Female Choice and the Love Plot in British and American Realist Fiction, 1860- 1918

Determined Consent: Female Choice and the Love Plot in British and American Realist Fiction, 1860- 1918

Elissa Gurman

A thesis submitted in conformity with the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy Department of English University of Toronto

Determined Consent: Female Choice and the Love Plot in British and American Realist Fiction, 1860-1918

Elissa Gurman

Doctor of Philosophy

Department of English University of Toronto

2017 Abstract

This dissertation explores the representation of women in love in nineteenth-century

British and American realist novels to demonstrate how the love plot paradoxically precludes the rational consent required for the marriage contract. While the choice of a lover, and the subsequent consent to marriage, is the most significant action available to a heroine in a nineteenth-century novel, this “choice” is consistently portrayed as a dream- like surrender to larger forces, which render the heroine’s will inconsequential. My dissertation probes at these forces by turning to discourses that influenced the love plot: the genre of the romance, Darwinian sexual selection, and pre- and early-Freudian conceptions of dreams and the unconscious. In the first chapter, I focus on scenes of reading in novels by George Eliot, Virginia Woolf, and William Dean Howells to consider how feminized, identificatory reading practices “prepare” women for the experience of falling in love. The second chapter turns to Darwin’s theory of sexual

selection to explore biological arguments for limited female choice in love in George

Gissing’s In the Year of Jubilee and Henry James’s The Portrait of a Lady. In the third chapter, I shift focus to consider how the dream, a common trope of the love plot, functions as a potential space for feminist rebellion and revolution in works by Sarah

Grand and Kate Chopin. Finally, in the fourth chapter, I discuss nineteenth-century notions of consent and contract and analyse novels by Thomas Hardy and Edith

Wharton. In this project, I work towards an understanding of the Anglo-American

“myth” of love, to consider how a love characterized by dream-like irrationality and surrender undermines the legitimacy of the heroine’s agency and consent. This suggests that our contemporary problems with delineating and making space for sexual consent may have origins in an unlikely place: the love stories of the nineteenth century.

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Acknowledgments

Thank you to Professor Christine Bolus-Reichert, my supervisor and mentor throughout this entire program. I could not have completed this project without your guidance and support. I would also like to thank my committee members, Professor Audrey Jaffe and Professor Naomi Morgenstern, my former co-supervisor, Professor Sarah Wilson, my external examiner, Professor Talia Schaffer, and my internal examiner, Professor Danny Wright.

To my parents, thank you for loving and supporting me; you built me up so I could fly. Thank you to my in-laws, Rita and Joel, for loving me like a daughter and taking pride in my successes. Thank you to Tamara, for taking every phone call and always being there.

I would like to gratefully acknowledge the material assistance I have received, from the Fonds de recherche sur la société et la culture, the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council, and the University of Toronto’s Department of English, without which I could not have completed this project.

This project is dedicated to Daniel, mon amour choisi et tant aimé.

Table of Contents

Acknowledgments ...... ii

Table of Contents ...... v

Introduction Swept Away: The Nineteenth-Century Novel and The Myth of Love ...... 1

Chapter 1: Literary Determinism in George Eliot’s The Mill on the Floss, Virginia Woolf’s The Voyage Out, and William Dean Howells’s The Rise of Silas Lapham ...... 10

Reading, Romance, and Realism ...... 10

2 The Mill on the Floss……………………………………………………………….26

3 The Voyage Out…………………………………………………………………….33

4 The Rise of Silas Lapham…………………………………………………………..43

5 Conclusion………………………………………………………………………….49

Chapter 2: Darwinian Sexual Selection in George Gissing's In the Year of Jubilee and Henry James's The Portrait of a Lady…………………………………………………...51

1 Darwin and the Novel………………………………………………………………51

2 In the Year of Jubilee……………………………………………………………….56

3 The Portrait of a Lady……………………………………………………………...75

4 Conclusion………………………………………………………………………….94

Chapter 3: The Unconscious in Sarah Grand's The Heavenly Twins and Kate Chopin's The Awakening…………………………………………………………………………..95

1 Mental Physiology: Dreams and the Unconscious…………………………………95 v

2 The Heavenly Twins………………………………………………………………108

3 The Awakening……………………………………………………………………126

4 Conclusion………………………………………………………………….……..139

Chapter 4: Consent, Contract, and the Law in Thomas Hardy's Tess of the D'Urbervilles and Edith Wharton's Summer…………………………………………………………..140

1 Consent, Contract, and Liberalism………………………………………………..140

2 Tess of the D'Urbervilles………………………………………………………….149

3 Summer……………………………………………………………………………166

4 Conclusion………………………………………………………………………...185

Works Consulted ...... 187

Introduction Swept Away: The Nineteenth-Century Novel and The Myth of Love

If we are to believe the stories told in novels, movies, and contemporary pop music, falling in love is the dramatic climax in the narrative of a woman’s life. It is the moment, the time she has been waiting for, when she can be truly seen by another, and when she can finally experience the depth of feeling she has apparently been dreaming of. In a nineteenth-century novel, this moment has added significance: in a world in which a woman’s economic and social future depended on marriage, the moment of falling in love or first experiencing desire represents not only the affective juncture at which a woman can experience the love she has been longing for, but the point at which she must make what is arguably the only and most crucial choice in her life – the choice of whom to marry and whether or not to consent to a lover’s proposal. It is this uncomfortable confluence, between the affective experience and cultural construct of love, and the element of decision and choice, that constitutes the primary focus of this dissertation. Is choice possible under the influence of love or desire? What does it mean to fall in love, and what is the impact of this emotional state on a heroine’s ability to consent? Literature plays a major role both in the production of the cultural ideal of love, and its critique; therefore, it is important to note that while the choice of a lover, and the subsequent consent to marriage, are the most significant actions available to a heroine in a nineteenth-century realist novel, this “choice” is consistently portrayed as a dream-like surrender to larger forces, which render the heroine’s will inconsequential. In other words, the cultural understanding of what it means to fall in love, as represented in nineteenth-century novels, insists that the woman in love is incapable of full, rational consent.

The love story is one of the foundational myths of modern Western culture, and the fundamental governing narrative of a purportedly feminine fantasy structure. The love plot gives directionality and meaning to the narrative of a woman’s life, and, as Talia Schaffer comments, was “until very recently the only female bildungsroman” (13). In his seminal discussion of love, Denis de Rougemont defines a myth as “a symbolic fable…which sums up an infinite number of more or less analogous situations…[and] expresses the rules of conduct of a given social or religious group” (7, emphasis in original). A myth, according to Rougemont, “hold[s] sway over us as though against our will” (7), as it works to structure people’s lives, behaviour, dreams and

1 2 fantasies, often without their conscious awareness or choice. While the quintessential masculine myth can be understood as an active quest for individual social and economic success, its feminine counterpart is a more passive form of striving towards an idealized dissolution of self into a beloved – a love story.

The love plot has been variously defined by many critics. For the purposes of this project, a love plot is a narrative (either the primary narrative of a text, or a subplot) in which characters fall into romantic, passionate love.1 William Jankowiak defines romantic love as “any intense attraction involving the idealization of the other within an erotic context” (4). While this general definition is immensely serviceable, I would add Anthony Giddens’s qualifiers to note that, in the nineteenth century and today, romantic love is also associated with “self-realisation” (40), “enchantment” (38), and dissociation from the “mundane” (37, see also Luhmann 26). Furthermore, as this project reveals, romantic love in the nineteenth-century Anglo-American novel is consistently represented as a dream or surrender, and compared to the seductive force of music, or to the rushing or drifting movement of water. For the heroine at least, love is a form of letting go, of giving in, that is not dissimilar to the warm joy of dissolving into sleep. Love lights up the world with brightness and wonder, but at the same time dulls its edges, rendering the heroine unconscious of her surroundings, and the individualized details of her self and usual social life. Love is the defining moment of the heroine’s life, and yet it is often represented as slippery or obscure; scenes of engagement and marriage, for instance, often take place “off- stage” with characters only emerging as married in later chapters, and love sequences are frequently disjointed and difficult to follow. While passionate, sexual love is universal (Jankowiak 5), romantic love “is much more culturally specific” (Giddens 38) and its corresponding ideals and conventions differ across time and place (Schaffer 15).

The nineteenth-century love plot, with its fixation on questions of marriage and choice, can tell us a great deal about the different and evolving conceptions of romantic love within the Anglo- American world. While novels do not represent an accurate reflection of real, lived experiences

1 I follow Pamela Regis in differentiating between the love plot and the romance novel. Regis identifies eight features of the romance novel – 1) “a definition of society, always corrupt, that the romance novel will reform,” 2) “the meeting between the heroine and hero,” 3) “an account of their attraction for each other,” 4) “the barrier between them,” 5) “the point of ritual death,” 6) “the recognition that fells the barrier,” 7) “the declaration of heroine and hero that they love each other,” and 8) “their betrothal” (14) – and explains that a love plot will not necessarily contain all eight of these elements (48).

3 of love,2 they do, as Ruth Perry attests, “represent the foci – the obsessions – of the culture” (5). Schaffer argues that “nineteenth-century marriage plots are consumed with the question of what kind of feeling constitutes an appropriate basis for marriage…What sort of love is appropriate for marriage?” (Schaffer 68, see also Jones 6). I would add that nineteenth-century American and British love plots are equally obsessed with the problem of female choice and consent: to what extent should a marriage be determined by female choice? In what ways is that choice limited or determined by external forces? How do feelings of love and desire affect a woman’s ability to make moral choices, and to give valid consent? This dissertation traces these recurring questions throughout a selection of novels from both sides of the Atlantic, and analyses how these questions were affected by different nineteenth-century transatlantic discourses.

This project is transatlantic in scope for several reasons but the main one is fairly simple: as I was reading texts from America and Britain, I noticed the same tropes and patterns – feminine love as a surrender, the sleepy woman in love, crashing waves and entrancing music – over and over again. I attribute this not to some innate feminine experience of love, but to the transatlantic circulation of texts, and consequently ideas and ideals, during the period. As Amanda Claybaugh has convincingly argued, “through much of the nineteenth century, the people of Great Britain and the United States constituted a single reading public” (Claybaugh 3, see also Bex 510). While the American and British literary scenes were distinct (Bex 511; Weisbuch xii; Giles 16; Claybaugh 12), they participated in a common “Anglo-American public sphere” (Claybaugh 3), and were constantly conceived of in relation to each other, as texts were shared across both sides of the Atlantic. As Claybaugh explains, “the nineteenth-century literary field took for granted the existence of…‘literature in English’” (12). This category is in evidence in contemporary reviews, with reviewers such as George Eliot, Walter Besant and Henry James “discuss[ing] at least some U.S. works interchangeably with British ones” (13). The assumption of a shared readership was partially due to the lack of international copyright legislation. Until 1891, there was no international copyright law in the United States (Claybaugh 12; McGill 4); as a result, unauthorized reprints circulated freely (Bex 506). Throughout much of the nineteenth century, this textual movement was mostly unilateral, with British texts flooding the American market (often without any compensation for British publishers and their authors), as customs records

2 For an interesting analysis of the representation of love in actual nineteenth-century letters, see Karen Lystra’s Searching the Heart: Women, Men, and Romantic Love in Nineteenth-Century America (1992).

4 show (Winship 99). This changed, however, with the huge success of Harriet Beecher Stowe’s Uncle Tom’s Cabin (1852): the novel’s popularity, both at home in America and abroad in England, “heralded the beginning of a new era in which the literary marketplaces of the United States and Britain were more or less symmetrical, with publishers on both sides of the Atlantic printing works by authors from their own nation and reprinting works by authors from the other” (Claybaugh 19). The commercial success of Uncle Tom’s Cabin prompted the U.S. Congress to pass the 1891 Chase Act, which granted limited recognition to British copyright (20). However, this did not immediately usher in a new age of nationally divided readerships: the law only extended copyright protections to “British texts that had been printed in the United States from type set by U.S. typesetters” (20). Consequently, only approximately 5 percent of British books were copyrighted in the United States (20).

All of this is to say that, throughout much of the nineteenth-century, readers in the United States were reading British novels, and in the latter half of the century, British readers were increasingly exposed to American fiction. This textual movement was not only limited to fiction: books of all kinds crossed the Atlantic during the period (Weisbuch xviii; Winship 99). This project is engaged in tracing not only common tropes and themes in the Anglo-American love plot, but the movement and influence of nineteenth-century transatlantic discourses and ideas. Books such as Charles Darwin’s The Descent of Man (1871), William Carpenter’s Principles of Mental Physiology (1874), and William James’s The Principles of Psychology (1890) travelled across the ocean and had considerable impact on British and American understandings of what it meant to be human, and what it meant to think, feel, and choose. This dissertation reflects not only on the transatlantic literary world during the nineteenth century, but also bears witness to a broader transatlantic intellectual sphere during the period. That being said, the primary interest of this project is not a justification or extended discussion of the realities of the transatlantic book trade. Instead, I follow scholars such as Martin Halliwell, Meredith Miller, George P. Landow, and Jonathan Arac, in utilizing a transatlantic array of texts to address a particular question about literature and culture that extends beyond national boundaries.

The question of the relationship between love and consent is especially pertinent to the study of nineteenth-century fiction because of the increasing emphasis placed on love and affection in the choice of a spouse during the period (D’Emilio and Freedman 73; Giddens 26; Lystra 28). Most historians agree that “the premodern family norm was generally some sort of extended kin clan,

5 with marriage arranged by and for the benefit of the group” (Schaffer 20). During the Medieval period, “love was not necessarily associated with marriage”: marriage was “usually a pragmatic arrangement…to benefit the larger kin network and to accumulate property and power…[and] was generally arranged by kin, church, and community, with the prospective bride and groom having little say” (43-44). Marriage was a practical alliance, established by the broader community and not especially focused on the individual preferences of husband and wife. This is not to say that married love did not exist; it simply was not considered a prerequisite for marriage. During the twelfth century, the ideal of courtly love emerged, yet this passionate romantic attachment was not associated with marriage, but with tragedy, and the inaccessible lover (45). However, by the early nineteenth century, “romantic love was fast becoming the necessary condition for marriage” (Lystra 28), with most people across classes expecting to choose their own partner based on feelings of love and affection (Schaffer 54; Stone 272; Luhmann 147; D’Emilio and Freedman 75; Giddens 26; Leach 106; Tracey 31).3 While it is difficult to pinpoint the exact historical moment at which the “switch from arranged marriages to marriages of the heart” (Luhmann 145) took place, most historians agree that the change likely occurred gradually, between the late sixteenth and eighteenth centuries, as a result of the rise of individualism, and the concurrent decrease of community involvement in courtship (D’Emilio and Freedman 75; Foucault 42; Stone 224; Schaffer 20). Marriage was increasingly based on voluntary, personal choice, and love was seen as a “marker of this voluntariness” (Jones 39).

The rise of the love-match marriage is often linked to the concurrent increase in the popularity of novels depicting romantic love (D’Emilio and Freedman 75; Giddens 40; Stone 284). This leads to a kind of chicken-or-egg debate: was the nineteenth-century ideal of romantic love constructed out of eighteenth- and nineteenth-century novels, or do these texts merely reflect a societal change that was already taking place? Is it true “that few people would fall in love had they never heard of love” (Rougemont 145)? Jones argues that “although the novel was instrumental in asserting modern ideals of marriage, the moral imperative to marry for love predated the

3 Romantic love was not the only respectable reason to get married during the nineteenth century. It was one competing narrative among many (and, I would argue, the narrative that emerged victorious). As Schaffer convincingly argues, there was an equally prevalent plot of familiar marriage (see Romance’s Rival). Another, very interesting, alternative model of love is that of the nineteenth-century American rational love movement, according to which true love was based on “an extended period of mutual self-scrutiny and revelation, and equal development of both sexes” (Leach 124).

6 establishment of the genre as a respectable literary form in the mid-eighteenth century” (4).4 Whether or not the novel is responsible for creating the idea of love as a motive for marriage, it certainly was instrumental in popularizing this notion, and, more importantly, in codifying and critiquing the form that true romantic love ought to take. In representing love, the novel inevitably engages in the practice of defining love.

In this project, I have chosen to focus primarily on realist novels because of the particular impact this mode has had on the love story. As many critics acknowledge, one of the major contributions of the nineteenth-century novel to the realist tradition was the interest in the individual, and the model of companionate marriage that followed.5 As Ian Watt explains, the rise of individualism weakened “the communal and traditional relationships” that once structured the novel – and the love plot – and instead emphasized “the importance of personal relationships[, which]...may be seen as offering the individual a more conscious and selective pattern of social life to replace the more diffuse, and...involuntary, social cohesions which individualism had undermined” (177). The realist love story, in theory then, ought to describe individuals who choose to marry one another due to their “special” qualities and personal desires, rather than couples involuntarily united by social or economic forces. As a genre dominated by individual choice, realism ought to describe romantic partnerships based on rational consent. Also, as this project ultimately works towards a consideration of the legal ramifications of the version of feminine love represented in these texts, it is beneficial to read novels that place this experience of love within a recognizable “real world” context.

What is especially interesting about how these realist novels represent and define romantic love is the way in which these descriptions begin to fall into a recognizable pattern, creating a myth of a decidedly involuntary, nearly unconscious, love. Although central to plot, love seems to lie on the generic margins of the text, as it defies the usual rules of realist motivation and causality. Authors on both sides of the Atlantic represent the experience of falling in love using similar

4 Jones attributes the rise of this ideal to “classic liberalism, in particular the writings of John Locke” (4). 5 The term “companionate marriage,” though often used by critics of the nineteenth-century novel, is a rather slippery one. As Schaffer points out, the term “is so vaguely defined that even the most eminent literary critics use it completely differently”: Sharon Marcus and Wendy Jones use it “to mean an amicable (non-erotic) partnership” while “Jennifer Phegley, Mary Lydon Shanley, and Ruth Perry all use the term ‘companionate’ to mean the opposite – they use it to reference romantic love…Meanwhile, Nancy Armstrong defines ‘companionate marriage’…[as] “a marriage in which women relinquish political control to the male in exchange for control of the private realm” (27). For the purposes of this project, I understand companionate marriage as a marriage based in a kind of quiet, less- than-passionate love founded on mutual esteem, friendship, and cooperation.

7 language and images that give shape to a fantasy structure that held – and still holds – considerable power in defining femininity and the feminine life. In all of the texts under study in this project, the woman in love is represented as semi-conscious, and under the sway of forces beyond her rational control. In each of the thematically organized chapters, I work to understand this phenomenon through a different discourse or lens. Why is the woman in love consistently represented in this way, and what are the effects of this representation? In the first chapter, I analyse George Eliot’s The Mill on the Floss (1860), Virginia Woolf’s The Voyage Out (1915), and William Dean Howells’s The Rise of Silas Lapham (1885) to argue that the persistent depiction of love as a dreamy surrender is, in these novels, partially a result of the heroine’s reading materials and reading practices. The heroine’s experience of love is governed by what I am calling “literary determinism,” according to which a heroine is fated to repeat either the plot of a beloved novel, or the pattern of self-surrender thought to be intrinsic to the feminine experience of identificatory readings of romantic texts. This chapter engages with nineteenth- century theories and anxieties about women’s reading, and examines the parameters of the genres of realism and romance, as it focuses on representations of women reading, and the connection between these scenes and the romantic depiction of the woman in love.

In the second chapter, the focus shifts to consider the impact of Charles Darwin’s theory of sexual selection, as set out in The Descent of Man, on the representation of female choice in the love plot. I analyse two multiple suitor courtship novels – George Gissing’s In the Year of Jubilee (1894) and Henry James’s The Portrait of a Lady (1881) – to explore the roles of, and conflicts between, instinct, desire, and rational preference in the heroine’s choice of a suitor. I argue that, despite their differences, both novels evince an anxiety about the possibility of female choice in love as they work to represent this choice as at least partially biologically determined, largely impossible, and even undesirable to the heroine herself.

The third chapter turns to nineteenth-century mental physiology to unpack the repeated trope of the “dream” in descriptions of women in love. Focusing primarily on works by thinkers such as William Carpenter, Frances Power Cobbe, Havelock Ellis, Sigmund Freud, and William James, I begin the chapter by fleshing out nineteenth-century definitions and connotations of the recurrent terms used to describe the actions and feelings of the woman in love: “unconscious,” “mechanical,” “semi-conscious,” “instinct,” and “dream.” In this chapter, I consider what it means to make a crucial life choice in a dream-state, and argue that Sarah Grand’s The Heavenly

Twins (1893) and Kate Chopin’s The Awakening (1899) play with and subvert conventional notions of female passivity to explore the ways in which a dreamy unconsciousness could create space for feminist rebellion and revolution.

In the fourth and final chapter, I turn to an analysis of the role of consent in the nineteenth- century marriage contract. If the woman in love is under the sway of unconscious instinctual urges, and the force of past stories and reading, what does this mean for her ability to consent to the legal marriage contract? This chapter explores the discourse of “marriage as contract” and looks to ideas of tacit and express consent to argue that the state of being in love, as described in the nineteenth-century novel, precludes the rational consent required by liberal contract theory. In this chapter, I conduct close readings of Thomas Hardy’s Tess of the D’Urbervilles (1891) and Edith Wharton’s Summer (1917) to argue that while these texts are critical of patriarchal law and order, and the eroticization of the sleepy, semi-conscious female figure, they continue to participate in a discourse that relegates women in love to tacit, bodily consent.

This dissertation, then, is interested in understanding the myth of love as it is represented in nineteenth-century novels and, in arguing that this myth insists that women in love are incapable of rational choice or consent. While romantic love is seen as the prerequisite (or at least one prerequisite) for marriage, it precludes the kind of rational, aware consent required for the legal marriage contract. The novels under study participate in and critique this convention but few are able to truly resolve the fundamental issue of how to reconcile romantic love with rational female choice. What ought to be the role of female choice in love, and how can one represent a love plot that is at once romantic and based on rational choice and consent? That these questions remain unresolved, even today, points to an underlying problem in one of our foundational cultural scripts: the idealized vision of romantic love leaves no space for the consent that twenty- first century educators are trying so desperately to inscribe in sexual interactions, both on campus and beyond, and this narrative implies that – when it comes to desire and romance – women are incapable of making choices and giving true consent.

