University of Southern California Dissertations and Theses

The heroine's mother: The plot of the older woman in nineteenth-century English fiction

(USC Thesis Other)

The heroine's mother: The plot of the older woman in nineteenth-century English fiction

PDF

Download

Open document

Flip pages

Download a page range

Download transcript

Copy asset link

Request this asset

Transcript (if available)

Content THE HEROINE'S MOTHER:
THE PLOT OF THE OLDER WOMAN
IN NINETEENTH-CENTURY ENGLISH FICTION
by
Susan Carolyn Cowan
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)
August 19 94
Copyright 1994 Susan Carolyn Cowan
UMI Num ber: D P23190
All rights reserved
INFORMATION TO ALL U SERS
T he quality of this reproduction is d e p en d en t upon th e quality of the copy subm itted.
In the unlikely event that th e author did not sen d a com plete m anuscript
and there are m issing p ag es, th e s e will be noted. Also, if m aterial had to b e rem oved,
a note will indicate the deletion.
UMI D P23190
Published by P roQ uest LLC (2014). Copyright in the D issertation held by th e Author.
Microform Edition © P roQ uest LLC.
All rights reserved. This work is protected against
unauthorized copying under Title 17, United S ta te s C ode
P roQ uest LLC.
789 E ast E isenhow er Parkw ay
P.O. Box 1346
Ann Arbor, Ml 4 8 1 0 6 - 1346
UNIVERSITY OF SOUTHERN CALIFORNIA
THE GRADUATE SCHOOL
UNIVERSITY PARK
LOS ANGELES, CALIFORNIA 90007
This dissertation, w ritten by
S.u s a ,n # , C at r o l_y_ n _ _ # C o wan.............
under the direction of h e x Dissertation
Committee, and approved by all its members,
has been presented to and accepted by The
Graduate School, in partial fulfillm ent of re
quirem ents for the degree of
Ph. p.
E
CBl 4
Z*HkZ-<*b
D O C TO R OF PH ILO SOPH Y
D ean of G raduate Studies
D a te..
DISSERTATION COMMITTEE
'.hairperson
Dedicated to the memory of my mother
Phyllis Yvonne Crook
with love and gratitude
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
I would like to thank the following people, without
whose help this project would have been impossible:
Professor Hilary Schor for her encouragement and for
her extremely able and diligent supervision of this
dissertation.
The other members of my committee: Professors Paul
Alkon, James Kincaid, Philippa Levine, and Peter Manning,
who were unstinting with their time and advice.
My family: my husband, Peter, and our sons, James and
Jason.
Table of Contents
iv
INTRODUCTION ........................................... 1
PART I
Chapter 1 . . _ ____________
"Two Dowagers" . . ~ . . ' ............................... 16
PART II
Introduction ........................................... .67
Chapter 2
"The Beautiful" ......................................70
Chapter 3
"The Useful".........................................134
PART III
Chapter 4
"Thomas Hardy and the End of the Heroine" .... 186
C O D A ......................................................228
WORKS CITED 246
V
ABSTRACT
This study examines novels by Jane Austen, George
Eliot, and Thomas Hardy, offering readings of that neglected
figure, the heroine's mother. Using motifs in recent
literary theory that encourage us to read "against the
grain," it focuses on characters who allow a different
vantage point on central thematic and cultural concerns,
discussing the figure of the older woman who seems to be
beyond the opportunities of plot and history. While the
ideal of the culture was for middle-class women to marry men
of rank and fortune, reproduce themselves in their
daughters, and then disappear, these novels write against
the structures offered by conduct books and mentors,
offering instead a view in which older women continue
(successfully or not) to manipulate the plots offered them.
Accordingly, although they are formally peripheral
characters, such women often become the most interesting
element of what seems to be the heroine's novel.
The readings attempt to identify the perspective of
each of the authors toward the heroine's mother, principally
in the novels, but with reference to other writings and
biographical information. Austen portrays the aunt and
mentor, whose advice is considered and ultimately rejected
by the heroine as she matures. Eliot's representations are
read against Dickens and Gaskell, in terms of two
categories, the beautiful and the useful, concluding that
the useful offers women more (although limited) scope.
Marking the end of the heroine fiction tradition, Hardy's
manipulative mothers imply its darkest critique. The coda,
alluding to Modernism's opening up of the possibilities
available to older women, suggests contrasting and
comparatively optimistic alternatives to the role of "the
heroine's mother."
1
The Heroine's Mother
Introduction
towards the end of the eighteenth century a change came about which, if I were
rewriting history, I should describe more fully and think of greater importance
than the Crusades or the Wars of the Roses. The middle-class woman began to write.
. . . Without those forerunners, Jane Austen and the Brontes and George Eliot could
no more have written than Shakespeare could have written without Marlowe, or
Marlowe without Chaucer, or Chaucer without those forgotten poets who paved the
ways and tamed the natural savagery of the tongue. For masterpieces are not single
and solitary births (65) .
all the great women of fiction were, until Jane Austen's day, not only seen by the
other sex, but seen only in relation to the other sex. And how small a part of a
woman's life is that (82).
--Virginia Woolf, A Room of One's Own.
The subjects of this study are characters in "the Great
Tradition" of English literature1 who have generally been
ignored, or worse, ridiculed: older women. As an older
woman, I am personally drawn to such characters; as a novice
scholar, I am indebted to contemporary critical theories
that take marginality seriously. To read "against the
grain" of tradition is now more than acceptable; for many of
today's scholars, it is crucial. As Nancy Miller explains
the technique she calls "italicization" or "emphasis added,"
readings that may have been (or be) "inaudible to the
dominant mode of reception" are justifiable if they meet
certain conditions: if they are "motivated within the
narration and supplied with a pre-text." In Miller's
example, the "internally motivating discourse" is mother-
daughter advice "that makes perfect sense in terms of the
idiolect spoken by [the mother]", and the "pre-text" is the
"reference to a 'real-life' precedent," or "maxim" (a
"given" according to the culture being depicted or reflected
in the novel).2 In other words, a non-traditional reading
is justified if evidence for it can be obtained from
appropriate parts of the text itself and from information
about the cultural setting. The location of both kinds of
information- may be marginal itself; or it may be a question
of repositioning the emphasis.
Thus is legitimized for scholarly inquiry my
fascination with the characters that underpin "heroine
fiction," the genre that arises from Virginia Woolf's
eighteenth-century women's romances, taken up by
"mainstream" writers because it was commercially successful.
("Money dignifies what is frivolous if unpaid for"--A Room
of One's Own. 65). This way, "silly" romances evolve into
"novels,"3 but the successful formula is retained: the
courtship and marriage of a heroine to a suitable hero, for
the unstated but practical purpose of producing heirs and
transmitting property.4
The heroine is so integral a part of the "great"
nineteenth-century English novels that, from the beginning,
the novels address themselves to defining her--often by the
device of undermining her. Catherine Morland, for instance,
Austen's heroine in Northanqer Abbey, has "by nature nothing
heroic about her" (3). Or consider Thackeray, in Vanity
Fair. Eight pages before he describes Amelia Sedley as "the
heroine of this work," he declaresshe is not a heroine,"
although in the previous paragraph he has endowed her with
most of the requisite qualities. "[S]he could not only sing
like a lark," "dance . . . and embroider beautifully; and
spell as well as the Dixonary [Johnson's] itself." In
addition, "she had such a kindly, smiling, tender, gentle,
generous heart," and "her' face blushed with rosy health, and
her lips with the freshest of smiles," as well as ready
tears for such tragedies as "a dead canary bird," or "a
mouse, that the cat haply had seized upon," or "the end of a
novel" (7-8). Throughout the novel, Thackeray's narrator
denies-yet-asserts the presence of the heroine; his contempt
for Amelia Sedley, for instance, is implied in the fulsome
descriptions quoted. It is as though he resents the
necessity to include a stock heroine, at the same time
recognizing the market demand.
As many feminist critics have pointed out, heroines are
produced by a highly structured system,5 and of all the
ways this system works, the most consistent is the passing
along of information and knowledge from one generation to
the next in the manner of master (mistress6) to apprentice.
There must always be a female authority for this
transmission, a "heroine's mother" of one sort of another.
Because they illuminate what I find most remarkable
about what nineteenth-century society allowed and expected
of its mature women, my focus is primarily on characters
created by Austen, Eliot, and Hardy--two of them among F.R.
Leavis's four "greats" in his "great tradition"--with some
digressions, particularly on those by Gaskell and Dickens.
Austen and Eliot are noteworthy as women who declined in
unusual ways to comply with societal expectations, and Hardy
is noteworthy as a man of lower-class, rural origin. The
combination of these personal circumstances with innovative
genius put these writers in unique positions to respectively
establish, develop and subvert the conventions of the
nineteenth-century "realist" English novel.
Ian Watt's 1957 study, The Rise of the Novel, indicates
that the history of the novel before Leavis's "great
tradition," like that of literature in general, "remains a
male preserve."7 Watt's book concerns the "fathers" of the
English novel: Defoe, Richardson, and Fielding. Only at the
end does it briefly allude to Fanny Burney and to Jane
Austen's "technical genius" in reconciling the Richardson-
Fielding dichotomy (i.e. internal vs. external "realism")
(296). Yet, as Watt himself acknowledges by including
discussion of Richardson's women reader-collaborators, "the
novel" has always been closely associated with female
audiences and writers.
Re-writing the history of the novel, feminist critics
have taken up this point, especially in connection with
"domestic fiction," the fictional component of "[1]iterature
devoted to producing the domestic woman."8 This phase in
the history of the novel, which begins with Maria
Edgeworth's fiction and ends with Virginia Woolf's attack on
Arnold Bennett, is the topic of Nancy Armstrong's Desire and
Domestic Fiction and the context of my study.
According' to Armstrong,"the way this sub-genre gains
access to subjectivity is through the consciousness of a
woman. Although domestic fiction was produced for, and
largely by, women, and seemingly was "a specialized domain
of culture where apolitical truths could be told" (21),
Armstrong reveals powerful ideology at work--for instance in
the change from male to female of control over private life
by the middle of the nineteenth century.
Whereas earlier heroines "seemed to challenge the
boundaries of family, status, and role," the political
silencing of "monstrous women" was part of mid-nineteenth-
century "scrutiny" (and regulation) of female sexuality.9
Texts (including fiction) directed at women impressed on
them the value of their dependence, modesty, and disdain for
displays of wealth. Thus male-dominated society kept women
in check, while handing over to them responsibilities that
men no longer had the interest or time to undertake
themselves. As Armstrong puts it, the literature directed
at women "suppressed" women's own sexual identity because
women were "valued . . . chiefly for material reasons"--as
objects. Hence, the texts transformed women into "a
metaphysical body . . . of words [rhetoric]" for the purpose
of "regulating desire, pleasure, the ordinary care of the
body, the conduct of courtship, the division of labor, and
the dynamic of family relationships" (95). In other words,
texts helped transform women into agents of ideology, a
point expanded upon by many recent historians and critics,
particularly in reference to the establishment of the middle
classes as the dominant social force.10
I acknowledge that "middle-class" is an amorphous term,
and borrow Sally Mitchell's definition: "the 60,000 or so
families that could afford a guinea for a year's library
subscription or a shilling a month to buy a new book . . .
in parts or in a magazine."11 This is a large segment of
society, but the definition seems appropriate here because
it specifically connects novels and the middle classes.
Previously, patrons of the arts were "[t]he monied and
leisured" but these people "were too few . . . to make a
best-seller." Sheer numbers were the basis of middle-class
pre-eminence, as they were of the success of the kind of
writing Mitchell identifies, writing obviously directed
toward the concerns and interests of its patrons.12 (Lady
Catherine may seem aristocratic, superficially; but up
close, she looks a lot like Mrs. Bennet because Austen
doesn't know aristocrats as intimately as she knows middle-
class women. But the vast majority of her readers don't
either).
The characters I discuss have apparently fulfilled a
heroine plot themselves and are now involved in another
heroine's story. Following these people, who are not
"meant" to be focal points, suggests a different response to
the question, "what are these books about?" Other questions
I explore include the following: What role is the older
woman expected to play in relation to the current heroine?
What is her special agency in terms of narrative functions?
What does she imply about the possibilities available to
women, particularly as they age, possibilities contained
almost exclusively in the notion of motherhood? What is the
relation of the woman writer to this character?
The story lines in which the ex-heroine is involved are
direct descendants from romance,13 and are concerned with
the courtship aspect of domestic fiction: the heroine's
progress toward marriage. To some extent, the heroine's
plot is always in tension with the conventions surrounding
the ideal young woman, because all heroines have deviated
from the ideal. This point is frankly acknowledged by the
flirtatious Cynthia Kirkpatrick: "I am not good, and I never
shall be now," she confides to her step-sister, Molly
Gibson, in Wives and Daughters. "Perhaps I might be a
heroine still, but I shall never be a good woman, I
8
know. 1 , 1 4 No less an authority than Sarah Ellis confirms
this apparent inconsistency with her pronouncements on
women's duty in The Daughters of England (1839) : women's
forte is "influence" as opposed to "power." For this
influence to work, a woman needs to renounce, in Ellis's
words, "all that converts the woman into the heroine"
[emphasis added] .15
The ideal domestic woman is so modest that she has "no
story," like the Countess in Charlotte Lennox's The Female
Quixote. who explains to the reluctant heroine, Arabella:
And when I tell you, pursued she with a
Smile, that I was born and christen'd, had a
useful and proper Education, receiv'd the
Addresses of my Lord--through the
Recommendation of my Parents, and marry'd
him with their Consents and my own
Inclination, and that since we have liv'd in
great Harmony together, I have told you all
the material Passages of my Life, which upon
Enquiry you will find differ very little
from those of other Women of the same Rank,
who have a moderate Share of Sense, Prudence
and Virtue. (VIII, VII, 327)
If the Countess personifies domestic ideology, women
with stories--"pasts" worth narrating--therefore all the
protagonists of heroine fiction, have consequently rebelled
to some extent. The heroine's story is supposed to end--
sometimes with the death of the heroine, more often with her
marriage to a suitable hero. But since by definition she is
a rebel, her story does not necessarily end with her
apparent conformity.
Because the heroine is at variance with the domestic
woman, what I will term "heroine ideology" is at variance
with domestic ideology; yet the terms are closely connected,
and at times they blur. Heroine ideology requires that a
young woman be all that domestic ideology calls for--modest,
virtuous, beautiful, "accomplished"--and at the same time
show the initiative and boldness to put herself into the
jeopardy that a "story" demands of its protagonist.
— This paradox underlies the texts discussed in Part I.
Starting with The Female Quixote and Belinda, the message
of courtship fiction is that conventional wisdom about what
a heroine needs to know is wrong. This message is reflected
throughout Jane Austen's work. In Pride and Prejudice, for
instance, silly Mrs. Bennet turns out to be right and
aristocratic Lady Catherine wrong about how to get girls
married. And in Austen's last novel, Persuasion, the
socially adept Lady Russell very nearly ruins the heroine's
life. These implied critiques fit into a broader assessment
of Austen's work: she "widen[ns]" the "narrowness of private
life," so that woman-centered fiction "becomes what it had
pretended to be but rarely was in its masculine location: an
unsentimental confrontation of the self in its irreducible
dailiness and the trivial excitement of the details of
representable experience."16 Important parts of this
unsentimental confrontation are Austen's attitudes about
10
heroines' mothers and the roles available for genteel women
who do not become mothers (or wives).
From the 178 0s to the 183 0s and 4 0s and beyond, women's
lives become constrained--fictionally, at any rate, there is
not as much fun in the world. As Nancy Armstrong notes,
very little domestic fiction appeared during the class
conflicts of the early nineteenth century, during the time
the middle classes were gaining ascendancy. When domestic
fiction resurfaces in 1848 and after, the heroine herself
has changed in response to increasing social constraints
placed upon the domestic woman by middle-class ideology.
But novels have also increased in scope as well as volume:
from the larger cast of characters of triple-deckers, other
characters often threaten to take over readerly interest
from the heroine. A variety of these characters is
discussed in Part II. For instance in Chapter 2, I focus on
the woman whose "past" may be merely hinted at--or sometimes
revealed as the narrative unfolds. Ostensibly agents of the
plot and images of what the heroine might become, the
heroine's mothers in Bleak House and Felix Holt, the Radical
destabilize the heroine's plot because they are more
compelling characters than the heroines, with more dramatic
stories than those of the heroines.
Calling on the "emphasis added" technique, in Chapter
3, I turn to less prominent heroines' mothers who also yield
readings responding to the questions I have raised. Many of
11
these "other" characters are minor players in the plot
simply because they have not seriously challenged domestic
ideology. They either did not have the kind of beauty that
briefly empowers heroines, making such a challenge possible,
or they had other ruling qualities enabling them to conform
with greater ease to the expectations of their society.
For convenience, I have called the groups in Part II
(Chapters 2 and 3) "the beautiful" and "the useful."
Although there is' some crossover between the two groups,
generally heroine's mothers fall into one or the other. As
I have said, the category affects how far they are able to
defy convention--they could have been classified as rebels
and conformists, but that would not have emphasized the
importance society placed upon women's physical appearance.
Ironically, once their heroine stories are over, most of
"the beautiful" are even worse off than other women, who may
be "allowed" more scope.
I am not suggesting that these women are central to the
Victorian novel--the successful marriage of the heroine is.
But by virtue of issuing commentary on the heroine's plot,
former heroines revise its emphasis, their stories revealing
that the "happy ending" leads to very limited opportunities,
or, worse, to a kind of death.17
Literal death is an alternative ending of the heroine's
story, other than marriage.18 One important difference in
the fates of heroines is determined by their resistance to
12
sexual desire. "Your virtue was proof against all
temptations," says Mr. B. to Pamela; her modesty won his
love.19 If she had capitulated to his efforts to seduce
her, she would have been disgraced as a "fallen" woman--no
longer a viable heroine--and death or disgrace would
eventually catch up with her, as it does with Mrs. Transome
and Lady Dedlock.
As Nancy Miller asserts, the issue of whether a woman
■is "pure" or "not pure" is crucial in the heroine's text.
This is one of the issues explored by Hardy that I discuss
in Part III (Chapter 4), which in general deals with Hardy's
disruption of "realist" conventions surrounding the
heroine's mother. Specifics include manipulative passivity
in The Mayor of Casterbridge and, in Tess of the
d'Urbervilles, active influence on the character of Tess as
part of the deconstruction by Hardy of the "purity" issue.
Tess is "pure" in a different sense of the word from that
connoted in heroine ideology. Part of the point of her
character is to comment on the hypocrisy of the traditional
version of purity. Her mother plays a key role in the
unfolding tragedy.
Hardy's versions of the heroine plot also appear to
mark the "death of the heroine" in three distinct ways: the
literal death of his meta-heroine, Tess, as she
unequivocally rejects heroine ideology; the death of "the
heroine" as a narratable character; and the "death" of the
13
culture that produced that character. Hardy (and others)
thought "the heroine" was dying with the old century, so it
seems fitting that her demise be marked by the writer who
epitomizes both an end and a beginning--both despair and
relief that heroine ideology no longer has a context.
Even now, the death of the heroine is debatable, as
popular culture, particularly current movies, confirms. For
example, in her conclusion to The Heroine's Text, Nancy
Miller emphatically denies that heroine fiction is "dead."
"Until the culture invents new plots for women," she argues,
it will keep the old ones, and as a result, "female Bildung
tends to get stuck in the bedroom" (157-58). Therein lies
the significance of my study: these old plots dominate other
women besides the heroines. A far more insidious holdover
from domestic fiction is the unrealistic attitude our
society continues to take toward mothers. Originally a
construction to keep women "in their place," the Victorian
concept of the selfless mother has survived. As it was
then, it is an impossible ideal to live up to, but one that
still exerts enormous pressure on women struggling to define
themselves in ways that are inimical to it.
14
NOTES
1 Title of F.R. Leavis's 1950 study on George Eliot,
Henry James, and Joseph Conrad. Leavis asserts that these--
and Jane Austen--are "[t]he great English novelists" (1).
For Leavis, Austen "is the inaugurator of the great
tradition of the English novel," and the other three are the
outstanding technical innovators (7) .
2 Original emphasis. Miller's example is a reading of
La Princesse de Cleves; the mother involved is Mme Chartres.
("Emphasis Added, " 344) .
3 As Laurie Langbauer points out.
4 Acknowledgements of this debt are not uncommon. For
instance, Thackeray's wonderful "hypothetical" spoof of the
Jos-Becky romance in Chapter VI of Vanity Fair and the over-
the-top Amelia-George parody in the same chapter of the
first edition. In the World's Classic edition, John
Sutherland, referring to Thackerary's allusions to Newgate
novels, Gothic novels, and Bulwer Lytton novels, comments
that "[t]he web of parodic allusion is dense" (895)--but so
is the debt to romance.
5 For example, see Nancy Armstrong, Claudia Johnson,
Mary Poovey (The Proper Lady), and Ruth Yeazell (Fictions of
Modesty).
6 Here, language traps me, because of the connotations
attached to the word.
7 Nancy K. Miller, "Emphasis Added," 341.
Admittedly, of Leavis's four "greats," two are women--
and one, Austen, is of such significance that she "needs to
be studied at considerable length"; therefore, Leavis limits
himself to the other three (lesser than Austen?) writers,
although much of his discussion compares later writers with
her and, consequently, digresses on her (The Great
Tradition. 1).
8 Nancy Armstrong, Desire and Domestic Fiction. 4.
9 Armstrong 177 and 179.
10 I make many references to feminist critics and
historians in the following chapters, addressing specific
points connected with nineteenth-century women's legal
status, marriage, education, employment, and so forth. Some
other useful, more general, social and historical contexts
for my study include the following: Corrigan and Sayer, The
15
Great Arch. Davidoff & Hall, Family Fortunes. Foucault,
The History of Sexuality. Perkin, The Origins of Modern
English Society 1780-1880. Stallybrass & White, The
Politics and Poetics of Transgression.
11 Fallen Angels, 100.
12 Mitchell also points out that by the mid-1800s,
"The middle-class man had moved into the ruling class and
left his woman behind"--the 1857 Divorce Act and 1832 Reform
Act extending the franchise were part of this separation:
they "codified . . . the double moral standard." Subject to
her husband (her lord and master) the middle-class woman had
more in common with the working class than she had with the
rest of her own class--the men (100) .
13' The "disreputable" genre identified by Laurie
Langbauer as connected with "woman," as opposed to the
"respectable" "male" novel, in Women and Romance: The
Conventions of Gender in the English Novel.
14 Wives and Daughters, 258.
15 Quoted in Judith Lowther Newton (5).
16 Nancy Miller, The Heroine's Text. 155.
17 See Nancy Miller, "Emphasis Added." Miller
accounts for what male critics have claimed are
"implausibilities" in women's fiction in which heroines
reject (male established) conventional endings such as union
with a desired lover. Miller extrapolates from Freud's
theory that writers' fantasies "assert themselves" in
fiction: women writers' "repressed" fantasies would include
"an impulse to power," one expression of which would
"disdain[] a sexual exchange in which women can participate
only as objects of circulation." This approach helps to
explain, for example, Mme de Lafayette's not allowing her
fictional heroine Mme de Cleves "the life she herself had
led." In contrast to male writers and audiences, women
writers and readers get a "sense of security" not from the
heroine's "triumph in some conventionally positive way, but
that she will transcend the perils of the plot with a self-
exalting dignity" (346-7). Most of the heroines in my study
do achieve "a self-exalting dignity,"--sometimes in a
"conventionally positive way." But the ex-heroines
generally do not; they achieve death, or at least ridicule.
A few are "forgiven."
18 Posited by Nancy Miller in The Heroine's Text (xi) .
19 The Heroine's Text 47.
16
Part 1
Chapter l--Two Dowagers
"You are this day 55," writes Isabel to Laura in the
14-year-old Jane Austen's Love and Freindship. "If a woman
may ever be said to be in safety from the determined
Perseverance of disagreable Lovers and the cruel
Persecutions of obstinate Fathers, surely it must be as such
~ a~ time of" Life. 1 , 1 This reference to liberation is also a
blunt reference to the loss of sexual attractiveness, and
although the comment may be taken as ironic, it is also apt.
Because she is no longer an alluring "monstrous woman,"
Laura may be comparatively safe from male dominance, like
many of Austen's older female characters, especially the
widows. The freedoms these women enjoy include freedom of
speech: their utterances are often preposterous^ as I will
show in the case of Lady Catherine, but a woman rich enough
and old enough can say more or less what she likes.
Younger women, especially heroines, have far less
latitude. Lady Susan, for instance, still (barely) a
heroine contender, is always aware that her effectiveness
depends on silence about her opinions and suppression of her
self. Hence the hasty, sketchy end of Ladv Susan and
Austen's abandonment of this type of woman: Austen could not
go anywhere with this model. If the novel is a means for
Austen to express the duality of women's nature (talkative,
17
sexy Lady Susan versus silent, chaste Frederica),2 it seems
inconclusive, since Lady Susan's worldly "success" depends
on how well she can feign the Frederica role. In her
situation, female desire is at odds with the submission and
modesty that the culture expected of women, and female
assertion tends to be made grotesque. Hence, I suggest,
Austen's ongoing absorption with the formidable dowager.
Q.D. Leavis suggests that several of these characters
evolve" from Lady Greville of Letter the Third.3 Leavis
argues that Austen's "invention" was "very meagre,"
requiring her skillfully to revise throughout her career
characterizations originating in the juvenilia. Leavis
claims that Lady Greville is "more robust" in "forms of
feminine ill-nature" than such descendants as Mrs. Norris,
Elizabeth Elliot, Miss Bingley and Lady Catherine de
Bourgh.4 But the obvious differences in these characters'
ages, situations, and plot functions seem enough to refute
Leavis's claim that they are "over-attenuated" variations
"on one note."
It seems more likely that rather than recycling
characters, Austen experiments with their evolution. In the
case of the dowager, from the original, Lady Greville, (a
stock, one-liner, blocking character5) , through the more
developed Lady Catherine de Bourgh, an agent of the plot,
Austen develops Lady Russell, who still fills the functions
of the other two but is likely to be read as a fully rounded
18
character infused with tragic implications.6 Lady Russell
is hard to define; a fairly complicated reader response is
probable. Compared with her predecessor, Lady Catherine,
she connects more intricately with both hero and heroine,
and while she is not 'punished,' neither is she let off the
hook. In fact, as we will see, there are two hooks: hers
and Wentworth's. The heroine is completely exonerated. But
both the hero and the mother figure are "realistically"
stubborn and unyielding.
According to Lennard Davis, "characters' reality" is
important in seducing people into reading novels at all
(102). He might argue that the "realistic" ambiguity of
Lady Russell's character is ideologically significant, part
of the novel's purpose in keeping people happy with the
status quo.7 I am hoping to establish that the realism of
Lady Russell's character is ideologically significant in
another way, having to do with what is at stake for a woman
writer in relinquishing narrative intelligence to an older
female character.
Ladv Catherine
A woman with the advantages of wealth and rank
possessed by Lady Catherine de Bourgh (Pride and Prejudice)
has so much freedom--and is presented as so "dreadful"--that
she can specifically voice opposition "to the very basis of
patriarchy, the exclusive right of male inheritance," by
19
objecting to the practice of entailing estates away from
female inheritance.8 An Austen heroine could never get
away with such bluntness. Lady Susan does get away with
some devastating comments, up until the truncated ending of
her eponymous novel. But she is addressing only her alter
ego, Mrs. Vernon. To everyone else, Lady Susan fastidiously
maintains decorum--hiding her true self. Only thus can she
"successfully" manipulate social forms. Lady Catherine,
powerful and independent {and old) enough not to be
similarly constrained, appears monstrous, so her outrageous
statements are defanged, although often they are actually
just. Like the heroine of Pride and Prejudice, Elizabeth
Bennet, she speaks her mind--only far more fiercely. In
their outspokenness, fearlessness, and anger, among other
qualities, the two are "surprisingly similar."
Consequently, Lady Catherine would be "an appropriate mother
to Elizabeth."9 She is, in fact, the agent of the marriage
for Elizabeth that she wants to prevent.
Lady Catherine may be thwarted in that respect, and she
is endowed by Austen with unpleasant qualities.
Nonetheless, in her community she is powerful and
autonomous; her male relatives treat her respectfully; and
she is free to move about the country at will, for instance
during the attempt to intervene in the Elizabeth-Darcy
relationship.
The narrator carefully prepares us for Lady Catherine
in several ways before her first appearance in the novel,
building anticipation of a formidable character. Mr.
Collins's effusions about her in his first letter to Mr.
Bennet (Pride and Prejudice I.XIII.55) suggest her power in
filling and supervising a clergy position, itself one of
considerable local authority. This impression is confirmed
a few pages later by the narration of Mr. Collins's history
(I.XV.61-62) and then by his obsequious references to Lady
Catherine during his visit to the Bennets at Longbourn. For
instance, he pesters Darcy at the Netherfield Ball
(I.XVIII); and during the preamble of his proposal to
Elizabeth, he bubbles: "'she [Lady Catherine] condescended
to give me her opinion (unasked too!) on this subject [his
marriage]" (I.XIX.95).
Wickham's testimony is much more blunt. He remembers
that Lady Catherine's "manners were dictatorial and
insolent. She has the reputation of being remarkably
sensible and clever: but I rather believe she derives part
of her abilities from her rank and fortune, part from her
authoritative manner, and the rest from the pride of her
nephew [Darcy]" (I.XVI.75). The last remark indicates that
Wickham hates Lady Catherine because he hates Darcy; if
readers knew about Wickham's deceits we might be suspicious
of his judgment on that account. If we adjust our reading
of Darcy based on what we later discover about Wickham,
21
perhaps we should also adjust our reading of Lady Catherine
insofar as it depends on Wickham.
Whatever Elizabeth anticipates about Lady Catherine,
Mr. Collins certainly attempts to daunt her after she
arrives at Hunston. "'She likes to have the distinction of
rank preserved,'" he tells Elizabeth to reassure her about
her dress for the dinner party; and hurrying the guests
along, he reminds them that "Lady Catherine very much
objected to be kept waiting for her dinner" (II.VI.143).10
When Elizabeth finally meets Lady Catherine, Wickham's
assessment is confirmed. Lady Catherine gives her
uninterrupted "opinion on every subject in so decisive a
manner as proved that she was not used to have her judgment
controverted." She asks imperious, probing questions and
makes outspoken comments to Charlotte, Maria Lucas, and
Elizabeth. Within this astonishing display of egotism is
buried the remark about the entail on Longbourn. "'For
your sake,'" she says to Charlotte (the wife of Mr. Collins,
the heir) "'I am glad of it, but otherwise I see no occasion
for entailing estates from the female line. It was not
thought necessary in Sir Lewis de Bourgh's family'"
(II.VI.146).
Since Lady Catherine is so ill-mannered and
opinionated, it is not surprising if one overlooks the
validity of the remarks about the Longbourn inheritance--or
other ways in which she demonstrates logic, such as her
22
condescension to the repulsive Mr. Collins. On review, most
of her comments that evening are equally sound--she urges
that young women should be educated by governesses and learn
to "'play and sing'" and "'draw.'" She further declares
that younger girls should not be brought "out" until their
older sisters are married--it is too confusing (Lydia's
adventures and Mary's social awkwardness demonstrate the
aptness of these observations). Her ideas are "sensible"
and conformist11 and are in marked contrast to the chaotic
regime of Mrs. Bennet. To a snappy answer from Elizabeth
about her sisters, Lady Catherine counters: "'You give your
opinion very decidedly for so young a person.'" Again, this
retort, outspoken and arrogant though it may be, is stunning
in its accuracy, as we will see throughout the novel, and
nowhere more than in Elizabeth's final exchange with Lady
Catherine. Elizabeth is opinionated.12
Part of readerly pleasure in Elizabeth Bennet is her
successful negotiation of the heroine plot despite her
rebelliousness and outspokenness. But these traits cause
her considerable anguish; they also suggest subversion:
young ladies are supposed to be modest.13 Lady Catherine,
however, because of her rank and her status as an
independent woman, is sanctioned in her outspoken
eccentricity. We are not specifically told that Lady
Catherine is old or physically unattractive; indeed,
Elizabeth immediately notices a resemblance in both the
23
"countenance and deportment" of Lady Catherine to the
incomparably handsome Darcy, as well as a striking contrast
to her insignificant daughter, Anne (II.VI.145). Much
later, Mrs. Bennet remarks of Lady Catherine, "She is a very
fine-looking woman" (III.XIV.319). But Lady Catherine's
energies seem to be absorbed in domineering the Collinses
and her other hangers-on; from this practice she apparently
*
derives what George Eliot defined as "the old woman's
pleasure of tormenting. 1 , 1 4 She is "allowed" this pleasure
because she is no longer a heroine contender--no longer
bound to modesty and its limitations.
That evening is the first of several spent with Lady
Catherine during Elizabeth's stay with the Collinses
(II.VII.151). On one of these evenings Lady Catherine
addresses Darcy, in Elizabeth's presence but ignoring her,
on the subject of Elizabeth's piano playing: "Miss Bennet
would not play at all amiss, if she practised more. . . .
Her taste is not equal to Anne's [Lady Catherine's daughter,
who does not in fact play at all]" (II.VIII.157). These
remarks typify the ease with which Lady Catherine
adjudicates people's performance and habits, while
establishing that she considers herself above and beyond the
reach of criticism. She displays the same tendencies when
she urges Elizabeth to delay her return home: "'I expected
you to stay two months. I told Mrs. Collins so before you
came. There can be no occasion for your going so soon,'"
24
she protests, implying that her needs and expectations will
be the first anyone would want to meet (II.XIV.187).
Usually, that is the case.
Lady Catherine is at her imperious best during her
mission to Longbourn for a confrontation with Elizabeth.
Lady Catherine is trying to prevent a marriage between Darcy
and Elizabeth, so that her own daughter can marry him
instead. From her arrival, she is "more than usually
ungracious" (III.XIV.311) and "more than usually insolent
and disagreeable" (313), snooping into various rooms on the
way outdoors. The exchange between the two strong-willed
women is most satisfying for readers who have taken
Elizabeth to their hearts, since every objection of Lady
Catherine to the marriage brings a cool and ready response:
Elizabeth is perfectly in command of herself. How young
women schooled to modesty must have enjoyed the vicarious
experience of putting such a dragon in her place! But Lady
Catherine assumes her wishes will be respected and that the
upstart descendant of Mrs. Bennet's tradesman family will
yield meekly. The delight of the fiction suggests that in
reality a Lady Catherine would prevail.
She is used to it, as she declares to Elizabeth: "'I
have not been in the habit of brooking disappointment.'"
Lady Catherine sets forth the pedigrees of her daughter and
Mr. Darcy, significantly adducing their noble connection
"'on the maternal side.'" (Her own aristocratic birth is
one source of Lady Catherine's confident authority.)
Elizabeth should prefer to remain in her own "sphere." Lady
Catherine has, of course, misread her adversary, in thinking
that such arguments will forestall Elizabeth (II.XIV.316).
Yet, curiously, all her objections, notably the effect of
the Lydia-Wickham scandal, have been considered by Elizabeth
herself as impediments to her relationship with Darcy, only
shortly before this interview takes place (for example, in
II.XI).
In fact, had either Elizabeth or Lady Catherine been
less spirited in their arguments, the marriage might never
have occurred. Darcy returns only because of his aunt's
report of Elizabeth's defiance. If Lady Catherine had
either appealed diplomatically to Elizabeth's sense of
propriety, or not intervened at all, the consequences might
have been very different.
Preventing the marriage is far more than a matter of
aristocratic pride to Lady Catherine. Her motive--the
importance to her of this intervention--is to save Darcy for
her own daughter. It has been argued that like all
"representatives of matriarchal power" Lady Catherine is
denigrated by Austen, depicted as "arrogant" and "rude"; her
cold, authoritarian approach to motherhood results in a
"'pale and sickly,'" mousey daughter.15 Power has made
Lady Catherine authoritarian, and she certainly treats
underlings peremptorily. But there is no textual evidence
26
she has been a cold or authoritarian mother. By confronting
Elizabeth, she is, in fact, demeaning herself in the attempt
to fill the most significant maternal role--that of getting
her daughter married. Nor is there any evidence that Anne's
sickliness is the fault of Lady Catherine. If we are to
make such assumptions about mothers and daughters, we might
conclude Mrs. Bennet would produce silly girls like herself,
rather than the "delightful" Elizabeth and the flawless
Jane.
As ludicrous as Mrs. Bennet may be, her embarrassing
her pronouncements are right, and she is right in believing
that the "great business of her life" is to get her
daughters married. Lady Susan knows this, too,
unsentimentally recognizing, as Marvin Mudrick puts it, that
"a mother's proper aim is to secure a respectable husband
for her daughter" (13 0). All these women are struggling to
achieve for their daughters the socially required destiny of
marriage, but Mrs. Bennet does it best, perhaps because she
is the most single-minded. Lady Catherine is undone by the
consistency of her character--her egregious pride and
misjudgment of her opponent. Lady Catherine's mistakes
actually save Elizabeth and grant her a happy ending; Lady
Catherine is, then, unknowingly playing the heroine's mother
for her own daughter's rival.
This aspect of Elizabeth's happy ending foreshadows the
pessimism embodied in Lady Russell about the effectiveness
27
of female authority. It seems better to be silly and so
ineffectual as to play no part in advising one's children.
Lady Russell
Lady Catherine's intransigence is an essential feature
of Pride and Prejudice, helping the narrative along and, as
Claudia Johnson puts it, parodying the system Austen cannot
directly criticize (89).15 Lady Catherine ends up
discredited because of the narrowness of her pride,
untempered by feeling; she makes no concession to the
feelings of others; she expects deference as her due. On
the one occasion when she really needs cooperation
(Elizabeth's), she does not get it because she does not know
how to conciliate across age and class boundaries. She is
foiled; but the narrative purpose is served.
But suppose that Persuasion is Pride and Prejudice
revisited; for argument's sake, we may assume they are the
first and last of Austen's major novels, thus they may offer
a working-out of similar issues. Both are heroine-courtship
novels in the two-suitor (one bounder, one hero), second-
proposal-from-the-hero-after-all-hope-is-lost genre. Among
the many common features is the interfering female authority
figure. Why may not the last novel offer a benevolent
version of the same basic type that was a monster in the
first?
Lady Catherine simply cannot back down, even in her own
best interest. But Lady Russell's saving grace is that she
can back down. Her character has the added dimensions of
feeling and conciliation in sufficient strength to
counteract her pride. She, too, is rank-conscious and used
to getting her own way. She is not in quite the power
position of Lady Catherine; for instance, no one is
dependent on her the way the Collinses are on Lady
Catherine. But” Lady Russell is more rational than Lady
Catherine, using tact and diplomacy instead of autocratic
pronouncements. Most significantly, between Anne and Lady
Russell has developed almost a mother-daughter relationship,
a real affection and mutual concern. Their relationship,
however, is much more complex than it first appears to be.
It suggests a darker view on Austen's part of the influence
of such a powerful older woman on a heroine, even when--or
especially when--it is wielded for "the good."
In assessing Lady Russell's role in the novel, it is
easy to leap to conclusions such as Claudia Johnson warns
against, categorizing Persuasion as "'autumnal"the
author's own love story" (144). With such a script, one
could cast Anne and Lady Russell as the once and future
Austens: the girl who turned down Tom Lefroy17 and the
middle-aged aunt who advised Fanny Knight about marriage in
the 1817 letters. Biographical extrapolations are
particularly problematic with Austen because of family
excision of the letters and family efforts to paint an
idealized Victorian portrait of 'Aunt Jane.'18 Yet it
seems reasonable to assume that Lady Russell may represent
the future self a single, mature woman might anticipate.19
She has a "composed mind and polite manners"; she "gets all
the new publications, and has a very large acquaintance"
(II.IV.138). She is rational, affectionate, intelligent,
articulate. All these qualities are indicated in Austen's
late letters, notably those to Fanny Knight, to whom Austen
apparently felt close enough to express herself more fully
than in the other surviving letters. These letters
corroborate the notion of Lady Russell as portrait of the
artist, although Austen is not nearly as convinced of her
own rightness.
Two questions arise in this connection: Why are so
many older women featured in Austen's novels? And why is
only Lady Russell personally redeemed?
The mature women in the major works may be generally
categorized as ridiculous (Mrs. Musgrove--she of the "fat
sighings", Mrs. Allen--crazy about clothes); silly or
incompetent (Mrs. Bennet, Mrs. Dashwood, Lady Bertram); worn
down (Mrs. Morland--with ten children, Mrs. Price with at
least nine); dead (Lady Elliot, Mrs. Woodhouse); or
autocratic (Lady Catherine, Mrs. Norris, Mrs. Churchill).20
The only non-mothers here derive their part in the action
from botched motherly roles.
30
In the small group of rational, sensible mature
women--Mrs. Smith (of Sense and Sensibility), Lady Russell,
Mrs. Weston (Emma's former governess), and Mrs. Gardiner--
only Mrs. Gardiner is actually a mother. Readers do not see
her mothering her own children, and her relation to the
Bennet girls is that of a good aunt, not a mother. Mrs.
Gardiner, "an amiable, intelligent, elegant woman," is
"several years younger" than Mrs. Bennet,21 and logically
too young to be the heroine's mother. Moreover, the advice
she gives is "Anne-like," as I will discuss later. But
overall, Austen's handling of mature women indicates
condemnation: frustration with the triviality of their
perspectives, bitterness at their limitations and
sufferings, contempt for their misuse of the little power
they may have.
The strongest point to be made in all this is the
indictment of motherhood, which has been cited as evidence
of Austen's own matrophobia, "the fear of becoming one's
mother."22 Mrs. Austen seems to have been quite
formidable: even according to the Memoir she dominated Jane
and Cassandra, made outspoken remarks, and increasingly
enjoyed ill-health. She had eight children and lived to the
age of eighty-eight.23 The Austen family's famous noble
connections derive, interestingly enough, from the maternal
line.24
31
In addition to combatting matrophobia, one of many
reasons for heroines to leave home is to get "male
protection which [not surprisingly] their mothers really
cannot supply. 1 , 2 5 Essentially, the only way to leave home
is to marry. Thus in getting away from one's mother, one
takes the course most likely to lead to the realization of a
deep fear: marrying, having numerous children, and ending up
as one's mother.
Feminist theory about mother-daughter relationships
assumes the daughter is to become a mother herself. But
what happens when obviously she will not, as in the case of
Austen herself--and Lady Russell? Lady Russell's role in
Persuasion and Austen's attitude in the Fanny Knight letters
suggest that the independent mature woman (the "accountable
being"26) becomes an authority figure--a "mother" anyway,
since no other authority position is available for women.
Lady Russell has been married, giving her status and wealth
("Single Women have a dreadful propensity for being
poor--which is one very strong argument in favour of
Matrimony"--Letters #141) and suggesting that women attain
whatever power they can only through marriage. Austen's
letters convey intelligence, wit, judgment--but not power,
not the social and economic freedom of Lady Russell.
Lady Russell is often considered primarily as the fuel
that gets Persuasion going, setting the narrative in motion
with her original "act of persuasion" against Anne's
32
engagement to Wentworth.27 Every time Anne and Wentworth
meet, "a terzo incomodo intervenes," explains D. A. Miller,
"the very publicity of social intercourse itself." They get
thrown together by "social occasions," but they "cannot
speak" openly (102); they are censored by decorum.28 In a
way, Lady Russell embodies this intrusive third: throughout
the novel, even when Lady Russell is not physically present,
Anne continues to need her approval and support, to rely on
her for the good judgment that everyone else seems to lack.
Although she realizes Lady Russell's limitations, Anne still
gauges her behavior by Lady Russell's hypothetical approval.
Lady Russell is the editor of Anne's script, a censor all
the more powerful because Anne has internalized her.
While she is. necessary to narrative tension, Lady
Russell also exemplifies the "powerful widow" more fully
than does Lady Catherine de Bourgh, or for that matter any
other Austen character. She is more complex than they are,
she has a history and 'closure,'29 and she is considerately
treated by the narrator. As substitute mother,30 friend,
mentor, and matchmaker to Austen's most mature heroine, Lady
Russell cannot be a caricature, a grotesque like Lady
Catherine, who is set up mostly in order to be cast down.
In that case, a character as sympathetic and intelligent as
Anne simply would not continue to repose confidence in
her.31 Lady Russell's character is complicated and
"life-like" in its balance of "good" and "bad" qualities.
33
She had been loving and loyal to her friend Lady Elliot,
Anne's mother, specifically settling in the neighborhood to
be nearby (I.I.11). After her friend's death, Lady Russell
gives Anne the same kind of devotion, notably putting up
with the rest of the Elliots for Anne's sake and acting as
Anne's confidante and companion.
Her regard for Anne not only demonstrates Lady
Russell's discrimination--out of duty, she "loved them all;
but it was only in Anne that she could fancy the mother to
revive again" (I.I.12)--it is for Anne "an extraordinary
blessing" (I.IV.44) in an otherwise friendless state.
Despite a singular lack of sympathy for Anne, even the
self-absorbed, hypochondriacal Mary is not "so repulsive and
unsisterly" to Anne as the autocratic Elizabeth: these
negatives reinforce the paucity of sisterly feelings. That
Anne finds such solace in the friendship of Lady Russell
also speaks for the fineness of Lady Russell's character, a
character who in turn recognizes Anne's worth. In Anne,
Lady Russell sees again the "excellent," "sensible and
amiable" Lady Elliot, whose single failure in "judgment and
conduct" was the choice of Sir Walter as a husband
(I.I.10)--admittedly a fairly serious mistake.32 As we
learn early in the novel, Anne's "elegance of mind and
sweetness of character," unappreciated by her family, "must
have placed her high with any people of real understanding"
{I.I.11-12). She is placed high with Lady Russell, implying
34
that Lady Russell possesses such understanding. Moreover,
Anne is confident about Lady Russell's feelings for her.
Alarmed at the prospect of a marriage between her father and
Mrs. Clay, Anne takes comfort in the thought that "she might
always command a home with Lady Russell" (II.IV.138).
Affection for Anne, however, does not impel Lady
Russell to discommode herself unduly: when Kellynch-hall is
let to the Crofts, "engagements of her own" take her away
from Kellynch and leave Anne stranded (I.V.35). Nor does
Lady Russell fully compensate for the loss of Anne's mother.
Since that loss, for example, "excepting one short period"
Anne has not "known the happiness of being listened to, or
encouraged" when she plays music, which she loves and does
well (I .VI .48) ,33
The judgment for which Anne values her friend is
similarly imperfect, as Anne herself is aware ("It was now
some years since Anne had begun to learn that she and her
excellent friend could sometimes think differently"--
II.IV.139). True, Lady Russell disapproves of the odious
Mrs. Clay, "a very dangerous companion" for Anne's older
sister, Elizabeth, whose inclination is to pursue the
opposite course to any suggested by Lady Russell (1.11.21) .
The "imprudence" of such a friendship for Elizabeth is felt
equally by Anne, but as painful for Lady Russell is the
"affront" to Anne in the implication of Mrs. Clay's superior
usefulness during the family's residence at Bath (I.V.36).
Here are both a reliable condemnation of Mrs. Clay and
further proof of Lady Russell's sound judgment--later events
justify her reactions to Mrs. Clay. Lady Russell's
aristocratic "prejudices" are not inflexible: she approves
of Anne's friendship with the humble and (mostly) deserving
Mrs. Smith (II.V.149). This approval undercuts claims that
Lady Russell is completely governed by snobbery. Her
distaste for the cheerful chaos at Uppercross (II.II.128)
may be read as either "good" or "bad" judgment.34 Her
impatience does, however, indicate someone accustomed to
others' concern for her comfort and well-being--someone of
position and authority. The narrator implies disapproval of
Lady Russell here, juxtaposing the clamor of the Bath
streets to which Lady Russell responds positively, as she
turns to more adult pleasures.
Leaving aside for the moment her interference with the
original engagement, Lady Russell's other failings include
her predilection for Bath (a danger signal: "good"
women--Anne, the narrat.or, and the narrator of Northancrer
Abbey--do not like Bath; Anne's father (Sir Walter) and
Elizabeth do). Lady Russell's social awareness does tend to
dissolve into snobbery, allowing her to overlook Sir
Walter's silliness and impairing her assessment of Mr.
Elliot. Her unmannerly snub of Capt. Wentworth shames Anne
(II.VII.169-170). Presumably chagrin accounts for this
remarkable lapse. Lady Russell's politeness has been
36
strained before, for instance at Bath, in "[t]he sight of
Mrs. Clay in such favour, and of Anne so overlooked"
(II.IV.138), and again when she delays calling on Mrs. Croft
at Anne's old home (II.I.119). She is able to overcome her
scruples in these instances, but about Wentworth she is
proved to have been completely wrong--making magnanimity
harder for her in dealing with him.
As a matchmaker for Anne, Lady Russell is at her worst.
She has prevented the one right match. She erred again in
her plans to launch Anne in wider society. If she believed
Anne could cope with Bath society ("She wanted her to be
more known"--(I.II.20-21), she did not consider closely
Anne's gentle and retiring character: "extremely pretty"
though she was at nineteen, Anne was never the type to be
noticed on the marriage circuit. Wentworth fell in love
with Anne because they were thrown together for "half a
year" when "he had nothing to do" but become acquainted
(29). Subsequently, Lady Russell urges the suit of Mr.
Elliot, the heir to Kellynch, ironically claiming "I am no
match-maker, as you well know." Mr. Elliot is later
revealed as a bounder; this discovery indicates another
failure in Lady Russell's judgment, although her motives
appeal to Anne:
to regard you as . . . the future Lady
Elliot--to look forward to see you occupying
your dear mother's place, succeeding to all
her rights, and all her popularity, as well
as to all her virtues, would be the highest
possible gratification to me.--You are your
mother's self in countenance and
disposition; and if I might be allowed to
fancy you such as she was, in situation, and
name, and home, presiding and blessing in
the same spot, and only superior to her in
being more highly valued! My dearest Anne,
it would give me more delight than is often
felt at my time of life! [Emphasis added]
(II.V.151)
Momentarily Anne herself is enchanted with the idea;
however, her own good judgment convinces her otherwise. But
the vision is not entirely selfish on Lady Russell's part:
the pleasure she anticipates would be at the thought of
Anne's acquiring comfort and standing. In any event, she
does not persist in this effort.35
Lady Russell's moral failures do not indicate a lack of
