Renegotiating the Sexual Contract: Fictions of Subversive Restraint 1810-1893
By
Jennifer English
BA(H) University of New Brunswick, Saint John 2003
A Thesis Submitted in Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements for the
Degree of
Master of Arts
in the Graduate Academic Unit of English
Supervisor: Sarah Maier, PhD, English
Examining Board: Sandra Bell, PhD, English
Donald Desserud, PhD, Political Science
This thesis is accepted by the Dean of Graduate Studies
THE UNIVERSITY OF NEW BRUNSWICK
October 2007
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1*1 Canada Dedication
To my family, with love
ii Abstract
Feminist critics of nineteenth-century fiction have long cited marriage as the cultural institution that most systematically oppresses women. This thesis examines how the chaste heroine - as represented in the seduction plot, the wedlock plot, and the New
Woman novel - challenges such readings of women's experience and illustrates the potential for the privileging of reason and chastity over passion to challenge an exchange- based marriage economy, to change the nature of the sexual contract, and to subvert the hierarchal nature of marriage. Because narrative responses to marriage evolve throughout the century, this study also traces the shift from the heroine's initial focus on courtship dynamics to a later emphasis on the reformation of marriage. Ultimately, I argue that while a heroine's reserve can effectively change the hierarchal nature of marriage, attempts to radically alter the institution of marriage itself surpass what can realistically be accommodated within the limits of either the seduction plot or the New Woman novel.
iii TABLE OF CONTENTS
DEDICATION ii ABSTRACT iii TABLE OF CONTENTS iv
INTRODUCTION 1
CHAPTER ONE Contextualizing Chastity 9
CHAPTER TWO "My marriage is to please myself alone": Subverting Seduction in Self-Control and The Tenant of Wildfell Hall 36
CHAPTER THREE She "meant to lead": Gwendolen's Matrimonial Management in Daniel Deronda 65
CHAPTER FOUR "We are not the property of our husbands": Challenging the Conjugal Imperative in The Heavenly Twins 85
CONCLUSION 112
WORKS CONSULTED 117
CURRICULUM VITAE
iv 1
Introduction
Feminist critics of nineteenth-century fiction have long cited marriage as the cultural institution that most systematically oppresses women. Nancy Armstrong, for instance, in her work Desire and Domestic Fiction: A Political History of the Novel
(1987), contends that the traditional dynamic between husband and wife mimics that of a "master and [his] servant" (114). Similarly, Joseph Allen Boone, in his landmark study of courtship and marriage Tradition Counter Tradition: Love and the Form of
Fiction (1987), equates matrimony with "female self-diminishment" (12), and asserts that female agency and autonomy have conventionally been figured as "antithetical to marital destiny" (14). More recently, Wendy S. Jones explores in Consensual
Fictions: Women, Liberalism, and the English Novel (2005) the connections between the "traditional, patriarchal" (7) marriage and "female subordination and self- effacement" (67). Although these critics differ considerably in both their theoretical frameworks and approaches, their diverse criticisms of marriage all stem from one specific, essential aspect of matrimony: the sexual contract. In her study The Sexual
Contract (1988), Carole Pateman defines this all-important clause of the marriage agreement as a legal guarantee of male dominance that both "established] men's political rights over women" and "established] orderly access by men to women's bodies" (2). Without the legal right to regulate her own sexual activity, to object to her husband's sexual demands, or to assert ownership of her body, the existence of the sexual contract meant that a married woman amounted to little more than an
"infinitely receptive body" (Boone 135). 2
The criticisms of Boone, Armstrong, and Thompson also derive from the very manner in which the conventional nineteenth-century marriage was contracted. In
"The Traffic in Women: Notes on the 'Political Economy' of Sex" (1975), feminist anthropologist Gayle Rubin explores the status of women in a marriage system based on exchange. Rubin grounds her discussion in the work of Claude Levi-Strauss, who asserts in The Elementary Structures of Kinship (1969) that "[t]he total relationship of exchange which constitutes marriage is not established between a man and a woman, but between two groups of men, and the woman figures only as one of the objects in the exchange, and not as one of the partners" (qtd. in Rubin 174). Such a system, wherein the female's value is located in her status as a "sexual semi-object" (176) whose function is to be passed from one man - her father - to another - her future husband - as a "conduit" (174) or solidifier of the relationship between them, demands that "women are in no position to give themselves away" (175). This
"asymmetric division of the sexes" (183) extends beyond a woman's lack of involvement in the choice of her husband; Rubin observes that
'[ejxchange of women' is a shorthand for expressing that the social
relations of a kinship system specify that men have certain rights in
their female kin, and that women do not have the same rights either to
themselves or to their male kin. In this sense, the exchange of women
is a profound perception of a system in which women do not have full
rights to themselves. (176)
In a system wherein "men have rights to women which women do not have in themselves" (183), dominion over the female body becomes the province of the male, 3
whether father or husband, and not the woman herself. Because a woman's body is
figured as male property, female passivity and acquiescence to the choices of fathers
and the sexual demands of husbands are essential components of the marriage
economy:
It would be in the interests of the smooth and continuous operation of
such a system if the woman in question did not have too many ideas of
her own about whom she might want to sleep with. From the
standpoint of the system, the preferred female sexuality would be one
which responded to the desire of others, rather than one which actively
desired and sought a response. (182)
Rubin asserts that ultimately, the marriage economy can be defined as a "system of relationships by which women become the prey of men" (158).
While literary critics like Boone, Armstrong, and Jones illustrate how the conditions of the marriage agreement and an exchange-based marriage economy necessarily relegated women to a subordinate position within marriage - both in fiction and real life - Mary Wollstonecraft attributed the cause of marital oppression to social customs which raise young women to not only expect, but to embrace, their
subjection. In A Vindication of the Rights of Woman (1792), Wollstonecraft details the detrimental effects of a female education predicated upon the "false" (47) notion that "man was made to reason, woman to feel" (58). The result of such a system, wherein women are prepared only to "gratify the appetite of man" (33), to be
"dependent" (35), and to "please" (43), is that women are encouraged not to think, but to become "slaves to their bodies, and glory in their subjection" (37): Women are everywhere, in this deplorable state; for, in order to
preserve their innocence, as ignorance is courteously termed, truth is
hidden from them, and they are made to assume an artificial character
before their faculties have acquired any strength. Taught from their
infancy that beauty is woman's scepter, the mind shapes itself to the
body, and roaming round its gilt cage, only seeks to adorn its prison.
(38)
Such a "superficial" (116) system of education is additionally detrimental in that it
renders women incapable of evaluating a suitor on any other basis than the sensation
he produces. For with their "senses [...] inflamed, and their understandings neglected,
consequently [women] become the prey of their senses, [...] and are blown about by
every momentary gust of feeling" (55). As a result, young women are incapable of
recognizing the worth of masculine qualities other than the "easy manners" and
"insinuating nothings of politeness" (116) characteristic of the educated gentleman of the period:
Rendered gay and giddy by the whole tenor of their lives, the very
aspect of wisdom, or the severe graces of virtue, must have a
lugubrious appearance to them; and produce a kind of restraint from
which they and love, sportive child, naturally revolt. Without taste,
excepting of the lighter kind, for taste is the offspring of judgement,
[...] how can they be expected to relish in a lover what they do not, or
very imperfectly, possess themselves? (117) 5
Were women encouraged to exercise reason and not be so easily swayed by passion,
they "might easily guard against exterior graces" (117) and accept a man not on the
basis of his charming manners and appearance, but for the "esteem" (69) he
demonstrates for her and the chance of a union founded not on oppression, but
"friendship" (117) and "tender intimacy" (117).
The fiction of the nineteenth century is rich with texts that narrate women's
experiences of courtship and marriage. While a number of these novels illustrate women's subjection uncritically, others (many of which are arguably indebted to the politics of Wollstonecraft) explore the potential of a heroine's privileging of reason
and chastity over passion as a way in which to challenge the marriage market, to change the nature of the sexual contract, and to attempt to subvert the hierarchal
structure of marriage. As the century progresses and social perceptions of, as well as fictional responses to, marriage evolve, so do the various heroines' strategies for navigating the rituals of courtship and marriage. Accordingly, this thesis examines examples of the early nineteenth-century seduction narrative, the mid-Victorian wedlock plot, and thefin de siecle New Woman novel to investigate the rationale of each heroine's attempt to preserve her chastity, the success/failure of this strategy, and how this success/failure is related to the heroine's conception of marriage.
Chapter One situates this study within the relevant legal, historical, and social context essential to an understanding of courtship and marriage in the nineteenth- century novel. Beginning with a discussion of the centrality of marriage to English society, the legal structure of the marriage contract, and the laws governing marital conflict and divorce, this chapter goes on to examine the correlation between a 6
woman's chastity and her value on the marriage market and to juxtapose the passive,
unconscious chastity espoused in many eighteenth- and nineteenth-century conduct
manuals with the conduct literature that instead advocated an active, conscious
chastity grounded in reason. Finally, this chapter explores the response to female
chastity in contemporary feminist literary criticism and illustrates how assumptions
about the association of a woman's autonomy with her sexual liberation have tended
to obscure the subversive potential of chastity.
Chapter Two examines Mary Brunton's Self-Control (1810) and Anne
Bronte's The Tenant ofWildfell Hall (1848) as texts which demonstrate the potential
for a heroine's defence of her chastity during courtship to subvert an exchange-based
marriage market and reorganize conventional male-female marital dynamics. As
revisions of the seduction plot, these novels appropriate certain characteristics of
seduction narratives - including the relentless pursuit of the seducer and the seducer's personal stake in the continued assaults - but reverse the conventional techniques of the genre by narrating the heroine's successful escape of her pursuer and eventual entry into a companionable marriage. This chapter argues that by claiming dominion
over their bodies and asserting their own desires, the heroines of these novels suggest
an alternative to the traditional structure of courtship and demonstrate the possibility of a mutually rewarding marriage.
Chapter Three explores George Eliot's Daniel Deronda (1876) and the efforts of Gwendolen Harleth, the novel's sexually reserved heroine, to navigate the marriage market and form a match that will accommodate both her desire for
autonomy and her aversion to sex. As an example of the wedlock plot, a narrative 7 genre that marks a transition from the courtship/seduction plot to New Woman fiction, this novel illustrates both the heroine's attempt to reverse the hierarchal structure of marriage and the utter failure of this attempt. This chapter demonstrates how Gwendolen's efforts to assert herself as the authority in her marriage and thereby change the very nature of marriage itself constitute a strategy that cannot be accommodated within the novel of the 1870's.
Chapter Four details the courtship and marriage experiences of the three central female characters of Sarah Grand's The Heavenly Twins (1893) and relates each character's education, exercise of reason, and response to male attention to the success of her marriage. Beginning with a discussion of Edith Beale, the novel's model of conventional femininity, and the consequences of an education intended to preserve female ignorance, this chapter focuses on Evadne Frayling, the text's remarkably intelligent and rational New Woman, and her attempt to protest society's acceptance of male vice by refusing to consummate her marriage to a dissolute man.
While this strategy makes Evadne the most socially conscious, chaste heroine of this study and proves effective for preserving her self-respect, her promise not to engage in public debate prevents her from effecting any larger social change. This chapter concludes with an examination of Angelica Hamilton-Wells, an alternative version of the New Woman, whose intelligence rivals that of Evadne and whose witnessing of her fellow characters' experiences with marriage convinces her that reason must take precedence over passion when choosing a husband. Her marriage suggests that with education and the exercise of reason, women can form rewarding marriages. Ultimately, this thesis argues that while the successful marriages of Self-
Control and The Tenant of Wildfell Hall demonstrate that female agency need not be
"antithetical to marital destiny" (Boone 14), the failed marriages of Daniel Deronda and The Heavenly Twins illustrate that the chaste heroine's attempts to radically alter the institution of marriage surpass what can be realized within the confines of either the wedlock plot or the New Woman novel. 9
Chapter One Contextualizing Chastity
Woman is "dependent for everything upon the chance of finding one who may be disposed to make a favourite of her instead of merely a drudge" - John Stuart Mill "The Subjection of Women" (1869)
In her 1858 essay "The Condition of Women," Margaret Oliphant presents a
spirited defence of the institution of marriage. She asserts that for women, "to be
married is the natural and best condition of existence" (220), and that it is their
especial vocation to enter into the essential task of "the establishment and support of
families" (219). Sarah Ellis, in her conduct book The Daughters of England (1842),
advocates a similar position, referring to the union between husband and wife as
"woman's all - her wealth, her power, her very being" (315). Oliphant and Ellis's defences of marriage illustrate one side of the nineteenth century's debate on the institution of marriage and the condition in which it placed women. While Oliphant,
Ellis, and their conservative contemporaries justified marriage, arguing that it was the basis of English society, a number of writers protested what they saw as the problematic structure of the institution. The objection of these opposing voices was not to the fundamental concept of a male-female union; in fact, one vocal social critic,
Frances Power Cobbe, concedes in her essay "What Shall We Do With Our Old
Maids?" (1862) that "[mjarriage is, indeed, the happiest and best condition for mankind" (87). The point of contention was instead that the very legal and social structure of marriage necessitated female subjection and fostered male mastery. These issues are at the centre of John Stuart Mill's seminal essay "The Subjection of
Women" (1869), in which he examines at length the position of woman in nineteenth- 10
century English society. He asserts that "the wife is the actual bondservant of her
husband: no less so, as far as legal obligation goes, than slaves commonly so called.
She vows a lifelong obedience to him at the altar, and is held to it all through her life
by law" (40). Writing in a similar vein in her notorious article "Marriage" (1888),
Mona Caird denounces the institution as a "vexatious failure" which "draws its life-
blood from the degradation of womanhood" (282). She asserts that the "chain of
marriage" carries with it severe consequences, which leads women to "become mere
echoes, half creatures, useless to the world, because they have run into a groove and
have let individuality die" (Caird 282).
Whether denouncing marriage as legalized slavery or protesting its self-
effacing effect on women, those writers who voiced their various objections to the
institution were in effect all focused on one contentious issue: the marriage contract.
The legal structure of marriage in the nineteenth century was such that a married
woman was "in a different position from any other woman" (Pollock qtd. in Shanley
185). As Wendy S. Jones observes in Consensual Fictions: Women, Liberalism, and
the English Novel (2005), a woman's signing of the marriage register authorized her
consent to the "total erasure of [her] identity" (37). No longer a feme sole,1 the
married woman was now legally considered a feme covert,2 and subject to all the
constraints implicit in her new official (non)identity. Mary Lyndon Shanley
demonstrates in Feminism, Marriage, and the Law in Victorian England, 1850-1895
(1989) that these constraints had their basis in the "common law doctrine of coverture, [which] dictated that when a woman married, her legal personality was
1 Legal term used to refer to an unmarried woman. 2 Legal term used to refer to a married woman. 11
subsumed in that of her husband" (8). Shanley observes that this subsuming of a
woman's identity significantly limited her autonomy and curtailed her legal rights:
"[f]rom the legal 'unity' of the husband and wife it followed that a
married woman could not sue or be sued unless her husband was also
party to the suit, could not sign contracts unless her husband joined
her, and could not make a valid will unless he consented to its
provisions [....] Further, a man assumed legal rights over his wife's
property at marriage, and any property that came to her during
marriage was legally his. While a husband could not alienate his wife's
real property entirely, any rents or other income from it belonged to
him. On the other hand, a woman's personal property, including the
money she might have saved before her marriage or earned while
married, passed entirely to her husband for him to use and dispose of
as he saw fit. (8-9)
Whereas an unmarried woman could bring a judicial proceeding, could make a binding contract, could make a legal will, and could retain her property and earnings, the change from feme sole to feme covert reassigned a woman's official status; no longer legally a person in her own right, the married woman was "in many ways regarded as the property of her husband" (Shanley 8).
The loss of a woman's individual identity at the time of her marriage was neither merely an abstract legal concept, nor something that affected only tangible property. The legal redefinition of a married woman as a feme covert extended further, and determined her husband's allowable treatment of her. Because of the 12
narrow legal conception of cruelty throughout most of the nineteenth century - the
courts deemed cruel only those acts which contained elements of "severe physical
violence" (Hammerton 55) - women were made to suffer all manner of maltreatment
without any legal recourse. In fact, as Hammerton notes, the "turning point in the law
of matrimonial cruelty" (55) did not occur until the case of Kelly v. Kelly in 1870, in
which a wife successfully won a judicial separation from her husband on the grounds
of cruelty without citing physical violence. Until this point, the law had "placed a
wife almost completely in the power of her husband, no matter how abusive he might
prove: he could beat her, lock her up, and live openly with his mistress" (Jones 37),
submitting his wife to any number of "cruelties, indignities, and insults [...] hideous
beyond description" (Caird 279). While there is no question that the grievances cited
by Jones and Caird would have made marriage intolerable, it is important to note that
a number of contemporary accounts detail more subtle and less visible
demonstrations of a husband's mastery, arguably just as damaging and yet impossible
to prosecute under matrimonial law. In "The Subjection of Women," Mill observes
that it is generally only the "extreme cases" (46) of marital violence that become known publicly, but that there exists a "terrible frequency of things only a little less
atrocious" (47). He notes that:
Absolute fiends are as rare as angels, perhaps rarer: ferocious savages,
with occasional touches of humanity, are however very frequent: and
in the wide interval which separates these from any worthy
representatives of the human species, how many are the forms and
gradations of civilization and even cultivation, living at peace with the 13
law, maintaining a creditable appearance to all who are not under their
power, yet sufficient often to make the lives of all who are so, a
torment and a burden to them! (47)
In "Outrages on Women" (1856), J.W. Kaye addresses the incidence of non-violent marital abuse, noting that husbands
may utter words more cutting than sharp knives; they may do things
more stunning in their effects on the victim than the blows of pokers or
hammers; they may half kill their wives by process of slow torture -
unkindness, infidelity, whatever shape it may assume - society will
forgive them. The law, too, has nothing to say to them. They are not
guilty of what is recognized as an assault, because they only assail the
affections - only lacerate the heart.3 (qtd. in Hammerton 74)
While some critics of marriage argued that "the fatal root of incalculable evil and misery" (Cobbe 138) lay in the loss of a woman's identity upon her marriage, and others cited the horrors that wives were made to suffer under the law, the most incensed denunciations of marriage came from writers like Mary Wollstonecraft and
John Stuart Mill, who asserted that the most repugnant aspect of the institution - and that which most stripped woman of her dignity - was the sexual contract. Predicated upon the law of coverture, the sexual contract - also referred to as the conjugal
It should be noted here that Kaye specifically refers to the actions of men "of education and refinement" (74). This situates Kaye's observations with those of a number of his contemporaries, who were satisfied with the "assumption that marital violence was a problem peculiar to the lower orders" (Hammerton 73), and that "upper-class men tortured their wives with adultery, irony, and indifference" (Shanley 163). Recent scholarship by critics such as Hammerton and Shanley has questioned the objectivity of these accounts of marital discord; here, Kaye's observations are included for the sense they provide of the range of cruelty endured by wives. imperative or the coital imperative - maintained that a married woman's body was
not legally her own, but the property of her husband. From this precept it followed
that it was "a married woman's duty never to reject her husband's sexual demands"
(Shanley 157) because "the consent given in marriage is held to cover the life"
(Besant qtd in Jackson 10). Shanley illustrates that not only was "sexual access [...]
taken to be part of the marriage contract" and "marital rape [...] not legally
cognizable" (156), but that the very notion of the need for a woman's consent was
irrelevant, and contrary to the structure of marriage. She cites the verdict of Justice
Pollock in the 1888 case of Regina v. Clarence, in which the court held that it was
unlawful to prosecute a man for exercising his conjugal rights, even though he had
openly acknowledged he was infected with a venereal disease:
The husband's connection with his wife is not only lawful, but is in
accordance with the ordinary condition of married life. It is done in
pursuance of the marital contract, and the wife, as to the connection
itself, is in a different position from any other woman, for she has no
right or power to refuse her consent. (Pollock qtd. in Shanley 185)
In A Vindication of the Rights of Woman (1792), Wollstonecraft argued that in
preventing women from regulating their own sexual activity, the law reduced wives to mere "slaves of carnal lust [...] who are, literally speaking, standing dishes to
which every glutton may have access" (138). Mill assented, noting in "The Subjection
of Women" that
however brutal a tyrant she may unfortunately be chained to - though
she may know that he hates her, though it may be his daily pleasure to 15
torture her, and though she may feel it impossible not to loathe him -
he can claim from her and enforce the lowest degradation of a human
being, that of being made the instrument of an animal function
contrary to her inclinations. (334)
In effect, the sexual contract was the culmination of all offensive aspects of marriage.
Embodying loss of self, cruel treatment, and subjection to "the lowest degradation of
a human being" (Mill 334), this aspect of the contract legally deprived women of any
vestige of personhood, making them the "personal body-servant[s]" (Mill 335) of
their husbands.