That is not to say that this project is meant to be a lambasting of the love plot and the nineteenth- century ideal of romance. In fact, in many ways, while this project critiques that narrative it also celebrates it: there is something beautiful about the idea of falling into a love that is akin to a dream, that enables one to let go, to dissolve, to become one with another. In fact, the problem

9 may not lie entirely with the love plot; the rigid, legal ideal of perfectly free and rational consent is also deeply flawed. Perhaps we need to broaden our conception of consent to make space for decisions and choices that are valid despite being less-than-completely informed and aware. This project, of course, does not have the answers. What it does offer, however, is a multi-layered approach to a social and cultural problem; by analysing a single issue – the representation of love and consent in the nineteenth century – from a variety of angles, I hope to help us approach an understanding of one of the foundational narratives that define what it means to be a woman in the Anglo-American world.

Chapter 1 Literary Determinism in George Eliot’s The Mill on the Floss, Virginia Woolf’s The Voyage Out, and William Dean Howells’s The Rise of Silas Lapham Reading, Romance, and Realism

She had a grand idea, - this selfish, hard-fisted little woman..., - a grand idea of surrendering herself and all her possessions to a great passion...[S]he desired to be so in love that she could surrender everything to her love. There was as yet nothing of such love in her bosom...But she was alive to the romance of the thing, and was in love with the idea of being in love. ‘Ah,’ she would say to herself...‘if I had a Corsair of my own, how I would sit on watch for my lover’s boat by the seashore!’ And she believed it of herself, that she could do so.

Anthony Trollope, The Eustace Diamonds (36-37)

In The Eustace Diamonds (1871), Anthony Trollope’s conniving, materialistic, and self-centered Lizzie Eustace has “a grand idea” – the idea that she could fall completely, romantically in love. Of course, Lizzie reasons, “it would also be very nice to be a peeress” (37), and she proceeds to ruthlessly pursue the hapless, and decidedly unromantic, Lord Fawn. Lizzie’s desire to fall in love, and to fall into a love characterised by surrender and romance, is decisively linked to her reading. In the above quotation and indeed throughout the novel, Lizzie longs for a “Corsair,” the titular hero of Byron’s popular tale in verse (1814). Lizzie searches everywhere for her Corsair, and explores romances with Lord Fawn, her cousin Frank, and Lord George in the process. In a particularly amusing incident, she believes that she has found her Corsair in a police officer who is questioning her about her stolen diamonds (which she had originally hidden from authorities): she begins to imagine a perfect romantic life for herself with this “handsome...powerful, fine fellow, who would know what to do with swords and pistols...and too, no doubt...would understand poetry!” This vision is quickly undercut by the narrator who wryly comments that “[a]ny such dream, however, was altogether unavailing, as the major had a wife at home and seven children” (474). In this quick scene, the reader is presented with the ironic disconnection between Lizzie’s romantic dreams and the reality of her character and her situation. She reads the romance of the Corsair onto the sordid event of being questioned by a police officer with regards to diamonds that she herself had effectively stolen earlier in the plot. While Lizzie asserts that

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“poetry was what her very soul craved,” Trollope forces us to recognize that her desires in fact extend to “poetry, together with houses, champagne, jewels and admiration” (468); materialistic Lizzie cannot renounce the pleasures of the real world for the poetic joys of romance.

In Lizzie Eustace, we can see the pervasive nature of the myth of romantic love as perpetuated by literature: even callous, cruel, and selfish Lizzie imagines that her perfect fulfilment must come in the form of an intense romantic love characterized by surrender and shaped by her reading. Although she is a character thoroughly mired in the material world, she imagines that her perfect contentment must come in the form of a love that would lift her beyond the real and into the romantic. In this chapter, I explore the complex relationship between representations of romantic love and women’s reading, focusing particularly on the modes of realism and romance, to articulate what I am calling the force of literary determinism. According to this model, the persistent depiction of love as a dreamy act of unconscious surrender is a result of women’s reading and the power of past stories and literary conventions to determine the moment of falling in love, and limit the heroine’s capacity for free choice. Through an analysis of reading heroines in George Eliot’s The Mill on the Floss (1860), Virginia Woolf’s The Voyage Out (1915), and William Dean Howells’s The Rise of Silas Lapham (1885), I will demonstrate that even within the frame of the realist novel, the scene of falling in love is consistently portrayed in the romantic mode and that this invasion of romance into the real is presented as stemming from the heroine’s reading practices and materials. This chapter therefore lies at a rich intersection between the fields of theories and histories of reading, and genre studies in an effort to untangle why these self-conscious representations of reading align so closely with the heroine’s experience of love. In depicting their heroines reading, Eliot, Woolf, and Howells are all making deliberate statements about the power of reading to affect the reader; in this chapter I use these scenes of reading as lenses through which to understand the heroine’s profound emotion and sense of possession during the moment of falling in love or first experiencing desire.

Within British and American contexts, women’s reading has been a focus of much critical debate. As Catherine Golden summarizes in Images of the Woman Reader in Victorian British and American Fiction (2003), a “transatlantic reading debate” was taking place during the nineteenth century (21). While reading was lauded as educational – both for its capacity to expand women’s knowledge and reinforce the status quo – women’s reading also generated a great deal of anxiety as critics argued that women could suffer medical and moral diseases as a

12 result of their reading (22-40). As Kate Flint explains in The Woman Reader (1993), nineteenth- century ideas about women’s reading demonstrate some of the contradictions inherent in Victorian gender theory. While reading was a mark of the gentility and leisure associated with the ideal middle-class home, “it could also be regarded as dangerously useless” (Flint 11). Similarly, although reading allowed a woman to extend her knowledge, “hence, perhaps, becoming a fitter marital companion in the process[,] reading was often, none the less, unavoidably associated with woman’s ‘inappropriate’ educational ambition” (11). John Ruskin illustrates this in “Of Queen’s Gardens” (1865) when he writes that “a man ought to know any language or science he learns, thoroughly, while a woman ought to know the same language, or science, only so far as may enable her to sympathize in her husband’s pleasures” (92). This idea of limiting women’s reading to the domestically useful appears in the American context as well, but with a somewhat different inflection. While Victorian British women were encouraged to circumscribe their reading to fit their roles as good wives and relatively intelligent companions, American women were advised to select texts that would best suit their position as “republican wives” and “republican mothers,” responsible for teaching husbands and sons a correct, and distinctly nationalistic, moral code (Nichols; Phegley; Robbins). In both cases, the “wrong” type of women’s reading could lead to disastrous societal effects.

In addition to these broader implications of reckless women’s reading, cultural leaders and commentators on both sides of the Atlantic were also concerned with the bodily and moral effects of “bad” reading. Reading was thought to be “an enemy to ‘health and beauty’, likely to ‘hurt [the] eyes’ or ‘spoil [the] shape’” of the woman reader and “immoderate reading [was believed to cause] fainting and even dangerous changes in pulse rate” (Pearson 4).6 According to Dr. Hugh Lenox Hodge in his medical treatise On Diseases Peculiar to Women (1868), reading could cause early puberty or even a condition called “irritable uterus,” which apparently could be exacerbated with “any exertion, even of the upper extremities, in holding a book” (Hodge qtd. in Silverman 31). Similar arguments are raised in Dr. Mary Wood-Allen’s What a Young Woman Ought to Know (1899) and Dr. Edward H. Clarke’s Sex in Education (1873), both of which argue that excess reading could cause, among other things, “premature development” of the “organs of sex,” infertility, and “uterine disease” (Golden 33-35). Books were frequently compared to

6 For a fictional example, consider Jessica Morgan of George Gissing’s In the Year of Jubilee (1887). While studying for her BA, Jessica becomes “a ghost of girlhood, a dolorous image of frustrate [sic] sex” (17) and falls ill due to the mental strain of her exams.

13 mental food and overindulgence was figured as a form of dangerous addiction (Golden 36-37; Hochman Uncle Tom 14-15).

While reading any text in excess could cause these physical symptoms, moral ailments were mostly thought to be the result of excessive novel reading. The Saturday Review complained in 1867 that novels are “the medium through which moral poison is frequently administered,” arguing that this genre could affect a “woman’s sense of the broad demarcation between right and wrong” (qtd. in Flint 73). Fiction, particularly romantic fiction, could call female readers away from the demands and duties of everyday life, and into an amoral realm of “[i]nflamed passions and irritable temper” (Confessions and Experience of a Novel Reader (1855), qtd. in Brady). As a result of the many social, medical and moral effects of “bad” women’s reading, many nineteenth-century British and American cultural leaders were focused on controlling and directing women’s reading, spawning an entire genre of advice manuals, periodical articles and didactic literature.7 This discourse itself was largely transatlantic, with such texts circulating freely across borders, and containing a mix of British and American recommended readings (Golden 4).8

Earlier in the century, control over women’s reading was maintained through the tradition of family reading; many artistic representations of reading from the late eighteenth century and earlier half of the nineteenth century depict fathers reading aloud to their families around the fireplace (Sicherman 140). As readers, fathers could censor material, altering the stories to suit their audience.9 However, as literacy rates improved and reading materials became increasingly available, women’s reading experience changed and the primary image of the woman reader became that of a solitary figure, deeply absorbed in her book.10 Such representations tend to show the woman reader as “pensive, languorous, absorbed to point of immobility and of utterly

7 See Exercises in Reading and Recitation (1832), Miss Stodart’s Hints on Reading (1839), Sarah Stickney Ellis’s The Young Ladies’ Reader (1845), Charles H. Moore’s What to Read and How to Read (1870), William Parsons Atkinson’s On the Right Use of Books (1878), Noah Porter’s Books and Reading: What Books Shall I Read and How Shall I Read them? (1881), Frederick Harrison’s The Choice of Books (1886), and Lucy Soulsby’s Stray Thoughts on Reading (1897). 8 As Sarah Robbins explains in Managing Literacy (2004), many British didactic texts about reading were tweaked or repackaged for American audiences. 9 See Patricia Howell Michaelson’s Speaking Volumes: Women, Reading, and Speech in the Age of Austen (2002) and “Women in the Reading Circle” (Eighteenth-Century Life 1989). 10 For a famous example, see Winslow Homer’s “The New Novel” (1877), a portrait of a young woman stretched on the grass, dreamily engaged in a book.

14 disregarding her surroundings” (Losano 34).11 The woman reader now appears not in a safe parlour or family setting, but as a profoundly separate figure – herein lies “the element of peril” (Phegley and Badia 10). As American Bishop Alonzo Potter stated in 1848, “It is to be feared that too much of the reading of the present day is solitary...the abundance and cheapness of books doubtless contributes to this practice” (qtd in Brady 730). Critics such as Potter worried that women readers left to their own devices – like Maggie in The Mill on the Floss, Rachel in The Voyage Out, and Penelope in Silas Lapham – might over-sympathize with the text, or worse, sympathize with the wrong text.

This preoccupation with misdirected feminine sympathy stems from the nineteenth-century theory that women read differently from men because of their greater sensitivity, sensibility, and empathy (Golden 30; Kelley 411; Welter 152-153; Flint 22). Critics were therefore most concerned with practices of identificatory reading. Identification has been defined as the process of imagining oneself as the other – or as the character or author,12 in the case of reading – to such a degree that the experience can permanently alter one’s self and subjectivity (Bernstein 144- 147; Silverman 5; Green 21). Identificatory reading is particularly dangerous because it is considered an uncritical and unself-conscious mode of reading.13 As Jennifer Brady argues, many nineteenth-century critics were most concerned not with women’s emotional responses to texts, but with their passive receptivity to those emotions – their propensity for feeling without thinking. In How to be a Lady (1848), Harvey Newcomb urged young women: “THINK AS YOU READ. – DO not drink in the thoughts of others as you drink water; but examine them, and see whether they carry conviction to your own mind; and if they do, think them over” (qtd. in Silverman 34). The familiar refrain was that women would not do such thinking and thus were likely to imaginatively, and uncritically, enter the world of the novel and become so emotionally involved in the fiction that they would neglect their duties at home and lose interest in their day-

11 This image of the female reader still exists today. In Loving with a Vengeance (1982), Tania Modleski cites a TV commercial for Harlequin novels that shows a woman “lying on her bed holding a Harlequin novel and preparing to begin what she calls her ‘disappearing act’” (28). This ad imagines the female reader as passive, solitary, and nearly disappearing into the text. 12 In Literary Identification: from Charlotte Brontë to Tsitsi Dangarembga (2012), Laura Green identifies three “ontologically distinct kinds of” literary identification: these include identification “between characters within novels; responses of readers to characters…[and] relations between readers and authors” (9). For the purposes of this project, I will be focusing mostly on identification of readers to characters and authors. 13 Even today, theorists such as Michael Warner (2004) consider identification to be a form of “uncritical reading.” Warner defines uncritical reading as any reading practice that is “unsystematic,” “disorganized” and – importantly – not “self-conscious” (16).

15 to-day lives.14 Without guidance, women readers were considered more likely to passively identify rather than critically engage with a text. 15

Following the paradoxical structure of nineteenth-century theories of gender, these passive identificatory reading practices were at once viewed as an affirmation of feminine identity and as a cause for concern. Women were seen as particularly disposed to entering a state of absorption or surrender, in which the mind passively and emotionally would take in the material of the text. Indeed, Ruskin counsels identificatory reading as a model natural and appropriate to women:

it is not the object of education to turn a woman into a dictionary; but it is deeply necessary that she should be taught to enter with her whole personality into the history she reads; to picture the passages of it vitally in her own bright imagination; to apprehend, with her fine instincts, the pathetic circumstances and dramatic relations. (90)

Thinkers such as Ruskin believed that women’s “fine instincts” were best put to use through identificatory reading, in which a woman could enter into a text with her “whole personality” and “imagination.” This process was considered so natural and feminine that some authorities, such as Henry Maudsley, even related identification to the “intimate and special sympathies which a mother has with her child” (Sex in Mind and Education, qtd. in Flint 69).

However, identificatory reading was also considered dangerous: it was believed that through identification women readers could lose their ability to distinguish between the real and the fictional. Their feminine surrender to the material could be so complete and so unself-conscious that they were thought to be at the mercy of the author or the book. This is exactly the kind of reading style that Lizzie Eustace tries and fails to achieve through her readings of Byron, Scott, and Shelley. When Lizzie reads, she imagines that the texts will lift her beyond the details of her reality, into a world of dream and romance that she can map onto her own courtship experiences – she desires to surrender herself to a book, just as she says she wishes to surrender to her

14 For an amusing take on this anxiety, see George Cruikshank’s “My Wife is a Woman of Mind” (1847) caricatures, which demonstrate the mutual exclusivity of women’s reading and domesticity. 15 Of course, there is substantial evidence that actual women did not in fact read in this way. See Elisabeth B. Nichols’s “‘Blunted Hearts’: Female Readers and Printed Authority in the Early Republic” (2002), Mary Kelley’s “Reading Women/Women Reading: The Making of Learned Women in Antebellum America” (2002), and Barbara Sicherman’s “Sense and Sensibility” (1989).

“Corsair” and “great passion.” However, Lizzie is far too calculating to fully achieve this selfless absorption, even in a book. For example, when Lizzie resolves to read “Queen Mab,” she insists on positioning herself outside of “the coarse, inappropriate, everyday surroundings of a drawing- room” (364): she attempts to read the book on the edge of a rock, alongside the sea, next to her Irish castle, all the while imagining just how beautiful and picturesque she must look. Unfortunately for poor Lizzie, she quickly finds that she has underestimated the heat of the sun, the force of the wind, and the discomfort of her “narrow seat” and she is unable to become absorbed in her reading. Instead, she memorizes a few key passages – for the purposes of adorably quoting them in the company of suitors – and never finishes reading the poem. Lizzie, unlike the other female readers I will engage with in this chapter, is incapable of the unselfconsciousness required for identificatory, uncritical reading. This deficiency at once marks her as a “bad” or unfeminine woman and functions as a pointed critique of contemporary anxieties about the effects of women’s reading.

Many of these concerns focused specifically on the type of reading material that Lizzie is attempting to engage with: romantic texts. Identifying with the “right” text would alter women for the better, making them more genteel and ladylike. Identifying with the “wrong” texts could lead to disaster. Novels and romances were the main targets of anti-reading rhetoric as critics feared women readers, solitarily absorbed in their books, could become “preoccupied with the importance of romance” and “seek perpetually for excitement” (Flint 24), thus turning away from their real world responsibilities. As Ruskin explains, “the best romance becomes dangerous, if, by its excitement, it renders the ordinary course of life uninteresting, and increases the morbid thirst for useless acquaintance with scenes in which we shall never be called upon to act” (93). Such ideas are echoed across the Atlantic, with Philadelphia social expert Benjamin Rush “castigat[ing] the increasingly prevalent novels for inspiring readers with wildly romantic notions entirely unsuitable to American society” (Nichols 1).

Of course, concerns about susceptibility to romance were not limited to women readers. Novels such as Joseph Conrad’s Lord Jim (1900) and George Meredith’s The Ordeal of Richard Feverel (1859) demonstrate the perilous results that can occur when men become overly influenced by romance narratives. In this study, however, I have chosen to focus on women readers of romance for two reasons. First, I would argue along with numerous scholars that much nineteenth-century anxiety about reading was focused on women, who were considered at the time to be the

“reading class, or reading sex” (Howells Vol. III 26). The sheer mass of transatlantic texts about women’s reading points to this cultural preoccupation in the Anglo-American world. Second, while male characters such as Richard Feverel can be influenced by romance in scenes of love, the norm is in fact far closer to the narrative of Lord Jim, in which romance plays a role not in courtship but in the desire for great quests or feats of heroism. The romance that makes a male character a hero is a romance of action, of greatness, of triumph. The romance that makes a female character a heroine is a romance of, as Penelope Lapham recognizes, passivity, self- abnegation, and suffering. It is this romance, of the complex self-aggrandization and self-denial of nineteenth-century depictions of love, that interests me in this study and that constitutes the literary determinism I am looking at. As a romance of action, the male romance narrative emphasises an almost superhuman agency; conversely, the romance of feminine love is an overly-determined plot, which leaves little space for agency and consequently renders impossible the active, rational consent of liberal contract theory and of the marriage contract.

Romance was thought to be perilous for the woman reader because of its generic predilection for extremes and its detachment from ordinary social life. There is a long critical tradition, both in the context of American and British literature, of theorizing romance and realism in opposition to one another (Langbauer; Levine; Arac; Greenwald). Romance plots recount extreme adventures of pleasure and pain while realism presents the everyday and “middling” (Levine 5); romance represents the irrational excessive world of “the wish-fulfillment dream” (Frye Anatomy 86) and realism attempts to imitate “the real,” emphasizing “a causal connection operating through time[, and]...purport[ing] to be an authentic account of the actual experiences of individuals” (Watt 22- 27). Reading realist fiction could potentially help women in their domestic duties, by naturalizing them to the demands of genteel society and family life. The romance, however, could “seduce” the reader, offering her a “kind of fairy world” which would render her unfit for her “common life” (Beer 14). Romance is often depicted as the older, inferior genre and associated with feminine irrationality while realism is frequently thought of as the newer, superior mode and linked to masculine logic (Langbauer 3, 66). Some traits of realism include “chronology, particularity, interiority, viewpoint, and everyday subject matter” (Ermarth xi). Romance, on the other hand, is characterized by “suspensions of natural law” (Frye Anatomy 36), “stylized” characters (304) and “the sense of individual detachment from routine existence” (185). In the preface to The American (1877), Henry James describes romance as a form in

18 which the “balloon” of experience, usually tethered to the earth, is “cut” free; experience is represented as “disconnected and uncontrolled... – uncontrolled by our general sense of ‘the way things happen’” (Edel 1062-1065). The romance leaves behind the regular world and “the way things happen” in favour of a world “remade...in the image of desire” (Beer 79). While characters in realist fiction are often represented as “social creatures,” living in complex networks of interrelation, protagonists in the romance are often solitary stereotypes, “confronting other individuals or confronting mysterious or otherwise dire forces” (Chase 22). For my purposes, I will align myself with this critical tradition that defines the romance as a genre of extreme emotions, adventure, dream-worlds, stereotypical characters, and a detachment from the ordinary conditions of life – crucially, these are the features that recur again and again in representations of falling in love.

Another important difference between realism and romance that is essential to my argument is the representation of individual choice. In realism, characters are capable (within limits) of making choices that affect themselves and others. Alfred Habegger explains that “the distinctive contribution of realism [was] in representing ethical choice” (Gender 109-110); Lee Clark Mitchell echoes this sentiment, writing that realist characters are “defined through an elaborate process of responsible choice” (xii). Realist characters make choices and the novels’ plots demonstrate the consequences of these choices. In romance, causality is less strict and often events seem to almost “fall from the sky” onto the characters without their help or consent. Accordingly, Frye theorizes that the shape of the realist plot is horizontal, and the romance is vertical: “[t]he realist, with his sense of logical and horizontal continuity, leads us to the end of his story; the romancer, scrambling over a series of disconnected episodes, seems to be trying to get us to the top of it” (Secular 35). The romance’s vertical plot can for this reason seem predetermined and beyond the characters’ control: as in a dream, the events that befall the characters can arrive without warning and without cohesive logical links (Greenwald 3). Beer writes that romances tend “to offer tableaux instead of the processes of choosing” (69): the romance thus defined elides the moment of choice and the impact of causality, two features central to the realist plot. This element of romance is crucial to my reading of the problems of consent in romantically represented love.

Although the distinction between realism and romance remains somewhat consistent across the Atlantic –American and British critics maintain similar definitions of the two genres and

19 continually contrast the two – the role of romance within the canon and its gendered connotations are somewhat different across the two nations. While British theorists tend to position the romance as marginal and as a feminized, inferior genre, Americans, following Richard Chase, traditionally view the romance as more central to the canon. Chase famously argues that American novels are distinctly romantic and that “the element of romance has been far more noticeable in the American novel than in the English” (viii).16 Chase defines the romance as I have described it: characterised by a “freedom from the ordinary novelistic requirements of verisimilitude, development, and continuity” with a “tendency towards melodrama” and “a willingness to abandon moral questions or to ignore the spectacle of man in society” (ix). However, unlike many British critics, Chase lauds these features for their ability to represent the experience of American life and “moral truths of universal validity” that are “unavailable to realism” (xi). Chase identifies two streams of American romance: one is similar to the English romance and “descends from Scott.” These novels are “the tag-end of a European tradition...[and] have come down into our own literature without responding to the forms of imagination which the actualities of American life had inspired” (20)17. These marginal, inferior, and out-dated romances resemble those described in many works of British literary theory. Chase, however, focuses much of his study on the other, superior, mode of American romance: this stream “includes Hawthorne, Melville, James, Mark Twain, Frank Norris, Faulkner, Hemingway, and others who had found that romance offers certain qualities of thought and imagination which the American fiction writer needs but which are outside of the province of the novel proper” (20). These novels, supposedly influenced more by Russian and French traditions than by British conventions (3), reconstitute romance into a distinctly American form, according to Chase, creating an “amalgamation of realism and romance” (xii). In this model, the excesses of romance are not criticized as feminine and irrational, but rather embraced as expressive of the hope, strength, truth, and contradictions of the new nation.