autonomy in her character or skill in her creator. On the
contrary, in a new introduction to Persuasion, Claude Rawson
attributes the "ambivalence" in Lady Russell's character to
its dual purpose: she "upholds Elinor [Dashwood]'s
values"--sense-- (xxxiv), at the same time being noted for
"a warm loving nature" (xxxiii).
Lady Russell is frequently read as a flat character36
tagged 'censure' and crucial only in that role. In an
assessment that, according to Rawson, over-extends flimsy
evidence, Marilyn Butler infers Capt. Wentworth's
"ideologically mistaken" status partly from Lady Russell's
disapproval (Butler 275). Rather than "revolutionary,"
claims Rawson, Wentworth is bitter at Anne's susceptibility
(xxxv). Rawson also denies the final repudiation of Lady
Russell that many critics take for granted. In fact, he
claims, Austen insists on Lady Russell's "ardent nature,"
albeit "in opposition to her thematic role" (the
"interfering elder"--xxxiii). Her loving nature and
particular affection for Anne prevail over her objections to
Wentworth--objections, moreover, usually "broadly endorsed
in Austen's fictional world," based on his financial
inadequacy and obscure family background (xxxvi-xxxvii). In
addition, the complexity of Lady Russell's character and the
"uncertainty as to which of her characteristics is to be
approved or disapproved" indicate on Austen's part a
potentially "more open and destabilized perception of human
personality and behaviour" than that of her previous work
(xxxvii). The duality of Lady Russell's character, then,
demonstrates extension of Austen's range as well as meeting
the requirements of the plot.
While I would qualify it, this reading seems confirmed
by the conversation between Anne and Wentworth about Lady
Russell's intervention in their original engagement--
incidentally, one area in which they do 'speak fully'
(Persuasion II.XI.232-233). Anne: "I must believe that I
was right, much as I suffered from it, that I was perfectly
right in being guided by the friend whom you will love
better than you do now. To me, she was in the place of a
parent. . . . If I had done otherwise, I should have
suffered more . . . because I should have suffered in my
conscience . . . a strong sense of duty is no bad part of a
woman's portion."
Marilyn Butler terms this a "nominally orthodox
declaration," adding, "[n]either the rather shadowy Lady
Russell, nor any of the book's symbols of external
authority, weigh in the reader's private scale against
Anne's eight years of suffering" (291). A popular reading
of Persuasion is that Anne "has become wise through
suffering the consequences of her own mistakes."37 But
Anne's "suffering" compared with that of Mrs. Smith seems
relatively minor. Making an unwise marriage, Mrs. Smith
burned her boats.
In affirming to Wentworth her belief that she was right
to follow Lady Russell's advice, effectively, Anne implies
that she owed Lady Russell filial obedience. When it
becomes her duty to obey Wentworth, she [unlike Louisa] will
do so just as wholeheartedly. Wentworth replies:
I trust to being in charity with her [Lady
Russell] soon. But I too have been thinking
over the past, and a question has suggested
itself, whether there may not have been one
person more my enemy even than that lady?
My own self. . . . I was too proud, too
proud to ask again [after he distinguished
himself and made a fortune, therefore
materially altering his status]. I did not
understand you. I shut my eyes, and would
not understand you, or do you justice. This
is a recollection which ought to make me
forgive every one sooner than myself.
(Persuasion II.XI.232-233)
Note the repetitions from both Anne and Wentworth: hers
stressing that she was right, she suffered, but her
conscience was clear; his emphasizing pride, self-blame, and
lack of understanding. Both of them substantially vindicate
Lady Russell's advice, which as Anne also points out was
"good or bad only as the event decides." Lady Russell is
powerful, mature, experienced; she stands in the mother
relation to Anne. It would seem that a loving mother should
advise her daughter on a matter so vital to her well-being
as marriage decisions are to Austen's young women, since
marriage is their only acceptable option in adult life. If
Lady Russell has gained knowledge about feminine
vulnerability in marriage decisions, she is only doing her
duty by advising her "daughter" against one that appears to
be full of pitfalls.
Austen's favorite heroine, Elizabeth Bennet, and her
aunt Gardiner discuss the same issue frankly: "What is the
difference in matrimonial affairs, between the mercenary and
the prudent motive?" asks Elizabeth, "Where does discretion
end, and avarice begin?" (Pride and Prejudice II.IV.137).
Elizabeth is alluding to advice her aunt has previously
given her against Wickham, "a wonderful instance of advice
being given on such a point, without being resented" (Pride
and Prejudice II.IV.130). Elizabeth does not resent the
advice because Mrs. Gardiner has advised rather than
coerced: "You are too sensible a girl, Lizzy, to fall in
love merely because you are warned against it . . . be on
your guard. Do not involve yourself, or endeavour to
41
involve him in an affection which the want of fortune would
make so very imprudent . . . you must not let your fancy run
away with you" (Pride and Prejudice II.IV.12 8-29).
When Lady Russell made a similar judgment about
Wentworth, he, like Wickham, had nothing to recommend him as
a suitor but his looks and personal qualities; he had,
though, ambitions and professional prospects that Anne
believed were justified. Lady Russell lacked Anne's
quickness of perception and did not accurately read
Wentworth's "sanguine temper, and fearlessness of mind" and
his confidence, soon realized, in his ability to provide for
Anne (I.IV.29-31). But Lady Russell could not countenance
his 'inferiority': he had neither fortune nor 'connections.'
Of course, Wentworth's eventual prosperity was never
guaranteed. Had they married and Wentworth not achieved
wealth and promotion, Lady Russell would have been 'right.'
Anne might then have ended up like Mrs. Smith, as Gilbert
and Gubar point out, in a position of utter deprivation.38
Mrs. Smith (formerly the less prosaically named Miss
Hamilton, a school friend of Anne) had married, evidently,
"a man of fortune." But Anne hears that this man "had been
extravagant" and had died leaving "his affairs dreadfully
involved" and his wife in penury (Persuasion 11.V. 144) . As
"an emblem of the dispossession of women in a patriarchal
society" (Gilbert and Gubar 181), Mrs. Smith not only
exemplifies the dangers of an ill-considered marriage. She
42
also symbolizes the typical fate of luckless women: worn out
and tossed aside at thirty.39
Mrs. Smith's position contrasts diametrically with that
of Lady Russell, who is "extremely well provided for"
(Persuasion I.I.11). Lady Russell's acquisition and
retention of comfort, freedom, and power may be just luck,
or it may be partially due to the exercise of judgment; at
any rate, she herself would probably think so. Lady
Russell's good sense is emphasized from the beginning: "Lady
Elliot mainly relied on her" for advice on raising her
daughters (Persuasion I.I.11). The wily Mr.Shepherd, faced
with restraining Sir Walter's extravagance, avails himself
of Lady Russell's "excellent judgment" and "known good
sense" to get the job done, whereupon Lady Russell is "most
anxiously zealous on the subject, and gave it much serious
consideration" (I.II.16). Consequently, we learn about
her "two leading principles": her "strict integrity,"
goodness, and reason on the one hand and her "prejudices on
the side of ancestry" on the other (I.II.17). These
prejudices incline her "compassion and consideration" to
disregard Sir Walter's foibles--but not sufficiently to have
married him.
Why she did not may perhaps be inferred from her own
discretion as well as his shallowness. In view of his
limited finances and her wealth, quite apart from her
V
proximity, it seems reasonable to assume that Lady Russell's
43
refusal was one of the "private disappointments" Sir Walter
experienced. Apparently "their acquaintance" had expected
them to marry (I.I.11). Readers may admire Lady Russell's
savvy in avoiding marriage with this silly, vain man. More
complex may be the reasons for her having "no thought of a
second marriage" (1.1.11) to anyone.
One critic reads Lady Russell's "steady age and
character" (Persuasion I.I.11) as a "lack of interest in
sex, for the other benefits of marriage she could still have
enjoyed."40 "The other benefits" seem problematic. Lady
Russell is already the first lady of the neighborhood--
Elizabeth gives precedence to her only (I.I.13); she has all
of Sir Walter's company that she wants, and she can escape
it whenever she wishes; she is free to come and go as she
pleases (to take trips, for instance); in her relationship
with Anne, she even enjoys many of the benefits, without the
pangs, of motherhood; most importantly, she is financially
independent. In view of the prevailing laws and customs of
marriage, which were dominated by the' principle of
coverture, a woman of sense and good judgment might well
repress her sexual feelings in order to retain her
independent status.
Many historians and critics recognize that coverture
underlay the social and legal oppression of women.41
Defining coverture, Mary Shanley quotes extensively from
William Blackstone, the jurist whose Commentaries codified
44
English law. According to the conditions of coverture (the
"one body" defined by Blackstone), husband and wife were
"'one person' in the law, and that person was represented by
the husband" (8). Married women therefore suffered "civil
death" (10); they did not exist as legal entities separate
from their husbands.42
The Caroline Norton case is often cited as an example
of the gross inequities of the system, under which her
brutal husband deprived her of her children and her
property.43 As a successful, published poet and novelist,
Norton was in an almost unique position to make public the
details her situation. Caroline Norton married in 1827,
putting her historically ahead of Lady Russell. But the
laws that victimized Norton were all in place at the time of
Persuasion, as evidenced by the dates of the Blackstone
Commentaries (1765-69).
If the social system required women to marry, it
apparently did not require them to remarry--"the public . . .
is rather apt to be unreasonably discontented when a woman
does marry again, than when she does not" (Persuasion
I.I.11). Who is this public, and why is it "discontented"?
Is it men looking for rich widows? Or women gratified that
some of their number have freedom and independence? Why
does "Sir Walter's continuing in singleness require []
explanation"? The answers to all these questions may be
much less obvious to us than they were to contemporaries.
45
Contemporaries would have been all too aware of what Lady
Russell would be giving up and what Sir Walter would be
gaining, were they to marry: in both cases, everything.44
Lady Russell might well see no other benefits in a
second marriage, a step that would hand over complete
control of her person and her property to a man quite likely
to be a fortune-hunter.45 Part of Lady Russell's
misjudgment was in applying the same criteria to Anne as to
herself.
In the final scene of Persuasion. Anne, having
justified Lady Russell to Wentworth, goes on to say that in
like circumstances she, Anne, would never give anyone the
kind of advice Lady Russell gave. Anne has felt this way
all along:
She did not blame Lady Russell, she did not
blame herself for having been guided by her;
but she felt that were any young person, in
similar circumstances, to apply to her for
counsel, they would never receive any of
such certain immediate wretchedness.
(I.IV.32)
Anne stands in an aunt-like relation to several other
characters, and her interactions with them do take a
different form than intrusive advice-giving. She gives
practical advice: "carry her [Louisa] gently to the inn,"
she tells the distraught Charles and Wentworth during the
accident at the Cobb, calmly taking over when everyone else
is in disarray (I.XII.108). Anne's "persuasion" is to
console the bereaved Captain Benwick by talking to him about
46
literature--he is too gloomy for anyone else to pay
attention to him, and her "advice" is to help him develop
"patience and resignation" (I ;XI.98-99) . In other words,
Anne's interference is limited to positive assistance and
gentle solidarity with the burdens of others, not extending
to influencing or changing the course of their lives.
By contrast, Lady Russell is known, as Henrietta tells
Anne, "as a woman of the greatest influence with every body!
. . . able to persuade a person to any thing!"
(I.XII.100-101) This facility illustrates the crux of
Persuasion insofar as Lady Russell is concerned. With her
more "pardonable pride" (than that of Sir Walter) in her own
opinions, Lady Russell actively derailed the Anne-Wentworth
romance. Calling upon the irresistible forces of filial
love and respect, she put her argument in such a way as to
guarantee compliance from the gentle and dutiful young
woman: in marrying Wentworth, Anne would be "throwing
[herself] away"; moreover, she would be jeopardizing "his
advantage" at the same time (I.IV.30-31). Lady Russell is
not evil; I have tried to show that she is rational, and she
loves Anne. But she is interfering and preventing. "It
must not be, if by anv fair interference of friendship, any
representations from one who had almost a mother's love, and
mother's rights, it would be prevented" (I.IV.30, emphasis
added). In Austenian terms, this is a scathing indictment
of Lady Russell's motivation.
47
Characters like Lady Catherine and Lady Russell, who
have lost the sexual power to delay the action, retain only
blocking power--the narrative digression in which the older
generation has to be got out of the way so that the young
lovers can get together.46 In comedy, the young prevail.
In tragedy, the old do. The danger for Anne is that she
will become--and in some ways she already is--a Lady
Russell, an aunt-like figure who misses out on romance and
marriage.
Heroines are uncannily accurate at looking back at
their lives and seeing points at which chances for happiness
escaped them. The beginning of Persuasion shows how
effectively Anne has done so; she sees clearly what went
wrong. In spite of her love for Wentworth and her "cheerful
confidence" in his ability to rise in the world, "she had
been forced into prudence in her youth [by Lady Russell]"
(I.IV.33). But Anne had the one chance at happiness•in
love, as Lady Russell comes to realize, pondering the
unlikelihood of Anne's marrying anyone else (32).
Despite that conclusion, however, Lady Russell has not
repented of her interference. She is "as satisfied as ever
with her own discretion" in the matter (32). This pride is
what determines her to re-write Anne's plot, the plot Lady
Russell herself has set into motion in the first place. If
not for her, Anne's trust "in futurity" (33) would have
resulted in no story, the mark of the "proper lady."47
48
Anne is so intrinsically good and her judgment so sound that
the only way for her to have a story is for her to have a
flawed mother. A "real" mother could not have such serious
flaws, or she would not have produced an Anne.48 On the
other hand, the surrogate mother must be more sympathetic
than not, or she would not command the filial duty of an
Anne. No self-respecting heroine would be cowed by a Lady
Catherine--not Elizabeth Bennet, and certainly not Anne
Elliot, who pays no attention to her sisters, particularly
the repellent Elizabeth (according to Q.D. Leavis another
Lady Greville clone, like Lady Catherine). Lady Russell has
to be far more than just another grotesque, or she could not
have accomplished the persuasion that sets the narrative
going, and even less could she retain Anne's affection.
In achieving this necessary complexity, Austen's
narrator is finally sympathetic to Lady Russell. Captain
Wentworth forgives her (232) and "value[s]" her "from his
heart" (237). She lacks Anne's perception, "But she was a
very good woman, and if her second object was to be sensible
and well-judging, her first was to see Anne happy. She
loved Anne better than she loved her own abilities" (235) .
She is one of the only two worthwhile friends Anne has
(236). Yet one cannot ignore the compelling textual censure
of Lady Russell's pride, prejudice, and faulty judgment.49
We may wonder why Austen cannot allow the powerful
woman to "win," even when logic suggests she would. Neither
Lady Susan's duplicity nor Lady Catherine's power are
upheld; both must be brought down. Lady Susan talks her way
out of "impossible" traps throughout the novel; there's no
reason she could not continue to do so. Darcy, who is in
the same mold as his aunt, learns to be more yielding; why
could not she? Noble birth--and marriage to men "beneath"
them--gives both Lady Susan and Lady Catherine a heightened
awareness of the privileges of their rank and helps explain
their complete confidence in their own authority.50
Perhaps their monstrousness is a repudiation of aristocratic
values, as Claudia Johnson argues.51 We are told nothing
about Lady Russell's origins, but her rank has derived from
her husband, not from birth. With its endorsement of the
"unconnected" Wentworth, the Crofts, and the Navy in
general, Persuasion privileges middle-class values and
meritocracy. In the kinder, gentler treatment of Lady
Russell than that of her prototype, Lady Catherine, perhaps
it makes a similar gesture.
The handling of Lady Russell seems to denote a changing
relation to the issues of female authority--a much more
pessimistic attitude about wisdom, experience, power, and
aging than is shown in the rollicking burlesques of the
juvenilia or the comic 'dragons' like Lady Catherine or Mrs.
Churchill. Now elders may be inclined to do right but are
still wrong in principle as well as particulars. The
earlier, obviously monstrous Lady Catherine is easily
50
disregarded because she is unloved and unworthy. Lady
Russell--liberated to speak, not made monstrous, cold, or
authoritarian by her power and independence; rational,
affectionate as she is--Lady Russell is still ineffective in
the end. Worse, she is wrong.
All this seems an utterly pessimistic view of female
authority. It indicates the inability of such a society to
produce an independent and powerful mature woman whose
judgment and affections would be unimpaired by expediency.
In implying all these flaws in Lady Russell, and
highlighting, in contrast, Anne's discernment, Persuasion
seems to encourage people to take risks, make their own
decisions.52 In this way, the novel makes a strong
anti-persuasion statement while it seriously questions the
status quo, not simply the hierarchical system but more
particularly the authority of the old over the young.53
When the young choose for themselves, they are likely
to make a choice that apparently does not figure in Lady
Russell's schema but is completely consistent in Austen
herself: marrying for love. "I consider everybody as having
a right to marry once in their lives for love, if they can,"
she writes to her sister, Cassandra, in 1808 (#62)--
ironically, since neither of them married at all.
Two letters in which Austen takes a "Lady Russell" tone
toward Fanny Knight illustrate the kind of ambivalence I
have been suggesting about the topics of love and marriage.
51
"Anything is to be preferred or endured rather than marrying
without Affection," she writes to Fanny (#103) in November
1814. Only two weeks later, she continues at length on the
importance of love: "in my last letter I was urging
everything in his favour, & now I am inclining the other
way. . . . When I consider how few young Men you have yet
seen much of--how capable you are (yes, I do still think you
very capable) of being really in love . . . I cannot wish
you with your present very cool feelings to devote yourself
in honour to him" (#106). In the same letter, a "Lady
Russell" comment: "I should dread the continuance of this
sort of tacit engagement, with such an uncertainty as there
is, of when it may be completed.--Years may pass, before he
is Independant." Practical advice, however, quickly turns
to what seems more important to Austen: "nothing can be
compared to the misery of being bound without Love, bound to
one, & preferring another." Again to Fanny Knight, three
years later, Austen complains: "Oh! what a loss it will be
when you are married. . . . I shall hate you when your
delicious play of Mind is all settled down into conjugal &
maternal affections." This seems to be a fairly general
condemnation of marriage, particularly in the regret about
the young woman's "delicious play of Mind," because Austen
almost immediately indicates approval of the specific
suitor, with the conciliatory "Do not imagine that I have
any real objection, I have rather taken a fancy to him than
not . . . I only do not like you shd marry anybody. And yet
I do wish you to marry very much, because I know you will
never be happy till you are." These comments suggest she
thinks marriage in general stultifying yet mandatory for a
bright young woman. She writes on, gradually skewing her
comments into an "anti" stance: "Think of his Principles,
think of his Father's objection, of want of Money, of a
coarse Mother, of Brothers & Sisters like Horses, of sheets
sewn across &c." (the last is apparently a warning of the
kind of economies Fanny will have to face with this man).
"But I am doing no good--no, all that I urge against him
will rather make you take his part more, sweet perverse
Fanny" (#140). Surely these warnings and qualifiers could
be transposed into the Anne-Lady Russell relationship, with
Austen's psychology several leaps ahead of her fictional
counterpart.54
Lady Russell's character and Austen's ambivalence in
the Letters about marriage both reflect some of Austen's
probable concerns as a female artist. Included in the
female version of the anxiety of influence is the issue of
concern to all women: matrophobia.55 John Halperin, in
particular, argues throughout his biography that strained
relations with her mother plagued Austen throughout her
life. Certainly, Austen's letters indicate some impatience
with Mrs. Austen's hypochondria. Hints about that condition
in an early letter ("my mother bore her journey so well,
53
that expedition was of little importance to us"--#9) soon
develop into exempla of Austenian detachment and wit. "It
began to occur to me before you mentioned it," she writes
three months later,
that I had been somewhat silent as to my
mother's health for some time, but I thought
you could have no difficulty in divining its
exact state--you, who have guessed so much
stranger things. She is tolerably well--
better upon the whole than she was some
weeks ago. She would tell you herself that
. - She has a very dreadful cold in her head at —
present; but I have not much compassion for
colds in the head without fever or sore
throat. (#18)
The attitudes conveyed in these two early letters--mild
concern alternating with a Mr. Bennet-type critical wit,
recur throughout the Letters. For example, sixteen years
later, Austen writes:
I am sorry my Mother has been suffering, &
am afraid this exquisite weather is too good
to agree with her.--I. enjoy it all over me,
from top to toe, from right to left,
Longitudinally, Perpendicularly,
Diagonally& I cannot but selfishly hope
we are to have it last till Christmas;--
nice, unwholesome, Unseasonable, relaxing,
close, muggy weather! (#118)
The concluding adjectives seem to leap off the page in
sarcastic rebuttal of maternal complaints about the weather.
Other than the purely formal opening modifier, in fact, the
whole indicates that the perhaps-by-now ailing daughter was
more impatient than concerned with the obviously hale but
self-absorbed mother.
One immediate response to claims about Austen's
impatience with her mother is to wonder why she did not take
same route out of "spinsterhood" as Charlotte Lucas,
Elizabeth's friend in Pride and Prejudice, who makes a
marriage of convenience.56 Austen contemplated the
possibility and rejected it--more than once, according to
Halperin.57 Such rejection is not surprising, though, if
she most wanted to avoid the kind of fate she satirized in
her fictional mothers--the worn-out, sickly, trivial and
narrow life she had presumably seen her own mother lead.
Under the waspish irony is some compassion for the human
female condition.
As the subjugated gender, women tend to suspect all
agents of power, even in (especially in?) their own ranks.
Hence, perhaps, Austen's simultaneous delight in and
repugnance toward her Lady Susan, the embodiment of the
dichotomy between social expectations and individual
inclinations, a woman whose power subsists on the appearance
of powerlessness.58 Austen subsequently addresses many
times the question of female authority, the most fully in
Lady Russell. Lady Russell is tainted by some of the
constraints that plagued Lady Susan (snobbery,
self-interest, obsession with form) but by societal
imposition--not her own nature, which is warm and basically
"good." She is allowed to reach further toward the rational
than any other of Austen's mature women, who are almost
55
universally given a bad rap, whether they are biological
mothers or not.
If Austen expresses the problems of female authority in
her writing by means of invective and ironic distance, the
retribution her monstrous women suffer--such as banishment
(Mrs. Norris), death (Mrs. Churchill), and ignominy (Lady
Catherine vis-a-vis Elizabeth)--is not meted out to Lady
Russell. And the careful, directly reported exchange
between Anne and Wentworth deliberately confirms that Lady
Russell is to be reinstated in the affections of both hero
and heroine. Her errors are glossed over, extenuated.
In Austen's world it is not possible for a woman to
step completely outside the role society has cast her in.
An older women is a mother, one way or another, and women
are dependent on men for protection and income. Other than
that dependency, the only respectable way for an upper class
woman to support herself--and not completely respectable at
that--was as a writer. Because she is also a figure for the
writer, Lady Russell comes close to possessing the kind of
autonomy, intelligence, and judgment such a woman might
have. But she is also an elusive character: there is almost
no there there. The ironic distance operates as Rawson
discusses, for example in the filtering through Lady
Russell's indirect speech of Sir Walter's responses to
suggested economies (xii). Otherwise, rarely if at all do
we see through Lady Russell's consciousness, and one cannot
56
always be quite be sure if she is present or not in key
scenes, for instance at Lyme. All this makes her "rather
shadowy," as Marilyn Butler puts it.59
This ambiguity indicates that Austen is rejecting the
blocking character role--even while she is employing
it--both for Lady Russell and for herself. To be a female
agent of authority, she seems to be saying, does not involve
regulating other people but reading them--and writing
oneself. In Austen's world, that meant, for one thing, not
being too easy to read, or too visible. Failure to
accomplish that ghostliness might have meant not being read
or seen at all.
57
NOTES
1 "Letter the First," Love and Freindship. 2.
2 This is what Gilbert and Gubar claim (155). Mary
Poovey takes further their points about Austen's own
anxieties concerning the two warring female natures
(assertion/modesty). Poovey's discussion of the political
implications of a character like Lady Susan concludes that
Austen is saying "there are no victors" in the struggle
between "individual desire" and the "'natural' propriety"
society expects--the two are mutually destructive (Proper
Lady 174). Lady Susan highlights the "gap between
appearance and reality," the tension that produces "the
crisis in moral, authority" endemic to the age.— -The trouble
with the epistolary form is that since it has "no narrative
authority," we readily "identify with whatever character
dominates the narration"--or our fancy--in this case, Lady
Susan. Because of this reader sympathy, Austen is finally
obliged to assume the narrator role in order to "punish"
such an evil character (178). Yet the epistolary form has
afforded Austen the freedom "to satisfy the prerogative of
desire" before the narrator restores "moral order" (179).
Austen then seems to have it both ways.
3 "A Collection of Letters," Love and Freindship 87-92.
4 Q.D. Leavis, "Pride and Prejudice and Jane Austen's
Early Reading and Writing," rpt. in Pride and Prejudice, the
Norton Critical Edition, p.293 ff. These quotations p. 298.
5 Of the type described by Northrop Frye as deriving
from Greek comedy. Frye notes that the dramatic emphasis
often falls on these characters, as opposed to the
"technical leads," who are "often . . . somewhat dullish"
(167). Lady Russell's blocking action on Anne and Wentworth
probably makes them more interesting, as well as
facilitating their story.
6 In Aspects of the Novel. E. M. Forster categorizes
flat characters as one dimensional types, capable of being
summed up in one sentence. They are the easily recognized,
easily remembered characters of such writers as Dickens and
Wells (neither favorites of Forster). The opposite, round
characters of, for example, Jane Austen are "ready for an
extended life" (115) and "capable of surprising in a
convincing way" (118) .
7 "Simply to follow a novel," Davis argues, we have to
believe it contains "not only a three dimensional space but
a person with . . . physical and psychological depth" (103)
58
that we can understand and--more than identify with--become.
Only those people produced by the same culture are fully
capable of such realization (106).
8 Madwoman 172.
9 Madwoman 172.
10 Here the comparison with Lady Greville breaks down.
Lady Greville is "an hour and a half" late at Ashburnham.
She "is too fashionable (or fancies herself to be so) to be
punctual" (Love and Freindship 89.) Whatever else Lady
Catherine is, she seems completely oblivious to the dictates
of fashion.
11 For discussions of girls' education, -largely'
consisting of ways they could be pleasing to men, see
Armstrong on conduct books (Chapter 2). Armstrong points
out that "the lifetime . . . of Austen . . . should be seen
as the high point of a tradition of conduct books for women"
(61-62).
Clara Reeve, in Plans of Education (1792), supports
"widely-held prejudices against a 'rational' life for women"
(Gina Luria, introduction to the facsimile reprint). The
purpose of Reeve's Plan is a return to times when the
daughters of Britain were "modest, delicate, and chaste"
therefore "well educated and well principled." Reeve
recommends a strictly hierarchical system ("paupers are not
to be taught to write or read; being rescued from extreme
poverty, they are to be hewers of wood and drawers of
water"--59), in which there are many rules and indentured
terms for assistants. Little information is given about the
curriculum: pupils are to "be taught every branch of useful
knowledge in common life, to qualify them to govern and
conduct a family" (44).
12 Claudia Johnson refers to "Elizabeth's outrageous
unconventionality which, judged by the standards set in
conduct books and in conservative fiction, constantly verges
not merely on impertinence but on impropriety" (Jane Austen:
Women, Politics, and the Novel, 75).
In Fictions of Modesty, particularly in Part One,
"Codifications," Yeazell details the rigorous codification
of modesty into pudeur, a highly structured commodity (with
clear outward manifestations) desirable and necessary for
marriageable young women, a "civic institution," that is
paradoxically considered natural by such luminaries as
Rousseau (25). While she does not include Elizabeth Bennet
in the "self-effacing" category of heroines, Yeazell asserts
that even a "bold and lively" heroine like Elizabeth is
subsumed into the "fictions of modesty": because them she
cannot allow herself to know that she is in love (xi). Her
59
unawareness brings about the "long circuit" required by the
narrative. In the absence of "female coyness" of one kind
or another, this kind of narrative would always be
"short-circuit[ed] " (232-233) .
13 In addition to Yeazell's discussion, Armstrong,
Johnson, and Poovey make similar cases for the rigidity of
standards of decorum for marriageable young women, citing
conduct books as indicators. Margaret Kirkham points out
that Austen's invention of the Collins inheritance situation
"mocks sexist pride and prejudice as it is enshrined in
legal customs" (xvi). Kirkham also suggests Austen's
heroines, while "not self-conscious feminists" make feminist
claims to moral equality (84). The trouble with Elizabeth
Bennet is that she degenerates from an "accountable being[]"
into a stock heroine in order to get her formal due at the
end of the novel (8 6 ). This claim seems dubious from the
text, which closes affirming Elizabeth's influence on Darcy
and his warm feelings for her middle-class aunt and uncle.
It seems to be rather that Elizabeth's outspokenness (along
with her wit, intelligence, and physicality) denote the same
sort of subversive mockery by Austen as the creation of the
pompous, hypocritical Mr. Collins and the cynical Mr.
Bennet.
14 Of Mrs. Transome, the disappointed and embittered
dowager in Felix Holt. Eliot wrote "[S]he liked every little
sign of power her lot had left her (28). Interestingly,
Mrs. Transome has violated the heroine code and passes off
her illegitimate son as the heir to the Transome estates.
He suffers, but never gets deposed. See discussion in
Chapter 2 of this study.
15 Madwoman 172 and 125.
16 According to Johnson, displacing patriarchal
authority onto Lady Catherine is safe: "she receives all of
the opprobrium we are never permitted to aim directly at
Darcy or his parents, or at great gentry families in
general." These people share attitudes which in Lady
Catherine appear ludicrous. Austen's "female authority
figures," thus rendered as ridiculous, are also a possible
critique of elders' interference--they are "invariably
defied by their young male relations" because they are
"risible" and "easier to assail than, say, fathers and
uncles." But Johnson also concedes that Lady Russell (and
Mrs. Smith of Sense and Sensibility, a woman who never
really appears in the novel) escape the parody and offer
[legitimate] "alternatives to male authority" (88-89).
60
17 John Halperin seems convinced (on rather skimpy
evidence) that this was Austen's "early warm attachment"
(308 for link to Persuasion) .
18 Nearly every critic comments on these problems;
see, for example, Poovey 172.
19 Even Louisa Musgrove is aware of Lady Russell's
interest in the life of the mind. She tells Captain
Wentworth that her brother Charles, who had wanted to marry
Anne, had not been "learned and bookish enough to please
Lady Russell" (I.X.87).
20 Two views of these renderings are apropos. John
Halperin: "Jane Austen laughs so as not to weep" at such
characters--she laughs "at human nature without any real
hope of changing it" (77). Kate Fullbrook: (of Mrs. Norris,
specifically) "The figure that Jane Austen defeats by making
ridiculous" is someone "who reacts to her suppression" by
taking it out on someone else more vulnerable than herself.
"Her comic defeat . . . is an exorcism of the highest
psychological order" (in "The Comic Negative" 54).
Halperin's connotation is sympathy; Fullbrook's satire. But
Halperin's reading of Mr. Bennet concurs more closely with
Fullbrook's reading of the female grotesque. Mr. Bennet's
"bottomless capacity to be amused by others" is
"unsympathetically dealt with." He is Austen's "warning" to
herself about her own ironic detachment: "don't become like
this, Jane Austen may be telling herself" (Halperin 73).
21 Pride and Prejudice II.II.125.
22 According to Gilbert and Gubar, who cite Adrienne
Rich, Lynn Sukenick, and Judith Kegan Gardiner (Madwoman
125-26).
23 A Memoir of Jane Austen, by Austen's nephew, J.E.
Austen-Leigh. Rpt. in Persuasion (Penguin). "In Mrs.
Austen," writes Austen-Leigh, "was to be found much of the
ability which was concentrated in Jane. . . . She . . .
often expressed herself . . . with epigrammatic force and
point" (279). One example Austen-Leigh quotes--Mrs. Austen
on the occasion of the young Jane's being sent with her
sister away to school: "'if Cassandra were to have her head
cut off, Jane would insist on sharing her fate'" (282).
John Halperin makes much of Austen's supposed
resentment of her mother, particularly of Mrs. Austen's
hypochondria. Some of his arguments are quite compelling.
24 Donald Greene's "Partial Pedigree of Jane Austen"
follows xiii in Halperin. See also Donald J. Greene, "Jane
Austen and the Peerage," which explores Austen's use and
61
knowledge of aristocratic names. She used "her own social
status" and knowledge "for greater realism" (160). But she
got that status from her mother.
25 Madwoman 126.
26 The phrase is Margaret Kirkham's (8 6 ).
27 D.A. Miller, Narrative and Its Discontents. 100.
28 According to Miller, they never do fully speak
before us readers. Their key conversation at the end of the
novel is reported--"systematically elided" (104).
29 For instance, she does not "disappear" from the
text,- as -does Mary Crawford -from Mansfield Park, once her
narrative function has been accomplished (Miller 83).
30 D.W. Harding: Lady Russell is "more nearly ideal
than any other living mother that Jane Austen gives a
heroine." She is "a lovable but not perfect mother, who, in
doing her mistaken best for the girl, has caused what seems
an irremediable misfortune" (9). Anne is "deeply attached"
to her (17) .
31 Harding, especially 8 , 16.
32 Deciphering the motive for this "youthful
infatuation" leads one to conclude, as with Mr. Bennet, that
in addition to the lure of his rank, Lady Elliot was the
victim of sexual attraction: she fell for physical beauty
(I.I.10). Possibly Lady Russell feared Anne was making the
same mistake in falling for Wentworth (see Harding 9).
33 This passage specifically refers to appreciation of
Anne's music, but is adduced by Gilbert and Gubar as
evidence of her general "invisibility and silence"--
following the death of her mother (178).
34 Rawson reads the 'chaotic Christmas' at Uppercross
as ironic--a send-up of The Family. Lady Russell and Mr.
Musgrove are the figures of reason, vainly attempting
discourse through the hubbub that Anne categorizes "'a
domestic hurricane'" (xxviii). Anne's censure may be a
validation of Lady Russell's attitude.
35 As Harding points out, "partly from caution and
partly because Mr Elliot is still in mourning for his first
wife" (24).
36 In the sense described by E.M. Forster in Aspects
of the Novel (115-118) .
62
37 Craik 167.
38 Gilbert & Gubar (G&G) claim: "Anne replaces this
cruel stepmother [Lady Russell] with a different kind of
mother surrogate, another widow, ['poor, confined'] Mrs.
Smith" (181). The text of Persuasion does not appear to
confirm this claim: "You will love [Lady Russell] better
than you do now," Anne says to Wentworth in their last
recorded conversation, and the narrator reports finally that
"he was very well disposed to attach himself" to both Lady
Russell and Mrs. Smith, Anne's only friends worth his regard
(Persuasion II.XII.236). At the close of the novel, the
reinstatement of Mrs. Smith through the efforts of Captain
Wentworth indicates rather Anne in the position of
"stepmother" than Mrs. Smith, although the closeness of
their ages (Mrs. Smith is 30--II.V.149--to Anne's 28) makes
friendship more likely than surrogate motherhood. In
addition, Mrs. Smith's initial silence about Mr. Elliot,
also noted by G&G, is motivated by self-interest (G&G 182),
not motherly concern for Anne. Another argument that seems
incomplete is the condemnation of Lady Russell for
"revelling in 'angry pleasure, in pleased contempt'
[II.I.119] at events sure to hurt Anne" (181). The words in
the text immediately following "pleased contempt" are "that
the man who at twenty-three had seemed to understand
somewhat of the value of an Anne Elliot, should, eight years
afterwards, be charmed by a Louisa Musgrave." Thus, Lady
Russell's angry pleasure is at being 'right' in her judgment
of Captain Wentworth--at having 'saved' Anne from him--and
her contempt is for him and Louisa, not for Anne. D.W.
Harding reads this passage as a "choric comment" on "Anne's
worth" opposed to Wentworth's (Harding 10).
39 For a discussion of Austen on women's marriage
choices, see Harding, who cites Mary Crawford on the
Frasers: "about as unhappy as most other married people .
. She could not do otherwise than accept him, for he was
rich, and she had nothing"; and Mrs. Jennings in Sense and
Sensibility: "Then they will have a child every year! and
Lord help 'em! How poor they will be." (Harding 11-12).
Lady Russell fears that Anne will be "sunk by him
[Wentworth] into a state of most wearing, anxious,
youth-killing dependence!" (Persuasion I.IV.30). This
corresponds with the views expressed in Austen's Letters.
for example:
Anna has not a chance of escape; her husband called
here the other day, & said she was pretty well but not
equal to so long a walk; she must come in her Donkey
Carriage.--Poor Animal, she will be worn out before she
is thirty.--I am very sorry for her.--Mrs. Clement too
is in that way again. I am quite tired of so many
Children.-- (No. 142; page 488)
63
Note Austen's telling metaphor: "Poor Animal." I take up
this topic at the conclusion of this chapter.
40 P. Beer, Reader, I Married Him 61.
41 E.g. Levine, Victorian Feminism. Chapter 6 ,
"Marriage and Morality." For discussion of coverture and
such related issues as "divorce, married women's property,
child custody, wife abuse," see Mary Shanley, Feminism,
Marriage, and the Law in Victorian England (3).
42 Shanley cites Blackstone, Commentaries on the Laws
of England. 4 vols. Oxford: Clarendon P., 1765-69. Vol. I,
Chapter II, 430.
43 For one discussion of Caroline Norton see Shanley,
especially 22-29. For another, see Poovey, Uneven
Developments. Chapter 3. According to Poovey, Caroline
Norton's Letter to the Queen "helped Barbara Bodichon
convince the Law Amendment Society to take up the issue of
married women's property" (90).
Not until 1891 could it be said that "'"Coverture" is
dead and buried,'" as E.W. Elmy wrote of the notorious
Clitheroe case, in which the appeals court finally ordered
release of a wife held virtual prisoner by her husband
(Shanley, 182). Other gross abuses included wife-torture
and property appropriation (Levine, Victorian Feminism
Chapter 6 ).
44 According to Claudia Johnson, the conventional view
was that "'second attachments,'" including those of widows,
were disapproved because they connoted unseemly freedom of
choice in a woman's "emotional and erotic life"--freedom too
close to that of men (6 6 ). Lady Russell, however, exercises
more freedom by not remarrying; so would most wealthy
widows.
45 "Heroine fiction" abounds with instances of
patriarchal exploitation of innocent women in this situation
(Mary Wollstonecraft's Mary and Maria come to mind). As an
example, Claudia Johnson discusses the way the Brandon
family victimizes the two Elizas in Sense and Sensibility
(Johnson 56-57).
See Phillipa Levine, "So Few Prizes..." The title of
the article refers to an 1883 feminist article "pondering
the pros and cons of marriage for women" which compared the
institution to a lottery with "'so few prizes and so many
blanks.'" Marriage seemed such a bad deal for women that
it is a wonder more did not opt out. But, as Levine points
out, those who did were the targets of society's "pity,
condescension, and even hostility." Such was the pressure
that only the strongest women were likely to choose to
64
remain single; and, of those, women capable of supporting
themselves were in the minority. Widows may often have
identified with the self-designated "'Freed Woman Lytton,'"
the widow of Edward Bulwer Lytton, who, according to Levine,
tyrannized his wife systematically (167).
Sally Mitchell notes: "Marriage required a woman to
give up her name, her identity, her right to her own body,
her property, her legal existence and her ability to act
independently" (Fallen Angels 175).
46 Northrop Frye discusses this classical comedy form
in "The Mythos of Spring: Comedy," pp. 163-166 of Anatomy
of Criticism.
47 See Introduction, p. 8 for discussion of the
Countess in The Female Quixote (Book VII, Chapter V ff.),
who has not only no story, but no name.
48 Along these lines, as I have suggested in the
introduction, one might argue about the unlikelihood of the
characters of the older Bennet girls, although they do have
the advantage of their sensible aunt, Mrs. Gardiner, as an
example. Moreover, neither of them initially has the
perception of Anne Elliot. Both have faults they must
overcome during the course of the narrative: Elizabeth her
impulsiveness and Jane her reserve.
49 Margaret Kirkham outlines a similar argument to
mine concerning Lady Russell: she emerges from "the stock
figure of a worldly society woman" with the "further
refinement" necessary for the duality of her nature. But
Kirkham argues Lady Russell is "not quite convincing," not
quite worthy of "Anne's regard" (152) . If Anne depended on
relating to her moral equals, though, she would be
solitary--both in her fictional world and outside it.
50 Use of the given names "Susan" and "Catherine" (or
"Anne," Darcy's mother) with the title "Lady" denotes a
woman who holds the title in her own right, by virtue of
being an earl's (or at least a marquis's) daughter and
therefore a member of the nobility. Such a woman retains
her title after marriage, unless she marries a man with a
higher title. Marvin Mudrick is incorrect in claiming that
Lady Susan "is a lady because she chose the right husband"
(136). If that were the case, supposing, as Mudrick does,
her husband to have been Sir Frederic--unlikely since his
brother, Mr. Vernon has now inherited his estate--she would
be Lady Vernon. In the same situation, as consort to Sir
Lewis, Lady Catherine would be Lady de Bourgh. Use of the
first names in this manner would have immediately alerted
readers to the distinction between these aristocratic women
and Lady Russell.
65
51 See note 16.
52 Yet by no means does it endorse such a policy for
everyone. Neither Anne's mother, for instance, nor her
sister Mary is capable of making wise choices about
marriage.
53 An early critic picked up on this endorsement of
youthful choice: 1 1 fPersuasionl contains parts of very great
merit; among them, however, we certainly should not number
its moral, which seems to be, that young people should
always marry according to their own inclinations and upon
their own judgment; for that if in consequence of listening
to grave counsels, they defer their marriage, till they have
wherewith to live upon, they will be laying the foundation
for years of misery, such-as only the heroes and heroines of
novels can reasonably hope ever to see the end of" (Unsigned
review, British Critic. December 1817, rpt. Southam 1.84).
54 Philippa Levine examines correspondence between a
later aunt and niece, in which Victorian feminist Emilia
Pattison wrote that without not only "love" but "moral and
intellectual" equality, marriage "as a means of subsistence"
for a woman was "utterly degrading and abhorrent" ("So Few
Prizes" 160).
55 Whether "patrophobia" runs through men's writings
(Oscar Wilde aside) is a question I am not attempting to
address here; nevertheless, nineteenth-century men had other
options in life than fatherhood. I am certainly implying
that the gender issues in which matrophobia is crucial
inevitably affect women's writing.
56 Discussed at the beginning of Chapter 3 (p. 115).
57 He cites opportunities Austen turned down at the
ages of twenty-six, thirty-two, and thirty-nine (309).
58 This may be the place for a brief discussion of the
points raised by Deborah Kaplan about cultural duality and
women's culture as they relate to Austen's creative
support-system. Kaplan's theory here sounds rather like the
Ardeners' "model of women's culture," represented
diagrammatically by intersecting circles that produce a
"'wild' zone" for women but not for men--as outlined by
Elaine Showalter in "Feminist Criticism in the Wilderness"
(Feminist Criticism 262). Kaplan contends that Austen
enjoyed the encouragement of "a small circle of enthusiastic
female supporters," to whom she addressed herself with the
kind of "self-confidence" that she did not employ in
addressing male correspondents and that was "not consistent
66
with domestic femininity" (Kaplan 99). Other evidence in
the letters, argues Kaplan, indicates Austen discussed
work-in-progress with such confidantes as Cassandra--and
Fanny Knight, although not with her brothers (104).
Kaplan's theory seems to be substantiated in the Lady
Susan-Mrs. Johnson relationship in Lady Susan.
59 War of Ideas 291.
67
Part II
In the following two chapters I focus on George Eliot
characters, for reasons that may be obvious but need to be
articulated. As a mature, independent, and educated woman,
she must have been vitally interested in the fate of older
women. As the premier novelist of her time and a prominent,
respected intellectual, she was in a unique position to
explore through fictional settings and characters the
limitations and opportunities available to women. Her
friendships with other leading thinkers and with women
activists could only enhance her contributions to these
issues, as her correspondence and non-fiction writings
attest. She probably said as much about the nineteenth-
century, middle-class older woman's plot as any one person
is capable of saying.
But no writer works in a vacuum. Eliot in particular,
as I will be arguing, was strongly influenced by other
writers, particularly in terms of subject-matter, and
attracted to the idea of revising characters and motifs of
current importance. To provide some of the context for
Eliot's responses, I have used Dickens as a counterpoint to
George Eliot in this section. As the writer she replaced in
popularity after his death and whose preeminence was
established when she first considered novel-writing,
68
Dickens represents the standard against which her work is
logically placed.
There is quite strong evidence for reading Felix Holt
as a revision of Bleak House, particularly in respect of
Mrs. Transome as a re-write of Lady Dedlock. This theory
underlies the major part of my discussion in Chapter 2,
which is titled "The Beautiful" because women who get the
opportunity to rebel--those who may be labeled
transgressive--are usually beautiful.
Fictionally less important older women characters are
grouped in Chapter 3 as "The Useful." Obviously, these
divisions are arbitrary--and some women fall into both
categories (the useful and the beautiful). In the case of
Dorothea Brooke (Middlemarch). for example, it seems finally
unclear whether, as a political wife, she becomes useful
rather than beautiful (her goal through the whole novel), or
if she is useful by virtue of being ornamental. But the
characters in Chapter 3 in general are noteworthy mostly
because they are useful to the dominant culture, which they
help promote--especially by complying with what it expects
of them.
Part II concludes with a discussion of two
diametrically opposite conformists. Their creator, another
popular mature woman writer, is Elizabeth Gaskell, an
appropriate choice for a second counterpoint to her
contemporary, George Eliot. Although Wives and Daughters is
69
by no means Gaskell's only medium for the depiction of
"heroine's mothers," I have chosen to discuss two characters
in that novel because they contrast so vividly with the
other characters in this section, as well as with each
other. Mrs. Hamley is almost Trollopian in her self-
sacrificing thoughtfulness despite insurmountable troubles
(Lily Dale, of The Chronicles of Barsetshire. comes to mind:
Trollope himself thought her memorable "because she could
not get over her troubles"--An Autobiography. 179). Mrs.
Hamley's mirror-image, the self-absorbed Mrs. Gibson, is a
nightmarish stepmother; but she is also the logical product
of the conditions of her existence. Mrs. Gibson has
traditionally been read as a grotesque, the source of
distress for the two heroines. But "emphasis added" reveals
Gaskell's sensitivity toward this character, making possible
a reading in which Mrs. Gibson is more to be pitied than
blamed.
The comparison of the beautiful and the useful in Part
II concludes that although the society appeared to want
women to be both and to give immediate rewards for beauty,
useful women have better, though limited, long-term
opportunities for satisfying lives. I have not addressed
(it seems to need no promotion from me) the advantages of a
minuscule third category, "the independently rich."
70
Chapter 2
The Beautiful
A withered and very ugly old woman, dressed not so much like a gipsy as like any of
that medley race of vagabonds who tramp about the country, begging, and stealing, and
tinkering, and weaving rushes, by turns, or all together, had been observing the lady, too;
for as she rose, this second figure strangely confronting the first, scrambled up from the
ground--out of it, it almost appeared--and stood in the way.
"Let me tell your fortune, my pretty lady," said the old woman, munching, with her
jaws, as if the Death's Head beneath her yellow skin were impatient to get out.
"I can tell it for myself," was the reply.
"Ay, ay, pretty lady; but not right. You didn't tell it right when you were
sitting there. I see you! Give me a piece of silver, pretty lady, and I'll tell your
fortune. There's riches, pretty lady, in your face." "I know," returned the lady, passing
her with a dark smile, and a proud step. "I knew it before."
"What! You won't give me nothing?" cried the old woman. "You won't give me
nothing to tell your fortune, pretty lady? How much will you give me not to tell it,
then?1 1 --Dotnbev and Son. Chapter 27) .
Celia thought it would be pleasant to hear the story.
"I daresay not," said Dorothea, pinching her sister's chin. "If you knew how it
came about, it would not seem wonderful to you."
"Can't you tell me?" said Celia, settling her arms cozily.
"No, dear, you would have to feel with me, else you would never know."--
Middlemarch. Chapter 84).
Not all the beautiful young women in domestic fiction
are heroines, but nearly all the heroines are beautiful,
although as such they do not necessarily qualify for the
group to be discussed in this chapter. Heroines are all
nonconformists because their "story" itself briefly violates
domestic ideology's criteria; however, settling into the
"domestic woman" role is especially difficult for the
heroine noted only for her beauty--she is probably the most
rebellious. Previously, she has been feted and courted
without having to do anything, she has needed only to be;
when courtship is over, to avoid misery, she must learn to
be pragmatic. Otherwise her story cannot end; but she
becomes irrelevant, re-appearing in another heroine's story,
perhaps as a tragic or absurd figure dealing with still
unresolved issues. In this context, former heroines are
71
obvious examples to current heroines of the consequences of
not progressing smoothly from heroine to domestic woman.
But they are much more than mere warnings: they illustrate
the terrible limitations imposed on women by societies that
mostly value women for youthful beauty.
In rejecting conventions of motherhood and domesticity,
beautiful ex-heroines rebel against the oppression of
marriage itself, an institution that could lead women to
misery, even literal bondage. Beautiful women are
particularly susceptible to bad marriages because their
assets on the marriage market are physically apparent ones
that may attract the highest bidder; the more the marriage
resembles a sale, the more likely the husband feels that he
has bought something to use as he pleases. Under these
circumstances, beauty is a liability: it helps objectify a
woman, something that is already legally permissible.1
Several of George Eliot's beauties suffer from this
predicament; for example Gwendolen Harleth (Daniel Deronda)
feels forced to marry "well"--she escapes opulent slavery
only by her husband's death. His death might be considered
fortuitous--and fits a pattern Eliot employs with other
heroines trapped in bad marriages, of having the husbands
conveniently die.2 These rescues from horrible
circumstances might well derive from the sometimes
conflicting artistic impulses of realism and sympathy that
72
Eliot expresses in "The Natural History of German Life,"
written after she herself had begun writing novels.
In that essay, Eliot asserts that "social novels
profess to represent the people as they are." The reason
that art must be faithful to life is to draw "a picture"
that "surprises even the trivial and the selfish into . . .
attention to . . . the raw material of moral sentiment."
In social novels, then, representation must be faithful to
"the true" object in order to elicit sympathy for the
oppressed. "Falsification here is far more pernicious than
in the more artificial aspects of life"3; if the vicarious
experience is false, we have been lied to about the lot of
the less fortunate. Idealized versions of oppressed people
(easier for the cultured to sympathize with) are not only
"pernicious" because they are untrue; they also lend
credence to "a miserable fallacy that high morality and
