masculine"
mode of defence: in denying the seriousness of her
flirtations with Boldwood, she echoes Troy's callous
flippancy:
[E]ach of those pleasures was just for
the day— the day just for the pleasure.
How was I to know that what is a
pastime to all other men was death to
you? (260)
Of course, this "death" is precisely what Boldwood
wants; that is, the realization of his masochistic
drive. Like Tess, like Fanny, Boldwood embraces
suffering, and his "dark form" resembles theirs in
wandering the landscape, "an unhappy shade in the
Mournful Fields ..." (292). He plays the female
role, the tragic role, in relation to Bathsheba's
"masculine" lightheartedness in flirting with him. No
wonder that Gabriel feels not rivalry but pity for him,
and notes that "this constant passion of the farmer
283
made him not the man he once had been1 1 (425, emphasis
added). A bizarre note is struck when "an
extraordinary collection of articles" is discovered in
a locked closet:
There were several sets of ladies'
dresses . . . of sundry expensive
materials; silks and satins, poplins
and velvets .... There were two
muffs, sable and ermine. Above all
there was a case of jewellery,
containing four heavy gold bracelets
and several lockets and rings, all of
fine quality and manufacture. These
things had been bought in Bath and
brought home by stealth. (446)
The dresses and jewels are labelled with
Bathsheba's name, but a less innocent explanation is
invited by the sheer sensuousness of the articles:
they seem fetishistic, and delicately hint that
Boldwood's emotional and imaginative transgression of
gender "boundaries" may be symbolically paralleled by
secret cross-dressing.
I want to conclude this chapter by arguing that
although it follows the conventions of romantic fiction
by ending in marriage, the novel sustains its critique
of romantic ideology since the marriage is based on
"camaraderie" rather than passion. The novel has
traditionally been considered a tragedy, as Susan
Beegel points out, though her own reading opposes this
view and stresses the "fragile optimism" of the text,
284
its validation of a "rare, ideal love" (209). Ian
Gregor is among those critics who finds the
redefinition of love unsatisfying:
Camaraderie has little to do with that
brief but distinctive moment . . . when
Bathsheba moved unerringly to take Troy
in her arms after he has been shot by
Boldwood .... [The] form of the
novel has given us a vision which is
far more inclusive than the final
narrative permits. (74)
However, we may recall that in a neat reversal of
the gender roles of romance (the damsel rescues the
knight in distress), Bathsheba performs a similar
service for Gabriel when she saves him from suffocation
in the Noah's Ark. He revives to find his head in the
lap of the "the young girl with the remarkably pleasant
lips and white teeth," and "her fingers unbuttoning his
collar" (70). In this incident, "camaraderie" is
enriched by a sensuousness that Gabriel tries to
capture in memory, though "he would as soon have
thought of carrying an odour in a net as of attempting
to convey the intangibilities of his feeling in the
coarse meshes of language" (71). The early promise of
the relationship— at least as Gabriel understands
it— resurfaces whenever he and Bathsheba work together:
during the storm scene, for example, or in the repair
of Fanny Robin's grave. Bathsheba's attachment to
285
Gabriel strengthens steadily as the plot progresses,
but she needs to undergo a shift in perception,
becoming more subtle as a reader of romances, before
she can value camaraderie according to its worth, or
discriminate the true hero from the villain. She is at
first so impressed by Troy's urbane flattery and
Boldwood's sentimental excesses that Gabriel's language
is altogether too "natural" to seem eloquent. Like the
princess in the fable who is disappointed when the
songbird turns out to be a real canary, Bathsheba
prefers artifice to nature, and rejects the most
lyrical utterance in favor of the most ornate. A
turning point in the novel is her inscription of Troy's
name upon Fanny's tombstone. Here she achieves closure
of the tale into which she literally stumbled on the
night she met Troy and became caught on his spurs. In
completing Fanny's story, Bathsheba liberates herself
from the grip of tragedy and is able to move from
fictional to "real" love, from romantic fantasy to the
more realistic domestic scene envisioned by Gabriel.
Actually, of course, Hardy has it both ways,
indulging in a form of the romanticness he criticizes
since it is Gabriel who is given the most eloquent
statement of love in the novel:
286
"I shall do one thing in this life— one
thing certain that is love you, and
long for you, and keep wanting you
until I die." (80)
These words are wonderfully poetic; and so is
Gabriel's promise of camaraderie: "Whenever you look
up, there I shall be; and whenever I look up, there
will be you." His pledges of love have a lyrical
cadence which connects with other natural rhythms in
the fictional world: the cycles of the seasons, the
cadences of folkloric speech. In the semiotic coding
of this novel, Gabriel's easy affinity with nature is a
clear sign of his goodness: when a man who has the
gift of measuring time by the stars vows to love you
unto death, you know that you can depend upon his
eternal devotion.13 When Gabriel's dream of domestic
harmony finally materializes, his simple, poetic style
is echoed in the description of the scene. This is the
language of nursery rhymes, of ballads and children's
stories:
So down she sat, and down he sat, the
fire dancing in their faces and upon
the old furniture .... (456)
Moreover, Gabriel not only practices linguistic
economy, but shows a real distrust of language's
capacity to define and express emotion, so that his
retreat into silence is not merely the self-defensive
287
gesture of wounded pride but a symbolic rejection of
Bathsheba's misdirected romantic notions. His silence,
like Cordelia's "Nothing," is a mode of protest— a
refusal to participate in the linguistic falsification
of love.
During his verbal withdrawal, however, Gabriel
continues to prove his love at the more material level
of work. Beegel makes Gabriel's sexuality the central
issue in evaluating "camaraderie": she argues that his
work as a farmer is inherently procreative and phallic,
and that the sheep-shearing scene parallels the sword
exercise since both activities are "sexual displays,"
their object "to shave a body as closely and as quickly
as possible without cutting" (210) . Some striking
images in the novel make this reading very persuasive:
for example, the sheared sheep is like "Aphrodite
rising from the foam ..." and it appears "startled
and shy at the loss of its garment ..." (198).
Certainly the language has an erotic quality which has
little to do with sheep, and this suggests that there
may be sexual surprises beneath Gabriel's plain "oak"
exterior.
Camaraderie, then, may well be enhanced by sexual
passion, but it is essential nonetheless that it is
camaraderie, not passion, that provides the substance
288
of the marriage. There is an equilibrium here, and an
equity, which Bathsheba could not experience with Troy
or Boldwood. Instead of offering to shelter Bathsheba
from responsibility and labor, Gabriel shares it with
her; they have a working partnership. It is very
important that the economic imbalance has been
rectified, so that each partner is financially
independent; moreover, the threat of claustrophobia in
Gabriel's domestic vision now disappears because
husband and wife occupy separate domiciles, which the
novel somewhat cynically suggests is one condition of a
happy marriage. More important still is the rooting of
love in time; Gabriel and Bathsheba have in a sense
been married to each other all along, and come together
at last in an inevitable fashion. As Troy says, "A
ceremony before a priest doesn't make a marriage";
socially contracted to Bathsheba, he is morally and
spiritually bonded with Fanny, and to the corpse he
solemnly declares, "[I]n the sight of heaven, you are
my very, very wife" (361). Even though these are
Troy's words, they should not be taken lightly:
marriages are indeed made in heaven in this novel, or
least in nature; and when Gabriel calls Bathsheba his
wife in such a "wonderful naturel way considering how
very youthful he is in wedlock as yet" (465), we cannot
289
feel surprised since in a sense they have been married
forever. As Adam and Eve, they share their labor in
the natural world and bear ultimate responsibility for
the "children" of their community. According to the
narrator, this is where the strength of the
relationship lies— ordinary marriages suffer because
"men and women associate, not in their labors, but in
their pleasures merely" (458). This marriage is ideal
because the romance has grown "in the interstices of a
mass of hard prosaic reality" and is therefore "the
only love which is as strong as death— that love which
many waters cannot quench, nor the floods drown" (459).
By contrast, the passion "usually called by the name is
evanescent as steam." Far From the Madding Crowd sets
out to dismantle the ideology of romantic love in
fiction: however, this is less a deconstructive than a
reconstructive task, and the novel ends by celebrating
a rare marriage which reconciles romantic love with
feminist principles.
At least, this is an attractive and plausible way
of seeing it. But the note of discord is struck in
Joseph Poorgrass's final grudging comment on the
marriage:
". . .1 wish him joy of her; though I
were once or twice upon saying to-day
with holy Hosea in my scripture manner,
290
which is my second nature,'Ephraim is
joined to idols: let him alone.' But
since 'tis as 'tis, why, it might have
been worse, and I feel my thanks
accordingly." (465)
And perhaps, after all, all is not well that ends
well; there may be a foreshadowing of marital misery to
come, in Coggan's wry prognosis that Gabriel's loving
tone will "improve" in chilliness in time. More
disquieting still is Bathsheba's silence at the
end— for at this point only Gabriel speaks to the men—
which may imply her sexual submission as a wife.14
Furthermore, we are told that "Oak laughed, and
Bathsheba smiled (for she never laughed readily
now) ..." (465). Penny Boumhela has argued that the
Bildungsroman, the "story of Bathsheba's emotional and
moral growth," is paralleled by "the breaking of her
spirit. Images of taming pursue her" (33).
Undermining Beegel's construction of the sheep-shearing
scene as richly and promisingly seductive, Boumhela
notes that "Oak jealously nips the ewe . . . in the
groin," and claims that Oak, like Troy, implies the
threat of violence as "a kind of surrogate for the
physical punishment of Bathsheba herself" (33).
Bathsheba has to undergo systematic suffering and
repression to become "a fitting wife" for Gabriel.
291
Like Beegel, my own inclination is to reconstruct
the novel as a romantic comedy, and to see the ending
primarily as an affirmation of the resilient,
regenerative power of love. But as Bathsheba herself
points out, to read as a woman is to read between the
lines— and in reading between the lines of the ending,
we may discern a different story, one which unsettles
and dismays. Doubts linger; questions remain. Can a
woman become a wife— can the heroine arrive at her
proper destiny, as the romantic plot fulfills its
dynamic of desire, reaches climax and closure— without
burying her self— that is the self that exceeds
ideological representation— even when the marriage
model has been significantly modified? If we can
articulate such questions, has the novel really reached
closure at all? Ambiguity casts a shadow over the
ending, even in its very moment of triumph. We can
choose to ignore it in favor of a strong argument one
way or the other: but if we acknowledge it, at the
very least the novel forces us to recognize our
reconstructive choices, and makes us realize that in
our desire for a coherent reading— in our desire for
the truth, the one truth— we squash, suppress and
smother those troublesome elements that refuse to fit.
292
NOTES
1 Review in The Observer. 3 January 1875. Reprinted
in Lerner and Holstrom, 35.
Note also Henry James's pompous attack on
Bathsheba, as a new literary type:
. . . we cannot say that we either
understand or like Bathsheba. She is a
young lady of the inconsequential,
wilful, mettlesome type which has
lately become so much the fashion for
heroines . . . the type which aim at
giving one a very intimate sense of a
young lady's womanishness. (Lerner and
Holstrom 33)
2 See, for example, Teresa de Lauretis, Alice
Doesn't. which develops Foucauldian and feminist
psychoanalytic theories to produce an extremely subtle
and compelling analysis of "woman" as ideological
construct.
3 It is Althusser's definition of ideology, i.e., as
a representation of the "imaginary relationship of
individuals to their real conditions of existence"
(162), to which I refer, but applied here to an
analysis of gender rather than class relations or in a
sense to woman-as-class.
4 This pattern can be traced from Clarissa onwards.
Clarissa becomes a woman of property but, as a dutiful
daughter, she relinquishes control of her wealth to her
father, and then pays a terrible price for resubmitting
to patriarchal law. Her loss of self-possession, as
she exchanges the father's tyranny for the lover's, is
poignantly represented in her actual derangement.
Examples proliferate throughout fiction of
attempts to write the story of the independent woman of
property— far too many to be considered here, so I want
to suggest just three which deal very directly with the
problem. In Trollope's Miss Mackenzie. the heroine
unexpectedly gains a fortune— but loses it to the
cousin she loves (a man unworthy of her) then has the
dubious recompense of marrying him at the end.
Mrs. Oliphant's powerful Miss Marjoribanks, in the
novel of that name, reigns over Carlingford for ten
years, but is only rescued from sudden impecunity and
disgrace by her cousin's triumphant return from the
293
colonies, and timely proposal of marriage. The
narrative drive towards the romantic ending seems too
hard to resist.
Charlotte Bronte1s Villette does succeed in
breaking free from the marriage plot, but the fate of
Lucy Snowe seems an excessive price to pay.
Resignation to a lifetime of dreariness, in a
peculiarly pleasureless fictional world, is the penalty
for the freedom to work. See Cora Kaplan's "Wild
Nights" for a discussion of the absence of pleasure in
feminism.
5 Penny Boumhela, Thomas Hardy and Women 34. This
excellent critique relates Hardy's fiction to
contemporary ideologies of sexuality and femininity.
See also Fred Reid, "Art and Ideology in Far From
the Madding Crowd, although his article tends to
oversimplify the complexity of romantic ideologies and
the covert nature of their operation.
6 Interestingly, Henry James saw the novel as
Gabriel's story. The whole structure of perceptions
evidently shifted, for, in his heavily sarcastic
review, James attacked the novel for its excesses:
. . . the work has been distended to
its rather formidable dimensions by the
infusion of a large amount of
conversational and descriptive padding
and the use of an ingeniously verbose
and redundant style. It is
inordinately diffuse and, as a piece of
narrative, singularly
inartistic .... (Lerner and
Holstrom 30)
But if we see the novel as engaging with the
woman's identity and her interpellation into romantic
ideology, it becomes the examplar of economy,
compressing many complex questions into its narrow
frame. James's assumption that the man's story is as
the center is very revealing: it reflects the
privileging of man in our cultural narratives —
including his story — and the consequential condition
that the woman's story becomes trivial and irrelevant.
7 Beegel, 2 09. She argues that to view the novel
tragically is to read it in a distorted way. It is
worth noting, though, that in its very refusal to
hierarchize its contradictory modes, genres and
discourses, (as Boumhela has argued), the novel forces
294
us to confront our own aesthetic (and political)
ideologies.
8 For example, the dog, like Gabriel, is taciturn:
its temper "as mild as milk, it "cynically avoided"
"superfluous barking." Note especially the encounter
between the well-mannered dog and the "fiendish,"
"arched" cat (75), which slyly foreshadows the sexual
conflict between Gabriel and Bathsheba.
9 See Teresa de Lauretis, "Desire and Narrative" in
Alice Doesn't. which explores the constraints of the
Oedipus quest, as the structure of narrative desire,
upon feminist reading practices.
10 Moreover, in considering our relationship with the
text we are, of course, triply voyeurs— watching
ourselves watching Gabriel watching Bathsheba.
11 Freud proposes, in "The Uncanny," that the gaze is
masculine and active.
12 Helene Cixous puns heavily on the verb voler to
suggest theft/flight as the feminine mode of resistance
to dominant male representations of femininity.
13 Hardy comically makes the point that it is only
through nature that Gabriel can tell the time— his
watch malfunctions to the point of redundancy.
Interestingly, the male characters' relationship
to time is encoded through their horological devices,
and we can trace subtle connections between
sexual/textual desire and its fulfillment through time.
Boldwood, whose timepiece is formidably "surmounted by
a spread eagle," wants to dominate time:
pathologically obsessed with possessing Bathsheba, and
ignoring her obvious distress, he bullies her into a
contract based on time ("A mere business
compact .... A promise to marry me at the end of
five and three quarter years . . . a blissful loving
intimacy of six years and then marriage . . . .") The
women's articles found in his closet are dated six
years ahead. But Boldwood's mania for legal time is
turned against him, since he is committed indefinitely.
Troy lives in a world of synchronized watches, which
partly accounts for his failure to marry Fanny Robin.
Like Boldwood, he uses time coercively (forcing
Bathsheba into urgent action if she wants to keep him);
and as the first lover formally to pledge enduring love
295
("Till death us do part") he keeps the symbol of his
treachery coiled in the back of his watch, in the shape
of Fanny's yellow hair. It is Gabriel, living outside
manmade time, waiting with saintly patience, who
experiences the blissful gratification of his
sexual/textual desires, since he is the only one to
fully know Bathsheba.
14 Professor Hilary Schor first suggested to me this
pessimistic reading of Bathsheba's silence— initially,
much to my dismay.
296
5
IMPERSONATING THE ANGEL:
MIRROR IMAGES AND MIMETIC FICTIONS
IN LADY AUDLEY1S SECRET
Red Herrings and False Trails:
or, the Mystery of the Missing Writer.
When you go the Library to look up M.E. Braddon,
you begin, in the best traditions of sensation fiction,
with a false trail, a minor act of literary detection,
and a little mystery— for the author is not where you
expect to find her. Though she was known
professionally by her own name, and associated all her
long life with her third but most infamous novel— many
of her eighty books bore the legend "By the author of
Lady Audlev's Secret"— Braddon is now catalogued as
Maxwell.
It was a name to which she made premature and
provocative claims. In 1866, after cohabiting with her
publisher John Maxwell for five years, but legally
prevented from marrying him for another eight, Braddon
wrote to her literary advisor, Edward Bulwer Lytton:
I will sign myself by a name which I
have for some time borne, but which for
very powerful commercial reasons I have
297
refrained from assuming in any public
manner. (Quoted in Wolff 107)
But her explanation was disingenuous: if she
could not be known as '.'Mary Maxwell,'' it was because
the real Mrs. Mary Maxwell was very much alive, if far
from well, having been confined in a mental asylum in
Dublin. Curiously, the Library of Congress has
conferred upon Mary Elizabeth Braddon the respectable
married title that proved such a source of controversy
during her life; for every attempt that she and John
Maxwell made to conceal the scandal of their illicit
liaison inevitably refuelled the blaze of publicity.