The right of husbands to exercise unqualified access to their wives' bodies
was adamantly reinforced by the Court's rigorous enforcement of spousal cohabitation. Wives were legally required to cohabit with their husbands unless they
could demonstrate severe physical violence; because marital sex was considered
"legally essential to a valid marriage" and was for some men "the prime purpose of marriage" (Stone 484), any complaints about a husband's sexual demands,
aggression, or excess could not be used as a justification to abandon the marital home.
In fact, a woman "who left her husband because he forced her to have sexual relations with him" (Shanley 156) was acting in contravention of the law, and could be legally ordered "to return to the marital bed and board" under a writ for restitution of conjugal rights. Failure to comply with the writ meant serving "an indeterminate jail sentence" (Shanley 156), which lasted until the wife acquiesced and agreed to return to her husband. Even after the punishment for non-compliance of the writ was overturned by Parliament in 1884, refusal to return to the marital residence was still 16
considered "wilful desertion" (Shanley 158), and could result in a woman's loss of all rights to her children.
In addition to upholding laws that sanctioned cruel treatment of wives, the
Courts made it nearly impossible for a woman to separate herself from her husband; in fact, as Joan Perkins remarks in Women and Marriage in Nineteenth-Century
England (1989), "[f]or most people in [...] England marriage was an indissoluble union, terminable only by death" (22).This assertion is especially true of the early decades of the century. Prior to the passage of the Divorce Act of 1857, "the only way to end a marriage other than by ecclesiastical annulment was by private Act of
Parliament" (Shanley 9). On one hand, divorce by ecclesiastical decree was generally granted only as a means to terminate marital cohabitation. As a consequence, remarriage of either spouse was only permitted if it could be demonstrated that the marriage was "invalid due to age, mental incompetence, sexual impotence, or fraud"
(Perkin 36); such a divorce was an "extraordinarily complex and expensive procedure" (Shanley 9), and was available "for all practical purposes only to wealthy men" (Shanley 37). In fact, Shanley notes that throughout the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries "only four women" (36) are known to have successfully obtained a parliamentary divorce. Even with the passage of the Divorce Act, the legal release from marriage continued to be difficult for women to secure. While a husband could divorce his wife solely on the grounds of her adultery, a woman had to demonstrate the existence of her husband's infidelity in addition to another severe aggravation such as incest, bigamy, or physical cruelty. Offences which the court would not accept as a justification for divorce included "rape, sodomy, desertion, transportation, 17
[and] penal servitude," because the House of Lords indicated that they did not consider these acts "fatal to the marriage bond" (Shanley 42). The marriage law reforms that were extensively debated and eventually passed as the century progressed are evidence of the growing recognition of women's need for protection within marriage, but they were conservative advances. For instance, the Matrimonial
Causes Act of 1878 enabled a wife "who had been beaten by her husband to apply for a separation order from a local magistrates' court" (Shanley 158), and the Summary
Jurisdiction (Married Women) Act of 1895 permitted a woman to apply for separation after she had left her husband on the grounds of cruelty or failure to provide for his family. While these reforms did provide some protection for women in abusive marriages, they upheld the legal standard of women's marital subordination by requiring that women be innocent of adultery in order to be eligible for the court's protection.
Even though writers like Caird, Mill, and Cobbe criticized the institution of marriage for the position in which it placed women, they nevertheless acknowledged that the majority of women would marry. In part, this was attributed to society's consideration of marriage as "the sole destiny of woman" (Cobbe 86). To fail to marry was to have the very structure of one's life fall short of the social ideal, and this shortcoming could be, as Mary Lyndon Shanley explains, "socially disastrous" (9).
Frances Power Cobbe illustrates the extent of society's disapproval of unmarried women in her essay "Celibacy v. Marriage" (1862), where she observes that the spinster was "shackled by social prejudices" (80) that kept her at the margins of society. Considered both "very improper" and not "entirely respectable" (92), single women led lives that were frequently "boring and monotonous," consisting "of a few
female friends" whose lives were as "closely limited" as their own, and who shared
their interest in pitiful "trifles" (80).
While the social ostracism a woman endured if unmarried was a sufficient
deterrent in itself, for most women marriage was additionally "an economic
necessity" (Shanley 10). To remain single was to go through life without the
monetary protection afforded by the marriage contract, and meant that women from
all but the wealthiest of families were faced with the often difficult question of how to
support themselves financially. While women of the working class could manage to
sustain themselves as servants, factory workers, shop assistants, or in other service
positions, economic opportunities for women of the middle and upper classes were
severely limited. Equipped with an education designed largely to prepare them to function successfully as hostesses and wives, gentlewomen were "without training
[or] work experience" (Shanley 190) that could assist them in finding employment, a
difficulty that was compounded by society's "inhibitions against work" (Stone 382) for women of the middle and upper classes. Constrained by both their education and their social position from entering the workforce, the "surplus English daughters of the upper classes" (Stone 382) had few ways in which they could sustain themselves.
For women who had no family to support them, or whose families were not financially able to assist, it was common to take a place as either a governess or a companion in a wealthier family. While these occupations had the benefit of providing a woman with a small degree of financial independence, they were notoriously thankless, tenuous, and poorly paid. Women who were fortunate enough 19
to have surviving family members capable of financial support often depended on a
"father, brother, or other relative" (Shanley 10); in families of small means, the
woman would generally inhabit the home of the relative on whom she was financially
dependent. Women of wealthier families might be allocated a "small pension"; often, this was only enough to allow them to live "in obscure and lonely lodgings" (Stone
382). Perhaps the most fortunate single women were those who came from fairly large, propertied, and financially stable families, and who thus had access to "a range of big houses with lots of accommodation, servants, and children" (Stone 382). These women "would be welcomed" in various familial households, acting as "part companion, part housekeeper, and part child-minder" (Stone 382). While these women enjoyed increased mobility, they were nevertheless "at the beck and call of others, and lacked financial independence" (Stone 382). Depending on how sympathetic the family, many single women essentially functioned as unpaid and unappreciated servants in the homes of their supposedly accommodating relatives.
Faced with such narrow alternatives as living as a governess or companion, or the equally dreaded prospect of lifelong "childlike and humiliating dependence" (Perkin
3) on family, for many women marriage was the most attractive - and the only realistic - option.
As Lawrence Stone points out in The Family, Sex and Marriage in England
1500-1800 (1977), a woman's desire to enter into marriage did not, however, guarantee that she would have the opportunity to do so. Although by the nineteenth century individuals had begun to enjoy more latitude in forming conjugal unions - the
"marriage of interest" was no longer customary, and marriages were less frequently 20
"arranged by parents, kin, and family friends" (Jones 24) - the strict rules governing the conventions of courtship continued to prevent women from taking an active role in the initiation of a suit. Stone observes that social custom "dictated that the initiative in the courtship process should be with the male and not the female" (398), and that though a man was "free to follow his personal inclinations wherever they might lead him," a woman was "restricted in her choice to those who made advances to her"
(398). She was permitted to "encourage or rebuff, but she could not formally initiate a courtship" (398). Aware that if she failed to attract a husband she would have to endure the disapproval of society, yet conscious also that she could not approach or signal her interest in an eligible man, a woman's position in the courtship process was frustratingly marked by contradiction and passivity.
In his study Cruelty and Companionship: Conflict in Nineteenth-Century
Married Life (1992), A. James Hammerton asserts that "the choice of a suitable husband" was "the most crucial decision" of a woman's life, where "one serious error
[...] would result in a lifetime [...] of patient suffering and unhappy martyrdom" (76).
Writers from both sides of the marriage debate agreed, counselling women to assess a prospective husband's character as thoroughly as possible before deciding to
"encourage or rebuff' (Stone 398) his interest. Sarah Ellis instructs her readers on the significance of their choice of a husband, noting that social custom hinders knowledge of another's character:
It is deeply to be regretted that so few opportunities are afforded to
women in the present state of society, of becoming acquainted with the
natural dispositions and general habits of those to whom they intrust their happiness, until the position of both is fixed, and fixed for life.
The short acquaintance which takes place under ordinary
circumstances, between two individuals about to be thus united, for
better or worse, until death do them part, is anything but a mutual
development of real character. (327)
Young women must be wary of the men who seek their company, as it is so difficult
to discern "a man's real character" (323) in a courtship of a typical length. Ellis adds
that the assessment of character is further complicated by men's "willing deception"
(323) in the matter of their true selves. She urges women to be aware of male
deception, of the propensity of suitors to exhibit "a plausible manner, a gentlemanly
address, or a handsome exterior, which serves for a while to bewilder the judgment,
so as to conceal from detection the emptiness within" (326). Although such a man
"may possibly please for an hour, or a day, [...] it is a fearful thought to have to dwell with such a one for life" (326). Rather than fall prey to outward charm, Ellis advises her readers to assess men according to how they speak of or behave towards female family members, asserting that this quality is the true measure of a man's worth as a husband:
If disrespectful to his mother, and inconsiderate or ungentle in his
manners to his sisters, or even if accustomed to speak of them in a
coarse, unfeeling, or indifferent manner, whatever may be his
intellectual recommendations, as a husband he ought not to be trusted.
On the other hand, it may be set down as an almost certain rule, that 22
the man who is respectful and affectionate to his mother and his
sisters, will be so to his wife. (324)
In "The Subjection of Women" (1869), Mill writes of the connection between the kind of husband a woman chooses and the quality of her marriage, arguing that a woman is "dependent for everything upon the chance of finding one who may be disposed to make a favourite of her instead of merely a drudge" (335). Although he does not identify the man whom a woman should choose, he does note that a woman must be aware of whom not to choose, because
[t]he less fit a man is for the possession of power - the less likely to be
allowed to exercise it over any person with that person's voluntary
consent - the more does he hug himself in the consciousness of the
power the law gives him, exact its legal rights to the utmost point
which custom (the custom of men like himself) will tolerate, and take
pleasure in using the power, merely to enliven the agreeable sense of
possessing it. (347)
Such men, Mill asserts, are not suited to marriage, are not "fit to be trusted with the exercise of absolute power" (Mill 337), because in their delight at their authority, they develop a "sort of sort of disrespect and contempt towards their own wife which they do not feel towards any other woman, or any other human being, [...] and which makes her seem to them an appropriate subject for any kind of indignity" (Mill 348).
In order to avoid lifelong drudgery, it was imperative for a woman to steer clear of any man who would revel in his mastery. With all the emphasis on the necessity of matching oneself with a suitable
husband and the injunctions against actively seeking such a match, it is hardly
surprising that women were inundated with advice on "how best to get themselves
chosen" (Yeazell 33). Eighteenth- and nineteenth-century conduct books4 and advice columns intended for a female audience grounded themselves firmly in the realities of courtship, and counselled their readership that, in order to be chosen in a male- controlled, over-stocked marriage market, women had to appeal to men's expectations, to be the kind of woman men sought as future wives. On this point, the authors of conduct literature were unanimous in their reinforcement of women's already passive role in courtship: the women who were sought by suitable men were those who did not appear available, who made no special effort to win male attention.
They asserted that the tactics employed by the coquette - a woman who sought to lure men with her flirtatious charms - and by the prude - a woman who affected to have no interest in men, but whose feigned modesty was intended to attract male interest - were not only "ridiculous and contemptible," they were also ineffective, because
'"the Art of Pleasing'" (Marriott qtd. in Yeazell 6) lay in the unconsciousness of one's charms, and not the active employment of them. As one anonymous young gentleman remarked to his sister in a letter that was included in a Lady's Magazine feature of 1793, although behaviour calculated to catch male interest might succeed for "an hour, or [for] a day," suitable bachelors "wish to find very different manners in those whom they would chuse for the companions of their lives" (qtd. in Yeazell
4 Notable examples of the genre include James Fordyce's Sermons for Young Women (1760), Thomas Gisborne's An Enquiry into the Duties of the Female Sex (1799), and Sarah Ellis's The Women of England (1839). 45). Another correspondent, writing twenty-five years later in the same publication, likewise advised the magazine's readership against attempting to lure a suitor, because such a woman '"will never be the kind of companion with whom a man of sense would wish to pass whole years'" (qtd in Yeazell 46). The conduct books concluded that a woman would not only fail to win a husband with such behaviour, but that she was also likely to ruin her chances of future matrimony, because being branded "cheap" and "not worth the marrying" (Yeazell 46) gave a woman a reputation that could follow her for the remainder of her marriageable days.
Conduct literature was similarly unanimous on the woman whom a man did want for a companion, collectively asserting that when a man "had marriage in mind he always looked for a modest woman" (Yeazell 33). The modest woman was fetching enough on the basis of her outward reticence with her "downcast eyes, her head turned aside, and above all by the blush that suffuses her cheek [...]" (Yeazell
5), but it was what this reticence signified that truly made the modest woman so appealing and which distinguished her so completely from her husband-hunting counterparts: her chastity. Lawrence Stone asserts in The Family, Sex and Marriage in England 1500-1800 that a woman's chastity was the most important determinant of her value in the marriage market for the twofold assurance it offered to a suitor: first, that in marrying "he [was] purchasing new and not second-hand goods" (Stone 637), and second, that "property inheritance" (Stone 637) would descend legitimately through the rightful male heir, and would not be endangered or compromised by any wifely infidelity. To insure the protection of both the personal and familial interests of 25
the male, the potential wife's chastity was absolutely necessary to any
courtship/marriage.
Mere bodily chastity was not sufficient testimony of a woman's
marriageability, however; conduct books throughout the eighteenth and nineteenth
centuries compounded their reinforcement of female passivity by espousing a kind of
mental chastity, a virginity of the mind that assured a man not only of a prospective
wife's physical inexperience, but also of her absolute ignorance of all matters sexual.
Aware neither of her allure, her effect on men, or her own desires, the ideal modest
woman of the conduct book was completely unconscious of her own erotic potential,
and of the possible intentions of her male acquaintances. As one anonymous contributor remarked in an edition of the Lady's Monthly Museum (1798), it is '"the glory of a delicate female to be unconscious' of all 'unbecoming knowledge'" (qtd in
Yeazell 56). This "modest unconsciousness" functioned as a kind of "early warning system," in which a woman's "modest reflexes" would react before "a conscious thought would have [...] time to form" (Yeazell 51). In his widely-circulated Letters to a Young Lady (1789), John Bennett illustrates this concept, writing of his model daughter Louisa: "She has really a native feeling, which vibrates to the most distant touch of what is proper and becoming, and would tremble, like the sensitive plant, where any thing, that could stain the delicacy of her mind, was conveyed in the most distant allusion" (qtd. in Yeazell 43). Perhaps the most illustrative example of the insistence on the necessity of a woman's "blankness of mind" (Yeazell 51) occurs in
William Cobbett's Advice to Young Men, and (Incidentally) to Young Women, in the 26
Middle and Higher Ranks of Life (1829). Of the woman most suited for marriage,
Cobbett observes:
Chastity, perfect modesty, in word, deed, and even thought, is so
essential, that, without it, no female is fit to be a wife. It is not enough
that a young female abstain from everything approaching towards
indecorum in her behaviour towards men; it is, with me, not enough
that she cast down her eyes, or turn aside her head with a smile, when
she hears an indelicate allusion: she ought [...] not to understand it,
and to receive from it no more impression than if she were a post. (96)
The passivity of the modesty recommended by Bennett and Cobbett was additionally qualified - and made impossible to adopt - in that it had to be instinctive. Dr.
Gregory emphasized this distinction in his widely-read Father's Legacy to His
Daughters (1774): "Now I do not wish you to affect delicacy: I wish you to possess it" (qtd. in Yeazell 53). The extent and veracity of a woman's unconsciousness was just as imperative as her physical chastity, as it was what assured a suitor that a woman's conduct concealed neither hidden motives nor attempts at manipulation, and that he could proceed with confidence, certain that he was safe from the embarrassment of succumbing to the feminine wiles that had unwittingly led so many men to matrimony.
Others writing in the conduct genre espoused an entirely different kind of chastity. These writers - often less well known than Bennett, Cobbett, and their contemporaries, and in many cases female - argued that the standard to which women were held in the majority of conduct literature was not only largely impracticable, but was also detrimental to a woman's ability to make a good marriage. They recognized that advocating a modesty which required a woman to be completely unaware not only of her own desires, but also those of the men with whom she was acquainted, placed her in an "almost impossible double bind" (Yeazell 130); if she was genuinely as modest as the conduct manuals suggested she be, then she was in danger of inadvertently succumbing to a man's advances, and if she betrayed any wariness, she revealed a "consciousness of sexual danger" (Yeazell 33) that equated her with such inappropriately knowledgeable women as the coquette and the prude. Whether she lost her virtue or merely exposed her awareness of the possibility of its loss, her presumed "improper consciousness" (Yeazell 53) could taint her reputation and seriously compromise her marriageability. Writing in the Lady's Magazine; or, Polite
Companion for the Fair Sex in 1759, a contributor who called herself "Elenora" discussed the difference between the modesty recommended to women in the majority of conduct literature, and a chastity aware of the realities of courtship and marriage. The distinction lay in consciousness - while modesty indicates "an instinctive response" (Yeazell 58) of the kind described by Bennett and Cobbett, chastity requires a "conscious exercise of the will 'founded on reason [...] and having its existence in the mind'" (58). The woman who possesses only modesty is vulnerable to the loss of her virtue, while the chaste woman's '"rational reserve'" (58) enables her to actively protect herself from danger. As an illustration of the distinction, Elenora juxtaposes modesty and chastity, anticipating Bennett's trope of the plant: 28
The true way to escape danger is to avoid the first attacks; modesty
shrinks from these with terror; but superior chastity rejects them with
disdain: the first withdraws from the rude touch like the sensitive
plant, which the next effort crushes: the latter armed with virtue and
with truth, deters the boldest from repeated trials [...] Let us thank
nature which has made us modest; but to improve that frail good to a
lasting virtue, let us use all our efforts to establish on it the everlasting
bulwark and defence of chastity, (qtd. in Yeazell 59)
The anonymous female author of The Polite Lady: A Course of Female Education. In a Series of Letters, from a Mother to a Daughter (1760), advances a similar argument, referring to conventional, conduct book modesty as '"sheepishness,"' while the term '"modesty"' (qtd. in Yeazell 60) is used to indicate the conscious chastity described by Elenora. Like Elenora, the author of The Polite Lady illustrates her distinction through juxtaposition, observing that a
[m]odest lady looks with a decent assurance: a sheepish lady looks
abashed, and blushes at she don't know what. A modest person will
never contradict the general taste of the company, unless it be
inconsistent with decency and good-manners: a sheepish person will
hardly contradict it, even when it is: the one acts from principle, the
other from mere instinct: the one is guided by the rules of right reason,
and therefore is consistent in her conduct; the other is guided by no
rules at all, and consequently has no uniformity of character, (qtd. in
Yeazell 60) 29
Perhaps the most vocal critic of the chastity recommended to women in conventional conduct literature is Mary Wollstonecraft, who asserts in A Vindication of the Rights of Woman (1792) that unless "virtue [...] be built on knowledge, it will only produce a kind of insipid decency" (133). She urges women to
acquire that soberness of mind, which the exercise of duties, and the
pursuit of knowledge, alone inspire, or ye will still remain in a
doubtful dependent situation [...] The downcast eye, the rosy blush,
the retiring grace, are all proper in their season; but modesty, being the
child of reason, cannot long exist with the sensibility that is not
tempered by reflection. (130)
Though Elenora, the author of The Polite Lady, and Wollstonecraft do not challenge the necessity of a woman's chastity - they recognize it as instrumental to a woman's ability to make a good marriage - they do redefine the use and character of chastity.
The chastity they espouse is one suited not to the purposes of men, but to the interests of women. In urging women to "an active and conscious virtue" (Yeazell 61) based not on mere instinct, but on awareness of the realities and dangers of courtship, the authors of these conduct manuals recommend to women a chastity that can help them to navigate the courtship period successfully, compromising neither their virtue nor their marriage prospects.
In her study Fictions of Modesty: Women and Courtship in the English Novel
(1991), Ruth Bernard Yeazell explores how constructions of chastity translated into fictional representations of the chaste/modest woman in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. Centering on the "crucial transition period" (44) of a young woman's life - 30
the particularly vulnerable period "between coming of age and marriage" (xi) -
fictions of chastity focus upon the heroine's attempts to preserve her chastity from
any number of men who seek to taint her "sexual virtue" (50): from suitors who profess love, but who have no intention of marrying; from men who aim to make a
mistress of her; and from men who will possess her sexually by any means necessary.