refined sentiment can grow out of harsh social relations,
ignorance, and want."4
At the same time, Eliot emphasizes the need for
sympathy. The pressing reason for faithful representation
is "the awakening of social sympathies" for "the peasant in
all his coarse apathy, and the artisan in all his suspicious
selfishness."5 One might add, for women in all their
.triviality, ignorance, and compliance--traits that John
Stuart Mill claims arise in women because they "are schooled
into suppressing" their independent characteristics.6
73
George Eliot demonstrates the same reasoning when she pleads
for opportunities for women more like those enjoyed by men--
for instance, in her letters, in her review of the Life of
Milton, and the essays on Madame de Sable and on Margaret
Fuller and Mary Wollstonecraft; these appeals are paralleled
by situations involving suffering women in her fiction.7
A.S. Byatt summarizes George Eliot: "She was a complex
woman, at once freely independent and timidly clinging,
powerfully intelligent and full of a compelled artistic
ambition that sprang both from 'feeling' and the mind"
(xiv). This duality underlies her particular mixture of
realism and romanticism, depicting conditions as she
understood them and at the same time expressing sympathy for
women who had to endure those conditions--especially in
'rescuing' susceptible beautiful heroines from brutal or
unfeeling men, the husbands such women often attracted.
This kind of sympathy is evident in her earliest
fiction, Scenes of Clerical Life. Each "scene" describes a
woman in a marital crisis because of the passivity that law
and morality required of women8--two of these women die as
a direct result. Only one survives--the beautiful one,
Janet Dempster, in "Janet's Repentance," who finds the
courage to rise above convention. A woman of "rich pale
beauty" ("the handsomest bride that ever came out of Milby
Church")9, Janet is herself the victim of her vicious
husband. Moreover, her widowed mother's property is under
74
his control, too, meaning any escape is effectively blocked.
During a violent scene, Janet is turned out of the house by
her husband and is forced to hide at a neighbor's. Her
husband's accidental death during the ensuing separation
frees her but makes her feel guilty, although she has done
nothing wrong. Cultural propriety places restrictions on an
attractive widow who has 'misbehaved' by running away from
an abusive husband: after his death, she does not feel
"allowed" to love another man.
Of Mr. Dempster, the narrator comments: "an unloving,
tyrannous, brutal man needs no motive to prompt his cruelty;
he needs only the perpetual presence of a woman he can call
his own." For such a man, the ownership of numerous animals
could not "glut his lust of torture" (note the violence of
the language), because the animals "could not feel as one
woman does" (335). What an indictment of nineteenth-
century marriage!10
An indication of prevalent attitudes to a marriage like
this one is the reaction of a neighbor. Mr. Dempster has
willed Janet "pretty nearly all his property to do as she
likes with." The neighbor comments, "that isn't behaving
like such a very bad husband" (3 90) . She implies that if he
had wanted to, Dempster could have continued tormenting
Janet with his 'dead hand,' for instance explicitly
thwarting her remarriage, the way Casaubon does with
Dorothea in Middlemarch.
75
While Janet Dempster (like Dorothea in Middlemarch and
Gwendolen in Daniel Deronda) is at least partially 'rescued'
by her husband's death, she has first suffered his
brutality: Scenes of Clerical Life gives a bleak picture of
what some women face after marriage. Janet may well be like
Lady Russell in not remarrying: she is probably unwilling to
jeopardize her freedom again, particularly in view of the
death of the only likely candidate, the saintly Mr. Tryan,
the "clerical" connection in this "scene." Janet turns
instead to unspecified "helpful labor" in the community,
making her unusual--a beautiful woman who finds an outlet
for "gratitude and patient effort" (412) in useful work.11
Since Janet is not a mother and is no longer a wife,
her work (whatever it is) cannot detract from her family
duties. Hence there is nothing particularly subversive
about her ending, other than the notion that she has been
"rescued." Widows have it both ways: they are perceived as
having done their duty. Remarriage was discouraged by
Positivism, the popular "Religion of Humanity" (at one time
espoused by Eliot) .12 Yet widows were more like grown-ups
than other women, because they were legally autonomous
individuals.
The evidence suggests that Janet's ending is a
"rescue." Writing to her publisher, John Blackwood, in
response to his complaint that "Dempster is rather too
76
barefaced a brute," and that beer was an "unsentimental . . .
resource" for Janet to have turned to, Eliot asserted that
in fact she had "softened" the situation for artistic
purposes: "the real Dempster was far more disgusting than
mine; the real Janet alas! had a far sadder end than mine,
who will melt away from the reader's sight in purity,
happiness and beauty. "13
Whether a rescue or not, Janet's fate certainly leaves
open the question of what happens in this society to the
beautiful woman who has not yet resolved her long-ago
rebellion against, or bitter experience of, heroine
ideology. In a society that would limit them to motherhood
and allied occupations, many women "wanted more," as George
Eliot herself wanted more: the useful work of Janet's
redemption. Janet's fate leads inevitably to the conclusion
that the price of finding useful work is solitude, a price
many women would not choose to pay.
George Eliot Revises Ladv Dedlock
Her early fiction provided George Eliot a way to
express imaginative sympathy with issues like female
authority.14 But the representation of a heroine's whole
life after marriage might do more: it might generate moral
outrage about women's helplessness and lack of
opportunity.15 Such an expose would be tricky, considering
the limitations of "realism" imposed by the very morality
77
under attack. One way it could be accomplished was in
working with material supplied by other writers, a strategy
Eliot had employed before; for instance in Adam Bede (1859) ,
she specifically sought to rewrite Elizabeth Gaskell's novel
Ruth (1853) .16
She probably used the same strategy with Felix Holt.
the Radical (1866). Among the political topics addressed in
this novel are the three key issues raised in the Scenes:
women's legal, social, and sexual oppression. Instead of
three characters, the suffering woman is now one character,
Mrs. Transome, whose plot and character suggest a revision
of Lady Dedlock of Bleak House.17 The two novels offer
several other parallel characters: the two Esthers, the
respective heroines, both with the sacrificial, redemptive
qualities of their biblical namesake18 are the most obvious
examples.
George Eliot was probably very familiar with Bleak
House. In 18 54, she began her union with George Henry
Lewes, who inspired and encouraged her fiction writing.
Lewes not only reviewed Bleak House when it appeared in 18 53
but was also the only living person mentioned in the
Preface: Dickens refers to him as "my good friend." Lewes's
personal connection with Dickens and the enormous popularity
of Bleak House may have combined to attract Eliot's interest
in re-exploring this familiar territory.
78
Robert Caserio argues that Mrs. Transome is an
outstanding example of George Eliot's questioning of Dickens
characters, an effort at a more "realistic" version of
Dickens's "sensationalism" and undisciplined plotting
(128). Caserio claims that Dickens's coincidences are
haphazard, and his characters get "rescued" from bad fates,
even if it is a "double" who enjoys success rather than the
original character. Hence, Esther Summerson's
happy-ever-after is a "rescue" for Lady Dedlock, of whom
Esther is a double, as is Rosa, the new lady's-maid--or, for
that matter, Hortense, the former lady's-maid and the
murderer. According to Caserio, the different characters
illustrate possible alternative fates for Lady Dedlock.19
Lady Dedlock's life is "fulfill[ed] as she wants to fulfill
it": emphasizing her romantic and undying love for Hawdon,
Lady Dedlock succumbs at the entrance to the cemetery where
he lies in a pauper's grave (144).
In Mrs. Transome, we get "a more lifelike donnee and
more potential genuine pity and fear than Dickens could
achieve" (129). Mrs. Transome's passion has already fizzled
out; instead of disappearing into poverty and an anonymous
death like Lady Dedlock's Hawdon, Mrs. Transome's former
lover has turned into a fat, manipulative bourgeois who
stays around to become also her tormentor, Felix Holt's
version of Lady Dedlock's nemesis, the lawyer Tulkinghorn.
According to Caserio, the Eliot version is more true-to-life
79
(as we age, we become tired, unattractive, and boring); and
Dickens's rescue strategy is, by contrast, a series of
"heroic" (147) struggles to impose meaning on life's
"arbitrariness" (145).
This evidence does support the revisionism argument,
and one of George Eliot's stated purposes is to say old
things in new ways.20 But she seems to be employing
different fictional conventions, rather than more realistic
ones. It seems disingenuous to claim that Dickensian
coincidences are less plausible than Eliot's. In the lost
wallet episode of Felix Holt, a usually reliable valet,
engaged in a confidential errand, just happens to take opium
and fall asleep under a secluded tree and be discovered
there by the very colleague he has humiliated, who happens
to have handy a knife with which to cut off the (exposed)
pocket in which lies the wallet containing the key
documents. There is more: Felix Holt, the only person who
would deliver the wallet to the Rev. Lyon (who must be the
one to get it), just happens to be the one to walk by at the
right moment to see it lying in the bushes. That's a
staggering chain of coincidences.
The convoluted plot lines concerning inheritance and
legitimacy seem just as improbable and melodramatic in Felix
Holt as in Bleak House--merely different. Why is the lover
transformed into blackmailer more "real" than the lover lost
in obscurity? Mrs. Transome might feel more threatened by
80
possible exposure than Jermyn would; but it does not seem
particularly realistic that he would not also feel too much
at risk himself to blackmail her. Old Mrs. Transome and old
Jermyn, seeing each other constantly and never uttering
their secret--that seems as melodramatic as does Lady
Dedlock's solitary jumpiness over her similar secret.
What the novels share, and what George Eliot seems
interested in revising, is the underlying presence of these
mysteriously nervous older women. Gillian Beer names Mrs.
Transome the "progenitor" of Felix Holt (142); although she
is "the arch-conservative" politically, she is also "far and
away the most radical person in feeling" in this novel
(134). Exactly the same claims may be made of Lady Dedlock.
Both women start the plots of their novels by giving birth
to illegitimate children.21 Both keep silent, attempting
to uphold conservative status quos; both are undone by
desire and motherhood. Both have been beautiful rebels--and
are dire warnings to their respective Esthers that beauty
and sexuality "should" be used selflessly and that the
exchange of beauty for material gain is bad. Mrs. Transome
wins a Pyrrhic victory;22 Lady Dedlock ends up defeated,
although partially redeemed by the undying love of Sir
Leicester.
Lady Dedlock's life and death are far more exciting
than Mrs. Transome's--Lady Dedlock's title, her wealth, her
still vibrant beauty, and her demeanor are all richly
81
dramatized and emphasized with figurative language.
Compare, for example, the two deaths. Lady Dedlock flees
dramatically through the country to St. Albans, pursued by
Esther and Inspector Bucket; having changed clothes with a
poor woman earlier befriended by Esther, Lady Dedlock
doubles back to London, leaving Esther a written record of
her wanderings, and is found dead at the graveyard gate.23
Mrs. Transome, with a much more radical plot than that of
Lady Dedlock, merely fades out; she just dies--no graveyard,
no blizzard, no loving daughter rushing after her, and
certainly no brokenhearted husband to mourn her. Her story
ends in silence; she cedes to the young couple the
resolution of the novel.
The ongoing predicament of Mrs. Transome illustrates
one of George Eliot's major complaints about the condition
of women: the absence of meaningful work--worse for someone
who has once had essential work to do and is deposed, as is
the case with Mrs. Transome. Her emotional bankruptcy, her
feelings of uselessness and abandonment--all these, though,
represent more than a simple catharsis. As I have
suggested with Austen's Lady Russell, readers might see the
mother (here Mrs. Transome) as a stand-in for the writer
herself. Logically, desire might have led her to a similar
position (in this case, disgrace and solitude), but for the
freedom and power writing has given. A mature woman needs
something worthwhile to do, a purpose for living, and few
82
choices were available. Writing can make a space for the
strong woman, but few women can claim this space. George
Eliot's message is partly a vindication: she is showing that
women who "want more" must be prepared to defy all of their
culture--to put themselves beyond the pale, as she herself
did. The alternative, for a heroine whose prime ended upon
her marriage, was often a gradual descent into triviality
and bitterness.
Lady Dedlock
The first impression of Lady Dedlock indicates
world-weary boredom: "My Lady Dedlock has returned to her
house in town for a few days previous to her departure for
Paris. . . after which her movements are uncertain. . . .
[H]er "place in Lincolnshire . . . has been extremely
dreary." Amid the description of this dreariness is
embedded the first, easily overlooked, reference to the
Ghost's Walk, a melodramatic device associated throughout
the novel with Lady Dedlock's impending doom. Also perhaps
easily overlooked is the reason for her precipitate
departure from Lincolnshire: the "childless" Lady Dedlock
"has been put quite out of temper" by the sight of a child
and its mother rushing outdoors in wet weather to greet
their father and husband on his return home. She says she
is "'bored to death,'" but we have been allowed to see
83
already something of what ails her (56). According to
convention, a childless woman is incomplete.
Lady Dedlock fills the void by taking a place "at the
top of the fashionable tree" (57). From her own perspective
in her mirror, she is "quite out of the reach and ken of
ordinary mortals" (59), dispensing bored and haughty
patronage to "deferential people, in a dozen callings," and
accepting quite naively their "profound subservience" (59).
As "Alexander wept when he had no more worlds to conquer,"
Lady Dedlock "fell, not into the melting, but rather into
the freezing mood" (57); she has become insensitive to
feeling. Yet almost immediately follows the first instance
of Lady Dedlock's tenuous control of her emotions: she
swoons at the sight of handwriting on legal documents.
(Readers do not learn the reason for her reaction until much
later, but she has recognized the handwriting as that of her
former lover, Hawdon). This moment of vulnerability
ultimately proves to be her undoing. Her freezing mood is
not secure, and neither are her leadership in fashionable
society or her position as Sir Leicester's wife, at least as
far as she understands it.
As prideful and arrogant as Lady Dedlock appears to be
at the beginning of the novel, she has, however, inspired
the unwavering love of her husband, Sir Leicester. Her
parting letter to him--and indeed her decision to disappear
into anonymity-- indicates her concern about his feelings:
84
"May you, in your just resentment," she writes, "be able to
forget the unworthy woman on whom you have wasted a most
generous devotion" (816). And later, in another letter, to
Esther, she writes "I shall be soon forgotten so, and shall
disgrace him [Sir Leicester] least. I have nothing about me
by which I can be recognized" (865) .
This same letter, written "in portions, at different
times" for Esther during Lady Dedlock's flight, also
demonstrates passionate feelings for Esther, her new-found
child. Lady Dedlock writes that, in despair though she was,
she went all the way to St. Albans for a glimpse of her
daughter--"but only to see her--not to speak to her, or let
her know that I was near." At St. Alban's, Jenny, the
brickmaker's wife, has helped Lady Dedlock--for Esther's
sake, because Esther has previously been kind to Jenny
(865) . Lady Dedlock's concern for Jenny (a poor woman, a
nobody) is another response that does not fit the autocratic
figure, "beautiful, elegant, accomplished, and powerful in
her little world" who "reigns supreme" in that world (447).
This concern is echoed in Lady Dedlock's dealings with
Rosa, the maid. Lady Dedlock has "taken a fancy to the
pretty girl" (300)--who, at nineteen, is the age her child
"would" be, of course--persuading Rosa to stay on as her
personal maid, rather than leave to be married right away.
But when Lady Dedlock fears that the scandal concerning
herself is about to break and may jeopardize Rosa's chances
85
of marrying Watt, because of the reaction of his father, Mr.
Rouncewell, she orders Rosa to leave. She has already
secretly written to Mr. Rouncewell, asking him to collect
Rosa (708). She has taken these steps in spite of Mr.
Tulkinghorn's admonitions that she is to change nothing, or
he will reveal her secret. Her renunciation of Rosa, then,
is clearly an act of self-sacrifice, confirmed when Mr.
Tulkinghorn announces that as a result their agreement is
now void (716). Lady Dedlock has done all this for someone
who, like Jenny, does not "matter." In putting Rosa's well
being above her own, Lady Dedlock does appear to love Rosa,
even if that love is a substitute for the feelings she
cannot express toward her own daughter, Esther.
Earlier, Mrs. Rouncewell, a staunch apologist for the
Dedlocks, whom she has served for sixty years, has admitted
that it is "almost a pity . . . that my Lady has no family.
If she had had a daughter now, a grown young lady, to
interest her, I think she would have had the only kind of
excellence she wants'" (208). And certainly, the most
dramatic change occurs in Lady Dedlock when she finds out
that her daughter did not die, as she had believed. She is
able to keep her composure until she is alone; but then she
is on her knees, crying, "'O my child, my child! Not dead in
the first hours of her life, as my cruel sister told me; but
sternly nurtured by her, after she had renounced me and my
name! O my child, O my child!'" (466) .24
86
As soon as possible, she tells Esther that they are
mother and daughter, but the secret must stay a secret, for
"I have a husband, wretched and dishonoring creature that I
am!" (566) . Her husband is representative of the system
that has oppressed her--he also loves her unconditionally.
Because of the genuineness of his feeling, she tries to
maintain loyalty to him. This dichotomy exemplifies one of
the ways the system "traps" women into compliance. Lady
Dedlock leaves Esther with these words:
"If you hear of Lady Dedlock, brilliant,
prosperous, and flattered; think of your
wretched mother, conscience-stricken,
underneath that mask! Think that the
reality is in her suffering, in her useless
remorse, in her murdering within her breast
the only love and truth of which it is
capable. And then forgive her, if you can."
(568)
The knowledge of her daughter's existence has been missing,
yet as may be inferred from her reaction to the loving
family at Chesney Wold and to Hawdon's handwriting, maternal
feelings were already present beneath her fashionable mask
of cynicism.
Lady Dedlock is apparently successful with her mask.
She has convinced not only the fashionable world, but also
herself, of her invulnerability. But the world below her
"knows her weaknesses, prejudices, follies, haughtinesses,
and caprices" quite thoroughly (59). This "world" of course
includes Mr. Tulkinghorn, to whom Lady Dedlock's reactions
are quite transparent. In her arrogance, she underestimates
87
the lawyer: "She supposes herself to be an inscrutable
Being, quite out of the reach and ken of ordinary
mortals--seeing herself in her glass, where indeed she looks
so" (59).
Indeed, it is this self-confident mask, not her beauty,
that Lady Dedlock looks for again in her mirror, during one
of her frequent inquiries after Mr. Tulkinghorn. Looking at
"her own brooding face," she sees Hortense watching and
taxes the maid to concentrate on what she is supposed to be
doing: "'You can contemplate your beauty at another time.'"
The maid replies, "'Pardon! It was your Ladyship's beauty.'"
Far from the reassurance that Mrs. Transome wants in the
Felix Holt maid-mirror scenes, Lady Dedlock flatly dismisses
the compliment. "'That,' says my Lady, 'you needn't
contemplate at all'" (213). Lady Dedlock, who i_s beautiful,
does not care about her beauty at all (she is quite annoyed
at a compliment from Mr. Jarndyce, an old acquaintance from
her youth--310). Mrs. Transome, who was beautiful, despairs
as she looks in her mirror, desperately trying to recapture
the quality by her worth has been measured.
The measure of Lady Dedlock is hard to take, since we
are mostly excluded from her consciousness. For instance,
we do not know why she has "flitted away to town," leaving
Sir Leicester at Chesney Wold (272). Actually, she has gone
to the extreme of acquiring servant's clothes and, in
disguise, tracking down Jo, the crossing sweeper, to find
88
out about Hawdon. This course of action requires
considerable courage, as well as resourcefulness, and is
incongruous with a bored and self-adoring woman of fashion.
Yet after the interview with Jo, Lady Dedlock "goes to a
grand dinner, and three or four balls" (2 79)--perhaps to
give herself an alibi.
From the beginning, there is a doomed quality about
Lady Dedlock, of which the Ghost Walk and its legend are
symbolic. According to the legend, the sound of steps on
the walk would be especially noticeable "when calamity, or
when disgrace is coming." Mrs. Rouncewell, who tells the
story, adds that what is remarkable is that the sound "must
be heard." While Lady Dedlock is in London seeing Jo, Mrs.
Rouncewell (who is rather deaf) remarks, "in all these years
I never heard the step upon the Ghost's Walk, more distinct
than it is tonight!" (279). And when Lady Dedlock at first
persuades Rosa to stay with her, the narrator interjects
some rhetorical questions about Lady Dedlock's reverie: "Or
does she listen to the Ghost's Walk, and think what step
does it most resemble? A man's? A woman's? The pattering of
a little child's feet, ever coming on--on--on? Some
melancholy influence is upon her; or why should so proud a
lady close the doors, and sit alone upon the hearth so
desolate?" (455). This connection of Lady Dedlock to the
ghost legend is one way she is marked as haunted with the
prospect of calamity.
In Lady Dedlock's appearances, and especially her
solitary ones, the absence of interiority is not a flaw.
Our not knowing is narratively necessary, just as our
knowing the state of Mrs. Transome's thoughts iss necessary
in Felix Holt. Lady Dedlock is essentially "frozen"--she
herself is almost as ignorant as are readers. She does not
know Esther lived (the sister has deliberately hidden
herself and Esther); she thinks Hawdon is dead; to forget
about them, she has busied herself with the trivialities of
fashionable life. Mrs. Transome, by contrast, has lived
almost completely in the past; for her, remembering is as
obsessive as Lady Dedlock's forgetting.
Mrs. Transome
Lady Dedlock plays far less prominent a role in Bleak
House than does Mrs. Transome in Felix Holt, the Radical.
In this character, George Eliot explores the long-term
implications of marriage and motherhood for a beautiful
woman in nineteenth-century culture who has been traded on
the marriage-market, illustrating what might happen to the
rebel-heroine thirty or forty years later. This is a long
aftermath, compared for example, with the one in Mary
Wollstonecraft's fictional critique of the barter-marriage
system in The Wrongs of Woman (published in 1798). A
generation later than Wollstonecraft's Maria, Mrs. Transome
has presumably had a nominal "say" (at age twenty or under)
90
in contracting her marriage; her choices, however, were
limited in the same way--by family pressure.
Unusual focus on her story and its unraveling make Mrs.
Transome unique. Nearly all other ex-heroines are virtually
invisible qua ex-heroines;25 few have stories as
accessible or as overtly tragic. In Mrs. Transome's story,
female desire is addressed in comparatively straightforward
terms. More details are given about her education,
background, and marriage than about any of the other
characters discussed in this study. She meets "heroine"
criteria the most fully: she is the most emotional; she
suffers the most, falls the furthest, and is the most silent
at the end. Mrs. Transome is especially interesting in the
ways she undermines the expected happy ending of the other
plot in the novel--the heroine plot--and, therefore,
undermines heroine ideology itself.
Felix Holt begins with a retrospective of the
countryside before the Reform Bill. This opening suggests
nostalgia and mystery, the keynotes to Mrs. Transome's
history26--her heroineship in the past, along with her
seduction, and her deception about the outcome--and
establishes the historical context of the novel that
follows. If Felix Holt is a pitch for the curative powers of
"organic progress" (rather than the accelerated changes
symbolized by the railway), then the coach-ride beginning of
the novel has an additional function "beyond picturesqueness
91
and nostalgia": to symbolize that "organic progress."27
The distancing of the introduction avoids overt didacticism,
at the same time providing readers a sense of shared
experience.28
Calling upon the mythic past--even its "departed
evils-establishes a fictional unity for readers adrift in
the turbulent and increasingly hostile present. Updating
classic modes, this type of appeal to nostalgia replaces the
epic invocation: now, mass-produced technology gathers
readers together, reenacting the classical transformation of
oral traditions into writing and pre-industrial print, with
the same motive. Valorizing the past creates distance from
the present and the illusion of a neutral place from which
to critique it.
The transformed epic singer, the coachman, has a
similar democratic and legendary appeal to that of the way
of travel he personifies. A traveler who collects and swaps
yarns, he is a Wordsworthian connector of communities and
individuals. He makes virtually inextricable from the
mythic shared past the particular story of Mrs. Transome, in
which readers seem to have a stake, as they do in its
setting. She is yet not the former heroine, Arabella
Lingdon Transome, whom we will encounter in the novel; the
nebulous "she" that the coachman refers to could be
Everywoman--on her epic journey through life after her
heroine days are over. The coachman is too canny--or too
92
forgetful--to tell the whole story. But what he does tell
say sets the stage for what seems truly radical about Felix
Holt. not the rather lame courtship plot of the improbable
Felix, but the story and character of Mrs. Transome. In
this sense, too, Felix Holt follows the classical practice
of "grouping its interesting characters around a somewhat
dullish pair of technical leads."29
The way Mrs. Transome's history is first alluded to--as
local folklore, by a humble figure, the coachman--makes it
seem commonplace. He brings up the muddled inheritance:30
Generations back, the heir of the Transome
name had somehow bargained away the estate,
and it fell to the Durfeys, very distant
connexions, who only called themselves
Transomes because they had got the estate.
But the Durfeys' claim had been disputed
over and over again. (10)
The sketchy history of the Transomes ends with the comment
"that property didn't always get into the right hands."
Retrospectively, this comment, like many others in the same
passage, is a double-entendre, applying equally to the
estate and to Mrs. Transome. As a married woman, she is
legally "property"31--another property that has fallen into
the wrong "hands" (those of the lawyer, Jermyn). Jermyn's
exploitation of both "properties"--the woman and the
land--may also be a metaphor for the power of the law, which
holds both real estate and women in thrall, defining them
and regulating their possession and use.
93
In the same layering of language, the coachman's
reiteration, "Lawyer Jermyn had sat on that box-seat many
and many a time," takes on a sexual connotation,
particularly as "she" (the young Mrs. Transome) "had a
spirit--you might see it in her eye and the way she sat her
horse." This "spirit" connotes sexuality and beauty, which
was traded in marriage to the "poor, half-witted" Transome
heir, because her family had no money. The implication is
that everyone understands the realities for a beautiful,
high-born, but penniless girl. She must capitalize on her
physical assets by marrying a man of property--an idiot, if
her family cannot afford to buy a better match for her.32
The first child of this union turned out like his
father, "only worse." The second, Harold, was "quite of a
different cut"--another embedded meaning, considering the
real difference between "her" two sons: different fathers.
In this light, another remark about Jermyn takes on
additional resonance: "But heir or no heir, Lawyer Jermyn
had had his picking out of the estate." Later in the novel,
this comment translates as follows: Jermyn (a) had had Mrs.
Transome, (b) had illicitly funneled money out of the landed
property, and (c) might see his child installed as the
proprietor. But at the beginning, the coachman only hints
darkly: "there had been fine stories" (11).
As narrator points out, such stories can have
consequences that "raise [] the pity and terror of men"--in
other words, tragic consequences according to Aristotle's
Poetics.33 These consequences are often suffered silently:
"committed to no sound except that of low moans in the
night, seen in no writing except that made on the face by
the slow months of suppressed anguish and early morning
tears." Such, as we will learn, is the case with Mrs.
Transome, whose face wears this anguish, as we are
repeatedly reminded by juxtapositions with her mirror and
her youthful portrait.
George Eliot's "Introduction" to Felix Holt is really a
prologue--almost a Greek chorus, fitting a pattern of
transformation from classical genres. The last paragraph
alludes to epic visions of the underworld which conceals and
figures human tragedies, concluding: "These things are a
parable." "These things" is an ambiguous phrase here,
relating to either the classical allusions just made, or to
the story that is to follow in the novel, or, even better,
to both. In any event, the announcement indicates that what
follows is to be accorded tragic status: the story is
"fine," not ironically referring to its credibility, but in
the sense that it is high-toned and serious. The
implication, then, is that what follows is either another
parable or an advance on parables, perhaps a clearer
representation, more evocative of pity and fear than epics
or classical tragedies would be for such a story.
95
Or perhaps a different genre is called for to mark the
tragedy of a different heroic figure: an accessible,
domestic vehicle for the victim of private catastrophe, a
female tragic hero.34 Mrs. Transome's appearance seems to
fill the heroic role: "slim and finely formed," she is "a
tall, proud-looking woman, with abundant grey hair, dark
eyes and eyebrows, and a somewhat eagle-like yet not
unfeminine face." Her clothes are shabby, but she wears
"rare jewels" on her aristocratic hands (14).
Her present "monotonous narrowing life" contrasts with
the excitement of her youth. Then "she had been thought
wonderfully clever and accomplished." Her education,
directed by "a superior governess," had been that of the
typical heroine in domestic fiction--superficial. As a
result, she has read quite widely: French authors, Burke,
Chateaubriand, the Lyrical Ballads. Southey. She "sat
supremely well on horseback, sang and played a little,
painted small figures in water-colours, had a naughty
sparkle in her eyes when she made a daring quotation, and an
air of serious dignity when she recited something from her
store of correct opinions" (28). All this is somewhat
ironic, but it is also ancient history; the
"accomplishments" she had once been so proud of are now
"valueless" (as the reader may have already adjudged),
superseded by cares about the lack of money, neighbors'
96
insults, and "advancing age" (28). Sic transit gloria mundi
for everywoman.
But "every living creature will find something that
makes a comparative ease"--a consolation for life's
disappointments --and in the absence of anything else, Mrs.
Transome has found hers. Dreading powerlessness above all
things,
she liked every little sign of power her lot
had left her . She -liked that a tenant
should stand bareheaded below her as she sat
on horseback. She liked to insist that work
done without her orders should be undone
from beginning to end. She liked to be
curtsied and bowed to by all the
congregation as she walked up the little
barn of a church. She like to change a
labourer's medicine fetched from the doctor,
and substitute a prescription of her own.
(28-29)
Although her husband is living, she enjoys the authority of
a widow because he is incompetent: a brief incident shows
all we need to know about the marriage.35 As Mrs. Transome
waits for Harold to arrive, she goes to check on her
husband, who shows obvious signs of fear when she appears:
he "shrank like a timid animal looked at in a cage where
flight is impossible" because he thinks she will scold him.
As she watches, he clears up the things he has disturbed;
finally, he hugs and talks to his dog, "as little children
do to any object near them when they believe themselves
unwatched" (15). His submission in such a small matter
indicates her supremacy in all matters. In this sense, at
97
least, Mrs. Transome's contempt for the patriarchy is quite
overt.
As Mrs. Transome anticipates Harold's arrival, she
wonders whether things to be as she has hoped. Is she
finally "to be no longer tacitly pitied by her neighbours
for her lack of money, her imbecile husband, her graceless
eldest-born, and the loneliness of her life; but to have at
her side a rich, clever, possibly a tender, son?" The way
these reflections are set up, we can already assume the
answers are likely to be "no!" For reassurance, she turns
to the portrait of Harold as a boy but tells herself "he
will be altered" (16).
And of course he is. No longer resembling herself as
he did formerly, Harold is now "overlaid . . . with another
likeness which would have arrested her" (17). Not only his
person but his manner bears little resemblance to her
"best-loved boy" (16). During a brief conversation with his
mother, Harold terms Mr. Transome a "wreck," speaks of his
own son as though he were a package ("My man Dominic will
bring him, with the rest of the luggage"--18), and abruptly
announces his intention to stand as Radical candidate for
parliament. He complains about the way Mrs. Transome has
managed the estate, telling she has "had to worry [her]self
about things that don't properly belong to a woman." Now
that he is assuming authority, not only will Jermyn be
dismissed, but Mrs. Transome will "have nothing to do now
98
but to be grandmamma on satin cushions" (20). None of this
is what she wants to hear.
Later, rebuking her for complaining again about his
Radical candidature, Harold says: "You must really leave me
to take my own course in these matters, which properly
belong to men. Beyond that, I will gratify any wish you
choose to mention. . . . But let us understand that there
shall be no further collision between us on subjects in
which I must be master of my own actions." At this, Mrs.
Transome finally retorts, "And you will put the crown to the
mortifications of my life. I don't know who would be a
mother if she could foresee what a slight thing she will be
to her son when she is old." Unfortunately, Jermyn
witnesses this outburst, which Mrs. Transome knows has
served "no purpose" (36).
The incident illustrates the position of nineteenth-
century mothers in relation to their adult sons,
particularly heirs.36 It is galling to be dependent upon
someone to whom one has given life, sustenance, and in Mrs.
Transome's case, a great deal else. She has loved Harold
possessively, yearning above all for him to grow up and
console her for all her sufferings. She made the sacrifice
of sending him away from her: the estate she always hoped
would come to him was depleted by lawsuits, and to build it
up, Harold had to leave home and make his own fortune (23).
Her ambition for Harold depended on her despised older son's
99
conveniently dissipating himself to death--and he now has,
leaving Harold as the heir. When he returns, Mrs. Transome
still sees Harold as "the loved child of her passionate
youth" (24); to him, however, she is merely "a harmless
elderly woman" (17) with whom he gets increasingly
impatient.
A description of Harold as he is now concludes:
"Whether all mothers would have liked him as a son, is
another question," leading into a narrative intervention on
the subject of motherhood in general.37 The point of this
passage is the "fact kept a little too much in the
background, that mothers have a self larger than their
maternity": when sons are grown and gone, mothers do not
spend all their time "praying for their boys, reading old
letters, and envying yet blessing those who are attending to
their shirt-buttons." The rather heavy-handed irony here
indicates that many mothers do spend their time in such
ways--because they do not have much else to occupy them.38
The implication is that Mrs. Transome is different: "Mrs.
Transome was certainly not one of those bland, adoring, and
gently tearful women" (98).
In most respects, this assessment of Mrs. Transome as a
mother is at odds with the evidence of the novel. She may
not be bland or gently tearful, but she is passionately
emotional about Harold and has wrapped all her hopes in him.
The truth about Mrs. Transome's attitude to Harold comes at
100
the end of the "mothers" passage: "now she began to look
back with regret to the days when she sat in loneliness
among the old drapery, and still loncred for something that
might happen" [emphasis added] (99).
This is an oddly contradictory passage, initially
asserting that "mothers have a self larger than their
maternity," but concluding, in Mrs. Transome's case, that
they do not: when her active maternity is over, so is her
life. This conclusion may support the opinion that the
'Mrs. Transome' sections, arguably the "best in the book,"
get "tedious" because nothing more can happen to her in
Felix Holt's time scheme. According to this view, what is
meaningful about Mrs. Transome's life is "not the empty
present" but "the rich progression of her past" that
unfolds, detective-style, during the course of the novel.
These revelations are not as compelling to readers as
"participat[ing] in the dramas, in the emotional life that
led up to the event."39
But several times in the novel we do participate in
immediate drama involving Mrs. Transome, for example, in her
encounters with Jermyn. Jermyn, who once "had written
verses" to her, but now has more practical concerns, seeks a
private meeting with her. He wants to learn Harold's
reactions to his stewardship and whether Mrs. Transome is
capable of keeping the secret that Harold must not know
(that Jermyn is his real father). On another occasion, as
101
she sits watching Harold and Jermyn, she thinks of the time
when, "in the splendor of her bloom, [she] had been
imperious to one of these men, and had rapturously pressed
the other as an infant to her bosom." She knows that now
she is "of little consequence to either of them" (34). But
somehow, the rapturous pressing bleeds over onto Jermyn--the
bitterness of her musing leads to the conclusion that long
ago she forced herself not to care about Jermyn, diverting
her passion into maternal feeling for Harold, and now this
love is betrayed, too.
Mrs. Transome already burns with humiliation at ever
having ever been involved with Jermyn. Moreover, "her
woman's pride and sensibility" still needs "chivalry"--but
accepts that she no longer has the power to attract it
(101). She is chagrined at the loss of her sexual power
over Jermyn, even though she would not want him any more.
She tries to elicit his promise that he will not "quarrel
with Harold." He rebuffs her: "A man can't make a vow not
to quarrel"--but a woman in Mrs. Transome's place cannot do
anything, except hint at the trouble that could ensue (as
Jermyn must be aware). Mrs. Transome's humiliation is
complete as she realizes that she is "powerless with him, "
just as she is with Harold. "This woman, who loved rule,
dared not speak another word of attempted persuasion"; all
she can do is wish to erase the past (103). These, then,
are the elements of her tragedy: usurpation, alienation,
102
emptiness, all of which she meets with stoic silence.
Following the "mothers have a larger self" passage, this
moment of recognition of powerlessness also suggests
something universal, calling forth pity and fear. To women
readers, Mrs. Transome's plight would be anything but
tedious.
For men, things are otherwise. Jermyn soon brushes
aside his regrets, contemplates his successful life, and
goes home to show off at a social gathering, while Mrs.
Transome stands alone in the bleak wintry light. The
contrast between the two is remarkable, demonstrating the
difference between the fate of men and that of women and
emphasizing Mrs. Transome's isolation. In another poignant
moment of isolation for Mrs. Transome, Harold and Jermyn are
arguing about the estate and she is alone, agonizing among
"rose-coloured satin" furnishings, pondering "the great
story of this world reduced for her to the little tale of
her own existence" (280). The rose colored satin, the great
story, and the little tale make apt metaphors for the human
female condition as personified in Mrs. Transome.
When Jermyn faces ruin, he goes to see Mrs. Transome
again. While he is waiting, he is forced to confront her
youthful portrait. Then, Mrs. Transome arrives; suddenly,
"as if by some sorcery, the brilliant smiling young woman
above the mantelpiece seemed to be appearing at the doorway
withered and frosted by many winters, and with lips and eyes
103
from which the smile had departed" (334) . The juxtaposition
of the portrait and its subject, now much older, makes
several points, starting with the contrast to Harold's
portrait and his appearance at the beginning of the novel.
He has changed so as to be almost unrecognizable to his own
mother; the change is from soft, powerless youth to virile,
commanding manhood. With Mrs. Transome and her portrait,
the change is reversed. In lovely youth, she possessed
power she has now lost; the "tragic consequences" alluded to
in the prologue have now written on her face the sorrows she
has suffered.
Mrs. Transome's appearance dramatically and cruelly
emphasizes the fate of an elderly heroine: that was the
woman the watching man had romanced; this woman remembers
his passion, knowing he now feels nothing for her. His only
concern now is protecting his own position. He has come to
solicit Mrs. Transome's influence with Harold; but she tells
him she has already done all she can, that Harold cares no
more for her than he would for "an old ballad-singer" (334) .
Once she has lost her youth, not only the lover despises
her; the child does, too. She has nothing left but her
past; that is why she lives in it.
When Jermyn insinuates that she could save him by
telling Harold "the whole truth" (that he, Jermyn, is
Harold's father), she angrily reminds him of sacrifices she
104
has already made because of their long-ago affair. She
concludes:
I would not lose the misery of being a
woman, now I see what can be the baseness of
a man. One must be a man--first to tell a
woman that her love has made her your
debtor, and then ask her to pay you by
breaking the last poor threads between her
and her son. (33 7)
Here is a summary of how Mrs. Transome sees the world--and
the source of her bitterness. A woman's lot is misery, a
man's is baseness; love is bartered; motherhood a series of
weakening threads.
The one man who still admires Mrs. Transome is Sir
Maximus, "a hale good-natured-looking man of sixty," who
notices that she still "rides about like a girl of twenty."
He considers her "slim and active" at fifty-six, as he tells
his wife, herself "a mountain of satin, lace, and exquisite
muslin embroidery" (81). Sir Maximus plays the "good
aristocrat": he defends Mrs. Transome to his wife; he goes
to Felix's trial (378); he defends Harold against the
upstart Jermyn (383) . Finally, he goes to Esther's wedding
(3 98) and Mrs. Transome's funeral (399). In many ways, Sir
Maximus and Mrs. Transome would be well-matched as a
couple.40
As it is, Mrs. Transome cannot socialize with people
like Sir Maximus--or her peers in the "women's culture";
there are no women in her family, and outside friendships
have been prevented by her transgression as well as by the
105
Transomes' relative poverty. The major emotional outlet for
Mrs. Transome is her early devotion to her beloved son
Harold, with his "downy lip" a feminized male, or at least
not yet a patriarchal one.41 All this suggests that a
woman like Mrs. Transome cannot find companionship from men
and cannot function as fully human without the support and
companionship of other women.42
For years, the only human fellowship Mrs. Transome has
had is with her maid Denner, but communication between them
is carried on in a code imposed by the class barrier. When
Mrs. Transome comments on her son's altered appearance,
Denner replies in such a way that "Mrs. Transome knew
perfectly that Denner had divined her thoughts" (26):
telling Mrs. Transome to "put a good face on it"--not to
seem to be watching for something, and thereby alert other
people. She points out the pleasures that Mrs. Transome can
still enjoy: her "rich son," her health, her aristocratic
bearing.
Mrs. Transome scoffs at Denner's optimism: 1 1 [T] here ' s
no pleasure for old women," she exclaims, "unless they get
it out of tormenting other people,"--a reflection on the
emptiness of her life. These boudoir sessions between Mrs.
Transome and Denner call to mind classical relationships,43
except that Denner's devotion is more selfless than that of
the manipulative classical nurse. She is not looking to
Mrs. Transome to provide meaning for her own life; it has
106
meaning because, like George Eliot's other "working women,"
she is necessarily busy.
To Denner, life is like a card game: "I like to play my
cards well, and see what will be the end of it; and I want
to see you make the best of your hand, madam, for your luck
has been mine these forty years now" (26). In Mrs.
Transome's words, Denner has "never had any trouble"
("trouble" in this context may be a code word for "unwanted
pregnancy," especially in view of the closely-following "You
never even had a child"). Denner replies: "I've had some of
your trouble, madam," (possibly referring to Harold's
birth--the only other time that Denner had ever addressed
Mrs. Transome as "my dear.") Mrs. Transome concedes the
point: "But as a sick-nurse. that never caught the fever.
You never even had a child" [emphasis added]. Denner
demurs; she has shared Mrs. Transome's troubles (315) . Her
strength--and her usefulness--is that she never caught the
fever; she was immune to it because of her social position,
if the "fever" is the lot of woman as exemplified by Mrs.
Transome.
Mrs. Transome is ruled by the looking glass and the
ephemeral power of physical beauty, an outlook bound up with
"heroine ideology." Denner has probably never worried about
her appearance: "I wouldn't be Letty in the scullery
because she's got red cheeks. She mayn't know she's a poor
creature, but I know it." Denner confidently declares, "I
107
would change with nobody, madam" (314). After Denner's
assertion that to her, life is worth living for Mrs.
Transome's sake, Mrs. Transome replies: "Ah, then, you are a
happy woman, Denner; you have loved somebody for forty years
who is old and weak now, and can't do without you" (317).
Denner loves and takes pride in her work. In maturity, a
useful woman is better off than a beautiful one.
That is why Denner plays her hand with more verve than
does poor Mrs. Transome, who cannot escape her past. But
Mrs. Transome is to have a chance, after all, when Harold
tells her about Esther's right to the Transome estate and
his proposed legal action against Jermyn. Here is the
"quarrel" Mrs. Transome has feared. If it were not for her
anxiety about Jermyn, Mrs. Transome would not have wanted to
invite Esther to Transome Court as Harold wishes her to; but
as it is, she complies docilely (294), hoping that the
lawsuit can be avoided and her secret kept. Determining
that she will succeed with Esther, Mrs. Transome unwittingly
how opens up the possibility of a purpose in life for
herself.
During their first meeting, Mrs. Transome, "agreeably
struck by Esther" (308), goes out of her way to be pleasant,
for instance with the comment that the role of heiress would
suit Esther "admirably" (309). Doubtless because of Mrs.
Transome's graciousness, Esther agrees to return immediately
with the Transomes to their home. The suddenness of this
108
plan shows quick thinking by the Transomes. What has seemed
a disaster might now be used to their advantage if they can
commandeer Esther. In view of Esther's reaction, their
hopes are buoyed. Harold may ingratiate himself as Esther's
suitor; Mrs. Transome may gain the daughter she craves,
particularly since Harold's rebuff of her maternal
affection.
"Heroine's mothers" represent a possible future for
their daughters, and this is the case with Mrs. Transome and
Esther, as Esther herself comes to understand during their
companionable time together at Transome Court. At first,
the two women talk about Mrs. Transome's glory days, her
social life and her illustrious family. Her pride in this
connection may remind one of Lady Russell but differs in
that it is inborn in Mrs. Transome, "as necessary as the
notes of the linnet or the blackbird."44 Mrs. Transome
sings unconsciously as a bird would, oblivious to greater
causes and effects: "In the dim background there was the
burning mount and the tables of the law; in the foreground
there was Lady Debarry privately gossiping about her, and
Lady Wyvern finally deciding not to send her invitations to
dinner" (320).45 Esther, fascinated by the novelty of
these subjects, wonders how they continue to sustain Mrs.
Transome for so long. But she responds eagerly to Mrs.
Transome's "beauty, position, and graceful kindness towards
herself," soon eliciting from Mrs. Transome the comment, "My
109
dear, you make me wish I had a daughter!" (321). When Mrs.
Transome becomes more melancholy, Esther says she has
"something of a daughter's feelings" toward her (362) .46
Mrs. Transome is immediately cheered up and alludes to hopes
about Esther and Harold's marrying.
Partly to cover her embarrassment, Esther asks to be
taken to her father's house unbeknown to anyone; Mrs.
Transome concurs, and in this little conspiracy against
Harold, the two women take another step toward a mother-
daughter relationship. Inadvertently, Mrs. Transome thus
provides Esther the opportunity of meeting Felix, a meeting
that is crucial to the Esther-Felix relationship and that
ends in their first kiss, "a seal of possession" as far as
Esther is concerned (390).
Following Felix's trial and conviction for
manslaughter, Esther's heart is "pierced" at the sight of
Mrs. Transome, who comes to Esther during the night,
distraught over Jermyn's revelation to Harold (393) . " [L]et
me tend upon you," Esther says, "It will be a very great
thing to me. I shall seem to have a mother again." She
soothes Mrs. Transome "with a daughter's tendence" and sits
with her all night. In the morning, she tells Harold: "I
think I would bear a great deal of unhappiness to save her
from having any more," a further indication of her filial
attitude. She then persuades Harold to wait by his mother's
bed until she awakes (394).47 Esther effects this
110
reconciliation between mother and son and renounces her
claim to the property. But she cannot give the Transomes
what they both want most--herself.48
This rejection and the end of the Transomes' story are
markedly anticlimactic: "Harold heard from Esther's lips
that she loved someone else, and that she resigned all claim
to the Transome estates" (395). Along with Harold, Mrs.
Transome has to make way for the young lovers. All we hear
about Mrs. Transome is that she dies later on, at Transome
Court: "Sir Maximus was at her funeral, and throughout that
neighbourhood there was silence about the past" (399) . Note
that it is "the" past, not even "her" past. Mrs. Transome,
tragic and heroic though she may be, simply fades out,
folded back into the mythic past from which she emerged
after the prologue.
Mrs. Transome's story illustrates the maxim the
narrator applies to Esther: "After all, she was a woman, and
could not make her own lot. . . . Her lot is made for her by
the love she accepts" (342). In the aftermath of her
marriage to the feeble Transome heir, a bargain struck
because of her family's genteel poverty, Mrs. Transome
accepted the advances of the young Jermyn, and that
acceptance brought about her lot: misery. Esther reflects
that accepting Harold would make her lot comparatively easy;
yet, of life at Transome Court, she has found "dulness
already in its ease" (341). Everything there seems reduced
Ill
to a kind of cash transaction--and the ease that Harold
offers is indeed material. The young Arabella accepted the
earlier Transome for material reasons, too--such as her own
ease and the placement of her brother in a clergy living
held by the Transome family. This is the kind of choice
Esther describes to Felix: "A woman must choose meaner
things, because only meaner things are offered to her"
(342). Above all, Mrs. Transome's story shows the
importance of female connections; its most paradoxical
feature is that if. Esther could have married Harold
(essentially, if Esther could have done what Arabella
Lingdon did), Mrs. Transome would have had the solace she
craved: a daughter. A happy ending for the old woman would
mean tragedy for the young one. The anticlimactic ending of
the Transome story reminds readers that the novel is
supposed to be about Felix and Esther, not about Mrs.
Transome, despite George Eliot's sympathy for the older
woman.
It has been suggested that George Eliot would identify
with Mrs. Transome.49 This must be partly because
"scandal" hung over both of them.50 In almost every other
way, though, they are not merely dissimilar but opposite.
Mrs. Transome is a beauty; of George Eliot, Charles Eliot
Norton wrote "one rarely sees a plainer woman";51 Henry
James called her "magnificently ugly" and "horse-faced"52,
and Herbert Spencer found her appearance romantically
112
off-putting.53 Mrs. Transome's education was superficial;
she has Tory, orthodox views and concern about what the
neighbors think; George Eliot was highly intelligent,
radical and unorthodox--she cared what people thought but
did not let that influence her behavior.54 Mrs. Transome
is self-absorbed, solitary, and unloved; her son regards her
as a nuisance. From the tone of her journals, diaries, and
essays, George Eliot's ego was healthy, but she had many
loving friends and enjoyed the lifelong devotion of George
Henry Lewes and his older son, Charles.55 The most
significant difference is the sense of purpose in the
writer's life, compared with Mrs. Transome's aimless
existence after Harold comes home. Mrs. Transome has
nothing to do, whereas George Eliot was always busy with
writing projects, correspondence, friends, and family. She
was the principal financial provider of the household,
including Lewes' sons--like Denner, almost Carlylean herself
in her acceptance of duty, doing cheerfully the things at
hand.56
In other words, although George Eliot sympathized with
Mrs. Transome, she had little in common with such a woman:
when she wrote Felix Holt, George Eliot was also a crucial
ten years younger, and as a physically plain woman she was
exempt from the torture to which beautiful women could be
exposed. With author and character (as with mirrored
characters like Hetty and Dinah in Adam Bede)--the positive,
113
active one feels the suffering of the negative, passive one;
she tries to alleviate it by taking it seriously and making
it the material of high tragedy, rather than comedy or
melodrama. Part of the tragedy is that in novels, an old
woman's suffering cannot be central, but must always be
peripheral to the main action: in this case, as so often in
nineteenth-century fiction, the courtship plot. Hence the
seeming disruption between two elements of Felix Holt, the
comedic heroine and the tragic dowager.
The Princess
George Eliot has shown that heroine ideology inevitably
produces Mrs. Transomes--lonely, disaffected women who, in