Newspaper reports of their marriage, in 1864, were
promptly refuted by Mrs. Maxwell's brother-in-law, who
claimed he "looked anxiously to see [John Maxwell] and
Miss Braddon contradict a report which is not and could
not be true" before writing to the Press and declaring
it "utterly without foundation.1 Over the next ten
years the couple quietly and quite successfully
encouraged assumptions that they were married; but when
Mary Maxwell died in 1874, and her widower tried first
to suppress the obituary notices, and subsequently to
"disclaim any knowledge of the maliciously-intended
announcement of a death of the 5th inst" (Wolff 249),
the brother-in-law was provoked into further public
298
denunciations of Maxwell's conduct, and exposure of his
irregular menage. In the ensuing escalandre, the
domestic servants were so morally outraged that "they
all gave notice and left" (Wolff 251), except for one
loyal maid, who drew upon the stuff of sensation
fiction in her mistress's circumstances, and handed
down to posterity a redeeming Jane Eyre tale of a
concealed mad wife and a bigamous marriage into which
the unsuspecting Miss Braddon was entrapped.2
Quite aside from its personal significance for
Braddon, the issue of marriage and the law held a
prominent place in Victorians' consciousness in the
1860s, the decade in which sensation fiction flourished
so strongly that "sensation itself, so to speak, was
the sensation" (Deadly Encounters 3). The Matrimonial
Causes Act had been passed in 1857; the first Divorce
Court was established in the following year and its
proceedings were extensively and intrusively reported
by a scandal-mongering Press. In the spring of 1861
the case of Thelwall v. Yelverton, which involved a
bigamous marriage, furnished the newspapers with plenty
of titillating material, and that summer the Houses of
Parliament were engrossed in debates on the laws
relating to bigamy. It was the same year that Braddon
took up residence with Maxwell and began writing Lady
299
Audlev's Secret and Aurora Flovd— concurrently
serialized and immensely popular. Later she referred
to them flippantly as "my pair of bigamy novels”
(Harvard Literary Bulletin 1:12), but despite her
lighthearted tone, she was deeply sensitive about her
own entanglement in the problems of illicit union and
assumed identities. Literary critics frequently used
their public forum to make pointed allusions to
Braddon*s private life: Francis Paget, for example,
lamented in his best pulpit rhetoric that "the writers
of these books, ay, of the very foulest of them . . .
who have put forth confessions of the darkest
profligacy that an utter reprobate could make . . .
[are] women; and the worst of them, UNMARRIED WOMEN!"
(297) ; and Mrs. Oliphant wrote nastily that Braddon
"brought in the reign of bigamy as an interesting and
fashionable crime, which no doubt shows a certain
deference to the British relish for law and
order . . . . [I]t is an invention which could only
have been possible to an Englishwoman knowing the
attraction of impropriety and yet loving the shelter of
the law" (258). Though one contemporary reviewer of
sensation fiction pretended that the availability of
divorce would make bigamy "clumsy and obsolete" as
fictional subject and social practice— "With such an
300
easy legal provision for being 'off wi' th'auld love,'
it will be worse than a crime, it will be a blunder, to
have recourse to illegitimate means of being 'on with
the new"' (H. L. Mansel 490)— actually there were many
restrictions built into the new law, particularly for
women; it provided no solution for Braddon and Maxwell,
nor, as David Skilton points out, did it help the
fictional Lady Audley out of her embarrassing
predicament, since "[it] was over a hundred years
before legislation was introduced which would make it
possible for Mrs. Talboys to divorce her husband . . ."
(xxiii). Bigamy novels may have offered a "symbolic
resolution" to intolerable social conditions, even if
the fantasies contained in the fiction were, as
Showalter points out, "very far from actualization."3
The new genre of sensation fiction which Braddon
helped pioneer both provoked and traded upon shock.
"Excitement and excitement alone," complained Mansel,
was the aim of novels written "to supply the cravings
of a diseased appetite . . . contributing themselves to
foster the disease, and to stimulate the want they
supply" (482-3). References to narcotics and addiction
proliferate in Braddon criticism (appropriately, since,
as I will argue, Lady Audlev's Secret plays many tricks
with perspective, and in a sense has a
301
consciousness-altering effect): E.S. Dallas, in The
Gay Science. wrote of "the craving which exists among
us for sensation" (II. 299-300); Henry James described
Braddon's fiction as "deep draughts of the happiest of
anodynes."4 W.F. Rae judged Ladv Audlev1s Secret
"exciting . . . but unnatural" and "one of the most
noxious books of modern times"; in his view, Braddon1s
notoriety was her "due reward for having woven tales
which are as fascinating to ill-regulated minds as
police reports and divorce cases."5
The implied connection between novels and
newspapers is apt, since sensation fiction is partly
rooted in "low" literary forms: broadsides and the
popular press. Mansel writes explicitly of the
"Newspaper Novel" in his review of sensation fiction,
arguing that "From vice to crime, from the divorce
court to the police court, is but a single step," and
that the novelist has merely to "keep an eye on the
criminal reports of the daily newspapers" to discover
"the outline of his story not only ready-made, but
approved beforehand, as of the true sensation cast"
(43). Wilkie Collins, whose Woman in White launched
the new genre in 1860 and was acknowledged by Braddon
as the inspirational source for Ladv Audlev1s Secret,
is a well-known example of the writer who drew directly
302
on crime reports for imaginative fiction. Dallas, too,
notes the connection; in a review of Lady Audlev's
Secret in The Times. he discusses the public's passion
for narrativizing real crimes as if they were
serialized murder mysteries, and the contemporary
writer's tendency to channel this morbid interest into
fictional terrain:
Every little clue is seized . . .
countless suggestions are made and
theories started . . . millions of
readers wait impatiently for more
news . . . and the police and the
newspaper offices are besieged by
correspondents eager to pursue new
lines of inquiry. The secret which
baffles the detectives, it is the
province of the novelist to unravel.6
More recently, Richard Altick has developed the
suggestions of these Victorian critics; positing a
symbiotic relationship between popular journalism and
sensation novels, he argues that the historical events
authenticated the extravagance of the sensation novels,
in a sense factualizing fiction:
Every good new Victorian murder mystery
helped legitimize and prolong the
fashion of sensational plots ....
[R]eal-life murders made it easy to
believe that fictional titled ladies
like Lady Audley were capable of
killing . . . (Studies in Scarlet 79).
The "sensational mania"7 which swept across the
nation had no respect for class boundaries, which is
one reason why it dismayed contemporary critics.
Official bourgeois culture coexisted in uneasy tension
with countercultural genres which turned crime,
decadence, deceit and immorality into irresistible
sources of titillation; the ideology of the family was
undermined by a series of domestic murders
sensationally reported in the press, and the stolid
decency of the middle-and upper-classes was called into
question by a deluge of popular novels which dealt with
their seamier side.8 As Thomas F. Boyle suggests, the
sensation novelists "discovered the skeletons in the
closets of an England which prided itself on its
respectable and moral progress" (93); and, in Winifred
Hughes' words, they provided "a racy, alternative
vision, which struck at the roots of Victorian
anxieties and otherwise unacknowledged concerns" (5).
W.F. Rae ironically congratulated Braddon for "having
temporarily succeeded in making the literature of the
Kitchen the favourite reading of the Drawing Room"; but
we might wish to see this, as Hughes does, from a more
positive, Bakhtinian perspective, as "an undisputed
example of 'democratic art,' not only being read by all
classes of society, but having its origins in the
less-than-respectable quarters of lower class
literature" (Hughes 6). Though the craze for sensation
304
fiction per se proved the phenomenon of a single
decade, the shocking, scandal-mongering journalism
which preceded it also, of course, outlasted it, and
the attitude affected by Rae— of snobbishly despising
the titillating narratives which everyone secretly
enjoys— has survived as a cultural ritual in England;
(where, if you dropped in on any middle-class home for
Sunday breakfast, you would be sure to hear the raciest
stories from the popular newspapers read aloud in lofty
tones of amusement, and find their pages smeared with
butter and toastcrumbs, while the highbrow papers would
very likely remain in virginal pleats until thrown out
next morning).
Aside from popular journalism, the strongest
shaping influence on sensation fiction is contemporary
theater. In a genre distinguished by the "violent
yoking together of romance and realism," melodrama is
fused with the domestic tale, and violent crimes are
committed within the sanctuary of the hallowed home.9
Madness and murder, false identities and scandalously
sexual heroines, mysterious secrets and illicit
marriages are the thematic components of the genre,
which parodies like Punch's "Lady Disorderly's Secret"
and Thomas Hood's "Quintilia the Quadrigaraist: or, The
Heir and the Hounds," and "Maurora Maudley: or, Bigamy
305
and Buttons," were quick to satirize.10 Braddon, who
anonymously churned out penny-dreadfuls in addition to
her relatively "respectable" sensation novels, was not
averse to a little self-mockery: she wrote to Bulwer
Lytton, "The amount of crime, treachery, murder,
slow-poisoning and general infamy required by the
Halfpenny reader is something terrible. I am just
going to do a little parracide [sic] for this week's
supply" (HLB 22:11). Braddon was herself a veteran of
stage melodrama: before commencing her writing career,
and her liaison with Maxwell, she had acted for three
years in provincial theater, sheltering behind the
pseudonym "Mary Seyton." She would later describe
going on the stage as "a thing to be spoken of with
bated breath, the lapse of a lost soul, the fall from
Rochester Terrace to the bottomless pit" (quoted in
Wolff 45); at the time she perhaps felt she had no
choice, since Lady Audley's story of a financially
irresponsible, deserting husband was very much
inscribed into her own family history: "Papa" had
"good abilities, good connections . . . a popular
manner" and winning ways, but his marriage-settlement,
like George Talboys's, turned out to be "the dream of a
sanguine mind," and by the age of twenty-one Braddon
was supporting herself and her mother by her chosen
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profession.11 Her stage experience no doubt helped
mold her writing, for the structural and thematic
conventions of melodrama were imported to the sensation
novel. An important characteristic of the latter genre
is its contemporaneity, which is suggested in Ladv
Audley1s Secret by very precise references to the
material details of everyday life: railway schedules,
brands of tobacco, newspaper advertisements for
cosmetics, and so on. This gives the novel a certain
quaintness as a period piece— but even setting aside
this historical "interference" for modern readers, I
suspect that the representation seemed stylized at the
time. In describing the extreme technical
sophistication of the Victorian theater, Winifred
Hughes notes:
[T]he illusions became increasingly
elaborate. By the time sensation drama
appeared, theatrical technicians were
capable of furnishing the required
spectacle— fires, earthquakes, and
cataracts, naval battles in real water,
detailed reconstructions of pubs or
railway stations, horses and other live
animals, even real hansom cabs driven
across the stage. Thus the most
extravagant and incredible excesses of
melodrama could be effectively combined
with a literal exactness in physical
setting, When the first villain tied
the first victim to the railroad tracks
in a sensation drama of 18 67, that
victim was rescued in the nick of time
from being run over from an actual
train. (11)
What Hughes is describing amounts in effect to a
kind of hyperreality, in which tangible, natural
objects are placed in the service of artistic illusion,
and made to function not as themselves but as
representation or aesthetic design. In my view we can
trace the influence of this effect in Ladv Audlev1s
Secret, where the richness of the details actually do
less to "authenticate" the textual experience than to
burnish it a little more brightly, animating fictional
life with an illusion of vitality and depth that
exceeds "natural" existence, and thus signals it as
representation. Like Madame Tussaud1s waxwork figures,
Braddon's fiction simulates reality with self-conscious
precision: "the theatricality is explicit" and we are
"meant to admire the perfection of the fake . . .
[which] tells us that faked nature corresponds much
more to our daydream demands . . . that technology can
give us more reality than nature can" (44). These
words are borrowed from Umberto Eco's analysis of
Disneyland. I find the quotation apt, first because
Eco's concept of hyperreality provides a useful
perspective on the sensation novel and stage melodrama,
and second, because I mean to suggest that their
particular mode of stylization not only survives but
flourishes in current, popular art forms— especially
308
film, where the forces of technology are marshalled to
produce vivid illusions of nature, often transparently
but sometimes self-reflexively.12
I will be investigating the implications of this
stylized representational technique in my subsequent
discussion of Lady Audley as fictional character; for
the moment I wish to abandon this particular trail and
conclude this section with a few comments on Braddon's
subversive role as a distinctly improper woman-writer.
As Wolff has noted, her own life was "as sensational in
its way and for its time as any novel she ever wrote"
(3). All the ingredients of a good sensation plot are
here: assumed identities, a scandalous career, a mad
wife in an asylum, a domestic secret, an illicit
liaison; at one point Braddon herself was poised on the
edge of insanity, suffering from "a nervous collapse,
complicated by an attack of puerperal fever. Madness
seemed to hover over her, as the surrounding world grew
shadowy" (Wolff 222).
It was her "fallen" status, however, that most
deeply thrilled and offended her critics. Given the
double sexual standard, it is not surprising that
Braddon was subjected to so many personal slights while
the extremely irregular menage of a partner in
crime-fiction, Wilkie Collins, was largely ignored.
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However, if we compare Braddon to another notoriously
"fallen1 1 woman-writer— George Eliot— we might conclude
that the critics’ hostility is, after all, a response
to the fiction rather than the author; for Eliot's
public discourse is so deeply conservative that her
private indecorum can be overlooked, while Braddon's
defiance of social convention takes brazen shape in a
narrative genre which delights in immorality. Lady
Audley's crimes may be brutally punished within the
ethical scheme of her fictional world, but for several
hundred pages her wicked exploits have titillated and
enchanted the reader; the sensation novel is a
carnivalesque celebration of feminine rebellion. In a
daring symbolic act, Braddon commits murder most
foul— for, long before Virginia Woolf declared the need
to kill the angel of the house, Braddon had dealt her a
death blow.13
If, as I suggested in Chapter 3, we can see the
eminently respectable Elizabeth Gaskell as symbolically
"fallen" because she made textual eroticism into a
marketable commodity, we can only marvel at the
impropriety of the woman-writer who traded on
"sensation" itself. Braddon expressed regrets to
Bulwer Lytton that she could not spare time to write a
more literary novel, but she cherished few Romantic
illusions about her writing; with five illegitimate
children of her own to support, as well as Maxwell's
five children by his legal wife, she had a sharp,
practical sense of her writing as a business venture,
and the profit-motive shamelessly propelled her plots.
If the characters of Ladv Audlev1s Secret are sometimes
caught up in a race against time, their feverish
consciousness of the clock was shared by their author,
who allegedly wrote the first installment overnight,
and "the third and some part of the second . . . in
less than a fortnight, and had the printer at me all
the time."14 Given the production-line conditions of
serial publication, the extreme popularity of sensation
fiction, and the public's voracious appetite for more
of the same, it is not surprising these novels often
seemed formulaic and tainted with
commercialism— "redolent of the manufactory and the
shop," in Mansel's words; but from his subsequent
observation that the "tawdry" covers were "hung out
like a signboard to give promise of the entertainment
to be had within" (491), we may infer an altogether
different kind of business enterprise, an intriguing
connection between novels and bawdy-houses. If we can
view the professional woman-writer of romantic fiction
as fallen because she makes money from the
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textual-sexual pleasures she supplies, can we by
extension see Braddon as a Madame, orchestrating
coarser thrills in a fictional genre designed expressly
for titillation? If writing is a sexy act, and its
commodification makes the very proper Mrs. Gaskell into
a Mary Magdalen, how do we gauge the impropriety of a
Mary Braddon who so brazenly traded on her readers'
craving for decadence and depravity? "I have learned
to look at everything in a mercantile sense," she wrote
to Bulwer Lytton, "and to write solely for the
circulating library reader, whose palette [sic]
requires strong meat" (HLB 1:13). We may be tempted to
agree with the Victorian critic who wrote that Braddon
deserved her notoriety, though what he thought
despicable may now seem delightful. Braddon may have
been deeply sensitive to social pressure towards
conformity, and easily wounded by the moral judgments
of her contemporaries, but she took grand and glorious
revenge in her fiction by exploiting a taste for
vulgarity that was evidently shared by respectable
Victorians (however much her critics affected to
despise it), and thus exposed bourgeois hypocrisy.
Instead of avoiding the implications of proffering her
seductive wares for public consumption, Braddon frankly
confessed herself "demoralized," abandoned all
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pretenses of innocence, and brashly solicited readerly
desire. Did Braddon prostitute her art, as she herself
seemed to think? In my view, we can invert this
notion: by explicitly confronting the symbolic
affiliations between the writer and the prostitute, and
between the erotic pleasures of the text and the erotic
pleasures of the body, and by defiantly embracing all
the pejorative associations of her role, Braddon turned
the selling of sensation, or literary "prostitution,"
into an art.
"So like and yet so unlike": distorted reflections
and tricky perspectives in Lady Audlev * s Secret
When "you," the reader, turn to the opening pages
of Lady Audley's Secret, you discover yourself an
intruder in a topsyturvy world. Formally flushed out
from the usual place of concealment, and
antagonistically interpolated into the text, the reader
is the first character to enter the novel, and the
first mystery we encounter. "You" are constructed as a
prying stranger, disturbing the cloying stasis of a
rural scene where "the cattle looked at you
inquisitively as you passed, wondering, perhaps, what
you wanted; for there was no thoroughfare, and unless
313
you were going to the Court, you could have no business
in that direction" (1).
Sometimes the most interesting places, and the
most liberating possibilities, are those to which there
is no thoroughfare. In part a detective fiction, Ladv
Audlev1s Secret is riddled with "false trails" or
narrative diversions which are either curtailed or
rendered inaccessible because the dominant plot-line
ploughs straight through them and seals them off. But
what would happen if we pursued one of those suspended
narrative suggestions to its logical conclusion,
ignoring, as it were, the "no trespassing" signs and
deliberately pursuing a path to which we had no lawful
access? Let us leave this question in abeyance until
the end of this chapter, and return to the personified
reader of the novel, who is indeed, it turns out,
boldly heading for the Court, though apparently without
an invitation.