This understanding of romance bears an interesting resemblance to realism. With their emphasis on the lived experience of Americans, these “romances” fit Michael Davitt Bell’s idea of the

16 Not all critics agree with Chase. For studies of the American novel that argue for the centrality of realism, as opposed to romance, see Alfred Habegger’s Gender, Fantasy, and Realism in American Literature (1982) and Amy Kaplan’s The Social Construction of American Realism (1988). 17Chase gives several examples of these romances: they include John Esten Cooke’s Surry of Eagle’s Nest (1886), Lew Wallace’s Ben Hur (1880) and Charles Major’s When Knighthood was in Flower (1899).

“associationist aesthetics” of American “conservative” romance (15). According to Bell, these “associationist” and “conservative” romances attempt to bridge the gap between the real and the ideal, imbuing the American real with the characteristics of European romance. During the nineteenth century, there was a push to write literature about “American materials”; this would at once create a national literature and add romance and lore to a new land that seemed devoid of magic or history (18). However, these American romances, with their emphasis on local experience, are in truth a hybrid form that necessarily shares interests and subject matter with realism (19).18

Romance-realism hybrids are not specific to the American context. Numerous critics of Victorian British fiction, including Laurie Langbauer, George Levine, and Suzanne Keen have noted the mixture of realism and romance in purportedly realist nineteenth-century British novels. Langbauer refers to romance as realism’s “shadowy enemy, always rising again” (200); similarly, Levine points out that realism must maintain elements of romance in order “to find appropriate space for such realities unassimilable to the conventions of realism” (205); and Keen describes such spaces as “narrative annexes,” allowing “impermissible subjects, and plot-altering events to appear, in a bounded way, within fictional worlds that might be expected to exclude them” (1). In both American and British genre theory, the insertion of romance into realism is figured as a method for integrating elements of magic, fantasy, and extreme emotion into the social, orderly world of the realist text. It therefore makes sense that scenes of falling in love – typically characterized by passion and feelings of transcendence – are consistent examples of these romantic “narrative annexes” in both British and American realist fiction. But why must the representation of love take this romantic shape? In this chapter, I will argue that in The Mill on the Floss, The Voyage Out, and The Rise of Silas Lapham the heroine is pre-determined to experience love in the romantic mode because of her identificatory reading of romantic texts.

This element of pre-determination is important and especially peculiar within the context of the realist novel. As a genre dominated by individual choice, realism in theory ought to describe romantic partnerships formed based on rational consent. However, as this chapter will

18 In “National Literature” (1820), James Kirke Paulding argues for the emergence of a “romantic” American fiction based on “native materials”: “The best and most perfect works of imagination appear to me to be those which are founded upon a combination of such characters as every generation of men exhibits, and such events as have often taken place in the world and will again” (qtd. in Bell 19). As Bell points out, this “definition smacks far more of” the novel than the romance (19).

21 demonstrate, the scene of falling in love is one that struggles to adhere to the generic parameters of realism, and to its paradigmatic focus on individuals and choice. Instead, love scenes are consistently depicted in a dream-like romantic mode: this generic aberration, in Eliot’s The Mill on the Floss, Woolf’s The Voyage Out, and Howells’s The Rise of Silas Lapham, is directly tied to women’s reading practices and materials. In this chapter, I will focus on representations of the woman reader and of women falling in love, to argue that the lack of female choice in love in these novels – and the persistent depiction of love as a dreamy surrender – is a result of a system of literary determinism, in which female readers’ experience of love is determined by the nature of their reading materials and reading practices. This determinism does not mean that every aspect of the heroine’s life is controlled by fiction and her mode of reading nor that she is completely incapable of choice, but that, while she may try to resist, the heroine’s experience of love is largely imprinted upon and framed by her reading. As a result of their identificatory reading of romantic texts, Maggie, Rachel, and Penelope all enter into a similar world of romance when they experience love.

2 The Mill on the Floss

When Maggie Tulliver falls in love in George Eliot’s The Mill on the Floss, the scene is characterized by the language of dream and surrender, of other-worldliness and pre- determination – it is a romantic “narrative annex” within the generally realist novel. This invasion of the romance into the real, particularly at the moment of falling in love, is portrayed as being a result of Maggie’s identificatory reading style and romantic reading material. Maggie’s readings of Byron, Scott, and even Thomas à Kempis shape her experience of love in a clear example of literary determinism. Maggie is an avid reader and her engagement with texts varies, but I will argue, as Margaret Homans does19, that Maggie grows from a more critical and independent reader into a more literal and “feminine” reader. It is this “feminine,” identificatory style of reading that leads her to experience love in the romantic mode.

19 Homans, who does not address Maggie’s reading of Byron and Scott or issues of romance/identification, rightly describes Maggie’s development as a reader as a move from creative and improvisational reading to more “literal” and “docile” – and thus feminine – reading.

Maggie is shown to be capable of two modes of reading: critical and identificatory. She is depicted alternately as reading books cleverly, “understand[ing] ‘em better nor half the folks as are growed up,” as her father comments (22), or as absorbed in her reading, “dreaming over her book” (21) and imagining herself into the world of the text. The first scene of Maggie’s reading, in which she reads The History of the Devil by Daniel Defoe, is an example of the former. When she explains the drowning of the witches, young Maggie is quick to understand and critique the text: “if she swims she’s a witch, and if she’s drowned – and killed, you know – she’s innocent, and not a witch, but only a poor silly old woman. But what good would it do her then, you know, when she was drowned?” (23). This type of alert and independent reading strikes Mr. Tulliver with “petrifying wonder” (23). Such reading material and strategies are inappropriate for a girl: “allays at her book! But it’s bad – it’s bad…a woman’s no business wi’ being so clever; it’ll turn to trouble” (22). She is advised to read “prettier books” (24) and, it is implied, to read in prettier ways. Such prettier (and more female-friendly) texts include Aesop’s Fables and The Pilgrim’s Progress when she is a child and the romances of Byron and Scott when she is grown. When Maggie reads these texts, she employs a markedly different reading strategy than the one applied to Defoe. While Maggie’s reading of Defoe leads her to question and criticize social standards and processes (an intellectual rebellion that startles her father), her romantic reading strategy is more receptive and passive. Instead of engaging intellectually with the text, she engages emotionally, using her readings to spin uncomplicated, if quietly rebellious, fantasies.

Maggie’s mode of reading shifts in this way in response to the reprimands of her family and other adult authority figures, as well as the difficult circumstances of her life. Not only is her father “petrified” at her reading of Defoe, but when she asks Mr. Stelling, her brother’s tutor, if she can study Latin, she is informed that while women “can pick up a little of everything...they couldn’t go far into anything. They’re quick and shallow” (163). Maggie feels “oppressed” by this “dreadful destiny” (163) as the myriad adult figures in her life discourage her from critical and intellectual endeavours. In addition, she turns increasingly to identification with romantic texts in order to emotionally and mentally escape the challenges of living in St Oggs. Throughout most of her life, Maggie has a great deal of difficulty fitting her personality and desires into the social world around her. She has an “imaginative and passionate nature” (290) and experiences “larger wants than others seemed to feel...wide, hopeless yearning[s] for that something, whatever it was, that was the greatest and best on this earth” (303). In this desire for passionate

23 extremes, Maggie has a personality best accommodated by romance and yet she lives surrounded by the “middling” features of realism. Eliot describes the “sordid life” of the Tullivers and Dodsons as

irradiated by no sublime principles, no romantic visions, no active, self- renouncing faith; moved by none of those wild, uncontrollable passions...Here, one has conventional worldly notions and habits without instructions or polish[.] (286)

Within this “conventional” and unromantic environment, Maggie struggles with a “conflict between the inward impulse and the outward fact” (290). She is a “wild thing” (17) who needs to be loved (44), and who, despite all of her cleverness, “rushe[s] to her deeds with passionate impulse” (73). These “passionate impulses” often lead her to actions that are frowned upon by her loved ones, such as cutting her hair or neglecting the rabbits. Maggie feels a great “hunger” for love, acceptance and sympathy, but she struggles to be herself and still achieve these bonds with her family, and particularly with her brother Tom. In reading the romance, Maggie imagines a world in which such emotional relationships would be simple and natural – a world in which she could be unselfconscious and enjoy reciprocal love without effort.

Maggie’s readings of Byron and Scott in particular serve these escapist functions: these are the texts she “dreams over.” The mode of reading she applies to these texts is not completely passive – she does use her reading to develop personal fantasies – but it is decidedly more emotional and identificatory than critical. For example, during the difficult time of her father’s illness and financial crisis, Maggie muses that “if she could have had all Scott’s novels and Byron’s poems, then perhaps she might have found happiness enough to dull her sensibility to her actual daily life” (301). Here, Maggie enacts the fears of Victorian anti-reading pundits, entering imaginatively into her books and using them as anesthetizing agents, alienating her and her desires from the real world. Maggie associates Byron and Scott with the creation of “dream- worlds” (301). She fantasizes about “wild romances of a flight from home in search of something less sordid and dreary; she would go to some great man – Walter Scott, perhaps – and tell him how wretched and how clever she was, and he would surely do something for her” (303). Not only does the actual moment of reading allow for an escape from reality, a moment of “dreamy”

24 reverie, but Maggie’s romantic readings help her to perpetuate fantasies in which she can enter a new, extraordinary world. Maggie reflects that

everyone in the [usual] world seemed so hard and unkind…in books there were people who were always agreeable or tender, and delighted to do things that made one happy, and who did not show their kindness by finding fault. The world outside the books was not a happy one[.] (249)

Maggie reads romance to imagine a world in which she can relate to others in uncomplicated bonds of sympathy. However, these reveries are always short-lived. Though she dreams of running away to Walter Scott, “in the middle of her vision her father would perhaps enter the room…The voice pierced through Maggie like a sword; there was another sadness besides her own, and she had been thinking of turning her back on it and forsaking it” (303); while her romantic readings and fantasies bring her into a dream realm in which she can momentarily forget herself and her surroundings, Maggie repeatedly returns to the moral obligations of her reality and of the realistic mode more generally. Although “there were few sounds that roused Maggie when she was dreaming over her book…Tom’s name served as well as the shrillest whistle” (21) – repeatedly, sympathy for others rouses her from her romantic daydreams, and the mode of the novel shifts decidedly back to realism. Reading the romance, and imagining herself as a character in a romance, only enables Maggie to escape briefly from the difficult ties of her reality.

Maggie’s feelings for her family and her obligations to her community continually draw her out of the romantic reveries she associates with the works of Byron and Scott. While her fantasies are temporarily satisfying, “they were hardly what she wanted...no dream-world would satisfy her now. She wanted some explanation of this hard, real life” (301). She chooses to leave the tempting dream worlds of romance to support and care for her family. As she matures, Maggie turns away from her beloved romances (she even refuses The Pirate when Philip offers it to her in the Red Deeps) and turns instead to a text that she believes will help her to reconcile herself to the difficulties of her reality: The Life of Thomas à Kempis. After her father’s crisis, she becomes an ardent reader of “her three books, the Bible, Thomas à Kempis, and the Christian Year” (309). On the surface, these devotional materials seem quite different from romantic literature. While romantic texts provide an outlet for Maggie’s passionate yearnings, Thomas à Kempis

25 encourages Maggie to renounce all personal desires in order to achieve “inward peace” (305). However, close analysis reveals that Maggie’s reading style in interpreting these two types of literature is actually quite similar. As she reads Kempis’s words, she experiences them like “a strain of solemn music”:

she went on from one brown mark to another, where the quiet hand seemed to point, hardly conscious that she was reading, seeming rather to listen while a low voice said ‘Forsake thyself, resign thyself...Then shall all vain imaginations, evil perturbations and superfluous cares fly away; then shall immoderate fear leave thee, and inordinate love shall die.’ (305)

Northrop Frye points out that music has a romantic effect “riveting the attention but putting the consciousness to sleep” (Frye Secular 149); here, as “hardly conscious” Maggie “listens” to the text, she surrenders passively to its message, slipping into the dangerously receptive mode of reading often associated with woman readers of romance. While this text speaks of self- renunciation rather than wish fulfilment, and banishment rather than gratification of immoderate emotions and impulses, Maggie reads Kempis in an unselfconscious mode not unlike the “dreaming over her book” method she employs with Byron and Scott. The words of Thomas à Kempis, like those of Sir Walter Scott “filled her mind with a continual stream of rhythmic memories” (309). Maggie identifies with the words on the page and imagines herself in a personal relationship with Thomas à Kempis. She looks to Kempis as she once looked to Scott, to give her “that satisfaction which she had so long been craving in vain” (305), to satisfy her constant need for “something that would link together the wonderful impressions of this mysterious life and give her soul a sense of home in it” (250). Also, Maggie’s reading of this devotional text similarly perpetuates romantic fantasies of importance and grandeur. Her readings inspire her to good works and self-sacrifice, but, as the narrator comments: “From what you know of her, you will not be surprised that she threw some exaggeration and wilfulness, some pride and impetuosity, even into her self-renunciation; her own life was still a drama for her in which she demanded of herself that her part should be played with intensity” (308). When she sews for the poor, for example, she insists upon buying her materials in public at St. Oggs, on relishing the performance of her self-renouncing virtue. Although Maggie is imbibing Kempis’s teachings of self-sacrifice and good deeds, she uses this text to position herself as the heroine of a romantic fantasy.

Maggie’s reading of Thomas à Kempis helps to complete her growth from unconventional, active, critical child reader to conventional, passive, uncritical “feminine” reader. Under the influence of Kempis and her distinctly romantic method of reading, Maggie’s passivity extends from the text to the world around her. She surrenders to life as she surrenders to the words in the book; she “give[s] up wishing and only think[s] of bearing what is laid upon [her] and doing what is given [her] to do” (317). Her reading of Kempis makes her “so submissive” (309) that she finally allows Mrs. Tulliver to tame and beautify her “abundant black locks” (310). Through her reading of this devotional text, the “‘contrairy’ child” becomes “a sight anyone might have been pleased to look at” (309). Suddenly, she is no longer a “Shetland pony,” but a “tall, dark- eyed nymph with her jet-black coronet of hair” (392). In this latter part of the novel, Maggie transforms into a beautiful lady characterized by grace and self-sacrifice. Once Maggie becomes this socially acceptable heroine, her story begins to shift from “the history of unfashionable families” (307) to the more “fashionable” marriage plot convention. In teaching her the self- importance and social acceptance that can come from renunciation, Maggie’s reading of Thomas à Kempis teaches her to become the ideal heroine of a romantic love plot.

It is in this state that Maggie meets her cousin Lucy’s suitor, Stephen Guest. Maggie’s identificatory, receptive feminine reading style determines her experience of forbidden love (or lust) with Stephen. The scenes in which Maggie and Stephen interact echo the language of dream used to describe Maggie’s readings of Byron and Scott, as well as the music motif that characterizes her reading of Thomas à Kempis. Maggie learns to experience love in the romantic mode as a result of her reading. In fact, Eliot explicitly connects Maggie’s love for Stephen to romantic reading: with him “she felt the half-remote presence of a world of love and beauty and delight, made up of vague, mingled images from all the poetry and romance she had ever read or had ever woven in her dreamy reveries” (402).20 As with reading Byron or Scott, time spent with Stephen leads Maggie beyond the confines of ordinary “sordid” reality and into an “enchanted land” (462); she feels that his “glances and tones bring the breath of poetry with them into a room that is half stifling with glaring gas and hard flirtation” (461). Finally, Maggie’s experiences with Stephen are characterized by a state of semi-conscious receptivity – that notably leaves little room for thought and choice – akin to that she experiences as she “listens” to

20 Similar to Gustave Flaubert’s Emma Bovary, Maggie develops a vision of what love should be based on her experience of reading.

27 the words of Thomas à Kempis. When she is with Stephen, “Maggie only felt that life was revealing something quite new to her, and she was absorbed in the direct, immediate experience without any energy left for taking account of it and reasoning about it” (421-2). She applies her uncritical reading strategy not only to books but also to love. Maggie is caught up in a romantic fantasy with Stephen, seduced by a world like that in the books in which she can be loved and will not have to struggle. She does not critically interrogate her actions or feelings; “thought did not belong to that enchanted haze in which they [she and Stephen] were enveloped; it belonged to the past and the future that lay outside the haze. Maggie was only dimly conscious” (487). Maggie’s relationship with Stephen represents the seductive and dangerous possibilities of enacting the world suggested by romantic readings and fantasies.

Stephen’s attractiveness is closely tied to his musical abilities, which seem to hypnotize Maggie into a sleepy surrender. It is when Maggie listens to Stephen’s singing that “all her good intentions were lost in the vague state of emotion produced” by the music (435). She slides into this romantic erotic state without effort and has “little more power of concealing the impressions made upon her than if she had been constructed of musical strings” (429). Maggie is as passively receptive to the charm of Stephen’s song as she is to the “strain of solemn music” she hears in the words of Thomas à Kempis. Maggie surrenders to Stephen’s singing, and allows it to lift her out of the ordinary waking world and into a dream world of romance.

The similarities between romance reading and Maggie’s relationship with Stephen are most manifest when Maggie floats away with Stephen on the boat. There is the sense, as they are borne along by “the swift, silent stream” and speak in “strange, dreamy, absent tone[s]” (488), that they are exiting the world of St. Oggs for some other, asocial dream realm. The entire scene appears semi-conscious and, to Maggie, feels pre-determined by some large outside force. In this moment, Maggie temporarily surrenders to a world of ease, fantasy, and dream. She leaves the harsh and “middling” space of realism and enters what seems to be another world, in which she can forget her individualized self and the particular features of her everyday life:

Behind all the delicious visions of these last hours which had flowed over her like a soft stream and made her entirely passive, there was the dim consciousness that the condition was a transient one and that the morrow must bring back the old life of struggle...But now nothing was distinct to her; she was being lulled to sleep

with that soft stream still flowing over her, with those delicious visions melting and fading like the wondrous aerial land of the west. (493)

The boat ride scene creates a space of “dim consciousness,” of “sleep” and “delicious visions,” that temporarily detaches Maggie from the realistic relational ties of family and community. As Maggie drifts into this soporific fantasy, this tempting semi-conscious existence, her individualized self and her awareness of her environment dissolve; she becomes the “stylized” character of the romance and experiences a “suspension of self” often connected to “a specifically feminine reading practice” of over-identification with the text and its protagonist (Pearson 84). In this dream world, “nothing was distinct”; like the landscape, Maggie too is “melting and fading.” The particular facts of herself and her life, for example her intense love for Tom, or her histories with Philip and Lucy, threaten to dissipate in this world of “dim consciousness” as she passively lets go of reality and society in favour of fantasy and romance.

In this sequence on the boat, Maggie is released from complexities of self and surroundings, the characteristics of realism that make choice both meaningful and difficult. As she enters the boat, “Maggie felt that she was being led down…by this stronger presence that seemed to bear her along without any act of her own will” (486-7); she feels that “the boat glided without his [Stephen’s] help” (487). She “yearns” to believe that “that the tide was doing it all, that she might glide along with the swift, silent stream and not struggle anymore” (488). Although at first she protests, Maggie seems to fall under a spell:

there was an unspeakable charm in being told what to do and having everything decided for her…Maggie was hardly conscious of having said or done anything decisive. All yielding is attended with a less vivid consciousness than resistance; it is the partial sleep of thought; it is the submergence of our own personality by another. Every influence tended to lull her into acquiescence: that dreamy gliding in the boat…all helped to bring her into more complete subjection to that strong mysterious charm. (490)

On the boat, Maggie’s personality is “submerged” in another: this experience echoes the concerns and the language of nineteenth-century critics of women’s reading of romance. Just as in the process of identificatory reading, Maggie loses the power to reason as she enters a “complete subjection” that forces her to yield to the dangerous whims of another. Modleski

29 identifies this type of “extreme passivity” and “self-forgetfulness” as a romantic trope in women’s fiction (29, 45) and argues that this state of “self-transcendence” (29) represents a pervasive female fantasy for women because it allows them to escape the “constant mental activity [they] must generally engage in” (45). Women, and female characters like Maggie, are always being watched, and must engage in a constant self-policing (44). On the boat with Stephen, Maggie can abandon her vigilance, and drift into a semi-conscious state characterized by the “partial sleep of thought” – a space of dream and surrender.

As Maggie herself recognizes, this is a space in which consent is nearly impossible. She accuses Stephen of trying to “deprive [her] of any choice” (Eliot 489). As she begins to think of the consequences of her actions, particularly for her loved ones, Maggie awakens from the dream of effortless love and loses her “passiveness” (496). Stephen recognizes that he merely had her “tacit assent” the previous day (496) and while she admits that she “couldn’t choose yesterday,” he promises that he will “obey [her] now” and “do nothing” without her “full consent” (497). Maggie tells Stephen, with “timid resolution,” that she never truly consented to her love for him and for that reason, they must return to St. Oggs:

I have never consented to it with my whole mind…I have never deliberately consented to it…It has never been my will to marry you; if you were to win consent from the momentary triumph of my feeling for you, you would not have my whole soul. If I could wake back again into the time before yesterday, I would choose to be true to my calmer affections and live without the joy of love. (500)

Here Maggie differentiates between the “tacit consent,” granted by her physical presence on the boat and her “feeling” for him – the only consent possible within the space of romance – and the consent that could only be granted “deliberately” and with her “whole mind.” Maggie awakens from the dream-state of romance and asserts that, for her, meaningful consent must be based on rational choice. Eliot makes it very clear in this moment not only that consent is essential for Maggie, but that such consent must be rational and active. Here, Eliot demonstrates that the true danger of a romantically determined love is that it renders such consent impossible, leaving little room for rational, and therefore moral, action.