outgrowing youthful beauty, have outgrown the meager role
they are assigned. They have nowhere to go, and the world
would keep silence about their fate. Many of these issues
are illustrated in the character of the Princess in Daniel
Deronda, the work that has been claimed as George Eliot's
"experimental novel."57 If the label "experimental" is
justified, one of the noteworthy achievements is the
distillation of the Mrs. Transome character into the
Princess, Daniel's "unknown mother" (Daniel Deronda 679).
The refinement is drastic: the Princess, having dramatically
revealed herself to Daniel, appears in only two scenes
toward the end of the novel (in chapters 51 and 53); she is
far more peripheral to the plot than is Mrs. Transome.
114
The Princess-Daniel relationship resembles the Mrs.
Transome-Harold one in several ways: the impossibility of
any real communication between mother and son, partly
because of long separation; the strong son vs. faded-beauty
mother; and the "transgressive" aura surrounding the mother.
But unlike Mrs. Transome's poor husband and her shadowy
older son, the Princess's current husband and extraneous
offspring do not even appear in the novel at all
(dismissively, she once mentions "five children"). This
woman definitely does not define herself in terms of
maternity but rather her by renunciation of maternity, the
act that sets the Daniel plot into motion. Yet she is a
commanding presence in the novel, mostly characterized in
her own dialogue, with very little of the interiority of
Mrs. Transome.
Although she is not "maternal," her conscience--
together with prodding from her father's old friend, who has
run into Daniel by coincidence and deduced his identity--has
prompted her to send for her long-lost son. His striking
resemblance to herself forces her to feel tenderness for
him, a tenderness she long ago repressed in what she thought
were his best interests. Yet she also feels frustration
because he will not or cannot do what she most wants him to
do: give up his new-found Jewishness. In both the
tenderness and the frustration, she echoes Mrs. Transome,
although in Mrs. Transome, the tenderness is more
115
deep-seated and the motives more obviously self-interested
(she has "lived" only for Harold's return) than those of the
Princess, a realist in the sense that she expects no
obligation from the son she has abandoned. It is possible
that the Princess's self-interest is a more insidious
variety: she needs to see her own choices confirmed.
If Mrs. Transome is weak and "womanly" in her relations
with Harold, with Daniel the Princess is strong-willed and
demonstrates typically masculine stoicism. Mrs. Transome is
frequently out of control, vulnerable and submissive to her
son, whereas the Princess stage-manages her brief
appearances to her son and is invulnerable to Daniel, the
"therapist."58 The Princess's resistance to Daniel, whom
some readers find priggish in his perfection, may come as a
relief. The Princess has been dominated by her father and
coerced by him into marriage, yet she fights not only him
but male-dominated society in general: her husband and
various lovers have been under her control--one admirer, Sir
Hugo, even adopting Daniel at her behest. Mrs. Transome has
complied with her father (in marrying Mr. Transome); she,
too, is rebellious, but she is subsequently subject to first
her lover and then her son.
The Princess, perhaps because of her exposure to a much
wider world than that of Mrs. Transome, is resigned to the
inevitable: a few years of glory doing what she wanted, then
retirement. She accepts both her own impending death and
116
the impossibility of establishing ties with Daniel (despite
his pleas).59 She has no lingering fantasies about
consolation, as does Mrs. Transome. This pragmatism seems
to result from the Princess's better education and
intelligence, as well as her experience. In giving the
Princess this attitude, George Eliot seems to suggest a kind
of coldness (or at least detachment) that the artist needs
to cultivate.
Because she is foreign, the Princess is not bound by
English social strictures. For example, she is "free" to
pursue a singing career--compare this freedom with
Gwendolen's. Professor Klessmer's assessment of her chances
at the same career causes Gwendolen to abandon the idea of
pursuing it; she is perceptive enough to realize that her
upbringing simply has not prepared her for what is entailed.
(Klessmer's advice to Gwendolen effectively informs readers
of the rigors experienced by both the Princess and Mirah in
achieving success at singing careers). Granted that
Gwendolen does not have the raw talent of the Princess,
neither does she have the passion. It would, however, be
interesting if Gwendolen had been "adopted" by the Princess
(as Esther is by Mrs. Transome, as the Princess herself was
by her aunt Leonora, a former singer). What might have been
the outcome of that younger woman-older woman dynamic in
terms of Gwendolen's chances at a singing career?
Gwendolen's mother is completely ineffective, and Gwendolen
117
has no "good aunt." But under such an influence, had she
applied herself and practiced, Gwendolen might have
achieved considerable success without great natural ability,
as the other singer in Daniel Deronda. Mirah, has done.
(Mirah, too, is foreign). As for the Princess, by the force
of her own will and passion succeeding at her career,
renouncing her heritage, and giving away her child--she
overcomes hurdles that seem impossible for an equivalent
English woman.60 She overcomes them and goes on to social
worldly success as well: all the kudos that goes with
marrying a Prince.
None of this is to minimize the profound unhappiness of
the Princess. Her brief but powerful appearance in Daniel
Deronda emphasizes the tragic implications of female
will-to-fulfillment, insofar as it deviates in the slightest
from the conventional, male-established expressions of that
impulse. The Princess demonstrates, quite unequivocally,
that a woman of her time and place could not be a mother and
have a profession other than motherhood; she would have to
choose, and the heavily-freighted morality required that she
choose motherhood or suffer terrible consequences not
excluding painful death.
Gillian Beer claims that George Eliot tended to portray
her career women as singers--because their medium is the
voice, they make apt substitutes for thinkers and writers
because. She wanted to avoid comparison with herself--
118
reticence about her "scandalous" domestic arrangement
prevented her from "coming out" socially, too61--so she did
not depict any women writers. Yet she passionately wanted
to address the problems facing women, particularly creative
working women. The Princess, for instance, tells Daniel
"you can never imagine what it is to have a man's force of
genius in you, and yet to suffer the slavery of being a
girl," whose "happiness is to be made as cakes are, by a
fixed receipt." She explains to him that her talent for
singing put her in an "enviable" position, because it gave
her the opportunity "of escaping from bondage."62
Rosemarie Bodenheimer interprets George Eliot's
"performing woman" as a kind of self-scourging by Eliot, "a
moving commentary on the immense psychological difficulty of
sustaining an 'unwomanly' artistic life."63 Accordingly,
the Princess's "story of ambition fueled by rage and
subverted by guilt [finally] hands the victory over to the
father" via Daniel, his representative.64 Bodenheimer's
argument is that from her Evangelical past, George Eliot's
guilt at the misuse of talents for personal ambition--"self-
aggrandizement"--finds expression in the creation of
"performing" women to be punished in her behalf. Always
struggling with this guilt was a sense of "justification of
her writing as an art that fulfilled a need in others," a
sense that was continually being overwhelmed by the greater
fears.65 Representing, in the Princess, the pain of the
119
talented woman constrained by narrow opportunities, Eliot
may both purge artistic "guilt" and fulfill a need in
others.
There is also another explanation for casting the
Princess as a singer, supposing that George Eliot was a
quiet feminist, a supposition for which there is
considerable evidence.66 Writing, or any work that can be
done in the home (Mrs. Meyrick's work, or Mrs. Poyser's, for
instance), may be very hard and time-consuming. But work at
home does not divide a woman in the way any other paid work
would do: it does not imply the "either-or" dichotomy (home
and family or career, but not both). That, it has been
suggested, is the reason for the early acceptance by male-
dominated society of writing as a suitable occupation for
women. Fictional representation of women writers does not
address the most vital question: the exclusion of women from
the public sphere. A woman writer working at home does not
stir up controversy over this issue. Another, subtler
argument might arise from the notion that a woman writer
writing about women's issues might be perceived as
"mothering" her readers. Certainly, that was the case with
some of Eliot's readers.67
The representation of an unequivocally public career
outside the home, such as singing, firmly addresses the
separate spheres issue--by no stretch could singing publicly
be seen as "motherly"--and shows the "impossibility" of such
120
a life for the proper middle-class English woman in the
nineteenth century. In spite of fewer restrictions than an
English counterpart would incur, the Princess cannot have
both her work and a family, and, essentially, she gets a
death sentence for having dared to try.
With the possible exception of Queen Victoria, at this
time, virtually no woman could have a public life--and still
"be a woman."6S Another beautiful and intelligent Eliot
creation, Dorothea, instinctively knows this from the
beginning of Middlemarch. Dorothea knows her talents have
to be exercised by making herself useful as a wife rather
than by finding in meaningful work a fitter outlet for her
"yearning for greatness." This knowledge is what causes
her to choose Casaubon, in the mistaken belief that helping
his work will give her life a worthwhile purpose.
Dorothea is not a rebel in the sense that Lady Dedlock,
Mrs. Transome, and the Princess are rebels, and, although
she is beautiful, she is not that in the sense that they
are, either, because beauty is not her ruling
characteristic. Goodness is. Dorothea's tragedy is that
the "great yearning" in her, which might have produced
another St. Theresa, actually produces a good wife. In
clearly making Dorothea's fate a critique of the culture
that reduces greatness to niceness, George Eliot is pointing
out the narrowness of women's opportunities. As a woman
with a "story," the heroine has more possibilities than most
women. But the heroine, having achieved the goal of
marriage, is still expected to turn into the domestic woman.
The best a heroine can aspire to is usefulness and self-
effacement as somebody's wife; her objective in life is to
reproduce herself, if not in her own children, in other
people's.
122
NOTES •
1 This situation is exactly what John Stuart Mill
argues can result from the legal status of women.
Qualifying the extremes with the comment that "[a]bsolute
fiends are as rare as angels, perhaps rarer," Mill argues in
part that a "vast . . . number of men" are "little higher
than brutes," but that "this never prevents them from being
able, through the law of marriage, to obtain a victim," and
that "the breadth and depth of human misery caused in this
shape alone by the abuse of the institution swells to
something appalling" (The Subjection of Women 3 6).
2 In at least three cases (Janet in Scenes of Clerical
Life. Dorothea in Middlemarch. Gwendolen in Daniel Deronda),
the wives feel guilty or implicated in their husbands'
deaths, although no one else has reason to suspect volition.
3 Such as "[o]pera peasants" in elaborate costumes,
objected to by Ruskin--"too frank an idealization to be
misleading," according to Eliot ("German Life" 110) .
4 "German Life," Selected Essays 111. But Felix
Holt's nobility seems to counter this claim.
5 "German Life," Selected Essavs 110-111.
6 The Subjection of Women 97.
7 Discussed by A.S. Byatt in her introduction to
George Eliot: Selected Essavs. Poems and Other Writings xiv-
xvi.
George Eliot's letters indicate her interest in
furthering higher education for women. For example, to
Emily Davies, the founder of Girton College, Cambridge, she
wrote "that complete union and sympathy [with men] can only
come by women having opened to them the same store of
acquired truth or beliefs as men have" (Letters IV.468).
8 See previous chapter and notes on the principle of
coverture and the relevant laws, and The Subjection of
Women, Chapter 2, on the legal bondage of women like Janet
Dempster. Supported by these laws, required behavior for
women meant (among other things) compliance with husbands'
sexual demands leading to constant, often fatal,
childbearing, as with Milly Barton. Women were expected to
be passive in all their relations with men, resulting in the
silent, helpless plight of a woman in unrequited love, such
as that of Caterina for Captain Wybrow.
123
As John Stuart Mill points out in The Subjection of Women,
"the wife is the actual bond-servant of her husband; no less
so, as far as legal obligation goes, than slaves commonly so
called. She vows a livelong obedience to him at the altar,
and is held to it all through her life by law" (51). Mill
goes on to argue that because of affection and sympathy, few
husbands actually exercise the power over their wives that
the law gives them; but Mill objects to the legal bondage
that means even the "vilest malefactor has some wretched
woman tied to him, against whom he can commit any atrocity
except killing her, and, if tolerably cautious, can do that
without much danger of the legal penalty" (35). Morality
requires "society between equals," and the fact that some
married people are proceeding as if they were equals is a
cause of hope for Mill that the legal situation will be
remedied (43f f )•. - - ------ - - - -
9 Scenes Chapter 5, p 285; Chapter 3, p 2 73.
10 This situation was familiar to many women,
according to sources like Caroline Norton. It reflects what
Mill describes in Chapter 2 of The Subjection of Women.
11 In this respect, Janet may be a forerunner to
Middlemarch's Dorothea, or at least, Dorothea at the
beginning of the novel with her "great yearnings." At the
end, Dorothea's opportunity to do meaningful work is by
helping her husband Will. The "work" Janet ends up doing,
however, is all hers.
12 In the Haight Biography. George Eliot's enthusiasm
for Comte and Positivism is downplayed. But George Henry
Lewes was a Positivist who wrote two books on the subject,
and the couple were intimate friends with Richard Congreve,
who "bee[a]me the chief English exponent" of Positivism
(299). When George Eliot married John Cross after Lewes'
death, Congreve observed: "The world will taunt Positivism
with it [the marriage]" (539). Congreve's comment strongly
suggests three connected points of popular opinion: (i)
George Eliot was an exponent of Positivism, (ii) Positivism
implied "the Comtian dogma of perpetual widowhood," (iii)
the George Eliot-George Henry Lewes union was accepted as a
marriage. A Positivist perspective would explain Eliot's
rewarding Janet's perpetual widowhood with a note of
"purity, happiness and beauty."
13 Blackwood's letter is quoted on p. 234 of Haight's
Biography, and George Eliot's reply on p. 235 (From Letters
II, 344-5).
124
14 Articulated by Gillian Beer, who summarizes the
reactions to George Eliot of "first wave . . . feminist
literary theory." Stipulating that George Eliot is
"not . . . a feminist theorist or activist," Beer goes on to
make a good case for Eliot as the champion of oppressed
woman (1). She points out that Eliot's sympathy is of the
same type as Wollstonecraft's, noting women's own complicity
in their oppression, a result of lack of education, public
opportunity, and meaningful work. Women were obliged to
take refuge in triviality (silly novels, e.g.), According
to Beer (Chapter 6) Eliot's feminism comes to full flower in
Middlemarch. reflecting her friendships with leading
feminists from the 1850s onwards.
Beer makes a good case for Eliot's reluctance to get
personally involved in feminist activism: the unconventional
union with Lewes might have brought discredit on women's
organizations and impede their struggles. As Gordon Haight
points out (and I discuss elsewhere), in any case, George
Eliot was in many ways a conservative about gender issues
(Biography 396).
15 Catherine Gallagher explores this implied change in
George Eliot's philosophy in "The Politics of Culture and
the Debate over Representation in the 1860s," focusing on
Felix Holt (Chapter 9 of The Industrial Reformation of
English Fiction.)
16 Gillian Beer, 59. Gordon Haight mentions the
reviewer E.S. Dallas's belief that the incident involving
Esther at Felix's trial came "from a story by Charles Reade,
which neither of the Leweses had read" (Biography 387). The
incident also calls to mind Mary's pleading at Jem's trial
in Elizabeth Gaskell's Mary Barton (1848).
17 This theory is expounded by Robert Caserio, in
"Felix Holt and Bleak House." George Eliot. Modern
Critical Views. Ed. Harold Bloom. New York: Chelsea House,
1986. 127-150.
18 The beautiful Jewish queen who saves her people.
Having won the favor of King Ahasuerus (sometimes named
Xerxes), she risks her own life by pleading with him to
revoke orders to destroy the Jews (Old Testament, Esther).
Eliot uses this source again in Daniel Deronda. when she
names gives Mirah's older brother the name Mordecai, the
name of a holy man involved in the Ahasuerus story, who
raised the biblical Esther. The naming of these characters
as "Esther" connotes self-sacrifice, particularly connected
with sexuality.
125
19 But another way of looking at the younger women is
that they all represent daughters for Lady Dedlock, and
their fates are connected with her mothering.
20 Exemplified in, for example, in "The Natural
History of German Life," in the "no more Antigones" passage
at the end of Middlemarch, and in the revision of classical
modes that Fred Thomson has identified in Felix Holt.
21 Their experiences of filial love differ markedly.
Contrasted with Harold's grudging affection for Mrs.
Transome after a lifetime of devotion on her part, Lady
Dedlock gets instant love and loyalty from the rediscovered
Esther, whom she "unknowingly" abandoned at birth. It is
curious that the devoted female child is authored by a male
writer and the callous male child by a female author.
22 According to Catherine Gallagher, Mrs. Transome
"finally achieves" power because the truth about the father
of her son Harold offers her "a kind of revenge": Harold's
social position has been determined through her only, and
the patriarchal system has been short-circuited (as it is
again in Esther's rejection of her inheritance) (262 ) . Mrs.
Transome "represent[s] the natural over the social" in a
process in which "nature and culture combine" to reveal the
"arbitrariness" of social structures only to reaffirm them.
This process, "the politics of culture," derives from the
philosophy of James Mill and the cultural criticism of
Matthew Arnold, which Eliot felt it her artistic duty to
represent (233) and which Gallagher contends is the focus of
Felix Holt. Employing "the politics of culture," Felix Holt
repudiates George Eliot's "earlier project of realism," and
the novel's self-reflexivity is its redemption (265). In
practical terms, fictional revelations about the plight of
women probably contributed to public debate about women's
issues.
23 Bleak House. Chapters 57 and 59.
24 According to Mary Saunders, this "floor scene" is
important for several reasons. It informs the audience that
Lady Dedlock did not know her baby had lived. It is a rare
"moment of emotional openness," the only one showing the
depth of Lady Dedlock's (or Esther's) feelings (76). This
theatrical device is also part of the "reader-involving
rhythm that Dickens creates in his characterization of Lady
Dedlock," i.e. a show rather than tell characterization
("Lady Dedlock Prostrate: Drama, Melodrama, and
Expressionism in Dickens's Floor Scenes." MacKay, 75).
126
25 Lady Catherine and Lady Russell have "no story" as
heroines, for example; since none is given do readers assume
they have none?
26 Eliot's strategy of chronological distancing was a
way of stepping around ideological involvement while still
expressing sympathy. Discussing the time-scheme in
Middlemarch. Barbara Hardy points out its usefulness in the
avoidance of feminist consciousness in the character of
Dorothea. Setting the time back enables her to air the
issues and at the same time she "avoid[s] anachronisms in
political consciousness" (Particularities, 123).
Leslie Stephen (editor of the DNB and Virginia Woolf's
father) believed a setback of sixty years was ideal for a
Romantic novelist: "the glare of the present has departed."
Quoted by Kathleen Tillotson (91) .
27 Fred Thomson, Introduction to World's Classic
edition of Felix Holt (1988. xv).
28 The perspective of the countryside from the
coach-roads must have evoked in first readers the kind of
nostalgia we now feel for the 'glory' days of the railroads,
when we were all connected. As with railroads, legends were
being constructed while coaching was still the current mode
of travel. Think of Boz's apprentice, leaning on his broom:
gazing at the "Wonder," or the "Tally-ho," or the
"Nimrod," . . . till it is out of sight . . . envying
the passengers . . . and thinking of the old red brick
house "down in the country," where he went to school .
. . the green field the boys used to play in, and the
green pond he was caned for presuming to fall into, and
other schoolboy associations. (Sketches by Boz 50)
Two kinds of literary construction are combined
here--those of stage coaching and "the English Countryside."
Cobbett (Rural Rides 1821-32) and Defoe (Tour through the
Whole Island of Great Britain. 1724-26) were major
contributors to this kind of construction of the idyllic
past. Ironically, Cobbett deplores coach roads almost as
much as Eliot deplores their passing. Cobbett's Rides.
first published in 1830, are nearly contemporary with
Sketches by Boz. first published 1833-36. Cobbett was an
old man nostalgically reaching for the mythic past; Dickens
was a young man creating nostalgia for something that was
nearly over. Both Cobbett and Dickens are drawing upon the
"organic past" myth--a powerful appeal to the community of
readers.
Thirty-odd years after Dickens, George Eliot taps into
the same combination, with country workers of bygone days
catching glimpses of the coach--"the pea-green Tally-ho" as
it races along. She also points out the less-than-ideal
parts of the vanished past: the "pocket boroughs, a
Birmingham unrepresented . . . unrepealed corn-laws,
127
three-and-sixpenny letters, a brawny and many-breeding
pauperism, and other departed evils" (Felix Holt 5).
29 Northrop Frye, 167 ("Theory of Myths").
30 According to Norman Vance, the legal complexities
demand hard labor from readers who want to unravel them
(111). I would add extra-textual consultation--at least the
George Eliot-Frederic Harrison correspondence (Letters. ed.
Gordon Haight, Vol. IV).
Frederic Harrison was an attorney well-versed in
inheritance law, who advised Eliot.
31 See discussion on coverture in previous chapter.
32 Often, her family depends on it, much as Gwendolen
Harleth's family depends on her marrying Grandcourt in
Daniel Deronda.
33 Which George Eliot was reading immediately before
she started the novel (see Haight, Biography 3 83 and
Thomson).
34 According to Fred Thomson (1988), Eliot's original
impulse in this novel was to express herself effectively in
"the tragic mode," an exercise she had recently attempted
unsuccessfully in The Spanish Gypsy. Thomson quotes Eliot's
Aristotelian principles of tragedy: "A good tragic subject
must represent a possible, sufficiently probably, not a
common action; and to be really tragic, it must represent
irreparable collision between the individual and the
general." Thomson notes the epigram of Chapter 4 8 (a
quotation from Aeschylus' Agamemnom) as especially relevant
to this "collision" in Mrs. Transome's case--the collision
of the "peculiar individual lot" and the "hereditary,
entailed Nemesis":
'Tis law as steadfast as the throne of Zeus--
Our days are heritors of days gone by.
Not only must Mrs. Transome "pay" for having "transgressed":
Harold must pay, too, in both his personal and public
life--not only to satisfy tragic criteria, "like Oedipus,"
but also to illustrate the novel's "corollary theme" that
"there is no private life which has not been determined by a
wider public life" (Felix Holt. Chapter 3). For Mrs.
Transome, presumably, "the wider public life" would entail
living up to the requirements of domestic ideology. In
making these connections, Thomson offers a persuasive
unifying device, grist for his "organic progress" mill.
35 As Philip Fisher points out, Mr. Transome has one
full sentence in the novel; and Harold's child rides about
128
on his back. (Making Up Society: The Novels of George Eliot.
162) .
36 A case in point, raised by Deborah Kaplan, concerns
a distant relative of Jane Austen,. Lady Honywood. After her
husband's death, her son John Courtenay, the heir, refused
to keep a promise she said he had made to his father about
provision for her. When all else failed, in 1812 she went
public with confidential letters as she had previously
threatened to do. As a result, she became a 'non-person' in
polite circles--Kaplan names several aristocratic women who
shunned her. (But not Jane Austen, who in 1813 writes of
Lady Honywood in complimentary terms, concluding "she is
altogether a perfect sort of Woman" (Letter 91). Kaplan
speculates that admirers may have taken sides (54-56), in
which case Austen's comments take on extra significance.)
Adult sons' authority over their widowed mothers
extends from the laws of inheritance and child custody. In
custody cases, courts virtually always ruled for fathers,
including dead fathers (Shanley 135), so that heirs
"inherited" custody as well as property. Not until the 1886
Infant Custody Act did the law grant widows full authority
over minor children (13 2).
37 "Gendered interventions" are described by Robyn
Warhol as a narrative device whereby readers are addressed
directly by the narrator. Generally, "distancing narrators"
are male; they emphasize fictionality and "subvert realism"
to assert their mastery and "control" (Example: Trollope, in
Chapter 16 of Barchester Towers, "reassures 'the reader'"
that Eleanor Bold won't marry Mr. Slope). "Engaging
narrators" are typically female; they "reinforce" realism,
for instance claiming personal acquaintance with characters
like Gaskell's narrator in Mary Barton or George Eliot's in
Adam Bede (39-40). This distinction represents the
"differing ends" of men and women writers. "Whereas men had
ample opportunity to exert serious didactic influences over
others, women had few forums in which they could publicly
'say something'; the realist novel provided one of the few
socially acceptable and effectual outlets for their
reforming impulses" (18). However, male and female writers
"sometimes borrowed" the "strategies" of the other gender
"to suit their novelistic ends" (19). The best example of
this exchange by George Eliot is the famous Chapter 17 of
Adam Bede on her theory of the novel. But in the
intervention on motherhood, here is Eliot in "engaging
narrator" mode, possibly hoping to move "readers who would,
in turn, work changes in the worlds of politics, society,
and personal morality" (xi).
129
38 Discussing Chapter 17 of Adam Bede ("a chapter-long
. . . manifesto for all the points of realism that Eliot had
earlier set forth"), Warhol asks the purpose of such a
"jolt" to readers' focus. She speculates that this narrator
wants people "to remember that they are merely reading,"
that "the sympathy they are expending" on fictional
characters "is only a model for what the actual reader could
and should feel for real-world sufferers" (130) . This
shorter "jolt" about motherhood by the engaging narrator in
Felix Holt might draw attention to real-world women who
found their lives "over" when their children had grown up.
39 Philip Fisher, Making Up Society. 157. Fisher
argues that "neither Rufus Lyon, Mrs. Transome, nor Jermyn
has any longer even a chance at initiative," although they
are the only characters whose interiority is known to the
reader. All are prisoners of their pasts. Because of the
limiting time scheme of the novel (six months, according to
Fisher--145) and their ages, no action for them is possible
except the unfolding of pasts they would prefer to keep
concealed. But Mrs. Transome "suffers most."
40 Much as would Dorothea and Lydgate, "the two
presumptive reformers" in Middlemarch, according to U.C.
Knoepflmacher, who quotes Arnoldian philosophy as the reason
they don't get together: "the Zeitgeist or 'Time' has
sundered mystery and dogma from reason and experience. . . .
heart and mind remain irrevocably apart" (Religious
Humanism. 79ff). Perhaps the same principle applies to the
two conservatives in Felix Holt.
41 See the epigraph to Chapter 1 of Felix Holt. The
downy lip syndrome occurs again in Daniel Deronda. when
Daniel is in Italy, recalling his feelings on parting with
the girl he loves: "stirring in him that deeply-laid care
for womanhood which had begun when his own lip was like a
girl's" (813). This suggests that sympathy for women by men
must start in boyhood, when men are not only more similar to
women physically (at least regarding facial hair) but also
hierarchically. As minors, boys have few legal rights,
although not as few as adult married women.
42 What Deborah Kaplan terms "the women's culture"
includes the "ghettoized" sharing of women's frustrations at
societal restrictions and is a concept with similar bases to
Showalter's "wilderness." Kaplan's version is
"paradoxical [] " because it "served a conservative purpose,
enabling them [women] to subscribe to the ideology of
domesticity." But "the women's culture" also enabled women
to connect emotionally and intellectually with other women
and thereby keep dissent alive; it made possible the
critical advice of peers that produced women artists, such
130
as Jane Austen. Domestic ideology meant women were thrown
together, usually only within their own social class, by
their lack of opportunity for public participation. Conduct
books and motherly advice in letters encouraged intimacy
between women; they were coaches or "guardian angel [s] " to
each other in both criticizing and upholding the ideology.
The system especially encouraged "friendships between
mothers or mother substitutes and younger women" (Jane
Austen Among Women. 64}. But "the women's culture" was not
available to Mrs. Transome because of her transgression.
This ostracizing supports Kaplan's "conservative" argument:
much lesser infractions of the social code than Mrs.
Transome's would result in a woman's being shunned by other
women, one of the ways they helped maintain the status quo.
43 Such as that of Phaedra and her nurse in Euripides'
Hippolvtus.
44 Catherine Gallagher cites this passage to support
the claim that Mrs. Transome represents nature as opposed to
civilization (262). But she is the result of a highly
structured civilization; it just seems "natural" to her.
45 Lady Debarry's and Lady Wyvern's censure indicate
that Mrs. Transome's past transgression is an open secret.
46 Thrown together alone at Transome Court, they form
a small "women's culture" as described by Deborah Kaplan.
47 Noted by Florence Sandler (14 9) . Because the
Transomes drop out of the story at this point, their
reconciliation is easily overlooked.
48 Barbara Hardy, arguing that the "crisis of
disenchantment" is a feature of GE's novels (45), claims:
"Part of Esther's disenchantment is the disenchanted face,
in the portrait and outside, of Mrs. Transome" ("The Moment
of Disenchantment" 48). Accordingly, Esther may not have
been able to resist Harold and choose Felix had it not been
for this 'education' from Mrs. Transome.
49 For instance, by Gillian Beer, quoting Bonnie
Zimmerman (Beer, 142-43).
50 Numerous letters indicate George Eliot's social
reticence at having outraged Victorian mores in setting up
home with Lewes, summarized in Chapter VI of Haight's
Biography. Especially moving is one to a dear friend, Sara
Hennell, justifying having kept her unaware for fear of
offending her feelings.
51 Haight, Biography 410.
131
52 In a letter to his father. Haight, Biography 417.
53 Haight, Biography 115-116.
Herbert Spencer espoused an apparently widespread
belief that "intellectual development (especially in women)
might impair the reproductive powers" and that, accordingly,
the intellectual limitations placed on women were necessary
and just for their primary function of motherhood. (Anna
Davin, "Imperialism and Motherhood," (20) gives the source
of this quotation as Spencer's Principles of Biology, vol.
ii (18 85), but no page number). Perhaps he was put off
Marian Evans as much by her intellect as by her appearance.
54 For instance, chiding friends, such as Bessie
Rayner Parkes for addressing her as "Miss Evans" rather than
"Mrs, Lewes" (Haight, Biography 180).
55 According to Gordon Haight, all Lewes' sons lived
under her roof at one time, and all called her "Mutter."
Seeking careers, the younger two emigrated in their youth.
One of them, Thornie, became seriously ill, came home to
die, and was lovingly cared for by his family, including
George Eliot, who was with him when he died. Charles Lewes
was like a son to her, and was her chief mourner, with J.H.
Cross.
56 See Chapter 9, "The Everlasting Yea," Sartor
Resartus, especially "Do the Duty which lies nearest thee"
(148) and "Whatsoever they hand findeth to do, do it with
thy. whole might. Work while it is called Today, for the
Night cometh wherein no man can work" (14 9) .
57 Penny Boumelha: "an extraordinary novel in so many
ways," especially because both male and female protagonists
are "allowed an open ending" (32).
U.C. Knoepflmacher: this novel represents George
Eliot's "increasing disbelief in her scientific humanism"
(136). It is "new territory" (137) for Eliot--it "examines
the present, but ardently longs for the future" (116), to
which it looks to the traditions of the past, specifically
Judaism. (Religious Humanism, Chapter IV, "Daniel Deronda:
Tradition as Synthesis and Salvation.")
Gillian Beer: "exploratory" (227).
58 Gillian Beer makes the point that Daniel's
mothering of himself and Gwendolen "would, only a little
later, through the work of Freud, be institutionalised as
that of the therapist" (217).
59 The Princess is "a sad representative of freed
women," according to Beer (225) .
132
50 Her situation reinforces that of Daniel and
Gwendolen, both of whom "escape [] British culture" (Beer,
227) .
61 Haight notes, at the time of Felix Holt, "how
thoroughly conservative Marian had become" (395). At the
beginning of the relationship with Lewes, she had said: "I
do not wish to take the ground of ignoring what is
unconventional in my position. I have counted the cost of
the step that I have taken and am prepared to bear, without
irritation or bitterness, renunciation by all my friends. I
am not mistaken in the person to whom I have attached
myself. He is worthy of the sacrifice I have incurred"
(162). The censure she expected was forthcoming. Even
close friends reacted predictably, in "revulsion from the
' fallen woman.'" (Haight notes: "All the popular Victorian
novelists, haunted by the canons of the circulating
libraries, were sticklers for propriety." Yet many of the
male writers were sexually "emancipated" themselves, but
clandestinely, not openly like Lewes and Eliot, a double
standard that irked George Eliot--146). To avoid exposing
herself to scorn, she made "the rule of never paying visits
. . . renouncing all social intercourse but such as comes to
our own fireside" (337). Her friends who did accept the
situation were expected to do so on her terms--for instance
the remonstrations with both Bessie Rayner Parkes and Mrs.
Peter Taylor for addressing her as "Miss Evans" rather than
"Mrs. Lewes" (180, 336) .
52 Daniel Deronda Chapter 51, especially 694. Compare
the Princess with Lady Dedlock, the creation of a male
writer, for whom female passivity is "natural." For her,
silence speaks and is her only protection; when her secret
is to be spoken (by Tulkinghorn), she is undone.
63 "Ambition and its Audiences: George Eliot's
Performing Figures," 17, 29.
64 "Ambition" 29.
65 "Ambition" 31.
66 Penny Boumelha gives a summary of arguments by
critics such as Patricia Meyer Spacks and Elaine Showalter,
that George Eliot allowed her women characters "so little"
compared with the freedom she herself enjoyed (24).
Boumelha replies that this kind of feminist criticism makes
"anachronistic demands" on "nineteenth-century realism" by
imposing late twentieth-century criteria. The text was
constrained by formal limitations, notably "typicality";
GE's heroines are not extraordinary, and her kind of
fictional realism was governed by the "real conditions of
S
133
existence." This meant women's options amounted to
"marriage or death" (25-6).
67 Haight terms the "many other young women who
confided their inner feelings to her" George Eliot's
"spiritual daughters." One of them was buried next to her,
with a headstone noting the "daughter" connection (Biography
452) .
68 Quoting Margaret Fuller's comment, "I shall always
reign through the intellect, but the life, the life! O my
god! shall that never be sweet?-George Eliot said, "I am
thankful, as for myself, that it was sweet at last" (Byatt,
introduction to Selected Essays xv).
134
Chapter 3
The Useful
It was not for me to muse over bygones, but to act with a cheerful spirit
and a grateful heart. So I said to myself, "Esther, Esther, Esther!
Duty, my dear!" and gave my little basket of housekeeping keys such a
shake, that they sounded like little bells, and rang me hopefully to bed
(Bleak House. Chapter 6).
Even a woman as courageous and capable as George Eliot,
who had formally rejected Victorian ideology in matters like
religion and marriage, conformed to it in other ways. She
could not fight social conventions, so she lived quietly to
avoid dealing with people's reactions to her as a "fallen
woman," reactions she would have considered justified had
she thought she merited the label. She could not risk
subjecting her children to ostracism, so she deliberately
did not have any children.1 If she had maternal yearnings,
she had George Henry Lewes's sons, and later on a number of
younger women admirers treated her as if she were their
mother, some of them addressing her as "Mother."2 But late
in life, she asked her devoted admirer Edith Simcox not to,
because "her associations . . . with the name were as of a
task."3 This revealing observation might explain her
preference for "Mutter" or "Madre": names that short-circuit
unwelcome connotations yet convey a nurturing relationship,
one of choice, not obligation. Aunthood, in other words.
Aunthood is the acceptable alternative to motherhood
offered to older women by domestic ideology. Considering
people like Austen's Aunt Norris (Mansfield Park). at first
135
glance this may seem an even worse fate than motherhood.
Aunt Norris is the focus of much ridicule, but actually her
fate could be worse: she ends up with not only independence
but the company of her favorite niece, Maria (disgraced by a
divorce)--even if "their tempers become their mutual
punishment" (Mansfield Park Chapter 48, p. 480). Aunt
Norris has what every older woman is supposed to want,
permanent motherhood.
This propensity for nesting and nurturing is
transformed in various ways by women who are obliged to be
useful because they are not beautiful--hence they could
never have been full-fledged heroines. Some women become
useful because their other choices are worse--for example,
Charlotte Lucas, Elizabeth's plain friend who marries the
pompous Mr. Collins in Pride and Prejudice. knowing exactly
what she is getting into and preferring it to impoverished
single life. Both Charlotte and the reader can make safe
assumptions about her future as a middle-class wife. She
will be supervising the household, responsible for the moral
and physical well-being of its inhabitants--her children and
the servants. By extension, she will also be expected to
fill in more general terms the same role toward the poor in
her community.4
Esther Summerson is defined by her usefulness, not her
beauty, although she is beautiful at the beginning of Bleak
House: she has to be, in order to resemble Lady Dedlock so
136
strikingly. The strategy of "de-beautifying" her
establishes her more firmly in the "useful" category, but
she has been jingling her household keys and acting as Dame
Durden and the Old Woman since the age of twenty. She comes
"that close" to a Charlotte Lucas type of marriage with Mr.
Jarndyce, thirty-five years her senior. In a way, she is a
heroine who makes the transition to domestic woman without
rebelling--Esther gets a heroine story only because Jarndyce
releases her from marrying him, enabling (and permitting)
her to marry the man she loves. And she ends up as she
began, nurturing an extended family and "going about" among
the people.
Long before Esther and Ada visit the brickmakers with
Mrs. Pardiggle (Bleak House). Austen's Emma and her protegee
Harriet Smith visit the neighboring poor. Austen gives no
specifics of the visit,5 which is made partly to contrive
an encounter with a clergyman whose house they must pass by
en route. But earlier, Emma has made it clear--and in a way
that suggests common practice for well-to-do women--that
helping the poor is her usual habit.6 In the Victorian
age, proper ladies continue the practice--but their
philanthropy also goes public.7
"Professionals"
"Telescopic philanthropy" (as Dickens calls it)--
charitable effort on behalf of those at great distance--is
137
one of the targets of satire in Bleak House. The dreamy yet
energetic Mrs. Jellyby, "a lady of very remarkable strength
of character" (Chapter 4, p. 82), is preeminent among the
zealous people with "missions" who importune Mr. Jarndyce
for contributions. Mrs. Jellyby devotes herself to an
assortment of charitable causes, but neglects her husband,
household, and children--her "real" work as a proper
Victorian lady.8
Mrs. Jellyby and her associates are Dickens's targets,
yet he seems reluctant to make Mrs. Jellyby as repellent as
the others. People are attracted to her; it must be partly
because of her personal qualities: she is "pretty, very
diminutive, plump," with "handsome [if faraway] eyes," "an
agreeable voice," and "very good hair" (85); she is noted
for her "sweetness of temper" (88). True, this sweetness
often dissolves to inappropriate placidity: engrossed in the
Africa project, she ignores her small child's fall
downstairs (87); has "no time to think about" Mr. Jellyby's
impending bankruptcy (385) or Caddy's engagement ("a silly
proceeding" that must not "interpose between me and the
great African continent"--387); and is "serenely looking
over her papers" until midnight on the eve of Caddy's
wedding (477). She is unkempt ("her dress didn't nearly
meet up the back" (85) and her hair is usually awry--at the
time of Caddy's wedding it is "looking like the mane of a
dustman's horse"--475). Still, the handsomeness of her
138
person and disposition contrasts with most Dickens
grotesques, whose appearance reinforces unpleasant character
traits--for instance her disciple Mrs. Pardiggle.
Mrs. Jellyby's household is extremely disorganized,
with smoky fires (88, 90); ill-served, almost raw (although
good) food prepared by a slatternly, unsupervised cook (88);
neglected children who "flock[]" around Esther and Ada for
attention (90); and a "mild, bald" husband who barely
speaks, so "[m]erged" is he "in the more shining qualities
of his wife" (82-3). The objections are ostensibly
feminine: Esther's narrative presents this picture of Mrs.
Jellyby, and the specific judgments are nearly always made
by her daughter Caddy, beginning with her vehement comment
to Esther: "'I wish Africa was dead!'" (92), after which
Caddy terms the household "disgraceful" (93). Esther's and
Caddy's protests confirm the view of middle-class women
themselves as monitors of domestic ideology.9 But in this
case, a male novelist has actually generated the
disapproval.
Caddy details more of her mother's failings in Chapter
14: "'Pa will be a bankrupt before long. . . . Pa told
me . . . that he couldn't weather the storm. . . . His
family is nothing but bills, dirt, waste, noise, tumbles
downstairs, confusion, and wretchedness" (237-8). Later,
Caddy confides, "'I don't believe Ma cares much for me,"
enlisting Esther's moral support for the task of announcing
139
her engagement to her mother. The ensuing scene at the
Jellyby household is one of greater-than-ever chaos: Mr.
Jellyby is closeted with bankruptcy officials (385),
fifty-eight letters have arrived that day for Mrs. Jellyby,
and the children are "grovelling on the stone floor" (388) .
The cheerful order of Bleak House offers a marked contrast
when Esther returns home to a loving welcome from everyone
"from the lowest to the highest" (389) .
The chaotic Jellyby home is often juxtaposed to the
peaceful haven Esther will create at Bleak House--as may be
inferred at the beginning from Ada's comment to Mr. Jarndyce
that, better than sweets and treats, their first visit to
the little Jellybys had "rained Esther" [and her loving
care] on them (114). Jarndyce has solicited his protegees'
opinion of Mrs. Jellyby, and they have all expressed
criticism of her preoccupation. As Esther puts it, "it is
right to begin with the obligations of home . . . while
those are overlooked and neglected, no other duties can
possibly be substituted" (113).
Considering Esther's visits to the poor, it may be
assumed that Dickens is promoting charitable involvement on
the part of middle-class homemakers, provided that the
duties of their own homes are accomplished properly first.
Yet Esther's visits to the brickmakers bring minimal relief
to the poor people and, more significantly, lead to disaster
for Esther herself.10 Similarly with Jarndyce's charitable
enterprises: nothing tangible comes from his numerous
"institutionalized" charities (except opportunities for
satire from the narrator), and on the personal level the
results are mixed at best. His three foster children bring
him more sorrow than joy. Despite all Jarndyce's efforts,
Richard's obsession with the Chancery case leads to early
death and Ada's consequent widowhood; and Esther, the wife
Jarndyce has tailor-made for himself, ends up marrying
someone else. Jarndyce's benevolence to Skimpole seems
positively counter-productive, enabling Skimpole to avoid
responsibility. Jarndyce's most successful act of charity
may be the one with the Neckett (Coavinses) family. He does
rescue the orphaned children, yet even that kindness has its
penalty: Charley contracts smallpox at Bleak House.11
Jarndyce categorizes himself as well as Mrs. Jellyby when he
says "'She means well'" (113), but Bleak House suggests that
there are few solutions, personal or public, to the social
problems of the current system, and implies that those who
try to provide solutions are themselves victims of the
system.12
The complexities of charity are embodied in the Jo
story. None of the official charities can or will help Jo,
the destitute child crossing-sweeper. He is an "ordinary
home-made" rather than "a genuine foreign-grown savage" and
therefore not interesting enough to people like Mrs. Jellyby
and Mrs. Pardiggle, who are-incapable of seeing need under
141
their own noses (696) .13 The poor brickmaker women do what
they can to help Jo but are afraid their husbands will hurt
him (487) ; Esther and Charley take him home (488) , and
Jarndyce takes him in (4 91). As a result, both Charley and
Esther contract smallpox from him. Dr. Woodcourt ministers
kindly to Jo (690) as well as to Jenny (685); but he can
only soothe, not save. The professional man, then, shows
compassion, not the officiousness of the (semi-)
professional woman, such as Mrs. Jellyby, who admits her
motivation is at least partly to distract herself from
family worries (Chapter 23, especially pp. 386-387).
Caddy's condemnations and Esther' s--1 1 it is right to begin
with the obligations of home"--continually remind readers of
Mrs. Jellyby's shortcomings.
But far more severely censured is the formidable Mrs.
Pardiggle, with her "rapacious benevolence" (15 0), who
recruits Esther and Ada for a visit to the brickmakers that
is more of an invasion than a mission of mercy. Mrs.
Pardiggle, a loud, obnoxious woman with "a prominent nose"
(151) makes "a show that was not conciliatory, of doing
charity by wholesale" (159). The brickmaker's monologue
confirms that Mrs. Pardiggle's charity consists not of any
practical help but of preaching about cleanliness,
temperance, church attendance, and reading "good books"
(158).14 Incredibly, as she sweeps out of the cottage,
Mrs. Pardiggle fails to notice the sickly baby who dies as
142
she is leaving. (Esther and Ada, behind her, help comfort
the mother, and return later with gifts).
"Excellent people," says Mr. Jarndyce, "Mrs. Pardiggle
and all the rest of 'em. Excellent people! Do a deal of
good, and mean to do a good deal more" (161). Clearly, this
"excellent" is meant by Dickens to be taken ironically. At
any event, Esther terms the Pardiggles and the other
philanthropists at Caddy's wedding "ungenial company" for
Mr. Jarndyce (478). And, as Jarndyce adds in the earlier
discussion, "they make such a bustle and noise, and they are
so confoundedly indefatigable" (161).
Mrs. Pardiggle prides herself on that very quality: "'I
am so accustomed and inured to hard work that I don't know
what fatigue is,'" she tells Esther and Ada at their first
meeting. "'I have seen my young family, and Mr. Pardiggle,
quite worn out with witnessing it ["[t]he quantity of
exertion" and "amount of business" she can accomplish], when
I may truly say I have been as fresh as a lark!'" (154) .
Mrs. Pardiggle criticizes Mrs. Jellyby, not for neglecting
her children, but for failing to include them in her
charitable endeavors (152), a "mistake" Mrs. Pardiggle
herself does not make: she drags her five atrocious sons
along with her on her missions and forces them to contribute
their allowances to her causes. But this course of action
proves even worse than Mrs. Jellyby's good-tempered neglect:
"We had never seen such dissatisfied children," comments
143
Esther about the Pardiggle boys. "It was not merely that
they were weazened and shrivelled--though they were
certainly that too--but they looked absolutely ferocious
with discontent" (151). These children are so vicious that
they inflict complaints and minor torture on Esther
(155-156), whom all the other children in the novel adore.
As a character, Mrs. Pardiggle has no redeeming
features, and as a mother, she is condemned in the
repulsiveness of her children. Not so with Mrs. Jellyby,
whose only child readers see up close is Caddy, a "good"
character, a hard worker, and someone who does not complain
about any of her many misfortunes except her mother. Caddy
has also been intimately connected with Mrs. Jellyby's other
most important characteristic--her obsessive writing.
The preponderance of writing and letters in the Mrs.
Jellyby scenes readily leads to comparisons between her and
the figure of the woman writer. The implication is that
Mrs. Jellyby is wasting her time; instead of concentrating
on her "real" work--motherhood--she is busy with the sending
and receiving of pointless documents.15 Women like this
did effective work, as Dickens knew full well, for example,
from his connection with Miss Coutts of the Urania Cottage
project. And if writing were really such a waste of time, a
writer like Dickens would have to question his own
priorities. But an unmarried woman and a male writer do not
have the prior obligations of Mrs. Jellyby.
Mrs. Jellyby and Mrs. Pardiggle may be caricatures of
the domestic woman, disseminating ideology. The problem
with this reading is that they are so grotesque that they
are completely discredited. Admittedly, their negative
example supports the notion that a woman's place is in the
home; but the stronger corollary condemns their
proselytizing out of the home. They are, then, being
derided for performing one of the ideological functions of
the domestic woman, making them potentially subversive
elements in a conservative medium, the popular "realist"
novel. Esther's usefulness in the Lady Bountiful role is
not denigrated (at least not explicitly), but the women who
are "professionalizing" that role are violating the
"separate spheres" ideal and proving themselves "unnatural"
women.16 The distinction is a subtle one. For Dickens, as
a male writer, the way around this dilemma is to make a
clear differentiation between the two. The "professional"
do-gooders are made into figures of ridicule, although the
writing woman (Mrs. Jellyby) gets let off to some degree by
her comparatively pleasant demeanor. The satire implies
that women trying to do meaningful work in the one area open
to them may easily violate cultural expectations.
George Eliot often deals with the situation by making
the "meaningful work" fit the criterion "domestic," even
though it may literally take the woman outside the home, as
in the case of Mrs. Winthrop, the community's indispensable
145
nurse in Silas Marner. Women like Mrs. Winthrop, Mrs.
Poyser (Hetty's aunt, the farmer's wife in Adam Bede). and
Mrs. Glegg (The Mill on the Floss) are not limited to
motherhood. Their biological motherhood (of someone else)
is de-emphasized for their effect on the relevant heroine.
They are aunts and working mothers; and they are influential
outside their homes--aunts to the community as well. In
Mrs. Cadwallader (Middlemarch), George Eliot incorporates
the functions of these aunt-like characters with those of
another group of "professionalized" women--social arbiters
that Dickens caricatures, women who have literally marketed
their domestic assets. The result is a witty, independent
character who, nevertheless, illustrates severe limitations
placed on able, intelligent women.
Social Arbiters
Mrs. Cadwallader is more than a Lady Bountiful. For
some historians, such a woman promotes and teaches
middle-class values, not only by living according to them
herself and teaching them to her own family, but also by her
relations with the rest of the community, including
involvement in charitable work among the poor. In these
ways she undertakes an important task that men engaged in
market capitalism have neither the time nor the appropriate
"sensitivity" to accomplish.17 Circulating women like
this--experienced and mature--are well-versed in the ways
146
and standards of society and Society. They become experts
on what is proper and what is not, ultimately decreeing
it--within limits.
Considering her upper-class origins and connections,
and her current role in the community--a combination of what
we might now call networking among the lofty and outreach
among the humble--Mrs. Cadwallader seems a particularly good
example of the (almost professional) social arbiter. She is
"a lady of immeasurably high birth, descended, as it were,
from unknown earls." Her distinguishing ability to "cut
jokes in the most companionable manner," with just about
everyone she encounters leads to easy acceptance of her
pronouncements: "Such a lady gave a neighbourliness to both
rank and religion" (76). Moreover, her witty articulation
of social mores and manners helps readers make connections
among disparate elements in the world of Middlemarch: she is
an interpretive conduct book for readers, too. In contrast,
her predecessor Mrs. Sparsit of Hard Times presents a
caricature of the social arbiter, and Mrs. General of Little
Dorrit offers an even narrower and more parodic version.
In a way, Mrs. Sparsit and Mrs. Cadwallader are two
sides of a coin; we might also see similarities in their
respective heroes (Ladislaw and Harthouse), heroines
(Dorothea and Louisa), and villains (Casaubon and
Bounderby). Ladislaw's free spirit is opportunist in
Harthouse: the free spirit disciplines himself to be worthy,
147
while the opportunist plots to ruin. The heroines are less
similar, but their mutual feature is vulnerability and
curiosity about class differences. The villains'--if
Casaubon deserves the censure of that term--common ground is
their possession of an undeserved 'prize' wife, from whom
they expect total heroinely submission.18
Partly because the heroines are severely limited, it
falls to older women to embody and exert knowledge and power
insofar as women possess them. To some extent, these
characters personally escape from the novelistic conventions
about women in society, but in their commentary they
confirm, even establish, the conventions, by turn disrupting
and conforming to imaginative representation. They
influence the representation of other characters as well as
that of the community and its contemporary 'great world.'
Mrs. Cadwallader and Mrs. Sparsit are also lenses through
which readers see developing relationships between lovers.
Mrs. Sparsit is a downright villain, and while her
punishment--lonely exile with a tyrannical female
relative--is farcical, it offers serious information about