Having now reached the "stupid, bewildering clock"
with its single hand, "you walked straight into the
gardens of Audley Court"; yet, should you succeed in
finding the main entrance, "squeezed into a corner of a
turret at one angle of the building, as if it was in
hiding from dangerous visitors, and wished to keep
itself a secret," you would still have no guarantee of
admission, for the old oak door seems inhospitably
modelled on Macbeth's, and the visitor is dismayed
"lest the noise of the knocking should never penetrate
the stronghold” (2). To be temporarily stranded in the
gardens, we are told, would be no hardship, for this is
"a place that strangers fell into raptures with;
feeling a yearning wish to have done with life" (2).
But we may be vaguely uneasy at that last clause; and
despite the narrator's murmur that "Peace seemed to
have taken up her abode here," we perhaps begin to find
the surroundings more sinister than soothing,
especially when we come to the "stagnant well,
which . . . hid itself away . . . with an idle handle
that was never turned, and a lazy rope so rotten that
the bucket had broken away from it, and had fallen into
the water" (2). Everything in the scene seems
decaying, rank, reclusive, out of step with the time,
or ambivalently poised between delightfulness and
foreboding; for example, in the lime-tree walk "a
conspiracy might have been planned or a lover's vow
registered with equal safety" (3). The descriptions
undermine the narrator's cheerful insistence that this
is "a glorious old place" and "a noble place." The
house itself, an incongruous and eclectic mixture of
architectural styles, comes straight from Gothic
315
romances and fairytales, with its "pointed gables" and
"straggling ivy," its turrets and secret passages; but
its framework also embodies a succession of dynastic
rules, with its "bit of Saxon wall" and its "Norman
arch," its "chimney coeval with the Plantagenets," its
Tudor rooms and its Queen Anne windows. This
structural complexity may account for visitors1
disorientation, but there seems a hint of supernatural
trickery in the way that your movements can be so
completely reversed:
[Y]ou incontinently lost yourself if
ever you were so rash as to go about it
alone .... [E]very room opened into
another room, and through that down
some narrow staircase leading to a door
which, in its turn, led back into that
very part of the house from which you
thought yourself the farthest ....
(2)
This foreshadows Alice's discovery that in the
world behind the looking glass she must walk in the
opposite direction from the place she wishes to
reach.15 In Lady Audley1s Secret we have a sense of
entering a dreamworld of deflected, distorted or
deceptive images, where it is possible to stand on the
site of "sudden and violent deaths by cruel blows,
inflicted with a stake cut from some spreading oak
whose very shadow promised— peace" and enjoy the
"sweet, rustic calm" (46); where we recognize without
surprise the most aberrant and unpredictable actions as
if they were perfectly normal and conventional; and
where time is both measured with meticulous precision
and crazily suspended as on a one-handed clock. This
is a world gone awry; it seems both reassuringly solid
and unsettlingly capricious, and the opening scene
strikes a note of discordance which will be sustained
throughout the novel. The dramatized reader is
promptly thrown off-balance and disoriented; initially
positioned in the novel as a meddlesome stranger who,
like other "dangerous visitors," wants to probe into
secrets, "you" are obliquely threatened in turn when
warned not to be "so rash as to go about it alone" (2).
But our narrator is soon discredited as a guide; we
have already noted the ominous undercurrent in scenes
extravagantly praised for their delightful tranquility,
and, as the detective plot thickens, readers are not
only kept in the dark, but also frequently tricked into
a false sense of omniscience, or narrative "mastery."
As Patrick Brantlinger points out, the narrator of
sensation fiction usually "ceases to convey all
information and begins to disguise much of it as hints,
clues, hiatuses . . . [becoming] willful and even
capricious .... At the same time that the narrator
of a sensation novel seems to acquire authority by
317
withholding the solution to a mystery, he or she loses
authority or at least innocence, becoming a figure no
longer to be trusted . . ."(15).
This distrust is essential in keeping the reader
off-balance— in establishing that the conclusions we
reach can easily be reversed or modified, for they are
built on shifting ground. On the one hand we have a
strong sense of predictability as we read, sharing
Robert Audley's conviction that the plot is moving with
its own inexorable momentum towards a damning closure;
on the other hand we discover that this novel has more
surprises in store for us than we had
anticipated— secrets in excess of the mysteries and
clues framed for our speculation— and thus, as readers,
we are once again caught off-guard. Bratlinger
suggests that the detective in the sensation-novel
functions as a substitute for the "no-longer
trustworthy narrator," taking over responsibility for
the "restoration both of social order and of some
semblance of narrative omniscience" (16). This is
clearly applicable to Ladv Audlev1s Secret, in which
Robert, the gentleman-detective, undertakes the burden
of reconstructing Lady Audley's elliptical history and
bringing her to justice. But the usual contract of
trust between narrator and reader having been breached,
318
and that relationship dramatized within the text as one
of mutual suspicion, we may be prompted to question
Robert's narrative integrity also. His story of a
woman's wickedness, and of patriarchal retribution and
restitution, becomes the official narrative, formally
endorsed because it takes precedence over competing
sub-texts— the suppressed or abortive fictional
possibilities we can trace in the novel.16 At the
same time, however, the very notion of narrative
authority is deeply undermined; Ladv Audlev's Secret
induces a healthy paranoia, and if its heroine is in
some sense a woman-text, the figure of fictionalized
femininity, as I argue below, then not only Robert's
particularly misogynistic reading of "woman," but
patriarchal narratives of femininity in general, are
challenged as untrustworthy constructions.17
Noting that readers' sympathies "have shifted
openly to Lady Audley and away from those she made
suffer," Martha Vicinus suggests that "We find new
truths for our times in Victorian melodrama" (141).
The novel easily accommodates pluralistic and
subversive readings, partly by casting doubt on the
truthfulness of its narrator-personae, as I have
suggested, and partly by playfully parodying its own
literary conventions and moral premises. As Jennifer
319
Uglow notes in her excellent introduction to the novel,
its "compulsive simplicity" in exploiting stereotypes
and conventions is countermatched by its tendency to
turn them inside-out, so that the work is "at once
familiar and original" (xi). Uglow attributes the
novel's unsettling effects to its formal tension:
The conjunction of two conventions,
realism and fantasy, contains an
unnerving suggestion. The prosaic
world of "daylight accessories" is
revealed as hiding a different universe
within it, a reverse image of chaos,
irrationality and violence, into which
we might suddenly step, like Alice
through her looking-glass, at the world
of the portrait, "so like and yet
unlike." The novel's first reviewers
agreed that this proximity to the
everyday world was the most original
and most disturbing aspect of sensation
fiction, for it "moved the hands of the
probable" and disturbed all sense of
stability (xvi).
Uglow's reference to reverse imaging is highly
suggestive, for we can see Ladv Audlev1s Secret as a
mirror-text, which adopts the looking-glass as a
recurring symbol and a principle of construction. For
example, as a parodic attack on a stereotype of
Victorian domestic ideology, the Angel of the House,
the novel becomes a distorting mirror which accurately
reflects the feminine ideal only to refract it into a
myriad of shattered images. This mirroring constitutes
a kind of mimicry, a practice which, as Luce Irigaray
has demonstrated, has powerful, subversive implications
for feminism;18 and in Lady Audlev's Secret, Braddon
exploits the strategy to maximum effect, faithfully
reproducing patriarchal fictions of femininity only to
displace and disrupt them with parodic distortions and
reversals. A direct target of her mimicry is a
bestseller published in the previous year, The Woman in
White. Though Wilkie Collins's novel also undercuts
domestic ideology in its way, by playing on a paranoid,
Gothic fear that the greatest danger to a woman is in
the home, Lady Audlev's Secret makes a bolder attack by
inversely mirroring the earlier text and suggesting
that the greatest danger in the home is the woman. The
heroines of both novels conform, at least on the
surface, to convention: they are angelic, blond,
sunny-tempered, and child-like. Both women are also,
to different degrees, ciphers, since they prove so
vulnerable to masculine constructions of their
identities. However, while Collins's Laura Fairlie
mutely submits to patriarchal authority— like her
spectral double, Anne Catherick, she is a blank page
open to the superscriptions of others' narratives— Lady
Audley is resolutely determined to take control of her
own story, and moves rapidly through a succession of
identities, pasted over each other like the labels
which Robert must so painstakingly prize off the hatbox
(204). When she sets out as Lucy Graham to try her
fortunes in the world— embittered by the failed promise
of her romantic marriage to a handsome but thriftless
young office— she severs her connection not only with
her husband but also with her myth of maternal origins.
(The story goes that her mother has left her a legacy
of latent insanity, which appears only in daughters and
is magically linked to the female reproductive cycle.)
Helen Talboys abandons her son to the patriarchal
line— appropriately, since he bears no resemblance to
her but is entirely his father's child— and reinvents a
respectable, colorless history for herself, one
suitable for the governess plot in which she resituates
herself, though she will not remain long within its
boundaries. Living with the Dawson family in a dull
little village "as contentedly as if she had no higher
aspiration in the world than to do so for the rest of
her life" (5), she seems genuinely surprised when Sir
Michael Audley proposes to her, though she readily
accepts and performs her wifely role with remarkable
fidelity. Tending with "anxious earnestness" to her
husband during his sickness, Lady Audley is the picture
of angelic innocence: "with her disordered hair in a
pale haze of yellow gold about her thoughtful face, the
322
flowing lines of her white cashmere dressing-gown
falling in straight folds to her feet, and clasped at
the waist by a cestus of agate and gold, [she] might
have served as the model for a Medieval saint" (184-5).
But her fellow protagonist, Robert Audley, is unmoved
by this vision of fragile loveliness and tender
solicitude: "I will read her as I have read her
before. She shall know how useless her artifices are
with me" (185). His strategies for reading a woman are
shaped by a cultural tradition of misogyny, for he
remembers "the horrible things that have been done by
women since that day upon which Eve was created to be
Adam's helpmeet," and knows "a hundred stories of
womanly perfidy" (2 35). He can look past the "fair and
beautiful face" and discern in the "starry blue
eyes . . . a strange and surely a dangerous light"
(235)— for the Angel of the House is an ambitious
psychopath whose guilty secret he must penetrate and
expose. At least, this is Robert's (and the official)
version of events. Thus he challenges Lady Audley to a
"duel to the death" (235)— to which her spirited
response is, "You shall not find me drop my weapon"
(259)— and so their fatal, oddly sexualized struggle
for narrative agency moves towards culmination. But
the text oscillates between rival perspectives, as if
323
setting up a double narrative mirror, so that questions
about truth, moral integrity, and sanity are
perplexingly multiplied and potentially reversible.
Though the novel eventually declines to sustain this
ambivalent playfulness, and supports the position that
Lady Audley is indeed a wicked woman, and Robert an
instrument of social justice, it also creates
suspenseful possibilities for reading Lady Audley as
innocent as Robert as her vengeful persecutor— red
herrings, if you like, which may lead to dangerous
trails.
Reverse mirror images, then, and disorienting
shifts in perspective can be seen as dominant features
of the text, and we, like the readers within the
fictional world, are kept guessing. When Lady Audley,
in the moment of committing arson, pauses to gaze at
herself in Phoebe's looking-glass, a "miserably cheap
construction which distorted every face whose owner had
the hardihood to look in it" (274), she may well be
seeing the hellish expression captured by the
pre-Raphaelite artist, whose portrait, "so like and yet
so unlike," gave a "strange, sinister light to the deep
blue eyes," a "hard and almost wicked look" to the
"pouting mouth," and "the aspect of a beautiful fiend"
in the "fair head rising out of the lurid mass of
324
colour, as if out of a raging furnace” (60). Though
jealous Alicia grudgingly admits that "We have never
seen my lady look as she does in that picture ..."
(61), she admires the portrait very much and is eager
to persuade her audience that this trick of perspective
illuminates the truth: "I think sometimes a painter
is . . . inspired . . . and able to see, through the
normal expression of the face, another expression . . .
not to be perceived by common eyes" (61). The events
of the narrative eventually corroborate Alicia's claim;
yet the question of a true perspective, or an accurate
reading, remains elusive and unresolved.
For there is so much mirroring within the text,
and reflections are so confusingly redoubled, back and
forth, that it becomes difficult to decide whether a
distorted or deflected image is more true than its
originary subject. This is particularly the case with
the heroine, whose representation plays out in complex
and parodic ways all the cliches of "femininity,"
thereby signalling the constructedness of "woman" and
marking the boundaries of the ideological plots that
define gender. Lady Audley has perfected the art of
mimesis, and reflects contemporary ideals of femininity
so brilliantly, at least on the surface, that she
virtually becomes a pure mirror-image. In Victorian
iconography of the period, angels and fairies are often
indistinguishable; graceful sylphs with translucent
wings and delicate, doll-like faces, they represent the
aesthetic model which Lady Audley embodies. Composed
of angelic and fairy essences, she is "too beautiful
for earth, or earthly uses"; her first husband recalls
that "to approach her was to walk in a serener
atmosphere and to breathe a purer air" (48). She is
exquisitely feminine by conventional standards, a tiny,
ethereal creature with a "pale halo" of golden curls,
"large and liquid blue eyes" which shone with all the
"innocence and candour of an infant" (44), a "pretty
little rosebud of a mouth" which even in the cold of an
English winter "retained its bright colouring and
fruity freshness" (119), and a "fragile figure" (45).
Though she has no wings, (despite her almost
supernatural mobility on occasions), she has, by way of
compensation, a "fairy-bonnet— all of a tremble with
heartsease and dewy spangles, shining out a cloud of
gauze" (48). Blessed with a "fairy-dower of beauty,"
she sustains its elements of fantasy and magic by
dressing in silks of "silvery, shimmering blue . . . as
if arrayed in moonbeams" (286), her fingers "starry
with diamonds"; and she lives in a "fairy-boudoir"
(116), surrounded by "fairy-like embroideries of lace
and muslin, rainbow-hued silks and delicately-tinted
wools" (251). She even writes a "pretty, fairy-like
note" in a hand which reveals and eventually entraps
her— "the feathery, gold-shot, flaxen curls, the
pencilled eyebrows, the tiny straight nose, the winning
smile, all to be guessed in these few graceful
upstrokes and downstrokes" (55). Her enchanting
loveliness is not merely physical; she is gifted with a
magic touch, and takes "joy and brightness with her"
(6) to gladden people's hearts, just as deftly as she
paints in "the delicate streak of purple which was to
brighten the horizon in her pupil's sketch" (7). A
consummate artist, she has the power to enhance and
transform images and perceptions; and when Alicia
complains that her step-mother is "wax-dollish" (28),
with the kind of beauty "to be found in a toy-shop"
(226), she makes a more suggestive claim than she
realizes, for Lady Audley has indeed turned herself
into a brilliant toy, and impersonates the patriarchal
fantasy of the ideal woman to the degree of becoming
hyper-real.
Like Madame Tussaud's waxwork figures— or better
still, Mrs. Jarley's, since their identities are
shamelessly reinvented whenever sales need to be
boosted— Lady Audley imitates fictions of femininity
and perforins herself with dazzling theatricality.19
We admire the ingenuity that can create such an
authentic fantasy. A work of art in her own right, as
well as an artist, Lady Audley knows how to manipulate
perception with tricks of perspective, and weaves the
magic of illusion around ordinary sights, so that they
are transformed into radiant visions. Hence she plays
up her own fairy-like qualities; and since she longs to
be the object of the gaze and the focus of desire, she
also exaggerates her childishness and the tininess of
her petite frame. Young enough to be her second
husband's daughter, she appears "as happy as a child
surrounded by new and costly toys," and dresses in
"heavy velvets and stiff rustling silks, till she
looked like a child tricked out for a masquerade . . ."
(44-5). Enveloped in the sables which Robert has
brought back from Russia, she "carried a muff which the
young man thought seemed almost as big as herself" and
looked "a childish, helpless, babified creature . . .
as she . . . warmed her tiny, gloved hands ..."
(119). She also, as Andrea Ivanov points out, "shrinks
herself" in many of her speeches, "participating in the
text's rhetoric of constriction and contraction" (77).
In this respect, as in the use of reverse rnirror
imaging, the novel seems to anticipate the Alice books,
328
for Lady Audley is a child-woman who becomes bigger and
smaller at will, and the locus of an erotic preference
for little women. So many Victorian novels fetishize
immature girls— a graphic example is Dickens' Little
Nell, who must die before she reaches puberty— that
Lady Audley's self-presentation as a child can be seen
as a satirical reflection of that pedophiliac
convention.
A curious exchange in the novel underscores the
suggestion that femininity can be willfully
impersonated, just as a waxwork figure can be dressed
up to simulate a particular identity. As if setting
the scene for a disguise that in fact never
happens— one of the red herrings in the text— Lady
Audley comments to Phoebe, her maid, that people have
often remarked on their physical resemblance. The
narrator might be included among them, for we have
several times been informed that Phoebe, a "dim and
shadowy lady" (95), has a ghostly likeness to Lady
Audley, mirroring her fine features though entirely
lacking her brilliant coloring. Phoebe's skeptical
response to this idea is not surprising, considering
her mistress's extraordinary beauty; but Lady Audley
insists that "with a bottle of hair-dye, such as we see
advertised in the papers, and a pot of rouge, you'd be
329
as good-looking as I am any day, Phoebe" (49). It is
as if Phoebe, too, could be a waxwork doll, an
unpainted and unfinished figure who might easily, with
a little artistic ingenuity, be transformed into her
mistress. One woman might easily metamorphose into
another, as if feminine identity itself were a
masquerade or a performance, a question of skillful
simulation rather than nature. A later passage takes
up this notion more explicitly, by discussing feminine
beauty as an illusion, produced through duplicitous
practices and a covenant of trust between mistress and
maid; for only that "well-bred attendant . . . knows
when the ivory complexion is bought and paid for— when
the pearly teeth are foreign substances fashioned by
the dentist— when the glossy relics of auburn hair are
the relics of the dead . . ." (2 85). Though Lady
Audley has too much natural beauty for these words to
apply literally, she does fashion her image upon
cultural myths about femininity, hence she can be
connected with "the lovely fairy of the ballroom" who
"enters her dressing-room after the night's long
revelry" and fades into a "modern Cinderella . . . in
kitchen-wench1s dirty rags," at which point only "the
lady's maid is by to see the transformation" (285).