Preserving her chastity from such men is crucial, because any sexual association with them, or even any suspicion of such association, could ruin her chances of making a
good marriage. Yet this resistance also serves additional purposes. A heroine's
"temporary resistance to the body and its desires" (x) can be read as an "interval of postponement [that] allowfs] for female choosing" (x), that enables "observation and questioning"(x) so that she might determine who would make a worthy suitor. In this way, a woman's sexual reserve allows her to be not simply the passive recipient of male interest, but also an active participant involved in assessing and gauging that interest, allowing her to judge a prospective husband's character in the way that Ellis and Mill consider so crucial to a good marriage.
Just as nineteenth-century commentators were divided in opinion on the nature of women's chastity, role in courtship, and treatment in marriage, so literary critics of the nineteenth-century novel, particularly feminist critics, are divided in their readings of fictional representations of these issues. The most widely debated issue is perhaps that of marriage. Because of the conditions of the marriage contract - particularly those of the sexual contract - marriage has conventionally been figured as a "traditional, patriarchal" institution in which "women were subordinate" (Jones 7).
Yet some feminists, most notably Wendy S. Jones, have illustrated marriage in a new 31 light. Jones argues that while certain forms of marriage were undeniably oppressive for women, particularly those made for mercenary reasons, and arranged by parents or family members, marriages contracted consensually "could potentially reorganize relationships between men and women in revolutionary ways" (7). She asserts that the marriage contract functions in certain eighteenth and nineteenth-century novels not as a means of subordination, but as a way for women to demonstrate their
"autonomy" in the "crucial area [of] the choice of a husband" (37).
Similarly, there is no feminist consensus on fictional representations of female chastity. Some feminist literary critics, like Patricia Stubbs, have altogether denounced fictions of female sexual self-restraint as conservative texts that espouse conventional ideas about female sexuality and reinforce female subordination. In
Women and Fiction: Feminism and the Novel 1880-1920 (1979), for instance, Stubbs declares that "the typical Victorian heroine is so insipid" and "submissive" because
"[c]hastity was the foundation of her personality, and its superstructure was made up out of a judicious arrangement of emotionalism, passivity, and dependence" (26). In part, Stubbs is correct in her assessment of the standard Victorian heroine, for the literature of the nineteenth century abounds with chaste heroines, and the majority of them are the very epitome of conventional femininity. Lucilla Marjoribanks, for example, the eponymous heroine of Margaret Oliphant's Miss Marjoribanks (1866), is known for her unfashionably prim "white frock[s], high in the neck" (Oliphant 53), her insistence on having a "chaperone" (51) at all social functions, and a
"superhuman virtue" (53) that has led her to prioritize the care of her father over her own marriage prospects. As Lucilla's foremost ambition is to secure her standing as 32 the town's premiere hostess, however, she is ultimately as conventional a character as that described by Stubbs. Even heroines who are more complex and free-thinking than Lucilla frequently conform at least in part to Stubbs' conception of the reticent heroine. Molly Gibson, for instance, the heroine of Elizabeth Gaskell's Wives and
Daughters (1866), exhibits a rather bold willingness to potentially taint her own name in order to defend her flirtatious step-sister's reputation, yet this potentially subversive aspect of her character is elsewhere overshadowed by a modesty so all- encompassing that she could just as easily be the subject of a conduct book as that of a novel. So proper is Molly that, much like the ideal young women described by
Bennett and Cobbett, she does "not know her own feelings" (Gaskell 354) and is bewildered by her first experience of attraction to the handsome Roger Hamley.
While Stubbs is, then, admittedly justified in observing the typical chaste heroine's adherence to propriety and conservatism, her conception of all such heroines as
"insipid" (26) is overly narrow and does not allow for the possibility of a chastity that is neither passive nor emotional.
Although other feminist literary critics are less limited in their approach to chastity in fiction than Stubbs, most also fail to credit the subversive potential of the chaste heroine. While Yeazell, for example, equates "narratives of female resistance" with "female choice" (4), she also identifies the heroines of these fictions as "self- effacing" (xi), a designation which altogether discounts and contradicts the assertiveness of her study's heroines. This reading situates Yeazell in close relation to a number of other critics who have explored chastity in fiction, but who have not addressed the significance of conscious, active chastity. For instance, Kathleen Blake's conceptualization of "feminist erotic self-postponement" (224) in her study
Love and the Woman Question: The Art of Self-Postponement (1983), takes its name
from a term of William Michael Rossetti's, who described the life of his sister
Christina as one of "quiet, [...] reserve, [...] lack of incident, and the self-sacrifice of
[...] existence" (vii). His reference to the "self-limitation" of his sister as "self-
postponement" (vii) is appropriated by Blake to describe the heroines of fiction who
temporarily resist the gratification of their desires. Accordingly, she represents
chastity as mere abnegation, and classifies heroines as diverse as Rhoda Nunn, Sue
Bridehead, and Evadne Colquhoun into the narrow category of the woman who clings
desperately to her virginity in an attempt to postpone entry into the reality of the adult
world; further, she contends that by putting off sexual relations, these heroines are
able to evade the complicated expectations and demands of courtship/marriage.
Blake's reading of chastity is atypical in her recognition of the "tendency in our post-
Freudian era to equate liberation of self and creativity with sexual liberation" (105),
and in her assertion of sexually reserved behaviour as "radical" (136); however, she
does not thoroughly demonstrate her rationale for how or why chaste heroines are radical, and her statement that such heroines are essentially immature and unwilling to enter the adult world limits the credibility of her assertion that their actions are transgressive. Somewhat similar to Blake's reading is that of Nancy F. Cott, whose
discussion of "passionlessness" (163) in her article "Passionlessness: An
Interpretation of Victorian Sexual Ideology, 1790-1850" (1979) is predicated on the notion that many women actually lacked the capacity for sexual desire. She posits a number of possible reasons why women might have "internalize[d] the concept of 34
passionlessness" (173), including the ability to "limit sexual intercourse within
marriage and thus limit family size" (173), opportunities to "develop their human
faculties and their self-esteem" (173), and a "solidarity" (173) among women borne
of a shared incapacity for carnality. Significantly, she characterizes female
passionlessness not as a conscious choice made by women but as the result of an
increasing belief in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries in women's lack of desire,
with which women were passively complicit. As such, her conception denies women
an active, conscious role in the preservation of their chastity, attributing it instead to a
mere byproduct of the social climate. Susan Ostrov Weisser's survey A 'Craving
Vacancy': Women and Sexual Love in the British Novel, 1740-1880 (1997) takes a
slightly different tact, dividing sexually reserved behaviour into two categories; in the first, women's self-restraint is posited as a manipulative ploy affected by the
"ambitious, self-interested Lady" (22) - a variant of the coquette - to gain desirable and eligible suitors' attentions and thus secure herself a desirable place in the social structure. This reading denies the possibility of any subversive potential and reinscribes the notion of chastity as merely conservative behaviour. Weisser's second conception of chaste strategies in fiction, which she calls "Moral Femininity" (22), involves the heroine's renunciation of her sexual desires as a means to improve herself, her lover, and eventually, her society; even though this strategy does involve a challenge to the sexual double standard, it is characterized by its distinctly "moral overtones and implications" (22) and is chiefly a means for the heroine to demonstrate, by example, her envisioning of an improved, and in many cases conservative, moral culture. 35
What neither Yeazell, Blake, Cott, nor Weisser address is the possibility of the
heroine's use of her chastity to modify the conventional arrangements of courtship
and marriage, thereby changing the way in which she enters into marriage and the
structure of marriage itself. Mary Brunton's Self-Control, Anne Bronte's The Tenant
ofWildfell Hall, George Eliot's Daniel Deronda, and Sarah Grand's The Heavenly
Twins feature heroines whose sexual reserve is neither self-effacing nor conservative in nature, but instead a means to attain a degree of agency in courtship and marriage.
In constructing such heroines, these authors explore the possibility of Jones' premise that, at least in fiction, marriage "could potentially reorganize relationships between men and women in revolutionary ways" (7). 36
Chapter Two "My marriage is to please myself alone": Subverting Seduction in Self-Control and The Tenant of Wildfell Hall
"Keep both heart and hand in your own possession, till you see good reason to part with them." — Anne Bronte The Tenant of Wildfell Hall (1848)
In Desire and Domestic Fiction: A Political History of the Novel (1987),
Armstrong defines seduction as a "struggle for possession of the female body" (109).
This struggle is at the centre of Mary Brunton's Self-Control (1810) and Anne
Bronte's The Tenant of Wildfell Hall (1848), each of which details a heroine's efforts to maintain dominion over her body in a culture wherein women are figured as property and valued for their economic potential, and where the advances of a seducer are not only sanctioned by the heroine's family, but also encouraged. In Self-Control, the central struggle occurs between the chaste heroine Laura and Hargrave, the lascivious man who pursues her throughout the novel. Initially Laura is charmed by
Hargrave's attentions, but upon discovering that he is interested only in her physical attractions, she rejects him, defying both her father and her guardian, who stand to profit from the union. In The Tenant of Wildfell Hall, the main conflict is also between a chaste heroine and her admirer, and, like Laura, Helen is flattered by the overtures of the handsome, propertied Huntingdon. Whereas Laura recognizes the nature of Hargrave's interest, however, Helen mistakes Huntingdon's lust for love, and marries him. While the novels thus differ in their use of the seduction narrative - in Brunton's text, the narrative focuses on Laura's efforts to defend herself from
Hargrave, while in Bronte's novel Huntingdon's efforts are subtler, and Helen's defence of herself occurs only after she is married - each novel illustrates the dangers 37 of responding unguardedly to male attention, the potential for a woman's preservation of her chastity during courtship to subvert an exchange-based marriage economy, and the importance of applying Wollstonecraftian reason to the choice of a husband. In doing so these novels not only subvert the conventions of the seduction plot, but also challenge the conventional structure of courtship and marriage.
The male pursuit and possession of the female body described by Rubin in
"The Traffic in Women: Notes on the 'Political Economy' of Sex" are at the centre of the seduction plot. This subgenre of the marriage plot, which Joseph Allen Boone identifies in Tradition Counter Tradition: Love and the Form of Fiction (1987) as "a tale of courtship gone awry" (100), emerged in the eighteenth century as a response to a marriage market controlled by rakish young men whose "libertine pursuits" (61) were becoming increasingly more commonplace, and populated by a surplus of young women whose sexual ignorance and physical chastity were essential to their marriageability. The resulting disparity - between sexually experienced, lascivious men and an overabundance of passive, chaste women - led to fictional accounts wherein "the teasingly coy game of courtship often disastrously blurred into the sex warfare of seducer and virgin" (61).
The standard seduction narrative details the frustrated overtures of a male
"would-be lover" (100) fixated on the sexual possession of the chaste object of his desire, and the heroine's equally determined, but futile, resistance to this possession.
In the classic seduction plot, including texts from Samuel Richardson's Clarissa; or,
The History of a Young Lady (1747-48) to Thomas Hardy's Tess of the D'Urbervilles 38
(1891), the action is characterized by a pattern of "pursuit/division" (100), and
develops
as a series of scenes of ever-narrowing entrapment rivet attention on
the impending sexual violation - and psychic fragmentation - of the
female protagonist. Accordingly, narrative movement becomes the
province of the male figure, who expends his libidinal energies in
devising multiple stratagems, and therefore creating more and more
'plot,' till his desire - the deflowering and breaking of his victim's will
- is attained. The female protagonist, in contrast, typically attempts to
halt action, to remove herself from the hazards of narrative time and
narrative desire, in order to escape the seducer's plots. But the only
'out' from such a dynamic is the death that is the end of narrative
itself, and hence, [...] the inverted text of seduction most often
enforces closure through tragedies of death or exile. (100)
Boone contends that at the root of the seducer's reduction of women to "objects of sexual conquest" (100) is his need to assert his authority over the opposite sex, to
"erase those signs of female autonomy [...] that threaten his own identity as the superior and more powerful sex" (100). The seduction plot can thus be read as the logical outcome of a marriage economy that privileges male entitlement to the female body through the exchange of women. Although the seduction narrative may not culminate in marriage, it nevertheless illustrates the asymmetric relationship through which, Rubin argues, "women become the prey of men" (158). Mary Brunton's novel Self-Control details the complex relationship between the calculating, urbane Hargrave and the chaste, pious Laura as he attempts to assert control over, and gain sexual possession of, the one woman who is determined to resist his advances. In a convoluted narrative that spans more than four years and encompasses locales as varied as the drawing rooms of high-society London, the military garrisons of rural Scotland, and the forests of isolated Quebec, Hargrave relentlessly pursues Laura with one object in mind: to "assert his rights over her"
(245) and thereby ensure that "her affections would be his alone" (7).
Hargrave's desire for Laura is first revealed in a pivotal seduction scene that establishes his intent and precipitates her resistance. In this introductory scene,
Hargrave - a man in possession of "an ample fortune, besides the near prospect of a title" (Brunton 5) - encounters the chaste Laura in a secluded wood near her country home. At the time of this meeting, the older, wealthier, and more experienced
Hargrave has been "for more than a year [...] labouring] with assiduity and success" to inspire in Laura a "passion" (5) equal to his own. "Charmed" and "fascinated" (5) by her, Hargrave "delight[s]" (5) in his encounters with Laura, and although he determines that a man of his "rank" (5) and stature requires a wife more accustomed to society than the provincial Laura, he resolves to indulge his "gratification" (5) and take her for a mistress. Observing that he has chanced upon Laura while she is unattended, Hargrave determines to discover whether she "would sacrifice her all" (5) to him, "wholly and for ever" (6). At "just seventeen" (4), the "artless" (5) Laura is no match for Hargrave's calculated attentions. "Completely captivated" (5) by the
"fine form" and "insinuating manners" of the "elegant, the accomplished, Colonel 40
Hargrave" (4), she has "willingly and entirely resigned herself' (71) to his
"fascinations" (71). Believing his overtures to be those of a devoted suitor who shares her anticipation of "scenes of domestic peace" (5), she allows Hargrave to "wr[i]ng from her a reluctant confession of her preference" (5). Assured of Laura's affection, and emboldened by their isolation, Hargrave reveals his "licentious purpose" (6):
[p]ressing her to his breast with all the vehemence of passion, he, in
hurried half-articulate whispers, informed her of his real design. No
words can express her feelings, when, the veil thus rudely torn from
her eyes, she saw her pure, her magnanimous Hargrave - the god of
her idolatry, degraded to a sensualist - a seducer. Casting on him a
look of mingled horror, dismay, and anguish, she exclaimed, 'Are you
so base?' and freeing herself, with convulsive struggle, from his grasp,
sunk without sense or motion to the ground. (6)
This attempt at seduction reverses the initial dynamic between Hargrave and Laura; no longer the welcome suitor, Hargrave must resort to scheming and manipulation to gain access to the woman he is determined to possess, while Laura, who had once eagerly anticipated Hargrave's visits, expresses her unwillingness to associate with a man of his character.
This reversal of their initial relationship convinces Hargrave that if he is to successfully possess Laura, he will have to contain his desire within the legitimating guise of wedlock. For Hargrave, the decision to pursue Laura as a wife rather than as a mistress indicates no change from his initial motivation, but is instead a mere change in strategy - if she will not have him as a lover, surely she will take him as a 41 husband. Aware that Laura would no more consent to marry a man who has just
insulted her than she would agree to be taken for a mistress, Hargrave appeals to the
authority of her father to circumvent the issue of Laura's sanction to his addresses.
One of "the best bred men in the kingdom" (134), Hargrave seeks not only to preclude Laura from determining whether or not he will have access to her, but also to exploit his access to property, wealth, and title, advantages which he knows will easily persuade the "far from affluent" (1) Montreville to urge his suit. To emphasize the financial benefits of Montreville's cooperation, Hargrave offers "to leave the grand affair of settlements to Montreville's own decision; demanding only in return, that the father would use his interest, or even his authority, if necessary, to obtain his daughter's consent to an immediate union" (134). That Hargrave's appeal is explicitly financial is significant, for, as Mary McKerrow observes in Mary Brunton, The
Forgotten Scottish Novelist (2001), a union between Laura and Hargrave would be
"the solution to her father's serious money problems" (85). Montreville's agreement to direct "his influence [...] at the Colonel's service" (134) thus forms a mutually beneficial financial alliance between the two men; the wealthy Hargrave gains access to Laura, and in return the near-destitute Montreville is assured of both his and his daughter's future financial stability.
Montreville's financial motivation is evident in his rationale for why Laura should consent to Hargrave's proposals. Although aware that his daughter has reservations about Hargrave's character and is uncertain how suitable a husband a
"man of gallantry" (125) would make, Montreville attempts to change her mind by extolling the advantages of marriage to a man of Hargrave's wealth. He reminds 42
Laura that it is "generous in Colonel Hargrave, who might pretend to the first woman in the kingdom, to think of offering to share his fortune and rank with her, who ha[s] neither" (14) and that she must have "strange reasons [...] to reject wealth and title, offered by a man not absolutely disagreeable" (124). When the benefits of wealth and rank fail to impress, Montreville, fearful that his daughter's resistance will discourage
Hargrave altogether, reminds her that she is in no position to reject a match that carries with it such advantages:
[w]hen I had a shelter, however humble - an independence, however
small, to offer you, your bare inclination determined mine. But now
your situation has changed; and no trivial reasons would excuse me for
permitting your rejection of an alliance so unexceptionable, so
splendid. (125)
In asserting that Laura's reasons for resisting Hargrave are "trivial" (125) and
"strange" (124), Montreville demonstrates his privileging of financial gain over his daughter's autonomy in the choice of a husband. In addition, these objections to
Laura's resistance highlight his complicity in a culture that excuses male vice. For although he is unaware that Hargrave has initially intended to take his daughter as a mistress, Montreville is fully conscious of Hargrave's reputation for "youthful indiscretions" (134), and realizes that he "may not have escaped the follies usual to men of his rank" (139). In accordance with the "world's opinion" (139), Montreville considers such conduct with "indulgent eyes" (139) and suggests that Laura's objections are the result of her "simplicity and ignorance" (126) of men and male behaviour. 43
Hargrave also allies himself with Lady Pelham in his effort to gain possession of Laura and, like Montreville, Lady Pelham complies for the benefits she will derive from her cooperation. At the centre of Lady Pelham's agreement to help Hargrave
"secure his success" (226) is her sense that the authority of family entitles her to determine whom Laura should marry. As both Laura's future benefactress - she resolves to make Laura "the heiress of forty thousand pounds" (232) upon her death - and her current guardian - following the death of Montreville, she asserts herself as the one who stands "in the place of Laura's parents" (232) - Lady Pelham reasons that she is doubly authorized to "claim authority" (232) over Laura, that she has the
"right to influence the choice of one whom she would make [an] heiress" (227). Just as Montreville is willing to cooperate with Hargrave in coercing his daughter in an effort to fulfill his own vision of her future, Lady Pelham perceives that Laura's
"prospects" are very much "her own" (227). Mere minutes after agreeing to assist
Hargrave in achieving his possession of Laura, Lady Pelham has mentally
composed the paragraph which was to announce the marriage of Lord
Lincourt [...] to the lovely heiress of the amiable Lady Pelham; taken
possession of her niece's barouche and four, and heard herself
announced as the benefactress of this new wonder of the world of
fashion. (226-227)
In short, Lady Pelham recognizes that she stands to increase her social profile considerably through an alliance with Hargrave.
Whereas Montreville's motivation for urging a match with Hargrave is at least partially altruistic - as Laura's father, he feels compelled to ensure that his daughter 44
will have a protector after his death - Lady Pelham's participation in Hargrave's
schemes is entirely self-serving and therefore more insistent, to the point where she
informs Laura that she "would never cease to urge so advantageous a match" (227).
With Lady Pelham's assistance, Hargrave, who is now driven to possess Laura not
only to gratify a passion that has become a "frenzy" (124), but also as a means to
reduce mounting gambling debts through her inheritance, resorts to considerably
more intense means to obtain his "prey" (309). Indeed, although Laura's reluctance to
associate with him is obvious, Hargrave goes to great lengths to defy this reluctance:
He pursued her wherever she went; placed himself, in defiance of
propriety, so as to monopolize her conversation [...] He claimed the
station by her side until Laura had the mortification to observe that
others resigned it at his approach; he snatched every opportunity of
whispering his adulations in her ear; and, far from affecting any
concealment in his preference, seemed to claim the character of her
acknowledged adorer. (235)
While much of the narrative is driven by Hargrave's relentless pursuit of
Laura and by Montreville and Lady Pelham's complicity in this pursuit, Self-Control
also relates Laura's resistance to both the demands of Hargrave and the claims of
Montreville and Lady Pelham. Significantly, this threefold refusal to acquiesce to
Hargrave is the result not of mere recalcitrance, but of Laura's aversion to being made the wife of a man whose attentions are motivated by the possession of her body alone. In fact, Laura's despair that it is her body that is the impetus for Hargrave's overtures forms the basis of her reaction to his initial attempt at seduction. Reflecting on his lascivious conduct, Laura "sicken [s] at the thought, that she had been the object of licentious passion merely; and she loathed to look upon her own lovely form, while she thought that it had seduced the senses, but failed to touch the soul of
Hargrave" (25). For Laura, the "passion" that is "a tribute to her personal charms alone" cannot "satisf[y]," and to "be the object of it degrade[s] her in her own eyes"
(71). In her article "Mary Brunton (1778-1818): An Assessment" (1979), Margaret H.