the fate of older women without husbands or money.
Mrs. Cadwallader is a more rounded character,19 whose
commentary and human value is correspondingly more benign:
nothing terrible happens to her. Mrs. Sparsit and Mrs.
General are obviously bogus because they did not have
heroine stories themselves but have rewritten their pasts to
148
make it appear that they did. Mrs. Cadwallader is
different. Her past as a heroine is implied by her defiance
of convention in marrying Humphrey Cadwallader: "Young
people should think of their families in marrying," she
tells Celia, "I set a bad example--married a poor clergyman,
and made myself a pitiable object among the De Bracys"
[presumably her family] (Middlemarch 80). While her
appearance is not described in detail, the information given
about her does not preclude her having been beautiful. She
is now a "high-coloured, dark-eyed lady" (75), with "a thin
but well-built figure" (76). Mrs. Cadwallader is
"legitimate"--acknowledged by the local aristocrats as
socially adept.
But Mrs. Cadwallader has serious flaws, too. She would
marry Dorothea to Sir James; she thinks it a fitting match,
despite the fact that Sir James is a stuffed shirt, who is
of no interest to Dorothea. What is insidious is that
having made Mrs. Cadwallader's match, Dorothea could put her
cottages-for-the-poor scheme into effect. At the price of
delivering her person over to Sir James, Dorothea could thus
become a latter-day St. Theresa--something she is actually
never able to accomplish. Mrs. Cadwallader's sense of the
fitness of Dorothea for Sir James has a certain logic,
considering his place in society.
According to one critic, Mrs. Cadwallader "is one of
George Eliot's most surely drawn minor characters."20
149
While one might not make quite the same claim of Dickens's
portrayal of Mrs. Sparsit--she is too obviously a
caricature--Chapter 7 of Hard Times is devoted to her, as is
the case with Mrs. Cadwallader in Chapter 6 of Middlemarch.
These introductions serve notice of the importance of both
characters, not as crucial elements of the narrative itself,
but as connecting devices and lenses through which readers
may perceive the world of the novel. In Middlemarch, the
world is a "widely diffused" one tied together by means of a
series of evaluating characters--for example "Mrs.
Cadwallader and Rosamond Lydgate and Raffles."21
Mrs. Sparsit is more limited; she has knowledge, but
she is not accepted in the community because of her
insincerity and her lack of concern with anyone else. Mrs.
Sparsit's sphere of influence is limited to Bounderby--and
only while she pleases him--and her function as a lens to
conveying in metaphorical terms a potentially adulterous
liaison that could not at that time be alluded to
directly.22 No one cares or notices, but she does declare
social proprieties, such as tracing her ludicrous pedigree,
or condemning Stephen Blackpool's marital impasse--and
Louisa Bounderby's, making her a grotesque forerunner of the
Mrs. Cadwallader character.
Our first view of Mrs. Cadwallader reveals her wide
influence in the community, as well as her acumen at her
"job." She is in characteristic mode, quickly recognizing
150
and acknowledging the departing Mr. Casaubon, then
bargaining with the lodgekeeper, through whose consciousness
we learn that "the countryside [would be] somewhat duller if
the Rector's lady had been less free-spoken and less of a
skinflint." One expository paragraph establishes Mrs.
Cadwallader as the local "character": keeping everyone
talking, she "pleaded poverty, pared down prices, and cut
jokes in the most companionable manner" (76). We have just
seen her do all of this, "though with a turn of tongue that
let you know who she was." This "turn of the tongue" I
assume means her upper-class accent, also referred to by the
narrator as "the clearest chiselled utterance" (75), which
would instantly differentiate her from the local people.
Shortly, readers see why Mr. Brooke dreads Mrs.
Cadwallader ("he winced" at her arrival), as she
demonstrates her power of quick, witty allusion (she terms
Mr. Casaubon "our Lowick Cicero") and her awareness of the
political realities of religion (discussing the Catholic
Bill, she baits Mr. Brooke about selling his land to
Catholics). She terms his answer "clap-trap," accuses him
of having political aspirations, and castigates him for not
having a party or a position (77). All Mr. Brooke can do is
prattle about ladies' ignorance of political matters (a
patent falsity in Mrs. Cadwallader's case and better applied
to himself); only the entrance of Celia enables him to
escape a trouncing.
151
Later, when the Cadwalladers and Sir James are mulling
over the financial cost of Mr. Brooke's standing for
parliament, Mrs. Cadwallader jokes about Mr. Brooke's
stinginess, a quality she perceives they share: "What we
good stingy people don't like, is having our sixpences
sucked away from us," she concludes (416). To Mr. Brooke's
face, she is a little less forthright but still cannot
resist remarking that "the most expensive hobby in the world
was standing for Parliament" (419).
But Mr. Brooke is used to Mrs. Cadwallader's taunts, if
not reconciled to them, as shown back in Chapter 6, where he
dreads having to tell her about Dorothea's engagement to
Casaubon, and hedges by paying compliments to Mrs.
Cadwallader's candidate for Dorothea, Sir James. When she
does finally worm out of Celia the identity of Dorothea's
suitor, Mrs. Cadwallader reacts with typical lack of
equivocation: "This is frightful" (79). She can get away
with such directness because she is the acknowledged
authority on social matters, particularly those to do with
marriage.
With Sir James, she uses a curious mixture of frankness
and diplomacy that allows him to save face. "I have a great
shock," she starts off, but adds "I hope you are not so far
gone in love as you pretended to be" [emphasis added] (80).
As the narrator says, there is no point in Sir James's
"protesting Mrs. Cadwallader's way of putting things." He
152
is used to her, too. She is his accepted matchmaker; he
readily acquiesces to her second candidate, Celia. To put
it crudely, then, Mrs. Cadwallader's role is part pander,
part social arbiter--the two are inextricably linked.
In Mrs. Sparsit, Bounderby's housekeeper in Hard Times,
those same roles are manifestly evil: in her world, all is
perverted. What is valuable in Mrs. Cadwallader is horribly
twisted, furtive, and threatening in Mrs. Sparsit, starting
with her credentials. Bounderby says to Mrs. Sparsit: "you
are not only a lady born and bred, but a devilish sensible
woman" (13 9). Readers already know both statements are
farcical. The "comedy" that some readers see "in the
relations between Bounderby and Mrs. Sparsit"23 highlights
the perversion.24 For example, preposterous names call
attention to the inauthenticity of Mrs. Sparsit's background
(Hard Times. I, 7). Through her short-lived, "Rake's
Progress" marriage, Mrs. Sparsit is "a Powler"; one may
infer the reverential tone in which she conveys this
information by the narrator's statement that people seemed
"uncertain whether it might be a business, a political
party, or a profession of faith" (Hard Times 83). Mrs.
Sparsit's other claim to gentility is based on her distant
relationship with greedy, fat old Lady Scadgers, with whom
she will end up living in cramped penury.
Following this background, the remainder of the chapter
introducing Mrs. Sparsit shows the mutually leech-like
153
relationship between her and Mr. Bounderby. The interview
with Stephen Blackpool demonstrates economically Mr.
Bounderby's overdone gallantry about Mrs. Sparsit's
connections: he has correctly inferred her susceptibility to
snobbery, as she has his to its opposite. She is not able
to sustain quite the level of hypocrisy that he does; she
cannot resist a taunt at Bounderby commenting that since
Stephen's marriage was so unhappy "it was probably an
unequal one in point of years" (111)--doubly ironic, in view
of not merely the Bounderbys' age difference but also of
Mrs. Sparsit's own marriage to a much younger man.
Mrs. Sparsit's motivation seems clear: she enjoys being
the mistress of a household, and seeing herself as the
future Mrs. Bounderby must figure somewhere in her schemes.
When she is usurped by Louisa, she will stoop to anything to
restore her previous favor with Bounderby. Mrs. Sparsit has
considered his marriage to Louisa as doomed from the start--
she is determined to see trouble before any arises and to
see Bounderby "as a Victim" (141). She turns out to be a
match breaker, rather than a match maker like Mrs.
Cadwallader, using every opportunity to spy (for example,
through the porter at the Bank and judicious questioning of
Mr. Harthouse when he arrives there looking for
Bounderby--14 8 and 153).
The robbery at the bank and Bounderby's subsequent
invitation to stay at his house present Mrs. Sparsit the
154
opportunity to encourage and observe the Harthouse-Louisa
relationship and the breakup of the Bounderbys' marriage
that she and everyone else have always sensed was
inevitable. In addition to Mrs. Sparsit's deliberate
muddles over the use of Louisa's maiden name and her fawning
attention on Bounderby, highlighting Louisa's inattention,
the narrator's comment confirms that "the Sparsit action
upon Bounderby threw Louisa and James Harthouse more
together, and strengthened the dangerous alienation"
(221-222).
Raymond Williams contends that Hard Times "is the work
of a man who has 'seen through' society" in all its
corruption (96-97) . Hence Dickens renders such moral
bankrupts as Bounderby--and Mrs. Sparsit (and most of the
characters in this novel). With the exception of the circus
I
people, and Gradgrind and Louisa at the end, all the
humanity is stripped away from the characters, contributing
to the notion that Hard Times is a novel pared down to
bitter metaphor.25 No character exemplifies this economy
more than Mrs. Sparsit: her lack of basic humanity not only
impedes her influence but finally undoes her.
The Middlemarch world may seem more "real" because the
characters appear to be complex and human-- flawed, but with
endearing qualities. Mrs. Cadwallader, for instance, is
shown as an affectionate and loyal wife, and her wit is
often tempered with consideration for others' feelings.
155
Consequently, her influence is much more effective than Mrs.
Sparsit's. Admittedly, Dorothea mostly ignores Mrs.
Cadwallader; but otherwise her authority and position are
real, her opinions valued, and her characterizations usually
sound.
As reader's guide to character, Mrs. Cadwallader is
already established, not only on her own merits (in Chapter
6 ) but in her accurate assessments of Mr. Casaubon, Mr.
Brooke, the Middlemarch burghers and their wives, and Will
Ladislaw. J.M.S. Tompkins, describing the novel's
"portraiture" of Will, isolates Mrs. Cadwallader as one link
in an "accretion of discrepant suggestions": Tompkins cites
"Dorothea's scornful rejection of Mrs. Cadwallader's
wounding parallel, 'an Italian with white mice'" (178).2S
But some of Mrs. Cadwallader's other comments on Will may be
more indicative of her ability to sum people up. "A very
pretty sprig," she dubs Will after she has met him, and,
after scant information from Mr. Brooke, she comments: "I
understand. . . . One who can write speeches" (364)--that
is, a politician, an astute prophetic summary. Later, she
adds "dangerous" to the "young sprig," on account of "his
opera songs and his ready tongue." She continues: "A sort
of Byronic hero--an amorous conspirator" (145) .
From what we know of Will's consciousness and his
idleness in Rome, as well as his easy sponging off Casaubon,
we can recognize that Mrs. Cadwallader is right, as least so
156
far. She cannot be expected to infer that under the
influence of his love for Dorothea, Ladislaw will make the
effort to develop into a worthier man. Yet her final
comment on Will ("wishing to make amends"), conveys warmth:
"After all, he is a pretty sprig," (877) says the woman who
categorizes her Humphrey as "an ugly archangel towering
above" the Middlemarchers (361). Appreciating Will's
physical beauty, she adds "He is like the fine old Critchley
portraits before the idiots came in" (877) . Quite an
accolade from one whose primary value is old family! If
critics have been over-influenced in their readings of Will
by Mrs. Cadwallader,27 they also may have under-read her
when it comes to the choice of man an intelligent,
comparatively independent woman might make: a Humphrey or a
Will, the kind of man whose own largesse leaves some space
for her.28
Mrs. Cadwallader's instincts are even more unerring
when it comes to Mr. Casaubon. She summarizes his scholarly
pretensions with the remark that "three cuttle-fish sable,
and a commentator rampant" would be suitable heraldic
flourishes for his family coat of arms (80). Her next
comment about him points out both his dryness and his status
as a (tragic) fool: "She says, he is a great soul.--A great
bladder for dried peas to rattle in" (83). For Walter
Allen, this assessment is "not quite just, but much nearer
to the truth than Dorothea's self-deceiving notion" (Allen
157
153). Casaubon's subsequent behavior seems, in fact, to
confirm Mrs. Cadwallader's opinion, expanded in her slightly
later witticism about Casaubon's blood: "Somebody put a drop
under a magnifying-glass, and it was all semicolons and
parentheses" (Middlemarch 96). Casaubon's dryness, lack of
common sense, and preoccupation with meaningless signs are
his major characteristics, as could hardly be better proved
than by his treatment of his beautiful and passionate young
wife, both on their honeymoon in Rome when she is alone in
her room sobbing, and later at home when he continues
relentlessly to woo the "Key to All Mythologies" instead of
her.29
In the characterizations of Casaubon, the text proves
Mrs. Cadwallader justified. Her metaphorical allusions help
establish her knowledge and intellectual acuity. Similarly,
consider the ease of her literary allusions: dubbing
Casaubon as first "Cicero" (76), then "Aquinas" (415)--a jab
at scholarship and at the portrait of Casaubon done in Rome,
when he posed as Aquinas (247 ff); and referring to Dido and
Zenobia (594) .30 The range of knowledge in Mrs.
Cadwallader's conversation and the quickness of her wit
indicates education and reading far outside the scope of
'the angel in the house'; rather, it suggests education at
the level of George Eliot's female acquaintances.31 A
number of commentators believe that Mrs. Cadwallader speaks
for George Eliot in some respects.32-
158
Mrs. Cadwallader' s expertise in the protocols of
courtship and marriage has been established by the ease with
which she achieves the Celia-Sir James union. Her
condemnation of distant honeymoons (310) is reinforced by
Dorothea's experiences in Rome. Mrs. Cadwallader's advice
to Dorothea following widowhood is equally sound: "You will
certainly go mad in that house alone . . . think what a bore
you might become . . .if you were always playing tragedy
queen . . . you may fancy yourself ruling the weather"
(581) .
Gilbert and Gubar assert that "Eliot employs theatrical
metaphors to illustrate that women without the definition
supplied by work have no stable self, no single character"
(532). Mrs. Cadwallader's "tragedy queen" comment is a
theatrical metaphor straight from the horse's mouth, i.e.
from a working woman to a woman currently "without the
definition supplied by work" (Dorothea), about the dangers
of loss of selfhood that go with purposelessness-- if Mrs.
Cadwallader's functions as social arbiter, matchmaker, and
confidante to the great do amount to work in the Eliotean
sense. And surely they do; she has found this way within
the system to exercise her considerable talents.
Consequently she does present "a stable self," a rounded
character. Without implying any reluctance on her part, all
this certainly demands her thorough commitment to a highly
159
conventional role, affecting the range of 'definition'
available to her.
The trouble with Mrs. Cadwallader's vision is that it
takes in only the externals; it deals only with the
perpetuation of the status quo and the observance of
propriety. But she sees the imprudence of Dorothea's
marriage to Casaubon, which she condemns in far more
censorious tones than she applies to the more appropriate
marriage to Will. That match may not be wise according to
Mrs. Cadwallader; but it is understandable. since it is very
close to the one she herself made. Her own match keeps her
happy, gives her life shape and meaning: if its poverty
calls upon her ingenuity, it also stimulates her wit. She
did not follow her own advice and perhaps even in that
closed world, people of vision do not need to--only Jameses
and Celias.
Mrs. Cadwallader is forthright, opinionated, and
respected. But she is not without personal charm: after
all, when they are not on the receiving end of it, people
enjoy her incisive wit. Her relationship with her husband
is too good to be that of a "dragon"; it appears to be a
marriage between equals.33 When Sir James is with Mr.
Cadwallader in his study, Mrs. Cadwallader comes in,
bringing her five-year-old daughter, "who immediately ran to
papa, and was made comfortable on his knee" (95)--the little
girl is obviously used to being taken care of by her father.
160
Sir James is complaining about the Casaubon-Dorothea
engagement, and Mrs. Cadwallader joins the conversation.
When she quips that all her husband cares about is
Casaubon's trout-stream, Humphrey Cadwallader takes the
remark in good part, though he still refuses to intervene,
turning down Sir James's pleas, as well as his wife's
{Chapter 8, 95-96) . The point is that Mrs. Cadwallader is
not condescended to by either of the men. In her world, men
as well as women listen to her.
She does, however, know when to back off--she knows her
own limitations. A woman as outspoken as she will
occasionally go too far, and when she does, she makes
amends, for instance in her parting comment on Will, and
more strikingly in the conversation about a second marriage
for Dorothea, when both Lady Chettam ("your clever tongue
runs away with you") and Sir James ("the subject of our
conversation is ill-chosen") rebuke her (593) . Celia jumps
in to defend her. But "Hush, my dear!" Mrs. Cadwallader
demurs. "I will not offend again" (although she may, with
the reference to Dido or Zenobia, if Dorothea is
sufficiently well-read); and she gracefully yields with a
self-deprecating reference to "the nature of rectors' wives"
(594) .
In expressing her opinions, influencing other
characters, and advancing the narrative, Mrs. Cadwallader
exercises substantial authority. Nothing bad happens to
161
her, possibly because she is honest and ultimately her
purpose benefits the community: she knows her role, which is
finally to encourage people to conform, or as the narrator
puts it, rather more positively, "socially uniting" them
(Middlemarch 76). In depicting this character, whose
wittiness has been compared with her own,34 Eliot displays
limitations that conditions imposed on all women.
But she also implies the potential contribution to
politics and society that able, intelligent women might
make. It must have struck some contemporary readers as
ironic that Mr. Brooke has a serious chance at Parliament
when Mrs. Cadwallader is ineligible to stand--or vote. The
subtle tragedy of Mrs. Cadwallader is that she is wasted.
Her mind, "active as phosphorous, biting everything that
came near into the form that suited it" (84) has to be
satisfied with making "a pickle of epigrams" (83) out of
social doings. In much the same sense as is Dorothea, Mrs.
Cadwallader is boxed in by her gender, so that she ends up
with "a nice life" but nowhere truly worthy to use that wit
and intelligence.35
In contrast, Mrs. Sparsit, interested only in her own
well-being, for which she would willingly sacrifice the good
of the community, comes to a humiliating end, more
marginalized than ever. Mrs. Sparsit's inauthenticity leads
her finally to misread everyone, especially Louisa. In her
final pursuit of Louisa, the muddy, rain-soaked Mrs. Sparsit
162
(the narrator compares her appearance with "an old park
fence in a mouldy lane") meets some readerly expectations of
comeuppance. Perhaps compromised by such expectations, one
has endured Mrs. Sparsit's machinations in the growing hope
of such deserved humiliation, similar to that of Evelina's
awful French grandmother, who, in a mock abduction, is
dunked into a ditch, losing her "curls" and face paint.36
But Mrs. Sparsit is not played mainly for comedy: the
results of her scheming are too tragic. If she does provide
some comic relief in the otherwise dark and pessimistic
vision of Hard Times, maybe readers should ponder exactly
what this tells us about the fate of heroines. Whether or
not a heroine gets her own happy ending, she may turn up as
an extra in another heroine's story, where she may be the
subject of the utmost derision.
Hard Times has been admired (and occasionally
dismissed) because of its efficiency, the tightness of its
metaphor-like characterizations, of which Mrs. Sparsit is a
brilliant example. Such a process is brought to a fine art
in Mrs. General, of Little Dorrit, a character whittled to
the bone to make points about oppressive (and artificial)
social codes. Fewer broad characteristics and descriptions
and more focus on the primary role convey more economically
a comic-satiric type like Mrs. General. Readers know all
about her role from the heroine's point of view: Mrs.
General is there ostensibly to teach Amy Dorrit the social
163
graces but actually to show readers that Amy is perfect the
way she is--without social graces. At the same time Mrs.
General provides comic relief and narrative digression.37
Like Mrs. Cadwallader and Mrs. Sparsit, Mrs. General has her
credentials set forth in her own chapter (II.2)--very
briefly and 'generally':
Mrs. General was the daughter of a clerical
dignitary in a cathedral town, where she had
led the fashion until she was as near
forty-five as a single lady-can be. •
These are bare bones, except the rigmarole about her age--a
direct humbug alert. A synopsis is related in horse-driving
terms: "she drove the proprieties four-in-hand." The
metaphor is sustained for her marriage: "they ran over
several people who came in the way of the proprieties; but
always in a high style, and with composure"--and her
widowhood: "the whole team of proprieties were harnessed to
his hearse." In this way, no details are revealed about
her, including her name ("Mrs. General" conveys completely a
pretentious status conferred by her husband's occupation).
Nor do we learn her fate--or need to. The point of the
character is to stress the emptiness of the forms that rule
her.38 Her precepts are so discredited that there is no
need for her to be brought down.
After Mr. Dorrit dies, we can assume she circulates to
some other foolishly aspiring father, who will deserve her,
then recirculate her. She and the people she touches will
continue in empty ritual, neither growing nor learning. She
>
164
is both a refinement and a lesser version of Mrs. Sparsit--
lesser because her evil is too petty to contaminate Amy
Dorrit. Despite the desire to please her father, Amy,
her character already formed in defiance of the Marshalsea,
is simply unable to "submit herself" to Mrs. General's
"Prunes and prisms" education (II.V). Consequently, Mrs.
General has absolutely no effect on Amy (although she does
on Amy's sister, herself a fledgling Mrs. General, only
better-hearted). Mrs. Sparsit's malevolence is much more
active. Her part in the ruin of Louisa, a character with
whom we are meant to sympathize, demands a detailed fall
from grace.
Not explicit, but strongly implied, are the similar
aspirations of Mrs. Sparsit and Mrs. General: unions with
Bounderby and Dorrit respectively. Here the opposite
situation applies to that of Lady Russell: both the women
are eking out parasitical existences based on spurious
knowledge of the 'great world' and its forms, with which
they contribute to the menages of pretentious phonies. In
such precarious circumstances, marriage with their patrons
would consolidate their slender power-bases as well as
improve their material conditions. Since neither has
property to bestow--and independence like Lady Russell's is
hollow without property--by marrying, neither would suffer
the disadvantages that she would. As far as surrendering
their persons is concerned, they are already perforce at the
165
beck and call of pompous men, so obedience to the whims of
husbands would be no real change. There is the matter of
sexual submission. While both Bounderby and Dorrit may seem
repellent to readers, there is no indication that Mrs.
Sparsit and Mrs. General find this to be so. Either they
have not dealt with the sexual issue, or they do not object;
possibly they consider it worth putting up with in order to
gain future security.
In such attitudes toward marriage, they also contrast
with Mrs. Cadwallader who, we remember, made a love match,
forfeiting the only real possibility of material advancement
open to women. Mrs. Cadwallader's education and connections
do, however, put her in a position where she can exercise
options not open to the other two. She is one of a
fortunate few in this respect, and in that of having a
"good" husband who enables her to define herself in
admittedly limited ways. Mrs. General has, perforce,
defined herself much more narrowly: to survive in a market
economy, she has adapted what skills she had--pitiful social
"accomplishments"--to the market. And she is doing her
little bit to perpetuate heroine ideology: with Amy, Mrs.
General's failure to have any effect helps produce a
heroine.
166
Friends and Relations
Mrs. General hires out as aunt to inculcate domestic
ideology in families lacking the mother who would otherwise
be doing it. Another possibility for the older woman is the
role of the stepmother, particularly one like Mrs. Gibson,
in Wives and Daughters, whom a man marries specifically to
give his motherless daughter a woman's care. Mr. Gibson is
quite open about his motive, when he starts off his proposal
this way: "I should like you to love my poor little Molly--
to love her as your own"--not getting to the "wife" part
until later on (140). He emphasizes the point when telling
Lady Cumnor, the matriarch of the local aristocratic family:
"I have been asking Mrs. Kirkpatrick to be my wife, and to
be a mother to my child" (141).
The new Mrs. Gibson is about as intolerable as she can
be without quite becoming grotesque, yet the conditions of
her life have led her to what she is.39 A very pretty,
"accomplished" girl ("she had a beautiful [French]
accent"40) , she could have been a heroine. But she had to
earn her living by becoming the governess in an aristocratic
family--trading, like Mrs. General, on others' desire to
master the forms that she had acquired. She married a poor
clergyman and was soon widowed; obliged to earn a living,
she again worked as a governess and later, with the help of
wealthy acquaintances, opened a girls' school that she runs
badly.41 Small wonder, her reaction to Mr. Gibson's
167
proposal is that "it was such a wonderful relief to feel
that she need not struggle any more for a livelihood" (140) .
For this reaction, one may question why she is to be
censured any more than Mr. Gibson is for his motive.42
Mrs. Gibson's life--her livelihood--has revolved around
empty social ritual. Small wonder, her ruling quality is
pettiness.43 Determined to be "wonderfully just to Molly
for a stepmother" (365) from the start, when she is
preparing a room for her daughter, Cynthia, Mrs. Gibson
insists on also refurbishing Molly's room--although Molly
herself desperately wants it left as it is, with her own
mother's childhood furniture. Mrs. Gibson calls this
"selfish fancy" on Molly's part; more concerned with form
and how she is perceived than about Molly's feelings, Mrs.
Gibson argues that people would accuse her of "petting my
own child and neglecting my husband's" (219).
Such adherence to social niceties is typical of Mrs.
Gibson's tyranny. In response to Squire Hamley's request
that Molly come to his sick wife, Mrs. Gibson makes Molly
keep a trivial social engagement first, despite Molly's
obvious distress. ("Molly was on the point of crying at the
thought of her friend lying ill and lonely, and looking for
her arrival"--224). When Molly is at Hamley Hall, Mrs.
Gibson repeatedly sends for her, because, as Mr. Gibson
tells Molly, "people will put a bad construction on your
being so much away from home so soon after our marriage"
168
(235) . When Molly gets home, Mrs. Gibson wants her to go
out dancing; governed by social ritual herself, she cannot
understand that Molly is grieving like a daughter for the
seriously ill Mrs. Hamley (236) .
In observing at least the forms with Molly, Mrs. Gibson
is doing better than she has done in the past with her own
daughter, Cynthia, who has been kept out of the way at
school in France.44 Cynthia "has to spend her holidays at
school," says the then Mrs. Kirkpatrick to the twelve-year-
old Molly, the same age as Cynthia, during Molly's adventure
at the castle where Mrs. Kirkpatrick is visiting. Yet five
years later, when the noble family is discussing Mrs.
Kirkpatrick, their former governess who still visits them,
one sister comments: "The only thing that makes me uneasy
now is the way in which she seems to send her daughter away
from her so much; we never can persuade her to bring Cynthia
with her when she comes to see us" (125). Evidently they
have always wanted her to bring Cynthia, but Mrs.
Kirkpatrick makes excuses because she does not want to be
eclipsed by her daughter. Mr. Gibson imagines Cynthia and
Molly will be bridesmaids; but Mrs. Kirkpatrick has no
intention of having Cynthia "flashing out her beauty by the
side of the faded bride, her mother" (156). So Mrs.
Kirkpatrick contrives for the French schoolmistress to
advise against disturbing Cynthia's studies, and again form
169
is preserved: no one knows whose fault it is that Cynthia
cannot be at the wedding (although the aristocrats guess).
When Cynthia does come home, one of her first comments
to Molly is no surprise: "mamma and I didn't suit when we
were last together" (254). Another of her early
observations is "I wish I could love people as you do,
Molly!" (257). Later, in rescuing Cynthia from a
blackmailer, as well as in trying to further the Cynthia-
Roger romance, Molly will show her love for Cynthia.
Molly's love is the closest to mother-love that Cynthia will
get. Cynthia is quite contemptuous of her own mother: "I'm
sorry mamma still looks upon me as 'an encumbrance,'" she
tells Molly, "But I've been an encumbrance to her all my
life" (651).
Indeed, Mrs. Gibson gets more cooperation from Molly
than she does from Cynthia, not because of Mrs. Gibson's own
merits, but because Molly wants to avoid hurting her father.
Perhaps because of this responsiveness, by the time Molly
comes home after the catastrophes at Hamley Hall, Mrs.
Gibson gives her a "warm welcome," because, among other
reasons, she "was really fond of the girl, in her way, and
sorry to see her pale heavy looks" (616). Mrs. Gibson is
more enthusiastic about this homecoming than she is after
Cynthia has been away two years: she will not go to meet
Cynthia's coach ("I hate scenes in the marketplace") and
170
will not leave the warm drawing-room once Cynthia arrives at
the house (252-253).
To please her father, Molly placates her stepmother.
For his part, Mr. Gibson soon realizes his mistake but tries
to overlook "his wife's plaintive fret or pretty babble over
totally indifferent things," concentrating instead on the
"positive advantages" she represents (364). In marrying
her, he believes he has gained "an unexceptional chaperone,
if not a tender mother, for his little girl; a skilful
manager of his previous disorderly household";45 and the
companionship of Cynthia for Molly (365). To Molly,•her
father's remarrying--to give her a mother--has only given
her pain. In any case, Molly has found her own mother
substitute in Mrs. Hamley. To be more precise, Mrs. Hamley,
the one who initiated the relationship, found Molly.46
Trying to be a mother to Molly by consoling her, Mrs. Hamley
invites confidences about Mrs. Gibson; but Molly, out of
loyalty to her father, keeps silent, adding "And besides,
you have helped me so much" (227).
Indeed, Mrs. Hamley has helped Molly. Of several kind
women acquainted with Mr. Gibson, Mrs. Hamley becomes
Molly's closest mother-surrogate.47 A well-educated woman,
Mrs. Hamley has given up the society of her peers out of
consideration for her husband, who avoids social contacts
because his father failed to provide him with an appropriate
education. Retired in the country, Mrs. Hamley has no
171
interests; her husband sent their sons away to school "very
early," for fear they would suffer the same "deprivation" as
he did (74). "Perhaps if she had had a daughter it would
have been better for her" comments the narrator.48 And
Mrs. Hamley thinks so herself: "I think with a girl I could
have been of use--a mother does not know boys," she tells
Molly (226-7). She reproaches herself: "I've made such an
idol of my beautiful Osborne; and he turns out to have feet
of clay" (230).
With nothing to do and only literature to console her,
Mrs. Hamley "sank into ill-health" (74); hence her
connection with Mr. Gibson, the local doctor, with whom the
Hamleys have become friendly, and her interest in his
motherless daughter, Molly. Because she has no daughters of
her own, Mrs. Hamley has long wanted Molly to visit (76).
Mr. Gibson has not allowed this until one of his pupils
makes advances to Molly, when her father is only too pleased
to comply with Mrs. Hamley's request.
From the beginning of Molly's visit, Molly and Mrs.
Hamley enjoy together the woman's pleasure of reading and
poetry (96); Mrs. Hamley writes poetry herself (75), and
there are plenty of new novels available, especially Scott's
(103) .49 Molly soon assumes the role of "daughter-of-the-
house," especially in listening to Mrs. Hamley's worries
about her son Osborne. "You're a blessing to mothers,
child!" she tells Molly, "You give one such pleasant
172
sympathy" (118) .50 Soon Molly becomes "passionately fond
of Mrs. Hamley" and "a favorite of the Squire's"; yet she
longs to go home to her beloved father, who, unknown to her,
is "drifting into matrimony" (122) . In Molly's distress
after she has learned her father's plan to marry, and in her
guilt at having behaved badly toward him about the news,
both Roger (the younger Hamley son) and Mrs. Hamley offer
sympathy. Molly feels sufficiently close to Mrs. Hamley
that she "thr[ows] herself into Mrs. Hamley's arms and
sobts] upon her breast" (154).
Molly will never regain the old, easy closeness with
her father: Mrs. Gibson will not permit it. Once Molly
returns home, she is soon needed back at the Hamleys'--and,
because of her love for Mrs. Hamley, is eager to go. Her
urgency must partly be to get away from her stepmother.
Molly needs a mother figure to console her about Mrs.
Gibson's oppressive triviality, and in the time between
leaving the Hamleys and returning, she is also befriended by
the Misses Browning and by Lady Harriet, all good women
without daughters, whose own needs she helps meet.
When Molly returns to Hamley Hall, Roger says, "You've
been like a daughter to my mother." Molly replies "I do so
love her." But Molly has had all the mothering she is to
get from Mrs. Hamley, who is now constantly drugged to
relieve the pain of her last illness. All Molly can do is
"h[ang] about the house," trying to comfort a family
173
unravelling under other pressures, without the mother who
could have made things right "if she'd been what she once
was," as Roger puts it (241, 240). From now on, Molly will
be mothering others, such as the squire and Cynthia, not
being mothered herself, certainly not by the dreadful Mrs.
Gibson.
A stand-in like Mrs. Hamley usually plays a small role
in the heroine's plot, such as getting the heroine through a
crucial stage toward her development.51 Very often this
type of character has failed, or thinks she has, as a
biological mother, and gets another chance (this situation
applies to some extent to Lady Dedlock and Rosa--more to
Mrs. Transome and Esther). The mother-surrogate, or "good
aunt," cares about the heroine, but not as obsessively as
she would about her own daughter; therefore, she can use
better judgment. Moreover, she has often learned from the
mistakes she has made with someone else (possibly her own
daughter).
This may be good for the current heroine; notvso good
for the ex-heroine who now plays a bit part in someone
else's story--if she is "lucky," benefitting that someone
but not herself. Her situation emphasizes the point that
heroines peak at the end of adolescence. For them, maturity
is ignominy: they have "nothing to do," for the rest of
their lives. The ironic ideal is offered by Gissing in The
Odd Women: at the book's opening, the mother of some of his
174
anti-heroines in this novel, "having given birth to six
daughters, had fulfilled her function in this wonderful
world; for two years she had been resting in the old
churchyard" (3).
The compromise that domestic fiction seems to offer to
the heroine after her story is over is as follows. Compared
with the mothers whose destinies I have discussed (Lady
Dedlock, Mrs. Transome, the Princess), the aunts fare much
better. Women who are aunts and mothers do better in the
aunt capacity (Mrs. Transome gets more happiness from being
Esther's mother-figure than from being Harold's mother; Lady
Dedlock does more mothering for her maid than for her
daughter; even Mrs. Gibson does better with Molly than with
Cynthia).
For the older woman who was once a heroine or an
aspiring heroine, the compromise--the via media--is
aunthood, which might include stepmothering. Aunthood is
second-best, but it is not so demanding of goodness and
self-sacrifice as is motherhood, which almost inevitably
leads to tragedy, or at best, silence. Aunthood is a more
detached relationship than motherhood, leaving aunts some
room to develop as persons, some independence. This
independence is at the price of a woman's "true" fulfillment
as a mother (fulfillment that is illusory since the ideal
mother is selfless). But the aunt role is small,
peripheral, and ultimately not very important, unless it can
175
somehow be transformed into meaningful work. That still
means that grown-up women have a narrow window of
opportunity.
176
NOTES
1 According to Haight, George Eliot's greatest friend,
Barbara Bodichon, wrote to another close friend, Bessie
Rayner Parkes, that "the Leweses practised some form of
birth control, and intended to have no children." Haight
was told about this in 194 2, by Parkes's daughter, who had
recently "destroyed" the letter itself (Biography 205).
2 Haight 452. Lewes's sons, as I mentioned in note 55
to Chapter 2, called her "Mutter," the German for "mother."
In the Biography. Haight makes a convincing case for George
Eliot as an affectionate stepmother, a notion undercut by
Rosemarie Bodenheimer's comment that two "inconvenient
stepsons were shipped off to South Africa" (an aside in her
"Ambition" argument). But the oldest, Charles Lewes,
remained in England, and his relationship with GE appears to
have been that of a son.
3 Haight, Biography 533.
4 In Desire and Domestic Fiction. Nancy Armstrong
argues that conduct books helped establish middle-class
domestic ideology--the ideal of the woman presiding over the
household, encouraging her to stay within it, except for the
one acceptable public contact, visiting the poor and the
sick to nurture them and dispense ideology along with
largesse: to act the Lady Bountiful.
According to Elizabeth Langland ("Nobody's Angels"),
this "'ideological work' of gender" puts the middle-class
woman in a very powerful position, in some respects (such as
contact with the lower classes) more influential in
disseminating dominant ideology than their male equivalents
(291). Because this woman controlled middle-class
signifiers (such as the precise codes that applied to dress,
social calling, and "the paraphernalia of mourning"), she
was actually empowered in certain ways by "the very
signifiers of powerlessness in the gendered frame of
reference." For example, her elaborate clothing,
"physically inhibiting as it may have been," and her
supposed idleness, were what we now call status symbols
indicating her higher class position--and her "managerial
status" (294).
Anita Levy sees women as "agents of hegemony" in that
they "regulate and socialize the members of the family" by
presiding over the home (34-35). Levy articulates the
nineteenth-century hegemonic view of woman's place: "good
woman in the home . . . bad woman in the street." This
"binary logic of gender difference" (55) derives from
nineteenth-century anthropology, which defines, for example,
Africans as "other." Anthropology has its own "political
177
logic" (57) whereby it decrees what is "'natural' about
human nature and 'human' about human beings" (59).
Following this "'good' female ideology" helps to stay the
chaos that is always threatening the middle-class woman and
middle-class ideology in general (68). Extending Levy's
argument to Dickens's philanthropic women reveals that they
are placed in a paradoxical and untenable middle position:
at one and the same time, they are "both good women"
promoting domestic ideology and "bad women" out in the
public street doing it--both the ideal and the "other."
5 "Emma was very compassionate; and the distresses of
the poor were as sure of relief from her personal attention
and kindness, her counsel and her patience, as from her
purse" (Emma I.X 79) .
5 To Harriet, on the subject of Robert Martin: "The
yeomanry are precisely the.order of people with whom I feel
I can have nothing to do. A degree or two lower, and a
creditable appearance might interest me; I might hope to be
useful to their families in some way or other. But a farmer
can need none of my help" (Emma I.IV.25).
7 Nancy Armstrong explains: "It was their acknowledged
aptitude for performing acts of charity that first enabled
women to move out of the home and into the political arena"
(92). This is the point that Elizabeth Langland expands in
"Nobody's Angels," in which she discusses various
"discursive practices that gave middle-class women
unprecedented political power" (292) over classes 'beneath'
them, including visits to the poor. Charity dispensed this
way kept the poor separated from one another and enabled
close middle-class surveillance and regulation.
8 As Armstrong and her sources, including the
influential Frances Power Cobbe, make clear, this public
aspect of women's forte was considered appropriate for
single women (92).
9 Historians such as Dyhouse, Davidoff and Hall, and
critics such as Poovey, Armstrong, and Langland, for
example, all see middle-class women as crucial in this role.
10 Elizabeth Langland argues that whereas the
brickmakers have no trouble "resist[ing] Mrs. Pardiggle's
high-handed attempts to take them into moral custody,"
Esther's influence on them is subtler. "[T]hey are seduced
by the same values when proffered with the soft voice and
gentle touch of Esther," the 'angel' type (297). This seems
to be overstating the case, since the men pay no more
attention to Esther than to Mrs. Pardiggle. The women are
178
more responsive to Esther, but the "values" she brings, as I
will be discussing later, are quite different from Mrs.
Pardiggle's. In any case, the brickmaker women do pay
slight attention to Mrs. Pardiggle.
11 These dubious results square with Dickens's
real-life experiences with charitable work, for instance,
the "Urania Cottage" project on which he and Miss Coutts
expended much time and energy. The idea was to rehabilitate
"fallen" women, enabling them eventually to start new lives
overseas. A pitifully small number could be helped at all,
and as of 1853 only about thirty had actually emigrated.
(See Selected Letters. "Urania Cottage," pp. 193-210. The
full versions in The Pilgrim Edition show in more detail
Dickens's compassion and understanding for the women. For
example, "The poor girl out of prison continues to do well.
. . . I am afraid of every hour, . . . because she is
constantly exposed to the hazard of going among old
companions. . . . It is dreadful to think how some of these
doomed women have no chance or choice. . . . [I]t would have
been a social marvel and miracle if some of them had been
anything else than what they were" (The Pilgrim Edition Vol.
5, p. 181-188. For other Urania Cottage letters in full See
Vol. 4 pp. 552-556 and 587-589; Vol. 5 pp. 117-179; Vol. 6
pp. 644-646) . Selected Letters is a helpful source of
information about Dickens's involvement in charitable causes
because it arranges the letters by subject matter. Part II,
"Social and Political Letters," has sections for his
principal interests in these areas, i.e. "Ragged Schools,"
"Urania Cottage," "Capital Punishment," and "Parliament and
Self-Help," the last reflecting his interest in democratic
reform.
12 Robert Donovan suggests that the Mrs. Jellyby group
and Mr. Chadband "demonstrate various specious modes" of
charity, while "Captain Hawdon, Mr. Snagsby, Mr. Jarndyce,
and Esther provide glimpses of the genuine article"--an
example of "the multiplication of instances," a "principal
technique" of Dickens in dealing with "ethical abstractions"
[in this case, charity] (106-107).
13 Their fascination with the "other" as the recipient
of charitable enterprise has sinister overtones that are
explored by Anita Levy in Other Women, including imperialism
and the displacement of evil.
14 Her male counterpart, Mr. Chadband, takes a
similar, all-talk, approach with the starving Jo. See
Chapter 19, p. 323ff, for the first meeting between Chadband
and Jo; Chapter 25, p. 411ff, for Chadband's preaching.
Each time, Mr. Snagsby helps Jo materially.
179
15 Parallels in Bleak House include Krook's junk shop
and the Chancery Court itself (both bogged down with
voluminous--and meaningless--documents, as J.H. Miller
points out in his Introduction to the Penguin edition).
16 Elizabeth Langland's point is that the spheres were
not separate but reciprocal: between them, middle-class men
and women imposed their ideology. Langland quotes Sarah
Ellis's explanation: "Society is to the daughters of a
family, what business is to the son." ("Nobody's Angels"
291) .
Another way of looking at Dickens's indictment of
"Telescopic Philanthropy" is the one expressed by Robert
Newsom in "Villette and Bleak House: Authorizing Women." It
is part of "Bleak House's radical suspicion of institutions
per se" (65).
17 This theory is advanced by many feminist critics,
notably Nancy Armstrong in Desire and Domestic Fiction. To
oversimplify her argument, the older woman of suitable
social status becomes a personified conduct book.
To reiterate Elizabeth Langland's point about the
complementarity of the "spheres," women like Mrs.
Cadwallader "were pursuing a 'career of sociability' . . .
the necessary complement to a man's career of monetarily
remunerated work" ("Nobody's Angels" 294).
18 This series of comparisons might support the claim
of another revisionist impulse, as discussed Chapter 2,
referring to Bleak House and Felix Holt, the Radical.
19 In the sense used by E.M. Forster in Aspects of the
Novel.
20 Walter Allen, George Eliot. 82.
21 Mark Schorer, 12 & 23.
22 This is in response to what Barbara Hardy refers to
as the "convention of reticence" imposed on Victorian
novelists, calling for considerable ingenuity in handling
taboo subject matter (see note 29). In "Podsnappery" (after
Dickens's coinage for Mr. Podsnap's fastidious concern for
his daughter's sensibilities in Our Mutual Friend). Ruth
Yeazell calls attention to the Victorian squeamishness about
sexuality, the cause for this restriction of expression.
But Kathleen Tillotson quotes "a surviving Victorian," who
explains that "the (largely imaginary) prudery and reticence
of the Victorians is chiefly due to th[e] habit of family
reading. It would take a tough father to read some modern
novels aloud to his children" (Novels of the Eighteen
Forties 55).
180
The subsequent use of figurative language resulted in
such symbols as Mrs. Sparsit's staircase, the access into
adultery looming for Louisa. Interestingly enough, over
half a century later than Hard Times, Freud, discussing
dream-theory and "the symbols for sexual organs and sexual
intercourse," singles out the staircase as a common one that
"could never have been reached by a conscious wish to
distort" (New Introductory Lectures on Psychoanalysis, 21).
23 For example, Churchill, "Charles Dickens" 13 7.
24 The term 'comedy' is apt, in the sense that comedy
is greatly concerned with proper matches after a suitable
crisis--see Northrop Frye, Anatomy of Criticism, "The Mythos
of Spring: Comedy," especially 163-4--but inappropriate in
view of the grotesqueness of the particular characters
involved.
25 Numerous critics comment to this effect, among them
those of such varied chronology and perspective as F.R.
Leavis (The Great Tradition 19-20), George Orwell ("Charles
Dickens"), Raymond Williams, "The Industrial Novels," in
Culture and Society 1780-1950), and Catherine Gallagher (The
Industrial Reformation of English Fiction: Social Discourse
and Narrative Form 1832-1867) . As Gallagher puts it,
"Metaphors are a hallmark of Dickens's style in all his
novels, but in Hard Times they become a thematic
preoccupation, even an obsession. This novel can, indeed,
be seen as a book about metaphors" (159-160).
26 What is also interesting about the "white mice"
epithet is the manner in which Dorothea learns of it: when
she and Celia are discussing Casaubon's codicil, Celia
remarks on the improbability of Will's proposing marriage to
Dorothea and quotes Mrs. Cadwallader (Middlemarch 532).
Celia has previously quoted Mrs. Cadwallader on wedding-trip
protocol (310). Thus is demonstrated another instance of
people quoting Mrs. Cadwallader as the social authority.
27 Examples of such reading's include J.M.S. Tompkins,
"A Plea for Ancient Lights" (178), Mark Schorer "The
Structure of the Novel: Method, Metaphor and Mind" (23), and
Walter Allen George Eliot (160).
28 Walter Allen implies George Eliot is in love with
Will, too, and wonders "what Dorothea and her author see in
him." Allen thinks Lydgate is "the exemplar in Middlemarch"
of George Eliot's superior "exclusively masculine" men. But
Lydgate is flat and unresponsive to his wife's needs. In
Paris, Madame Laure has told Lydgate, "I do not like
husbands. I will never have another" (Middlemarch Chapter
15). Lydgate, while appealing to men, (Allen, for
181
instance) perhaps is not very attractive as a man to an
independent woman.
Will is supposed to be just that. Gilbert and Gubar
claim that "Will is Eliot's radically anti-patriarchal
attempt to create an image of masculinity attractive to
women" (528-9). The fact that he is an unpropertied
outsider and a Jew, an outcast indeed, is part of the anti-
patriarchal impulse.
29 Barbara Hardy points out that writing "within a
restricted convention of reticence," George Eliot
nonetheless conveys sexuality in many of her characters--and
impotence in the case of Casaubon, partly by clues like
commenting that he is "physically repulsive" (292), but more
importantly for my argument, by the remarks from other
characters on the unsuitability of the match with Dorothea.
"The very technique of implication has dramatic advantages.
Mrs. Cadwallader might be expected to talk to Sir James in
knowing metaphor ..." As a member of the "chorus of
disapproval" of Casaubon--Sir James, Will--"Mrs. Cadwallader
is unambiguously thinking of sterility." ("Implication and
Incompleteness: George Eliot's Middlemarch. 1 1
Particularities 298).
30 Dido is likely to have been a commonplace in
educated society, but Zenobia is fairly obscure--two
possibilities: (1) character in Hawthorne's The Blithedale
Romance 1852, who drowns herself over unrequited love (2)
Queen of Palmyra captured by Aurelian.
31 Gillian Beer points out that nearly all George
Eliot's close women friends were "actively involved with the
women's movement" (George Eliot 181). Most of these women
were highly educated and intelligent--such as Bessie Rayner
Parkes, Barbara Bodichon ("the most constantly valued friend
of her adult life" according to Beer--156), dementia
Doughty, Maria Bury, and Edith Simcox.
32 For didactic purposes, according to Isobel
Armstrong, citing the sharp views about Dorothea and
Casaubon in Chapter 10 (119); to make "ironic evaluations"
for the author, according to Mark Schorer (23); "George
Eliot speaks through the witty Mrs. Cadwallader [among
others]," according to U.C. Knoepflmacher (Religious
Humanism. 114).
33 Until the twentieth century, extremely rare in
English literature, according to Carolyn Heilbrun, who cites
the exception of Elizabeth and Darcy in Pride and Prejudice.
This is because they are friends and equals, a necessity for
a good marriage, but unusual in societies "'where men are
educated and women not, where one sex works and the other is
182
idle, or where they do totally different work'" ("Marriage
Perceived: English Literature 1873-1944," Hamlet's Mother
and Other Women 146-7). Mrs. Cadwallader is clearly well-
educated, and the Cadwalladers' work is quite similar; they
meet C.S. Lewis's criterion (quoted by Heilbrun): they have
something "to be Friends about."
34 For Robert Heilman, George Eliot's and Mrs.
Cadwallader's "wit" and "amusing dialogue" represent one of
two disparate "modes that emerge from the eighteenth
century": they typify "the novel of manners" (the other is
the Gothic mode) (51-2).
Barbara Hardy cites Mrs. Cadwallader (and others) as
George Eliot's vehicles for the expression of irony
(Critical Approaches 23).
35 I am not suggesting that Dorothea becomes Mrs.
Cadwallader, only that Dorothea is similarly circumscribed
into a "useful" role.
35 In Burney's Evelina. Letter XXXIII.
37 She is one of James Kincaid's particular examples
of Dickens characters whose "readiness to cite authorities
stands in inverse proportion to his reliability" (11).
38 According to John Wain, her "distrust of the
instinctual and spontaneous" (184) is part of Dickens' deep
pessimism in Little Dorrit. She and characters like Mr.
Tite Barnacle are "buttoned-up" (Little Dorrit 11.12),
because "human relationships [have] become warped" as the
result of the prison-like society (176) .
39 John Gross observes that toward the end of her
career, Elizabeth Gaskell "gave up writing about current
social problems," although "their presence [was] felt
offstage," by such means as making the narrator a railway
engineer in Cousin Phillis (227). In her "masterpiece,
Wives and Daughters." allusion to new technology (railways)
is very limited and vague because she "stays firmly inside
the period of her youth." But if the conditions of women
were considered a "social problem" in 1865 when she was
writing Wives and Daughters (and John Stuart Mill, for one,
argued that they were), Gaskell foregrounds them until the
very end--not only in the dilemmas facing the youthful main
characters but those of the older generation.
Rosemarie Bodenheimer makes a strong case for her
argument that in heroine stories "women writers represent
the range of interconnected social dilemmas that constitute
their own ideological membership of the Victorian middle
class" (17). As far as Gaskell's representation of social
dilemmas is concerned, Bodenheimer focuses her discussion of
183
"the politics of negotiation" on "the female paternalist" in
North and South (53-68); she explores the creation of an
alternative interior [pastoral] realm" in Ruth (150-165);
but she does not discuss Wives and Daughters, which does not
offer such concise solutions, or at least compromises, as
she suggests the earlier novels do. From the "politics of
story" viewpoint, however, I would suggest that Gaskell's
last novel offers a more radical expose of women's issues,
for instance in the implied critique of women's education.
Mrs. Gibson is the main figure in the part of that critique
concerned with governesses.
40 Wives and Daughters p. 125.
41 Hilary Schor alludes to a tension in the novel: "it
-wants-Mrs. Gibson to stand as evil, unadulterated by her own
necessities" on the one hand, yet it insists on "a world of
economic necessity and forced choices" for "'poor dear
women'" like Cynthia and her mother on the other (18 7).
42 Margaret Homans makes a persuasive argument that
the "androcentric culture" imposed the institution of
motherhood as the definition of what women should be, and
"in the nineteenth century women did nothing, including
writing except as women" (28). But Homans is hard on Mrs.
Gibson, a victim of that system, who fell through the cracks
into governessing and later running a business with no
business training. Homans sees Mrs. Gibson as "maneuvering"
Mr. Gibson to propose (258).
But Chapter 9 of Wives and Daughters indicates that it
is Mrs. Gibson who is originally exploited by male scheming.
First, Lord Hollingford suggests to Mr. Gibson, who is
worried about his daughter's incipient sexuality, that he
should consider remarrying. Then Mr. Gibson mulls his
possibilities and decides on Mrs. Kirkpatrick--a country
surgeon is not much of a catch (135-136).
The Gibsons' marriage illustrates Carolyn Heilbrun's
point regarding the focus of slightly later novels on "the
bankruptcy of marriage as a personal institution, though it