This is, I would suggest, about more than the trickery
330
of faked beauty; it reveals also that the existence of
the "lady" depends upon a conspiracy between women of
different social ranks to reproduce the myth and keep
its contrived status a secret.
The Victorian construct of femininity is, as I
argued in Chapter Three, deeply fissured; and this is
borne out in the heroine's representation, for by
mirroring the angelic fairy of domestic ideology, she
can scarcely escape associations with the opposite of
that construct, the demonic witch. As the "social
fairy" of the tea-table, for example, she stirs an
ambivalent brew:
The floating mists from the boiling
liquid in which she infuses the
soothing herbs whose secrets are known
to her alone, envelop her in a cloud of
scented vapor . . . . (190)
Though there is "magic harmony to her every
movement," yet there is "witchery to her every glance,"
and the masculine fear of women's secrets powers is
suggested in the rhetorical question: "What do men
know of the mysterious beverage?" (190). Perhaps
contemporary readers, at this point, would have made an
association with the notorious case of Madeleine Smith,
whose story had just been revived in an anonymous,
triple-decker novel published in 1862, the year that
Lady Audlev's Secret was begun. Six years earlier, in
331
1857, this twenty-one year old, respectable young lady
had been charged with killing her former lover with
arsenic; most probably she had dissolved the poison in
his cocoa. Thus the fictional tea-brewing scene may
hint darkly at feminine treachery beyond the confines
of the text, and probably caused a frisson of
recognition in Braddon's readers.
Lady Audley links herself with witches, in
implicit and explicit ways. For example, she is
intrigued by the "French story of a beautiful woman who
committed some crime" and was, after years of being
honoured as an "uncanonised saint," suddenly
discovered,"tried, found guilty, and condemned to be
burnt alive" (91). After her own confession has been
wrung from her, Lady Audley consoles herself with the
thought that "The days were gone in which her enemies
could have branded her with white-hot irons, and burnt
away the loveliness whic had done so much mischief."
The heroine is connected with other infamous witches
and figures of diabolical femininity: Lady Macbeth,
for example, who is evoked in her insistence that "a
lamp should be kept burning all night" (315). And, as
Jennifer Uglow points out, "She summons at her will
elemental forces of earth, water, and fire— the grave,
the well, the burning inn" (xix).
The novel does, as I have pointed out, eventually
take a stand against the heroine, but the ambivalence
of her construction is largely sustained. Our
perceptions of her are often filtered through the
contradictory views of others, ranging from the
villagers' unanimous decision that she is a
"sunbeam . . . the sweetest girl that ever lived" (5)
to Robert's conviction that she is "the demoniac
incarnation of some evil principle" (292). Given such
a perplexing array of images, we are prompted to
question our collusion with the "official" reading, the
detective-narrator's construction of her as a wicked
woman. In other words, the mirror is also held up to
us as readers— a narrative strategy formally signalled
at the beginning, when we were arrested by the image of
the reader in the text, and evicted from the voyeur's
dominant position. Lady Audley is as careful to resist
textual mastery as the novel itself; she chooses a
precisely ambivalent name when she rechristens herself
Lucy, for it encompasses both the villagers'
perspective on her as a radiant vision, and Robert's
view that she is a diabolical, fallen angel.
The novel1s perplexing tricks with perspective
emphasize the deceptiveness of appearances, and
foreground perception as a question of position, which
333
can readily shift. For the morally upright characters
in the text, it is Lady Audley who personifies the
disconnection between appearances and reality— whose
guileless exterior disguises extreme duplicity. But in
this cynical novel, all the moral touchstones are
flawed; some fairly unpleasant passions are shown to
lie beneath the polished surfaces of civilized
society— Robert's gentlemanly courtesy, for example,
thinly masks his sadistic hatred for women— and the
worthier characters are shown to be perfectly
Pharisaical in their self-righteousness. Even Alicia,
set up as Lady Audley's moral opposite, is not quite
the "frank-hearted, generous girl who cannot conceal
any impulse of her generous nature" that the narrator,
Robert, and Alicia herself keep telling us she is.
When Lady Audley urges her "not [to] try and deprive me
of your father's affection," Alicia indignantly denies
herself "capable of a contemptible meanness" (90), yet
we have just witnessed her, from our semi-privileged
readers' perspective, working hard to convince Sir
Michael that his new wife has "all manner of affected,
fantastical ways, which you stupid men call
fascinating" (89)— just as she will try to discredit
Lady Audley with anyone who will listen. Even if the
novel eventually legitimizes her observations as
334
insight, Alicia's much-vaunted generosity and sincerity
are at this point cast in a questionable light. While
Lady Audley is condemned for reinventing her past, and
for the ruthless measures she takes to preserve her
fiction intact, her moral judges create exonerating
fictions to justify their dubious motives and
treacherous actions. This applies particularly to the
hero, whose zealous mission to uncover the truth is
superseded by his determination to smother any breath
of scandal. Honor matters less to him than the
appearance of it, and in his concern to preserve his
family's social respectability, he acts far more
cruelly than Lady Audley herself, though he disguises
it beneath a hypocritical rhetoric of justice, honor,
restitution, and the protection of the innocent. And
despite the fever of pity and indignation that the
wronged husband and alleged murder victim, George
Talboys, arouses in Robert, readers may find him less
sympathetic. Note how George represents himself as a
chivalric hero when he tells the story of deserting his
wife to make his fortune:
He was so brave in his energy and
determination, in his proud triumph of
success, and in the knowledge of the
difficulties he had vanquished, that
the pale governess could only look at
him in wondering admiration. "How
brave you were!" she said. "Brave!" he
335
cried, with a joyous peal of laughter;
"wasn't I working for my darling . . .
her pretty white hand beckoning me
onwards to a happy future?" (19)
But this heroic vision is diminished by the less
flattering perspective of those who witnessed his
behavior and its consequences. The landlord of the
Wildernsea inn, for example, tells how "the gentleman
ran away to Australia, and left the lady, a week or two
after the baby was born" (209); and Mrs. Barcamb
explains that "the poor little woman . . . tried to
support herself after her husband's desertion by giving
music lessons .... But I suppose her father took
her money from her and spent it in public houses"
(213). Given this gloomy little tale of male treachery
and exploitation, and the mitigating circumstances they
imply, we may take a malicious delight in the picture
of little Lucy contriving to topple her big, athletic
buffoon of a husband into the well. Like one of the
three sisters of Fate, she "drew the loose iron spindle
from the shrunken wood" and dispatched George to his
destiny, watching him "sink with a horrible cry into
the black mouth" (333) in an involuntary disappearing
act. Though she claims that in that moment "I was
mad," her story is very appealing as a feminine
revenge-fantasy, and if this is indeed madness, it is
336
positively carnivalesque. In her study of Victorian
women accused of murder, Mary S. Hartmann suggests that
these lawless individuals proved fascinating to their
more respectable sisters largely because the latter
recognized themselves in the former:
For us, as for many who attended the
trials, the experience is less one of
attending a freak-show than of looking
into a distorting mirror— the features
are altered but they are unmistakably
our own (9).
And Elaine Showalter makes the bold suggestion
that "As every woman must have sensed, Lady Audley1s
real secret is that she is sane. and, moreover,
representative.1,20
Showalter's is a compelling and brilliant reading;
nonetheless, we may be troubled by the notion that
there is a "real secret," a single explanation. The
novel1s twists and turns remind us that there are often
secrets in excess of those we thought we knew about,
and it remains for Luke, the unsavory blackmailer, to
point out the potential hazards of definitive readings:
"Suppose my lady had one secret and I another. How
then?" (350). As readers we inevitably make guesses at
Lady Audley's "real" secret, perhaps even sharing
Robert's sadistic desire to penetrate the heart of her
mystery; but to pin her down to a single truth is
337
inherently problematic. She is not merely the
possessor— and the victim— of secrets, but also the
figure of feminine and textual elusiveness, and remains
free, as Jennifer Uglow suggests, "to operate as an
endlessly suggestive symbol" (xviii). The novel seems
to offer rich opportunities for pluralistic readings,
and invites us to acknowledge the multiple
possibilities of the interpretive act.
One way to read the heroine is as a Sphinxian
figure of female desire, about whom we might pose the
notorious Freudian-Lacanian question, "What do women
want?" The problem with this question— as I argued in
Chapter 1— is that the way it is framed excludes women
from participating in the answer, so that their
sexuality is always already spoken. We see a similarly
closed economy of interpretation operating in the
novel, when Robert posits Lady Audley as a woman-text,
or as a floating signifier to be fixed into place and
assigned a value— "decoded" through the reconstructive
activities of the detective. When Robert articulates
his theory of circumstantial evidence, he effectively
describes an invisible network of signifiers which
coalesce around an absent center in a subtle, semiotic
code, until the sign is "discovered" that reveals the
whole. Robert undertakes a quest for meaning when he
seeks to identify Lady Audley and solve the riddle of
her secret; but his answer is determined in advance of
the search, the conclusion to his plot already written.
Robert outlines for Lady Audley a story of relentless
pursuit and sudden entrapment, lingering with such
obvious relish over his metaphoric references to
"invisible rope . . . woven out of straws . . . yet
strong enough to hang a man," and to "links of steel in
the wonderful chain forged by the science of the
detective officer" (104) , that he frightens Lady Audley
into a faint. In the conflict between the two
protagonists, in their devious raid and counter-raid
upon each other's private rooms, in the delicate
innuendo that marks their many clandestine meetings, we
can trace the outlines of a seduction plot, though the
libidinal energies are parodically displaced and the
liaisons dangerous in the fullest sense. Under the
pretext of being "like the hero of a French novel. I
am falling in love with my aunt" (48), Robert, who is
too sensitive to hunt foxes, turns "chasser la femme"
into a deadly sport; and, in the best traditions of
seduction fiction, as he reaches the climactic closure
of the story he tells the lady, he succeeds in making
her swoon.
At this stage his covert threat of the gallows is
based on the most tentative of speculations: the
heroine is merely an implied suspect of an unspecified
crime conjectured from the unexplained absence of an
unreliable friend. From circumstances as apparently
unconnected as his friend's disappearance and some
faint bruises on the lady's wrist, Robert has already
pieced together a narrative of feminine guilt. His
strategy, then, is to make the clues he seeks fit the
conclusion he has already reached; hence his emphasis
on "travelling backwards, in my lady's life" (197).
Having succeeded in "trac[ing] the histories of Lucy
Graham and Helen Talboys to a vanishing point," he
resolves to "discover the history of the woman who lies
buried in the Ventnor churchyard" (215).
Interestingly, the hermeneutic circuit Robert sets up
is suspended between missing bodies (for George is
somewhere in absentia— actually in New York having a
very nice time— and the corpse in the grave is of
course not Helen Talboys at all but the luckless
consumptive daughter of Mrs Plowson). Missing or dead
bodies are a most productive site for generating
meaning, since they are not in any position to
challenge the stories that are construed about them.
Lady Audley is also, as I have argued, to some extent a
340
cipher, but she gives Robert more trouble, resisting
his constructions with her own inventive and
tightly-woven fictions. Robert is, however, determined
to prove her guilty of something— ostensibly murder,
but the crime remains for the most part unnamed— and
thus, though he admits that "the chain of
circumstantial evidence . . . is formed of very slight
links" (222), he is also resolved to "go on adding
fresh links to the fatal chain until the last rivet
falls into its place and the circle is complete" (133);
in other words, to form a deadly network of signifiers
which will trap a woman in its center.
In undertaking the detective's role, Robert
becomes an Oedipus-figure. His narrative, like
Oedipus's, is plotted backwards, and driven by the
compulsion to uncover a secret; he remains deeply
committed to his task, even though he knows that to
resolve the mystery is to wreak havoc on his ancestral
home:
"My duty is clear enough," he
thought— "not the less clear . . .
because it leads me step by step,
carrying ruin and desolation with me,
to the home I love." (205)
When he warns Lady Audley, then, that he will
level her home "to the earth, and root up every tree in
the garden, rather than . . . fail in finding the grave
of my murdered friend" (236), his threatened act of
destruction has a symbolic resonance which reaches back
to the ancient myth. This modern Oedipus, however,
does not locate the source of corruption in himself but
overturns the paradigm by deflecting the riddle back
upon the Sphinx and finding her guilty. Robert
resolves "to tear away the veil under which she hides
her wickedness . . . wring from her the secret of [his]
friend's fate, and banish her for ever from the house
which her presence has polluted" (217). Ironically, if
he had carried out his threat to uproot Audley Court,
he would have saved Lady Audley a great deal of
anxiety, since the body she pushed into the well is no
longer there, and she could not be prosecuted for
murder without some evidence that a murder had been
committed. Indeed, as the psychiatrist points out to
Robert, even if George's death could be proved, "[Y]ou
could produce no evidence against this lady beyond the
one fact that she had a powerful motive for getting rid
of him. No jury in the world would condemn her upon
such evidence as that" (321, emphasis added). But
Robert knows this already, hence his determination to
keep Lady Audley beyond the reach of the law. With
extraordinary energy and zeal, he not only takes over
the role of the police detective, but all the other
342
public offices of the legal system as well: "The young
barrister had constituted himself the denouncer of this
wretched woman. He had been her judge; and he was now
her gaoler" (323). He conducts a private prosecution,
accusing Lady Audley in the seclusion of the Court
library, forcing her to make a confession of guilt to a
jury composed of himself and her husband, and imposing
on her a 1ife-imprisonment which soon turns out to be a
death-sentence.
Yet, until he met Lady Audley, Robert has been a
barrister in name only, for he has never undertaken a
professional case. An indolent and hedonistic young
man, considered something of a joke by the other
lawyers, he has spent his days "exhausting himself with
the exertion of smoking his German pipe, and reading
French novels" (27). What is it about Lady Audley that
fires him into such a frenzy of physical and mental
activity, and a zealous passion for retribution that
exceeds the law? Or to put the question another way:
what is it about George? since, after all, it is his
body which Robert so hotly pursues for most of the
novel.
As the detective, Robert scatters his own red
herrings into the plot, using the pretext of an illicit
attraction to his young step-aunt to explain the
343
intensity of his interest in her. Lady Audley neatly
turns this pretence back upon him when she plants the
idea in her husband's head that "it is dangerous for
his poor little wife's peace of mind to have a nephew
of eight or nine and twenty smoking his cigars in her
boudoir" and has Robert turned out of the house. But
certain passages in the text suggest that if we were to
take this contrived fiction seriously, we would be
looking for rivalry in the wrong place. When Robert
literally bumps into George for the first time since
their boyhood at Eton, their former intimacy is
suggested through a curious exchange:
"What!" said the stranger,
reproachfully, "you don't meant to say
that you've forgotten George Talboys?"
"No. X have not!" said Robert, with an
emphasis by no means usual to him; and
then hooking his arm into that of his
friend, he led him into the shady
court, saying with his usual placidity,
"and now, George, tell us all about
it." (29)
He responds enigmatically to the news of George's
marriage: "The idea of your having a wife, George!
What a preposterous joke!" (30), just as he will later
take refuge in self-mockery when he considers marrying
Clara: "The idea of my thinking of George's
sister . . . what a preposterous idiot I am!" (179).
After George's disappearance, Robert is so forlorn
344
without his friend, so visibly and inconsolably
distressed, that he provokes Alicia into malicious
references to "Pythias . . . [who] cannot exist for
half an hour without Damon" (73) and the accusation
that he is behaving like "some ghost-haunted hero in a
German story" (22 5). He even becomes the target of
local gossip, for Luke observes that "You was oncommon
fond of that gent," and refuses to let the subject
drop, though Robert would rather not discuss it:
"I've heerd the servants at the Court
say how you took on when you couldn't
find him. I've heerd the landlord of
the Sun Inn say how cut up you
was . . . 'If you two gents had been
brothers,' the landlord said, 'our
gent,' meaning you, sir, 'couldn't have
been more cut up when he missed the
other." (349)
None of the women in the novel, not even Clara,
whom Robert eventually marries, inspires a love as
impassioned as that which he pledges for George:
". . .1 declare that I would freely give up all I
possess and stand penniless in the world tomorrow . . .
if George Talboys could stand by my side ..." (137).
Despite his "lymphatic temperament," Robert is galled
into action by George's disappearance. Marveling that
"it is possible to care so much for the fellow," he
resolves that "sooner than be baulked in finding him,
I'll go to the very end of the world" (7 6) and he means
345
this quite literally, even planning to go to Australia
so that he might continue his search. Since George is
in every sense unavailable, Robert takes consolation in
the existence of a sister:
"[I]t seems abominably lonely tonight.
If poor George were sitting opposite to
me, or— or even George's sister— she's
very like him— existence might be a
little more endurable . . . ." (179)
On first meeting Clara, who is "very handsome"
(168) and "different from all other women whom he had
ever seen" (171), Robert regards her with "tender
compassion in his face; she was so like the friend whom
he had loved and lost . . ." (173). Eventually this
resemblance to George proves seductive enough to tempt
Robert into a marriage-proposal, despite the virulent
misogyny that lies deep in his heart, often erupting
into angry tirades:
"I hate women!" he thought,
savagely . . . "They are brazen,
abominable creatures ....