Bruce observes that the construction of Laura as a "virtuous heroine in distress" (5) differs markedly from the "vapid and feckless heroine who appeared in popular romances which filled the shelves of the circulating libraries" (6). Indeed, Laura's insistence on preserving herself from Hargrave and his "selfish passion" (276) is significantly different from conventional chastity because it originates not in propriety, but in her refusal to become sexual property. Writing of the chaste heroine in "Leaving her Father's House: Astell, Locke, and Clarissa's Body Politic" (2005),
Leslie Richardson argues that in the context of the marriage economy the sexual act
"functions as a symbolic occupation, similar to digging a clod of earth or cutting down a tree in staking a claim to real property" (152). The heroine who resists such sexual possession thereby asserts the "right to control her own sexual body"
(Richardson 153). In objecting to Hargrave's attempted possession of her, Laura effectively claims ownership of her own body, and disrupts the system whereby women are figured as property.
Laura's determination to maintain dominion over her body determines the measures she takes to curtail Hargrave's access to her. The spirit with which Laura defends her chastity is evident from her first acquaintance with Hargrave's intentions when, harnessing all her energy to remove herself from harm, Laura, with "blood gushing from her mouth and nostrils" (8),
dart[s] through [the woods] with what speed she could command; and,
reckless of all danger but that from which she fled, she leapt from the
projecting rocks, or gradually descended from the more fearful
declivities, by clinging to the trees which burst from the fissures; till,
exhausted with fatigue, she reached the valley, and entered the garden
that surrounded her home. (8)
The increasing "violence" (27) of Hargrave's desire from the time of this initial, thwarted attempt to possess Laura necessitates increasing vigilance on her part. The result of Hargrave's mounting "frenzy" (124), Lady Pelham's self-interested facilitation, and Laura's determined resistance is that the contest between seducer and virgin for control of the female body becomes ever more aggressive, taking on a militaristic character evident in both the language used to describe the conflict and the conflict itself. In this contest, Hargrave seeks to become Laura's "master" (308), the claiming of her chastity his "prize" (308) for so long enduring her resistance. In response, Laura becomes "a soldier, who strives in an enemy's land" (10), her chamber within Lady Pelham's residence the "citadel" (241) from which she
[w]atche[s] his approach; and whenever he appear[s], intrenche[s]
herself in her own apartment. She confine[s] herself almost entirely to
the house, and excuse[s] herself from every visit where she th[inks] he
might be of the party. He besiege[s] her with letters; she sen[ds] them 47
back unopened. Lady Pelham command[s] her to be present during his
visits; she respectfully, but peremptorily, refuse[s] to comply. (235)
Although Laura's resistance is accomplished primarily through confinement, this is,
significantly, an active confinement in that it seeks to preempt Hargrave's advances
and forestall his access to her altogether. The vigour with which Laura defends her
chastity is similarly important, for it continues her disruption of the marriage
economy and underscores her refusal "to consider her chastity anyone's property but
her own" (Richardson 163).
Laura's position within the nexus formed by Hargrave, Montreville, and Lady
Pelham is complex: although she refuses to allow herself to be bartered as a means to
ensure her family's financial stability or to become the sexual property of the man she
once thought a legitimate suitor, her relationship to Hargrave is complicated by the
fact that throughout much of the novel she remains "fondly attached" (135) to him.
Yet while Laura initially responds to Hargrave's first attentions unguardedly, she has
learned from this experience the necessity of tempering passion with reason. Thus, in
an attempt to reconcile her continued affection with the knowledge of the nature of his regard for her, Laura counters Hargrave's frequent marriage proposals with a proposal of her own: if Hargrave can demonstrate his suitability as a "good husband"
(71) whose passion for her encompasses more than just the pleasures he will derive from her body, she will allow him to renew his suit. Significantly, Laura not only
suggests this probation period, but also determines its conditions. She informs
Hargrave that, in order for her to consider his offer of marriage, for "two years" (29) his "conduct [must] bear the inspection of the wise, of the sober-minded, of the 48 pious" (29). Then, and only then, "will [she] welcome [him]" (29). She resolves not to have any contact with Hargrave until "the stipulated two years are finished" (72), reasoning that "[i]f he really loves [her], his affections will survive absence" (72), and if not, the knowledge of his inconstancy is preferable to later finding herself a
"neglected wife" (72). While Laura's arrangement is in part motivated by her piety - she is eager to allow Hargrave this chance as a means to convert him "to the views, the pursuits, the habits of a Christian" (29) - his conversion is for her integral to his suitability as a husband, and thereby part of the standard by which she will evaluate his conduct. In asserting the terms by which she will consider Hargrave's suit Laura effectively assumes a position of authority in their relationship, a position that subverts both the conventions of the seduction plot and of the marriage economy that informs it.
Laura's marriage to Montague is the novel's final and perhaps most subversive challenge to the conventions of both the seduction plot and the marriage economy. The courteous Montague DeCourcy is a model gentleman whose desire for
Laura is so carefully guarded, and so unlike the invasive lust of Hargrave, that he has been disparaged in criticism of the novel as "lacking in verisimilitude" (Bruce 7).
Although it is true that in some respects he is meant as an obvious foil to Hargrave -
Brunton herself confessed that her characterization was largely limited to "illustration or contrast" (qtd. in Bruce 5) - his construction does more than just underscore
Hargrave's unsuitability: it posits a model of masculinity otherwise absent from the novel. Unlike Montreville, Hargrave, or marginal male characters like Warren, all of whose connections to Laura are in some way mercenary, Montague does not seek to profit from the women in his life. In fact, even though the "provision" (96) he has laboured to accumulate for his sister Harriet interferes with his own marriage prospects, he is careful that she have no cause to "feel herself a mere pensioner on his bounty, or to seek dear-bought independence in a marriage of convenience, a sort of bargain upon which he looked with [...] aversion" (96). Montague's unwillingness to allow his sister to exchange herself for financial stability positions him outside a marriage economy wherein women are valued only as currency, making him not just the antithesis of Hargrave, but also an illustration of an alternative possibility for male-female relations.
The alternative represented by Montague is realized in the proposal, a scene significant for its destabilization of assumptions about male authority and property in women. In this scene Montague, who has just learned of Laura's preference for him when she makes an inadvertent "confession" (304) of her feelings by reacting with
"tender solicitude" (302) to the possibility of his endangerment, offers marriage by asking "long-loved, ever dear Laura, will you pardon me these hopes? Will you not speak to me? (304, emphasis mine). The manner in which Montague proposes marriage is noteworthy, for in presenting his offer interrogatively and to Laura herself, without prior consultation of Lady Pelham, Montague places the issue of consent solely at Laura's discretion. And while this is itself significant, Laura's response, and Montague's interpretation of this response, is even more so. Although
Laura fails to speak a word in reply to Montague's offer, her body language - specifically, her "crimson" (304) countenance and the "expressions of her half- averted face" (304) - speak volumes more to her desire than any verbal response appropriate to nineteenth-century narrative could have done. That Montague "read[s]" this reaction and is "satisfied" (304) indicates that the engagement is as much a reflection of and response to Laura's own desire as it is an assertion of the desire of her suitor. In asserting her desire for Montague and agreeing to marry him without taking into account the claims of family, Laura challenges not only the conventions of the seduction plot, which maintain that desire is the province of the male, but also subverts a marriage economy wherein women are figured as property rather than individuals capable of choice.
Whereas the seduction element of Self-Control is largely focused on
Hargrave's pursuit of Laura, Anne Bronte's The Tenant of Wildfell Hall is suffused with descriptions of a Regency-era male culture dominated by pursuit and predation.
This culture of pursuit takes a number of forms throughout the novel, including
"stalking" (263) and shooting of such wild game as pheasant, grouse, fox, partridge, and deer, purging of hawk and crow as punishment for these birds' attacks on "better prey" (22), and competing to see which man can best "make war with the pheasants"
(185). The array of predatory behaviour in the novel is reflected in the range of men who participate in such activities, from the modestly-propertied gentleman farmer
Gilbert Markham, who is depicted early in the novel as "in pursuit of such game as
[he] could find within the territory of Linden-Car" (22), to more impressively-landed members of the gentry like Arthur Huntingdon and Mr. Maxwell, who regularly avail themselves of their considerable resources to host shooting parties that span weeks, if not months. At their most basic level, these descriptions of "gentlemen [...] ranging the woods" (232) and of the "depredations" (226) that occupy their days provide 51 depth to Bronte's picture of country life, whether it be on a remote farm or on a country estate; at the same time, however, such depictions of male culture also reinforce and illuminate the structure of courtship and marriage in the novel.
That Bronte's men set out to secure wives in the same determined, self- serving manner in which they pursue game is evident in a number of the novel's courtships and marriages. Mr. Boarham, a dull middle-aged bachelor favoured by
Helen's aunt for his "inestimable virtues" (138), conducts his pursuit of Helen with such "remorseless pertinacity" (135) that nothing, not even Helen's "positive rudeness" (134) or her eventual refusal of his offer of marriage, is sufficient to
"convince him that his presence [is] disagreeable" (134) to her. Likewise Mr. Wilmot, a man with a "house full of gold" (137) whose obtrusive attentions Helen has repeatedly "repulsed" (145) from the time of their introduction, nevertheless feels himself entitled to "return to the siege" (145), buoyed by his "wealth," his "powers of attraction," and his "conviction of feminine weakness" (145). The predatory nature of male culture evident in the efforts of Boarham and Wilmot to secure Helen's hand in marriage is even more apparent in the manner in which Lord Lowborough and Ralph
Hattersley approach marriage. Lowborough, despite being in the process of recovering from a failed romantic relationship, resolves to "search all England through" (195) for an heiress as a means to solve his mounting financial problems and to distract himself from his addictions to gambling and alcohol. That his determination to secure a wife - even if he need "compass sea and land" (195) to find her - is entirely self-seeking is evident in his explanation of his rationale to
Huntingdon: If I could get a wife, with fortune enough to pay off my debts and set
me straight in the world [...] [a]nd sweetness and goodness enough
[...] to make home tolerable, and to reconcile me to myself, — I think I
should do, yet. I shall never be in love again that's certain; but perhaps
that would be no great matter, it would enable me to choose with my
eyes open. (195)
More predatory still is the marital motivation of Hattersley, who forms "a resolute determination to see himself a married man before the year is out" (221) as a means of exacting "revenge" (184) against his cohort Huntingdon and his own impending nuptials. Like Lowborough, Hattersley's pursuit of the woman who will enable him to accomplish his goal is oriented toward his own needs only; as he informs
Huntingdon, '"I must have somebody that will let me have my own way in everything
[...] I must have some good, quiet soul that will let me just do what I like and go where I like, keep at home or stay away, without a word of reproach or complaint; for
I can't do with being bothered"' (221). In her discussion of the male-female dynamics at play in the novel, Rebecca L. Jackson asserts in "Women as Wares: The Rhetoric of Economy in Anne Bronte's The Tenant ofWildfell Hair (1996) that "the text foregrounds woman's status or 'use-value' in the larger cultural marketplace as commodities or objects of exchange. The novel's male characters [...] appropriate the language of economy easily, often using it to describe and exploit objects of desire, usually women" (58). That men in the novel consider women as potentially useful property to which they need only stake their claim is apparent from the manner in which characters such as Wilmot, Boarham, Lowborough, and Hattersley approach courtship and marriage.
In addition to the novel's detailing of numerous instances of male pursuit of and entitlement to women, it also chronicles female complicity in the treatment of marriageable daughters as commodities rather than as individuals capable of participating in the choice of a husband. Like Lady Pelham, Mrs. Hargrave is more concerned that her fortuneless daughters form financially advantageous matches than that they marry men whom they love and esteem, and although she is not as manipulative and self-serving as Laura's guardian, Mrs. Hargrave's management of her daughters demonstrates that her motivation is primarily financial. Although her daughter Millicent "dread[s] the thought of marrying" (221) Hattersley and is frightened by "his abrupt manners and strange hectoring ways" (221), she becomes a
"sacrifice to the manoeuvrings of [her] mistaken mother" (231), who convinces
Millicent that marriage to Hattersley - a man whose primary recommendation is that he is "the son of a rich banker" (222) - is "for the best" (222) and "will be a good thing for the family as well as for [her]" (222). The same mercenary spirit with which
Mrs. Hargrave approaches Millicent's marriage is evident in her attempt to manage the marital prospects of her younger daughter, Esther. Mrs. Hargrave uses the occasion of Esther's first season in London to advance her "darling project" (373) of marrying off her daughter, in this case to a gentleman who boasts a "good family and large possessions" (373) and is willing to "lay his heart and fortune at [the] feet"
(373) of the young Esther. When Esther objects to her mother's choice on the grounds that he is "old as Adam [and] ugly as sin" (373), she discovers that the claims of family supersede her own wishes, as, in response to her refusal, her brother grows
"seriously displeased at [her] perversity and absurd caprice" (373) and her mother
"does all she can [...] to make [her] feel [her]self a burden and encumbrance to the family" (434).
In a novel that sets forth a marriage economy characterized by men intent on the pursuit and capture of women and family eager to aid them, it follows that privileged men like Arthur Huntingdon exploit their wealth and family connections to gain access to the women they desire. Although Huntingdon and Mr. Maxwell have little in common - the latter remarks to his niece that he "wonder[s] what the deuce the lad means by coming so often [...] [h]e wants none of my company, nor I his - that's certain" (136) - Huntingdon is the son of a late friend of Helen's uncle, and this bond, in conjunction with the fact that he boasts "a pretty tidy fortune" (136), justifies his paying frequent visits to the family while in London and joining the shooting party at the Staningley estate. Thus, although Huntingdon is a "full ten years older"
(149) than Helen, is known to have had "an intrigue with a married lady" (149), and is no favourite of Mrs. Maxwell, who clearly disapproves of his association with her young niece, Huntingdon's relationship to Mr. Maxwell provides him with ample opportunities to interact with the much-courted Helen.
Much in the same way that Huntingdon exploits his wealth and connections to facilitate his access to Helen, so too does he enlist his considerable powers of manipulative control in his seduction of her. In many ways, their initial relationship parallels that of Hargrave and Laura in Self-Control: like Hargrave, the "lively" (135),
"charming" (148), and "handsome" (150) Huntingdon is older, wealthier, and more experienced than the chaste Helen, who like Laura is "not an heiress" (175) and is
"only just eighteen" (131) at the time of her introduction to Huntingdon. However, whereas Hargrave's quest to possess Laura is driven by a lust that develops into an obsession, Huntingdon's pursuit of Helen, although just as focused on possession, is subtler and more psychologically sophisticated. Rather than bombarding her with love letters, springing upon her unawares, or resorting to schemes such as those
Hargrave employs, Huntingdon embarks on his pursuit of Helen with gallantry and officiousness, providing a cavalier charm that he knows is lacking in the tedious attentions of his rival suitors. The effect of such tactics, including offering himself as a dance partner as a substitute for Boarham and rescuing Helen from the insistent advances of Wilmot, is twofold: on one hand, Huntingdon's behaviour allows him to present himself as an attractive alternative to the suitors who have thus far sought her acceptance. At the same time, it enables him to awaken in Helen a desire that will further his pursuit of her.
While Huntingdon's seduction of Helen has its beginnings in gentlemanly conduct, it is no less determined than that of Hargrave, nor is it less predatory. In fact, much of Huntingdon's pursuit of Helen occurs while visiting Staningley as part of her uncle's shooting party, so that descriptions of Huntingdon eagerly setting out for or returning from a day of sport, "all spattered and splashed [...] with the blood of his prey" (161), often follow from or are interspersed with scenes in which he works to secure Helen. Stevie Davies notes in her introduction to the Penguin edition (1996) of the novel that the effect of such juxtaposition is a sense that "the female of our own species is also the subject of male 'sport'" (xix) and that at times, there is an uncertainty as to whether "the cocksure 'sportsman' is doing much more than seeking to make a 'kill'" (507). Indeed, the nature of Huntingdon's pursuit of Helen is evident in the way he handles his discovery of Helen's "infatuation" (156) for him. After seeing that Helen has laboured to render his "fascinating physiognomy" (156) on the reverse of a number of her drawings, his response is to do all that he can to rouse her jealousy; without a word to Helen, he promptly "pass[es] over to where Annabella
Wilmot [sits] vehemently coquetting with Lord Lowborough, seat[s] himself on the sofa beside her, and attache[s] himself to her for the rest of the evening" (156).
Huntingdon's campaign to inspire Helen's jealousy is not limited to this incident; during his stay at Staningley he resorts to close association with Annabella on a number of occasions to incite Helen's envy, at one time "addressing] himself entirely to Annabella" (162) in Helen's presence, at another devoting himself to Annabella for a period of several days, during which time he ignores Helen altogether, speaking to her only "from pure necessity" and regarding her with "a cold, unfriendly look"
(162). In part, Huntingdon's efforts to rouse Helen's jealousy are part of the game that is the pursuit of women, yet they also work to make her vulnerable to his advances, and hence to hasten his success. For, although she resolves to meet his conduct "calmly and coldly" (156), she is unable to feign indifference to his seeming preference for Annabella. On one occasion, the thought makes her so "miserable"
(156) that she abandons tea to "take refuge in the library" (156); on another,
Huntingdon's attentions to Annabella reduce her to tears, and she must "bur[y] [her] face in the sofa-pillow that they might flow unseen" (166). Such overt disclosures of her distress are tantamount to a confession of attachment, and Huntingdon treats them as such, subjecting her to surreptitious "kiss[es]" (157) and "embrace[s]" (168) following each episode. While Huntingdon's method of pursuing Helen - first, with courtesy calculated to rouse her desire; later, with a manipulation of her jealousy meant to weaken her defences - is subtler than the desperate measures employed by
Hargrave, it is more effective, for it ends in success.
The fact that Huntingdon's pursuit of Helen culminates in neither an illicit affair nor a sexual assault, but rather a marriage consented to by Helen, her guardians, and her father, makes his pursuit no less a seduction. Like Hargrave, Huntingdon perceives that the only way to "posses [s] such a treasure" (169) as Helen is to legitimate his desires within marriage. And while Helen is very much Huntingdon's prey, it is clear that she accepts his marriage proposal as a way to gratify her desire for him. Although her given reason for her acceptance is an aspiration to reform a misled man - she tells her aunt that she "long[s] to deliver him from his faults" (176)
- her inability to "get him out of [her] mind" (130), the "shocking colour" (147) she turns in response to his first confession of adoration, and the delight she receives from his "sweet smile" (165) bespeak a strong sexual attraction. Writing of Helen's motivation for marrying Huntingdon in her article "Siblings and Suitors in the
Narrative Architecture of The Tenant of Wildfell Hair (1999), Tess O'Toole argues that "[i]n presenting Helen's attraction to her first husband, Bronte daringly implies that her heroine's culturally sanctioned role as the would-be reformer of a sinful man serves as a cover for her sexual attraction to him" (716), and that Helen's acceptance of Huntingdon's marriage proposal amounts to no more than "succumbing to her desire for" (716) him. 58
That Helen allows her desire for Huntingdon to interfere with her assessment of his character is apparent from her earliest diary entries following their marriage.
After a mere "eight weeks experience of matrimony" (202) Helen acknowledges that her husband is "not what [she] thought him at first" (202), and that she allowed herself to be "willfully blind" (202) to his many faults when she agreed to his proposal. The result of surrendering to Huntingdon's "conscious power" (146) over her is a marriage in which she becomes little more than a commodity. In the earliest months of their marriage this commodification is apparent in the way that Huntingdon parades his latest acquisition around London; as Helen confesses to her diary, her husband "seem[s] bent upon displaying [her] to his friends and acquaintances in particular, and the public in general, on every possible occasion and to the greatest possible advantage" (217). To enhance the effect produced by his "worthy object of pride" (217, emphasis mine), Huntingdon insists that Helen abandon her preference for plain, sensible dress and instead "sparkle in costly jewels and deck [her]self out like a painted butterfly" (217). As Jackson observes, Huntingdon's success in claiming Helen as his own makes her his "most prized possession, the 'treasure' against which he measures his own value" (59). Later in the marriage, after
Huntingdon's ardour has cooled and his amusements have shifted to the pursuit of other, more sexually alluring women, Helen's worth shifts. No longer valued for the envy she might elicit from other men, Helen is now useful to Huntingdon chiefly in her capacity as "steward and housekeeper" (320), roles she occupies "without pay and without thanks" (320). Reflecting on her marriage, Helen observes that for
Huntingdon, a wife is a thing to love one devotedly and to stay at home - to wait upon her
husband, and amuse him and minister to his comfort in every possible
way, while he chooses to stay with her; and, when he is absent to
attend to his interests, domestic or otherwise, and patiently wait his
return; no matter how he may be occupied in the meantime. (244,
emphasis mine)
Whether he values her for her attractions or her unpaid housekeeping duties,
Huntingdon's perception of a wife's worth is ultimately no different from that of men like Lowborough and Hattersley.