The general movement between romance and realism in the text, therefore, tracks an oscillation between indulgence in romance and punishment for such indulgence. Maggie awakes from her

30 romantic reverie on the boat with Stephen and chooses to return home to St. Oggs to face the realist and social consequences of her actions. As Daniel Cottom explains, Eliot’s novels are often characterized by a somewhat “masochistic” relationship between realism and romance. Characters “must take pains...to cure themselves through the experience of sickness and to undergo extreme suffering to purge themselves of romance” (128). George Levine makes a similar argument, stating that “[t]he progress of Maggie’s disenchantment echoes the conventional progress of the disenchanted protagonists of realistic fiction: an excessively romantic and egoistic heroine must learn the relation of desire to possibility, of self to society” (45). While the realm of romance allows Maggie to drift temporarily into a space of easy and effortless sociality, she must continually return to the punishing social world of St. Oggs.

The critique of romance in The Mill on the Floss, however, is not quite as straightforward as that: Eliot’s representation of the conflict between realism and romance is complicated by the flood that ends the novel. Though Maggie manages to resist the seduction of Stephen Guest, the flood signals a return to the dream world of romance. Maggie’s experience during the flood is described in similar terms as her boat ride with Stephen: “[t]he whole thing had been so rapid, so dreamlike, that the threads of ordinary association were broken” (541). Again, the force of moving water carries her away from her regular life into what seems to be another world. During the flood, she enters a realm that is the fatal underside of her romantic fantasies, a space “which had made the nightmare of her childish dreams” (542). As with her boat ride with Stephen, “there was no choice of courses, no room for hesitation, and she floated into the current. Swiftly she went now, without effort” (543). Indeed, “in the first moment Maggie felt nothing, thought of nothing” (541). The final scene of the flood bears all the markers of other romantic episodes in the text, such as Maggie’s fantasies about Byron and Scott, and her boat ride with Stephen: the flood lifts her away from the social world of St. Oggs and into a dream-like space characterized by the suspension of thought, self, and choice.

Again, the shift into romance is strongly linked to Maggie’s reading. Prior to the flood, Maggie has received news from Dr. Kenn that he will be unable to employ her and her future appears to be nothing but an unending struggle against the social mores of St. Oggs (537). Then, Stephen’s letter arrives and once more, Maggie feels herself surrender to passive reading: “[s]he did not read the letter; she heard him uttering it, and the voice shook her with its old strange power” (538-9). The force of romance calls out to her almost musically and suddenly she perceives two

31 possible fates for herself: one is “a lonely future through which she must carry the burden of regret, upheld only by clinging faith” – the future realism and the real world have in store for her – and the other, “in which hard endurance and effort were to be exchanged for easy delicious leaning on another’s strength!” – a permanent return to the romantic dream worlds of her girlhood reading of Byron and Scott, and her boat ride with Stephen. As she contemplates these options, Maggie recites the words of Thomas à Kempis. As Homans astutely notes, at this point in Maggie’s development as a reader “her adult self is a battleground for conflicting texts” (125). In this scene,

she is reading again, choosing this time between two texts: the letter from Stephen and the words of Thomas à Kempis that would help her resist Stephen’s appeal. At this last stage in her growth, her reading is only the passive reiteration of conflicting texts for which she is simply the medium, providing no original words of her own. (124)

Maggie has grown to be such a passive, feminine reader, that she is limited to regurgitating and negotiating received texts. As the words of Stephen and Kempis swirl in her head, Maggie’s choice is merely whom to listen to, to which voice she will surrender. It is at this moment that the flood waters rush in. Homans argues that Maggie’s death by flood therefore represents her death by reading: she posits that the “complete feminine docility” that Maggie has learned through her reading “leads to the self’s silence and ultimately to death” (125). While the flood does end with Maggie’s death, I would like to suggest that the text provides a somewhat less dark view of the ending. Instead of leading to “the self’s silence,” this final entry into romance brings Maggie into a space in which she can reconcile the sympathetic demands of the real world with the ease and fantasy of romance. The ending represents an amalgamation of the tenets of realism and romance that “rescues” Maggie from the difficult choice between community (the real world of St. Oggs) and romantic life (running away with Stephen).

While the flood scene is described using a similar language of dream and surrender, there are distinct differences between the romantic world of the flood and those of Maggie’s fantasies about Stephen, Byron, and Scott. During the flood, for the first time, the action that Maggie so wishes to surrender to – the force of the rushing water around her – is concurrent with her ideas of moral sympathy. She gets onto the boat not to drift away from the emotional ties and

32 responsibilities she has to her family but to save her brother, Tom. As with her boat ride with Stephen, and her dream of escape to Scott, sympathy rouses Maggie “to fuller consciousness” (541): but this time she is able to quickly wake from her paralysis and “she was in action” (542). Maggie is able to break out of her romantic haze as she “seize[s] an oar and beg[ins] to paddle the boat forward with the energy of waking hope” (542). In this romantic episode, Maggie’s struggle is not mired in a moral conflict of self versus relation or community. During the flood, there is finally space for female agency – as evidenced in Maggie’s taking of the oars – and such agency can be moral and satisfy Maggie’s need to love and be loved. She rushes through the current to reach her brother, who greets her with “an embrace never to be parted” (546). Finally, Maggie is loved and recognized and she can surrender to a romantic world of easy, reciprocal relations without dire social consequences or moral conflict. No choice was required to lead Maggie to this end, as the force of the water seems to arrive like a literary act of God designed to save Maggie from the turmoil of negotiating received texts or narratives. As this scene ends in her death, Maggie need never awaken to return to the real world of struggle. The flood provides the ultimate release. In this final scene, the desirable dream-like surrender of romance is concurrent with the relational sympathetic demands of Maggie’s real world.

This ending complicates the critique of romance and romantic, identificatory reading that I have been tracing throughout the novel. While surrender to romance is problematic, as evidenced through Maggie’s fantasies about Byron and Scott and her disastrous boat trip with Stephen Guest, romance may be the only mode capable of ending Maggie’s struggle between “inward impulse” and “outward fact.” The final romantic flood enables Maggie to reconcile her dream of easy love and relation with the outward circumstances of her life. While it does not open up a space for female consent and choice, the flood can be read as a happy ending as it allows Maggie to inhabit her fantasy of utter surrender truly and uncomplicatedly: the action that she is pushed to by forces beyond her control finally balances her personal desires with her emotional ties to her family. As Cottom points out, “romance is not wrong, as far as Eliot was concerned – in fact, it is only too right” (128), in representing a world of ease and importance that all desire. The conclusion of the The Mill on the Floss, contrary to the presentation of romance throughout, embraces romance; the end indulges in the seductive, but elsewhere denied, possibilities of romantic fantasy.

3 The Voyage Out

“We are happy together.” He did not seem to be speaking, or she to be hearing. “Very happy,” she answered... “We love each other,” Terence said. “We love each other,” she repeated. “We love each other,” Terence repeated...She said “Terence” once; he answered “Rachel.”... “Terrible – terrible,” she murmured after another pause, but in saying this she was thinking as much of the persistent churning of the water as of her own feelings. On and on it went in the distance, the senseless and cruel churning of the water... “Is it true, or is it a dream?” “It’s true, it’s true.” Virginia Woolf, The Voyage Out (278-283)

In this scene from Virginia Woolf’s first novel, The Voyage Out (1915), Rachel Vinrace and Terence Hewet confess their love for one another. Similar to the boat sequence in The Mill on the Floss, this moment is presented as dream-like and pervaded by the image of “senseless” moving water (while Terence does not propose on a boat, he proposes by the waterside, soon after a boat ride). Like Maggie and Stephen, Rachel and Terence seem “unable to frame any thoughts” (278) as they sleepwalk through their declaration of love. The two appear as oddly disembodied voices, repeating each other’s words as they drift in a romantic and dream-like sea. While they repeat each other’s names, the scene is characterized by de-individuation rather than mutual recognition, and by the sense that the two are reciting a predetermined script, rather than actively consenting to love. Woolf presents this scripted, over-determined moment of recognizing love as being the result of a fictionalized, literary marriage plot that Rachel encounters both through her readings of books and of characters around her.

The Voyage Out tells the story of Rachel Vinrace, a heroine who begins the novel as “weak rather than decided” and defined by a “lack of colour and definite outline” (16). The plot details her journey from her father’s boat to a South American resort with her aunt and surrogate mother, Helen Ambrose. While in South America, Rachel meets Terence Hewet, an aspiring novelist. The two fall in love, become engaged, and then the story ends abruptly with Rachel’s death by fever. While the novel recounts Rachel’s personal development, Rachel’s “voyage out”

34 is as much a journey into literature as it is one into womanhood: her growth as a woman and individual is strongly influenced by her reading and her introduction to different literary texts and reading methods. At the start of the novel, Rachel “did not naturally care for books” (30). Helen and Terence, as well as various other secondary characters in The Voyage Out, influence Rachel’s growth by shaping her reading habits. Nearly every character in the novel has some relationship to books or reading, from Miss Allan who is compiling a literary anthology to Ridley Ambrose the secluded scholar to Susan Warrington who reads insipid ladies’ fiction aloud to her aunt. As Rachel meets these figures and moves from Richmond to her father’s ship to South America, she negotiates different reading strategies and wrestles with the haunting and seemingly inescapable marriage plot and the model of femininity it entails.

Rachel first encounters the seductive possibilities of the marriage plot on her father’s boat where she meets Richard and Clarissa Dalloway, who represent “almost a parody of the Victorian ideal” of love and marriage (Kennard 153).21 While Rachel openly professes that she “shall never marry” (57), and as such seems to outright reject the life the Dalloways represent, she is undeniably attracted to the couple. She is fascinated by Clarissa’s beauty and charm, and – in a moment of romantic confusion – is kissed by Richard Dalloway. This kiss seems to happen without her control and opens her life up to “infinite possibilities she had never guessed at” (73). While this is not a moment of falling in love, it is the moment in which Rachel discovers and first experiences sexual desire. With a rush of water, the boat surges, pushing their two bodies together: “holding her tightly, he kissed her passionately, so that she felt the hardness of his body and the roughness of his cheek printed upon hers” (73). With this illicit kiss that notably imprints her, Rachel is inducted into the world of gender relations and the literary marriage plot that the Dalloways represent. She feels in this moment that “her small world [was] becoming wonderfully enlarged” (80) as she begins to recognize her sexuality and her femininity. While she professes that she “like[s] him” and “like[s] being kissed” (79) there is the immediate suggestion that in opening her to sexuality, this kiss has also introduced Rachel to the confines of traditional womanhood, giving a particularly claustrophobic definition to her previously undefined self. When Richard kisses Rachel,

21 Clarissa compares her reverence for her husband to “what my mother and women of her generation felt for Christ” (48) and Richard extols his wife’s virtues as the “Angel in the House” (62).

She fell back in her chair, with tremendous beats of the heart, each of which sent black waves across her eyes...Her head was cold, her knees shaking, and the physical pain of the emotion was so great that she could only keep herself moving across the great leaps of her heart. She...gradually ceased to feel, for a chill of body and mind crept over her. (73)

With the kiss, “black waves” cross her eyes and she “ceased to feel” – the language and imagery parallels that of Maggie and Stephen’s boat trip; Rachel too experiences the surrender and dissolution of self characteristic of the romantic representation of love and desire. The pleasure and heat of the kiss are not without “pain” and “chill” and the images here notably foreshadow the sensations Rachel experiences at the end of the novel when she dies of brain fever. In waking up to sexuality, there is a kind of death associated with becoming a woman.

The images of darkness and water continue as Rachel has the first of a series of recurring nightmares the night after the kiss:

She dreamt that she was walking down a long tunnel, which grew so narrow by degrees that she could touch the damp bricks on either side…she found herself trapped in it, bricks meeting her wherever she turned, alone with a little deformed man who squatted on the floor gibbering, with long nails. His face was pitted and like the face of an animal. The wall behind him oozed with damp, which collected in drops and slid down…she felt herself pursued…A voice moaned for her; eyes desired her. (74)

While during the daytime, the kiss makes her feel that her world is “enlarged,” the night reveals the dark underside of this romantic and sexual surrender. Through these dreams, Rachel’s unconscious mind works through some of the insidious implications of the love plot that the Dalloways represent. The dream space is claustrophobic, a tunnel “so narrow” that it seems to close in on her with its notably “damp” walls. The nightmare reveals to her the narrowness of the romantic paradigm of the marriage plot: the same rushing water that brings women to sexuality also entraps women and deforms men, transforming them into “squatting,” “gibbering” “animals.” In becoming a sexually pursued woman, Rachel feels herself to be “a creeping hedged-in thing, driven cautiously between high walls, here turned aside, there plunged in

36 darkness, made dull and crippled for ever” (79).22 With Richard’s kiss, Rachel awakens to the limitations and confines of a feminine self.

This vision of femininity is strongly linked to the particular literary marriage plot that Clarissa and Richard represent. Like many other characters in the novel, the Dalloways respond to Rachel’s seeming blankness of self by recommending books. While they suggest a number of texts,23 the couple most strongly urges Rachel to read Jane Austen, particularly Persuasion. Clarissa says that while she “couldn’t live” without the Brontës, she would “rather live without them than without Jane Austen” (54) and Richard lauds Austen as “the greatest female writer we possess” for “she does not attempt to write like a man” (58-59). Notably, at the start of the Dalloways’ stay, Rachel proclaims that she does not like Austen for she is “so like a tight plait” (54). It is likely that Rachel is responding to the “tyranny of the marriage plot in Austen’s novels” (Friedman 120), all of which “are concerned with the quest for an ideal love-match” (Hinnant 298): she seems to agree with Charlotte Brontë who famously wrote that she “should hardly like to live with [Austen’s] ladies and gentlemen in their elegant but confined houses” (Letters 10). Austen is “confined” and “tight” like the narrow tunnel of Rachel’s nightmare. However, the problem with the Dalloways’ reading of Austen goes beyond the conventional plot structures of her novels, and hinges on the modes of reading that Clarissa and Richard bring to these texts.24 Richard reads Austen as a sleep-aid (Woolf 59) and, as Nancy Cervetti argues, Clarissa uses literature “in the way she uses other material objects, like her clothes, scents, jewellery, and furs” – as ornament (Cervetti 104). Both Richard and Clarissa engage superficially with Persuasion, using the text only to affirm their own beliefs about gender relations and social order. However, despite being vapid and silly, the Dalloways’ engagement with literature leaves a lasting impression on Rachel. Rachel is affected by their visit, and, upon their departure, Clarissa leaves Rachel a copy of Persuasion with the Dalloways’ contact

22 Here, Rachel resembles Isabel in Henry James’s The Portrait of a Lady: her experience of the marriage plot entraps her in a distinctly architectural space. 23 Clarissa adores Pascal (48), Shelley (40), and the Brontës (54), while Richard suggests Matthew Arnold (40) and Burke’s Reflections on the Revolution in France (72). 24 Woolf’s essays about Jane Austen suggest that she was not nearly as critical of Persuasion as The Voyage Out suggests. In “Jane Austen 1925,” she writes that in this work Austen is beginning to recognize a world outside of her usual scope and “discover that the world is larger, more mysterious, and more romantic than she had supposed” (154). In reading Persuasion as a way to “divert” themselves “in an exquisite, quaint, sprightly, and slightly ridiculous world” (Woolf 59), the Dalloways are thoroughly missing this point.

37 information written inside. This book signifies the persuasive marriage plot – and the possibility of entry into the Dalloways’ world – that continues to haunt Rachel’s narrative.

Soon after the Dalloways’ departure, Rachel leaves her father’s ship and travels to South America with Helen and Ridley Ambrose. During this period, when Rachel notably has a room of her own (122), she commences a period of independent and immersive reading. For the first time, Rachel chooses her own books – her preference is for “modern books,” despite her aunt’s recommendations (123) – and these texts introduce her to alternative feminine plots unlike those of the Dalloways and Austen. In one of the most extended scenes of reading in the novel, Rachel spends a day reading Ibsen. This private scene of reading is deeply identificatory, as she becomes completely immersed in the play. After closing the book,

She was speaking partly as herself, and partly as the heroine of the play she had just read…Ibsen’s plays always left her in that condition. She acted them for days at a time…Helen was aware that it was not all acting, and that some sort of change was taking place in the human being. (122-123)

As she reads, Rachel identifies so fully with the text that she starts to speak in the voices of the characters, and these incursions into fiction permanently alter and shape Rachel’s “shapeless” self. Although Rachel and Maggie are very different – young Maggie was at no point “shapeless” in The Mill on the Floss – both heroines imagine themselves into the worlds of fiction, which leave indelible marks upon their personalities. Susan Friedman explains that “[r]eading what she likes involves for Rachel an identification in which the text becomes life and her life becomes the text” (110). The reading is so immersive that the boundaries between reality and fiction, between text and life, become permeable and confused. To add to this text/life dynamic, it is interesting to note that Rachel’s reading is also profoundly physical. Rachel reads

with the curious literalness of one to whom written sentences are unfamiliar, and handling words as though they were made of wood, separately of great importance, and possessed of shapes like tables or chairs. (Woolf 123)

Rachel handles texts as if they are physical entities, as if they are part of the “real” world, rather than the “imaginary.” Books and the narratives contained therein are pointedly described as having real, physical influence in the world of The Voyage Out.

The attention given to Rachel’s reading methods in the novel is particularly interesting in light of Woolf’s 1925 essay “How Should One Read a Book?” In this text, Woolf outlines her theory of the ideal reader. She writes that, in reading, “man and woman are alike” (389): for both, reading “is not merely sympathizing and understanding; it is also criticising and judging” (396). The ideal reader is neither young Maggie, critically reading Defoe, or mature Rachel, identifying wholly with Ibsen, but someone in the middle, who blends both methods. The reading process, Woolf theorizes, can be divided into two essential stages, identificatory and critical. During the first stage, called “the actual reading,” the reader is receptive to the many twists and surprises of the text: “[o]ne’s judgment is suspended, for one does not know what is coming next. Surprise, admiration, boredom, interest succeed each other in such quick succession that when, at last, the end is reached, one is for the most part in a state of complete bewilderment” (396-97). This is indeed the state which Rachel enters when she reads. The second stage of reading is that of the “after reading.” Once the reader has completed the text, “some process seems to have been finished without one’s being aware of it. The different details which have accumulated in reading assemble themselves in their proper places. The book takes on a definite shape…Now one can think of the book as a whole” (397). Though the “actual reading” is the more pleasurable and exciting process, it is the “after reading,” in which “we hold the book clear, secure, and (to the best of our powers) complete in our mind,” that leaves a “profound and lasting” effect on the reader (397). While Rachel has mastered “actual reading,” she does not continue on to the “after reading” that ought to have such a significant effect on her development. For, at the peak of her reading prowess, Rachel again encounters the conventional Victorian feminine plot embodied by Clarissa and Richard Dalloway.

In South America, Rachel first re-encounters this plot as a spectator: “Susan Warrington and Arthur Venning, whose bliss Rachel secretly scorns, act out the conventional courtship-and- marriage plot” (Froula 76). Before Rachel’s derisive eyes, Susan and Arthur – two guests at the hotel – fall in love and enact the conventions of the love story. Although both characters are represented as thoroughly ordinary, Arthur and Susan feel that their love lifts them out of their everyday dismal realities into a dream-like world of romance. Similar to Maggie and Stephen, Susan and Arthur enter a state of semi-consciousness as they fall in love, appearing as though they “were not altogether conscious” and “trying to put things seen in a dream beside real things” (138). Though they are enacting a stereotypical plot, they feel that their union is special for

“there was only one Arthur Venning, and only one Susan who could marry him” (180), and they traipse happily from courtship to engagement. Rachel is highly critical of this entire spectacle. She says to Terence, “I don’t like that…it makes one sorry for them” (139). Though she does not articulate why she does not like it, I believe that Susan and Arthur’s courtship functions like Clarissa’s novels and Richard’s kiss to remind Rachel of her narrow status as a “creeping hedged-in thing” (79), as a woman.

Despite her disgust with Susan and Arthur, and her avowal that she will never marry, Rachel very shortly enters into a nearly identical love plot of her own with Terence Hewet. Like Susan with Arthur and Maggie with Stephen, Rachel’s feelings for Terence function to lift her away from the ordinary world of realism to another, romantic, level. From Terence, “all life seemed to radiate” (175) and with him, she feels an “extraordinary intensity in everything” (200). He “moved as a god” and shows her “a depth in the world hitherto unknown” (227). Rachel, similar to Susan, believes her love to be special and unique: “[t]hat any one of these people had ever felt what she felt, or could ever feel it, or had even the right to pretend for a single second that they were capable of feeling it, appalled her” (300-1). Just as Susan repeats to herself after her engagement with Arthur, “I’m happy, I’m happy, I’m happy” (148), almost convincing or reminding herself of her appropriate joy, after Terence proposes, Rachel tells herself, “This is happiness, I suppose” (290). Crucially, Rachel, like Susan and Maggie, loses her ability to think critically when she falls in love and enters into the marriage plot. She “could not reason about” Terence (175); “the sunny land outside the window being no less capable of analysing its own colour and heat than she was capable of analysing hers” (227). These similarities reflect the notion that, as a heroine, Rachel’s plot is pre-determined by convention: Rachel must inevitably fall in love and her love must be characterized by a dreamy semi-consciousness that elides rationality and choice.