continues to serve the ends of society and business"
("Marriage Perceived," 148). By the 1890s, however,
writers like Gissing, Ibsen, and Wilde are "dramatiz[ing]
the failure of marriage to serve either society or its
[marriage's] incumbents" (149).
43 In his introduction to Wives and Daughters.
Laurence Lerner concludes, "Like all realists, Elizabeth
Gaskell believed that environment forms character."
Lerner's argument here is the "realist" one that the
environment carefully created by Gaskell has formed both
Molly's and Cynthia's characters, as against the Romantic
notion of "personality as formed, mysteriously, from
184
within." Lerner assigns responsibility to Mrs. Gibson for
Cynthia's "heartless flirt" (the expression is Tess
Cosslett's) personality. Lerner does not speculate as to
who is responsible for the way Mrs. Gibson has developed;
but that is a question that Wives and Daughters seems to me
to explore quite thoroughly.
44 Laurence Lerner ends his "Introduction" with a
discussion of Mrs. Gibson's neglect of Cynthia, arguing that
Cynthia's character is the direct result (Wives and
Daughters 27).
45 According to Elizabeth Langland, he has acquired
"an executive who knows her business"--the business of
running a nineteenth-century middle-class home and family.
Because of her mastery of "a complex system of [social]
signifiers," Mrs. Gibson is a "formidable figure in the
novel," who imposes efficiency on the doctor's household and
etiquette on his family. Precisely because she is
"unaccompanied by any mystifying rhetoric of sensitivity,
sympathy, and sainthood"--in other words, because she is so
unsympathetic a character--she is a "signal achievement on
Gaskell's part." Uncluttered by softening touches, Mrs.
Gibson is a manifestation of "Gaskell's unblinking realism"
in uncovering ideology: "Wives must manage the class issue"
--by defining, reading, and imposing its signs (3 00-301) .
46 Tess Cosslett attributes close, nurturing
friendships between women to "mother-want," a longing
arising from lack of good mothering, betrayal by false
mother-figures. Cosslett's examples support her notion of
"mutual mothering" as a way to ease the longing; Cosslett is
actually discussing sisterhood, like the Molly-Cynthia
relationship, rather than the mother-child relationship
(56) .
For the older woman, though--especially one with only
sons, Mrs. Hamley, for example--"mother-want" might imply
the yearning to mother someone responsive, without the
desire to be mothered in return.
47 Cosslett draws attention to Molly's "'whole
constellation of deeply concerned, warmly affectionate
mother-surrogates,' including Lady Harriet, Mrs. Hamley and
the two Miss Brownings" (88). While the others are kind to
Molly, I would place only Mrs. Hamley in the "maternal"
category. Molly holds back with all the other women; only
with Mrs. Hamley does she feel uninhibited enough to fling
herself into her arms sobbing.
48 Narrators pointing out this "wanting a daughter" is
quite commonplace--for example, about Lady Dedlock and Mrs.
Transome.
185
49 Molly is particularly absorbed in The Bride of
Lammermoor, an interesting choice for Gaskell to have made,
in terms of the "representation of social issues" question,
as it applies to oppressed women. In her marriage, Lucy
Ashton is the victim of a particularly Draconian patriarchal
exchange.
50 Hilary Schor notes that Mrs. Hamley provides
"maternal daughterhood" for Molly (190). But I maintain
that Molly also provides the daughterly motherhood that Mrs.
Hamley has missed. It seems unclear whether this yearning
to have a daughter is a feminist goal or a completion of
androcentric programming.
51 Mrs. Meyrick for instance, to whom Daniel takes
Mirah in Daniel Deronda. This accomplished woman, who
already has four daughters of her own, borders on a
professional mother figure. She provides sanctuary for the
vulnerable Mirah without ever getting emotionally involved.
186
Part III
Chapter 4--Thomas Hardy and the End of the Heroine
As a novelist, Thomas Hardy, in his ambivalent position
at the end of one period and poised for the new age,1 was
at once attracted and vexed by the conventions of domestic
fiction. But critics of widely different theoretical
persuasions agree that he exploited the conventions rather
successfully--to make a sustained critique of them and the
culture that produced them. As George Levine explains,
Hardy believed the age now lent itself not to the comic but
to the "impassive . . . and tragic" (236). Consequently, it
was more logical to manipulate the conventions to bring
about catastrophe rather than to bring about happy
endings.2 Continuing to read "against the grain," I will
be arguing that Hardy uses this strategy with "the heroine's
mother": disrupting literary forms to highlight injustices.
Hardy himself wrote that a novelist's "main object"
should be to characterize "the people of his little world"
in such a way as to achieve "reality of humanity." The "art
of writing them [novels] is . . . in its infancy." And "the
difficulties" are such that "one or two strokes toward . . .
a possible ultimate perfection" are all that "each
generation" of novelists can be expected to add."3 This
philosophy would justify subtle variation of established
literary forms--saying something new using familiar means.
187
According to Irving Howe, writing in 1966, Hardy "could
neither fully accept nor quite break away from" the
conventions. The "Victorian plot," despite its "worn
devices," lent itself to Hardy's practical and philosophical
goals, although eventually he considered it "a rigid and
repressive convention" from which he attempted to free
himself. In The Mayor of Casterbridcre. Hardy's
"metaphysical" intent was "to signify, through its startling
convolutions, a view of the human condition."4 (Many
critics today, however, might consider this "view of the
human condition" a critique of patriarchal capitalism, with
Henchard's "tragedy" subsumed by--or caused by--his
exploitation of class and gender dependents.)
John Bayley employs a colorful metaphor to describe
Hardy's debt to Victorian society: "when he is saying the
Emperor has no clothes he is also clinging to the Imperial
coat-tails." For instance, rather than being constrained by
Victorian propriety, Hardy takes advantage of it to "sustain
illusion" (8). For Bayley, "[t]he most Victorian thing
about his [Hardy's] novels is their plot: the least, their
sense of time, place, and event" (13). The implications in
Hardy's work are "more radical, more innovatory even, than
might at first sight appear," because he "quietly presents"
issues, "contradictions," (social injustices) that Marx and
Engels are at the same time "proclaiming" about society and
the individual (12).5
188
John Goode sees a similar strategy in the
"disjunctions" of Hardy's narrative--the gaps. Hardy uses
these spaces "as a particular strategy," a design (they are
not a flaw or censorship, as some critics infer) to
articulate "ideological discourses" (111), specifically, "a
truth that is on the offensive," fighting for "'Justice'"
(137). Especially in the later work, Hardy's novels are
"about" heroic people who struggle but succumb in that
fight--Henchard, Jude, Tess for example. These novels do
not credit survivors, probably because survivors necessarily
compromise, neither challenging nor defying the powers that
oppress them.
A feminist view of Hardy's use of Victorian conventions
is persuasively argued by Patricia Ingham. Because of
"underlying structures" of society in the 1860s when Hardy
"began to write women-centered novels," only certain
patterns of "narrative syntax" were available for the genre
(28). One example is the choice-of-a-husband--this pattern
can have a 'happy' resolution only if the woman is virtuous.
Another is the fallen woman who repents and is punished
(38). Ingham traces Hardy's variations on these themes, and
concludes that he uses them to take a radical, feminist
approach to women's situations.6
These critics' arguments support my claim that two
Hardy characters, Susan Henchard (The Mayor of Casterbridge)
and Joan Durbeyfield (Tess of the d'Urbervilles), both
189
conform to and disrupt "heroine's mother" conventions. As
far back as Austen and earlier, a substitute often contrasts
poorly with the absent or dead (or, sometimes, ineffectual)
mother.7 The implication is that if the heroine's mother
had only been present, things would not have gone awry--
there would then be no conflict (no story, either). As the
lonely Eleanor Tilney explains in Northancrer Abbey, a mother
would have made all the difference to her: "A mother would
have been always present. A mother would have been a
constant friend; her influence would have been beyond all
other."8
Susan and Joan are biological mothers who are present,
not absent; and they are flawed, not perfect. Pretty when
they were young, they may qualify as former heroines, now
fulfilling their "proper" role of reproducing themselves in
their daughters; that is, they are heroines' mothers. As
far as (mostly middle-class) readers are concerned, these
two characters are more "openly subversive" of patriarchal
culture than their predecessors in fiction, partly because
they are working class. Because of their class position,
they have none of the conventional "accomplishments" of the
heroine, as well as no material advantages. For such women,
one's face is one's fortune--and it does not amount to much.
Susan and Joan, by the time of their major influence on the
plot, are precluded by their age from capitalizing on that
commodity. Everything considered, they both seem seriously
190
disadvantaged in terms of the dominant social order. Yet
their agency is crucial in each novel.
Susan's is the power of silence and absence: her
strategy is passive resistance--she "gets her way" by
keeping quiet, that is, in the "traditional" feminine
manner. Where Susan is silent, Joan has the power of
utterance. She is an "earth mother," supposedly connected
with the natural world, a speaker of the "women's language"
that is distanced from male control. These representations
of female authority appear to reflect nineteenth-century
attitudes about gender differences. Such characters are
part of Hardy's questioning of ideology, if "the historical
situation" was, as Penny Boumelha contends, "a vital
determination of his radicalism" (8). Boumelha explores at
length nineteenth-century theories of female sexuality,
especially in her first chapter, "Sexual Ideology and the
'Nature' of woman, 1880-1900" and in her chapter on Tess.9
Patricia Ingham--expanding on the notion of women's
sexuality as especially connected with nature and therefore
diminishing, in women, qualities such as reason and
judgment--draws on the arguments of Boumelha, whom Ingham
terms "[t]he most sophisticated writer on Hardy's women."10
According to Irving Howe, many Hardy characters "gain
their initial credence through their representativeness."
In other words, the novels "work" because of Hardy's "having
grounded the story in commonplace social reality." Howe
191
cites the main characters in Tess as representative in this
manner: "Tess as a country girl," "Alec as a sleazy
arriviste, Angel as a neurotic moralist, Joan Durbeyfield as
a good-natured slattern."11 Extension of this thinking
might categorize Joan the "earth-mother" as similarly
representative.
Howe also claims that Hardy has a "curious power of
sexual insinuation," an ability to "shuttle between, or for
moments yoke together, the responses of the two sexes."
Accordingly, Hardy could enter "intuitively into the
emotional life of women." His "vision of the feminine,"
though, "was thoroughly traditional in celebrating the
maternal, the protective, the fecund, the tender, the life-
giving."12 If Howe is right, then Joan Durbeyfield
embodies some of Hardy's conceptions about women, if
imperfectly. Howe adds that Hardy's ambivalence about
gender perspectives is one reason that "he does not pass
judgment on his characters. The feminine admixture is very
strong in his work, a source of both his sly humor and his
profound sympathy."
It seems to me, however, that Hardy does "pass
judgment" on Joan several times in Tess. for example here,
via Tess's consciousness: "Being mentally older than her
mother, she did not regard Mrs. Durbeyfield's matrimonial
hopes for her in a serious aspect for a moment. The light-
minded woman had been discovering good matches for her
192
daughter almost from the year of her birth" (Tess 60). In
this commentary, there does not appear to be any intuitive
understanding of Joan's life, emotional or otherwise--or any
consideration of what might cause a woman with many
children, living in abject poverty, to think in these terms.
Many critics have demonstrated that one could scarcely
be less empowered than Susan at the beginning of The Mayor
of Casterbridcre, when her husband sells her to a stranger.
In this transaction, as Elaine Showalter points out,
Henchard "repeats in a startlingly blatant form the
definitive patriarchal act of exchange." Eventually,
though, Susan and the other women in Henchard's life gather
around him "unmanning" him, divesting him eventually of "all
the signs . . . of his power and authority." Hardy "used"
women for this divestiture because of their "otherness" and
"'their combination of weakness with strength'" that
transforms into a "sublimity of suffering" exclusive to
women.13
Irving Howe (to whom Elaine Showalter is specifically
responding in her essay "The Unmanning of the Mayor of
Casterbridge"), begins his argument about the novel with the
claim that depicting how to "shake loose from one's wife" is
"insidiously attractive to male fantasy" [emphasis added].
Later, however, he summarizes as follows: "the opening
scene . . . embodies a mythic kind of truth. Speaking to
the depths of common fantasy, it summons blocked desires and
193
transforms us into secret sharers" [emphasis added] .14 Not
all of "us," of course, share this fantasy. Although women,
too, may have "blocked desires" to "shake loose," most women
probably do not feel like "secret sharers" in a scheme of
being passed like a commodity from one possessor to another.
Howe's presumption that all readers will identify with "male
fantasy" is precisely the point taken up by Showalter, who
argues that the women who have been used by Henchard get
even with him.
The manner in which Susan Henchard gets even is linked
to the paradox defined by Gilbert and Gubar: the woman
writer functioning within, and simultaneously against, the
conventions of the literary patriarchal order. Susan's
encounters with the patriarchal marriage order work in a
similar way, using its "rules" to her advantage (to some
extent). (Coincidentally, at the end of her life, Susan
write a "story" in patriarchal discourse--her posthumous
letter--that eventually undoes Henchard, the novel's
representative patriarch).
Combining the desire to shake loose with an adroit use
of weakness as strength suggests a different scenario for
Susan. In the wife-sale incident at the beginning of the
novel, she acquiesces to Henchard's inclination to "sell"
her--his "possession"--to gain better prospects for herself:
a more attractive partner and freedom from an unpleasant man
(a hot-tempered, vindictive drinker) and a bad situation
194
(extreme poverty). True, Henchard sells Susan to a
stranger, putting into market language the truth that he
owns her.15 But she consents to the sale; in fact, she
eggs him on, expressing, in succession, indifference, taunts
("it is a joke no longer," she rebukes him, more than once--
e.g. The Mayor 14), and, finally, compliance.
This passive opportunism characterizes Susan throughout
the novel--it's a strength that has gone largely unnoticed
because it is nothing like male fantasies about women's
power.16 Despite Henchard's "contempt" (and the
narrator's), at the beginning as throughout the novel, Susan
"triumphs over circumstance: reading Newson's character at a
glance she exchanges a carping and discontented husband for
one who honours her self-concept."17 Worth interjecting
here is Ian Gregor's quotation of the advertisements that
were Hardy's sources for the wife-sale incident. The "most
apposite" of these advertisements concludes, "She seemed
very willing. Bells rang." [Emphasis added to the phrase
indicating a wedding] .18
I contend that Susan's silent power is quite
deliberately exercised, notwithstanding her naivete in
reacting as she apparently does once she becomes "aware of
the legal status of her relationship with Newson."19 That
reaction is considerably distanced from readerly
apprehension and may well contain ambiguity of its own, such
as homesickness, curiosity, or boredom; or the possibility
195
that Susan has heard that someone called Henchard is mayor
of Casterbridge. She has to find a way to provide for
Elizabeth-Jane if she has fears about her own health:
descriptions of Susan (pale, wan, and so on) that support
the "lethargy" argument also support physical illness. As I
will show later, the narrator cannot be relied on for
background information on such matters.
John Goode's argument supports the notion of Susan's
silent, deliberate agency. He asserts that Susan "upstaged"
Henchard at the auction and later "holds him by an ironic
knowledge that he will only learn when he speaks the truth
to Elizabeth Jane. . . . Susan presides, by her stratagem,
over the first movement of the actual drama." She
continually "undermines the self creating will of the man of
character."20 But what is Susan's "stratagem," how does
she wield her power, and to what ends?21
At the beginning, as Susan and Henchard plod along,
she keeps "her eyes fixed ahead, though with little
interest" (The Mayor 6). This could be lethargy, or it
could be a metaphor for far-sighted indifference to the
greater part of her immediate circumstances. Only when she
is looking at her child does she become animated; her role
is primarily mother; everything she does is for her child,
as it will be later in the novel. During the auction,
"[s]he bow[s] her head with absolute indifference" (13), and
immediately afterward, when Newson offers to take the child,
196
too, she again keeps silent. However, she can speak
eloquently when needed, as she demonstrates by her
passionate repudiation of Henchard immediately before
leaving on Newson's arm (15). For all the passivity readers
may infer,22 Susan makes a favorable impression on other
characters: "A comely respectable body like her--what can a
man want more?--I glory in the woman's sperrit," comments
the admiring staylace vendor after Susan's departure with
Newson, and apparently the crowd concurs (16).
The next time we see her, nineteen years later, Susan
is still characteristically silent, giving Elizabeth-Jane
only a necessary minimum of information (Chapter III). When
Elizabeth-Jane objects to questioning the disreputable-
looking furmity woman (a witness to the wife-sale), Susan
responds "quietly": "I have learnt what I wanted, however."
This woman does and says nothing unless it has a motive.
Elizabeth-Jane wants to run after some men who have
"mentioned the name of Henchard" (29), but Susan responds,
"Not for the world just yet. He may be in the workhouse or
in the stocks" (30). She is not going to expend energy
pointlessly until she knows Henchard is worth claiming.
Elizabeth-Jane has to do all the running around to make
inquiries--Susan says, "I'm too worn out to do anything"
(33). Susan says she is reluctant to stay at the hotel
because of the cost, but in fact she waits there helplessly
until Elizabeth-Jane devises a way to pay the bill (waiting
197
tables in exchange for part of it, a plan of which Susan
half-heartedly disapproves but does not prevent).
Susan's behavior may seem helpless, but this is a woman
determined enough to get where she wants and avoid doing any
menial work herself--merely by keeping quiet--at the same
time putting herself in a position to observe and assess
Henchard: "surely, if he takes so warmly to people who are
not related to him at all, may he not take as warmly to his
own kin?" she asks Elizabeth-Jane, referring to Henchard's
befriending the newcomer Farfrae (59). Of course, Susan
knows that Elizabeth-Jane (the pretty messenger she will
send to Henchard) is no "kin" of his--and she must feel
dubious about her own position in that regard. Later, she
admits her own culpability (although not all of it) during
the meeting with Henchard at the Roman amphitheater (Chapter
XI, especially 73-74). Not, as Henchard thinks,
illiterate,23 not even inarticulate, Susan nevertheless
avoids committing anything to writing at this point, sending
her daughter, "her only daughter," Elizabeth-Jane (not a
common name) as her advocate to Henchard. Thus Elizabeth-
Jane is a kind of deceptive substitute-text, better than a
well-crafted letter that might 'say' more for the writer
than he or she could say in person, in certain
circumstances:24 Susan's scheme seems well thought out.25
Susan uses the same routine--mostly silence, minimum
information (actually, the exclusion of important facts),
198
helpless wan-ness— when she meets Henchard at the Ring. In
this way, she puts him on the defensive. For twenty years
he has been guilt-ridden about the way he treated her; her
pathos now taps into that guilt. "Judge me by my future
works," he pleads with her, for the chance to redeem himself
(75). Note Susan's masterly equivocation in response to his
concern over Elizabeth-Jane's learning the truth: "You would
be surprised to find how unlikely she is to dream of the
truth. How could she ever suppose such a thing!" (74).
Showing great sang-froid in dealing with Henchard,
Susan is also astute enough to think on her feet. When
Henchard comments, in front of Elizabeth-Jane, that the
girl's hair is much lighter than Susan had forecast their
child's would be, Susan manages to pass the comment off
casually, so that Henchard thinks she has rescued him from
awkwardness (89). (In fact, she had not considered that
Henchard might remember the child's appearance and what she,
Susan, had said about the future color of her hair.) This
duplicity is quite inconsistent with the brainless drudge
Susan is usually made out to be.
In her re-marriage, and up to her deathbed, Susan
maintains her power--silence. Then, at almost the last
minute, she puts her secret into writing. All the time
Susan is alive, Henchard has kept their agreement not to
enlighten Elizabeth-Jane about the past; in this respect,
too, Susan has exerted power over him. When Susan dies, as
199
Gregor points out,26 Mother Cuxsom comments: "her wishes
and ways will all be as nothing" (The Mayor 121) . This may
seem to be true immediately, but eventually it is not: in
death, Susan is even more influential and powerful than in
life.
Almost immediately after Susan dies, the first level of
her power dissolves: Henchard reveals "the truth" to
Elizabeth-Jane. But now a subtler power begins to exert
itself: Henchard allows himself to love Elizabeth-Jane
openly as her father, something he has been doing covertly,
in defiance of Susan, since the women's return. After he
has already acknowledged his fatherly feelings, he discovers
Susan's letter where she drops the bombshell that this
Elizabeth-Jane is Newson's daughter, not his. Interestingly
enough, one early response is, "Ah--I wonder if it is true"
(12 6); his reaction may be grounded in his experience of
Susan as capable of such deception,27 just as she may have
"known" Henchard would not long keep quiet without her
restraining influence, her silent reproach.
Ian Gregor has argued that in the character of
Henchard, Hardy accomplishes an "inclusiveness of vision"
that is both a "triumph" and a "limitation." The
"limitation" is that "Henchard drains the life out of the
other characters," so that the writer has nothing left for
the other characters. In that Susan "was one of the few
women who get what they want," Hardy might have described
200
her "energy, spirit, inventiveness, native shrewdness . . .
strategic sense and managerial skill"; but this is not the
case because Henchard takes over the novel--and the writer--
to the extent that even Hardy cannot see the other
characters except from Henchard's point of view.28
Yet how can we deny the narrator's complicity in
Susan's deceptions--of readers, as well as of Henchard?
When the women are approaching Weydon Priors in Chapter III,
he does describe Elizabeth-Jane as "about eighteen," and if
we do our arithmetic, we realize this cannot be the child
sold with Susan. This deduction is obscured by the
prominence of other information: "A glance was sufficient to
inform the eye that this was Susan Henchard's grown-up
daughter," one traveling under the same name as the baby of
Chapter I. Even more deceitful is the bland assertion of
Chapter IV:
The history of Susan Henchard's adventures
in the interim can be told in two or three
sentences. Absolutely helpless she had been
taken off to Canada, where they had lived
several years without any great worldly
success, though she worked as hard as any
woman could to keep their cottage cheerful
and well provided. When Elizabeth-Jane was
about twelve years old the three returned to
England. (26)
Excised from this account is the crucial information that
the first child died in Canada. To any parent, the death of
a child would hardly be insignificant enough to be excluded
from such a "history," even in those days of common infant
mortality; certainly not to Susan, whose major concern
201
during the wife-sale had been to keep her little daughter
with her. In these conspiracies of silence with Susan,
Hardy implies, or at least permits, the later' ones that I
have inferred, amounting to another sub-title for the novel:
"Susan Henchard's Secret." Only Susan knows the whole
truth.
Looked at in this light, Susan demonstrates one way a
woman could negotiate the path open to her--a narrow path
without legal status. After all, she was nothing but a
chattel that could be sold to the highest bidder, not only
without censure from anyone else but with none from herself:
she knew when she was better off. Despite this absence of
status, women could and did exert power, "get their way"--
whether like Hardy's mother, a "peasant" girl who
nevertheless maneuvered a local Lothario into marrying her
when she was pregnant,29 or like Susan, a "peasant"30 girl
whose passive resistance strategy gets her out of, then back
into, marriage with the man of character. Particularly in
view of the anonymous letters getting Elizabeth-Jane and
Farfrae together, Susan's remarriage with Henchard is a
"heroine's mother" strategy.31
Susan's quiet power, maternally motivated though it may
be, has its most profound influence on Henchard's tragedy,
acting only tangentially on the "story" of Elizabeth-Jane,
the heroine who is completely overshadowed by Henchard.
Susan does her job as "heroine's mother" the same way she
202
bests Henchard--by keeping quiet and exploiting the flux of
power relations. Ostensibly, this novel does not have a
woman-centered plot; The Mayor of Casterbridge is "about"
the plotting of male desires.32 Men like Henchard are
"unmanned" because they do not know their own desires.33
Looking at Susan with "emphasis added," though, suggests an
alternative, female-generated plot. For all that Henchard
occupies the center of the book, he does so while being
pushed out of the center--from the moment he sells his wife.
All along, Susan's woman-centered plot runs counter to him,
and it continues, even after her death, by the agency of
substitutes such as her letter, her replacement in
Henchard's desire (Lucetta), a "feminized" man (Farfrae),34
and Susan's daughter, Elizabeth-Jane. For Susan's plot to
work, she has to be seemingly uninvolved--offstage most of
the time, shadowy and silent when she .is present.
Elizabeth-Jane is an appropriately self-effacing
successor to Susan. Nominally the heroine, she gets a
nominally happy ending. But whereas Susan does not
capitulate--rejected by Henchard, she leaves for a new life,
a life we are told very little about, but evidently a happy
one--Elizabeth-Jane goes along with the "system," sticking
with one man regardless of his behavior. Rejected by
Farfrae, she waits patiently and, when his preferred wife
dies, placidly marries him, ending up "not demonstratively
thankful" about her fate. A survivor, at the end she gets
203
the damning of faint praise from the narrator: her one
"secret" is the art of "making limited opportunities
endurable" (a heritage from Susan, except Susan's version is
more creative and more daring).
In contrast to Susan's complex plot agency and
understated "heroine's mother" role, Joan Durbeyfield's role
in Tess of the d'Urbervilles is overtly maternal. Joan is
significant because of her influence over Tess, the heroine
who dominates the novel. To open a window into Joan's
consciousness is to argue a more complicated vision of "the
heroine's mother" on Hardy's part, one of many features that
distinguish Tess as a major development in the novel as a
genre.35
For one thing, according to Margaret Higgonet, Tess is
"a woman's story," in which Hardy attempts to "truthfully
represent [] a woman's language," to "translate" it into
male-dominated discourse because men would not otherwise
listen to a woman's story. Both within the novel and in his
response to calls for its censorship, Hardy's sympathy over
the silencing of Tess's voice helps him develop a "feminine"
voice himself, a voice with which to criticize gender and
class "stereotypes."36 For instance, Hardy's narrator
contrasts the language of rigid "men who follow the Word"--
like Angel's father--with that of women in Tess "who follow
the truths of their heart"--women like Angel's mother, Mrs.
Clare. Higgonet specifically excepts Joan from these
204
women,37 implying Joan's complicity with patriarchal
"ordinances of civilization" (17).
But it seems to me that Joan does follow her heart,
embracing Tess every bit as lovingly as Mrs. Clare embraces
her child, Angel. And Joan does so with more acceptance:
Mrs. Clare loves without knowing what is going on; Joan
knows what has happened but never judges Tess--"tis natur,'"
says Joan of Tess's "fall."
This same comment may also, however, be used as
evidence of Joan's lack of feeling, indicating that she is
"an example of the evolutionary process which turns the
woman callous when she accepts her inferior status" and
demonstrating "the way woman will exploit woman as a result
of a sexist society which constantly attempts to strip woman
of her dignity."3S While part of this reasoning fits my
own argument that Joan exploits Tess, the exploitation seems
to stem from desperation over her family's survival rather
than callousness. Just as Tess's character and actions
demonstrate one set of inequities, so Joan's demonstrate
another: in order to survive, "woman" has little choice but
to accept her inferior status at this point--little choice
but to manipulate the system. Only "poor weak" John
Durbeyfield stands between Joan (and her many children,
including Liza-Lu, another heroine) and starvation. Because
of poverty, Joan's "greed" and "exploitation" seem more
pronounced than do the compliance of middle-class women such
205
as Mrs. Clare, who never have to worry about basic needs
like food and shelter. Tess is the victim of the system
rather than of her mother, who is herself a victim--for
example, made homeless by the death of her husband.
Like her mother, Tess is all the more a victim of the
system because she is not only female; she is working class.
According to John Goode, one important feature of Tess is
that "the text puts the reader through the primary working-
class experience: the truth does not make you free, it"
simply exposes your chains" (131). For both Tess and Joan,
the "chains" are heavy indeed. Hillis Miller points out
that Tess "accepts death as the price she must pay for that
happiness" that she shares briefly with Angel.39 Miller
quotes Tess's parting speech, in which she tells Angel that
their "happiness could not have lasted. It was too much. I
have had enough, and now I shall not live for you to despise
me!"40 Pressed on this issue, Hardy himself said he
believed Tess was right, commenting: "of course Clare would
quickly have tired of her, because the disparity between
them, in terms of class and outlook, was too great."41
Joan is, surely, both a model of what Tess might become
had she survived--not a pretty picture42--and a channel of
the kind of revelation posited by Goode ("the primary
working-class experience: the truth does not make you free,
it simply exposes your chains"). One explanation for
Hardy's ambivalence about Joan--showing her nurturing,
206
artistic side in a "good" light and her childish opportunism
in a "bad" one--may have to do with his tendency to deal
superficially with female characters. Kristen Brady
considers that Hardy's representations of women are mainly
"visual," making them vulnerable to stereotyping. Using the
theory that in the nineteenth-century, male anxiety about
female sexuality generated a "Janus-faced" stereotype of
woman, Brady reasons that Hardy "construct[s] woman in
radically contradictory terms: she is both corrupt and pure,
both victim and victimizer. 1 , 4 3 Joan is such a
construction; perhaps Tess is initially, until her
rebellion, when she opts for a new, uncompromising kind of
purity. (A woman who is "pure" in this sense cannot
survive; a survivor, who must compromise, cannot be
"pure.")
Throughout the novel, Joan is both a means of revealing
"offensive truths" about social issues and a model of the
future a surviving Tess could expect; furthermore, Joan
demonstrates a tenacious influence on Tess. This influence
is important in three areas: aesthetics, economics, and
sexuality. Until Joan, none of the characters I have
discussed has had this range of influence or articulation.
Where Susan is silent, Joan has the power of utterance,
expressing herself in writing, speech, and song, as is
emphasized when we first encounter her, singing, while she
washes clothes and rocks her baby.
207
Discussing the importance of vocal music to Tess and
her mother, John Goode considers that this scene at the
washtub, and the authorial commentary that "something of the
freshness of her youth" could be perceived about Joan,
amount to a poignant statement about the "lost potential of
womanhood" (116). Joan's activities here could be regarded
as symptomatic of motherhood: you comfort, you work, but you
can also sing, and, in "an exclamation at highest vocal
pitch," lavish tender praise on your baby's perfection (Tess
30). Clearly, the singing that Tess loves--and the dancing
that she is returning from--as well as "all my prettiness"
(118)--are her heritage from Joan. Joan is a "primitive"
artist whose art smoothes the rough edges of "peasant"
existence.
As an artist, I believe, Joan has the decisive
influence on Tess, if the term "artist" is extended to
include literary activity. Joan's letter to Tess, a
powerful document--tight, discreet, affectionate--is the
single most important reason for Tess's silence to Angel, as
we can see from Tess's introspection over the letter:
"perhaps her mother was right. . . . Silence seemed, on the
face of it, best for her adored one's happiness" (209).
Tess, although longing to be completely open with Angel, is
"steadied by a command from the only person in the world who
had any shadow of right to control her action" (209)--her
mother [emphasis added].
208
Joan's letter is a well-constructed appeal. It adduces
powerful reasons for Tess to keep silent about her "past":
"your Father ['s] . . . Respectability," and "your
Intended['s]"; "Many a woman--some of the Highest in the
Land--have had a Trouble44" that they don't "Trumpet," so
"why should you Trumpet yours"; Tess would be "a Fool" to
tell; it was long ago and not her fault anyway. To clinch
the reasoning, the letter is framed in maternal expressions
of affection and concern. Tess can see the logic of it: the
"Jacobean" mother, with her "lumber of superstitions,
folklore, dialect, and orally-transmitted ballads" (Tess 34)
seems to make more sense of the way things are than the
"National" school-taught daughter with her "Standard"--and
for her useless--knowledge.45 Joan's letter points out
what Tess in fact later learns, Goode's maxim: the truth
will not make her free. Indirectly, it hangs her.
It could, however, be argued that Joan's conniving is
what leads to all of Tess's troubles in the first place,
that they start in Joan's delight at learning that her
husband is related to a great family. She has rosy visions
of improving the family's economic situation. "I've been
thinking since you brought the news," she says to him, "And
my proj ick is to send Tess to claim kin" (37) . Later, she
confirms that behind this plan is a scheme to trade Tess's
beauty and virginity to Alec in return for whatever material
advantage can be got, "if she plays her trump card aright.
209
And if he don't marry her afore, he will after" (64). No
mistake may be made about the trump card, either: "No,
stupid," she replies to John, who thinks that she refers to
d'Urberville blood; "her face--as 'twas mine." Those last
five words, placed emphatically at the end of a chapter,
speak volumes about Joan's commodification of the only
valuable asset a "peasant" woman has; moreover, they hint
that Joan herself may have ventured into that "market"--
although she only netted Durbeyfield--or at least she
observed enough of what can be achieved in it to pass advice
to Tess.
In this socio-economic mode, Joan also exerts
considerable influence in smaller ways that contribute to
both of Tess's migrations to Alec. After the death of the
family's horse, for which Tess feels responsible, Joan plays
her daughter just right, wasting no time on recriminations
but urging her to "try your friends," the d'Urbervilles.
Against Tess's objections, Joan neatly manipulates "Sir
John" into arbitrating--and neither Tess nor John see how
she has played them, which she continues to do more
obviously when Tess returns from her first visit to the
d'Urbervilles and Joan promotes Alec's offer of a job for
Tess (56-60). Incidentally, Joan slips into the role of
pander here--witness the care she takes with washing Tess's
hair and decking her out in the carefully-laundered white
dress in preparation for her journey to Alec (61), making it
210
obvious that "face" is a euphemism for what she really means
by the "trump card" she wants Tess to play.46
Joan is canny about this pandering. Later, when the
"ruined" Tess cries: "Why didn't you warn me?"47 Joan
replies "I thought . . . you would be hontish wi' him and
lose your chance" (98). Joan did not hold back out of
ignorance; she has deliberately traded Tess's innocence--and
ignorance--in a calculated marketing ploy. As she has
pointed out earlier in the same conversation, discussing
Tess's inability or unwillingness to get Alec to marry her,
"Any woman would have done it but you." To Tess's
rejection of such a marriage, Joan makes the self-revealing
reply, "Why didn't ye think of doing some good for your
family instead o' thinking only of yourself? See how I've
got to teave and slave, and your poor weak father with his
heart clogged like a dripping-pan" (97).4S Clearly, Joan,
like many parents, expects Tess to help them out of poverty
by "trading" herself--not to be "selfish. 1 , 4 9
Joan will hammer home the point about the family's
economic dependence, and Tess will eventually get the
message, when Liza-Lu is sent to Flintcomb Ash to tell Tess:
"Mother is took very bad . . . Father is not very well
either . . . we don't know what to do" (364). John
Durbeyfield, not Joan, is the one who dies, though, and with
him the tenancy of their home. Tess feels her very presence
renders widow and orphans homeless: "Had she not come home,
211
her mother and the children might probably have been allowed
to stay on as weekly tenants" (3 7 3).50 Providence--and
Alec--wear Tess down; but it is really the economic plight
of her mother that sends Tess back to Alec, to live as wife
to the man whose role "alone as her husband seemed to weigh
more and more" (378), particularly due to his knack of
showing up when the Durbeyfields are at their most helpless,
for instance, during the pitiful pilgrimage to the ancestral
seat (382-383). This time, the exchange Tess effects is
literally an economic one: in return Alec supports Joan and
the children. The situation of Joan and the children after
John Durbeyfield's death is an important commentary on
social conditions, this time exposing the harsh effect of
tenancy laws on widows and orphans. Other major writers of
the time, such as Gissing, Meredith, and Moore, convey their
indignation at the general condition of women's helplessness
and lack of legal status.
Walter Allen points out that George Moore's
"Naturalist" impulse caused him to deride Tess of the
d'Urbervilles for "flagrant breaches of probability and the
melodrama." Moore's version of Tess, "the servant-girl
seduced," Esther Waters, is completely "ordinary."51
Esther does not kill her seducer; because of her dogged
tenacity, she and her child both live, and she struggles
through numerous unromantic setbacks. John Bayley concludes
212
that Moore's Esther answers Hardy in the manner of Shamela
and Joseph Andrews vis-a-vis Pamela.52
But Tess's rebellion, romantic though it might be, is
far more subversive than Esther's mute acceptance.
According to Penny Boumelha, it was the "new element of
polemic" that "made Tess so controversial," and "not the
relatively harmless plot" (the country girl seduced), which
had already been used by major writers. Hardy's perceived
radicalism was in his "increasing questioning . . . of sex
roles and of the double standard," including Tess's
"ambivalence" toward the baby and her lack of commitment to
motherhood, as well as the fact that "sexual and marital
relationships are presented in such direct relation to
economic pressures and to work." [Emphasis added].
Moreover, the sub-title suggested to some that "Hardy was
presuming to offer a moral argument in the shape of a
structured defence of his central character."53
Two comments of Hardy's about the sub-title ("A Pure
Woman") are worth consideration. Near the time of
publication, in 1892, he writes that, re-reading the novel,
it suddenly occurred to him "with some surprise--that the
heroine was essentially pure--purer than many a so-called
unsullied virgin: therefore I called her so. . . . But the
parochial British understanding . . . [does not] see [] that
'paradoxical morality' may have a very great deal to say for
itself, especially in a work of fiction." Seventeen years
213
later, he makes a completely different claim: the sub-title
"was in no sense meant as a challenge (though it was taken
as such in some quarters). It was written at the last
moment, after reading the proofs, as a mere description
unlikely to be disputed."54 At least one of these
explanations must be incorrect--maybe both; but I am
inclined to trust the chronologically nearer one. With its
contemptuous references to "so-called unsullied virgins,"
"parochial British understanding," and "paradoxical
morality," this explanation of the sub-title implies a
severe critique of what Dickens had dubbed Podsnappery--a
squeamish insistence on the quantifiable purity of "goods"
on the marriage market. Such an explanation supports nicely
the extrapolation I now make for Joan's situation.
The homelessness of Joan and her children is polemical
in a similar way to the "pure woman" issue--and linked to
that issue, particularly since the implication is that they
are evicted for no other reason than Tess's "fallen" status.
In Joan's plight, Hardy brings a special poignancy to the
specific evil of dispossession caused by laws relating to
the "tied" cottages of agricultural workers or tenants.55
Tess's conviction about Alec "alone as her husband"
reflects an apparently widely-held Victorian view of female
sexuality:56 women, because of "their physiological
organisation and their biological or social roles as
mothers" were thought to be "closer to the operative forces
214
of evolution, natural and (more particularly) sexual
selection." Hence, a woman makes her sexual selection in a
primeval way, and that's it for life--Tess's natural husband
is Alec until his death. This 'naturalism' theory had some
peculiar offshoots: women were consequently more governed by
primal impulses, more nervous, more mentally unstable. The
women in Tess are acted upon by a sort of cosmic sexuality.57
This idea is illustrated by the ancient Club Dance at which
Angel first sees Tess at the beginning of the novel--and
later by the sexually-charged atmosphere in the sleeping
loft at Talbothays. Joan, with her fertility and her
"primitive" artistry, embodies such female choice and
sexuality. Tess sees her mother as "a happy child," but also
resents her mother's "thoughtlessly giving her so many
little sisters and brothers" to be responsible for (Tess
48). Female fertility cements financial dependence.
Joan's sexuality is but one aspect of her character,
but because it is so closely related to her maternal
role,58 it may be seen as a figure for what she represents,
to Tess and about Tess's future. But ultimately, Tess
rejects the system that Joan wants her to collaborate with
(Joan "had been discovering good matches for her daughter
almost from the year of her birth"--Tess 60). Tess accepts
that Alec is her husband until his death, and that is why
she kills him, rejecting everything he stands for.
Ironically, the killing and the rejection are what make her
215
into "a pure woman," a woman who is willing to kill and to
die rather than capitulate and turn into her mother. Tess
is a pure woman because she rejects the system, not in spite
of that rejection. Joan is the unconscious traitor,
although she is right about what the system offers for women
like herself, because rebellion like Tess's leads only to
death. By all we see of Joan, there is no mystery about her
influence and power over Tess. She can and does appeal to
Tess's deepest feelings, feelings that seem to Tess
instinctive, but have actually been formed long ago by Joan
herself: basic aesthetic, material and sexual desires
previously instilled in Joan herself in the same way.
Showing no evidence of being governed by such desires,
(and thus, in some ways, a more "radical" woman character
than Joan), the "silenced woman" with her maternal agenda,
Susan Henchard, in life, has "no voice." (This is not
completely true, however; she speaks up occasionally, for
instance at the conclusion of the wife auction). In death
Susan is finally able to "bear the word,"--to speak.59
Joan speaks all along; her situation speaks "the terrible
truth" of oppression. The character Joan Durbeyfield may
not seem radical compared with Susan Henchard--or, of
course, with Tess. Susan quietly exploits the system; Tess
flouts it; Joan mostly plays the role it casts her in:
opportunistic, untidy, and sensual.50 But ultimately Joan
signals, just as the other two do, the inevitable tragedy
216
and failure of women agents, at least while they must
maintain either silence or deception in order to be
effective--while they can only manipulate the system, not be
included in it. After all, Susan is most "successful" after
she is dead.61 Joan, however, represents a glimmer of
hope. True, she is one of Hardy's survivors and therefore
suspect. But in Joan's utterances, which draw attention to
her state of dependence, the female condition is displayed
more clearly and questioned more vigorously than before,
particularly if readers can see past their own condemnation
of actions to which there are virtually no alternatives
except death. Her oppression itself seems to plead for
justice.
217
NOTES
1 See, for instance, the opening of Michael Millgate's
biography, Thomas Hardy: a Biography:
Few English writers have been so self-consciously 'modern'
in their ideas as Thomas Hardy: fewer still have shared
his intense, apparently paradoxical, preoccupation with
the personal, local, and national past (3).
2 The sub-title of Levine's chapter on The Mayor of
Casterbridge. "Reversing the Real," makes the point rather
well. The Mayor is a reversal of comic realism in that
Henchard's pattern--a series of "grand disasters"--reverses
the comic hero's attainments. Plot manipulations such as
."Dickensian coincidences" are. used in the same reverse way--
resulting in "not comic conjunction but tragic disruption"
(242) .
3 "On Literary Matters." Thomas Hardy's Personal
Writings.
4 Thomas Hardy. 89-90.
5 An Essay on Hardy. New York: Cambridge UP, 1978.
6 Thomas Hardy.
7 Austen continues the tradition of the absent mother
so frequently a feature for heroine predecessors in writers
such as Edgeworth and Burney--or Wollstonecraft, for that
matter. Two of Austen's major heroines have no mother (Emma
and Anne Elliot); two have ineffective mothers (Fanny Price
and Elinor Dashwood); one has the mother worn out by
childbearing that Austen lamented in her letters (Catherine
Morland); and Elizabeth has Mrs. Bennet, the "black hole" of
motherhood. Of course, Mrs. Bennet does a better job as
"heroine's mother" than most: in getting her husband to call
at Netherfield to see the eligible new tenant, she sets into
motion the plot that gets her girls married.
8 Eleanor is talking to Catherine Morland, the heroine
of Northanger Abbey, whose own mother is "absent" by virtue
of having ten children (II.VII.144).
9 Chapter 6, Thomas Hardy and Women: Sexual Ideology
and Narrative.
10 Ingham 5 .
11 Howe 12 9.
218
12 Thomas Hardy 109.
13 Penny Boumelha summarizing feminist critiques of
the novel, specifically (1) Elaine Showalter's and (2)
Rosalind Miles's. (Thomas Hardy and Women 2-3).
The "unmanning" in the title of Showalter's essay, "The
Unmanning of the Mayor of Casterbridge," is taken from
chapter 3 5 of the novel, in which Henchard goes to meet
Lucetta at the Roman Amphitheatre where he had once met
Susan and "the memory of another ill-used woman" overcomes
him with remorse; he is "unmanned" (The Mayor 250). In this
essay, Showalter responds to the suggestion by Irving Howe
that the wife auction is part of the "fantasy that women
hold men back, drag them down, drain their energy" (58).
1 4 __ Thomas Hardy. Chapter V,_ "The Struggles of Men."
15 In Thomas Hardv: Distance and Desire, Hillis Miller
explains this rejection of Susan as the first instance of
Henchard's "turning" on a series of people (not limited to
women because it includes Farfrae)--out of the frustration
of the "passionate desire for full possession of some other
person" (147) . According to Miller's explanation of Hardy,
desire always works like this. Because of Hardy's lack of
faith in God ("'I have been looking for God 5 0 years,'
writes Hardy in 1890, 'and I think that if he had existed I
should have discovered him'"), the meaning of existence must
be affirmed by possession of the beloved (74). Yet in
possession, one realizes "that she [the beloved] is a human
being" after all, with "no more right [than anyone] . . . to
be called the center of the world." The beloved's
"extraordinary power" comes only from the unfulfilled desire
of the lover--once won, she, and love, become ordinary and
devalued (184). For many Hardy protagonists, "[t]his
discovery is immediately followed by a withdrawal of the
lover's consciousness into lucid detachment" (187),
although for Henchard himself, the reaction is far more
dramatic. The "lucid detachment" resulting from "falling
out of love" makes crystal clear to him that which was
previously hidden: the emptiness and folly of his life and
his fixation on the past where the once-yearning lover had
focused on a bright future (197) .
16 Ruskin, for example in "Of Queen's Gardens" in
Sesame and Lilies, articulates a "typically" Victorian
vision of 'women's power': "equal" to that of men, in that
it is good and desirable, but actually subordinate. For
example, "woman's true place" is to "be incapable of error,"
"enduringly, incorruptibly good, instinctively, infallibly
wise--wise, not for self-development, but for self-
renunciation" [ah! renunciation] (86). The education Ruskin
advocates for the woman who fills this role must "enable her
219
to understand, and even to aid, the work of men." It does
not matter that she actually learn anything--only that she
develop the capacity "to feel, to judge" (89), to sympathize
and relieve pain.
17 Dale Kramer, introduction, The Mayor of
Casterbridcre. World's Classics edition, xix.
18 Ian Gregor. Introduction. The Mayor of
Casterbridge. New Wessex Edition. Gregor includes the same
passage in his essay "A Man and his History," claiming that
such an announcement would appeal to "Hardy's love of the
factually bizarre." What was "remarkable" was the use of
the incident as the opening of the novel in such a way as
"to give it the tragic, as distinct from the merely bizarre,
resonance which he needed" (Bloom, Thomas Hardv's The Mayor
of Casterbridge).
Adding credibility to the "factual" claim, Christine
Winfield has traced the sources of the wife sale incident to
the Dorset County Chronicle and the Brighton Gazette,
newspapers appearing in the 1820s and noted by Hardy in
previously unpublished documents. Winfield quotes a fuller
version of the announcement cited by Gregor, concluding
"Bells rang." Hardy's notes indicate that the entry in the
Dorset County Chronicle appeared on 6 December 1827.
19 Kramer, introduction, The Mayor xix.
20 John Goode. Thomas Hardv: The Offensive Truth.
Goode does not hyphenate the name Elizabeth-Jane.
21 In Foucault's theorizing of 'power,' the key
determinant in manipulating the process of fluctuation is
the adroit use of disruptive knowledge ("Truth and Power,"
The Foucault Reader, especially 61 & 74).
22 For example, as Kramer describes Susan's modus
operandi. "she seems to be wanly stupefied before others'
greater energy" (introduction, The Mayor xx).
23 "She could write her own name, and no more," he
tells Newson, when they are discussing Susan's innocence and
ignorance--qualities both men confirm as typifying her
(Mayor. Chapter XLI, p. 292). Yet Susan has written not
only the "bombshell" letter that enlightens Henchard but
also the anonymous letters that result in the first meeting
of Elizabeth-Jane and Farfrae, a meeting that Susan has
engineered as a match-making ploy for her daughter. Those
letters were sufficiently well disguised that Elizabeth-Jane
does not suspect her mother. The possibility that Susan
kept from Henchard, Newson and Elizabeth-Jane the fact that
she was literate also suggests considerable subterfuge.
220
24 Such as Darcy's letter of explanation to the fuming
Elizabeth Bennet in Pride and Prejudice, following his
haughty proposal--a letter she reads and considers, as
opposed to the rebuff she would have given to a Darcy
offering his explanation in person.
25 This Elizabeth-Jane, a substitution for Henchard's
own daughter, also reflects Victorian conventions of the
kind Hardy subverts and uses: the switching of heirs, the
changeling child.
26 Gregor, Int. The Mayor Wessex Ed., 19. Many other
critics note this passage, for example, Irving Howe quotes
Mother Cuxom's eulogy in its entirety, calling it a "Hardyan
chorus," an example of the nostalgia Hardy conveys for the
rustic past in the face of "the deracination or defeat of
the major characters." Such passages are an "occasional
grace note [] " in the otherwise "hard and realistic light" of
Hardy's fiction (100 & 101).
27 See note 23 .
28 Ian Gregor, "A Man and His History," 35-36.
29 According to Hardy's biographer Robert Gittings, it
was Jemima's mother, Elizabeth Hand, who would not let Hardy
Sr. off the hook. She was a comparatively well-born,
educated woman, who had fallen on hard times after she
married and had seven children (Young Thomas Hardv).
30 The word peasant appears in quotation marks to
acknowledge possible objections to its use. One may prefer
to term these women "rural workers," a phrase that may
connote paid agricultural labor and would therefore be
inappropriate for Susan (or Joan)--but not, of course, for
Tess. Most of the non-feminist critics consulted for this
study use the term peasant in reference to Hardy's working-
class rural characters. They do so ahistorically, for in
Hardy's day, England could not be said to have had a
peasantry. The connotation is less an economic than a
cultural referent.
31 She does write the anonymous letters to both
Farfrae and Elizabeth-Jane, resulting in their first private
meeting. Susan's "personality" has had a profound effect on
her daughter, an essentially "private person" (Bayley 83).
Otherwise, Susan's actions in the novel mostly relate to
Henchard, not to Elizabeth-Jane, and are concerned with her
daughter only in the indirect sense of establishing her in
Henchard's patronage. Susan clearly does not want to marry
Henchard for her own benefit--it is "a situation into which
221
she had entered solely for the sake of her girl's
reputation" (The Mayor Chapter XIII--p. 82).
32 For critical analyses of this view, see Howe,
Gregor, and Kramer.
33 Showalter and Hillis Miller argue versions of this
view.
34 When he first arrives in Casterbridge, at any rate,
Farfrae is "feminized"--young, alone, friendless, and
romantic. Later, as Dale Kramer has suggested, he is
"corrupted by success" (77). Kramer and others infer a
homosexual relationship between Henchard and Farfrae, "the
heroes" of this, Hardy's "one successful 'classical'
tragedy." Evidence includes Henchard's overt declaration of
love for Farfrae and his lack of "physical desire for Susan,
even after eighteen years of regret." Henchard's passion