Like Laura, Helen despairs when she discerns that Huntingdon's love for her is limited to "ardent affection" (201) and frequent "caressing" (202) - in short, to discover that his object in marrying her was purely sexual. Helen's response to her realization that her marriage is grounded in the physical - that her "higher and better self is indeed unmarried" (243) - echoes Laura's, for she too claims ownership of her body, in this case by denying her husband's claim to it. While a number of notable episodes illustrate Helen's assertion of self-possession, including the oft-quoted scene in which she "lock[s] [her]self up in [her] own chamber" (210) and refuses
Huntingdon access, as well as her avowal that she and Huntingdon are "husband and wife only in the name" (306), her most subversive denial of her husband's right to possess her person is her decision to abstract herself from the marriage altogether. In her article "Personal Property: Exchange Value and the Female Self in The Awakening" (1994),5 Margit Stange argues that "what a woman owns in owning herself is her sexual exchange value" (481). In refusing to allow Huntingdon access to her person or to tolerate his marriage-sanctioned claims to her, Helen not only denies
Huntingdon's sexual possession of her, but also figures her body as her own and demonstrates her unwillingness to participate in a system wherein women are treated as exchangeable property.
Helen's refusal to allow herself to be commodified is also evident in her management of Gilbert Markham's attentions and of her desire for him. Of course, her wariness of Gilbert's interest is in part owing to the fact that she is still legally married to Huntingdon and must be careful not to draw attention to herself. Aside from this obvious necessity, however, Helen's cautious response to Gilbert's advances is significant for two reasons: first, it reflects her refusal to be made the sport of yet another predatory male, and second, it illustrates that she, like Laura, has learned the importance of rationally evaluating a man's character before indulging any desire for him. In the initial stages of their acquaintance, Helen's caution is certainly justified, for Gilbert is as much a participant in the male culture of pursuit as
Huntingdon or any of his companions, and his initial attempts to foster an "intimacy"
(52) with Helen are just as determined and self-serving. In a passage that echoes the discussions of Lowborough and Hattersley about their own motivations for seeking wives, Gilbert muses that although he is unlikely to "fall seriously in love with the young widow" (53) she might divert him from his waning attraction to Eliza, and if
5 Although Stange's specific focus is the exploration of Kate Chopin's novel The Awakening (1899), her general discussion of female sexual self-possession acknowledges the subversive potential of a woman's defence of her chastity, and as such is useful to my exploration of similar themes in The Tenant ofWildfell Hall. he "find[s] a little pleasure in her society [...] and if the star of her divinity be bright enough to dim the lustre of Eliza's, so much the better" (53). Just as his motivation recalls that of the novel's other male characters, so too does his pursuit of Helen recall theirs. Once he has resolved to "seek" (53) diversion in Helen, Gilbert "seldom suffer[s] a fine day to pass without paying a visit to Wildfell" (53) and forms a number of "pretext[s] for invading the sanctum" (73) including bringing gifts for
Arthur, conveying plants from his sister, and commenting on Helen's artwork.
While Gilbert sets out to possess Helen in much the same way that the novel's other male characters set out to secure wives, Helen's assumption of authority in their relationship forestalls his attempted possession of her and allows her to control the terms of this relationship. Although she is content to permit Gilbert to bring presents for her son, she balks at his "presumptuous" (73) decision to present her with a copy of "Marmion," and informs him that "unless [she] pay[s] for the book, [she] cannot take it" (74). In her discussion of the symbolic significance of the gift in "The Traffic in Women: Notes on the 'Political Economy' of Sex," Rubin observes that gift giving constitutes a form of exchange, and that "acceptance implies a willingness to return a gift and a confirmation of the relationship" (172). Given that in the context of nineteenth-century courtship practices the gift of a book often signified a man's intent to formally pursue a woman, it is significant that Helen tells Gilbert that she does not
"like to put [her]self under obligations" (74), and only accepts the book because
Gilbert promises not to "build [...] hopes upon it" (75). The control over the relationship that Helen establishes in this episode extends to encompass not only the gifts Gilbert is permitted to give, but also how often and in what manner he might 62 contact her. After she has acquainted Gilbert with the story of her diary, she tells him that he may write to her "in six months" (404), provided he can "maintain a correspondence all thought, all spirit - such as disembodied souls or impassioned friends [...] might write" (404). In part, Helen withholds herself from Gilbert's advances and determines the parameters of their relationship because to do otherwise would be adultery; however, her prudence serves an additional purpose in that it allows her the opportunity to observe Gilbert once his "present ardour" has had time to "cool" and thereby to "try the truth and constancy of [his] love" (404).
Just as Helen controls the terms of her relationship with Gilbert, so too does she direct the proposal scene. In a reversal of the episode in which Gilbert proffers his copy of "Marmion," Helen presents to Gilbert the "gift" (483) of a "beautiful half- blown Christmas rose," asking him "[w]ill you have it?" (482). As Melinda Maunsell observes in her article "The Hand-Made Tale: Hand Codes and Power Transactions in
Anne Bronte's The Tenant ofWildfell Hair (1997), the manner in which this offer is made is significant, for it allows a "woman [to gain] the upper hand by making her desires paramount in non-verbal display" (58). Elizabeth Langland posits a similar argument in her article "The Voicing of Feminine Desire in Anne Bronte's The
Tenant ofWildfell Hall" (1992), arguing that Helen's offer of the rose is an illustration of "the assertive woman expressing feminine desire" (121) and that in this scene, Helen's "wishes dominate; [Gilbert] is subject to her desire, and he is the object of her desire" (122, emphasis in original). Although opinion on Gilbert's 63 suitability is one of the most critically contentious aspects of the novel,6 with critics such as Tess O'Toole marking him as "egotistical and [...] sexist" (718), and Russell
Poole asserting that Gilbert "scarcely seems [Helen's] equal" (27), others have hailed the union as evidence of the possibility of equality in marriage. Juliet McMaster, in her discussion '"Imbecile Laughter' and 'Desperate Earnest' in The Tenant of
Wildfell Hall" (1982), defends Gilbert by tracing his development throughout the novel, and asserts that he "serves to restore our faith in the possibility of a relationship between a man and a woman that is one of equals" (363). Likewise, N.M.
Jacobs in "Gender and Layered Narrative in Wuthering Heights and The Tenant of
Wildfell Hall" (1986) suggests that the act of reading Helen's narrative has a profound impact on Gilbert's character, the result being "revolutionary, and absolutely instrumental to the partnership of equals their marriage will become"
(213).
The marriages in which Self-Control and The Tenant of Wildfell Hall culminate illustrate the potential for a woman's exercise of her reason and active participation in the choice of a husband to change conventional male-female dynamics within a marriage and, thereby, to change the structure of marriage itself.
For by entering into marriage not just on the basis of their suitors' attractions, but also
6 This divide is evident from the time of the novel's publication, when many early reviewers objected to the notion that a gentleman farmer from modest origins could form a desirable companion for the accomplished, propertied Helen. One reviewer, writing in Literary World (1848), dismissed Gilbert as a "boor," a mere "caitiff ditcher, who should have been passed out of the window with a farm-yard fork" (qtd in Allott 258), while Charles Kingsley observed in Fraser's Magazine (1849) that he "cannot see any reason why Gilbert Markham, though no doubt highly attractive to young ladies of his own caliber, should excite such passionate love in Helen" (qtd in Allott 272). 64 after a rational assessment of their suitability as husbands, Laura and Helen are able to form unions wherein they can assert their own desires, rather than be mere objects of desire. Ultimately, the marriages that conclude Self-Control and The Tenant of
Wildfell Hall illustrate that matrimony need not subordinate women, but can in fact
"potentially reorganize relationships between men and women in revolutionary ways"
(Jones 7). 65
Chapter 3 She "meant to lead": Gwendolen's Matrimonial Management in Daniel Deronda
For what could a woman not do when she was married, if she knew how to assert herself? - George Eliot Daniel Deronda (1876)
In his introduction to George Eliot's novel Daniel Deronda (1876), Terence
Cave identifies the text as "one of the most controversial prose fictions of the nineteenth century" (ix). While much of this controversy stems from what many reviewers and literary critics refer to as the "Jewish portion" of the novel - specifically, books five, six, and seven, which focus largely on Mordecai, Daniel
Deronda, and their disquisitions on Jewish religion, history, and culture - the
"English section" of the novel has not escaped its own share of controversy for its depiction of the heroine Gwendolen Harleth and her navigation of the marriage market. Gwendolen's carefully considered acceptance of Henleigh Grandcourt has been read as mercenary and self-interested from the time of the novel's publication, with both contemporary reviewers and modern literary critics asserting that her marriage is motivated by little more than opportunism. Through an examination of the novel's exchange-based marriage market and Gwendolen's position within this market, her desire to escape social expectations, her belief that this escape can be achieved through marriage, and her marked aversion to the sexual advances of men,
Gwendolen's marriage can be understood as more than a merely mercenary move.
Her decision to marry the seemingly passive, dispassionate Grandcourt is intended to accomplish far more than to secure a position in high society; rather, her marriage is meant to accommodate her desire for autonomy and her aversion to sex. Because it includes elements of earlier texts - like Laura and Helen, Gwendolen seeks to undermine conventional male-female marital relations through courtship strategies - and later ones - Sally Ledger observes that the "sexually recalcitrant" (2) Gwendolen could be "construed as [an] embryonic New Wom[a]n" (2) - Daniel Deronda can be read as a transitional text that marks a midpoint between the seduction plot and New
Woman fiction.
In Tradition Counter Tradition: Love and the Form of Fiction (1987), Joseph
Allen Boone defines the counter-traditional wedlock plot as one that attacks the marriage tradition "from within" (19) by "following the course of wedlock beyond its expected close and into the uncertain textual realm of marital stalemate and impasse"
(19). While Boone emphasizes that such conflict in male-female relationships is by no means unique to the wedlock plot - indeed, the seduction narratives of earlier decades are suffused with "violent martial imagery to depict sexual pursuit and conquest" (143), themes that are present throughout Self-Control and The Tenant of
Wildfell Hall - the marital discord that pervades the wedlock plot differs in that it "is no longer represented as simply a personal tragedy but as an ongoing battle that can never be resolved given the patriarchal rules and oppositional roles by which society has locked partners in wedlock into place" (20). The wedlock plot thus departs from the standard narration of marriage not only in its form and content but in its agenda; as Boone asserts, texts that explore marital disintegration do more than challenge the conventional depiction of married life in fiction - they "decenter the presumed universality of the dominant sexual order" (21). Daniel Deronda is a particularly useful illustration of the wedlock plot because it exposes in detail the social conditions that determine how marriages are transacted. Eliot's novel sets forth an exchange-based marriage economy wherein marriageable daughters are commodified in a manner that recalls the blatant use of women in Self-Control and The Tenant ofWildfell Hall. After announcing her intention of marrying the foreign musician Klesmer, Catherine Arrowpoint, sole heiress to her parents' considerable fortune, is accused of having neglected "all sense of duty" (Eliot 246) and is reminded that her vision of her marital future is secondary to her parents' conception - is, in fact, subordinate to the expectations "of the nation and the public good" (247). The Arrowpoints' objection to the match lies not only in what they perceive as Klesmer's social/political disadvantages - as a foreigner, he is not "connected to the institutions of this country" (246) and as an "unpractical" (247) musician, he "won't do at the head of estates" (247) - but also in their indignation that a man who can make no addition to the family holdings would think himself worthy to marry "such a property" (248) as that promised to their daughter. The equation of women with property extends to daughters without substantial inheritances, a fact evident in the experience of the Princess Halm-Eberstein. Like
Catherine, the Princess's vision of her future is of no concern to her family, and she is
"forced into" (626) marrying her cousin, the "only one left of [her] father's family that he knew" (633), to fulfill her father's intention that his daughter carry on the
Jewish family line. An even more overt illustration of the exploitation of young women is the story of Mirah Lapidoth. Like Catherine and the Princess, Mirah is valued for her potential to benefit her family - from the time of her childhood, her father has worked to profit from his daughter's talents, coaching her to "sing the greatest music" so that she might "fetch the greatest price" (217) - yet whereas the
Arrowpoints and the Princess's father direct their energies towards deciding their daughters' marital futures, Mirah's father is not concerned that the sale of his daughter be legitimated through marriage. For Mr. Lapidoth, Mirah becomes a means for him to settle his accounts with an older, foreign Count, a man to whom he is indebted for his having once freed him from "prison" (218), and he stresses that if
Mirah refuses the Count's "splendid offer" (218) to take her for a mistress, she will be left to "sing and beg at people's doors" (219). Although Catherine, the Princess, and
Mirah are each exploited by their families in different ways and for different reasons, their collective experiences demonstrate that in Daniel Deronda, a woman's value stems from her potential as "an object of exchange in a male-centered economy"
(Flint 175).
Gwendolen's position within this economy is arguably the novel's most compelling illustration of a daughter's obligation to form a financially advantageous match with a well-positioned man. While each of the novel's minor female characters is pressured to marry a man who will in some way benefit her family, whether it be through increased property, the repayment of a debt, or the realization of a family ideal, her family's recent financial devastation makes the marriageable Gwendolen the subject of considerably greater family pressure to attract an appropriate suitor. As
Kate Flint observes in her essay "George Eliot and Gender" (2001), "as the eldest and most beautiful of five sisters without a fortune, expectations fall on her to make a
'good match' in order to resolve the family's financial crisis" (174). Indeed, 69
Gwendolen's family, in particular her uncle, the Reverend Gascoigne, who has taken on the "management" (92) of his niece's marital prospects, determines that the "point is to get her well married [...] not to a poor man, but one who can give her a fitting position" (78-9). Indeed, as an "admired" and "striking girl" (12) who effortlessly attracts male attention and who has the potential to form a "first-rate marriage" (37),
Gwendolen (like Catherine, the Princess, and Mirah) derives her value from her potential to succeed in the marriage market. In fact, as Pauline Nestor asserts in her study George Eliot (2001), Gwendolen is a kind of financial "speculation" who is
"really worth some expense" (37) provided she can secure the kind of suitor who will ensure her family's future wellbeing.
Deirdre David observes in Fictions of Resolution in Three Victorian Novels
(1981) that Lord Brackenshaw's annual archery meeting of Wessex's most prestigious families is therefore a crucial event because it is "the occasion for
Gwendolen to be put on display by her relatives as an attractive commodity in the upper-class marriage market" (182). Specifically, the competition is Gwendolen's opportunity not only to display her considerable archery skills, but also to best her rivals in the greater contest of the day while vying for the attention of Henleigh
Grandcourt, a promising "bachelor of good fortune and possibilities" (91) who boasts
"a mixture of noble blood in his veins" (93). For her family, the appeal of a union between Gwendolen and Grandcourt is twofold; on one hand, the marriage of her daughter to a man whose future wife is "sure to be well provided for" (91) has obvious economic advantages, and would mean that Mrs. Davilow would no longer be forced to vacate the spacious Offendene, and on the other, such a match would be "desirable" (106) for its larger social implications. Like the Arrowpoints, who counsel their daughter to consider the "public good" (247) when considering marriage, the Reverend perceives that marriage to Grandcourt - the "almost certain baronet, the probable peer, [who] was to be ranged with public personages" (140) - can promise more than just "a brilliant lot for Gwendolen" (93) and a solution to her family's financial situation. In fact, the Reverend views the match as "a sort of public affair" that "might even strengthen the Establishment" and is "to be accepted on broad general grounds national and ecclesiastical" (140). Even though the Reverend has little knowledge of Grandcourt's character aside from some potentially troubling
"gossip" (142) circulated by his male acquaintances which he has chosen to disregard, he does not consider his ignorance about "what sort of young man" (93)
Grandcourt is to be in any way sufficient reason to question the suitability of the match. In fact, the Reverend's philosophy is that it is "futile [...] to show any curiousity as to the past of a young man whose birth, wealth, and consequent leisure made many habits venial which under other circumstances would have been inexcusable" (93), and advises Gwendolen that the consideration of marriage to such a promising suitor is "out of the range of mere personal feeling" (141) and is, in fact, a matter of "duty [...] both to [her]self and [her] family" (141). In her discussion of the Reverend's desire to orchestrate a match between Gwendolen and a man about whom little is known aside from his wealth, social position, and potential to inherit,
Pauline Nestor argues that Gwendolen becomes little more than a "sacrifice" (146) to the greater interests of her family. 71
Gwendolen's eventual acceptance of Grandcourt has little to do with the financial advantages perceived by her mother or her uncle's lofty ideas about the potential for the union to benefit the nation. Although Gwendolen is by no means indifferent to her future husband's wealth and social standing - she acknowledges that "[o]f course marriage [is] social promotion" (39) and she delights in the prospect of acquiring "parks, carriages, a title" (143) - she has her own vision of her marital future, and it is one that does not accord with her family's expectation that she will marry out of a sense of "duty" (141) or "responsibility" (142). A headstrong young woman who has "always been the pet and pride of the household, waited on by mother, sisters, governess, and maids, as if she had been a princess in exile" (25), who considers "[g]irls' lives [...] stupid" (69), and who intends to "conquer circumstance by her exceptional cleverness" (39), Gwendolen thinks little of the conventional matrimony for which her mother and uncle believe she is destined. In fact, her impression is that for the majority of women - her own mother included - marriage is "rather a dreary state, in which [the wife] c[an] not do what she like[s], ha[s] more children than [are] desirable, [is] consequently dull, and bec[omes] irrevocably immersed in humdrum" (97). This dismissal of matrimony is complicated by Gwendolen's awareness that she has neither the financial resources to eschew marriage altogether, sufficient talent to provide for herself by ascending to "a high position" (252) on the stage, or the fortitude necessary to endure life as a governess. Thus, while Gwendolen knows that she has no choice but to marry, she resolves that her marriage will be on her own terms, and that she will not allow herself to become like most women, who "allo[w] themselves to be made slaves of, and to have their lives blown hither and thither like empty ships in which no will [is] present" (39); rather, Gwendolen envisions her future marriage as one which will enable her to escape "the narrow theatre which life offers to a girl of twenty" (63), to avoid "being expected to please everybody but [herself]" (97), to "manage her own destiny" (40) as well as a means "to lead" (39) and where she expects that her future husband, the man she fully intends to "rule" (669), will "declare himself [her] slave"
(95). In looking forward to marriage as an opportunity to assert herself and escape the condition of being another's subordinate, Gwendolen necessarily anticipates a reversal of the conventional dynamic of "male dominance and female submission" within marriage (Boone 8).
Because these aspirations to "lead" (39) are admittedly "vague" (39) and
Gwendolen entertains "no disturbing reference to the advancement of learning" (39), critics have tended to dismiss Eliot's heroine as little more than selfish. Bonnie
Zimmerman, in her essay "Gwendolen Harleth and 'The Girl of the Period'" (1980), classifies Gwendolen as a "superficially feminist" (206) character who can only conceive of "unfocused, idle dreams" (207). Similarly, Boone discredits the significance of Gwendolen's desire to assert herself, arguing that she "is filled with dreams of autonomy rendered ambivalent by the fact that they are based on an illusion of freedom and power for which her pampered, solipsistic upbringing is alone responsible" (174). The fact that Gwendolen has no intention of devoting herself to social reform or campaigning for wider opportunities for women should not, however, eclipse the subversiveness of her navigation of the marriage market, nor should her "rhetoric of agency" (Nestor 142) be trivialized because of its limited scope. In Becoming a Heroine: Reading about Women in Novels (1982), Rachel
Brownstein argues that "the idea of [a heroine's] own importance to herself is a basis of feminism" (9) and that conventionally, "women are supposed to subordinate themselves gladly to men, to renounce, to please, to find their importance only as it is reflected by another's choice, approval, esteem, love" (9). Brownstein further asserts that even though a heroine might not identify herself as feminist or sympathize with the feminist cause, she who recognizes "the importance to her of her own life is protofeminist, at least" (Brownstein 9). As a heroine who yearns for "freedom" (Eliot
53) but struggles to articulate how she intends to achieve it, who desires for her life to differ from that of "ordinary young ladies" (53) yet is uncertain "how she should set about leading any other" (53), it is certainly fair to call Gwendolen's vision narrow; however, her recognition of her own "importance" (Brownstein 9) and determination to manage her life in a way that accommodates this importance should be credited as more than mere selfishness - it should, according to Brownstein's conception, be considered a kind of protofeminism.