Indeed, in the moment when Terence and Rachel profess their love to one another, as quoted at the start of this section, they seem to lose touch with the regular world and their ordinary selves. The proposal is pervaded by a sense of unreality and confusion: Mark Wollaeger aptly describes the scene as “a prolonged moment of surreal dislocation in which the pair seems drugged and confused, the landscape uncanny and disorienting” (56-57). Directly after the proposal, Terence says “‘Why did I ask you to marry me? How did it happen?’ ‘Did you ask me to marry you?’ she wondered. They faded far away from each other, and neither of them could remember what had

40 been said” (289). Rachel and Terence appear bewildered, as in the state of “actual reading” rather than “after reading” and cannot recall having rationally and consciously entered into their engagement. Woolf presents the entire betrothal as an ill-defined dream, in which the two transform into archetypal lovers sleepily enacting a predetermined script. Rachel and Terence’s proposal scene reads much like the two are memorizing their lines. As Cervetti notes, “during discussions of love with Terence, Rachel often repeats what he says as though she is trying to learn the script” (115). Although they repeat each other’s names, this appears to be a futile effort to maintain their individuality in the face of the conventional roles available to them in the marriage plot. Rather than enforcing their individuality through mutual recognition (“I am special because you love me; you are special because I love you; our love is special and unique”), the love scene renders Terence and Rachel as stereotypical iterations of “man in love” and “woman in love” or “suitor” and “betrothed.” This is why their love scene bears such a striking resemblance to that of silly Susan Warrington and Arthur Venning. During the sequence, Terence says to Rachel, “‘I’m...a man, not a woman.’ ‘A man,’ she repeated, and a curious sense of possession coming over her” (289). Terence and Rachel become “possessed” by traditional gender roles as they enter the love plot and become subject to literary determinism.25

Interestingly, Rachel denies the influence of literature on her experience of love. Rachel believes that “none of the books she read, from Wuthering Heights to Man and Superman, and the plays of Ibsen, suggested from their analysis of love that what their heroines felt was what she was feeling now. It seemed to her that her sensations had no name” (228-229). However, as Beverly Ann Schlack argues, there are far more similarities between Rachel and her literary predecessors than she imagines: “Rachel’s own love story, like Cathy’s, is consummated in death,” “both heroines suffer delirious states in which each fears the self-surrender required by passional [sic] love,” “each resists the concept of domesticity and the demands of married life” (19). To a large extent, Rachel is unaware of the force of past stories on her relationship. Looking back on her engagement, Rachel thinks:

25 This possession continues past the proposal scene. As Friedman points out, “[o]nce engaged, Terence begins, in spite of himself, to act out the ideological and narrative script of conventional romance, in which he, as the man, instructs and guides the woman. He sharply criticizes her reading of worthless moderns, like Ibsen; he tells her she must answer all the congratulations of their engagement while he works on his novel; he announces that they should have one boy and one girl” (113).

the methods by which she had reached her present position seemed to her very strange, and the strangest thing about them was that she had not known where they were leading her. That was the strange thing, that one did not know where one was going, or what one wanted, and followed blindly[.] (321)

She notes that she has been blindly following a “pattern” (321), of which she was unaware until she reached the end point of engagement. This pattern is that of the conventional love or marriage plot. Past stories comprise the force that leads her “blindly” through life, establishing the “pattern” that her life, as a woman’s life, must follow. Despite all of Rachel’s claims that she “never fell in love, if falling in love is what people say it is” (300), her relationship with Terence is largely circumscribed by the conventions of the novels that precede her own.

The most direct evidence of the influence of literary conventions on Rachel’s life is her death. Suddenly, and seemingly without warning, Rachel’s head begins to ache. This headache quickly (and inexplicably) mounts to a state of feverish delirium and culminates in Rachel’s death. While several characters interpret this brain fever as the result of an exposure to infection during Rachel’s boat excursion, Woolf makes it obvious that her death is equally tied to the proposal that took place on that boat trip and the conventional literary mode of femininity that fatally entraps Rachel as a result. Once Rachel becomes engaged to Terence, she ceases to be an independent reader. Terence criticizes her reading choices and begins to read to her, robbing her of the fruitful agency and independence of her earlier reading. Directly prior to showing symptoms, Rachel had been listening to Terence read Milton’s Comus aloud to her. Woolf’s choice of text here is deliberate: Comus is a parable about feminine chastity. Milton’s masque tells of an allegorical Lady who is threatened by Comus, the son of Bacchus and Circe. The Lady is ultimately lauded for her “hidden strength/Which if Heav’n gave it, may be term’d her own:/Tis chastity” (Milton l. 418-420). In reading Comus to Rachel, Terence imposes a restrictive paradigm of feminine virtue upon her.

As Rachel descends into delirium, several lines from Comus become stuck in her head, colouring her hallucinations: “Under the glassy, cool, translucent wave,/In twisted braids of lilies knitting/The loose train of thy amber dropping hair” (Woolf 336). Sabrina’s chaste “twisted braids” echo Austen’s “tight plait” in their oppressive conventional femininity. As Rachel focuses on these lines, “the glassy, cool, translucent wave was almost visible to her...it was

42 refreshingly cool” (336). However, as her illness intensifies, this cool wave becomes “a deep pool of sticky water, which eventually closed over her head...she was curled up at the bottom of the sea” (348). Again, she enters the nightmare world she first experienced after kissing Richard Dalloway: she “found herself walking through a tunnel under the Thames, where there were little deformed women sitting in archways playing cards, while the bricks of which the wall was made oozed with damp, which collected in drops and slid down the wall” (338). In this iteration of the dream, the women have become the “deformed” figures, playing games in a narrow tunnel that continually fills more and more with water. These dreams can be interpreted as Rachel’s symbolic and unconscious “reading” of the received marriage plot text; only in her unconscious mind can she rewrite and critique these scripts. The water imagery that characterizes Rachel’s hallucinations ties back to the dark waves after her kiss with Richard Dalloway, and the water that “churns” furiously when Terence proposes: the rushing force of literarily determined love crashes down upon Rachel as she dies a symbolic death by drowning not unlike Maggie’s in The Mill on the Floss. However, unlike Maggie, Rachel experiences no redemptive strength in this final scene: “she ceased to have any will of her own; she lay on the top of the wave conscious of some pain, but chiefly of weakness” (353). While Maggie recovers a sense of strength by going to rescue her brother, Rachel only languishes in the weakness of complete surrender to a surreal, dream-like world. She completely loses touch with the outside world and even with her own self as she seems to dissolve in the waters of literary determinism.

Many critics read Rachel’s enigmatic death as a retreat from the sexual (Schlack 25; Kahane 110) or from the traditional marriage plot (Kennard 155; Friedman 116) and some argue for the redemptive possibilities of this “refusal to serve the institutions of male privilege, marriage, and the masculine plot” (Cervetti 121). However, I position myself alongside Jane de Gay who insists that “it is difficult to claim the ending...[as] a ‘feminine “act of victory”’” (39). In representing Rachel’s death, Woolf does not “refuse,” “kill off,” or “retreat” from the marriage plot; as Gay astutely notes, Rachel’s death recreates the Austenian convention of representing heroines who “only ever get engaged” (31). In addition, Rachel’s death still falls into the marriage-or-death ending that conventionally punctuates heroine-centred fictions. Rather than “killing off the Angel in the House,” as Friedman argues, Rachel’s death demonstrates how the Angel in the House can kill off the individualized female character. In a text where reading and literature have real and tangible effects on the heroine’s fate, Woolf demonstrates how the

43 confining force of the literary marriage plot, and the femininity it entails, transforms and effectively kills off her heroine. Literary determinism imprints Rachel’s self, a shapeless subjectivity formed and drowned by the force of past stories.

4 The Rise of Silas Lapham

For the final case study of this chapter, I turn to William Dean Howells’ The Rise of Silas Lapham (1885). This text, like The Mill on the Floss and The Voyage Out, represents literary determinism: Penelope Lapham’s experience of love with Tom Corey is explicitly modeled on her reading of the sentimental novel Tears, Idle Tears, to the point that even Corey comments on the connection (268). When she falls in love, Penelope, “the novel’s paradigmatic realist” (Kohler 223), engages in an irrational and non-realistic repetition of the romantic self-sacrifice plot of Tears, Idle Tears, refusing to accept her lover because she believes she ought to sacrifice him for her sister, whom he does not love. Although earlier in the novel, she denounces this behaviour as “foolish and wicked” (Howells 268), witty and intelligent Penelope seems irresistibly compelled to imitate the heroine of the novel Nanny Corey calls “Slop, Silly Slop” (206). This narrative demonstrates the tenacity and force of literary determinism, and substantiates contemporary anxieties about the dangerous effects of women’s reading.

Although Howells clearly represents literary determinism in Silas Lapham, he does so in a different way and to different ends than seen in The Mill on the Floss or The Voyage Out. Howells pointedly refuses a feature of the moment of falling in love that I have emphasized in the rest of this chapter: while Penelope and Corey enact a romantic plotline, they do not enter the dream world of romance and instead remain firmly rooted in the real world. In this way, Howells uses his novel as an argumentative vehicle for demonstrating not only the dangers of identificatory women’s reading and of romantic novels, but the supremacy of realism as a literary mode. Unlike Eliot, Howells does not complicate his critique of romance and, unlike Woolf, he posits that realism does offer a viable plot alternative to that of literary determinism. I argue, however, that the novel’s self-conscious assertion of realism’s victory over literary determinism and romance falls somewhat flat. Howells’s alternative realistic plot is feeble; Penelope and Corey can overcome literary determinism, but they must do so “off-stage” so to speak, as they are forced to move to Mexico to begin their new life together. Also, in an effort to elide the typical romantic tropes of dream and surrender, Howells must keep the reader

44 completely outside of Penelope’s consciousness, making her motives appear ridiculous and inconsistent with her previous characterization (Blair 88), ultimately undermining the realist structure of the novel. The Rise of Silas Lapham presents literary determinism in order to deconstruct and correct it but ultimately demonstrates the limits of realism and the challenge of representing a love plot wholly in the realistic mode.

The Rise of Silas Lapham tells the story of the commercial and social rise and fall of businessman Silas Lapham and his family. Lapham is a bumbling, loud and decidedly uncultured lower class man, who rises to prominence as a result of his successful paint business. While the bulk of the novel provides a sometimes-sardonic, sometimes-sympathetic portrayal of Lapham and his foibles, there is also a “romantic subplot” (Kohler 224), the love story of Penelope Lapham and Tom Corey. Penelope is Lapham’s elder daughter; the younger, Irene, is a “wonderful beauty...[with] an innocence almost vegetable” (Howells 40), while Penelope is “the plain sister” (111), known for her “humourous” speeches (111) and her “odd taste...for reading” (39). When Tom Corey, the son of wealthy aesthete Bromfield Corey and snooty Mrs. Corey, begins to pay attention to the Lapham girls, everyone assumes that he is interested in Irene. Irene develops feelings for Corey; the Laphams become excited by the potential match; and the Coreys grow increasingly anxious about their son’s future. However, all are surprised – including Penelope – when Corey announces that the Lapham sister he is in love with is in fact Penelope. Despite her feelings for Corey, Penelope enacts the self-sacrificial plot of Tears, Idle Tears as she insists on renouncing Corey for fear of hurting Irene. While this self-sacrifice has some beauty to it (both the Coreys and the Laphams feel that she is behaving correctly), this behaviour is ultimately revealed to be ridiculous. As Reverend Sewell explains, according to the “economy of pain” (252), it is absurd for three to suffer instead of one. In the end, Penelope accepts this logic: she and Corey marry and the two move to Mexico.

Throughout Silas Lapham, Penelope is identified as a reader. From the start of the novel, she is the bookish sister, an autodidact who attends lectures and “reads books out of the circulating library” (39), and she often appears with a book in her lap (163; 225). Like Maggie, Penelope utilizes two modes of reading: critical and identificatory. The two major works that Penelope reads in the novel are George Eliot’s Middlemarch and the invented sentimental drama Tears,

Idle Tears26. When Penelope reads Middlemarch, she is quick to critique its style, saying that she “wish[es] she [Eliot] would let you find out a little about the people for yourself” (99). Penelope seeks what Dawn Henwood calls a “sense of vicarious heroinism, or living the plot oneself” in her reading (18): she wants to “find out” about the characters independently and to immerse herself in the world of the text. She achieves a version of this identificatory experience with Tears, Idle Tears, a text that is “pretty easy to cry over” (Howells 228),27 but this identification does not come at the cost of Penelope’s critical abilities. Despite becoming emotionally involved in the text, she accurately notes that “it’s rather forced” (228), as she recognizes that the “naturalness” of some parts of the text makes the central action – the heroine’s absurd sacrifice of her lover to the woman who loved him first – appear natural and realistic as well. Penelope admits frustration with herself and the novel: “I’m provoked with myself when I think how I cried over that book – for I did cry. It’s silly – it’s wicked for any one to do what that girl did. Why can’t they let people have a chance to behave reasonably in stories?” (228). This statement, along with other details and instances from the text, have led several critics, particularly Michelle Kohler, to align Penelope with the voice of realism in the novel. However, despite her critical powers and what Kohler calls her “realist sensibility” (225), Penelope is compelled to re-enact the “silly” and “wicked” self-sacrifice plot of Tears, Idle Tears when Corey professes his love for her.

Howells draws the connection between Tears, Idle Tears and Penelope’s behaviour in love with a heavy hand. Not only does Reverend Sewell complain earlier in the text that novels such as Tears, Idle Tears are “ruinous,” “noxious,” and “monstrous” in their effect on readers (207), but Penelope, Corey, and the Laphams all remark upon the way her self-sacrifice is modeled on that of the heroine. Various literary critics have commented on how the sentimental novel is “her inspiration for this course of action” (O’Hara 92; Kohler; Blair; Eakin; Henwood; Murphy). Interestingly, several critics, whether ironically or not, adopt the language of nineteenth-century anti-reading pundits to describe this phenomenon: Alfred Habegger writes that the book has “corrupted” Penelope’s heart (“Nineteenth” 896), and John Beckman and Charles Campbell use the language of “poison” and “infection” (Beckman 42; Campbell 296) to explain the effects the

26 For a helpful discussion of the significance of this title (it is drawn from Tennyson’s The Princess), see Dawn Henwood’s “Complications of Heroinism” (1998), pp.21-24. 27 For an extended discussion of the relationship between reading, “having a good cry,” gender, and the sentimental novel, see Robyn Warhol’s Having a Good Cry: Effeminate Feelings and Pop-Culture (2003).

46 novel has on its reader. This anti-reading rhetoric is echoed in Howells’s own critical writing about the dangers of certain modes of reading and certain types of texts. Howells identifies three primary categories of fiction: “the novel” (realism), “romance,” and “romanticistic” fiction. Realism, “the supreme form of fiction,” is “the sincere and conscientious endeavour to picture life just as it is” (Vol. III 218); romance is a tired, “decorative” (Vol. II 20) form that seeks to represent truth but does so by studying “the ideal rather than the real” (Vol. III 218); and romanticistic fiction such as Tears, the lowest and most dangerous in the hierarchy, “professes like the real novel to portray actual life, but...does this with an excess of drawing and colouring which are false to nature” (Vol. III 218). Howells argues that reading such novels, which “flatter the passions” over the principles, is akin to “opium-eating; in either case the brain is drugged, and left weaker and crazier for the debauch” (Vol. II 44). While many imagine their reading to be an intellectual endeavour, incorrect engagement with the wrong texts can be “poisonous” or “injurious” (Vol. II 44), having negative effects on individuals and society. Penelope’s blind re- enactment of the plot of Tears is an example of this “injurious” and “foolish” influence.

When she falls in love, realistic, funny, and critical Penelope becomes the absurd, self-sacrificing heroine of Tears, Idle Tears. Corey points this out to her:

Don’t you remember that night…you were talking of that book; and you said it was foolish and wicked to do as that girl did. Why is it different with you, except that you give me nothing, and can never give me anything when you take yourself away? If it were anybody else, I am sure you would say –

She cuts him off before he can finish his sentence: “But it isn’t anybody else and that makes it impossible” (268). Although she is capable of criticizing this type of behaviour in a book, and she knows that she could criticize this behaviour if it were “anybody else,” when it is she who is experiencing love, she who is in the position of the heroine of Tears, she cannot help but act out the self-sacrifice plot and deny the happiness of both herself and her lover. The big question is: why? In The Mill on the Floss, Maggie is most influenced by the texts that she cannot read critically; in The Voyage Out, Rachel is doomed by the narrative that the social world around her seems to imprint onto her shapeless self. In Silas Lapham, no such forces are acting upon Penelope. She is capable of critically reading Tears and her social world actually encourages her

47 to marry Corey, with both her parents counselling her to accept his hand. Why, then, is Penelope represented as an inevitable victim of literary determinism?

Critics offer a variety of possible answers to this question. Beckman argues that Penelope is susceptible to romance “due to [her] inferior social class” (44) and Paul Eakin suggests that her looks make her particularly vulnerable as such texts allow her “to become...the pretty girl she isn’t in real life” (122). Others, such as Habegger and Henwood, posit that Penelope enacts the self-sacrifice narrative because it constitutes an “attempt to influence...the real world in some way” (Habegger “Nineteenth” 896), and provides her with the “fantasy of controlling her own destiny” (Henwood 16). While these explanations are intriguing and valid, I would agree with Eakin when he states that “the only answer Howells fully develops to account for Penelope’s renunciation is, quite simply, that she has read too many sentimental novels” (122). The novel paradoxically draws a straight line of influence between Penelope’s reading and her behaviour, despite the fact that this belies her previous characterization. Her ability to read critically is no protection against the dangerous force of literary determinism and romanticistic fiction.

As such, I argue along with critics such as John Seelye, Brenda Murphy, Beckman, Kohler, and others that the romantic subplot of Silas Lapham is meant to be read as a comment on genre and literary modes as such. While the novel does counsel against identificatory reading, this is not the culprit in the “debauch” of modern society (253): the blame is placed entirely upon the dangerous power of the romanticistic mode. In Silas Lapham, Howells engages in a representation of literary determinism in order to “correct” such narratives (Murphy 22) and demonstrate the triumph of realism. Howells represents Penelope mimicking the plot of Tears to show the complete absurdity of such over-blown romantic behaviour. As Reverend Sewell says to Silas and Persis Lapham,

Your daughter believes, in spite of her common-sense, that she ought to make herself and the man who loves her unhappy, in order to assure the life-long wretchedness of her sister, whom he doesn’t love, simply because her sister saw him and fancied him first! And I’m sorry to say that ninety-nine young people out of a hundred – oh, nine hundred and ninety-nine out of a thousand! – would consider that noble and beautiful and heroic; whereas you know at the bottom of your hearts that it would be foolish and cruel and revolting. (253)

Sewell, the voice of realism and Howells’s stand-in in the text,28 argues for an “economy of pain” (252) in which common-sense prevails and decisions are made according to a utilitarian- like principle of harming the fewest people. This logic exposes the ridiculousness of Penelope’s actions and the ways in which the “beautiful” plots of “dear old-fashioned hero[es] and heroine[s]” (206) render one unfit for the real world. Ultimately, Sewell’s reasoning prevails: Penelope is convinced to accept Corey and the two marry. This alternate ending to the self- sacrifice plot can be read as a “correction” of the problematic romantic narrative.

Howells also modifies the romantic narrative in another crucial and interesting way. While the actions that Penelope and Corey engage in are definitively romantic, they are not represented in the romantic mode as I have been describing it. There are no mentions of dreaminess, driftiness, or surrender in the depiction of Penelope’s grand self-sacrifice; there is no music and there are no waves, lulling the heroine into a state of semi-consciousness. Howells maintains an ironic, realistic distance from Penelope throughout the entire episode in a concerted and self-conscious effort to maintain realism in representing a romantic plotline (Campbell 290). I argue that this is an effort to depict the triumph of realism over other, more romantic modes – it is the realistic representation of romance that can undo, rewrite, and belie the seductive narratives of sentimental fiction.

The problem with this correction of romance and triumphant representation of realism is that, as I mentioned earlier, it falls somewhat flat. The alternate ending that Howells provides to rewrite the romantic plot of Tears – Penelope and Corey’s marriage – is weak: in order to escape literary determinism the two are forced to leave their social world, departing for Mexico on business. Both the wedding and marriage are kept conveniently “off-stage” and outside of the reader’s view. Once Penelope agrees to accept Corey, the lovers effectively disappear from the text. Also, in eliding romantic tropes such as dream and surrender, Howells must stay entirely outside of Penelope’s consciousness. To maintain an ironic and realistic distance from his heroine’s actions, he must keep a distance from his heroine. As a result, the reader never truly understands Penelope’s motives for renouncing and then accepting Corey. She appears less as a three- dimensional realistic character and more as a romantic “type...limited to the expression of one principle, simple, elemental, lacking the God-given complexity of motive which we find in all

28 There is some critical debate about Sewell’s position in the regard. See John Barton’s “Howells’ Rhetoric of Realism” (2001).

49 the human beings we know” (Howells Vol. II 19). In using Penelope as a vehicle for an argument against sentimental texts, Howells strips her of the interiority and complexity of a realist character, turning this plotline into a parable against romance rather than a realistic representation of truth. Instead of demonstrating the superiority of realism, the romantic subplot of Silas Lapham effectively reveals the limits of the realist gaze and the challenges of representing love, an overblown and lofty state, in the realist mode.

In Silas Lapham, Howells engages in a representation of literary determinism that is fully rooted in realism and completely and ironically conscious of its own fictive nature (Seelye 53; Beckman 24). As Charles L. Campbell argues, “by constantly presenting his novels in perspective with other fictional worlds and by comparing his ‘real’ characters with those in novels, [Howells] actually draws attention to the fictive nature of his own work” (292). The effect is a pointed statement about the dangers of identificatory readings of romance, and a realist correction and criticism of what Howells terms “romanticistic” narratives, in this case that of self-sacrifice (Murphy 22; Campbell 295). Woolf and Eliot too engage in these activities to some extent: The Mill on the Floss repeatedly corrects Maggie’s forays into romance, and The Voyage Out ends in Rachel’s death by text, showing the insidious effects of literary influences. However, as I have shown, Eliot complicates her criticism of romance, suggesting that it may be the only mode that allows for female agency and fulfilment, and Woolf criticizes literary determinism but ultimately represents its inevitability, offering no correction or solution. Howells, on the other hand, criticizes romance without offering a depiction of its value or seductive qualities and represents a literary determinism that is ultimately overcome by realist logic. Howells uses his novel as a device intended to demonstrate the supremacy of realism over other narrative modes. I argue, however, that the attempt is not entirely successful. Howells’s alternative realist plot is feeble and in staying outside of Penelope’s consciousness, he undermines the logical, realist, and character-based structure of the plot. The Rise of Silas Lapham represents literary determinism in order to rewrite and correct the convention, but the novel ultimately demonstrates the limits of realism and the challenge of representing a love wholly in the realistic mode.

5 Conclusion

In this chapter, I analyse The Mill on the Floss, The Voyage Out and The Rise of Silas Lapham to demonstrate the pervasive connection between representations of women reading and of women

50 falling in love in Anglo-American fiction of the long nineteenth century. Maggie, Rachel, and Penelope are all, to some extent, affected by literary determinism as the texts they read and modes of reading they employ determine their experiences of love. Romantic texts and identificatory reading practices – whether chosen by the reader or enforced by society – determine the heroine’s experience of love and consistently result in a scene of falling in love that is a romantic narrative annex within the space of the realist novel. The experience of love serves to lift the heroine away from the ordinary world of realism and into the extraordinary, dream-like world of romance. While I am not arguing that this romance is entirely a bad thing – like Eliot, I think sometimes it is something that is all too good – I do want to point out the ways in which this generic slip into romance makes rational consent, which was legally required for the nineteenth-century marriage contract, problematic. As mentioned earlier in this chapter, the feminine romance of falling in love is characterized by passivity rather than action. Even the word “falling” emphasizes surrender over agency or choice. How then does this moment of “falling” in love or into desire translate into the consequent action of “consenting” to marriage? While the use of the romantic mode accounts for the role of the affections in the ideal of nineteenth-century companionate marriage, it does not leave space for the personal, rational consent required by the liberal form of the marriage contract.