[George's] good, honest, manly heart
[is] worth a million of the treacherous
lumps of self-interest and mercenary
calculation which beat in women's
breasts." (178)
Clara would not be flattered if she overheard
Robert's description of choosing a wife: "Who shall
decide from the first aspect of the slimy creature,
which is to be the one eel out of the colossal bag of
snakes?" (174). She will no doubt soon discover his
authoritarian stance as a family man, for even Sir
Harry Towers notes that the "sneaking lawyer" (106) has
a "hand upon the curb [that] weighs half a ton" (110);
and Robert has already declared that his daughters
"will never go beyond the gates till they are
marriageable, when I will take them straight across
Fleet Street to St. Dunstan's Church, and deliver them
into the hands of their husbands" (101). Given
Robert's aversion to women, and his preference for
bonding with his own sex— for he lives in a
Ulysses-fantasy and claims that "Man might lie in the
sunshine and eat lotuses, and fancy it always
afternoon, if his wife would let him!" (177)— it seems
remarkable that he marries Clara at all; and even then,
as Ivanov suggests, "we can't help thinking he would
have preferred George all along" (80). To borrow
Robert's own metaphor for the dreadful discomfort
married men must endure: "The square men in the round
holes are pushed into them by their wives" (177).
In the topsy-turvy world of this novel, the
protagonists' sexuality has gone "awry," becoming
disengaged from the normative, heterosexual structures
of desire which support patriarchal culture. This
seems so not only with Robert but also with Lady
347
Audley, for in transforming herself into an image and
actively courting the gaze, she turns her erotic drive
back upon herself and becomes the object of her own
desire. The luxuriance of her surroundings, the rare
art-treasures which she keeps in such abundance around
her person, are merely the foil for her own exguisite
beauty, and her boudoir is filled with mirrors for her
narcissistic pleasure:
[T]he looking-glasses, cunningly placed
at angles and opposite corners . . .
multiplied my lady's image, and in that
image reflected the most beautiful
obj ect in the enchanted chamber."
(251)
It is appropriate that her son bears no
resemblance to her, for narcissism is a sterile mode of
sexuality, and Lady Audley cannot reproduce herself
biologically, being too caught up in multiplying and
fetishizing her own image. Her sensuality is suggested
in many ways— in the perfumed baths she takes, in the
wild disarray of her hair, in the furs and silks and
satins she wears— but for all that, she is curiously
a-sexual. Her first husband compares her to "one of
those what's-its-names, who got poor Ulysses into
trouble" (3 0); but, as we see, she uses her "dreamy
music" to lull Sir Michael Audley— "one of the hardest
riders in the county" (3)— into a regular,
348
post-prandial sleep, which may explain why three years
of marital bliss have produced no son and heir. The
French-novel pretext becomes an absurd joke when we
consider that not only are the nephew and the aunt not
interested in each other, but neither seems genuinely
interested in the opposite sex at all. In my view,
however, the cover-story is a necessary fiction, since
it masks a different sexual orientation from the one
Robert publicly claims. In a way, Lady Audley's guilty
secret mirrors his own, for they both occupy
potentially subversive positions in the symbolic order.
Just as she displaces patriarchal fictions of
femininity by the very act of mimicking them so well as
she secretly transgresses the law, so Robert's
unorthodox sexuality constitutes a threat to
patriarchal order. As Irigaray suggests, homosexual
relations are taboo because "they openly interpret the
law according to which society operates." and so
"threaten . . . to shift the horizon of that law"
(193). There is a conflict of interests and identities
here: Robert's homosociality verges on excess,
blurring the boundaries that mark the site of
prohibited desires; yet, because he so fully aligns
himself with patriarchal power, his own secret must be
kept in hiding, or subtextual. And what better way to
349
do this— what more traditional way— than by
constructing the narrative of a woman's guilt and
punishing her instead?
Robert's distrust of women is borne out by Lady
Audley's covert resistance to masculine power, and by
her cunning attempts to usurp it. She defies domestic
ideology by turning it to her own advantage, empowering
herself through the artful strategy of impersonating
the Angel. She disrespects the social institutions of
matrimony and the family when she abandons her child
and commits bigamy. She dares to point out the
hypocrisy of the privileged classes by suggesting that
virtue is contingent upon wealth. She tells her
accusers: "You . . . have been rich all your lives and
can well afford to despise me; but I knew how far
poverty could affect a life ..." (297) ; and claims
that "I was now rich and could afford to pity and
relieve the poverty of my neighbours. I took pleasure
in acts of kindness and benevolence . . . and I think I
might have been a good woman for the rest of my life"
(300). She is cynically aware that in "the world's
great lottery" (297) a woman's fate depends on making a
good marriage, and economics rather than romance should
influence her choice. But her jury is comprised of men
who sternly uphold the values of romantic ideology.
350
Her husband can "scarcely think there is a greater
sin . . . than that of a woman who marries a man she
does not love" (8); and though he recognizes that in
this December-May match he "could hardly expect to be
the choice of a beautiful young girl" (8), he never
forgets or forgives Lucy's honest admission as she
accepts his proposal: "I cannot be disinterested; I
cannot be blind to the advantages of such a marriage"
(9). Even the "simple Dawsons," we are told, "would
have thought it madness in a penniless girl to reject
such an offer" (8); yet when Lady Audley is condemned
as a "designing and infamous woman" (204), it is in
part because she perceive romantic ideology as an
attractive fiction which conceals the economic and
social degradation of women beneath its flattering
promises. And so Lady Audley invents a fiction of her
own and steals male power.
What is the crime Robert charges her with, the
confession he seeks? In the end, I think, her actual
legal infractions, whether real (such as bigamy) or
falsely alleged (such as murder) become irrelevant;
they are merely the form that her insubordination
takes. It is her secret acts of usurpation, her
cleverness in outwitting men, and her private mockery
of their ideals that so enrages Robert. Instead of
351
meekly accepting her role and functioning as a sign,
Lady Audley engages in a sustained act of "signifying";
the term, from African-American culture, denotes the
practice of slyly mocking and defying the masters
beneath a mask of acquiescence. She reveals the
fictionality of the feminine ideal— in some sense
becoming a metafictional heroine— and produces a
disjuncture between "woman" as construct and "women" as
historical subjects.21 Paradoxically, this most
"feminine" of women has to be denounced as unwomanly,
for her behavior goes against "nature"; thus Robert
accuses her in his most oratorical style;
"Henceforth you must seem to me no
longer a woman .... I now look upon
you as the demoniac incarnation of some
evil principle. But you shall no
longer pollute this place by your
presence." (292)
Robert's status as lawyer is more symbolic than
professional after all, for his mission is to uphold
patriarchal law. It is not just his family's honor
Lady Audley has jeopardized, but family ideology in
general. In his action of restoring patriarchal
authority, Robert finds a willing ally in the
psychiatrist, and the official discourses of medicine
and the law are combined to consign Lady Audley to
oblivion: to smother any breath of scandal, she will
352
be "Buried Alive," as the chapter-title tells us.
Dr. Mosgrave knows how to read faces; Robert is
disconcerted when the "earnest and searching" glance is
turned upon himself, and realizes that the physician
"is looking for the diagnostics of madness" in (surely)
the wrong person. The situation explained, the
psychiatrist refuses to pronounce Lady Audley mad:
"[T]here is no evidence of madness in
anything she has done. She ran away
from her home, because her home was not
a pleasant one, and she left it in the
hope of finding a better. There is no
madness in that. She committed the
crime of bigamy, because by that crime
she obtained fortune and position.
There is no madness there. When she
found herself in a desperate position,
she did not grow desperate. She
employed intelligent means, and she
carried out a conspiracy which required
coolness and deliberation in its
execution. There is no madness in
that." (319)
The psychiatrist is certain, then, that Lady
Audley is neither mad, nor guilty of murder; thus we
anticipate that he will refuse Robert's request to have
the lady institutionalized. What happens next,
however, is one of the most chilling episodes of the
novel— certainly comparable with any crime committed by
Lady Audley. The psychiatrist makes his position very
clear: "I do not see adequate reasons for your
suspicions; and I will do my best to help you" (311).
353
But the "and" is very telling. There is no sign of
contradiction here, no acknowledgment of ethical
transgression; if the honor of the patriarchy conflicts
with the honor of his profession, the medical man
slides over the difficulty as if it is barely
noticeable. In this scene the novel's many, detailed
references to time suddenly become very pointed indeed;
witness the frightening efficiency with which the
authorities resume control. During the entire, hurried
interview with Robert, Dr. Mosgrave keeps glancing at
his watch; having heard the official version of events,
he announces, "I can only spare you twenty minutes,"
and returns after a ten-minute examination to declare
the truth about Lady Audley: "The lady is not
mad .... She has the cunning of madness, with the
prudence of intelligence. I will tell you what she is,
Mr Audley. She is dangerous!" (321). He then writes
rapidly "for about seven minutes" (321), communicating
the story of this menacing woman to his friend, the
proprietor of the "maison de sante" where Lady Audley
will be confined. Handing Robert the letter, he
comments that "If you were to dig a grave for her in
the nearest churchyard, and bury her alive in it, you
could not more safely shut her from the world and all
worldly associations," and hurries away with the words:
354
"[M]y time was up ten minutes ago; it is as much as I
shall do to catch the train" (342). With extraordinary
speed, Lady Audley's fate is signed, sealed, and
dispatched. Contrast this "masculine" compression and
measurement of time with Lady Audley's "feminine" and
subjective experience of its measurelessness: "Shall I
grow old like this . . . with every minute of my life
seeming like an hour?" (283). If this echoes Marianna
in her moated grange, it also strikes a chord with the
opening sentence of The Woman in White: "This is the
story of what a Woman's patience can endure, and what a
Man's resolution can achieve" (33). Lady Audley's
torment is appropriately described through a textual
metaphor:
She suffered agonies that would fill
closely-bound volumes, bulky with a
thousand pages, in one horrible night.
She underwent volumes of anguish . . .
sometimes repeating the same chapters
of her torments over and over again;
sometimes hurrying through a thousand
pages of her misery without . . . one
moment of breathing time. (266)
Committed to the asylum for a period of infinity,
Lady Audley learns the meaning of the one-handed clock
in the stable, on which time is both maddeningly
suspended and crazily precipitous. And she will
experience the loss of all meaning, like a clock with
355
"its mainspring broken forever, and the hands pointing
to purposeless figures on a shattered dial" (175).
It is important to note that no judge could have
decreed such a sentence, nor could any jury have
reached a verdict of guilt so quickly. Lady Audley is
the victim of a private, gentlemen's agreement to keep
her "out of the reach of justice," and in their
civilized cruelty, the doctor and lawyer impose a far
worse punishment than anything the law could devise.
Lady Audley points out their hypocrisy in her last
defiant speech, before she is permanently silenced:
"[T]he law could pronounce no worse
sentence than this, a life-long
imprisonment in a mad-house. I do not
thank you for your mercy, Robert
Audley, for I know what it is worth."
(333)
At the end, Lady Audley takes her place in the
novelistic tradition of heroines imprisoned in
madhouses, from Maria; or the Wrongs of Woman to Sylvia
Plath's Bell Jar and beyond. Her identity is both
inscribed and effaced by patriarchal authority; Robert
renames her "Mrs. Taylor," signifying her
dispossession, and finally she is reduced to "the
woman" (329). Even after he discovers that George
survived his precipitous journey down the well, Robert
makes no move to have Lady Audley released, and she
356
dies within a year of a "maladie de langueur"— a French
term which, like "maison de sante" masks the ugly truth
beneath its polite rhetoric, just as Robert conceals
his brutality beneath the polish of his perfect,
English upper-class manners.
A symbolic explanation for Lady Audley*s death can
be found in her status as object of the gaze. She
evidently craves admiration so badly that she seems "as
pleased with the admiration of a toothless crone as if
she had been listening to the compliments of a marquis"
(5). On the eve of her incarceration, she consoles
herself with the thought that "there was scarcely any
spot upon this wide earth in which her beauty would not
constitute a little royalty, and win her liege knights
and willing subjects" (323). But Robert has found such
a place; and in the madhouse Lady Audley is reduced to
a shadow-self, her fate signified in the "solitary
flame" of the candle which lights the funereal
chambers:
[P]ale and ghostlike in itself, [it]
was multiplied by paler phantoms of its
ghostliness, which glimmered everywhere
about the rooms; in the shadowy depths
of the polished floors . . . or in
those glimmering surfaces which adorned
the rooms, and which my lady mistook
for costly mirrors, but which were in
reality wretched mockeries make of
burnished tin. (329)
357
She sees her own image mirrored everywhere— but
parodically, elusively— so that the idea of mimicry is
finally turned against her, and her deflected,
narcissistic sexuality is both incited and
frustratingly kept from fulfillment. Ironically, since
one of her crimes was to subvert the ideology of the
family, she is now subjected to a parodic version of
it, for the "maison de sante” seems closely patterned
after the more enlightened asylums of the day, which
took the patriarchal family as their' ideological model
and as their principle of organization.22 Hence,
though Lady Audley declares herself "tired of being
treated like some naughty child" (326), she cannot
escape this role, for the madhouse keeps the insane
suspended in "an imperative fiction of the family; the
madman remains a minor, and for a long time reason will
retain for him the aspect of the Father" (Madness and
Civilization 254).
In her discussion of carnivalesque madness,
Catherine Clement suggests that the three central
figures, the madman, the wildman, and the child, are
all combined in woman, who "partakes of all three,
and . . . beats all: madwoman, wildwoman, childwoman"
(24). These labels might be suggestively applied to
Lady Audley herself? and, given the mysterious
358
circumstances of her death, and the patriarchal
conspiracy to crush her subversive self into oblivion,
we may be reminded of Clement's poetic claim that the
witch in captivity turns into the hysteric:
As long as the sorceress is still free,
at the sabbat, in the forest, she is a
sensitivity that is completely
exposed .... When she is caught,
when the scene of inquisition is formed
around her, in the same way the medical
scene later forms around the hysteric,
she withdraws into herself, she cries,
she has numb spots, she vomits. She
has become hysterical. (39)
At the novel's closure, Robert's situation is
altogether luckier; for this is, finally, a hero's text
which culminates in the triumph of patriarchal power.
Once Lady Audley has been evicted from the fictional
scene, Robert is able to live in a "fairy cottage"
(375), and all his dreams can come true. The lawn
slopes down to a boathouse and the river, where lots of
masculine activity can be enjoyed; there is even a
"pretty baby" to affirm Robert's status as a
patriarchal figure. Best of all, in a humorous twist
on the conventional happy ending, Robert gets not only
George's sister but George as well, in a blissful
menage-a-trois.
359
Delusions and Dangerous Trails:
or "What if I am Wrong After All?"
Finally I would like to take up my earlier
proposal that we follow one of the novel’s false trails
to its logical conclusion. Among the conflicting
perspectives and suspended narrative possibilities of
the text, the most intriguing is the notion that Lady
Audley could be innocent and Robert therefore insane.
This idea is developed through the novel's playful
and revealing discourses upon the theme of madness.
The story of hereditary insanity, which Lady Audley
considers her darkest secret, mirrors cultural
associations between femininity and madness, especially
since the illness is linked to the reproductive cycle,
to blood and to childbirth, and descends only through
the female line. Burdened from her girlhood with "the
knowledge that the only inheritance I had to expect
from my mother was— insanity!" (296), the heroine is
surprised, when she has a baby, to have escaped "the
crisis that had been fatal for my mother" (298) ; yet
she connects her "fits of violence and despair" after
her husband's desertion to the "hereditary taint that
was in [her] blood," even though "it had never until
this time showed itself by any one sign or token"
360
(299). It seems clear that whether or not Lady Audley
has actually inherited the malady— and the
psychiatrist's diagnosis suggests not— she has
inherited a plot of feminine madness that pinions her
as securely as a straitjacket, for it binds her to
dismal expectations of dementia. Consequently, she
reads herself from that perspective, perceiving her
fury at her husband's desertion, for example, as
symptomatic of the disease. Moreover, given the other
fiction to which she is bound, the ideological model of
woman as Angel, she is indeed "crazy" or misaligned
with her culture when she expresses such uncivilized
rage; though we might read it very differently, as a
reasonable response to her situation.
Lady Audley's inherited plot of insanity is shared
by women generally. As Elaine Showalter argues in The
Female Malady. madness is "metaphorically and
symbolically represented as feminine" (3) even when
experienced by men, and is typically linked to
"biological crises of the female life-cycle" (55):
These images of female insanity come
from a cultural context that cannot be
tabulated or translated into the
statistics of mental health. Analyzed
and objectified through the medium of
psychiatric interpretation, they are
nonetheless the stories that the male
culture told about the female
malady .... [T]hey operated as ways
361
of controlling and mastering feminine
difference itself. (17: emphasis
added)
It is therefore quite significant that the
conflict between Robert and Lady Audley— a symbolic
battle of the sexes— is enacted on the borders of
madness. Which of the two is situated on the other
side of the 1 1 narrow boundary between reason and
unreason"? (175). As the text tantalizes us with first
one answer and then another, the question of insanity
becomes deeply enmeshed with the question of gender
identity; the political function of the boundary, and
the principles behind its demarcation, are foregrounded
as strategies for containing the feminine subject.
Interrupting the tale twice with some enigmatic
suggestions about madness, the narrator insists that it
is a condition to which we are all extremely
susceptible: "There is nothing so delicate, so
fragile, as that invisible balance on which the mind is
always trembling" (341). The human mind can be "mad
to-day and sane to-morrow, mad yesterday and sane
to-day" (17 6), and we are asked: "Who has not been, or
is not to be, mad in some lonely hour of life? Who is
quite safe from the trembling of the balance?" (341).
The most respectable characters in this civilized
society have volatile passions seething beneath the
362
surface: for example, Clara, though "colder than
marble," cries, "Oh let me speak to you . . . or I
shall go mad!" (168). We are reminded of the "terrible
picture" of Samuel Johnson, "kneeling on the floor of
his lonely chamber, in an agony of childish terror and
confusion, praying to God for the preservation of his
wits" (341). The narrator hints darkly that once the
idea of derangement has been planted in the mind of the
observer, behavior that was considered merely eccentric
now begins to seem insane. Thus Johnson is warned that
"the memory of that dreadful afternoon, and of the
tender care he then received, should have taught [him]
to keep his hand steady at Streatham, when he took his
bedroom candlestick, from which it was his habit to
shower rivulets of molten wax upon the costly carpet of
his beautiful protectress ..." (341). The "doctor"
should, moreover, have been "taught" by his own
experience "to be merciful, when the brewer's widow
went mad in her turn" (341).