Gwendolen's vision of her marital future is further complicated by her aversion to men and their sexual advances. A woman who declares men "ridiculous"
(78) and "wonder[s] how girls manage to fall in love" (78), Gwendolen is characterized by a "certain fierceness of maidenhood" (78) that causes her to react with "physical repulsion" (78) to confessions of love or attachment. So "passionately averse" (81) is Gwendolen to a "life of passion" (81) that after her cousin Rex
Gascoigne admits his love for her, she declares herself unable to "love anybody" (82) and asserts that, with the exception of her mother, she cannot "bear any one to be very near [her]" (82). While a number of critics have noted Gwendolen's unusual response to the prospect of intimacy, the majority of these studies have focused on this aversion as part of a larger analysis of Eliot's characterization7 or as a key to the heroine's psychological development.8 Few, however, have remarked the significance of Gwendolen's sexual reserve in the context of her marital aspirations. In her discussion of Gwendolen in George Eliot: The Last Victorian (2002), Kathryn
Hughes makes such a connection, linking Gwendolen's lack of a "spontaneous interest in men or sex" (320) to her desire for "power" (320) and asserting that for her, marriage is "a kind of game in which she can gain the upper hand" (320). Bonnie
Zimmerman indicates a similar link between Gwendolen's aversion to passion and her desire for power, suggesting in her article "Gwendolen Harleth and 'The Girl of the Period'" (1980) that for her, "[s]ex threatens the loss of self-control and [presents] the possibility of control by men" (210). Though narrative convention prevents Eliot from being explicit, the suggestion behind her heroine's "fastidious chastity"
(Brownstein 209) is that she seeks a husband who will not only allow himself to be managed, but whose own lack of passion might allow her to forgo fulfilling the sexual aspect of the marriage contract.
Gwendolen's choice of Grandcourt is motivated not by family pressure or the simple promise of financial and social advantages, but by her belief that he is the type
7 In "Daniel Deronda: A View of Grandcourt" (1985), Badri Raina observes that Gwendolen "prefers [Grandcourt] as lover and husband precisely because he is cold- blooded" (376), yet does not further the analysis, choosing instead to explore Eliot's reasons for constructing Grandcourt as she does. 8 In Fictions of Resolution in Three Victorian Novels (1981), Deirdre David suggests that Gwendolen's "arrested sexual development" has its origins "in a fixation upon her mother" (177), but attributes this to the conditions of Gwendolen's class, not her ideas about love or marriage. of man over whom she would enjoy "indefinite power" (315), who would certainly allow her to "manage him thoroughly" (137), and finally who, more than any other potential husband, "suit[s] her purpose" (138). In part, her assessment of
Grandcourt's suitability is based on a seemingly innocuous physical appearance characterized by "an extensive baldness surrounded with a mere fringe of reddish- blond hair" (111), a "complexion [that] had a faded fairness resembling that of an actress when bare of the artificial white and red" (111) and "long narrow grey eyes
[that] expressed nothing but indifference" (111). This judgment is reinforced by
Grandcourt's reserved demeanour. Introduced in the text as a dispassionate, withdrawn man who could not "look less animated" while "wide awake" (111),
Grandcourt is depicted as a man whose bearing "incline[s] to the flaccid" (111), whose manners are "extremely calm [and] cold" (112), and who "d[oes] not appear to enjoy anything much" (137). Perhaps most importantly, Grandcourt's "behaviour as a lover" (326) -the narrator observes that his advances "ha[ve] hardly at all passed the limit of an amorous homage which [is] inobtrusive as a wafted odour of roses" (326)
- indicates no intention to "transgress" (327) against Gwendolen's marked aversion to physical intimacy. For Gwendolen, Grandcourt's mild appearance, aloof demeanour, and reticent manners - in short, the qualities she reads as evidence of his asexuality - suggest that Grandcourt is not only a man without any "particular tastes or desires" (137) who is unlikely "to interfere with his wife's preferences" (112), but also that he is the kind of man who will not make many demands, sexual or otherwise, of his wife. 76
Just as critics have tended to deny the subversive potential of Gwendolen's determination to manage her own future, so too have her motives for accepting
Grandcourt's proposal been attributed to a straightforward desire to make a financially profitable marriage. James Picciotto's dismissal of Gwendolen as "selfish and detestable" (qtd. in Carroll 413) in an 1876 review in Gentleman's Magazine is an early, representative example of critical opposition to the marriage. More recently, critics such as Joanne Long Demaria, in her article "The Wondrous Marriages of
Daniel Deronda: Gender, Work, and Love" (1990), have accused Gwendolen of
"making a mercenary, illegitimate marriage in order to remain in the fashionable world" (406). Similarly, Margueritte Murphy remarks in her essay "The Ethic of the
Gift in George Eliot's Daniel Deronda" (2006) that Gwendolen '"sells' herself through marriage" (191). Catherine Gallagher continues in this line in The Body
Economic: Life, Death, and Sensation in Political Economy and the Victorian Novel
(2006), noting the "obvious ways in which 'Harleth' rhymes with 'harlot'" (131), claiming that Gwendolen "marr[ies] for money" (131), and observing that
Gwendolen's receipt of her engagement ring in the same parcel as a cheque for her mother in the amount of £500 illustrates "the obvious humiliations of self-sale" (131).
While these critics are correct to point out the economic and material advantages of the marriage - Mrs. Davilow and her girls are spared from having to relocate to
Sawyer's Cottage, and Gwendolen is elevated to a position in the highest ranks of society - the assertion that Gwendolen marries for money simplifies her vision of her marital future and fails to fully credit the complexity of her motives. Gwendolen's attempt to achieve mastery through marriage is fundamentally flawed because of her ignorance about men and the realities of courtship and marriage. Gwendolen has based her future on her certainty that marriage affords women "a fuller power of managing circumstance" (355), and that a married woman need only "assert herself' (298) to achieve whatever she likes. In a passage that recalls Wollstonecraft's warning in A Vindication of the Rights of Woman of the dangers of raising young women to have no knowledge of men or marriage,9 the narrator makes clear that Gwendolen's ideas about marriage are "all constructive imagination" (298) and that she "ha[s] about as accurate a conception of marriage - that is to say, of the mutual influences, demands, duties of man and woman in the state of matrimony - as she ha[s] of magnetic currents and the law of storms" (298).
Similarly, Gwendolen has so little knowledge of men's lives or of their sexual conduct that when she learns of Grandcourt's former liaison with Lydia Glasher and of the several illegitimate children who resulted from the affair, she must ask her mother whether "men generally [have] children before they are married" (333) and asserts that "'[i]f it were so, [she] ought to know" (333). In short, Gwendolen's confidence that marriage "would be the gate into a larger freedom" (146) and that men are "altogether a matter of management" (315) amounts to little more than her
"walking amid illusions" (355).
9 Wollstonecraft points out that the custom of protecting female ignorance places young women at a double disadvantage; on one hand, this enforced ignorance means that girls are often "ruined before they know the difference between virtue and vice" (67). On the other, this custom leaves women vulnerable to men who "are inclined to tyrannize over, and despise the very weakness" (50) that society so carefully guards. 78
Just as Gwendolen's ignorance about men and marriage results in unrealistic ideas about the opportunities that matrimony will afford her, so too do these misconceptions lead her to form a dangerously inaccurate evaluation of Grandcourt's character. For instance, while Gwendolen reads her suitor's languor as evidence of his general "utter indifference" (305), his longtime companion Lush recognizes his master's reserve and "subdued tones" (127) to be indicative of a "peremptory will"
(127). Similarly, although Gwendolen perceives Grandcourt as a cold, withdrawn man who is unlikely to have "been in love or made love" (137), he is actually known to be "much given to the pursuit of women" (3,40). Perhaps the most telling illustration of Gwendolen's flawed interpretation of Grandcourt's character - what
David refers to as her inability "to see what moves beneath that languid and pale exterior" (180) - is revealed in her comparison of him to a "handsome lizard of a hitherto unknown species, not of the lively, darting kind" (137). For as the narrator comments, "Gwendolen knew hardly any thing about lizards, and ignorance gives one a large range of probabilities. This splendid specimen was probably gentle, suitable as a boudoir pet: what may not a lizard be, if you know nothing to the contrary?" (137).
Gwendolen's inability to assess Grandcourt's character proves disastrous to her marital strategy because in forming an entirely inaccurate idea of Grandcourt's personality, she necessarily misreads his motives. Gwendolen is confident that
Grandcourt's proposal is inspired by his "devotion" (303) to her, a devotion to which she has grown accustomed from her other admiring suitors, and does not suspect that
Grandcourt's marital motives parallel her own. In fact, Grandcourt - a character whom Henry James referred to as the embodiment of "English brutality refined and distilled" (qtd. in Carroll 422) - surpasses Gwendolen in his desire to command, control, and dominate, a dynamic that Eliot establishes through a number of analogous passages. For instance, whereas Gwendolen takes Grandcourt for the kind of man who will permit his future wife to "mount the chariot and drive the plunging horses herself' (137), Grandcourt gloats over his feeling that in accepting him,
Gwendolen has been "brought to kneel down like a horse under training for the arena" (320). Likewise, although Gwendolen is confident that Grandcourt can be easily "manage[d]" (137), she is no match for his anticipation of the hold he intends to gain over her. Indeed, Grandcourt's attraction to Gwendolen lies foremost in the pleasure he expects to derive from "triumph[ing] over" (301) her own attempts at authority and becoming "completely master" (301) of her:
he enjoyed thinking of [Gwendolen] as his future wife, whose pride
and spirit were suited to command every one but himself. He had no
taste for a woman who was all tenderness to him, full of petitioning
solicitude and willing obedience. He meant to be master of a woman
who would have liked to master him, and who perhaps would have
been capable of mastering another man. (320)
As Catherine Gallagher asserts in The Body Economic (2006), Grandcourt's proposal has little to do with "homage" (302), but is instead motivated by his cruel realization of "how completely he can undermine [Gwendolen's] own intentions" (135).
The resulting union is one that Andrew Dowling has identified in '"The Other
Side of Silence': Matrimonial Conflict and the Divorce Court in George Eliot's
Fiction" (1995) as "one of the most profound" examples "of matrimonial cruelty in 80
Victorian literature" (323). Indeed, following a mere seven weeks of marriage to
Grandcourt, Gwendolen is forced to acknowledge not only "her former ignorance about the possible mental attitude of a man towards the woman he sought in marriage" (425), but also the extent to which her marital strategy has failed. Rather than finding marriage "the gate into a larger freedom" (146), a means to "do just as she like[s]" (132), or an escape from the expectation that she must "please everybody" (97), Gwendolen is required to adhere to a version of wifehood the very opposite of that which she had envisioned. With a husband who will settle for
"nothing less than the best in outward equipment, wife included" (406) - a husband whom Eileen Sypher identifies as a man for whom a woman serves little other purpose than to be "an ornament to enhance male power" (511) - Gwendolen becomes as much a commodity for Grandcourt as is Helen in her marriage to
Huntingdon. As part of a marriage wherein "all the ostensible advantages [are] on her side" (669), Gwendolen is obligated to be on constant display so that others might observe her husband "with the beautiful bride whom he had chosen to marry" (585) and to gratify her husband's vanity by conversing with men "eager to talk with her and escort her within his observation" (586). As time passes, Gwendolen's existence as a glittering possession continues unabated:
The May weeks went on into June, and still Mrs Grandcourt was
outwardly in the same place, presenting herself as she was expected to
do in the accustomed scenes, with the accustomed grace, beauty, and
costume; from church at one end of the week, through all the scale of
desirable receptions, to opera at the other. (604) Significantly, Gwendolen is instructed not only that public appearances are essential
to her wifely duties, but in how she must comport herself in such situations. On one
occasion, Grandcourt asserts his authority by informing her that he "hate[s] to see a
woman come into a room looking frozen" and that if she is "to appear as a bride at
all," she must "appear decently" (428). Likewise, after observing a private exchange between Deronda and Gwendolen, Grandcourt instructs her that she is to "oblige"
(446) him by "fill[ing] [her] place properly" and "behav[ing] as becomes [his] wife"
(447). Eileen Sypher asserts that Grandcourt's insistence that Gwendolen conduct herself in public in a manner that conforms to his instruction is merely the most obvious means by which Eliot illustrates Grandcourt's "power" (511) over his wife.
Less explicit, but far more insidious, is Eliot's suggestion of Grandcourt's sexual control. In '"The Other Side of Silence': Matrimonial Conflict and the Divorce
Court in George Eliot's Fiction" (1995), Andrew Dowling posits a link between
Gwendolen's reticence about the conditions of her marriage and her husband's sexual conduct, arguing that "[i]n George Eliot's work silence in marriage is repeatedly viewed as concealing a deeper truth, and in Daniel Deronda what Grandcourt's silencing of Gwendolen veils is a condition of sexual brutality" (334). Indeed, while the Grandcourts are to all appearances "a model couple in high life" (671) whose outward behaviour betrays no indication of marital conflict - in fact, whose
"companionship consists] chiefly in a well-bred silence" (671) - Eliot's emphasis on
Grandcourt's insistent, determined will reveals a power over his wife that extends far beyond determining how she is to dress and behave in public. From the time of their marriage, Grandcourt's control of Gwendolen is all-encompassing; indeed, he wishes 82 her to "be as fully aware as she would have been of a locked hand-cuff, that her inclination was helpless to decide anything in contradiction to his resolve" (584). In a number of instances, however, the character of Grandcourt's reflections on his relationship to Gwendolen - most notably, his certainty that "she would have to submit" (320) to him once married, his "pleasure in mastering [her] reluctance" (320) to his attentions, and his satisfaction that "she [is] his to do as he like[s] with" (668) - indicates a mastery that is distinctly sexual. As an illustration of this mastery, and of
Gwendolen's "submission" (427), Dowling cites the passage in which Grandcourt demands that his wife wear the diamonds that he has given her to mark the occasion of their wedding, diamonds that had formerly been in the possession of his mistress.
Significantly, Grandcourt not only makes it clear that Gwendolen is to wear the diamonds when he "desire[s]" (427) her to, but also takes it upon himself to see that they are displayed to his taste, "fastening] them as he would" (427) about her person.
Dowling notes the significance of Grandcourt's "insistence that these jewels rest against her flesh" (335), arguing that his actions "suggest his own hold upon her body" (335). The text's suggestion that Gwendolen has submitted to Grandcourt - has, as David asserts, become his "sexual property" (197) - is further illustrated through Gwendolen's allusion to her husband as "a dangerous serpent ornamentally coiled in her cabin without invitation" (672). For Gwendolen, whose acceptance of
Grandcourt is based on her certainty that he will prove "the least disagreeable of husbands" (305), a marriage wherein her only control - specifically, control over her own person - is to hope that her husband is "not going to pause near her, not going to look at her or speak to her" (670), marks the utter reversal of what she had envisioned 83 of her marriage. Indeed, as David remarks, the conditions of Gwendolen's marriage - in particular Grandcourt's absolute mastery over her appearance, her conduct, and her body - "represen[t] her transformation from the colonizer to the colonized" (197).
Much has been written about "Gwendolen's disastrous experience of wedlock" (Boone 172) and about her unqualified failure to attain any degree of agency through her marriage. Some critics, such as Joanne Long Demaria, have approached this outcome as a kind of cautionary tale that illustrates Eliot's personal belief in "the personal and the social destructiveness of the mercenary marriage"
(404). Conversely, others attribute the novel's conclusion not to Eliot's moral stance, but to her literary sensibilities and dedication to representing circumstances not as they '"should be'" but '"as they have been or are'" (Eliot qtd. in Nestor 141). Pauline
Nestor, for instance, observes that in conceiving Gwendolen's fate in Daniel
Deronda, Eliot's "commitment to scrupulous realism once more gave her little room to move in shaping the novel's ending" (141). Still others have built on this argument, asserting that Eliot's depiction of Gwendolen's failed marriage and uncertain future was motivated not just by her realism, but also by her desire to criticize the institution of marriage and the position in which it placed women. One such critic, Kate Flint, asserts that Gwendolen's story is best understood as "one of imprisonment within social forms" (177), and that "[t]he unhappy marriage of Grandcourt and Gwendolen serves as an indictment of the power structures of Victorian society" (175).
While these critics are correct to point out Gwendolen's failure, it is also important to note that Eliot's decision to leave her heroine's story unresolved opens the possibility for Gwendolen to achieve an alternate form of autonomy in the community she creates with her mother and sisters. Indeed, following her release from Grandcourt Gwendolen detects in herself the "beginning of a new existence"
(769) and declares to her mother that she "mean[s] to live" (807), an affirmation that neatly recalls her earlier assertion that she "mean[s] to lead" (39) and that illustrates the extent to which she has reassessed her initial goals over the course of the novel.
While Gwendolen's experience with Grandcourt illustrates that attempts to fundamentally alter marriage cannot be realistically accommodated within the novel of the 1870s, the fact that Gwendolen's story concludes with the opportunity for her to create a "new existence" (769) is significant, for it signals that although she fails initially, she has the potential to both maintain her reticence and achieve autonomy outside the confines of marriage. 85
Chapter 4
"We are not the property of our husbands": Challenging the Conjugal Imperative in The Heavenly Twins
"Love which lasts is a condition of the mature mind; it is a fine compound of inclination and knowledge, controlled by reason, which makes the object of it, not a thing of haphazard, but a matter of choice." ~ Sarah Grand The Heavenly Twins (1893)
In her landmark study The New Woman and the Victorian Novel (1978), Gail
Cunningham designates Sarah Grand's novel The Heavenly Twins (1893) as "the first recognizable novel of the purity school" (51) of New Woman fiction. Indeed, in a sprawling narrative that traces the courtships and marriages of three central female characters, each of which represents an aspect of the contemporary debate on the
Marriage Question, Grand covers a veritable catalogue of topics that were of importance to the New Woman novelist, including sex, marriage, chastity, venereal disease, and female education. Most importantly, she explores how these topics intersect, and how each character's education and response to male attention determines her experience of courtship and marriage. Edith Beale, a girl whose utter lack of knowledge about the realities of sex and marriage is carefully maintained by her parents and the females of her community, is the text's representative of conventional femininity; her disastrous marriage illustrates the consequences of guarding female ignorance. Evadne Frayling, an exceptionally intelligent young woman who educates herself in spite of her parents' attempt to raise her according to custom, is the novel's New Woman; her marriage demonstrates that even the most well-informed, rational women can fall prey to lust, while her attempt to transform society's acceptance of male licentiousness through her refusal to consummate her marriage highlights the inability of the individual alone to effect social change.
Angelica Hamilton-Wells, a spirited girl who chafes against society's expectations and who demands an education equal to that of her brother, is an alternative vision of the New Woman, a girl whose parents are progressive in their approach to female education, and whose witnessing of the marital experiences of Edith and Evadne convinces her of the dangers of choosing a suitor solely on the basis of her desire for him. Through the juxtaposition of the marriages of Edith, Evadne, and Angelica,
Grand is able to criticize the social practices that permit young women to be made wives without any knowledge of men or male behaviour and, more damningly, female complicity in these customs. At the same time, Angelica's marriage posits a cautiously optimistic suggestion that with sufficient education and the exercise of reason, women can form rewarding marriages.
In Rebel Women: Feminism, Modernism and the Edwardian Novel (1995),
Jane Eldridge Miller highlights the difficulty of defining the New Woman heroine by detailing the range of terms conceived by late nineteenth-century literary critics to describe the emergent "new kind of fiction" (14) in which she appeared. Part of an
"almost interchangeable" catalogue of narrative labels that included the '"marriage problem' or 'sex problem' novel, the 'fiction of sex', [and] the 'woman novel'" (14),
Miller notes that the term New Woman was given "rather indiscriminately by the popular press to any novel which featured a heroine who was frankly 'advanced' in her views about women and marriage" (14). The fact that reviewers were unable to reach a consensus on what the new fiction should be called, or even to succinctly 87 define the heroine who was at the centre of these works, is a telling reflection of the range of identities encompassed by the New Woman. So diverse was this new kind of heroine that, as Sally Ledger observes in The New Woman: Fiction and Feminism at the fin de si&cle (1997), "New Woman writers themselves did not always agree on who or what the New Woman was" (10). Known variously in the periodical press as the '"wild woman,' the 'glorified spinster,' the 'advanced woman,' the 'odd woman,' the 'modern woman,' 'Novissima,' the 'shrieking sisterhood,' [and] the 'revolting daughters'" (Ledger 3), the New Woman was both the "bicycling, cigarette-smoking
Amazon [who] romped through the pages of Punch and popular fiction" (12) and the
"neurasthenic victim of social oppression [who] suffered in the pages of New Woman novels" (12), a woman who in the pages of radical novels experimented with free love unions, challenged the maternal ideal, and questioned the social value of the marriage contract, but who also appeared in more moderate fictions as a woman who sought to preserve female chastity, championed motherhood, and maintained that matrimony should remain a woman's primary ambition. In short, the New Woman was, as Angelique Richardson and Chris Willis assert in their introduction to The New
Woman in Fiction and in Fact: Fin-de-Siecle Feminisms (2001), "not one figure, but several" (12).