Chapter 2 Darwinian Sexual Selection in George Gissing’s In the Year of Jubilee and Henry James’s The Portrait of a Lady

1 Darwin and the Novel

In the previous chapter, I looked to representations of women reading, and to questions of genre, as a way to explain and account for the consistently dream-like and romantic characteristics of the scene of falling in love. This chapter approaches the same issue, but through the lens of another transatlantic reading-related phenomenon: the massive impact of Charles Darwin’s The Descent of Man (1871) on the courtship plot. This chapter moves away from an analysis of the fictionalized scene of reading to explore how Darwin’s ideas about gender and sexual selection permeated popular culture and affected representations of love in the late-nineteenth-century novel. In this post-Darwinian model, female characters are overcome at the moment of falling in love not by the force of past stories, but by their evolutionary and biological urges, which complicate the possibility of female choice in love. When Darwin turned his focus to human beings in The Descent of Man, his theory of sexual selection – and the contentious role it grants to female choice – sparked a “wide-ranging social debate” (Bender 6) in the Anglo-American world. Darwinian sexual selection brought the language of instinct into the drama of courtship and marriage, and placed an (uneasy) emphasis on the role of female choice in love and sex. This chapter explores the anxiety surrounding female choice in Darwinian sexual selection, and looks at George Gissing’s In the Year of Jubilee (1894) and Henry James’ The Portrait of a Lady (1881) as case studies to demonstrate the extension of this concern into literary representations of love in the period.

It is not uncommon for critics to comment on the connections between contemporary science and literature; as Cannon Schmitt puts it, “one crucial aspect of the novel’s vocation as a genre...[is] to explore the human implications of scientific discovery” (263). During the nineteenth century in particular, science and literature existed in a relation of “mutual borrowing” (Seitler 5) or mutual influence. The language of The Descent reveals a debt to literary representations of romantic love; for instance, Darwin describes “the courtship of butterflies,” which includes a “wooing” stage and a “final marriage ceremony” (317, 319). Ruth Yeazell comments that

Darwin shapes his stories of animal sexual selection “after the plan of the novels he appears to have loved so well” (“Nature’s” 42). As literary realists, novelists at the time were particularly attuned to advances in science as the possibility of representing the real was increasingly “conditioned by the discourse of science, which had begun to assume almost exclusive responsibility for reporting on that real” (Levine 12). However, it is important to note that this close relationship between literature and science does not imply a narrative of direct influence in which novelists simply reproduce scientific models. I want to suggest, alongside numerous other critics, that literature develops its own kind of semi-scientific method as it adapts, extrapolates, tests, and contests scientific theories and findings (Schmitt 464; Leatherdale 1-2; Levine 3; Beer 2).

In looking to the relationship between Darwin and literature, I am not limiting my focus to actual historical readers of Darwin (as Gillian Beer does in Darwin’s Plots [1983]) to trace a narrative of influence, but instead opening up the study to late-nineteenth-century authors who may or may not have directly encountered Darwin’s work. This broader approach, similar to that employed by George Levine in Darwin and the Novelists (1988), sets out to recognize the more diffuse and culturally embedded influence of Darwin, which extends beyond personal reading. Darwin was so explosively popular across the Anglo-American world that his work “was quickly absorbed into the narratives by which the culture defined itself” (Levine 2). It is this “absorption,” whether direct or indirect, of Darwinian ideas into the love plot that constitutes the focus of this chapter.

Female choice is essential to the drama of Darwinian sexual selection: throughout the vast majority of the animal kingdom, males compete and females select. However, while The Descent is devoted to explaining the connections and congruencies between animal and human behaviour, it stops short at one crucial point: the element of female choice in sexual selection. Female birds and quadrupeds have the power to “choose” their mates (Darwin 416), but the human power of sexual selection has been transferred from women to men. Female choice therefore becomes a space of contradiction and confusion within an otherwise (mostly) coherent theory. Darwin devises sexual selection to account for variations that are not evolutionarily useful. For example, why do so many male birds have brightly-coloured plumage that clearly exposes them to dangerous predators? This trait clearly could not have survival value, so why would it persist? Darwin answers questions such as these with sexual selection, a process that

53 depends on “the advantage which certain individuals have over others of the same sex and species solely in respect to reproduction” (209). Male birds retain their gorgeous plumage across generations because this quality is desirable in a mate and therefore these characteristics get passed on not through natural selection but through sexual selection and reproductive success.

The process of sexual selection is one of “female resistance and female choice” (Yeazell “Nature’s” 34). The usual narrative typically involves the males of a species competing and/or fighting to gain attention from the opposite sex and the females initially resisting and ultimately “selecting one out of several males” to mate with (Darwin 212). While the female’s role is “comparatively passive,” it is ultimately her “choice” to “accept one male in preference to others” (222). Therefore, a great deal of power is afforded to the females in determining the future development of their species. Females will normally select a mate who appears strongest and most beautiful or healthy – she is often wooed by victors in battle, or excellent singers or dancers – but Darwin does note several exceptional instances in which the female appears to display personal preferences that stray from the ordinary, attractive, or genetically useful. He comments that “it does not...appear that the females invariably prefer the victorious males” (367), and lists several examples of birds and mammals choosing to mate with partners of other species (for example, a “male wigeon”29 that pairs – inexplicably – with a “pintail duck” [414], and a terrier that “loves” a retriever to the point that the two have to be “dragged” apart [524]) and even notes that female pigeons will sometimes reverse the gender order completely, “court[ing] the male, or even fight[ing]...for his possession” (419). This suggests that there is some variability when it comes to sexual selection and that it is difficult to predict how or why a female will make her choice of a mate: while there are certain usual indicators (beautiful feathers, victory in battle, a pleasing singing voice) there is also an element of personal preference that is difficult to pin down or explain. Along this same vein, Darwin comments that as animals become more advanced, the reasons for their choices are even more opaque to the human observer. He comments that “with most of our domesticated mammals,” the females display “strong individual antipathies and preferences” but that “we can seldom or never discover with certainty” the cause of these preferences (525).

29 A wigeon is a dabbling duck in the genus Anas.

It is clear then that in the animal world, sexual selection depends on the element of female choice. But, the nature of this choice is never made completely clear in The Descent. At some points, Darwin asserts that “the female deliberately chooses her mate” (416), while in other instances he writes that females “unconsciously prefer” certain males (367) and states that “it is not probable that she consciously deliberates; but she is most excited or attracted by the most beautiful, or melodious, or gallant males” (421). This second formulation suggests that the choice likely occurs on a more unconscious and less individualistic level than that implied by “deliberately choosing”: it is not the case of one bird who decisively selects a mate based on personal preferences, but rather of one bird who unconsciously acts upon the instincts and preferences of her race as a whole. Yet the use of the phrase “deliberately chooses” earlier undermines the certainty of this reasoning: the very idea of female choice in sexual selection depends upon an ambiguous understanding of the word “choice.” On the one hand, there is the possibility that animals may exert personal choice (the wigeon, for example), but on the other hand there is also evidence that they may be acting according to primeval or biological laws that effectively determine their choice (the female birds who always choose the best singer). Darwin’s language also brings up the question of whether this choice is rational or even conscious. There is a vast divide between the workings of a “deliberate choice” and an “unconscious preference.” In this way, Darwin seems to vacillate throughout the text in his representation of the nature of female choice and, thereby, leaves conceptual openings to both readings: the female is both a conscious, personal chooser and an unconscious, biologically driven selector.

Despite these ambiguities, the theory of sexual selection still insists on a single structure of sexual selection: males compete and females choose. This order, however, is overturned when Darwin turns his attention to human beings at the end of The Descent. Earlier, in comparing the sexual selection patterns of mammals and birds, Darwin comments that “it would be a strange anomaly if female quadrupeds, which stand higher in the scale and have higher mental powers, did not generally, or at least often, exert some choice” (522). Yet, in a “strange anomaly” indeed, Darwin argues that female humans, standing higher in the scale than other mammals, have lost the power of choice in sexual selection. Darwin explains that through years of development – particularly the “savage state” during which men kept women in an “abject state of bondage” (597) – man has become so “superior to woman” (565) physically and mentally that “it is not

55 surprising that he should have gained the power of selection” (597). Social organization, however barbaric, has intervened and altered the structure of human sexual selection. While sexual selection used to depend on females in the human species (Darwin sees evidence of this in the male beard which has no evolutionary advantage and must have been used to attract the female), human beings have evolved beyond this point and Darwin asserts that the power of selection currently rests with the males, while the females prance, sing, and compete in hopes of being selected (597). To further complicate this reversal, Darwin states just ten pages earlier that “the opposite form of selection, namely of the more attractive men by the women” does occur in “civilized nations [where] women have free or almost free choice” (586). Suffice it to say that Darwin’s explanation of the human patterns of courtship and sexual selection is contradictory and confusing in its attempts to overturn the order that has dominated his account of the rest of the animal kingdom.

Due, then, to these ambiguities, there are many ways to read Darwin’s theory of sexual selection. Most feminist scholarship on sexual selection argues for Darwin’s “blatant sexism – or, more correctly, androcentrism (male-centeredness)” (Hubbard 93). These scholars, notably Ruth Hubbard and Eveleen Richards, explain that Darwin’s inversion of sexual selection at the end of The Descent constitutes a desire to reaffirm “Victorian sexist ideology” (Richards 59). Richards’s biographical study insists that Darwin’s personal “experience of women...entered into his concept of sexual selection and his associated interpretations of human evolution” (61). In this way, Darwin promoted a theory of sexual selection that “rationalized Victorian conceptions of male dominance and importance and confirmed Victorian sexual stereotypes” (97). This historical, biographical reading of the text is a valid explanation for the seemingly inexplicable shift at the end of The Descent. I believe, however, that there is room for another argument, one that draws upon the feminist possibilities of Darwin’s emphasis on female choice and that dwells on the discomfort that The Descent seems to exhibit in its sudden and anomalous turn away from choice in the final section of the text. Is it possible, perhaps, that the insistence on a lack of female choice in humans is not an assured, confident naturalization of a social phenomenon, but rather an anxious cover-up of a recognized biological fact? That, in discovering a pattern in animals that revealed the importance of female choice in the drama of courtship, Darwin felt the need to placate and account for “unnatural” social standards?

Indeed, many nineteenth-century readers responded to The Descent with the conviction that sexual selection did depend on female choice – an interpretation that caused a “peculiar uneasiness” as “proprietary males...seemed unwilling to grant that women might control the evolutionary plot” (Bender 22). Travis Landry paraphrases late-nineteenth-century American sociologist Lester Frank Ward, who worried that

If...human females had selected in some primeval past, what was to prevent them from returning to their unseemly, unfeminine ways? What was to stop Victorian women from snatching the agency of selection back from men, making improper sexual choices, and effectively bringing ‘civilization’ down with them? (65)

This type of anxiety around female choice belies a strictly anti-feminist reading of Darwin. Indeed, as Richard Kaye notes, many nineteenth-century suffragettes took up Darwin’s text as evidence of the power and importance of women’s choice (101-2). We must recognize the space of feminist possibility that is inherent within the confusion and contradictions of sexual selection in order to conduct Darwinian readings of contemporary fiction. Indeed, the anxiety evinced in Ward’s comment is manifest in the literature of the time, both in Britain and America, as novelists worked to incorporate the new reality of sexual selection into the courtship plot while negotiating the limits of female choice.

2 In the Year of Jubilee

George Gissing’s In the Year of Jubilee is written in the wake of, and in many ways in response to, Darwin’s theory of sexual selection. Gissing’s novel demonstrates how romantic choices are determined by biological forces of instinct and attraction, and how these forces serve to limit options for female characters. The novel tells the story of Nancy Lord, a heroine who initially longs for freedom and independence, but surrenders to her feelings of love and desire, and to what Constance Harsh terms her “biological destiny” (Harsh “Epistemology” 855). As the plot progresses, Nancy is compelled to sacrifice her agency to husband and child, and she enters a Godwinian marriage30 with Lionel Tarrant, in which the couple lives apart, ostensibly to

30 The “Godwinian marriage” (referring to William Godwin) suggested that husband and wife, though married, ought to live apart. This was a popular idea at the time (Sjöholm 85), and Gissing explicitly mentions it in The Emancipated, where Reuben Elgar says “Wasn’t it Godwin who, on marrying, made an arrangement that he and his wife should inhabit separate abodes, and be together only when they wished?” (Gissing 301).

57 maintain her “comfort” and his “liberty” (Gissing 339). The love plot at the heart of In the Year of Jubilee can be read as Gissing’s conservative reaction to the Darwinian suggestion of female choice: the novel represents a New-Woman-like heroine who is defeated by biology and ideology, unable to select a partner freely, and who ultimately learns that “a woman’s place [is] under the sheltering roof” (249).

In denying female choice in love, however, Gissing is not simply re-enacting the final turn at the end of Darwin’s The Descent. In The Descent of Man, Darwin argues that the human female lost the power of selection because the superior male wrested it from her. Social evolution worked in tandem with biological evolution to alter the plot of sexual selection. In In the Year of Jubilee, while Tarrant often asserts that he is Nancy’s “superior in force of mind and force of body” (344), Gissing makes it clear that male characters, such as Tarrant and Horace Lord, have pointedly not gained the power of selection. Both Tarrant and Horace are drawn to their mates by biological forces beyond their rational control. In In the Year of Jubilee, determinism in matters of love and desire is presented as complete: both females and males lack choice in love. This revision demonstrates the primacy of biology for Gissing: in his version of sexual selection, biological urges and instincts trump social rules when it comes to determining actions. Still, social structures and customs do matter in the novel and conventional gender roles (as well as systems such as inheritance) play a considerable role in limiting the actions available to given characters. Nancy and Tarrant, once the vapours of desire have settled, have very difference choices available to them as a result of their genders. By the novel’s end, Tarrant has regained his power of choice and agency, but Nancy, as a woman and mother, has not; the forces that determine her experience of love extend to control the rest of her life as she is imprisoned not by Tarrant, but by her maternal instincts and her internalization of feminine social roles.

In the Year of Jubilee focuses primarily on Nancy Lord, a middle-class young woman with a sham education and a “roving mind.” Nancy proclaims at the start of the novel that “all she knew was that she wished to live and not merely to vegetate” (16); she longs for “independence,” though she is not quite sure how she will use it. Early in the novel, Nancy has two potential love interests: Luckworth Crewe, a crude, energetic advertising man, and Lionel Tarrant, “a very fine specimen of the man born to do nothing” (280). Although Nancy toys with Crewe – she experiences an “impulse of lawless imagination” (94) with him on Jubilee Day and at London Bridge – she is seduced by “indolent,” upper-class Tarrant, who marries her quickly and in

58 secret. Directly after her marriage, Nancy’s father dies and his will specifies that she be disinherited if she marries before the age of 26. Although Nancy is pregnant, she and Tarrant resolve to live apart and keep their union a secret. Oppressed by the idea of being a husband and father, and realizing that he has been left without a penny (a much-anticipated inheritance from his grandmother fails to materialize), Tarrant escapes to the Bahamas and then to the United States, effectively abandoning Nancy. Nancy struggles to raise her child without detection, and during this time she achieves a limited version of the independence she had always dreamed of: she works in Beatrice French’s shop, and she manages a quiet, modest household with her former housekeeper, Mary. At this point, Tarrant returns to London, impoverished and tired. When he realizes that people have been gossiping about his relationship with Nancy, he makes their marriage public and claims Nancy as his wife. However, Tarrant’s impulse for liberty cannot suffer an ordinary marriage: he insists (despite Nancy’s protests) that the two live apart. The novel ends with Nancy still asking Tarrant to live together, and Tarrant still refusing.

Critical study of In the Year of Jubilee has been somewhat limited,31 and there are no studies that account for the influence of Dawin’s theories of sexual difference and sexual selection on the novel’s representation of love. This would not be such a major gap if not for the novel’s obvious references to Darwin. In the Year of Jubilee is insistently set in a post-Darwinian epoch: characters refer to the study of “evolution” (15, 83) and “heredity” (317), discuss the idea that “only the fit survive” (336), and even mention Darwin by name (83). The world of the novel is saturated with popular versions of Darwin’s theories. Nancy Lord reads – or avoids reading – “that new book on Evolution,” as she thinks that she already knows “all she needed to know” about Darwin, or at least enough to talk about his ideas “with an air” (83); Arthur Peachey “ha[s] the misfortune...to read in a paper or magazine something on the subject of heredity” (317); Nancy and Mary reflect that when it comes to children of the poor, “only the fit survive” (336). In addition, the narration is peppered with the language of “instinct” (101, 171, 211) and animality (211, 58), hallmarks of Darwinian influence.

31 Like most Gissing criticism, much of it is biographical and focused on establishing connections between Gissing’s personal experience of marriage and women, and the depictions of marriage and women in the novel (Lineham, Halperin, Coustillas), or on considering his realism, his pessimism, his penchant for paradox (Cunningham, Grylls, Selig, Sloan).

Most important for the purposes of this dissertation, the central love scene, in which Tarrant seduces Nancy, takes place deep within an “overgrown” natural space (101) – a setting often recognized as characteristic of the Darwinian plot (Bender; Beer; Levine).32 Darwin’s theories reveal overarching laws and tendencies, such as natural and sexual selection, but his nature is not a space of order and decorum: The Descent places repeated emphasis on variation (Darwin 26- 27), exceptions (414), and violent struggle (366). The natural world is revealed to be a complex network of relation and “descent,” which human beings “like every other species” are deeply a part of (2). It is crucially within this overgrown, fecund, Darwinian natural space that Tarrant seduces Nancy.

Tarrant takes Nancy to his favourite country spot twice; while both scenes are laden with erotic suggestion, he is only successful in seducing her the second time. Gissing takes great pains to demonstrate the separation of this space from the world of Nancy’s regular life (Harman 356): not only are the two outside of London, in Teignmouth, but they leave even that town behind, as they walk first through “streets,” then a “road bordered with gardens,” and finally into a “lane all but overgrown with grass” (Gissing 101), where they “pass a gate” (102) and finally reach Tarrant’s “spot.” In crossing the boundary between civilization and the natural world, Tarrant and Nancy enter what Suzanne Keen calls a “narrative annex”; they access a bounded, different world, that allows for “plot-altering events” that would normally be impermissible within the regular space of the story-world (Keen 1). They leave the space of the social world, in which they exchange terse, uncomfortable dialogue that only serves to remind both of the wide class and educational gap between them, and enter a natural space in which they can explore and indulge in their attraction to one another. While Tarrant’s secluded spot undoubtedly alludes to the Garden of Eden (as Barbara Harman astutely notes), it can also be read as a reference to Darwinian nature:

The hedge on either side was of hazel and dwarf oak, of hawthorn and blackthorn, all intertwined with giant brambles, and with briars which here and there met overhead. High and low, blackberries hung in multitudes, swelling to purple

32 Bender argues that with the advent of Darwinism, the natural world ceased to be seen primarily as a space of simplicity and repose, but rather as one of “complexity, struggle, and entanglement” (17); similarly, Beer describes Darwinian nature as “surg[ing] onward in hectic fecundity” (125), and Levine emphasizes the “abundance” of Darwinian natural space (18).

ripeness. Numberless the trailing and climbing plants. Nancy’s skirts rustled among the greenery; her cheeks were touched, as if with a caress, by many a drooping branchlet. (Gissing 102)

This “intertwined,” abundant, “ripe” green space is filled with “numberless” living things that reach out to touch Nancy, “as if with a caress,” folding this city girl into the erotic laws of its overgrown fecundity. The natural world appears here to be complicit, even active, in Nancy’s seduction.

It is within this space that Nancy succumbs to love in a way that by now sounds familiar: “a languor crept upon her” and she experiences “a soft and delicious subdual of the will to dreamy luxury” (96); she begins to follow Tarrant “insensibly” and finds it increasingly “difficult to command her thoughts” (100). Although she is resistant at first, by the second visit to the wood, Nancy has become Tarrant’s “captive” (107): his slow-moving indolence appears contagious as she joins him in his “posture of languid ease” (105), and finds herself speaking “languidly, all but plaintively” (110). On this second trip, Nancy only tries “faintly, to get free” (109), and she begins to behave like a dreamer or automaton, as she heeds Tarrant’s commands to “Obey!” (110). The mode of the text shifts into the genre of romance, but that romance is inflected with a particular element of Darwinian influence. Nancy’s feels “her will subdued” (104) not by the force of past stories, as explored in the previous chapter of this dissertation, but by a biological determinism that lulls her into a “dreamy” state, and makes rational thought and free choice nearly impossible.

Nancy tries to resist the pull of this force: “on an instinct of resistance” she brings a dry, scientific text with her into the green space on her first visit, and pretends “that the exact sciences were her favourite study” (101). Throughout the first scene in the wood, Nancy attempts to use this book – by Helmholtz33 – as a shield against Tarrant’s advances. When he offers her blackberries he has gathered on a leaf, she clings to the book, feigning a deep interest in its subject matter; when he compliments her, she looks down at its pages, so that she seems to be reading (103). However, the text’s subject matter demonstrates obliquely that her resistance is

33 Nancy is likely reading a translation of Helmholtz’s Popular Scientific Lectures, published by Longman & Co. in 1873. The Westminster Review lauded this book, calling it essential to “readers who, without being professionally occupied with the study of natural science, are yet interested in the scientific results of such studies” (230).