Johnson being long since dead and buried, who is
the target of the admonishment and plea for clemency?
A figure-head of the so-called age of reason, "the
doctor" notoriously, if unfairly, symbolizes all that
is most pompous and prescriptive about patriarchal
authority— as evidenced in Becky Sharp's insouciance in
tossing the "Dixonary" out of the window (Vanity Fair
45). Yet even this magisterial person is subject to
the threat of madness, and to being read suspiciously
for signs of the disease. In the novel, the
authority-figures are another kind of doctor and a
lawyer, and their responsibility is to put dangerous
women in madhouses. But Robert is quite capable of
being diagnosed as insane himself— we saw Dr. Mosgrave
considering the possibility— and various characters who
have trusted implicitly in his sanity begin to question
that judgment. Considered an "inoffensive species of
maniac" (98) and a "harmless drone . . . [who] would
not hurt a worm" (27), he can also be seen as an
obsessive persecutor who hounds a woman to her death.
"Mr. Audley, you are mad!" announces Harcourt Talboys,
on hearing the story of his son's murder (164). When
Robert tells Mr. Dawson that he wishes to clear Lady
Audley from "a dreadful suspicion," the response is:
"Which exists only in your mind?" (188). So certain is
Mr. Dawson of her innocence that he declares: "It
would be an uprooting of one of the strongest
convictions of my life, were I compelled to think ill
of her" (189). Even Robert starts to wonder how he
arrived at such a paranoid interpretation of George's
disappearance:
364
"Was it a monition or a monomania?
What if I am wrong after all? What if
this chain of evidence which I have
constructed link by link is woven out
of my own folly? What if this edifice
of horror and suspicion is a mere
collection of crotchets— the nervous
fancies of a hypochondriacal
bachelor? .... Oh, my God, if it
should be in myself all this time that
the misery lies!" (218)
Robert becomes, like Oedipus, a pariah; he shrinks
from his associates "as if he had, indeed, been a
detective police officer, stained with vile
associations," and as if being haunted by the memory of
George Talboys weren't enough, he also fears being
haunted by his ghost. With only the "perpetual trouble
of his mind for his companion . . . he had grown as
nervous as habitual solitude will eventually make the
strongest and wisest man," and ends up in a state of
nervous terror which is euphemistically described as
"hypochondria" (340-1). The question of his sanity is
most ambivalently and brilliantly presented during one
of his confrontations with Lady Audley. With all the
persistence of an unwanted suitor, he insists on
dragging her into the secluded lime-walk for a private
talk. She begs to be excused with "painful piteousness
in her tone," and asks more peevishly: "Why do you
bring me to this horrible place to frighten me out of
my poor wits?" (227). When he announces that the house
is "haunted by the ghost of George Talboys," she
reacts, quite reasonably under the circumstances, with
"quickened breathing," "shivering," and "loud beating
of her heart." In response to Robert's dark threats
and veiled allusions to "justice being done," she
bursts out: "Why do you torment me about this George
Talboys? .... Are you going mad, Mr. Audley, and do
you select me as the victim of your monomania?" (228).
Subsequently she warns him that "such fancies have
sometimes conducted people . . . to the lifelong
imprisonment of a private lunatic asylum" (234), and
sets about persuading others that Robert "looks at a
common event with a vision that is diseased, and
distorts it into a gloomy horror engendered of his own
monomania" (247). To convince her husband of Robert's
insanity, she has only to quote his own words about
destroying Audley Court: "Then he must be mad," Sir
Michael said gravely .... "What could have put such
hideous fancies into the unhappy boy's head?" (247).
And Lady Audley reflects later, in the solitude of her
room: "You are mad, Mr. Robert Audley . . . you are
mad, and your fancies are a madman's fancies. I know
what madness is. I know its signs and tokens, and I
say that you are mad" (254).
366
In scenes like these, the woman-as-sign fights
back, in a valiant attempt to displace the semiotician
and turn him into the sign of madness. Ultimately her
counternarrative is defeated; significantly, it is her
writing that traps her, and though she cannot, by the
letter of the law, be charged with murder when the body
has absented itself from the scene of the crime, her
own letters are sufficient to "prove" her an imposter.
It is important to note, however, that the alternative
reading position, affirming Lady Audley*s innocence and
Robert's sadism, is made formally available to us, even
though it is disproved by the "evidence" of the text.
But my question is: What would it mean to hold on to
this interpretation, in defiance of the textual signals
that contradict it?
Clearly, such an interpretive strategy would be
perverse; even as a mode of "resisting readership" it
goes beyond common sense and into the realm of non
sense. In her essay on feminist theories of reading,
Patrocinio Schweickhart argues:
We can think of validity not as a
property inherent in an interpretation
but rather as a claim implicit in the
act of propounding an interpretation.
An interpretation is not valid or
invalid in itself. Its validity is
contingent upon the agreement of
others. (13 7)
Sanity itself might be described in a similar way,
as a collective agreement about the definition of
normalcy, with madness represented as a position beyond
the boundaries. The hypothetical reading I have
proposed is in the end untenable. But this is a text
which flirts with madness; it induces paranoia by
keeping readers off-balance and suspicious, and its
method, as a contemporary reviewer noted, is one of
"preaching to the nerves."25 Even though the novel
retracts its playful suggestion that the story of Lady
Audley's guilt is Robert's invention— the fabrication
of a dangerously deluded mind— it also teases us with
the subversive possibilities of a "mad" reading
position, one situated on the wrong side of the border
and outside the symbolic order.
368
NOTES
1 Quoted in Wolff 104. My account of the scandal is
drawn primarily form his extensive biography of
Braddon.
2 The story was told to Wolff in 1956 by the
daughter of Eliza Pryke, the loyal maidservant. See
Wolff 102.
3 "Symbolic resolution": see Jameson 79-81. The
quotation from Showalter is from "Desperate Remedies"
(5). For discussions of the divorce laws, see Basch
16-2 6. For discussions of bigamy, see Altick's account
of the Thelwall v. Yelverton trial, a major news story
in 1861 (Deadly Encounters 8-17).
4 Quoted in Uglow's useful discussion of this theme
(x) .
5 Rae 185.
6 Quoted in Skilton, xxii. See his discussion also.
7 The term is from Westminster Review. LXXXVI (July
1866): 126.
8 See Altick: Deadly Encounters (7) and Studies in
Scarlet (286).
9 The quotation is from Hughes (16). As she points
out, the sensation novel's "primitive, troublesome
vision collided sharply with that of the reigning
domestic novel— which was never quite the same again"
(37) .
10 See Wolff (194; 449) for information on parodies
of sensation fiction.
11 Wolff 38.
12 A revealing, recent example is David Lynch's Blue
Velvet. where the polarized opening shots of flowers
and the house with a white picket fence are too
startlingly clear and brilliant to be quite
believable— and, as it turns out, they are not. We
discover ourselves in a nightmare world of melodrama
and abnormality, like an extreme version of the
369
situation in Lady Audlev's Secret. where corruption
festers beneath the appearance of natural innocence,
and family ideology is radically subverted.
13 See Woolf's Room of One * s Own. Coincidentally,
Braddon's stage name, Mary Seyton (or Seton)— one of
the four Marys who surrounded Mary Queen of Scots— is
the name given to the feminist persona in A Room of
One 1s Own.
14 Quoted in Uglow xiii.
15 Uglow also makes a connection with Alice.
16 Ivanov suggests that the sensation novel's
"satiric and parodic moments forestall us long enough
to consider other possibilities" (81).
17 See D.A. Miller's discussion of The Woman in White
as a paranoid text.
18 See Irigary, This Sex Which Is Not One and
Speculum.
19 See Mary Hartman's discussion of the case (51-85)
and Altick's Studies in Scarlet, especially p. 189.
20 The quotation is from Showalter's Literature of
their Own (167). She also quotes Hartman.
21 The woman/women distinction is from de Lauretis,
Alice Doesn1t (5). See also my discussion in Chapter 1.
22 See Showalter's Female Malady (21-120) for a
discussion of changes in psychiatric institutions in
Victorian England.
23 See Mansel (491) .
370
6
"A VIEW FROM 'ELSEWHERE"* —
SUBVERSIVE SEXUALITY AND THE REWRITING OF HERSTORY IN
THE COLOR PURPLE
The novels I have considered in the preceding
chapters play in complex ways upon cultural constructs
of femininity and desire. While none of them deny the
possibility of pleasure for women, Far From the Madding
Crowd and Marv Barton modify their happy endings— as if
tracing a ghostly question-mark into the text— by slyly
hinting that the heroine's self-fulfillment through
marriage is deeply compromised; and Ladv Audlev1s
Secret represents its heroine as defeated by the
patriarchal alliance, punished for her presumption in
mimicking and undermining their masternarratives of
feminine fulfillment to achieve the real object of her
desire.
In my opening chapters I asked how we could resist
seduction without relinquishing pleasure; and I argued
that feminism needed some seductive fictions of its
own. The conclusion to this study filters these
questions through a reading of Alice Walker's The Color
Purple. which I construct as a utopian text in its
rewriting of sexuality through a different framework of
371
desire, and in its carnivalesque celebration of
polymorphously perverse pleasures. I don't mean to
imply that the novel's "view from 'elsewhere'" is the
only solution to the problem of feminine pleasure in
patriarchal society, but, in the spirit of utopian
fictions, it suggests promising possibilities.
The Color Purple begins with a paternal injunction
of silence:
You'd better not never tell nobody but
God. It'd kill your mammy. (11)
Celie's story is told within the context of this
threat: this is a novel about breaking silences and,
appropriately, its formal structure creates the
illusion that it is filled with unmediated "voices."
Trapped in a gridlock of racist, sexist, and
heterosexist oppressions, Celie struggles toward
linguistic self-definition. She is an "invisible
woman," a character traditionally silenced and effaced
in fiction; and by centering on her, the novel replots
the heroine's text.1 In this chapter I want to show
how Celie's story— the story of that most marginalized
of heroines, the black lesbian— challenges our cultural
constructions of female subjectivity and sexuality, and
thus makes representation itself a compelling issue for
all women, regardless of ethnicity or sexual
372
orientation. I begin by exploring the question of
representation, and considering The Color Purple in
relation to feminist theoretical discourses on
femininity. I will then argue that by exposing and
opposing a powerful ideological
construct— institutionalized or "compulsory"
sexuality— the novel appropriates the woman's narrative
for herself, in effect reinscribing "herstory."2
To substantiate my claim that The Color Purple is
a rewriting of canonical male texts, I want to propose
the literary connection which is at once the most
obvious and the most unlikely: the novel's epistolary
form invites us to take its literary ancestry all the
way to Clarissa. Both novels represent a woman's
struggle towards linguistic selfdefinition in a world
of disrupted signs: Celie, like Clarissa, is
imprisoned, alienated, sexually abused and driven into
semiotic collapse.3 Against the monolithic Clarissa.
The Color Purple stands in a parodic, or at least
irreverent relation; the comparison between two books
so radically separate in historical and cultural terms
is, I think, appropriate because Clarissa so fully
endorses the bourgeois morality which is under attack
in The Color Purple. and because Richardson himself
(that is, as we construct him in our literary
373
histories) is the perfect symbol of white patriarchy:
the founding father of the novel (by convention, if not
in fact) he tells the woman's story, authorizing her on
his terms, eroticizing her suffering, representing her
masochism as virtue and her dying as the emblem of
womanly purity. Clarissa, even if largely unread now,
occupies a dominant position in literature: its myths
and values are recirculated in many fictions,
especially in the ideology of romantic fiction, with
which woman are most fully engaged as readers and as
writers.
Beneath the monumental edifice of works like
Clarissa. male-authored texts which tell the woman's
story "as an Exemplar to her sex," there is mass of
buried texts by women. The history of publishing is a
record of female silencing, as many feminist critics
have pointed out.4 Women have traditionally suffered
economic and educational disadvantages and all kinds of
cultural constraints that prohibited writing; and when
oppressive "technologies of gender" were overcome and
women took up the forbidden pen, the technologies of
print could always be deployed against them. What may
seem an outdated argument, a Victorian woman-writer's
dilemma, remains a very real and acute problem for
women of color, for whom the silencing goes on.5
374
Recent feminist attempts to revise the canon and
address the problems of sexism, are marred by the
failure to recognize heterosexism and racism, and the
"herstory" that emerges continues to erase women who
are not white or heterosexual. Sojorner Truth's cry,
"Aren't I a woman?" is insistently echoed in the
writings of women of color: for example, in
anthologies like This Bridge Called My Back or But Some
of Us Are Brave.
Alice Walker has also protested at the exclusion
of black women from feminist revisions of herstory:
for example, she criticizes Patricia Meyer Spacks for
totally excluding black women from her transhistorical
study of the female imagination:
The scholarly tome was published.
Dozens of imaginative women paraded
across its pages. They were all
white . . . [T]he index alone was
sufficient proof that the work could
not be really serious scholarship, only
serious white female chauvinism. (In
Search of our Mothers' Gardens 372)
As I argued in Chapter One, even within the
feminist movement the subordination of women as a class
is compounded for many women of color by racial,
economic and heterosexist oppressions. In The Color
Purple Walker portrays a heroine entrapped in the
interlocking of this whole range of possible
375
oppressions. Celie's struggle to create a self through
language, to break free from the network of class,
racial, sexual and gender ideologies to which she is
subjected, represents the woman's story in a new way.
Can a boo]s like The Color Purple make any real
difference to the hegemony of male discourses? Placed
beside Clarissa on my bookshelf, the physical shape of
The Color Purple symbolically suggests the position and
power of the "womanist" text within the canon:
dominated by the weight, prolixity and authority of
patriarchal narratives of female subjectivity, it may
nonetheless be able to challenge and displace those
masternarratives.
"Womanist" is Walker's coinage, and she gives
several definitions: "A black feminist or feminist of
color .... Usually referring to outrageous,
audacious, courageous or willful behavior .... A
woman who loves other women, sexually and/or
nonsexually" (Search xi). I choose the term "womanist"
in preference to a "woman's text," that is, a book
written by a woman, because I want to stress that the
problem of representation is not resolved simply by the
incorporation of more women writers in a male-dominated
canon. It is, of course, important for women to tell
their stories, to gain a voice in literary and
376
theoretical discourses; a certain kind of empowerment
is achieved when women writers are published, or when
characters are depicted in literature or film who might
traditionally have been excluded on grounds of
ethnicity or sexual orientation; but we have to
consider also the ideological constraints on
representation. To put it bluntly, can a woman truly
reconstruct her own subjectivity when the identity of
Woman has, for centuries, been circumscribed by men?
Teresa de Lauretis argues that women experience a
double consciousness in relation to their
representation in film: we are seduced (or
interpellated) into identification with "woman" as
cultural image, and yet aware of our exclusion, of the
non-representation of ourselves in that construct. If
women are always constituted as objects (of the gaze;
of desire) or as Other, if "female" is always the
negative of the positive value "male," we find
ourselves situated in a negative space, neither
participating in patriarchal discourses nor able to
escape from them.
When Lauren Berlant describes Celie as "falling
through the cracks of a language she can barely
use . . . crossing out 'I am' and situating herself
squarely on the ground of negation" (838), she refers
377
specifically to Celie's self-sacrifice (she becomes the
"female exemplum of humiliation" by taking her sisters'
share of suffering upon herself). I would like to
propose a different explanation: Celie's situation is
shared by any woman who attempts to construct an
identity outside patriarchal definition. If we are
constituted as subjects in a manmade language, then it
is only through the cracks in language, in the "chinks
and cracks of the power-knowledge apparati"
(Technologies of Gender 25) or in the places where
ideology fails to cohere, that we can begin to
reconstruct ourselves. As Luce Irigaray points out,
the problem is to escape patriarchal discourse in the
telling of our own stories:
If we keep on speaking the same
language together, we're going to
reproduce the same history. Begin the
same old stories all over again. Words
will pass through our bodies, above our
heads . . . Absent from ourselves,
we'll be spoken machines, speaking
machines . . . They can speak to each
other and about us. But what about us?
Come out of their language. (205)
The work of de Lauretis and Irigaray reflects a central
concern with the absorption of the female identity by
the male. In de Lauretis's words:
. . . most of the available theories of
reading, writing, sexuality, ideology
or any other critical production are
built on male narratives of gender,
378
whether oedipal or antioedipal, bound
by the heterosexual contract;
narratives which persistently tend to
reproduce themselves in feminist
theories .... Which is why the
critique of all discourse concerning
gender, including those produced or
promoted as feminist, continues to be
as vital a part of feminism as is the
ongoing effort to create new spaces of
discourse, to rewrite cultural
narratives, and to redefine the terms
of another perspective— a view from
"elsewhere." (Technologies of Gender
21)
What I want to suggest is that The Color Purple. a
novel frequently praised for its realism and criticized
for its "failure" to stay within that genre, offers us
that "view from elsewhere." In part this is because
Celie's sexual orientation provides an alternative to
the masternarrative of the conventional marriage plot,
which defines female sexuality purely within the
paradigm of heterosexuality and thus in relation to the
male; but, as de Lauretis points out, "the terms of a
different construction of gender also exist. in the
margins of hegemonic discourses. Posed from outside
the heterosexual social contract . . . these terms can
also have a part in the construction of gender ..."
(Technologies 18; emphasis in text). I would suggest
that lesbianism is situated in the margins of
discourse, beyond the heterosexual contract and the
man-identified woman; thus Celie's erotic attachment to
379
her own sex is politically charged, as I argue below.