While the New Woman's multiple guises preclude a fixed definition of her characteristics as a heroine, New Woman fiction as a whole is unified by its concern with the Marriage Question. Miller asserts that the issue of marriage was "central [...] in 1890s feminism, and as a result, marriage retained its traditional centrality in the
New Woman novel" (19). Some novelists, such as Mona Caird in The Daughters of Danaus (1894) and Grant Allen in The Woman Who Did (1895), took a radical approach to marriage and explored the possibilities of free unions and other alternatives to the marriage contract. Ledger asserts that the authors who advocated an end to matrimony altogether or who, like Caird, supported the substitution of a
"private agreement" in place of the compulsory "bourgeois contract" (22) were few, and "it would be a mistake to attach too great importance to 'free love' in a survey of the socio-sexual climate of the fin de siecle" (15); rather, the "main thrust of New
Woman fiction [...] was infused by social purity ideology" (Richardson and Willis
25), a movement whose position on the issue of marriage was the very antithesis of that espoused by the writers of free love narratives. As Miller notes, novelists of the social purity school of New Woman fiction "sought to improve or redefine rather than abolish the institution of marriage, for they realized that it afforded essential legal and economic protection for women and children" (15). Like the social activists who led the campaigns against the Contagious Diseases Acts, the cause which inspired the birth of the social purity movement, social purity novelists aimed to publicize the threat of male sexual vice to the integrity of the female body, and used their fiction as a means to promote this agenda:
[t]he campaigns against the Contagious Diseases Acts, charismatically
led by Josephine Butler, started out as a feminist enterprise: the
objective was to defend the integrity of women's bodies and to fight
against the notorious Victorian 'double standard' of sexual morality
which legitimized male sexuality but punished its female equivalent.
The original aims of the campaigns were, though, later extended, to include a revaluation of the legal limits for male sexual expression. If
the Contagious Diseases Acts of the 1860s were predicated on the
assumption that it was the female body which was responsible for
polluting the larger social body, then the social purity movement
which grew out [of] the Anti-Contagious-Diseases campaigns turned
this predicate on its head. It was male sexuality, according to the social
purity movement, which most needed controlling, it was the male body
that was responsible for social degeneration. (112)
Ultimately, supporters of the social purity movement sought to inspire men to "match the 'high' standards of sexual purity and chastity that had so long been enforced on women" (Ledger 112-113), therefore allowing them to enter into marriage as husbands who were more suitable for and deserving of their chaste wives.
At the centre of some of the fin de siecle's most heated debates about sex, marriage, and social purity was Sarah Grand, the prolific novelist, essayist, and frequent contributor to periodicals and women's magazines whom Miller identifies as
"the first, most influential and most popular of the New Woman novelists" (18). A
"mild reformer" (Cunningham 2) who defended the institution of marriage but
"deplored [...] the condition of carefully nurtured ignorance and total inexperience in which young girls were supposed to choose their life partners" (Cunningham 2),
Grand's expansive body of work explores the intersections of sex, female education, and male sexual vice. That Grand's social and sexual politics owe much to
Wollstonecraft has been remarked by a number of her critics; for example,
Richardson and Willis trace the central concerns of New Woman writing to the 90 arguments Wollstonecraft raises in A Vindication of the Rights of Woman, asserting that Grand and her fellow New Woman novelists "had a radical inheritance from the pioneering feminist Mary Wollstonecraft" (1). Likewise, Ann Heilmann, in New
Woman Strategies: Sarah Grand, Olive Schreiner, Mona Caird (2004), observes that
"[a] century after Mary Wollstonecraft's repudiation of the traditional model of female education [...], New Woman writers like Sarah Grand, who had themselves been deprived of academic schooling, drew attention to the fact that her demands were still waiting to be met" (88-89). Grand's debt to Wollstonecraft is perhaps most evident in a North American Review essay entitled "The Modern Girl" (1894) and a
Young Woman magazine article called "On the Choice of a Husband" (1898). In the former, Grand explores the inconsistencies of a society that esteems marriage as "the holiest and most perfect state both for men and women" (36), yet ensures that marriageable young women are kept "in the most perfect ignorance of everything connected with it" (36). While mothers defend the custom of raising their daughters to be "ignorant of everything objectionable" (38) by asserting that such measures are necessary to preserve a girl from the possibility of emotional upset, Grand argues that the real reason behind the calculated effort to maintain a young woman's innocence is a desire to protect her marriage market potential. The daughters of "society mothers"
(41) are particularly vulnerable to the self-interested maneuvering of their mothers, for such women
have no nobler ambition than to secure a good place in society for
[their daughters]. These girls are most sedulously "protected," that is
to say they are deprived of the safeguard of knowledge, and not for any good reason, but merely for vulgar commercial purposes. The less
girls know the more easily they are influenced in their choice of
husbands. These girls are brought up, regardless of character and
constitution, exclusively for the marriage market, and are exhibited
like fatted fowls whose value depends upon the color and condition of
their flesh. The sooner a girl in this set is married, the better her
parents are pleased. They have done with the trouble of her then, and
do not care much what becomes of her afterwards, so long as she
keeps up appearances. (41)
Grand summarizes the objection to female education by juxtaposing the girl raised according to custom and the one allowed some "knowledge of the world" (41); while the former is easily "exposed, forced forward, and sacrificed" (41) to the interests of her parents, who will encourage marriage to "the lowest in the land if only he have a high-sounding title" (41), the latter "become[s] extremely fastidious in [her] choice of
[a] husban[d], and it is obvious that nothing could be more inconvenient both to men and mothers" (41-42).
While Grand asserts in "The Modern Girl" that it is upper class or aristocratic young women who are most likely to be kept ignorant to ensure that their marriages are profitable, her analysis in "On the Choice of a Husband" demonstrates that the daughters of less wealthy families are held to the same "superficial" (106) customs as their more affluent counterparts. An extension of her argument in "The Modern Girl,"
"On the Choice of a Husband" examines the effect of a young woman's "ignorance"
(106) on her ability to accurately assess a suitor's character. In a passage that recalls 92
Wollstonecraft's link between a woman's lack of education and her susceptibility to being "blown about by every momentary gust of feeling" (Wollstonecraft 55), Grand connects the English custom of raising young women to have "nothing but the most superficial acquaintance of men" (107) to a woman's tendency to accept a suitor solely on the basis of her emotional response to him:
such information as a girl has been able to obtain on the subject of
marriage has for the most part been admirably calculated to mislead
her. Her only outlook upon life has been through the novels of the day,
which, as a rule, give but a poor, fragmentary, and altogether primitive
view of it. Of men she has no knowledge at all. She is left to choose a
husband as she might choose a parrot - for his power to please, his talk
and his plumage, so to speak. Her feelings are her only guide, and,
having no idea of the way in which they may mislead her, she
confides in them utterly, and only too often to her own destruction.
(106)
Even the most "intelligent gir[l]" (107) is prevented from exercising reasonable judgment in the acceptance of a suitor because without any knowledge of men, "she
[is] quite unable to compare one man with another and judge of their respective merits" (107). Ultimately, the custom of preventing girls from acquiring any reliable knowledge about men, sex, or marriage means that a young English woman is entirely unqualified to assess the character of potential suitors - in fact, she is less suited "to choose a husband than she [is] to choose a horse" (107). 93
The Heavenly Twins anticipates the themes Grand advances in "The Modern
Girl" and "On the Choice of a Husband" and details the courtship and marriage experiences of three young women, each of whom represents a contemporary model of womanhood. Edith Beale, "a well-bred English girl" (155) who is her parents'
"only daughter" and thus their carefully guarded "pearl" (155), is the text's representation of conventional femininity, or what Ann Heilmann identifies in her introduction to Sex, Social Purity, and Sarah Grand (2000) as the text's "Old
Woman" (7). Like the majority of young women of her class, Edith's experience of life has been confined to her interactions with the "gentle mannered, pure-minded women among whom she had grown up" (155), women whose chief aim is to preserve their carefully protected ignorance about the world:
They kept their tempers even and unruffled by never allowing
themselves to think or to know, so far as it is possible with average
intelligence not to do either in this world, anything that is evil of
anybody. They prided themselves on only believing all that is good of
their fellow-creatures [...] They seemed to think that by ignoring the
existence of sin, by refusing to obtain any knowledge of it, they
somehow helped to check it [.] (155-56)
Having been raised with only such women to guide and educate her, Edith is "by descent, by teaching, by association, and in virtue of the complete ignorance in which she had been kept, [...] essentially one of that set" (156), a woman whose existence is grounded not in reason, but in "feeling" (156). Grand makes it clear that it is Edith's reliance on emotion that is responsible for her unguarded acceptance of Menteith's flattering attentions. An older, "eligible"
(167), and "nice looking [...] man" (167) whose "animal eyes" (191) and frequent compliments betray his desire for her, the mere presence of Menteith renders Edith unable to "reason" (191) or make use of "[h]er wits" (191). In fact, the majority of
Edith's interactions with Menteith reduce her to girlish "smile[s] and blushe[s]"
(191), and she develops a tendency to "drop her eyes every time she look[s] at him"
(161). The same "delicate maiden mind" (169) that allows Edith to respond so unguardedly to the overtures of a man whose recent past and character are unknown to her also results in her "ecstatically happy" (231) acceptance of his marriage proposal. Even when her longtime friend Evadne attempts to dissuade her from the marriage, telling her that Menteith is a "thoroughly bad [...] dreadful man" (232) about whom her husband has suggested there is "something objectionable" (232),
Edith maintains that she "love[s]" (235) him. Indeed, the knowledge that Menteith has an uncertain reputation and a questionable past only inspires Edith with additional
"enthusiasm" (234) for the match, as she sees her marriage as an opportunity to
"save" (234) her husband and "make him all that he ought to be" (235).
Far from acting as a foil to her impetuous acceptance of Menteith and refusal to consider his sexual history, Edith's parents are only too willing to encourage her to overlook the fact that that "there have been errors" (235) in Menteith's past, and reason that it is only to be expected for a "man in his position" (235) to have succumbed to "great temptations" (235) in his youth. That their acceptance of
Menteith is motivated by the financial and social advantages of the match is obvious, for although Mrs. Beale asserts that her approval of the marriage is in no way related to his considerable "position and property" (235), her claim that it is the "dear fellow himself that we want" (235 emphasis mine) merely reinforces the Beales' self- interested motives in not only permitting, but actively encouraging a union between their trusting daughter and a man with a disreputable past. Like the parents in "The
Modern Girl," the Beales' primary concern is not the character of their daughter's future husband, but how well he is positioned socially and financially.
Given the mistaken optimism with which Edith approaches the reform of her husband and her parents' encouragement of her illusions, it is not surprising that
Grand depicts their marriage as an utter failure. For in addition to being ill-equipped to choose a husband, Edith is unprepared for marriage itself, particularly to a man of
Menteith's habits. Far from ameliorated, Menteith is an "indifferent" (280) husband who makes little effort to conceal his intrigues with other women, and as Edith enters the marriage "totally unprepared even for the possibility of any troubles of the kind"
(276), she has no means to address her husband's present behaviour, let alone his past conduct. Far worse than this failure to reform Menteith is the fact that she and her son contract the syphilis that is the consequence of the "temptations" (235) about which she and her mother were so unconcerned. That Edith's marriage ends in disaster illustrates not only Grand's certainty that a dissolute man is incapable of change,10 but also her censure of a system of female education that substitutes emotion for reason.
Furthermore, the narrator's claim that Edith's education has "robbed [her] of all
10 In "On the Choice of a Husband" (1898), Grand famously counseled her female readers that when assessing a man's character, they must remember that "once a dog, always a dog" (109). means of self-defence" (280) indicts not only society as a whole for demanding that young women be kept ignorant from the knowledge that would enable them to make reasoned choices, but also women for their complicity in facilitating this ignorance.
As an example of conventional femininity, Edith represents the dangers of raising women to "feel more than to think" (280).
Like Edith, Evadne has been equipped with "the accustomed education for a girl in her position" (25). By the age of eighteen, she is sufficiently accomplished that her mother boasts to her friend Lady Adeline Hamilton-Wells that Evadne is 11 all and more than we dared to hope to have her become" (38), and notes with pride that she
"speaks French and German well, and knows a little Italian [...] [s]he does not draw, but is a fair musician [...] and she sings very sweetly" (38-9). The Fraylings are much like the Beales in their approach to the proper education for a young woman - Mr
Frayling, for example, "believe[s] emphatically that a woman should hold no opinion which is not of masculine origin" (5), while Mrs Frayling enthuses to Lady Adeline that her daughter is "perfectly innocent, and [she is] indeed thankful to think that at eighteen she knows nothing of the world and its wickedness, and is therefore eminently qualified to make somebody an excellent wife" (39).
Whereas Edith has no objection to her "marketable ignorance" (Cunningham
52) - indeed, much like the subject of "The Modern Girl," Edith does not "even know enough to enable her to realize how very much more there was to know" (107) -
Evadne uses her parents' prejudices against the female intellect to her own advantage.
Aware that both her mother and father firmly believe that a proper young woman
"cannot possibly understand" (22) subjects other than those which form the core of a 97 conventional female education, Evadne convinces her parents that she should be allowed to read widely, as information which she cannot comprehend cannot "do
[her] any harm" (22). As a result of this clever inversion of her parents' opinion of her intellectual abilities, Evadne embarks on a rigorous course of self-education, beginning her studies with "advanced mathematics" (12) and later progressing to
"anatomy and physiology" (21), "pathology" (23), and "prophylactics and therapeutics" (23). Significantly, these researches are more than a novel form of diversion or a passive absorption of information, for Evadne approaches her reading critically and with the "utmost deliberation" (23). Indeed, her extensive study of literature, in particular the rogues' tales The Adventures of Roderick Random (1748) and Tom Jones (1749), exposes her to a knowledge of male behaviour uncommon to young women of her set, while at the same time affording her the opportunity to form decided opinions about male character. In a passage wherein she becomes a mouthpiece for Grand's own position on male sexual license and its consequences,
Evadne records her opinions on the heroes of these narratives. Of the first, she observes the unsuitability of the match between a hero who has experienced "a career of vice" (19) and an "amiable girl" (19), noting that such a man as Roderick would be better wedded to the former prostitute Miss Williams. She likewise objects to Tom
Jones's marriage to Sophia Western, asserting that a man "steeped in vice" (20) is unfit to marry a "spotless heroine" (20). Ultimately, her reading of these texts leads her to conclude that "[s]uch men marrying are a danger to the community at large"
(20). Likewise, the opportunity to read such texts as John Stuart Mill's "On the
Subjection of Women" (1869) and familiarize herself with "the condition and capacity of women" (13) has a significant influence on the formation of her character, making her "essentially herself' (13) and positioning her intellectually "in front of her father at once by a hundred years" (13). In contrast to the obediently ignorant Edith, the self-educated, well-informed, and "serious-minded" (Heilmann 8) Evadne is the text's "New Woman" (Heilmann 8), an independent thinker who manages to not only subvert her parents' efforts to foster in her an "impossible ignorance" (23), but also to surpass them in intellect and knowledge.
Even with her demonstrated ability to think critically and assess situations rationally, Evadne is as easily swayed by desire as Edith in her decision to marry
Colquhoun. While initially her approach to the choice of a husband is as reasoned and determined as her resolve to educate herself - indeed, once she begins to "entertai[n] the idea of marriage" (52), she sensibly concludes that the surest way to decide on the
"right man" (52) is to do so with her "mind" (52) - her studies have not prepared her for the experience of receiving attention from an attractive man, nor has she considered the "possibility of being overcome by a feeling which is stronger than reason" (52). Accordingly, her first encounter with Colquhoun produces in her the same girlish reaction as Edith experiences in the early stages of her relationship with
Menteith. In fact, the normally composed Evadne responds to the attentions of her older, handsome suitor in the same manner as that of any "ordinary school girl" (100), greeting Colquhoun's presence with a "flushed" (53) face and privately relishing the
"sensations" (53) he produces in her. She likewise becomes uncharacteristically mute while in his company, seating herself beside him at their first lunch yet speaking
"scarcely [...] a word the whole time" (53), and accompanying him on walks around 99 the family estate yet only stealing "timid glances" (54) at him while she does so. So enthralled is Evadne by her "absorbing passion" (55) for Colquhoun that after an acquaintance of mere "weeks" (54), during which time his exchanges with her have contained no more substance than the "tender speech[es]" (54) typical of an ardent suitor, she accepts his proposal without making any more than the most cursory inquiry into his "past life" (56). Far from "decid[ing] with her mind" (52), Evadne yields "unreservedly" (76) to her desire for a man whose character is virtually unknown to her.
Just as the Beales are eager to see their daughter married to a man of
Menteith's position, so too are the Fraylings motivated by acquisitiveness in their endorsement of Colquhoun. Although he has made a "frank" (55) confession to Mr.
Frayling that he "was rather wild as a young man" (55), this information does nothing to sway the Fraylings' opinion that he is an "excellent match" (88) for their daughter.
In fact, in a letter to Evadne following her discovery of Colquhoun's past, Mrs.
Frayling defends him, reminding her daughter that her new husband "is certainly a handsome and attractive man of most charming manners" (88) who "regularly [...] accompanie[s] [her] to every service" (88). Like Mrs. Beale, however, Mrs. Frayling reveals her real motivation for urging her daughter to "bear" (87) with her husband's past behaviour when she counsels her to think of the material advantages of the marriage, particularly the property Colquhoun stands to inherit. In addition to "[t]he
Irish property, which he must have, [and which] is one of the best in the country"
(88), Mrs. Frayling reminds Evadne that "as there is only one fragile child between him and the Scotch estates, [she] might almost venture to calculate upon becoming 100 mistress of them also" (88). Whereas the Beales at least concede their knowledge of
Menteith's sexual history, the Fraylings allow Evadne to marry Colquhoun under a
"grave misapprehension of his true character" (82), an action that demonstrates an even greater concern for social position than that shown by the Beales.
While Edith and Evadne each marry men with questionable reputations, their responses to their situations differ considerably. Whereas Edith's ignorance about licentious male behaviour and its consequences leaves her utterly unequipped to cope with her husband's philandering, giving her no recourse but to return to her parents' home where she resides until she succumbs to venereal disease, Evadne has "done enough reading to be able to protect herself' (Cunningham 52) from such a fate.
Indeed, unlike Edith, whose ignorance makes her relatively unconcerned about accounts of Menteith's reputation, Evadne's investigations of medical texts and familiarity with fictional "vice-worn" (66) men means that when she is informed of her new husband's disagreeable "past" (83) and of the fact that he is an "unworthy man" (83), she reacts not with enthusiasm for the opportunity to reform him, but with
"great indignation [...] for having been allowed to marry" (83) him. That Evadne's education has significantly shaped her opinions on a man's suitability for marriage is perhaps most evident in a letter to her parents, in which she observes that Colquhoun
"is not at all a proper person for a young girl to associate with, and [...] in point of fact his mode of life has very much resembled that of one of those old-fashioned heroes, Roderick Random or Tom Jones, specimens of humanity whom I hold in peculiar and especial detestation" (84). 101
Just as Evadne's education governs her response to the revelation of her husband's sexual history, so too does her thorough study of the Woman Question determine her manner of coping with this history. For, although her parents demand that she accept Colquhoun and spare the entire Frayling family the "scandal" (52) that will inevitably result from her continued resistance to the marriage, and remind her that her sisters' "prospects will be simply ruined" (90) if she insists on maintaining her "perfectly revolutionary" (115) refusal to accept her husband, Evadne recognizes that her submission to the marriage would not only signify her consent to a system wherein young women are allowed, and even encouraged to marry "disreputable m[e]n" (78), but would also make her complicit in this system. In a passage that anticipates Grand's assertion in "The New Aspect of the Woman Question" (1894) that women "have deserved much of the obloquy that was cast upon" (272) them,
Evadne declares to her aunt that it is women such as her, women who would advise her to "submit" (95) to her marriage, who allow such "emergencies]" (80) as her marriage to occur:
That is the mistake you good women all make [...] You set a
detestably bad example. So long as women like you will forgive
anything, men will do anything. You have it in your power to set up a
high standard of excellence for men to reach in order to have the
privilege of associating with you. There is this quality in men, that
they will have the best of everything; and if the best wives are only to
be obtained by being worthy of them, they will strive to become so. 102
As it is, however, why should they? Instead of punishing them for their
depravity, you encourage them in it by overlooking it [.] (79-80)
In short, Evadne perceives that her acceptance of Colquhoun would amount to "self- sacrifice" (80) and would only perpetuate "centuries" (80) of female tolerance of male licentiousness.