61 futile. With chapter titles such as “Interaction of Natural Forces,” “Conservation of Force,” and “Physiological Causes of Harmony in Music,” the text alludes to the irresistible forces of the Darwinian natural world. The action that plays out between Nancy and Tarrant can be read as an “interaction of natural forces,” with the force of his seduction pushing against that of her resistance. As mentioned, Nancy acts upon “an instinct of resistance” during this first jaunt with Tarrant. The use of the word “instinct” is deliberate here and suggests Darwin’s deduction that “the innumerable contrivances...by which the male is able to seize the female” (Darwin 275), such as “great jaws, adhesive cushions, spines, elongated legs,” “shew that there is some difficulty in the act” of seduction (326). In other words, Darwin acknowledges that there is typically some instinctive resistance or modesty on the part of the female, even if she is the one to choose her mate – it is this instinct, I argue, that Nancy is enacting in this scene. According to Ruth Yeazell, this delaying instinct of resistance is essential to courtship, both for Darwin and the romantic plotline (“Nature’s” 36). Yeazell argues that the instinct of modesty opens up the possibility for female choice: it creates time and space for selection. In this novel, however, Nancy’s resistance is overpowered by stronger forces of desire and attraction, and does not lead to a freer, more deliberate choice.

Nancy’s eventual surrender is foreshadowed in the title of Helmholtz’s chapter on musical harmony, another topic that has particular Darwinian significance. Bender argues that “nearly every” Darwinian love plot “will contain a scene in which a lover is drawn to or charmed by the other’s musical power to attract” (19). While Tarrant does not sing to Nancy, the Helmholtz chapter heading can be read as an allusion to Darwin’s theories about the role of music in sexual selection and courtship. Darwin explains that music is essential to courtship not only for birds, but for human beings:

music arouses in us various emotions...It awakens the gentler feelings of tenderness and love, which readily pass into devotion...we may assume that musical tones and rhythm were used by our half-human ancestors, during the season of courtship...musical tones in this case would be likely to call up vaguely and indefinitely the strong emotions of a long-past age. (571-572)

The reference to music refers not only to the seductive possibilities of the scene in question, but also to the links between Nancy, Tarrant, and an entire history of human and animal

62 development. Darwin’s ideas here are almost atavistic, as they point to connections and repetitions of a “long-past age” of “half-human ancestors.” As Dana Seitler explains, this type of thinking “belies the conception of identity as direct and individualized...[and] instead plac[es] human beings in a more inclusive...history of biological origins and influences” (2). In enacting the primal scene of love and seduction, Nancy and Tarrant are not acting according to individual preferences and motives, but rather according to a determined biological script that points to the legacy – and future – of their species.

Though Tarrant does not sing to Nancy, he does recite poetry to her. In response to her attachment to Helmholtz, he argues that women should be taught to read poetry rather than science, and recites Keats’s “La Belle Dame Sans Merci.” This is another important intertextual reference in the scene. The poem functions on several levels in Nancy’s seduction and eventual yielding to Tarrant’s advances. First, the recitation serves as a form of Darwinian courtship singing. Poetry has long been linked to music and song, and Gissing describes Tarrant reciting the poem “slowly, musically” (103). The recitation of the poem can be interpreted as the modern man’s version of the male bird’s beautiful singing during the time of courtship. Second, the poem and discussion about poetry that follows serve as a marker of Tarrant’s education and class in comparison to Nancy’s. Throughout their interactions, Tarrant has made Nancy feel that he regards her as a poorly educated social inferior. His mention of Keats reinforces this dynamic, as she is held “silent” and “motionless” (104) by the fact that her knowledge of the poet does not extend past familiarity with his name (103). The recitation of the poem, then, appeals not only to Nancy’s animal instincts (as a male bird’s singing would appeal to a female), but also works on her more “civilized” impulses. According to Darwin, when human females do have the choice of a mate in modern society, “their choice is largely influenced by the social position and wealth of the men” (586). This assertion demonstrates an element of Darwin’s theory that he does not explicitly acknowledge: the role of culture in shaping desire and selection. Darwin amends his theory to account for the modern woman’s “choice,” but does not account for the way in which this choice is influenced not only by biology but by culture and convention. Tarrant’s recitation of Keats can be read as a strategic reminder to Nancy of his social status and the degree to which, biologically and socially, he would be an advantageous match for her.

Finally, the choice of this particular poem is telling and invites interpretation. In “La Belle Dame Sans Merci,” the knight describes the seductions of a “wild” lady in a fecund and magical natural

63 space. Notably, the knight makes the lady “a garland” (l.17) –Tarrant makes Nancy an “ivy wreath” during the second seduction sequence in the wood (108) – and the lady “lulls” the speaker into a dream-filled sleep (l.33-34), an element of the poem that is echoed in the language of sleep and dream that pervades the description of Gissing’s scene. The poem is a reference to the magical, seductive possibilities of love and desire, but also to the bleak return to reality after the moment of “sweet moan” (l.20), in which the lover re-enters a grey, infertile world of loneliness and difficulty. This hints at the challenges that both Nancy and Tarrant will face as a result of their union. This foreshadowing can also be read in the ivy from which Tarrant makes Nancy’s wreath: it comes from a “mass of large, lustrous leaves, concealing a rotten trunk” (108), suggesting that beneath the abundant fertility and magic of the scene, there is something empty, dangerous, or rotten.

In the wood, Nancy succumbs to Tarrant’s advances – and to the forces of her own biologically and socially determined desires34 – and the two reappear in the narrative engaged to be married. The moment of consent and choice is elided, but Gissing makes it abundantly clear that Nancy and Tarrant are attracted to one another, and that the gap in the narrative between the second sequence in the wood and the announcement of their engagement consists of a sex scene we simply are not privy to.35 John Sloan and Constance Harsh comment on the role of Nancy’s sexual desire in the scenes in the wood, and indeed that force is undeniable. Nancy’s “erotic susceptibility” (Harsh “Gissing and Women” 32) and “active sexuality” (Sloan 358) lead directly to her marriage. But, as several critics (notably Harman and Harsh) have pointed out, the moments in the wood are not the sole instances in the novel in which Nancy’s sexuality is apparent: the Jubilee Day crowd sequence is also pervaded with images of abandon and sexuality. It is in this setting that Nancy meets up with Crewe, her other suitor.

The Jubilee Day scene represents an urban iteration of the entangled setting of Darwinian nature: within this space, it is not “briars” and “brambles” that reach out to caress and enfold the

34 Darwin was not the first to suggest that desire might be tied to biological forces such as instinct and attraction. In The Theory of Passionate Attraction (1808), French philosopher Charles Fourier discusses “passionate attraction,” which is given to humans “by nature prior to any reflection; it is persistent despite the opposition of reason, duty, prejudice, etc” (Beecher 216). In The New Amorous World (published in 1967, 130 years after Fourier’s death), he imagines a world in which “complete instinctual liberation” (Beecher 55) has taken place, and sexual passions are recognized and fulfilled. According to his radical theory, “the sexual needs of men and women can become just as urgent as their need for food” (337). 35 Despite this delicacy, many American publishers thought the novel too explicit and “removed passages they considered expressed with insufficient decorum” (James and Huguet 6).

64 heroine, but rather “millions” of “tightly” “packed” people (Gissing 52, 58). Harman interprets the Jubilee Day sequence as an example of the “bad merging” (Harman 353) that characterizes Nancy’s story; in the festive crowd, Nancy engages in acts of “class confusion, coarse commercialism, and sexuality neither controlled nor restrained by moral vision” (347). The lines between self and other, private and public, become blurred and Harman recognizes this “bad” or “dangerous” merging as the source of Nancy’s vulnerability and downfall. Harman’s theory of bad merging contributes to my Darwinian interpretation of the scene: just as the Darwinian natural world is a place of complex, and often uncomfortable, connections, the Jubilee Day crowd is also a space of merging and mixing, of entanglement. The “tumult” of the crowd creates associations and relationships that Nancy would ordinarily resent (Gissing 52): she allows a “young fellow of the clerkly order” to speak with her “as though it were a matter of course,” and permits another man, visibly drunk, to wrap his arm around her (59). Here, “hustled” by the “profane public” (52), “Nancy forgot her identity, lost sight of herself as an individual. Her blood was heated by close air and physical contact. She did not think” and she starts to behave like “any shop-girl let loose” (58). She enters a state similar to the one in the woods in that she loses her ability to reason and choose as a rational individual, and begins to enact the desires of her species. She joins the crowd, which is significantly described as a “huge beast purring to itself in stupid contentment” (58, emphasis added); the connection between the human and animal world is made evident here. Propelled by a desire to “taste independence,” Nancy resolves “to mingle with the limitless crowd as one of its units” and allows herself to be “borne in whatever direction” (54); she becomes part of the beast and surrenders her will to its collective mass. When Crewe suggests that they meet up, she says yes on a whim, not intending to actually find him later. However, she soon recognizes that in the crowd, “save by a disagreeable struggle, she could hardly change the direction of her steps” (59); she is compelled by the movement of the Jubilee Day crowd to meet with Crewe.

Although this scene takes place in a social, urban context rather than an isolated, natural one, it bears many similarities to the wood sequences with Tarrant: the environment is entangled, and linked to the natural world, and Nancy is compelled to sacrifice her agency to larger forces. Indeed, Harsh suggests that Nancy’s “sexual blossoming” at the Jubilee makes her more vulnerable to Tarrant’s approaches later on (“Gissing and Women” 32). However, there is an important difference to note between Nancy’s responses at Jubilee Day and in the woods. When

65 she is in the woods with Tarrant, Nancy surrenders to a dream-like state of languidness; the urban scenes with Crewe, at Jubilee Day and on London Bridge, notably do not contain any mention of dreaminess or sleep. Instead, they emphasize just the opposite: in both scenes, Nancy is represented as nearly feverish with energy and movement (54, 88). Although the crowds determine her course, they paradoxically make her feel powerful and “free” (58). She returns home from the Jubilee not with a will “subdued” but with a defiant “sovereign will” (82). She develops an inflated sense of self and begins to feel that “she – Nancy Lord – was the mid point of the universe” (88). The scenes at Jubilee Day and on London Bridge, despite their images of abandon and surrender, reinforce Nancy’s sense of independence and strength; in these spaces, Nancy participates not in the atavistic tendencies of the natural world, but in an energetic, future- oriented modernity (Harsh “Epistemology” 858). This difference is reflected and embodied in Nancy’s urban suitor, Luckworth Crewe.

Luckworth Crewe is constructed as a foil to Lionel Tarrant. Crewe is a self-made, lower-class man of “coarse vitality and vigour” (95); Tarrant is a member of the leisure class, defined primarily by his “chronic languor,” which “might be sheer laziness” (45). Crewe is a man of action and Tarrant is not; Crewe looks to the future and Tarrant to the past. But as Nancy herself notes, the difference between the two goes beyond that: while Tarrant makes Nancy feel the insufficiency of her education and breeding, time spent with Crewe gives her the “sense of being so undeniably his superior” (86). In the woods, it is Tarrant who calls out “Obey!” and Nancy who quickly rushes to acquiesce to his demands. During Jubilee Day, and on the London Bridge, Nancy enjoys giving Crewe “a sharp command” and takes pleasure in “observ[ing] his ready obedience” (86). As she muses, the difference between Tarrant and Crewe is that with Crewe, she feels herself to be “mistress of the situation”: “with him she could go anywhere, enjoying a genuine independence, a complete self-confidence” (98), and with Tarrant the roles are reversed.

Gissing sets up Crewe and Tarrant in this way to demonstrate how Nancy’s reaction to Crewe is determined by his class and education – she outranks him in both categories – and his business- like strategy of seduction. While Tarrant seduces Nancy with poetry, a type of singing that lulls her into a dream-like state and appeals to her primordial and social desires, Crewe attempts to appeal to Nancy with money and business-like transactions. When Nancy and Crewe are on London Bridge, Crewe comments on the portraits of rich men’s wives that he has seen in the Academy, and says that he would love to see Nancy’s portrait hanging there. Nancy replies that

“[p]ortraits at the Academy cost a great deal, you know” (88) and tells him he will need “twenty thousand a year” to win her as his wife (89). When he balks at the price, she replies “But what was it you said? The most beautiful girl in all London?...How much is she worth?” (88-89). Nancy negotiates with Crewe – participating in her own commodification as Harman explains (Harman 352) – and says she will consider giving him two years to reach that position. Crewe’s style of negotiation, that of the “money-making” man (Gissing 88), places Nancy in a position of power. He does not appeal to her biological or sexual instincts, but instead to her economic logic and her “conceit of self-importance” (88).

Herein lies the essential – and troubling – reason why Nancy marries Tarrant rather than Crewe: Crewe, as a result of his inferior class and business tactics, affords Nancy more agency in courtship than Tarrant does. Nancy does not select Crewe because he gives her the power of selection, the power to say “yes” or “no” to his advances – she “chooses” Tarrant, conversely, precisely because he gives her no choice. In response to Darwin’s theory of sexual selection, Gissing articulates a model of feminine desire that avoids and opposes the possibility of choice. In appealing to her economic logic, Crewe treats Nancy, in many ways, like a man and an equal: she is akin to a colleague in business who can negotiate her terms with a clear head to obtain the best deal. Tarrant, on the contrary, treats Nancy as a woman and as an inferior: he silences her will with the natural forces of sexual attraction and music, which appeal to Nancy’s inner animalistic nature and desires. Nancy can say “no” to Crewe, but there is the sense that she cannot do so with Tarrant. The most insidious part of this is that the narrative suggests that this lack of choice is what she wants.36 While Nancy is interested in Crewe, she falls deeply in love with Tarrant. For much of the novel, she is utterly devoted to him, and struggles to resist her desire to be with him and please him. In the Year of Jubilee presents the disturbing – and not unfamiliar – idea that women want men who give them no choices.

36 While Darwin does not address this desire for domination, this was a topic of critical conversation. Fourier explains that “[w]omen appear to be more in need of masters than of liberty; thus among their lovers they often give preference to those whose conduct merits it the least” (Beecher 175). Fourier does not link this to a primordial biological urge. Instead he explains that this desire to be mastered is a sexual perversion, attributable to the structures of civilization: “how could a woman avoid having servile and perfidious penchants since her whole education has accustomed her to smothering her natural character and adapting herself to the first comer whom chance, intrigue, or avarice may bring her as a husband?” (175). This sentiment is echoed by John Stuart Mill in The Subjection of Women (1869), when he writes that women “are brought up from the very earliest years in the belief that their ideal character is to be the very opposite to that of men; not self-will, and government by self-control, but submission, and yielding to the control of others” (27). The link between this submission and sexual fantasy is evident in Sharon Marcus’ assertion that images of domination were also popular in the pornography and – interestingly enough – women’s magazines of the nineteenth century (Marcus 141).

Gissing provides Nancy, and the reader, with the illusion that she has the choice between two suitors. However, this choice is compromised and over-determined as she is compelled by biology and her social conditioning to “select” Tarrant in a moment of passion. This can be interpreted as Gissing’s conservative reaction to the Darwinian suggestion of female choice in sexual selection – even if given the choice, a woman cannot actually, deliberately choose, nor does she want to – and also as a re-enactment of Darwin’s anti-feminist turn away from female choice at the end of The Descent. Many critics have commented on the anti-feminism that pervades Gissing’s work (Cunningham; Grylls; Fernando; Markow). Markow argues that despite his “attention to the subject of women’s rights,” Gissing continually “‘undercuts,’ subverts, or satirizes the new woman through a plot action” (59). Indeed, this seems to be what is happening in In the Year of Jubilee: the text contains several decidedly misogynistic comments, severely limits Nancy’s capacity for choice, and is careful to enclose independence-seeking Nancy within a confining domesticity after her marriage. However, in drawing the reader’s attention to the “monotonous, imprisoned life” (342) of the wife at home, and in devoting so much space to Nancy’s consciousness, the novel is somewhat ambiguous in its valuation of female agency and endorsement of male supremacy.37 Although the novel structurally seems to end “happily” with Nancy and Tarrant’s marriage, thus potentially supporting Tarrant’s point of view over Nancy’s, this results in a “series of ‘silences’ at the centre of the novel” (Sloan 358), due to the deep, readerly sympathies established for Nancy and her stifled self. While these silences and contradictions do not negate the anti-feminism of the novel, they point to ambiguities that complicate a purely anti-feminist reading.

Another factor that complicates the novel’s anti-feminism is the representation of Tarrant’s experience of love and lust. While Tarrant believes he is Nancy’s superior, he reflects that when it came to seducing and marrying Nancy “choice he had none” (125). After Nancy and Tarrant are engaged, the narrative focalization shifts to Tarrant as we gain insight into his version of what has transpired. He feels a “confused, disagreeable sense” that his “freedom had suffered a violation” in the sudden shift from “bachelor” to “married man” (123). Like Terence and Rachel in Woolf’s A Voyage Out, he struggles to believe that he is really engaged, and asks himself,

37 This ambiguity is reflected in the critical discussion of the novel: while Sloan asserts that the text gives “centrality to Tarrant’s point of view” (359), Harsh argues that Nancy is “privileged thematically, narratologically, and epistemologically” (“Epistemology” 855), and Molly Youngkin takes a middle ground, arguing that in the end the novel is “even-handed, weighted toward neither Nancy’s nor Lionel’s perspective” (67).

“Could it be sober fact? Had he in very deed committed so gross an absurdity?” (123). He reflects that Nancy is “in every respect his inferior” (123) and that, if he could have chosen a wife, he would not have chosen Nancy: “he would as soon as contemplated taking to wife a barmaid” (124). He places the blame on Nancy’s “self-abandonment” and lack of “the common prudence of womanhood” (126), arguing to himself that he was “goaded by his raging blood,” “lured” on by “her beauty” (125). In other words, Tarrant, like Nancy, is represented as experiencing love and desire as forces beyond his control and choice. He too is spurred on by biological desires that disregard the protests of his rational, waking self. In the novel, Nancy has not lost the power of choice because a superior male has won it from her; instead, Gissing constructs a version of biological determinism that governs both sexes equally in moments of love and passion. This constitutes a note-worthy revision of Darwinian sexual selection as presented in The Descent – it articulates a more complete lack of agency, and more complete determinism, in moments of passion.

This interpretation is reinforced by an analysis of the subplot of Nancy’s brother, Horace Lord. Horace, a comparatively minor character, struggles with his ungovernable attraction to Fanny French, a rather repulsive, manipulative, and silly lower-class girl. Fanny is only interested in Horace’s money and treats him “badly, very badly” (359). Nancy and Mrs. Damerel (Nancy and Horace’s mother in disguise) urge Horace to stop pursuing her, and Mrs. Damerel almost succeeds in matching Horace with Winnifred Chittle, a quiet girl of considerable wealth and a tarnished reputation. However, unable to banish Fanny from his mind and heart, Horace severs his engagement to Winnifred, and runs off with Fanny. The two marry and die soon after, of consumption. Horace’s interest in Fanny is decidedly sexual; whenever he is near her, he “burned and panted at the proximity of her white flesh” (76). Horace appears animal-like in his desire: not only does he “pant,” but he follows “at her beck...like a dog” (193). When he is with Fanny, Horace acts according to an animalistic, biological instinct that he cannot control. Although Horace initially refuses to see Fanny’s true character, he does come to recognize – long before the two wed – “that if he married such a girl, his [life] could [not] possibly be a happy one” (193). However, despite this knowledge, “she still played upon his passions” (193) and it seems he cannot help but follow where these feelings lead. It is telling that Nancy sees “in him the victim of ruthless destiny” (347); his “choice” of Fanny French is represented – similar to Tarrant’s choice of Nancy – as determined by forces beyond his control.

Therefore, in In the Year of Jubilee, biological determinism is represented as affecting the moment of sexual selection for both men and women. Nancy and Tarrant (and Horace) appear to lack choice in love (or lust) as their capacities for rational, reasoned action slip away from them. Gissing revises Darwin to articulate an even more powerful role for instinctive desires during mating or courtship. While Darwin’s theory somewhat accounts for the role of culture in influencing instinctive behaviours such as sexual selection (as mentioned, he does acknowledge the attraction of more wealthy males, and the way in which centuries of “savage” society altered courtship patterns), Gissing asserts that there are certain instincts that are averse to culture’s influence. Tarrant and Horace pursue women that do not fit their social stature or personal expectations; they are slaves to their desire and – under the spell of their animalistic impulses – they cannot rely on social rules or structures to contravene their urges.

In the novel, the crucial difference between the sexes is not selection in sex, but the degree of freedom and choice granted to the gendered life cycles (both social and natural). After their marriage and the consummation of their desire, Tarrant is able to regain his agency and independence as he departs for the Bahamas and then the United States. Nancy, on the other hand, enters a “threefold bondage” to Tarrant, her father’s will, and motherhood (173). As Nancy laments, “What an exchange I have made! I was going to be so independent” (173). Tarrant is able to regain his active will after the sexual act and Nancy, as a woman, is not. This is framed as being the result of biological forces – such as, notably, the maternal instinct – and more “civilized” powers, such as gossip, the maintenance of one’s reputation, and the strictures of systems of inheritance. The plot, from the moment of seduction until the novel’s end, forces Nancy to relinquish any independence she may still cling to, as she is compelled to recognize and obey what she perceives as “Nature’s law,” according to which a married woman must be the “slave of husband and children” (336). While Gissing overtly represents the forces that determine the course of Nancy’s life as “natural,” there is evidence that the social is equally implicated in Nancy’s domestic imprisonment.

When Nancy refers to her “threefold bondage” to husband, father, and child, she exposes the ways in which her social and biological gendered roles of wife, daughter, and mother restrict her self-determination and free choice. Her father imposes his paternal, patriarchal will from the grave, forcing her to keep her marriage and pregnancy a secret or risk losing her inheritance, and her “natural” womanly love for husband and child threatens to permanently subdue her

70 independent will. When Nancy marries Tarrant, she feels that she is “all love” of him. She states, “[a]s long as I am myself, I must love you...I ha[ve] no will of my own left” (130). Nancy’s surrender of her individual will can be read in the context of a Darwinian understanding of female instincts, particularly the maternal instinct (563), but is also necessarily ideological and conventional. On the topic of instincts, Darwin explains that all human beings – male and female – exhibit instincts in common with other animals, such as “that of self-preservation, sexual love, the love of the mother for her new-born offspring, the desire possessed by the latter to suck, and so forth” (66). But he comments that men have fewer instincts than other less developed species and, it is implied, than women who bear a stronger similarity to “the lower races...of a past and lower state of civilization” (563-4). He also insists that the maternal instinct is more powerful and irresistible than “any other instinct or motive” as it is “performed too instantaneously for reflection” (110). Nancy indeed does sometimes act according to this instinct. She is always thinking of her son and longs to be with him whenever possible (223), but she also bows to social conventions; she hides his existence in order to preserve her reputation and adhere to the tenets of her father’s will. As with Darwin’s original theory, Gissing’s “Nature’s Law” can be read as a convenient biological explanation for deeply embedded ideological assumptions about a woman’s place and role.