Moreover, while the heroine is lesbian in the narrowest
definition of the word, the novel also participates in
the "lesbian continuum," to borrow Adrienne Rich's
term. Walker's use of the word "womanist" seems
influenced by Rich; and in this womanist text, the
eroticism of women's love for women is at once
centralized and incorporated into a more diffuse model
of woman-identifying women.
Another way in which The Color Purple offers a
"view from 'elsewhere"' is through its displacement of
standard English. Aware that "the master's tools can
never dismantle the master's house" (Lorde 99), Walker
has fully confronted the challenge of constructing an
alternative language. The significance of her
achievement here has been overlooked, partly because
critics tend to confine the novel to the genre of
realism and evaluate the Southern Black vernacular
solely for its authenticity. Indeed, Walker herself
disingenuously describes her own role in The Color
Purple as that of a medium, communicating on behalf of
the spirits who possessed her (Search 355-60). She
seems to intend this myth of inspiration quite
literally, and it is attractive because readers
certainly experience the novel as filled with "voices"
380
which address us directly. In Celie's case we undergo
a metamorphosis of experience, aligning ourselves fully
with her vision of the world since she insists on being
taken on her own terms. Her language is so compelling
that we actually begin to think Miss Celie— like Shug,
we have her song scratched out of our heads, because by
participating in her linguistic processes, we
collaborate in her struggle to construct a self. For
various reasons, then, we are distracted from the
extreme skill with which Walker exploits her formal and
linguistic resources, and thus may underestimate the
degree to which this is language as performance. There
is a clue, however, in what is commonly perceived as a
flaw in the novel— the sequence of letters from Nettie,
which inevitably disappoint readers. If we consider
Michael Cooke's definition of signifying, that is as a
"form of meta-communication where the surface
expression and the intrinsic position diverge" (15), we
can regard The Color Purple as an elaborate act of
signifying, since the apparently impoverished and
inarticulate language of the illiterati turns out to be
deceptively resonant and dazzlingly rich. Celie's
sentences seem pared to the bare bone; the result,
however, is not reduction but compression, so that
whether she experiences pain or joy, there is a poetic
381
intensity and rhythm to all she says. When she
incorporates Nettie’s letters with Celie's text, Walker
underscores the resourcefulness of the Southern black
vernacular. In contrast with the spare suggestiveness
of Celie's prose, Nettie's is stilted, verbose and
colorless. By measuring the expressive flexibility of
black vernacular, a supposedly inferior speech, against
the repressed and rigid linguistic codes to which
Nettie has conformed, Walker challenges the position of
standard (white) English and privileges Celie's
vitality over Nettie's dreary correctness. Nettie has
been imaginatively stunted by her scholastic training,
her English bleached white and her ethnicity almost
erased. No wonder that Nettie is always the Other
Woman, the one who doesn't have a role of her own; no
wonder that she has to be cast in the preposterous role
of the black missionary attempting to impose the
ideology of her oppressors onto a culturally
self-sufficient people. Nettie's story provides a
perfect example of the way women are constituted as
subjects (or as "subject-objects," in de Lauretis's
phrase) within ideology: neither represented within
white culture, nor capable of constructing an identity
outside it, Nettie is divided from herself, and
experiences her subjectivity as otherness. Celie, by
382
contrast, declines to enter the linguistic structures
(and strictures) of white patriarchy, commenting that
"only a fool would want you to talk in a way that feel
peculiar to your mind" (194), and so retains a
discourse which is potentially subversive. We can make
compare Walker's technique with Irigaray's, whose
linguistic playfulness, fragmented phrases and poetic
cadences are similar in purpose (though not in style)
to the suppleness, the sharp wit, the compression and
resonance of the black vernacular; both modes of
expression represent resistance to the hegemonic
discourse, and the deliberate positioning of the self
outside mainstream ideology through linguistic
nonconformity. Walker's use of dialect is at once
naturalistic and symbolic but critics who want to
confine her to the genre of realism may easily
underestimate the complexity of the novel and its
womanist aims. Her transgression of generic boundaries
has also been perceived as a lack of artistic control,
though it is entirely consistent with current feminist
practice; and some of the criticisms directed at Walker
imply a covert form of racism— an assumption that black
novelists should (or can) write only in the realistic
vein established by Wright.
383
Walker constructs her heroine against an American
literary tradition of invisible women. From its
beginnings, Anglo-American literature has foregrounded
the issue of patrimony, and the mythic construction of
the American Adam has been achieved at the expense of
marginalizing the American Eve. We might expect that
the first generation of African-American male writers,
a generation of men who were symbolically fatherless
and had only mothers, would focus all the more
pointedly on the feminine in their shaping of their
consciousness, but in fact the opposite is true, and we
find many black male writers just as concerned as white
male writers with patrimony, the denial of the mother
and the desire to authorize themselves. The invisible
man at least had a chance to protest his condition; the
invisible woman has been silenced as well as erased;
or, if she made it into fictional representation, it
was as the victim of violence whereby the male
demonstrated his anger and defined his masculinity— for
example, in the work of Richard Wright. (Bigger Thomas
authorizes himself by murdering women— it is not until
he sees himself named in the newspapers that he gains a
positive, male identity.) Zora Neale Hurston offered
an alternative view, but her disappearance in her own
lifetime is a grim reminder of the ease with which she
384
and many other women writers could be defeated by
sexist and economic oppression. It is the conspicuous
absence of mothers in the African-American canon that
Walker addresses in her fiction and in her theoretical
writings. For example, in "One Child of One's Own" she
describes her resistance to "a large group of educated
and successful Black women" who had objected that when
"she asked them to address themselves to themselves"
she in fact "made too much of Black History. That she
should not assume her mother represented poor mothers
all over the world (which she did assume)" (But Some of
Us Are Brave 39).
In that essay Walker characterizes her writer self
as "our mother": she insists on the recognition of the
mother/daughter creative legacy, regarding herself as
the teller of tales handed down by mother and
grandmother. Since they, lacking a public forum, had
to divert their talents in a different direction
(gardening, quiltmaking, herbal medicine and other
"feminine" crafts) Walker claims the responsibility for
communicating the underprivileged black woman's story
to the world. Walker situates her creative enterprise
within a feminine domain, making the mother the source
of the fictional imagination, and rewriting black
herstory by beginning with the personal (since the
385
"impersonal", the "objective" is usually synonymous
with masculine and white interests). The mother has a
symbolic function within Walker's fiction too— for
example, it is by liberating the mother in themselves
(Albert loves to sew, Harpo to cook) that the men in
the novel can escape the repressive technology of
gender and achieve social redemption. This is not a
token role reversal,as some critics have thought;
Albert's sewing, for example, represents his collusion
in the narrative activity: after his years of male
tyranny in silencing Celie, she (and Walker) generously
allow him to enter the domain of female narrative, and
in exchanging stories about their lives, Celie and
Albert establish an essential connection in a world
where narrators have been silenced, audiences forcibly
separated from them. That patriarchal world has
metamorphosed into a matriarchy, but men are not
excluded if they can enter on female terms.
Walker chooses an appropriately homely, feminine
craft as a model and metaphor for writing: quilting.
Critics have written at length about the importance of
this trope and so has Walker, describing it as a
structuring principle for her own work:
You know, there's a lot of difference
between a crazy quilt and a patchwork
quilt. A patchwork quilt is exactly
386
what the name implies— a quilt made of
patches. A crazy quilt, on the other
hand, only looks crazy. It is not
"patched", it is planned . . . A crazy
quilt story is one that can jump back
and forth in time, work on many
different levels, and one that can
include myth." (Hull 176)
In the crazy quilt patterns of The Color Purple,
herstory is rewritten in a formally innovative way.
There are designs that emerge clearly, but the overall
pattern is extremely complex. Ideas are introduced and
inverted, or turned, like a piece of fabric, inside
out, so that the pattern can be traced a different way;
characters and relationships change, and change again,
apparently in a continual state of metamorphosis until
the final utopian vision, the brave new world of the
ending. The novel moves freely through time and space
and the Africa patterns are constantly juxtaposed
against the African-American, supplying a dialectical
commentary on the two cultures. Comic reversals of
expectation are part of the pattern: for example, the
Christian missionaries want to impose their own values
on the Olinkas, but they inadvertently reinforce
polygamy because the Olinkas believe (and rightly, as
it turns out) that Samuel is married to both Corinne
and Nettie. Just as we think that a pattern is
complete, Walker deftly restitches the terms of her
387
narrative and weaves in a new complication or unravels
the thread. Celie, for example, comes to terms with
the horror of her father's violation of her, only to
discover that "Pa not Pa." Walker constantly regroups
her characters into various configurations, and thereby
dissolves and redefines the social and interpersonal
positions which these characters represent and adopt.
Significantly, triadic sexual relationships supply
a dominant motif in the novel. The groups include
Celie, Nettie and Pa; Celie, Nettie and Albert; Celie,
Shug and Albert; Annie Julia, Shug and Albert; Nettie,
Corinne and Samuel; Shug, Grady and Squeak; Squeak,
Sofia and Harpo. In comic and subversive fashion,
Walker switches the object of rivalry in the
Shug-Celie-Albert triangle from the man to one of the
women; and Albert, for many years a tyrant in his
egocentric world, is dismayed to find himself relegated
to the margins by the sexual preference of his two
"wives" for each other.
"Triangular desire," to use Rene Girard's term, is
of course the model on which the great
twentieth-century narratives of sexuality and
socialization are based: Freud's Oedipal theory and
L6vi-Strauss's theory of kinship-systems and the
exchange of women. Both theories center on the incest
388
taboo, and mesh together very precisely. Both theories
also explain (and have been used to reinforce) what
Gayle Rubin has described as "compulsory
heterosexuality" (see below).
In The Elementary Structures of Kinship
Levi-Strauss describes the exchange of women as "the
system of binding men together" and thus defines
marriage as a social contract between men, and the
kinship system as one in which male power is reinforced
through the circulation of women. Levi-Strauss
concludes that the incest taboo, which is defined in
different ways in various societies but is always a
precondition for the establishment of cultural systems,
is designed to ensure exogamy. In other words there is
no biological justification for the prohibition of
incest but there is a social necessity: the taboo is
"less a rule prohibiting marriage with the mother,
sister or daughter than a rule obliging the mother,
sister or daughter to be given to others. It is the
supreme rule of the gift" (481).
Gayle Rubins's "The Traffic in Women" draws upon
readings of Marx, L^vi-Strauss, Freud and Lacan to
provide a lucid account of the way heterosexuality is
established as an institution in the construction of
societies through kinship systems, and in the
389
enculturation of individuals as gendered subjects
within those societies. She interprets Levi-Strauss's
theory of kinship thus:
If it is women who are being
transacted, then it is the men who give
and take them, the women being a
conduit of a relationship rather than a
partner to it . . . . The relations of
such a system are such that women are
in no position to realize the benefits
of their own circulation. As long as
the relations specify that men exchange
women, it is men who are the
beneficiaries of the product of such
exchanges— social organization."
(Reiter 174)
Gender is itself, of course, a social construct,
separable from biological sex, as Rubin points out, and
Teresa de Lauretis elaborates. In Technologies of
Gender de Lauretis describes gender as representing
"the individual in terms of a particular social
relation which pre-exists the individual and is
predicated on the conceptual and rigid (structural)
opposition of the two biological sexes." This
sex-gender system is a "sociological construct and a
semiotic apparatus" into which the child enters, is
"signified" as girl or boy, and takes up a position
within the social hierarchy according to that category.
Rubin proposes that in L^vi-Strauss's theory
"individuals are engendered in order that marriage be
guaranteed" (my emphasis). In other words, compulsory
390
heterosexuality becomes the basis on which society
operates and, because the exchange of women reinforces
the bond between men, it is the condition whereby the
patriarchy flourishes. Women are prevented from
becoming subjects in a system where they are exchanged
as objects; and homosexual desire becomes as taboo as
incest.
In Between Men, Eve Sedgwick develops
L^vi-Strauss's theory of male bonding through the
exchange of women; she proposes that the reason
homophobia is so severe in our society is because
homosexuality exposes the homosocial contract upon
which the patriarchy is founded. Irigary's coining of
the word "hom(m)osexualit£" suggests a similar idea:
it describes patriarchy as a power structure which is
really predicated on the economy of sameness. although
that recognition is suppressed: "The 'other'
homosexual relations, masculine ones, are just as
subversive, so they too are forbidden" (19 3). The
effect on women in this economy of sameness is to erase
them as subjects. For example, as I argued in Chapter
One, in psychoanalytic discourse women's sexuality is
constructed within a male paradigm, and women are
excluded from being the subjects of desire, or from
having their own sexuality theorized except through
391
this distorting masculine lens. Consequently,
lesbianism becomes unrepresentable within this vision;
as Irigarary interprets Freud, "it is only as a man
that the female homosexual can desire a woman who
reminds her of a man" (194) . The lesbian-as-woman
remains outside this representation, in excess of the
masculine framework within which women's desire is
constructed.
But the question is:
Why is the interpretation of female
homosexuality now, as always, modeled
on that of male homosexuality? ....
Why should the desire for likeness, for
a female likeness, be forbidden to, or
impossible for, the woman? Then again,
why are mother-daughter relations
necessarily conceived in terms of
"masculine" desire and homosexuality?
(65)
Feminist critiques of the Oedipal scheme have
focused on the problem of why the girl should redirect
her libidinal activity from the original object of
desire, the mother, to the father. The oedipalization
of girls is more complex and less easy to explain than
that of boys. As Adrienne Rich points out, it is not
homosexuality but actually heterosexuality that needs
to be accounted for, for girls. After all, the
question is "whether the search for love and tenderness
in both sexes does not originally lead towards women:
392
why in fact women would ever redirect that
search . . . " (68). Rich argues that heterosexuality
is a "political institution" into which women are
conscripted ideologically, by force, and through the
censorship of alternative models of sexuality.
What happens when the taboo is broken and women
refuse to be co-opted into the system of compulsory
heterosexuality, refuse to become objects of exchange
between men? As Gayle Rubin puts it, "What would
happen if our hypothetical woman not only refused the
man to whom she was promised, but asked for a woman
instead?" (183).
Adrienne Rich argues that in fact throughout
history individual women have "always resisted male
tyranny," although their lesbianism has been labeled
deviant, pathological or repressed because our social
vision is so constricted by the model of
heterosexuality: however, "when we turn the lens of
our vision and consider the degree to which
heterosexuality has actually been imposed on
women . . . we begin to observe behavior, both in
history and in individual biography, that has hitherto
been invisible or misnamed; behavior which often
constituted . . . radical rebellion" (83).
393
In "Commodities Among Themselves," Irigaray asks
the same question: "But what if the commodities
refused to go to market?" She describes the
surveillance and control which men exert over women:
It is out of the question for [women]
to go to "market" on their own, enjoy
their own worth among themselves, speak
to each other, desire each
other . . . . (196)
Yet, she suggests, female homosexuality "has
eluded psychoanalysis" since lesbianism is recognized
"only to the extent that it is prostituted to man's
fantasies." Irigaray's utopian vision of "exchange
without identifiable terms, without accounts, without
end .... Without sequence or number. Without
standard or yardstick" suggests, I think, that it is
precisely where lesbians stand in excess of
representation that they are most disruptive of the
social order. Compare de Lauretis1s argument about the
construction of gender:
For gender, like the real, is not only
the effect of representation but also
its excess, what remains outside
discourse as a potential trauma which
can rupture or destabilize, if not
contained, any representation.
(Technologies 3)
The question of representation is, of course, an
extremely complex and contradictory one that cannot yet
be resolved. Foucault's History of Sexuality argues
394
compellingly that power is deployed through the
technologies of sex: power is "productive" rather than
"repressive" in relation to sexuality, and the
discourses on sexuality create and multiply
"polymorphous perversities" but at the same time
control them (by labeling and identifying; by
incorporating them within institutionalized discourses,
such as psychology, and hence within the domain of
power). Thus to remain outside discourse, to be
silent, is the only way to resist power. Conversely,
there is the more traditional argument that silence is
itself a repressive mechanism within patriarchal power,
and therefore to insist on their representation of
marginalized or erased subjects is to engage in the
struggle for power within the arena of "social
reality." Foucault's theory ignores history: and
current feminist discourse embodies this contradiction
by theoretically recognizing the need to remain outside
male discourse even while in practice it is engaging in
such discourse as a way of negotiating for power. In
Technologies of Gender Teresa de Lauretis seems to
argue for the need to construct a "feminist subject"
who is embodied in the site of contradiction between
ideological constructions of woman in the "imaginary"
and women as historical subjects in the socially
395
’ ’real"? what is needed is a "de-reconstruction."
Clearly there is a fundamental incompatibility between
the Foucauldian notion of power as produced through
discourse, and the more materialist notion of power as
something inescapably existing in social relations. It
is impossible at present to conceptualize a way out of
this collision of discourses, and I am aware that my
paper shifts uneasily between the two, but the
contradiction is, I think, inevitable if we recognize
both concepts of power as valid.
To return to Irigaray and then The Color Purple:
Irigaray ends her chapter "Commodities Among
Themselves" on an enigmatic note which seems pertinent
to the novel, and perhaps reinforced Rich's claim that
lesbianism has always been deployed as a politically
subversive strategy:
Utopia? Perhaps. Unless this mode of
exchange has undermined the order of
commerce from the beginning— while the
necessity of keeping incest in the
realm of pure pretence has stood in the
way of a certain economy of abundance.
(197)
In The Color Purple Freud's psychoanalytic and
Levi-Strauss's anthropological theories are played out
at the literal level in the drama of Celie's life. The
novel represents in graphic detail the systems of
oppression which operate against women in patriarchal
396
cultures: "compulsory heterosexuality" is reduced to
its most basic level, or in a sense is made abstract.