for Lucetta could be explained away as the "pride of
possessing a rare and courted object" (86).
35 Commentators as early as D.H. Lawrence believed
Hardy had revolutionized the novel, particularly because of
his expertise with tragic character development. In "A
Study of Thomas Hardy," claiming important connections with
himself as a novelist, Lawrence makes the point that Hardy's
forte is "[h]is feeling, his instinct, his sensuous
understanding," which is "deeper than that perhaps of any
other English novelist" (93). Lawrence's discussion of
Tess illustrates his point that he sees Hardy (and Tolstoy)
as his own precursor in "metaphysics," particularly
individuals' male-female qualities. We are all an admixture
of male and female, according to Lawrence: "There are no
women, there are only daughters of men," he quotes, in an
allusion to Genesis (105)--a telling indicator of what
gender "we" "really" are. Hardy's characters also
illustrate what Lawrence calls "aristocracy," so that, for
instance, Tess's "aristocratic" and "male" nature means that
she "never tries to alter or to change anybody. . . . She
respects utterly the other's right to be. She is herself
always" (95). The trouble is that other people will not do
the same for her.
Lawrence sets this argument up in order to discuss
Tess's relationships with Alec and Angel, but it applies
equally to that with her mother. That is, Tess, exasperated
though she may be by Joan at times, respects her mother's
"right to be," and she does not try to change Joan; Joan,
however, does try to change Tess (and tragically succeeds).
Two important examples: the primping for Alec at the
beginning and the silence to Angel about Alec later.
222
36 "A Woman's Story: Tess and the Problem of Voice."
Higgonet, A Sense of Sex 14-15.
Not all feminists agree with the view of Hardy as a
feminist advocate. In the same collection of essays, Judith
Mitchell examines Hardy's representations of women in terms
of both narratorial and readerly voyeurism and narcissism,
arriving at what she terms "the fairly typical [feminist]
conclusion that 'These novels show the tenacity of sexist
assumptions even in so humane and enlightened a man as
Hardy'" ("Hardy's Female Reader," Higgonet 173-4).
37
39
40
Higgonet, note 10, page 29.
Mickelson 112.
J. Hillis Miller, Fiction and Repetition. 138.
Tess. end of Chapter 58.
41 Quoted by John Bayley in An Essay on Hardv p. 173.
42 Poor Joan is despised by almost everyone.
Feminists like Higgonet and Bronfen condemn her for
exploiting Tess; a masculinist critic like Howe sees her as
a stereotypical, cheerful over-the-hill slut.
In this context, I like Patricia Ingham's comments
regarding a possible physical attraction to Alec on Tess's
part. Ingham infers "a subtext about Tess, sexuality and
naturalness that urges the exclusion of purely sexual
relationships from the sphere of moral judgement. By
implication Tess in a less artificial world might have
regarded such a relationship [as that with Alec] as an
available option." Ingham concludes "[t]his is
paradoxical: it cannot be logically reconciled with the
equally urgent assertion that she is the victim of
exploitation" (87). In this scenario, Tess is tempted,
rather than seduced--and Joan understands. But of course,
Joan put Tess in the path of temptation in the first place.
43 Kristen Brady 89. See also Note 57.
Chapter 2 of Mary Poovey's Uneven Developments
discusses in detail the difficulties and fears of
nineteenth-century men (particularly doctors) who were still
trying to define women in moralistic terms, i.e. as
"idealized," in the face of evidence that seemed rather to
support the earlier (eighteenth-century) notions of "woman
as a sexual creature" (50).
44 Recall that Mrs. Transome and her servant, Denner,
use this code word in their "woman's language."
223
45 Because of her schooling, Tess is what Higgonet
terms "bilingual," with a basic standard English she uses
away from home superimposed on "woman's language." From her
mother Tess has inherited her "love of song, superstitions,
and use of dialect." Changes made by Hardy to the
manuscript "added dialect for Tess, especially in states of
emotion" (19). "Significantly," Higgonet adds in a note,
"the narrator's comments stress women's use of dialect
rather than that of John [Tess's father]" (29). In other
words, the language Hardy added for Tess is Joan's language:
Joan is the conduit to Tess of the woman's language. Joan's
letter is a curious blend of that language and Fieldingesque
prose, pointing to bilingualism in Joan, too.
46 As Elisabeth Bronfen explains in "Pay As You Go: On
the Exchange of Bodies and Signs" (Higgonet 6 6 f f . ), the way
this "economic exchange" turns out is the reverse of Joan's
hopes. It does not establish kinship with the d'Urbervilles
and lead to "restored fortune, health and life" for the
Durbeyfields but results in Alec's "erotic desire" for Tess
(desire, I would add, that Joan anticipated but naively
thought could be capitalized upon without endangering Tess).
Moreover, the exchange "ricochets" on the Durbeyfields and
leads "to signs of death," exemplifying that, genetically,
Tess is "a metonymy" of her usurped ancestors, of whom Alec
is a sham (Higgonet 76).
This last point illustrates another subversion by Hardy
of a Victorian novelistic convention--the entangled
inheritance plot. With Tess as a rewrite of the Transome
plot in Felix Holt, for example, the sham heir Harold
Transome is transformed into Alec, the fallen heir Tommy
Trounsome into John Durbeyfield, and the changeling heiress
Esther Lyon into Tess. It's interesting to note that the
mother parallel does not hold: Mrs. Transome does not equate
to Mrs. d'Urberville, who is essentially patriarchal
herself, albeit "Rochestered" by her blindness.
The Transome-Trounsome, d'Urberville-Durbeyfield
evolutions have "real life" parallels in Hardy's own
experience. According to Robert Gittings, Hardy's mother,
Jemima, a major source of anecdotes for Hardy from early
childhood, told him about "a girl called Priddle, descended
from the Paridelles, who clung to her far-off aristocratic
origins by insisting on using her maiden name after
marriage." Hardy used the same names for Retty Priddle, one
of the dairymaids in Tess (Tess, Chapter 21). Gittings
believes that Hardy, himself, had a "d'Urberville complex,"
because when he and his wife Florence were organizing
material for the Life they "deliberately started" a story
that the Hardy family had originally "been important but had
come down in the world" (Thomas Hardy's Later Years 55).
224
47 The whole passage poses an interesting question:
How does Tess come by her pertinent reference to the
sociology of reading? She berates Joan: "Why didn't you
warn me: Ladies know what to fend hands against. because
they read novels that tell them of these tricks: but I never
had the chance o' learning in that way, and you did not help
me!" [Emphasis added].
48 "Dripping" here must refer to the "drippings" from
roasting meat, i.e. lard: Durbeyfield suffers from arterial
sclerosis.
49 As Alice Marwood, "Good Mrs. Brown's" daughter,
points out in Dombev and Son, this trading of a beautiful
young woman in exchange for goods and money is exactly what
is done in the highest circles, particularly by families
down on their luck. "When I was young and pretty . . . my
mother . . . found out my merits, and was fond of me, and
proud of me. She was covetous and poor, and thought to make
a sort of property of me. No great lady ever thought that
of a daughter yet, I'm sure, or acted as if she did--it's
never done, we all know--and that shows that the only
instances of mothers bringing up their daughters wrong, and
evil coming of it, are among such miserable folks as us"
(Chapter 53, "More Intelligence." Dombev and Son 847).
Alice's situation with her mother has been carefully set up
to juxtapose with that of Edith Dombey and her mother, so
readers cannot overlook the irony of Alice's remarks. See,
for example, the narratorial comment at the end of Chapter
34, "Another Mother and Daughter":
Were this miserable mother, and this miserable
daughter, only the reduction to their lowest grade, of
certain social vices sometimes prevailing higher up?
. . Allowing for great difference of stuff and
texture, was the pattern of this woof repeated among
gentle blood at all?
Say, Edith Dombey! And Cleopatra, best of
mothers, let us have your testimony! (579).
Perhaps one of the prime examples in literature of this
period of this kind of "trading" is Gwendolen Harleth, in
George Eliot's Daniel Deronda. Gwendolen's motives are
similar to Tess's (to provide for her widowed mother with
children), although not as pressing: however pitiful
Gwendolen's mother's situation, she and her girls are not
likely to be reduced to destitution, as Joan and her family
are. Gwendolen trades herself to Grandcourt, hates him, and
kills him, or at least helps cause his death; Grandcourt's
drowning is told "at a remove"--by Gwendolen's semi-
hysterical testimony to Daniel (Daniel Deronda 750). But,
on the evidence of the rest of the book, the event is at
best ambiguous in Gwendolen's mind: she considers herself
guilty of his death. Middle-class Gwendolen gets away with
it; working-class Tess hangs.
225
Sally Mitchell states that both Vanity Fair and Dombev
and Son "pointed out that the marriage market was a form of
prostitution"--that is, the exchange of cash for sex. Both
novels appeared "just as active feminists began to organize"
(Fallen Angels. 58).
50 When Hardy's father died in 18 92, his mother was
allowed to stay, "by the courtesy of the landlord," in the
cottage of which Hardy Sr. "had been the third and final
'life' of the lifeholding." (Gittings. Thomas Hardy's
Later Years, p. 71).
51 Introduction, Esther Waters, by George Moore.
52 Bayley 179-180.
53 Boumelha 119-120. Kathleen Blake's article "Pure
Tess; Hardy on Knowing a Woman" explores multiple meanings
of the sub-title besides that suggested by Hardy in the
Preface to Tess, "the connotation of natural and aesthetic
purity," according to Blake (206).
54 The first letter is to Roden Neal (an aristocratic
poet), and is dated 17.5.92. The second is to Henry Jones,
a professor of moral philosophy at the University of
Glasgow, and is dated December 2, 1909. (The Collected
Letters i.267 and iv.62 respectively).
55 Specifically discussing Jude the Obscure. Patricia
Ingham compares Hardy's attitudes with "New Women" novels of
the 1880s and 90s by writers like George Egerton and Sarah
Grand. Whereas Hardy "can't" allow such a breach of
"narrative syntax" as to have Tess not die, later, in Jude,
he employs a new element: "a woman rejecting marriage."
According to Ingham, this new "narrative matrix" is a
"transformation" from the New Woman novels (89). This is
the genre (discussed in A Literature of Their Own, Chapter
VII, pp 182-215) that Elaine Showalter terms "feminist"
fiction. Hardy's transformation of the rejection of
marriage is a radical move for a mainstream male writer, as
are the specific ways he implies critiques of the
commodification of maidenly purity and of the conditions
governing tenancy.
56 Another "reversal" of the heroine plot--for
example, the situation of Lily Dale, Trollope's heroine in
The Small House at Allincrton and The Last Chronicle of
Barset. Lily is so confirmed in the "once-for-all" attitude
about sexual choice that after she is jilted by her first
love, she cannot consider marrying, even when the same man
asks her later. According to George Levine, Hardy regarded
Trollope in particular as "merely conventional" among
226
realists, the same attitude Jane Austen had toward the
gothic genre which she parodied (23 6).
Hardy's questioning of this particular convention is
expressed again in Sue Bridehead's attitude to her first
husband, Phillotson, in Jude.
57 Penny Boumelha, Thomas Hardv and Women. See, for
example, p. 37, for a discussion of pastoral eroticism and
the girls at Talbothays. Boumelha's explanation of this
nineteenth-century view of female sexuality complements the
theories of Herbert Spencer (he who found George Eliot's
appearance so repellent).
Spencer's extrapolation of Darwin's theories was that
in order "to adapt women for motherhood . . . female
evolution is cut short," resulting in women's inferior brain
development and consequently inferior reasoning, as well as
other survival-related differences between the sexes
(Ingham, 13).
Apropos here again is Kristin Brady's discussion of
"the nineteenth century's discourse" on female sexuality,
extending a Foucauldian theory (from The History of
Sexuality) about the duality that the "hvsterization of
women's bodies'" produced. The discourse held that women
are nurturers and hysterics at one and the same time,
resulting in the "contrariness" of Hardy's women
characters --"both corrupt and pure, both victim and
victimizer, both feminine and not feminine" (Higgonet 89).
If all this applies to Tess, the more so for Joan, who, as
an older woman, has perforce learned to negotiate through
the system.
58 Motherhood is the key factor in "nineteenth-century
gender ideology," according to Kristen Brady, who quotes
Mary Poovey. The ebb and flow of the intellect and the
maternal instinct are in inverse proportion for Sue
Bridehead (Jude the Obscure), for instance (Brady, in
Higgonet, A Sense of Sex 99).
According to Poovey, women's "most important work was
increasingly represented as the emotional labor motivated
(and guaranteed) by maternal instinct" (Uneven Developments.
10) .
59 Margaret Homans' point in Bearing the Word is that
writing and the transmission of stories is a significant
role of female characters. (See note 42 of previous
chapter, particularly in reference to Molly Gibson of
Gaskell's Wives and Daughters).
60 Penny Boumelha's criterion seems to exclude Joan:
"the radicalism in Hardy's representation of women resides,
not in their 'complexity,' their 'realism' or their
'challenge to convention,' but in their resistance to
227
reduction to a single and uniform ideological position" (7).
61 As I have already mentioned, many early heroines
have dead mothers; female protagonists are frequently
"killed into art," like Browning's Duchess--and, more
significantly, Tess.
228
Coda
Not long ago, "the heroine's mother" could not have
been the subject of a doctoral dissertation--such a woman
would have been considered irrelevant. Today's feminism and
feminist theories make this project possible, giving it a
context that was previously missing, not only in academia
but also in popular culture: Gloria Steinem or Betty Friedan
might be contemporary embodiments of Lady Russell.1 But I
believe the story is only beginning, especially for older
women. In 1928, Virginia Woolf thought it would take about
a hundred years of preparation before the world would be
ready for "Shakespeare's sister."2 The project got off to
a slow start, and there is still a third-of-a-century to go.
Therefore, I have no "conclusion"; instead, this a coda
offers some possibilities that reflect back on--and look
forward to--the older woman's plot.
********
Lady Russell and Joan Durbeyfield are widely disparate
characters. But their common story line goes something like
this: old hand shows rookie the ropes--and makes a hash of
it. Joan's daughter's tragedy is that she cannot overcome
the misdirection the way Lady Russell's "daughter" does.
What has Hardy to say after Joan? With her, it seems,
he takes the mother-of-the-heroine as far as he can.
Perhaps his views on such characters darkened--part of the
229
general pessimism evidenced in Jude the Obscure by suicidal
children and the impossibility of survival for good, ethical
people. At any rate, in Jude, his last major novel, Hardy
reverts to the absent mother convention: the mothers of both
Jude and Sue are transgressive "monstrous women" who have
rejected motherhood and whose absence underlies their
children's tragedies.
The stand-in mothers are Jude and Sue's stern Aunt
Drusilla and Arabella's shadowy stepmother, "a simple, quiet
woman without features or character."3 The stepmother
panders passively, by getting her husband out of the way for
the Arabella-Jude assignation at the family cottage.
Echoing Esther Summerson's Aunt Rachel of Bleak House. Aunt
Drusilla is the kind of person to tell Jude as a child, "'It
would ha' been a blessing if Goddy-mighty had took thee too,
wi' thy mother and father, poor useless boy!'"4 These
characters present grim and sterile alternatives about the
value of older women's authority.
*******
Or it could be claimed that mothers--heroines' or
otherwise--become obsolete in Jude: the pragmatic, cynical
new generation has fearfully absorbed the older woman's role
toward itself in such a way that when Arabella lobs the
pig's "part" at Jude, she and her friends are sixteen-year-
old Joans. But they are children, so they make a game of
sexual initiation. Arabella at that time is "a complete and
230
substantial female animal--no more, no less."5 She tells
her friends "'I must have him [Jude]. I can't do without
him.'"6 As a result of the girls' collective strategy,
Arabella then systematically sets about getting him--in much
the same way Joan plotted for Tess to "get" Alec--with her
body. Tess asks her mother why she was kept innocent; when
Arabella wants motherly advice, she turns to her peers
rather than to her (step)mother. Advising her to seduce
Jude and fake a pregnancy, her friends comment: "Lots of
girls do it; or do you think they'd get married at all?"
These knowing girls understand the system all too well,
showing the same logic as Joan's.
By "the system" I mean the "inevitable objectification"
of women by patriarchal society, exactly what "Sue denies
and tries to resist," but "Arabella stoically accepts and
tries hard to exploit," as James Kincaid points out. Sue is
"the woman of the feminist movement,"7 who bucks the
system. Arabella, on the other hand, has no pretensions to
idealism:
She practices her fake dimples, arranges her
fake hair, mounts the show of fake affection
because she recognizes that "poor folks must
live" [1.X.69], that women can survive only
by making themselves not substantial but
"seen." So she arranges to be seen. It is,
as she tells Phillotson, "damn rough on us
women, but we must grin and put up wi' it!--
Haw haw!" [5.VIII.360). Arabella sees no
alternative, nor, for that matter, does
Hardy.8
231
Both Hardy and Arabella recognize the reality of the
patriarchal exchange, a key part of the "cash nexus" of
survival. Arabella does not need a mother like Joan; she
and her friends "instinctively" know everything such a
mother would tell her. Later, Arabella will show that, like
Jude's and Sue's mothers, she has also shed the emotional
baggage of motherhood; she gives her child away--twice, in
fact9--clearly considering him nothing but inconvenient.
Arabella's absorption of Joan's "wisdom" is marked by
her commentary at the end of the novel. After the
children's murder-suicide and Jude's death from despair,
Arabella observes, of Sue's living death with Phillotson:
"She's never found peace since she left his [Jude's] arms,
and never will again till she's as he is now [dead]." The
positioning of this statement--as the last word--emphasizes
it and marks Arabella as the authority on human
relationships, usually the function of the "heroine's
mother."
In all her appearances in the novel, Arabella has
rightly intuited both Jude's and Sue's emotional responses.
Although she appears to be devoid of emotions herself,
Arabella is astute about these things in others, reading and
manipulating people to her own material advantage, in
exactly the way Joan has done in Tess.10 The good and
ethical cannot survive in this kind of world, Arabella and
Hardy are telling us in Jude, far more bluntly than Joan and
232
Hardy imply the same lesson in the earlier novel. This
doomsaying is the deeply pessimistic role of the "heroine's
mother" at the end of the Victorian age, according to Hardy,
one of its most prominent spokesmen.
* * * * * * *
To end where I began--with Virginia Woolf. Her
comments on the role of fiction lead to the last writer I
want to consider on the question of the older woman's plot.
Woolf rates Hardy high; she commends his "deep compassion
for the sufferings of men and women."11 In "Modern
Fiction," an attack on "materialists" such as Wells,
Galsworthy, and Bennett, Woolf offers Hardy (and Conrad)
"unconditional gratitude" as opposed to writers who labor
skillfully but pointlessly to render endless material
detail--"a plot," "comedy, tragedy, love interest," and so
forth.
Woolf reserves most of her censure for Arnold Bennett,
because, of those she disparages, he is "by far the best
workman. . . . His characters live abundantly, even
unexpectedly, but it remains to ask how do they live, and
what do they live for?" Bennett's writing is not what life
is like, according to Woolf: "Life is not a series of gig
lamps symmetrically arranged; life is a luminous halo, a
semi-transparent envelope surrounding us from the beginning
of consciousness to the end."
233
Woolf's attack on Bennett is more focused and more
specific in Mrs. Bennett and Mrs. Brown, where she argues
that writers like Bennett are using outdated tools,
specifically a piling-up of material details such as
inventories of property and buildings--tedious minutiae
inappropriate for the new age that has started "on or about
December 1910," when "human character changed."12
Another way of looking at Bennett's work that it
provides valuable insight and assessment on an age from the
perspective of one who is neither fully part of it nor fully
separate from it. Margaret Drabble sums up Bennett's
geographic and cultural point of view: he was "neither the
expert from London nor the proud provincial; but he knew
both. . . . Bennett alone described the living world of high
teas13 and gloomy goal posts . . . a world . . . ignored
then as now by the Clive Bells of Britain" (Arnold Bennett
145). I am suggesting Bennett occupies a similar position
regarding the Victorian age--he knew both it and the
following age from an unusual insider-outsider perspective.
Commenting on the Woolf-Bennett opposition and
defending both writers, Drabble points out that the "import"
of their work concerns many of the same issues, such as "the
little movements of the spirit in its daily routine" and
"the inner dramas of ordinary events" (294). According to
Drabble, Woolf's antagonism to Bennett was class- and
culture-based. Woolf (and her nephew Clive Bell) derogated
234
Bennett because he was a lower-class northerner, two
categories they--as upper-class southerners--neither
understood nor respected; they were especially snobbish
about nouveaux riches such as Bennett, who made a fortune
from his writing (291-294). But as Drabble argues
throughout her book, the very qualities that annoyed Woolf
and Bell are the ones that make Bennett's work virtually
unique and thus of special value.
in The Old Wives' Tale, Bennett proyides another
version of what happens to older women, a perhaps bleak, but
rather convincing one that contrasts with the comparative
optimism of Woolf's Mrs. Dalloway or Mrs. Ramsey of To the
Lighthouse. Both these women are upper-class ex-heroines,
crucial to a large number of people. In The Old Wives'
Tale. Bennett's Baines sisters are "ordinary," solitary, and
finally unheroic, although, as the jacket blurb of my copy
says, "the book is not gloomy: things are too present, too
tangible for that, and the tragedy is too stealthy for it to
be felt before the book is over."
In the early part of the novel, two contrasting
characters exemplify the "heroine's mother": the queenly
Mrs. Baines, who presides to perfection over her girls and
her household,14 and her antithesis, Mrs. Daniel Povey, "a
dreadful figure" described as she lies dead:
A wife and mother! The lady of a house!
The centre of order! The fount of healing!
.The balm for worry, and the refuge of
distress! She was vile. Her scanty yellow-
235
grey hair was dirty, her hollowed neck all
grime, her hands abominable, her black dress
in decay. She was the dishonour of her sex,
her situation, and her years. (225)
The combination of ironic titles and straightforward
description completes the contrast with Mrs. Baines, a woman
of such "assured authority, of capacity tested" that she
"seemed to impart [these qualities] to her dresses even
before she had regularly worn them. 1 , 1 5 But the Mrs. Baines
kind of woman is (like chivalry) already (and always?)
mythical. Constance, her mother's successor, is a pale
imitation.
Although neither of the Baines sisters can strictly be
termed a "heroine's mother" in the end, they have that
potential as girls at the beginning--one dutiful and
"useful," the other clever and beautiful, a heroine
contender. In Bennett's Preface, some of the optimism of
this beginning is already dispelled, because we are told
that this is to be a history of some "stout ageing woman
[who] was once a young girl with the unique charm of youth"
(13). The sisters' lives--one might well say with Virginia
Woolf--are pointless. But in following their stories, we do
get a convincing picture of the ordinary, everyday life of
women in an otherwise unfamiliar time and place.
The Old Wives' Tale appeared in 1908, but it is set
from the early 1860s to 1898, encompassing a period of legal
reforms concerning women. For example, when Constance, the
"useful" sister, marries Mr. Povey, he automatically becomes
236
the proprietor of her late father's business; the widowed
Mrs. Baines moves out of her home and has to accept changes
introduced there by her son-in-law. In 1898, by the time of
her own death, Constance has been a widow for many years,
raising her son, Cyril, and managing her financial affairs;
when she dies, her property is her own. Ironically--
although there is no authorial indication of the irony--the
exercising of her right to vote leads to Constance's
death.16 --- ---
The Baines sisters are compelling characters,
particularly the beautiful, defiant Sophia, who elopes with
a glamorous stranger, a James Harthouse17 type. After a
short time he deserts her, and she stays in Paris rather
than endure the scorn of the folks at home. Stereotypically
in a Victorian novel, alone, penniless, and beautiful, in a
foreign city, the transgressive Sophia would have become a
"fallen woman." But Bennett allows this heroine to have a
head for business and the toughness to defend herself from
predators. Profiteering from food supplies she has had the
foresight to stockpile during the 1870 siege of Paris, she
acquires the capital to establish a successful business, a
pension.
The novel follows the sisters' lives to their deaths in
old age, so that there is nothing heroic or exciting about
them in the end. Previously, for many years they have both
managed to live and prosper without the help or protection
237
of men--Bennett's details show convincingly how they manage
these comparatively uncommon accomplishments.
There is only one heir, Cyril, who turns out to be
unresponsive to his mother's devotion--later, to his aunt
Sophia's, too--and not particularly appreciative of his
inheritance of their estates. Although neither sister gets
any response from Cyril, a relative of Mr. Povey
(Constance's husband) becomes a "son" to them, and his
fiancee becomes a "daughter" to Constance, the surviving
sister. Constance considers this couple "a treasure" to
her, as she looks forward to the wedding, which she does not
live to see (and therefore does not in fact give them the
splendid wedding-present, presumably cash, that she had
planned) .18
The point here is that for both the sisters as older
women, aunthood triumphs (once more). The woman with a
child of her own does much better as an aunt than as a
mother; she gets filial love not from her son, upon whom she
has lavished devotion, but from a distant cousin-by-
marriage. Her husband's cousin, early in the novel, kills
his abusive wife (the "dreadful figure" contrasted with the
girls' mother, Mrs. Baines). The son of these two turns out
to be, arguably, the only really "good" character in the
novel--except for the fiancee, whose role is small. In old
age, the childless Sophia, too, is treated lovingly by this
distant "nephew," rather than by her own sister's son.
238
Another important feature of this novel is the
depiction of the sisterly bond between the Baineses--the
relationship is not sentimentalized. When they are young,
they compete for parental attention; they have several
plausible disagreements when the Paris sister returns after
thirty years; yet their "women's culture" is always
portrayed convincingly--they do care about one another and
in old age learn to be considerate of one another.
Bennett""himself, “as narrator, seems to~ answer the~
criticism of "materialism." As Constance considers her
son's indifference to the inheritance from her sister, his
aunt, she reflects:
His behaviour caused her to revert in
meditation again and again to the futility
of Sophia's career, and the waste of her
attributes. She had grown old and hard in
joyless years in order to amass this money
which Cyril would spend coldly and
ungratefully, never thinking of the immense
effort and endless sacrifice which had gone
to its collection. He would spend it as
carelessly as though he had picked it up in
the street. As the days went by and
Constance realized her own grief, she also
realized more and more the completeness of
the tragedy of Sophia's life. > Headstrong
Sophia had deceived her mother, and for the
deception had paid with thirty years of
melancholy and the entire frustration of her
proper destiny. (558)
Some of these regrets might spill over into Constance's own
life, especially her relationship with her adult son, who is
as careless of her devotion as he is of Sophia's money.
Constance herself has put motherly devotion first, and since
her son is coldly indifferent, readers may infer that her
239
priority is as futile as Sophia's. Nevertheless, the
passage implies a thorough condemnation of materialism.
Of course, as I have argued, Constance is not good at
the domestic woman role as her own mother was. This could
be because the role is outmoded, just as easily as it could
be because "now" is not as good as "then." Margaret Drabble
comments that "Constance's unmoving life . . . is seen, not
defended."19 That same comment could apply to Mrs.
Baines's life, except" that Mrs. Baines's~life is founded
upon a (mythical) stability and sense of purpose that is not
present in Constance's.
In all her domestic perfection, Mrs. Baines plays a
role has virtually ended before the novel begins. What
Bennett conveys through her character is a nod in the
direction of the myth of the more perfect past and its
organic unity. Mrs. Baines's transference of authority to
her dresses, her expert pie-making, her deferential attitude
to the new son-in-law--these incidents almost parody the
"domestic woman." Otherwise, The Old Wives' Tale is not
"about" idealizing the past. The novel is set back
chronologically in the manner frequently used by George
Eliot--in this case starting fifty years before and ending
ten years before its appearance in 1908. In Middlemarch,
this technique is a means of exploring a community grappling
with major social upheaval; in The Old Wives' Tale, it is a
means of focusing on individuals over a forty-year period,
240
with the relevant social changes unstressed. Particularly
since it is written in the new century, The Old Wives' Tale
offers a retrospective that seems somehow remote already in
1908. This remoteness is not a flaw but part of the novel's
considerable depth. The book is not outmoded, as Woolf
might suggest, but rich in cultural insight.
In what it reveals about women's lives and
opportunities, this novel looks back on the previous half-
century, but it also looks forward. It remains timely in
the sense that unless we die first, we are all going to face
old age and its helplessness--from some viewpoints, its
futility. An unblinking look at it, like this one, does not
seem as pointless, as removed from the concerns of "Modern
Fiction" or modern people, as Virginia Woolf's argument
implies. The same relevance applies to the "stealthy"
tragedy of a grotesque old woman contemplating the futility
of her sister's life--and denying that of her own, perhaps
rightly.
Of her own life, Constance reflects:
She had lived in honesty and kindliness for
a fair number of years, and she had tasted
triumphant hours. She was justly respected,
she had a position, she had dignity, she was
well-off. She possessed, after all, a
certain amount of quiet self-conceit. (582)
The evidence of the novel supports these conclusions by
Constance--one instance of her kindliness and honesty occurs
when, after many years of silence, Sophia's whereabouts are
241
discovered and Constance immediately issues Sophia a loving
invitation to return home.
After Constance's death, her friends mourn for her,
overlooking her shortcomings. And, though they do not
succeed, "[t]hey tried, in their sympathetic grief, to
picture to themselves all that she had been through in her
life" (583-4). People loved her! Perhaps Bennett does not
defend Constance's life; but her own feelings about it, and
those of others, indicate ‘that it-is not futile or tragic
after all; her life shows that an older woman can achieve
all that a human being can reasonably expect,20 without
being a heroine's mother, or a mother at all.
Bennett's account of the older woman contrasts
dramatically with that of Hardy. Susan's escape from
Henchard is accomplished by attaching herself to another
man; her second escape is her return to Henchard. Joan's
survival, such as it is, depends on Alec's charity. Even
the powerful Arabella is all right at the end of Jude the
Obscure because she has a prospective third husband in view.
Constance and her sister "make it" on their own, without
defining themselves through men.
It seems to me that this point brings up the crux of
feminist protest: "woman" is a role defined by men. Gloria
Steinem points out that "there are two times of crisis in a
woman's life: when she enters that social role in
adolescence, and when it abandons her at around fifty" (89).
242
The first "crisis," of crucial interest to male-dominated
society (because the future of that society depends on the
outcome), has been represented in countless permutations as
the heroine's plot; Virginia Woolf visualized an alternative
in her "Shakespeare's sister" analogy.21
Until comparatively recently, the second "crisis" has
had little currency in popular representation. Past their
usefulness in "the role," older women have been marginal
because they have been socially irrelevant.22 Now,- in the
1990s, that seems to be changing, if only slowly. As far as
we know, Virginia Woolf did not make any analogies about
"Shakespeare's mother." It's fascinating to speculate about
what she might have said.
243
NOTES
1 As a random example, in Revolution from Within,
Steinem writes from the perspective of "elder stateswoman"
in the contemporary women's movement an extended discourse
of advice to younger or less-informed women. The focus is
on techniques to build self-esteem; examples are frequently
drawn from Steinem's own experience or the knowledge she has
gained from activist associates.
2 Conclusion of A Room of One's Own.
3 Jude l.VII (51).' Shortly after this description,
she is also referred to as "her [Arabella's] mother" l.VIII
(57). The reference could be an error or an elision--the
quoted description is so damning that it hardly matters what
this woman's relationship is to Arabella.
4 Jude 1.II. (13) .
5 Jude l.VI (41).
6 Jude 1.VII (52).
7 Jude, p. 7--Hardy's "Postscript" (1912).
8 Kincaid, "Girl Watching" (145).
9 See her letter to Jude (Jude 287).
10 Rosemarie Morgan demonstrates that Arabella is
deliberately set up as "a truthful reporter of all she
witnesses" (145)--a collaborator with Hardy in the narration
(143). " [ H ]er sexual vitality sharpens, in Hardy's view,
her perceptual acuity, her discerning judgement, and her
sharp intuition" (144) . Morgan argues that "for all her
unappealing qualities" Arabella is one of "Hardy's strong
women" (144). "Arabella scorns the language of men. She
shows no sign of dependency upon creed or doctrine and is
noticeably free from prejudice or zealotry." When she is
temporarily involved with the Chapel people, "even this
Hardy turns to her advantage. Arabella is no sooner the
sanctimonious prude than the new guise is discarded and her
native honesty breaks through; her efforts at self-salvation
utterly fail" (145-146).
Joan is not as vital or resourceful as Arabella (or as
young--or as unappealing), but with those provisos, much of
this argument applies to Joan, supporting the notion that
Arabella is a refinement of the Joan character, or at any
rate, of its opportunistic side.
244
11 "The Novels of Thomas Hardy," Common Reader 2, 257.
12 Mr. Bennett and Mrs. Brown, 4. This often-quoted
claim heralds Modernism, but the example demonstrating the
way human character has changed needs also to be quoted: "In
life one can see the change, if I may use a homely
illustration, in the character of one's cook. The Victorian
cook lived like a leviathan in the lower depths . . . the
Georgian [the new, or changed] cook is a creature of
sunshine and fresh air; in and out of the drawing-room, now
to borrow The Daily Herald, now to ask advice about a hat."
Woolf's quaint example seems to me far more remote than
Bennett's fixations on rent and wages (Mr. Bennett 18). I
am curious about what things cost in the 18 90s; I'm
incapable of imagining what it would be like to assess the
character of a personal cook--either lumbering in the
basement or bounding into "the drawing room."
13 By the term "high tea" Drabble obviously refers to
the meal popular with working-class Britons, especially in
the north of England, a substantial cooked snack eaten after
work, around 6 p.m.--not the American socialite occasion
with sherry and finger sandwiches.
14 For example, in Chapter 3, "A Battle." Mrs.
Baines's pastry-making is a masterly example of the
"realistic" detail Bennett uses (50-51). The chapter shows
Mrs. Baines with her fingers in all the family "pies." (The
Old Wives' Tale, pp 48-80).
15 The Old Wives' Tale 28.
16 Constance is adamantly opposed to the Federation of
the Five Towns and persuades herself that she must vote
against it; so, sneaking past her servant, she struggles out
to the Town Hall and back, despite great infirmity. As a
result of this excursion, she sinks into her last illness
(578 ff.)
17 The would-be seducer of Louisa Gradgrind in Hard
Times.
18 The Old Wives' Tale. 583.
19 Arnold Bennett. 147.
20 To feel that one has "lived in honesty and
kindliness for a fair number of years," and "tasted
triumphant hours," to be "justly respected," to have "a
position" and "dignity," to be "well-off" and to have "a
certain amount of quiet self-conceit"--as Constance does at
the end of her life (The Old Wives' Tale. 582)--these
245
feelings sum up what I believe most people nowadays, men or
women, would agree seem reasonable expectations from Life.
21 A Room of One's Own 46.
22 The young Jane Austen's version of this situation is
quoted at the beginning of my Chapter 1.
246
Works Cited
Allen, Walter. George Eliot. Masters of Literature Series.
Gen. ed. Louis Kronenburger. London: Weidenfeld and
Nicolson, 1965.
Allen, Walter. Introduction. Esther Waters. By George
Moore. New York: Dutton, 1962.
Armstrong, Isobel. "Middlemarch: A Note on George Eliot's
'Wisdom.'" Critical Essays on George Eliot. Ed.
Barbara Hardy. London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1970.
Armstrong, Nancy. Desire and Domestic Fiction: A Political
History of the Novel. New York: Oxford UP, 198 7.
Austen, Jane. Jane Austen's Letters to Her Sister Cassandra
and Others. Ed. R.W. Chapman. Oxford: Clarendon P.,
1932 .
Austen, Jane. Emma. (1816). New York: Oxford UP, 1971.
Austen, Jane. Love and Freindship and Other Early Works.
London: The Women's P, 1978.
Austen, Jane. Northanger Abbey, Lady Susan. The Watsons,
and Sanditon. (1818). New York: Oxford UP, 1980.
Austen, Jane. Persuasion. (1818) . New York: Oxford UP,
1990. World's Classics edition. Page numbers in the
text refer to this edition.
Austen, Jane. Persuasion. With A Memoir of Jane Austen.
(1870). By J.E. Austen-Leigh. Ed. D.W. Harding.
(1965) New York: Penguin Classics, 1985.
Austen, Jane. Pride and Prejudice. (1813). Ed. James
Kinsley and Frank W. Bradbrook. World's Classics
edition. Oxford: Oxford UP, 1970.
Austen, Jane. Pride and Prejudice. Norton Critical
Edition. Ed. Donald J. Gray. New York: Norton, 1966.
Austen-Leigh, J.E. A Memoir of Jane Austen. (1871). Rpt.
Penguin ed. Persuasion.
Bayley, John. An Essay on Hardy. New York: Cambridge UP,
1978 .
Beer, Gillian.
George Eliot. Bloomington: Indiana UP, 1986.
247
Beer, Patricia. Reader. I Married Him: A Study of the Women
Characters of Jane Austen. Charlotte Bronte. Elizabeth
Gaskell and George Eliot. London: Macmillan P, 1974.
Bennett, Arnold. The Old Wives' Tale. Harmondsworth,
England: Penguin Books, 1954.
Blake, Kathleen. "Pure Tess: Hardy on Knowing a Woman."
Studies in English Literature, 1500-1900 22 (1982):
689-705. Rp t. Critical Essays on Thomas Hardy: The
Novels. Ed. Dale Kramer. Boston: G.K. Hall, 1990.
Bloom, Harold, ed. George Eliot. Modern Critical Views.
New Haven: Chelsea House, 1986.
Bloom, Harold, ed. Thomas Hardy's The Mayor of
Casterbridge. Modern Critical Interpretations. New
York: Chelsea House publishers, 1988.
Bodenheimer, Rosemarie. "Ambition and its Audiences: George
Eliot's Performing Figures." Victorian Studies 34.1
(Autumn 1990): 17-29.
Bodenheimer, Rosemarie. The Politics of Story in Victorian
Fiction. Ithaca: Cornell UP, 1988.
Boumelha, Penny. Thomas Hardv and Women: Sexual Ideology
and Narrative. New Jersey: Barnes & Noble, 1982.
Brady, Kristen. "Textual Hysteria: Hardy's Narrator on
Women." Higgonet, A Sense of Sex 89.
Burney, Fanny. Evelina. (1778). New York: Norton, 1965.
Bronfen, Elisabeth. "Pay As You Go: On the Exchange of
Bodies and Signs." Higgonet, A Sense of Sex 76.
Butler, Marilyn. Jane Austen and the War of Ideas. Oxford:
Clarendon P, 1975. (New intro. 1987) .
Byatt, A.S., ed. Eliot, George. Selected Essavs. Poems,
and Other Writings.
Carlyle, Thomas. Sartor Resartus. (18 3 3-4). Oxford:
Oxford UP, 1987.
Caserio, Robert. " ' Felix Holt' and ' Bleak House. ' 1 1 Bloom,
George Eliot 127.
Chapman, R.W., ed. Jane Austen's Letters to Her Sister
Cassandra and Others. Oxford: Clarendon P, 1932.
248
Churchill, R.C. "Charles Dickens." The Pelican Guide to
English Literature. Ed. Boris Ford. Vol. 6.
Harmondsworth, England: Penguin, 195 8 (1973).
Corrigan, Philip and Derek Sayer. The Great Arch: English
State Formation as Cultural Revolution. Oxford: Basil
Blackwell, 1985.
Cosslett, Tess. Woman to Woman: Female Friendship in
Victorian Fiction. Atlantic Highlands, NJ: Humanities
International, 1988.
Craik, W.A. Jane Austen: The Six Novels. New York: Barnes
& Noble, 1965.
Davidoff, Leonore and Catherine Hall. Family Fortunes: Men
and Women of the English Middle Class 1780-1850.
Chicago: U of Chicago P, 1987.
Davin, Anna. "Imperialism and Motherhood." History
Workshop Journal. V. (1978): 9-65.
Davis, Lennard J. Resisting Novels: Ideology and Fiction.
New York: Methuen, 1987.
Dickens, Charles. Bleak House. (1853). Ed. Norman Page.
Int. J.Hillis Miller. New York: Viking Penguin, 1971
(1985) .
Dickens, Charles. Dombev and Son. (1848). New York:
Viking Penguin, 1970.
Dickens, Charles. Hard Times. (1854). Ed. David Craig.
New York: Viking Penguin, 1969.
Dickens, Charles. The Letters of Charles Dickens. The
Pilgrim Edition. Oxford: Clarendon P, 1965-88. 6
vols. Ed. Graham Storey et al.
Dickens, Charles. Little Dorrit. (1857) . New York: Books,-
Inc. n.d.
Dickens, Charles. Sketches by Boz. (1839). New York:
Oxford UP, 1957.
Donovan, Robert Alan. "Structure and Idea in Bleak House."
English Literary History 29 (1962): 175-201. Rpt. The
Victorian Novel: Modern Essays in Criticism. Ed. Ian
Watt. New York: Oxford UP, 1971. p. 85.
Drabble, Margaret. Arnold Bennett. New York: Alfred A.
Knopf, 1974.
249
Eagleton, Terry. Criticism and Ideology; a Study in Marxist
Literary Theory. New York: Verso, 1978.
Edgeworth, Maria. Belinda. (18 01). New York: Pandora P,
1987 .
Eliot, George. Adam Bede. (1859). Ed. Stephen Gill. New
York: Viking Penguin, 1980.
Eliot, George. Daniel Deronda. (18 76). Ed. Barbara Hardy.
New York: Viking Penguin, 1967.
Eliot, George. Felix Holt, the Radical. (1866). Ed. Fred
C. Thomson. Oxford: Clarendon P, 198 0.
Eliot, George. Felix Holt, the Radical. (1866). World's
Classics edition. Ed. Fred C. Thomson. New York:
Oxford UP, 1988.
Eliot, George. "Life and Opinions of Milton." (1855) .
Essays of George Eliot. Ed. Thomas Pinney. New York:
Columbia UP, 1963.
Eliot, George. The George Eliot Letters. Ed. Gordon S.
Haight. 7 vols. New Haven: Yale UP, 1954-55.
Eliot, George. Middlemarch. (1871). Ed. W.J. Harvey. New
York: Viking Penguin, 1965.
Eliot, George. The Mill on the Floss. (1860). New York:
Oxford UP, 1981.
Eliot, George. Scenes of Clerical Life. (1858). Ed. David
Lodge. New York: Viking Penguin, 1973.
Eliot, George. Selected Essays. Poems, and Other Writings.
Ed. A.S. Byatt & Nicholas Warren. Int. A.S. Byatt. New
York: Viking Penguin, 1990.
Eliot, George. Silas Marner. (1861). Ed. Q.D. Leavis. New
York: Viking Penguin, 1967.
Fisher, Philip. Making Up Society: The Novels of George
Eliot. Pittsburgh: U of Pittsburgh P, 1981.
Forster, E. M. Aspects of the Novel. New York: Harcourt,
Brace, 1954.
Foucault, Michel. The History of Sexuality. Vol I. New
York: Vintage Books, 1980.
250
Foucault, Michel. The Foucault Reader. Ed. Paul Rabinow.
New York: Pantheon Books, 1984.
Freud, Sigmund. New Introductory Lectures on
Psychoanalysis. Trans, and ed. James Strachey. New
York: Norton, 1964.
Frye, Northrop. Anatomy of Criticism: Four Essays.
Princeton, NJ: Princeton UP, 1957.
Fullbrook, Kate. "Jane Austen and the Comic Negative."
Roe, 39.
Gallagher, Catherine. The Industrial Reformation of English
Fiction: Social Discourse and Narrative Form, 1832-
1867. Chicago: U of Chicago P, 198 5.
Gaskell, Elizabeth. Ruth. (1853). Ed. Alan Shelston. New
York: Oxford UP, 1985.
Gaskell, Elizabeth. Wives and Daughters. (1866) . Ed.
Frank G. Smith. Int. Laurence Lerner. New York:
Viking Penguin, 1969 (1986).
Gilbert, Sandra M. and Susan Gubar. The Madwoman in the
Attic: the Woman Writer and the Nineteenth-Century
Literary Imagination. New Haven: Yale UP, 1979.
Gissing, George. The Odd Women. London: Lawrence & Bullen,
1893. Rpt. New York: AMS P, 1969.
Gittings, Robert. Thomas Hardy's Later Years. Boston:
Little, Brown, 1978.
Gittings, Robert. Young Thomas Hardy. Boston: Little,
Brown, 197 8.
Goode, John. Thomas Hardy: The Offensive Truth. Oxford:
Basil Blackwell, 1988.
Greene, Donald J. "Jane Austen and the Peerage." PMLA,
LXVIII (Dec. 1953) 1017-1031. Rpt. Jane Austen, A
Collection of Critical Essays. Ed. Ian Watt.
Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice-Hall, 1963.
Gregor, Ian. "A Man and His History." Bloom, Thomas
Hardy's The Mayor 33.
Gregor, Ian. Int. The Life and Death of the Mayor of
Casterbridge: a Story of a Man of Character. By Thomas
Hardy (1886). New Wessex Edition. London: Macmillan,
1974 .
251
Gross, John, and Gabriel Pearson, eds. Dickens and the
Twentieth Century. London: Routledge and Kegan Paul,
1962 .
Haight, Gordon S. George Eliot: a Biography. New York:
Oxford UP, 1968.
Haight, Gordon S., ed. The George Eliot Letters.
Haight, Gordon S. and Rosemary T. VanArsdel. George Eliot:
a Centenary Tribute. Totowa, New Jersey: Barnes &
Noble, 1982.
Halperin, John. The Life of Jane Austen. Baltimore: Johns
Hopkins UP, 1984.
Harding, D . W. Introduction. Persuasion. By Jane Austen. -
New York: Penguin Classics, 1985.
Hardy, Barbara, ed. Middlemarch: Critical Approaches to the
Novel. London: U of London, Athlone P, 1967.
Hardy, Barbara. "The Moment of Disenchantment." Bloom,
George Eliot 4 5.
Hardy, Barbara. Particularities: Readings in George Eliot.
London: Peter Owen, 1982.
Hardy, Thomas. Jude the Obscure. (1895). New York: Bantam
Books, 1981.
Hardy, Thomas. The Collected Letters of Thomas Hardy. Ed.
Richard Little Purdy and Michael Millgate. 7 vols.
Oxford: Clarendon P, 1978-88.
Hardy, Thomas. The Life and Death of the The Mayor of
Casterbridge: a Story of a Man of Character. (1886).
Ed. Dale Kramer. World7s Classics Edition. New York:
Oxford UP, 1987.
Hardy, Thomas. Tess of the D'Urbervilles: a Pure Woman.
(1891). New York: Penguin Books, 1964.
Hardy, Thomas. Thomas Hardy7s Personal Writings. Ed.
Harold Orel. New York: St. Martins, 1990.
Harvey, W.J. Character and the Novel. Ithaca: Cornell UP,
1965 .
Heilbrun, Carolyn G. Hamlet7s Mother and Other Women. New
York: Ballantine, 1990.
252
Heilman, Robert B. "'Stealthy Convergence' in Middlemarch. 1 1
Haight & VanArsdel, 49.
Higgonet, Margaret R., ed. A Sense of Sex: Feminist
Perspectives on Hardy. Chicago: U of Chicago P, 1993.
Higgonet, Margaret R. "A Woman's Story: Tess and the
Problem of Voice." Higgonet, A Sense of Sex.
Holloway, John. "Hard Times: A History and a Criticism."
Gross S c Pearson, 159.
Homans, Margaret. Bearing the Word. Chicago: U of Chicago
P, 1986.
Howe, Irving. Thomas Hardy. New York: Macmillan, 1967.
Ingham, Patricia. Thomas Hardy. Atlantic Highlands, NJ:
Humanities P International, 1990.
Jameson, Frederic. The Political Unconscious: Narrative as
a Socially Symbolic Act. Ithaca: Cornell UP, 1986.
Johnson, Claudia Jane Austen: Women. Politics, and the
Novel. Chicago: U of Chicago P, 1988.
Kaplan, Deborah. Jane Austen among Women. Baltimore: John
Hopkins UP, 1992.
Kincaid, James R. "Girl Watching, Child-Beating and Other
Exercises for Readers of Jude the Obscure." Higgonet,
A Sense of Sex.
Kincaid, James R. "Performance, Roles, and the Nature of
the Self in Dickens." MacKay, 11.
Kirkham, Margaret. Jane Austen. Feminism and Fiction. New
Jersey: Barnes & Noble, 1983.
Klaus, Patricia Otto. "Women in the Mirror." in The Women
of England from Anglo-Saxon Times to the Present. Ed.
Barbara Kanner. Hamden, CT: Archon Books, 1979.
Knoepflmacher, U.C. Religious Humanism and the Victorian
Novel: George Eliot. Walter Pater, and Samuel Butler.
Princeton, NJ: Princeton UP, 1970.
Kramer, Dale. Thomas Hardy: the Forms of Tragedy. Detroit:
Wayne State UP, 1975.
Kramer, Dale. Introduction. The Mayor of Casterbridge. By
Thomas Hardy. World's Classics edition.
253
Langbauer, Laurie. Women and Romance: The Consolations of
Gender in the English Novel. Ithaca: Cornell UP, 1990.
Langland, Elizabeth. "Nobody's Angels: Domestic Ideology
and Middle-Class Women in the Victorian Novel." PMLA.
102.2 (Mar. 1992): 290-304.
Lawrence, D.H. A Study of Thomas Hardy and other Essays.
Ed. Bruce Steele. New York: Cambridge UP, 19 85.
Leavis, F.R. The Great Tradition: George Eliot. Henry James.
Joseph Conrad. London: Chatto & Windus, 1950.
Leavis, Q.D. "A Critical Theory of Jane Austen's Writings."
Scrutiny. X (1942): 61-75. Rpt. Norton Critical
edition, Pride and and Prejudice 293-305.
Lennox, Charlotte. The Female Quixote. (1752). New York:
Oxford UP, 1989.
Levine, George. The Realistic Imagination: English Fiction
from Frankenstein to Lady Chatterlev. Chicago: Chicago
UP, 1981.
Levine, Phillipa. "So Few Prizes and So Many Blanks":
Marriage and,Feminism in Later Nineteenth-Century
England. Journal of British Studies 28 (April 198 9):
150-174.
Levine, Phillipa. Victorian Feminism 1850-1900.
Tallahassee: Florida State UP, 1987.
Levy, Anita. Other Women: The Writing of Class. Race, and
Gender, 1832-1989. Princeton: Princeton UP, 1991.
Lewis, Jane. Women and Social Action in Victorian and
Edwardian England. Stanford, CA: Stanford UP, 1991.
Lucas, John. The Literature of Change Studies in the
Nineteenth-Century Provincial Novel. Totowa, NJ:
Barnes & Noble, 1980.
MacKay, Carol Hanbery, ed. Dramatic Dickens. New York: St.
Martin's, 1989.
Mickelson, Anne Z. Thomas Hardy's Women and Men: the Defeat
of Nature. Metuchen, NJ: Scarecrow P, 1976.
Mill, John Stuart. The Subjection of Women. (1869) .
Cambridge, MA: MIT P, 1970.
254
Miller, D.A . Narrative and Its Discontents: Problems of
Closure in the Traditional Novel. Princeton: Princeton
UP, 1981.
Miller, J. Hillis. Fiction and Repetition: Seven English
Novels. Cambridge: Harvard UP.
Miller, J. Hillis. Int. Bleak House. By Charles Dickens.
Miller, J. Hillis. Thomas Hardy: Distance and Desire.
Cambridge, MA: Belnap P of Harvard UP, 19 70.
Miller, Nancy K. "Emphasis Added." Showalter, Feminist
Criticism. 339.
Miller, Nancy K. The Heroine's Text: Readings in the French
and English Novel 1722-1782. New York: Columbia UP,
1980 .
Millgate, Michael. Thomas Hardy: a Biography. New York:
Random House, 1982.
Mitchell, Judith. "Hardy's Female Reader." Higgonet, A
Sense of Sex 172.
Mitchell, Sally. The Fallen Angel: Chastity. Class and
Women's Reading, 1835-1880. Bowling Green, Ohio:
Bowling Green University Popular P, 1981.
Morgan, Rosemarie. Women and Sexuality in the Novels of
Thomas Hardy. New York: Routledge, 198 8.
Mudrick, Marvin. Jane Austen: Irony as Defense and
Discovery. Berkeley: U of California P, 1968.
Newsom, Robert. "Villette and Bleak House: Authorizing
Women." Nineteenth-Century Literature 4 6.1 (June
1991) : 54-81.
Newton, Judith Lowder. Women. Power, and Subversion:
Social Strategies in British Fiction. 1778-1860.
Athens, Georgia: U of Georgia P, 1981.
Paroissien, David, ed. Selected Letters of Charles Dickens.
Boston: Twayne Publishers, 1985.
Poovey, Mary. The Proper Ladv and the Woman Writer:
Ideology as Style in the Works of Marv Wollstonecraft.
Mary Shelley, and Jane Austen. Chicago: U of Chicago
P, 1984.
255
Poovey, Mary. Uneven Developments: the Ideological Work of
Gender in Mid-Victorian England. Chicago: U of Chicago
P, 1988.
Rawson, Claude. Introduction. Persuasion. By Jane Austen.
New York: Oxford UP, 1990.
Reeve, Clara. Plans of Education with remarks on the
Systems of Other Writers. Int. & ed. Gina Luria. New
York: Garland Publishing, 1974. (Facsimile rpt.
London: T. Hookham and J. Carpenter, 1792) .
Roe, Sue, ed. Women Reading Women's Writing. New York: St.
Martin's P, 1987.
Ruskin, John. Sesame and Lilies and the Queen of the Air.
"(1871)7 New York: A. Li Burt, n.d.
Sandler, Florence. "The Unity of Felix Holt. 1 1 Haight &
VanArsdel, 137.
Saunders, Mary. "Lady Dedlock Prostrate: Drama, Melodrama,
and Expressionism in Dickens's Floor Scenes." MacKay,
68 .
Schor, Hilary M. Scheherezade in the Marketplace: Elizabeth
Gaskell and the Victorian Novel. New York: Oxford UP,
1992 .
Schorer, Mark. "The Structure of the Novel: Method,
Metaphor and Mind." B. Hardy, Middlemarch: Critical
Approaches 12.
Shanley, Mary Lyndon. Feminism, Marriage, and the Law in
Victorian England, 1850-1895. Princeton: Princeton UP,
1989 .
Scott, Walter. The Bride of Lammermoor. (1819) .
Everyman's Library edition. New York: E.P. Dutton,
1906 .
Showalter, Elaine, ed. Feminist Criticism: Essays on Women.
Literature, and Theory. New York: Pantheon Books,
1985 .
Showalter, Elaine. "Feminist Criticism in the Wilderness."
Showalter, ed. Feminist Criticism: Essays on Women,
Literature, and Theory. 243.
Showalter, Elaine. A Literature of Their Own: British Women
Novelists from Bronte to Lessing. Princeton: Princeton
UP, 1977.
256
Showalter, Elaine. "The Unmanning of the Mayor of
Casterbridge." Critical Approaches to Thomas Hardv.
Ed. Dale Kramer (1979). Rpt. Bloom, Thomas Hardy's The
Mayor 53.
Smith, Anne, ed. George Eliot: Centenary Essays and an
Unpublished Fragment. Totowa, NJ: Barnes & Noble,
1980 .
Southam, B.C. Jane Austen: The Critical Heritage. New
York: Barnes & Noble, 196 8.
Stallybrass, Peter and Allon White. The Politics of
Transgression. Ithaca: Cornell UP, 1986.
Steinem, Gloria. Revolution from Within: a Book of Self-
Esteem. Boston: Little, Brown, 1992.
Thackeray, William Makepeace. Vanity Fair: a Novel without
a Hero. (1847). Ed. John Sutherland. New York:
Oxford UP, 1983.
Thomson, Fred C. Introduction. Felix Holt. By George
Eliot.
Thomson, Fred C. "Felix Holt as Classic Tragedy."
Nineteenth-Century Fiction 16.1 (June 1961): 47-58.
Thomson, Fred C. "The Genesis of Felix Holt." PMLA 74.5
(Dec. 1959): 576-584.
Tillotson, Kathleen M. Novels of the Eighteen-Forties.
Oxford: Oxford UP, 1965.
Todd, Janet. Feminist Literary History. New York:
Routledge, 1988.
Todd, Janet. Women's Friendship in Literature. New York:
Columbia UP, 1980.
Tompkins, J.M.S. "A Plea for Ancient Lights." Hardy, ed.
Middlemarch: Critical Approaches 172.
Trollope, Anthony. An Autobiography. (1883). New York:
Oxford UP, 1980.
Trollope, Anthony. The Last Chronicle of Barset. (186 7).
New York: Oxford UP, 1980.
Trollope, Anthony. The Small House at Allington. (1864).
New York: Oxford UP, 1980.
257
Vance, Norman. "Law, Religion and the Unity of Felix Holt. 1 1
Smith, George Eliot: Centenary Essays.
Wain, John. "Little Dorrit." Gross & Pearson 175.
Warhol, Robin. Gendered Interventions: Narrative Discourse
in the Victorian Novel. New Brunswick: Rutgers UP,
1989 .
Watt, Ian. The Rise of the Novel. Berkeley: U of
California P, 195 7.
Williams, Raymond. Culture and Society 1780-1950. New
York: Columbia UP, 1958.
Winfield, Christine. "Factual Sources of Two Episodes in
The Mayor of Casterbridge." Nineteenth-Century Fiction
25.2 (Sept. 1970): 224-231.
Woolf, Virginia. A Room of Onef s Own. New York: Harcourt,
1929 .
Woolf, Virginia. Mr. Bennett and Mrs. Brown. London:
Hogarth P, 1928.
Yeazell, Ruth Bernard. Fictions of Modesty: Women and
Courtship in the English Novel. Chicago: U of Chicago
P, 1991.
Yeazell, Ruth Bernard. "Podsnappery, Sexuality, and the
English Novel." Critical Inquiry. 9.2 (Dec. 1982) :
339-357.