In an effort to avoid the kind of complicity of which she accuses her aunt and at the same time appease her distraught mother, Evadne agrees to "keep up appearances" (109) and reside with her husband, but only on the condition that the relationship be that of "brother and sister" (108) and "only that" (109) - in short, on the condition that the marriage remains unconsummated. In part, Evadne's injunction against her husband's sexual advances is motivated by a practical concern for her health, for as Cunningham observes, she is conscious of the "possible medical implications" (52) of a sexual relationship with her husband. At the same time, however, Evadne's conviction that a man of Colquhoun's former habits is unfit to be her sexual partner - that he is, as she declares to her parents, "not good enough, and
[she] won't have him" (93) - signals more than a justifiable fear of venereal disease.
Indeed, Evadne's refusal to consummate her marriage is a daring refutation of the
"rights of property" (102) that dictate that she "belongs to Major Colquhoun now"
(102). Like Laura and Helen, who subvert courtship conventions by refusing to be bartered on the marriage market to men who are undeserving of them, Evadne challenges both her husband's authority and the terms of the marriage contract by maintaining that her refusal of Colquhoun is necessary if she is to "preserve her honesty and self-respect" and that any woman who would accept the attentions of a man like Colquhoun "shows a poor appreciation of her own worth" (88). In refusing to allow her husband the access to her body guaranteed by the marriage contract,
Evadne in effect stages a personal "mutiny against the syphilitic male body" (Ledger
114), an action that both establishes her as a "heroine of the purity school"
(Cunningham 52) and constitutes "a discursive manoeuvre of the highest feminist order" (Ledger 115).
In addition to challenging the authority of her husband and the marriage contract, Evadne intends the preservation of her chastity to help bring about social/political change. Unlike the other chaste heroines considered throughout this study, whose reasons for maintaining their chastity are fundamentally personal, regardless of their subversive potential, Evadne's refusal to consummate her marriage is a distinctly political manouevre, so much so that she approaches it as if it were a kind of civic duty. As she explains to her aunt, it is necessary for someone to "rebel"
(95) against social convention in order to "extend the boundary of right little by little, narrowing the confines of wrong, and crowding it out of existence" (95), and she regards herself as just such a rebel. Indeed, she considers her marriage as a kind of transition - she informs Colquhoun that their union represents a "junction of the old abuses and the new modes of thought" (340) - and muses to him that "two people must have met as we have for the benefit of others" (340). In spite of her refusal to recognize the authority of either her parents of her husband or to submit to the terms of the marriage contract, critics of The Heavenly Twins have rarely acknowledged the subversive potential of Evadne's refusal of Colquhoun's advances, preferring instead to dismiss Grand and her heroine in favour of more radical New Woman novelists 104 and their more overtly revolutionary heroines. Ledger, for instance, even though she concedes the significance of Evadne's decision, also identifies her rather unfavourably as a "pri[g]" (114), and maintains that Grand was a "distinctly puritanical feminist" (13) whose "all too conventional stance towards marriage and sexual politics is disappointing to late twentieth-century feminists" (21). Likewise,
Heilmann, whose extensive work on Grand is generally sympathetic to her politics, situates her in Sex, Social Purity, and Sarah Grand as part of "the most conservative branch of social purity politics" (3) and refers to Evadne as a "rather frosty" (8) version of the New Woman. While it is certainly accurate that neither Grand nor her heroine are as radical as other figures in the period, it is important not to simplify
Grand's complex politics nor to attribute Evadne's preservation of her chastity to mere fastidiousness or lack of desire. Heilmann herself makes this point in New
Woman Strategies: Sarah Grand, Olive Schreiner, Mona Caird, asserting that
"today's equation of social purity with sexual puritanism is too simplistic" (50).
Indeed, Grand makes it clear that Evadne maintains her decision not to consummate her marriage in spite of, and not because of, her feelings for her husband. In a passage that occurs several months into their marriage, Grand demonstrates that Evadne is far from "cold-blooded" (345), and that Colquhoun's presence produces in her the same effect it did during their courtship:
[h]e leant forward so close that her senses were troubled - too close,
for she pushed her chair back to relieve herself of the oppression [...]
Another moment, a little more persuasion and caressing of the voice,
which he could use so well to that effect, and she might have given in to the kind of fascination which she had felt his presence from the first
[...]. [She had a] momentary yearning to be held close, close; to be
kissed till she could not think; to live the intoxicating life of the senses
only, and not care [.] (344)
The crucial difference between her original desire for Colquhoun and the sensation she experiences here, of course, is that her "[p]hysical attraction" is now tempered with a stronger "moral repulsion" (226), and she allows the moment to pass without wavering in her resolve to resist his advances. In opting to stage a "mutiny" (Ledger
114) against male vice by refusing to consummate her marriage, then, Evadne is not merely reacting to the possibility of venereal disease, punishing her husband for his past habits, or gratifying her own frigid nature - instead, her chastity signifies her belief that she deserves a sexual partner who is worthy of her, and is a means for her to set an example for other young women, so that they might avoid her own regrettable situation.
Despite her efforts, however, Evadne's marriage is ultimately as much a failure as Edith's. While initially she and Colquhoun are able to establish "an excellent understanding" (347) about the conditions of their unconventional marital arrangement, an agreement which enables Evadne to experience "calm content" (345) and affords her "perfect health" (345), her acquiescence to Colquhoun's request that she maintain a private life turns a satisfactory arrangement into a kind of intellectual
"captivity" (657). Without the freedom to express herself publicly on the subjects that her marriage has made so important to her - she has promised Colquhoun that she will not publicly participate in the "question[s] of the day" (345) or "join societies, 106 make speeches, or publish books, which people would know [she] had written" (342)
- Evadne begins to feel "cramped" (349). Eventually, the knowledge that she has agreed to a lifetime wherein she can "do nothing" (349) to combat the "horrid system" (238) that has permitted her own marriage leads her to abandon her lifelong pursuit of knowledge altogether:
She would look at nothing that was other than restful; she would read
nothing that harrowed her feelings; she would listen to nothing that
might move her to indignation and reawaken the futile impulse to
resist; and she banished all thought or reflection that was not
absolutely tranquilizing in effect or otherwise enjoyable. (350).
In short, the once "curiously well-informed and exceedingly strong-minded" (110)
Evadne regresses to a point where she is as willfully ignorant as Edith and, like her, falls into a rapid physical and mental decline that culminates in hysterical symptoms.
Although Grand is clear that the state of Evadne's health is the direct result of the ramifications of her promise to Colquhoun and has no relation to her unconsummated marriage - in fact, as Heilmann observes in New Woman Strategies: Sarah Grand,
Olive Schreiner, Mona Caird, Grand "is at pains to stress" that Evadne does not
"suffe[r] any physical or mental harm because of it" (74) - critics of the novel have tended to point to her chastity as the reason for her decline. Cunningham, for instance, argues that Evadne "crack[s] under the strain" (54) of her resistance to being
"shakefn] [...] into Colquhoun's bed" (54). Likewise, Kathleen Blake asserts in Love and the Woman Question in Victorian Literature: The Art of Self-Postponement
(1983) that Evadne "suffer[s] from the sexual denial that is also [her] necessary defence" (134). Yet just as critics have tended to oversimplify Grand's sexual politics and the motivation for Evadne's chaste marriage, so too do these readings of her decline fail to credit its significance to the text. For in misattributing the state of her health entirely to her refusal to consummate her marriage, critics like Cunningham and Blake necessarily overlook the social criticism implicit in her decline. As Miller observes, "[it] is part of the realism and social criticism of [New Woman] novels, of course, that their heroines are for the most part thwarted in their rebellion - late-
Victorian society did not easily accommodate new ways of life for women" (19).
Heilmann expands on this analysis, noting that Evadne's decline demonstrates "the futility of feminist resistance which remains detached from a wider political network"
(46). Evadne's decline is thus best understood not as a comment on her refusal to consummate her marriage, but as a statement about the realities of sex and marriage in the late nineteenth century and the difficulty of one woman sustaining an individual protest against these realities. In spite of the fact that Edith and Evadne represent "very different types of girlhood" (237) and approach their "vice-worn"
(66) husbands with such different attitudes, the parallels between their experiences suggest that regardless of how well-informed a woman may be, education alone provides neither a defence against nor a remedy to marriage to a dissolute man.
While Grand's portrayal of the courtship/marriage experiences of Edith and
Evadne is admittedly bleak, she does posit a possible alternative to their fates in her characterization of Angelica Hamilton-Wells. Described by Ledger as "the real New
Woman of the piece" (116), Angelica is a headstrong, precocious young woman whose intellectual curiousity rivals, if not exceeds, that of Evadne. In part, Angelica's inquisitiveness is a product of the permissive environment in which she is raised - in
addition to enjoying free rein on the family estate, she has access to the library, which is stocked with the "books and papers and magazines of the day" (255) - and to her mother's rather liberal attitude towards the education of women. Unlike Mrs. Beale and Mrs. Frayling, whose objective is to foster in their daughters an "impossible ignorance" (23), Lady Hamilton-Wells is conversant with arguments in favour of female education - she has read Mill's "On the Subjection of Women" (1869) and is in fact the person who first exposes Evadne to his theories - and herself advocates educational reform, declaring to Mrs. Frayling that what most women call " 'beautiful innocence' " (41), she considers "dangerous ignorance" (41), and that the education with which most girls are equipped "is not a safe state in which to begin the battle of life" (41). While Angelica's girlhood thus affords her greater latitude to cultivate her intellect and indulge her "vivid imaginatio[n]" (137), her determination to "know everything" (137) pushes the boundaries of what even her progressive parents consider appropriate. Indeed, when Mr. Hamilton-Wells decides that although his son would benefit from the instruction of a "tutor" (123), a "governess" (123) should suffice for Angelica, she arranges to attend her brother's lessons in "mathematics and
Latin and Greek" (125), proving to her father that she is indeed "far too advanced"
(126) for her governess. Similarly, she responds to the information that she will only be taught the "judicious excerpts" (128) of Latin that are not "too highly seasoned for a young lady" (128) by devoting herself to the study of the language, "simply for the purpose of finding out what it [is] [she] ought not to know" (128). The quality that most distinguishes Angelica from Evadne and which justifies
Ledger's assertion that she is "the real New Woman" (116) of the novel is not, however, her vigorous pursuit of knowledge, but her application of reason to the choice of a husband. Having witnessed first-hand the consequences of marrying solely for passion - Angelica is present at Edith's deathbed and is horrified by the condition of her syphilitic child, and, while not aware of the details of Evadne's marriage, is conscious that "all ha[s] not gone well" (122) with that union - Angelica resolves to avoid the "heartache" (318) of their experiences by approaching marriage with a "heart [...] hard enough to crack nuts with" (318). Accordingly, when she learns that her parents have determined that it is time for her to "be presented at Court and otherwise 'brought out' in proper splendour immediately" (320), Angelica forestalls any possibility of falling prey to the attentions of a dashing suitor by proposing marriage to Mr. Kilroy of Ilverthorpe, an older, established, and "kin[d]"
(321) county gentleman who has long been a friend of her parents, and whom she has known since her girlhood. As Lyn Pykett observes in The "Improper" Feminine: The
Woman's Sensation Novel and the New Woman Writing (1992), Angelica's proposal certainly "transgresses all the norms of proper femininity" (159), yet the criteria by which Angelica determines his suitability make the arrangement truly subversive. For while Angelica's choice of Kilroy is in part a mere matter of convenience - she knows that she will have to marry eventually, and by engaging herself to Kilroy before her social debut she is able to avoid "the constant social pressure" (Pykett 159) of the marriage market - Kilroy's real appeal lies in his agreement to allow her to "do as [she] like[s]" (321), his companionate demeanour that is devoid of sexual intent, 110 and his willingness to afford her some participation in the political sphere by reading her speeches in Parliament. In short, Angelica proposes to Kilroy because she perceives that by marrying him she can achieve a greater degree of agency than what she has observed in the marriages of Edith and Evadne, while at the same time sparing herself the threat of syphilis or hysteria.
Critics have generally expressed disappointment with Angelica's marriage, pointing to the companionate nature of the union as evidence of Grand's ultimately conservative position on sexuality and inability to conceive of alternatives to conventional marriage. Ledger, for instance, dismisses the pairing of Angelica and
Kilroy as an artistic failure, and asserts that although Grand "may have been convinced that the 'ideal' husband for a woman is a father figure [...] her readers remain unconvinced that Angelica's writing of political speeches for her husband to present in the House of Lords matches her childhood dream of equality" (117). This reading fails to take into account the fact that as a young girl, Angelica declares her intention to do just that - to use a man as her "mouthpiece" (249) until society progresses sufficiently to allow her to present speeches to Parliament herself. In addition, Ledger's criticism of the match relies on the assumption that a marriage must present a radical departure from convention if it is to be considered innovative, and in doing so she misses the ways in which the Angelica-Kilroy match more subtly challenges our expectations of what constitutes a rewarding male-female relationship.
For although the marriage might appear conventional - Angelica and Kilroy do, after all, share a residence and attend functions together - the basis of their relationship is not. The bond between Angelica and Kilroy is founded neither on love nor passion - Ill the narrator remarks that Angelica "[is] not in love with" (467) her husband, and indicates that the couple's "caresses" (484) are no more intimate than those exchanged between affectionate friends - but on shared intellectual interests and a genuine regard for one another. While the scope of Angelica's challenge to convention may be narrow, and is certainly not as revolutionary as the unions that conclude other, more radical New Woman novels, her reasoned choice of Kilroy does allow her to escape the fates of Edith and Evadne and suggests the possibility of achieving fulfillment in a marriage founded not on passion, but on intellectual compatibility and mutual respect. 112
Conclusion
In Desire and Domestic Fiction: A Political History of the Novel (1987),
Armstrong asserts that "to transform one party of the sexual contract effectively transforms the relationship between the two sexes and therefore the contract itself'
(111). This thesis surveys three distinct attempts at such a transformation. In
Brunton's Self-Control (1810) and Bronte's The Tenant ofWildfell Hall (1848), both of which are set in the early decades of the century, Laura and Helen each subvert conventional male-female courtship dynamics by preserving their chastity as a means to assess the suitability of a potential partner, assert their own desires, and determine whom they will choose for a husband. The fact that each text concludes with a rewarding marriage founded on mutual esteem illustrates the potential for a woman's preservation of her chastity and active participation in the choice of a husband to change male-female relations within courtship and marriage, and to therefore change the structure of marriage itself.
Whereas Laura and Helen guard their chastity in order to determine a potential husband's suitability, Gwendolen, the sexually reserved heroine of Eliot's Daniel
Deronda (1876), seeks to assert herself as the authority in her marriage and to fundamentally alter the very nature of marriage by accepting the proposal of a man who she believes will allow her to forgo the sexual aspect of the marriage contract. In this novel the attempt to transform male-female relations extends beyond a desire to make a mutually rewarding marriage; instead, Gwendolen intends to form a marriage wherein she will rule her husband, and in which she need not compromise this authority by accepting her husband's advances. The dismal failure of Gwendolen's 113 marriage - and, by extension, her attempt to transform the sexual contract - suggests that her bold visions of what she might accomplish in her marriage are simply too advanced to be accommodated within the novel of the 1870s.
Like Gwendolen, the heroine of Grand's The Heavenly Twins (1893) also seeks to transform the sexual contract from within the confines of her marriage, but whereas Gwendolen's aspirations are limited to herself, Evadne envisions a future wherein other young women will benefit from her refusal to consummate her marriage to a man with a disreputable sexual past. This attempt to transform the sexual contract is the one most concerned with overt social reform, and arguably also the most daring. For, in denying her husband access to her body, Evadne defies not only the terms of the marriage contract, but also the authority of her husband, her parents, and nineteenth-century law. Just as Gwendolen fails to achieve her vision,
Evadne's promise not to participate in public debate leads to her withdrawal from her intellectual pursuits, and, eventually, to her physical and mental decline. Evadne's inability to effect social change can be read as a statement about the realities of sex and marriage at the fin de siecle, and about the difficulty of sustaining an individual protest against these realities.
It is the intent of this thesis to demonstrate that as the century progresses, the chaste heroine's attempt to renegotiate the sexual contract shifts from a focus on destabilizing male-female courtship dynamics to an emphasis on the reformation of marriage; significantly, the success of the heroine's endeavour to subvert male-female relations is contingent on her conception of marriage and the degree to which she attempts to radically modify marriage. While Laura and Helen's early challenges to conventional courtship dynamics enable them to form mutually fulfilling marriages,
Gwendolen's attempt to rule her husband only encourages his brutal, controlling nature, and Evadne's intention to improve the conditions under which young women enter into marriage leads to the suppression of her intellectual curiosity and withdrawal from all social criticism. This correlation suggests that while a heroine's sexual reserve can effectively change the structure of courtship and thereby destabilize the hierarchal nature of marriage, later attempts to radically alter the institution of marriage itself exceed what can realistically be accommodated within the limits of either the wedlock plot or the New Woman novel.
While the chaste heroine's success in transforming the sexual contract decreases as the century progresses, Grand does posit an alternative to these failed strategies in her depiction of Angelica's marriage to Kilroy. Angelica's decision to marry Kilroy signals a return to the strategies of the earlier part of the century, where a heroine sought not to directly challenge the institution of marriage itself, but to change conventional courtship dynamics and, by extension, the dynamics of marriage itself. Angelica's carefully reasoned choice of Kilroy allows her to escape the fates of
Gwendolen and Evadne and, more importantly, suggests that late nineteenth-century authors still perceived the possibility for women to form rewarding marriages like those of Laura and Helen.
Recently, modern feminist cultural critics have begun to interrogate the equation of female sexual license with female autonomy, agency, and power. In her controversial work Female Chauvinist Pigs: Woman and the Rise ofRaunch Culture
(2005), Ariel Levy investigates modern Western culture's fascination with the 115 commercial sex industry - including the popularization of mainstream pornography, stripper culture, and institutions like the Playboy empire - and explores how women's acceptance of, and participation in, this sex culture has been recognized by some feminists as "evidence that the feminist project ha[s] [...] been achieved" (3). Far from demonstrating "how far we've come" (5), however, Levy asserts that women's embracing of this "raunch feminism" (75) only illustrates "how far we have left to go" (5) and signals that rather than gaining freedom from "objectification or misogyny" (4), women have simply "ma[d]e sex objects of other women and of
[them] selves" (4).
Like Levy, Wendy Shalit also explores how "Women have been "compromised by a sexual free-for-all" (139) in her fascinating study A Return to Modesty:
Discovering the Lost Virtue (2000), but whereas Levy's analysis is limited to a discussion of the ways in which feminism's encouragement of overt sexuality has failed women, Shalit's work extends this debate, and posits a potential corrective in the form of female modesty. Modesty is a subject that has long been anathema to feminists, the common position being that sexual reticence "was constructed by men with the explicit intention of enslaving or subordinating women" (111) and is therefore necessarily "sexist" (111). Shalit disagrees with this "attack on modesty"
(110) and argues that far from repressing women, "the primary and most direct consequence of a recovery of modesty's meaning would be an end to a culture that objectifies women and inadvertently encourages the violent acting-out of any deep misogynous impulses" (113). 116
Although neither Levy nor Shalit engages with literature in her analysis,
Female Chauvinist Pigs and A Return to Modesty advance arguments that are nevertheless valuable to a study of nineteenth-century chaste fictions. For in challenging the assumption that a woman can achieve autonomy only through her sexual liberation - a challenge that each author acknowledges is an unpopular one - these authors have broadened the discussion of female sexuality and invited other feminists to question their own positions. While the subversive potential of female sexual reticence remains a relatively unexplored area in feminist literary criticism, critics like Levy and Shalit have opened a debate on sexual politics that may extend to our investigations of the nineteenth-century novel. 117
Works Consulted
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Eliot, George. Daniel Deronda. 1876. Ed. Terence Cave. London: Penguin, 1993.
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Jennifer English
BA(H) University of New Brunswick, Saint John 2003
Publications:
"Refiguring the Marital Home: Helen's Appropriation of Interior Space in The Tenant of Wildfell Hall." Leeds Centre Working Papers in Victorian Studies 8 (2006): 57-63.
Conference Presentations:
"Gwendolen's Matrimonial Management in Daniel Deronda." Reading Daniel Deronda, University of Bristol, Bristol, UK, August 31-September 1, 2007.
"Refiguring the Marital Home: Helen's Appropriation of Interior Space in The Tenant of Wildfell Hall." Victorian Space(s): Seventeenth Northern Victorian Studies Colloquium, Leeds Centre for Victorian Studies, Leeds, UK, March 18, 2006.