If some critics have objected to Celie's degradation
and passivity as "unrealistic"— for example, Trudier
Harris, who asks, "What sane black woman .... would
sit around and take that crock of shit from all those
folks?" (8)— it is because, once again, they are
applying the criteria of realism (and in Harris's case,
a very narrow form of empiricism) to a novel which
exceeds realism. The specific systems of oppression
which operate in Celie's life symbolize the more or
less subtle operations of male power in the lives of
women everywhere. Like Celie's vernacular, which is in
one sense inarticulate yet full of complex nuances, the
representations of male tyranny are in one sense
reductive or crude, yet in another sense emblematic,
their implications far-reaching.
Let's consider the ways in which compulsory
sexuality enforces Celie's subjugation and erases her
subjectivity. The novel begins with an injunction of
silence: "You better not never tell nobody but God"
— which could indeed stand as an epigraph to a history
of the silencing of western women,given the powerful
Christian ideology of renunciation and submission.
Trapped into complicity in the shameful secret of
397
incest, Celie makes a timid plea to God: "Maybe you
can give me a sign letting me know what is happening to
me." But how can Celie be given a sign when she is a
sign, an object of exchange between men? God the
Father is in any case a remote and threatening figure
in Celie's hostile world: no wonder he is identified
with "Pa." When asked whose baby she is carrying,
Celie tells the lie which is the truth:
I say God's. I don't know no other man
or what else to say .... Finally
she ast: Where is it? I say God took
it. He took it. He took it while I
was sleeping. Kilt it out there in the
woods. Kill this one too if he can.
(12)
Mr.— , too, becomes part of the system of male
oppression, joining God the Patriarch as Celie
envisions him ("He big and old and greybearded and
white" 176) and Pa in an unholy trinity of power.
Celie's helplessness is revealed in her inability to
pronounce her husband's name: like God the Father and
Celie's real father, he is a remote stranger, a Mr.— .
Married to a man whose last name is a blank, Celie's
identity is further eroded. The marriage negotiations
take place entirely between the step-father and
husband; Celie is handed over as a beast of burden,
identified with the cow that accompanies her, as the
following brief exchange makes clear:
398
Mr.— say, That cow still coming? He
say, Her cow.
We may recall Celie's lament when her children are
taken from her: "I got breasts full of milk running
down myself."
Physically and psychologically abused, by father
and husband alike, Celle's humanity is denied. Her
sexuality and reproductive organs are controlled by
men: her children are taken from her and her
submission is enforced through violence. Can we deny
that Celie's terrified acquiescence in this "crock of
shit," as Harris puts it, has anything to do with real
women in the contemporary world? Only if we deny the
very real controls which men continue to exert, and to
which women submit in fear: only if we ignore such
issues as rape, the current attempts to outlaw
abortion, the vulnerability to physical danger that the
liberated woman suffers in any crowded inner city, in
any deserted rural place? only if we ignore state
intervention in the family, in the sexual orientations
of individuals, and hundreds of other examples where
Celie's condition parallels our own.
Celie's idiom is used to poignant effect in the
double negative of "I don't have nothing" (13). Her
connection with her sex is severed and she is doubly
399
silenced, by father and husband. Her voice is reduced
to an inscription addressed to an absentee God, and the
only "sign" she gets shatters an already-eroded
identity: the discovery that her father was lynched
precipitates Celie (as Lauren Berlant also points out)
into a semiotic collapse: her attempts to make sense
of her new history collapses into the negative
tautology of "Pa not Pa."
^1 want to pause at this point to ask some
questions about the treatment of incest in this novel.
To begin with, why does Walker set up the full horror
of father/daughter rape at the beginning of the novel
only to reinscribe the relations halfway through?
Lauren Berlant argues that the novel switches direction
at this point:
In this revised autobiographical tale,
racism succeeds sexism as a cause of
social violence in the narrative. The
switch from a sexual to a racial code,
each of which provides a distinct
language and a distinct logic of social
relations, releases into the text
different kinds of questions about
Celie's identity. (839)
I would challenge this argument; it seems to me
that, on the contrary, it is not the specificity but
the inseparability of racial and sexual violence that
is being stressed at this point. Walker wants to
demonstrate, I think, that for women of color
400
oppression is always rooted in a compound of sexism and
racism. This is symbolically represented in the other
incestuous rape, Mary Agnes's violation by her white
uncle. Also, given that we have already witnessed the
terrible sufferings inflicted on Sofia in the
institutionalized systems of white tyranny, it is not
accurate to imply that the issue of racism enters the
novel for the first time at this point.
What is the effect on the reader of discovering
that "Pa not Pa"? At one level, I would argue, it
makes no difference at all. Celie was still raped, and
by a man who was in every respect socially, if not
biologically, her father. But Walker plays too many
variations on the theme of incest for the question to
be dismissed do easily. What, for example, do we make
of the fact that Brother Samuel marries Sister Nettie,
or of his claim that "We behave as brother and sister
to each other"? Shug and Celie, sisters in spirit,
become lovers in the flesh; Adam marries Tashi, who has
a sister's bond with his own sister. Albert complains
that Shug views him "like I'm her brother"; but note
Celie's response: "What so bad about that? I ast."
Shug transgresses an intergenerational barrier to have
an affair with a nineteen year old who subsequently
becomes "Like a son. Maybe a grandson." Time and
401
again, the incest taboo is symbolically dissolved as
the different categories of social relations, family
and sexual, are intertwined.
Perhaps this is an honest and courageous attempt
to situate sexuality exactly where it belongs: in the
heart of the family. If the family is the site of
sexual repression and taboo, it is also the place where
sexuality is engendered. (in every sense). Foucault,
who has argued that L4vi-Strauss's theory of incest is
a strategy of repression, denies the relevance of the
incest taboo in our culture:
It may be that in societies where the
mechanisms of alliance predominate,
prohibition of incest is a functionally
indispensable rule. But in a society
such as ours, where the family is the
most active site of sexuality, and
where it is doubtless the exigencies of
the latter which maintain and prolong
its existence, incest— for different
reasons altogether and in a completely
different way— occupies a central
place; it is constantly being solicited
and refused; it is an object of
obsession and attraction, a dreadful
secret and an indispensable pivot. It
is manifested as a thing that is
strictly forbidden in the family
insofar as it the latter functions as a
deployment of alliance; but it is also
a thing that is continuously demanded
in order for the family to be a hotbed
of constant sexual incitement. (109)
402
Juliet Mitchell, too, suggests that in the nuclear
family, the prohibition of incest is an incitement to
desire as well as a mechanism of repression:
The proximity and centrality of the
tabooed relations within today's
nuclear family must put a different
load on the incest desire. Nothing is
done to assist the prohibition, on the
contrary all is done to promote the
desire .... No wonder Freud found
not only the dominance of the
unconscious desire but the prevalence
of the forbidden acts, for actual
incest is not all that rare in our
society. (377 - 378)
If the Pa-Celie sexual relation is at first the
literal rupturing of a primary taboo, it subsequently
turns out to have been incest in a social and symbolic
but not, after all, literal sense. The novel seems to
delve into the Oedipus drama and unravel then reweave
its complexities. For example, there is not doubt that
while Celie's violation by Pa is against her consent
(even when she dresses up like Shug to seduce him, she
is renouncing her own will to protect her sister) she
is symbolically cast in the role of murderous rival
against her mother: her father warns, "It'd kill your
mammy"— and it does.
The discovery that "Pa not Pa" places Celie in a
new site of contradiction. The Pa who is not Pa is
yet— Pa. Celie's history has been shattered and she
403
has no meaningful connection with the alternative
narrative provided for her: no wonder Nettie tells the
story in such abstract terms, as if the characters had
nothing to do with her or Celie.
Earlier in the novel, Celie had taken her first
steps towards self-possession. Telling her story to
Shug, she breaks the father's injunction of silence,
and discovers in Shug not only sisterly support but
sexual passion too. Maternal tenderness and erotic
impulses blend in their first sexual encounter:
Then I feels something real soft and
wet on my breast, feel like one of my
little babies mouth. Way after while I
act like a little lost baby too. (109)
The libidinal satisfaction that this scene
represents could be described as anaclitic; and, to
borrow Foucault's term, the scene seems to be about
"bodies and pleasure," a return to an idealized state
of innocent eroticism— or, in other words, a return to
the pre-Oedipal.
Failing to connect with the alternative family
history she is given, Celie ritualistically buries her
sad double-narrative of paternal origins and instead
establishes a new identity constructed within a
feminine domain. As Shug says, "Us each other's people
now": the two women who have nurtured each other in a
reciprocal maternal exchange, now elect to be
woman-identified women. What is suggested here is an
escape from patriarchal law. In breaking that other
taboo, homosexuality, Celie symbolically exits the male
narrative of female sexuality, abandoning the position
ascribed to her within the Oedipal scheme. Instead she
chooses a mode of sexuality which Freud described as
"infantile"; but perhaps it is time to reassess the
value of that term. Shug, for example, is enviably
infantile— as polymorphously perverse as a child, she
apparently pursues her pleasures without guilt or
repression. Celie's initiation into eroticism is
linked with her growing sense of self and her capacity
to see wonder in the world: taught by Shug, whose
religious principle is admiration. Celie metamorphoses
into a Miranda, filled with childlike delight at the
brave new world to which her latent sensory responses
have now been awakened. In "On Narcissism," Freud
proposed that "the homosexual choice of object is more
closely related to narcissism than the heterosexual."
We see the positive and empowering effect of this in
Celie's relationship with Shug. Early in the novel the
notion of narcissism is suggested when Celie dresses up
as Shug: later, in loving Shug, Celie becomes a
subject of desire, and in being loved by Shug, she is
405
made visible to herself as an object of desire. In
contrast with the repression which Celie has
experienced in accepting her social position as a
"mature" woman in a phallocentric culture, her
"infantile regression" seems an attractive prospect.
By choosing "deviancy, " " immaturity, ' • and the
"sickness" that lesbianism represents within a system
of compulsory heterosexuality, Celie enacts a critique
not of the Oedipus theory itself but of the sexist
socialization which it uncritically represents.
Gayle Rubin begins her essay "Thinking Sex" with
the words: "It is time to think about sex." I would
like to conclude mine with the words: It is time to
think about the clitoris. Trudier Harris rather
unfairly described Celie as a "bale of cotton with a
vagina" and then dismisses the love-relationship
between Celie and Shug as a "schoolgirl fairytale, "
thereby overlooking the radical political implications
of the shift from vagina to clitoris that the lesbian
relationship represents. In Freud's theory the
clitoral orgasm is notoriously "immature": and while
the work of sexologists has challenged this proposal, I
would suggest that in terms of cultural representation
Freud's theory of the "mature" vaginal orgasm still
predominates, because it is a necessary myth within our
406
compulsorily heterosexual society. For a long time
Celie's clitoris remained "undiscovered"; and while it
is surely (surely?) the case that real women in
heterosexual relationships have lovers more skillful
and sensitive than Mr.— (although his being signified
in this way— a title followed by a blank— mischievously
suggests he is the archetypal male), the ideological
construct Woman still seems to be experiencing orgasm
without reference to her clitoris. I am thinking of
cultural representations of sexuality in commercial
films, for example. In some typically voyeuristic love
scene, the camera will show the couple engaging in
coitus in the missionary position: mere seconds later
the camera moves in to a close-up on the woman's face
and we see that, miraculously, she is in the throes of
orgasm, her mouth wide open so that she can utter
rapturous cries (and also, perhaps, to symbolically
represent that place where the camera is forbidden to
go). At this climactic point, the scene will dissolve
from the screen in an act of self-censorship. We are
left with the dominant image of the desirable woman in
our culture: passive, utterly open and available, and
obligingly able to reach a vaginal orgasm in about
twelve seconds. If film directors know about the
clitoris, or active female desire, film censors are
407
surely involved in the conspiracy to keep such
knowledge in the realm of the inadmissible.
What this suggests is that in the ideology of
popular culture, women are subjected to a mild form of
psychological clitoridectomy; and perhaps for the same
reason that real clitoridectomies are performed in
"more misogynistic" societies:
Kathleen Barry first pointed out that
it is not simply a way of turning the
young girl into a marriageable woman
through brutal surgery, it intends that
women in the intimate proximity of
polygynous marriage will not form
sexual relationships with each other.
(Rich 71)
The way that the myth of vaginal orgasm is
continuously recirculated in our society would
reinforce Rich's point that what men really fear is not
"women's sexual insatiability," as has commonly been
suggested, but "that women could be indifferent to them
altogether." Thus the erotic zone of the clitoris has
to remain undiscovered in social constructions of
sexuality, because its mapping on the female body would
allow women to just say no to that coveted male organ.
So, for Celie, the discovery of the clitoris (and
the possibility of sexual fulfillment with a woman) is
accompanied by a whole range of other discoveries which
relegate man to the margins of a world he has always
408
dominated. The most significant of these is a
reconceptualization of God the Patriarch. Describing
her feminist redefinition of God, Shug makes an
explicit connection between spiritual and sexual
"jouissance":
HMy first step from the old white man
was trees. Then birds. Then other
people. But one day . . . it came to
me: that feeling of being part of
everything, not separate at all ....
In fact, when it happens, you can't
miss it. It sort of like you know
what," she say, grinning and rubbing
high up on my thigh. (178)
In answer to Celie's shocked protest, Shug maintains:
"God loves all them feelings. That's some of the best
stuff God did." And shortly afterwards we are reminded
of the title of the novel: "I think it pisses God off
if you walk by the color purple in a field somewhere
and don't notice it." This is a moment of epiphany for
Celie, and we might notice her appropriately
detumescent metaphor when, in severing the connection
between "man" and "God," she observes that "Next to any
little scrub of a bush in my yard, Mr— 's evil sort of
shrink" (179). Phallocentrism has collapsed: the
transformation of God, the Transcendental Signifier,
from the "old white man" to a new form of otherness,
the ungendered creator of the color purple, is one of
the most important metamorphoses of the novel.
What is meant, finally, by the color purple?
Clearly, in part, it symbolizes the wonder of the
natural world to which Celie's eyes have been newly
opened: "I been so busy thinking about him I never
truly notice nothing God make. Not a blade of corn
(how it do that?) not the color purple (where it come
from?)" (179). In addition, it represents the womanist
spirit as defined by Walker. One of the definitions,
partly quoted earlier, is embodied by Shug: "A woman
who loves other women, sexually or nonsexually ....
Sometimes loves individual men, sexually or
nonsexually." Another definition proposes female
joie-de-vivre, the condition Celie achieves, as a
defiant or bodacious spiritedness: "Loves music.
Loves the moon. Loves the spirit. Loves love and food
and roundness. Loves struggle. Loves the folk. Loves
herself. Regardless." In her fourth and final
definition, Walker states suggestively: "Womanist is
to feminist as purple is to lavender." (In Search of
our Mothers1 Gardens xi)
The color purple is encoded within the novel as a
sign of indomitable female spirit: for example, Celie
makes red and purple pants for Sofia, (who survives a
brutal beating by the police that leaves her "the color
of a eggplant"): "I dream of Sofia wearing these
410
pants, she was jumping over the moon" (194). Purple
is, of course, traditionally associated with royalty
and Easter: Dilsey, for example,another literary
example of female endurance, wears a purple dress on
Easter Sunday in The Sound and the Fury. And finally,
given the bonding of female eroticism with religious
ecstasy in this novel,the color purple seems to refer
to the female sexual organs. In "One Child of One’s
Own" Walker wonders if "white women feminists, no less
than white women generally, cannot imagine Black women
have vaginas. Or if they can, where imagination leads
them is too far to go" (43, my emphasis).
Provocatively and graphically, she proceeds to a
sensuous description of a black woman's vagina:
A vagina the color of raspberries and
blackberries— or scuppernongs and
muscadines— and of that strong, silvery
sweetness, with as well a sharp flavor
of salt. (43)
What I want to suggest is that in The Color
Purple. in her representation of the unrepresentable,
Walker dares us to arrive at the place where
"imagination is too far to go."
411
“NOTES
1 In The Heroine1s Text. Nancy Miller defines the
"euphoric text" as built on a "trajectory of ascent"
and ending with the heroine's integration into society.
Miller confines her study to eighteenth-century novels,
but her model provides a useful contrast to The Color
Purple, demonstrating how Walker's novel subverts the
conventional plot by rewriting the story of seduction
within a lesbian framework.
2 The term "compulsory heterosexuality" originated
with Gayle Rubin: her influential essay The Traffic in
Women synthesizes readings of Freud, Lacan, Marx, and
Levi-Strauss to account for our enculturation into the
sex-gender system. See also Adrienne Rich. The term
"herstory" comes from Alice Walker's feminist prose
(see esp. Search).
3 See Terry Castle's excellent account of Clarissa's
semiotic collapse.
4 Classic feminist texts that deal with the problem
of silencing include Virginia Woolf's Room of One's
Own. Tillie Olsen's Silences, Patricia Meyer Spacks's
Female Imagination. Elaine Showalter's Literature of
Their Own, and Sandra M. Gilbert and Susan Gubar's
Madwoman in the Attic.
5 Printing presses geared towards so-called minority
groups have been set up recently, for example the
Kitchen Press. Calvin Hernton, whose book is so
provocatively titled that it makes one suspicious about
the place of men in black feminism, (The Sexual
Mountain and Black Women Writers: Adventures in Sex.
Literature and Real Life) describes a 1985 meeting in
New York to discuss the founding of a black publishing
enterprise.
(The speaker) went into a tirade
against black women writers . . .
claiming that they had "taken over" the
publishing world in a conspiracy
against black men writers. He alleged
that the women were using their pens to
"put down" black men before the eyes of
the world. The most accusative of such
remarks were hurled at Toni Morrisson
and Alice Walker, the latter of whom
412
was specifically charged with being an
"avowed lesbian". (xv)
Compare Trudier Harris's allegation that Walker
has become a favorite of the media because she "had
been waiting in the wings of the feminist movement and
the power it had generated long enough for her curtain
call to come" (155).
413
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