Linked assets

University of Southern California Dissertations and Theses

Conceptually similar

PDF

Getting to know the poor: Early Victorian fiction and social investigation

PDF

The imperial family domesticity and nationalism in the Victorian novel

PDF

Fictions of health: medicine and the ninteenth-century novel

PDF

Home work: Women, accomplishments, and Victorian constructions of class

PDF

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

PDF

Fracture subjects on the margins of identity: Race, gender, class, and sexuality in colonial and postcolonial texts

PDF

Suspicious narrative: The assassination of JFK and American way of not-knowing

PDF

Race, ethnicity, and the ideology of marginality

PDF

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

PDF

The moral fiction of Raymond Chandler

PDF

Sexual Parody In American Comedic Film And Literature, 1925-1948

PDF

Facing the camera: Dickens, photography, and the anxiety of representation

PDF

Gossip, letters, phones: The scandal of female networks in film and literature

PDF

Voices in the mirror: Sacrifice and the theater of the body in the dramatic monologues of Ai and Frank Bidart

PDF

Critical beauties: Aesthetics, gender, and realism in John Ruskin and George Eliot

PDF

Machismo in twentieth century American fiction

PDF

The real and the ideal worlds of Virginia Woolf

PDF

A tripart vector multi-attribute model of consumer brand preference

PDF

Becoming a feminist reader: Romance and re-vision

PDF

The economics of education of the urban ghetto

Asset Metadata

Creator Cowan, Susan Carolyn (author)

Core Title The heroine's mother: The plot of the older woman in nineteenth-century English fiction

Contributor Digitized by ProQuest (provenance)

Degree Doctor of Philosophy

Degree Program English

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

Tag literature, English,OAI-PMH Harvest

Language English

Advisor Schor, Hilary M. (committee chair), Kincaid, James R. (committee member), Levine, Philippa (committee member)

Permanent Link (DOI) https://doi.org/10.25549/usctheses-c20-240670

Unique identifier UC11255700

Identifier DP23190.pdf (filename),usctheses-c20-240670 (legacy record id)

Legacy Identifier DP23190.pdf

Dmrecord 240670

Document Type Dissertation

Rights Cowan, Susan Carolyn

Type texts

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

Access Conditions The author retains rights to his/her dissertation, thesis or other graduate work according to U.S. copyright law. Electronic access is being provided by the USC Libraries in agreement with the au...

Repository Name University of Southern California Digital Library

Repository Location USC Digital Library, University of Southern California, University Park Campus, Los Angeles, California 90089, USA