As a result of the social and physical changes it entails, Nancy’s pregnancy, “the second supreme crisis of a woman’s existence” (153), separates her from her old self and old dreams. While once she dreamed of moving about in the wide world, when she becomes a mother

The word ‘home’ grew very sweet to her ears. A man, she said to herself, may go forth and find his work, his pleasure, in the highways; but is not a woman’s place under the sheltering roof? What right had a mother to be searching abroad for tasks and duties? Task enough, duty obvious, in the tending of her child. Had she but a little country cottage with needs assured, and her baby cradled beside her, she would ask no more. (249)

Nancy here is a mouthpiece for conventional femininity, as she evokes a pastoral domestic scene of perfect maternity. Forgotten is the self-important, independence-seeking Nancy, exhilarated by the world and all its possibilities – instead, she sees her fulfilment in essentialist gendered

71 terms, asserting that her only “tasks” and “duties” are related to the tending of her child within the “sheltered” space of the home.

However, as an abandoned wife and mother Nancy has no such “sheltering roof” to turn to. Instead, she and Mary (her former housekeeper) establish an alternative all-female household together, and Nancy remains separated from her child to preserve appearances and avoid violating her father’s will. It is during this time – separated in time and space from husband, father, and child – that Nancy “gr[ows] conscious of a personal freedom not unlike what she had vainly desired in the days of petulant girlhood” (230). Although she suffers many humiliations during this period, Nancy lives “independently,” taking a job at Beatrice French’s shop, and working on a novel about a “love story...very like her own” (250), which she someday hopes to publish. While she is apart from husband and child, Nancy temporarily achieves the “freedom” and “independence” she had always longed for; having her own space enables her to articulate an identity outside of those of daughter, wife, lover, and mother.

This independence, though, is short-lived: Tarrant returns to London and his proximity forces Nancy back into her biologically and socially determined roles of wife and mother. When Tarrant writes to Nancy upon his return, she feels that his letter takes her outside of her ordinary world, as she slips into a “dreamy” state akin to that she experienced during her seduction in the forest (270). However, she does not fall into this “dreamy” condition without significant resistance: when Tarrant approaches her, she tells him “I am not your wife! You married me against your will, and shook me off as soon as possible. I won’t be bound to you; I shall act as a free woman” (308). Here Nancy displays a clear understanding of what transpired between her and Tarrant and her defiance speaks to a maturity and strength of character that she did not previously possess. She is not sleepy or languid in this scene, as she articulately argues with Tarrant, telling him that “there is no husband in the world worth such a friend as Mary” (313). Nancy recognizes that she has been able to achieve independence and she is unwilling to give that up without a fight. She says to Tarrant, “you mustn’t imagine that I put myself into your hands to be looked after as though I had no will of my own” (313) – gone is the “will subdued” of previous chapters as Nancy clearly asserts her own will in this exchange. This argument between Nancy and Tarrant demonstrates that Nancy has advanced beyond a Darwinian animal- like instinct of resistance to a fully cognizant strategy of resistance, relying not on external shields but on female friendship, logic, and personal strength.

Paradoxically, then, this discussion is followed by a total shift in reasoning as Nancy acquiesces to Tarrant’s will, and becomes the wife he desires her to be. Herein lies the gap, or inconsistency, that many critics note: the final section of the novel, in which Tarrant and Nancy enter a “happy” Godwinian union, does not seem to match or logically follow the previous sections. First, Tarrant’s decision is in itself somewhat irrational; despite his near-penniless condition, he insists that Nancy acknowledge the marriage, which not only serves to cut her off from any chance of financial independence, but precludes them both from accessing her sizeable inheritance. Second, Nancy switches from a tone of defiance and self-assertion to one of acceptance and obedience. She leaves her job, and enters the domestic space where she cares for her son, and waits, hopeful that her husband may visit when he so desires. Nancy feels that “the monotony of her own days” lies heavily upon her as Tarrant regales her with stories of his “quasi-bachelor life” (339). In this arrangement, Tarrant maintains total freedom, while Nancy becomes a prisoner of the home, and accepts her duties with a sigh and a smile. Although she wishes to live with Tarrant and have a more traditional marriage, he tries to convince her that such a “huddlement of male and female” is nothing but a “factory of quarrel and hate” (341). Tarrant insists that their model of marriage makes him love her more; he can treat her more as a “mistress” than a wife and feel a fresh sense of attraction and conquest each time they meet (151, 309). It is clear, however, that Nancy is not entirely convinced or won over by this reasoning; not only does she continue to request that they share a home, but when Tarrant speaks to Nancy on the subject, “she looked up and commanded her features to the expression which makes whatever woman lovely – that of rational acquiescence” (343). This “rational acquiescence” does not necessarily imply that Nancy agrees with Tarrant’s reasoning, but that she has decided to accept it; this element of decision is reflected in the way Nancy “commands” her features into the appropriate and attractive expression. There is the sense that Nancy still maintains an independent opinion of the matter, but that she has decided to override that opinion, and allow Tarrant’s will to determine their marriage, and her life.

This is further reflected in Tarrant’s treatment of Nancy’s literary aspirations. Even after they marry, Nancy continues to aspire to “do something” (355, emphasis in original). She questions why “a woman should be shut out from the life of the world” (355) and she wishes to publish her novel. Tarrant, however, belittles her efforts and forbids her from publishing, telling her that her work “will never be literature” (355). Tarrant explains to Nancy that while a man’s “duty [is] to

73 join in the rough-and-tumble for more or less dirty ha’pence,” a woman’s “positive duty [is] to keep out of the beastly scrimmage” (355). Her part in the world, instead, is to bring to it “a new inhabitant” and shape “him into a man” (355). In short, the purpose of Nancy’s life is her maternity and maternal role. This advice disappoints Nancy and she contemplates defying his will and publishing anyway. She reflects,

It was nothing more than advice; often enough he had told her that he claimed no coercive right; that their union, if it were to endure, must admit a genuine independence on both sides. But herein, as on so many other points, she subdued her natural impulse, and conformed to her husband’s idea of wifehood. It made her smile to think how little she preserved of that same ‘genuine independence;’ but the smile had no bitterness. (356)

Nancy recognizes the imbalance of freedom between herself and her husband. While their “modern” marital arrangement promises “genuine independence on both sides,” in practice it heavily restricts Nancy’s liberty and privileges her husband’s. Yet, despite her awareness of this disparity, Nancy smiles without bitterness. She puts aside her book as her husband recommends and, Gissing’s narrator would suggest, is content to do so.

The question that then arises for the reader is: why? Why does independent, intelligent, ambitious, modern Nancy acquiesce to Tarrant’s reasoning and subdue her will in favour of his? Critics have attempted to answer this question in various ways, with most arguing that Gissing is attempting to please various audiences or reconcile conflicting cultural ideals. Emma Liggins postulates that the “inconsistencies in the third volume perhaps indicat[e] Gissing’s aesthetic struggle to provide realistic conclusions to the New Woman narrative, which would placate conservative critics without completely alienating feminist readers” (176); Gail Cunningham suggests that the ending reflects “an uneasy combination of some modern attitudes to women with an ill-disguised hankering after the old ideals” (149). These are likely and useful arguments, but they focus primarily on Gissing-the-man and the novel as historical artifact. If we turn to the text itself, we can see that Gissing does attempt to provide us with an answer to this question.

The reason given within the text for Nancy’s acquiescence is that it is “Nature’s law.” As Nancy says to Mary,

Nature doesn’t intend a married woman to be anything but a married woman. In the natural state of things, she must either be the slave of husband and children, or defy her duty...It’s a hard saying, but who can doubt that it is Nature’s law? I should like to revolt against it, yet I feel revolt to be silly. One might as well revolt against being born a woman instead of a man. (336)

Nancy explains that as a “married woman” she has no choice but to be the “slave” of her husband and child. This appears to her to be Nature’s decree and resistance is futile and “silly”: Nancy sees herself as determined by this law as a result of “being born a woman.” Nancy continues on to explain that, at first, this was difficult for her to accept. She does “have brains” and “should like to use them; but Nature says that’s not so important as bringing up the little child” she has brought into the world (336). She must relinquish her own ambitions and desires and focus on those of her husband and child. While it troubles her that “Nature says that women are born only to be sacrificed,” she is “bound to believe it,” and ultimately her recognition of this law makes her “far more contented” than she was at first (336-337). Nancy is able to accept her role as submissive and self-immolating mother and wife because she sees it as, as Harsh phrases it, her “biological destiny” (Harsh “Epistemology” 857).38

Yet, we as readers can perceive that this is not necessarily “Nature’s law”, but “Culture’s law”; indeed, in the earlier quotation, Nancy recognizes her “natural impulse” to act in the world – why is this not “Nature’s Law” for women? Neither the narrator nor Nancy acknowledges the essential role of the social in shaping and determining choices and action. In the Year of Jubilee revises Darwin’s theory of sexual selection to articulate a more complete determinism for both sexes and to insist that women do not want choice in love, but maintains Darwin’s blithe lack of interest (or perhaps fear of engaging with) the complex role of culture in determining human behaviour. Darwin’s theory of human sexual selection does obliquely account for the role of human history in shaping courtship and mating habits. In the Year of Jubilee, conversely, insists on the natural and biological nature of the forces behind women’s subjection. In representing Nancy as placated by her “biological destiny,” In the Year of Jubilee suggests an amped up Darwinian biological determinism that compels Nancy to accept her gendered roles of wife and

38 Harsh interprets this as Nancy’s submission to the “masculine order” (857), an idea echoed by Sjöholm who writes that Nancy is “defeated by ‘nature’ in the form of motherhood, and the patriarchal society in the form of the attitudes and conventions surrounding her” (Sjöholm 101).

75 mother. The same forces of instinct, nature, and biology that determine her consent to Tarrant as lover and husband continue to govern her choices later in life once she becomes a wife and mother. Nancy’s purported contentedness at the end of the novel – difficult as it is to reconcile with representations of her resistance – is consistent in that it echoes Gissing’s earlier assertion that women are biologically predisposed to prefer a lack of choice. Although Tarrant crushes Nancy’s will, as a woman she somehow likes this. While Darwin’s The Descent of Man suggests the possibility of female choice in its numerous observations from the animal kingdom, Gissing’s novel argues that deliberate choice in sexual selection is impossible for both men and women, and that women prefer a lack of choice despite their protestations to the contrary.

3 The Portrait of a Lady

In his Preface to The Portrait of a Lady, Henry James claims that his novel “place[s] the centre of the subject in the young woman’s own consciousness” (11). By focusing on Darwin’s theory of sexual selection, this section brings to light the degree to which Isabel’s “vivid” consciousness is directed by un/semi-conscious biological forces, such as instincts and impulses, that lie beyond her rational comprehension. From the start of the novel, Isabel Archer, like Nancy Lord, is quick to assert that she is “very fond of [her] liberty” (34) and she convinces the Touchetts that she “will do everything she chooses” (57). The reader of Portrait finds herself in a similar position to that of Ralph Touchett; the great drama of reading the text is the “thrill” (158) of seeing what Isabel will do with her freedom, of watching and wondering at the choices she will make. These choices, however, are exposed as increasingly bounded and determined as the novel proceeds. Similar to Woolf’s Rachel Vinrace, Isabel begins by declaring “I’m not sure I wish to marry any one” (119), but is quickly folded into a love plot that echoes the novels she has read,39 as her choices devolve from the choice of what to do to the choice of whom to marry.40 This narrowing of Isabel’s choices is represented as socially determined, but also as being a result of seemingly unavoidable biological imperatives.

39 During her early days at Gardencourt, Isabel compares the old house to the setting of a romantic novel (59), and delights in Lord Warburton’s social status: “Oh, I hoped there would be a lord; it’s just like a novel!” (30). When Warburton proposes, “[i]t suddenly came upon her that her situation” (115) was much like that of a literary character “[b]ut[,] as she was now the heroine of the situation she succeeded scarcely the less in looking at it from the outside” (116). She perceives that she has in many ways entered the world of the novels she has read, and views herself as a heroine of romantic fiction. 40 As Elizabeth Allen and Annette Niemtzow note, Isabel’s “choices seem inevitably to narrow down into the choices of marriage” (Allen 59); she “has no options except marriage” (Niemtzow 392).

Unlike Rachel Vinrace and Nancy Lord, however, Isabel appears to be a figure of active resistance against what she dimly perceives as the determining forces of the courtship plot (both fictional and Darwinian): she refuses proposals from Lord Warburton, the conventional choice of romantic fiction and a convincing Darwinan competitor, and Caspar Goodwood, the compelling and sexually attractive Darwinian male. She strives to “choose something very deliberately, and be faithful to that” (James 267), and, in finding that “one must marry a particular individual” (346), she “chooses” Gilbert Osmond because with him it appears to her that she will be able to choose freely, based upon her individual preference. However, Isabel’s choice of Osmond is revealed to be the most determined and orchestrated of all. Despite her efforts to resist the narrative of seduction and to regain the power of selection by consciously choosing a partner, Isabel is captured by the more highly evolved Darwinian competitor who appeals to her theories and her instinctive urges. In depicting his independent heroine “put in a cage” (340) through marriage, James represents free, rational female choice in sexual selection as being nearly impossible to achieve.

The multiple suitor courtship plot of course predates Darwin, but in a post-Darwinian world, Isabel’s choosing among her many (competitive) suitors does lend itself to a Darwinian interpretive lens. Since the novel’s publication, readers have wondered at Isabel’s choice of Osmond and her decision to return to him at the end of the novel. This section approaches that fundamental problem of the text from a Darwinian angle, essentially asking: might Isabel’s choice be limited or determined by her biological instincts? Henry James was indeed familiar with Darwin; the two met in 1869,41 and as Leon Edel records in his biography, James was familiar with Darwin’s work (95, 166).42 While Edel famously proclaimed that James was “impervious to the great scientific strains of his century” (166), Bender argues the opposite, insisting that The Portrait of a Lady “resounds with scenes and imagery of the courtship reality, as defined by the theory of sexual selection” (142). Indeed, as Bender points out, the novel is full of references to gripping male hands (prehensile methods of holding down a resistant female), mating dances, and the general representation of love as a battle or conflict. Bender also notes

41 Bender theorizes that Henry James was likely an “emissary” for his brother William at this meeting (106). William had just published two positive reviews of Darwin’s The Variation of Animals and Plants under Domestication and the meeting was arranged by his publisher, Charles Eliot Norton. 42 James also refers to Charles Darwin in his Galaxy review of George Eliot’s Middlemarch: he comments that Eliot was “too often [echoing] Mssrs. Darwin and Huxley” (qtd. in Bender 132).

77 that both William James and Henry James, Sr. held strong (and public) opinions about Darwin’s theories, and concludes that, “living in Cambridge when The Descent of Man was published, [James] could not have avoided hearing a great deal about it” (108).43 As Meredith Miller argues, novelists such as James and Gissing “layer the most pressing social, political and cultural questions at work in [their] world” upon the choice of suitor in the romance plot (93). In this chapter, I am interested in drawing out the ways in which Isabel’s choices are reflective of a post-Darwinian sexual reality. By attending to the Darwinian elements and influence in The Portrait of a Lady, I argue that Isabel’s choice of a husband – despite her insistence on its freedom and rationality – is at least partially determined by her instincts and impulses. James’s representation of Isabel’s choice in the novel demonstrates a Darwinian influence, but also extends Darwin’s latent suggestions about the role of the social in determining the script of sexual selection. While Darwin largely avoids discussions of the role of the social and ideological in the drama of sexual selection, James brings this feature to the fore to argue that biology and society are deeply intertwined as both prevent and limit female choice; in the figure of Gilbert Osmond these two forces work in concert against Isabel’s free, rational choice. Isabel attempts to resist the usual narrative of Darwinian sexual selection, and to assert her capacity for deliberate, personal choice, but is ultimately entrapped by a highly evolved Darwinian suitor who has harnessed the capacity of social forces to alter the course of biology, just as, for Darwin, years of human “savagery” altered the usual role of female choice in sexual selection. In The Portrait of a Lady, social and biological forces collude to deny Isabel’s agency and choice in love.

Although Isabel asserts that she is not interested in marriage – that instead she is more determined “to see, to try, to know” (64) – she is quickly pulled into the drama of the multiple suitor courtship plot, in which the question of choice is focused quite claustrophobically on the choice of whom to accept in marriage. Early in the novel, this “tight plait” of the courtship narrative appears to be an awkward fit for Isabel: while “[m]ost women…waited, in attitudes more or less gracefully passive, for a man to come their way and furnish them with a destiny[,] Isabel’s originality [is] that she [gives] one the impression of having intentions of her own” (75). Isabel seems, at least to the Touchetts and to herself, destined to pursue a freer, less

43 My work in this section is indebted to Bender’s analysis of The Portrait of a Lady. I diverge from Bender, however, in suggesting that Osmond’s power as a suitor arises not only from his “‘erect’ personality” (150) but from his highly evolved ability to harness the power of social, as well as biological, forces.

78 conventional, and more individualistic course than other young ladies. She has a “strong will” (54), is “very natural” (56), and likes to “know why” (60) and “to choose” (79). Although her thoughts are a “tangle of vague outlines” (63), she strives to act according to consistent and beautiful theories of her own and to decide things for herself.

Isabel is first given the opportunity to apply these theories in her rejection of Lord Warburton. Lord Warburton, according to the standards of nearly every character in the novel, is an eminently marriageable man – he even suits the exacting Gilbert Osmond. Warburton is a suitor straight out of Isabel’s girlish, novel-based fantasies; she perceives him to be “a hero of romance” (78). Also, he is a worthy Darwinian competitor in terms of the usual standards of sexual selection. When Warburton is first introduced, James’ narrator points out his attractiveness and physical strength. Notable details are “the rich adornment of [his] chestnut beard” (21) – a male ornament for sexual attraction of the female according to Darwin (Darwin 597) – and his “large, white, well-shaped fist” (James 21), which can be read as an example of the “innumerable contrivances” males have developed to “seize the [resistant] female” (Darwin 275). Although Warburton’s hands are later described as “quiet” (James 125), this large fist in his first introduction is indicative of the brute masculine strength that lies latent beneath Lord Warburton’s civilized exterior. There is the sense that, if stirred, his instincts and corporeal strength could lead him to victory in battle.

In addition to his physical prowess, Warburton is also rich and aristocratic; this too is an advantage in the battle for reproductive success. As mentioned earlier, Darwin notes that when women have the power of selection in “civilized nations[,]…their choice is largely influenced by the social position and wealth of the men” (586). As Bender explains, “Warburton promises in name and appearance [and, I would add, socio-economic status] to be the dominant and therefore successful male in the ensuing struggle for Isabel” (143). He is masculine, successful, powerful, and even likeable. If Isabel is to adhere to the usual evolutionary and social script, she would likely select Warburton without hesitation. And yet, when he proposes, Isabel feels that “there had been no choice in the question[:] [s]he couldn’t marry Lord Warburton” (121).

Many critics explain that Isabel rejects Lord Warburton because this marriage would restrict her freedom (Moore 37; Mull 130-1). This is indeed Isabel’s own explanation. Isabel rationalizes her rejection of Warburton with the idea that, in marrying him, she would be drawn into “the system

79 in which he rather invidiously lived and moved” and would lose the ability to follow her own “system and orbit” (114). She perceives that marriage to Warburton would limit her freedom and movement in the world – that in a way, her story would be over before it had begun – and she therefore declines his offer. While this reasoning stands,44 it is also important to point out the ways in which James’s narrator undercuts the rationality of this decision: there is considerable evidence that Isabel’s rejection of Warburton is due to an animalistic “instinct” of resistance or even fear, rather than a coherent theory or idea (Blackwood 274). When Warburton first approaches Isabel in the garden, she rises almost automatically from her seat; “she felt a wish, for that moment, that he should not sit down beside her” (James 113). Like Nancy, Isabel demonstrates an instinctive resistance to seduction, and seeks to shield herself from the “aggression” of a romantic approach (113). Warburton’s proposal is almost an “affront” (113) to her and, as he speaks, a “certain instinct, not imperious, but persuasive, [tells] her to resist” (114). The animalistic imagery continues: despite her “admiration” of the opportunity presented to her, Isabel “manage[s] to move back into the deepest shade of it, even as some wild, caught creature in a vast cage” (120). While Isabel might believe that in this moment she is acting according to a grand theory for her development – and perhaps she is, partially – she is represented as behaving like a “wild, caught creature” obeying the instinct to avoid certain imprisonment. The difference between a “yes” and “no” answer to Warburton’s proposal is a question not of reason, but of impulse. As Isabel thinks, “[s]he would have given her little finger at that moment to feel strongly and simply the impulse” to accept his offer (119). Isabel declines Warburton’s proposal not simply because she thinks he threatens to limit her, but because she lacks the “impulse” to accept and instead obeys an “instinct” to resist.

In this scene, we begin to see the complex balance between reason and instinct in James’s characterization of Isabel. Isabel’s rejection of Lord Warburton, on the levels of dialogue and plot, demonstrates that Isabel is able to escape the typical narrative of sexual selection (and of the literary love plot): she asserts her originality and independence of will in her rejection of a

44 Indeed, despite all of his kindliness, there is evidence that Warburton poses a real threat to Isabel’s independent subjectivity. Earlier, when he describes his brother’s opinions to Isabel, and explains how he disagrees with them, Isabel recognizes several of these opinions as her own: “Many of them indeed she supposed she had held herself, till he assured her she was quite mistaken, that it was really impossible, that she had doubtless imagined she entertained them, but that she might depend that, if she thought them over a little, she would find there was nothing in them” (80). Here we see a more benign version of Osmond’s philosophy that his wife’s mind is to be a reflection of his own, a garden from which all of her own thoughts have been weeded out (472).

80 suitable match who meets the standards of social convention and biology. However, James’s representation of the inner workings of Isabel’s consciousness works to deflate and undercut this reading. Isabel may speak of her grand ideas of life and the intellectual bases of her choices, but James demonstrates that her “decisions” are closely tied to instinct and impulse. Try as she might, Isabel cannot “transfer the seat of consciousness to the organ of pure reason” (111).45 As a woman in the world of Portrait, Isabel is “human and feminine” (558): as such, her choices are necessarily affected by “common passions” (558) and biology.

The force of Darwinian biology is most evident in the scenes involving Caspar Goodwood. Robert White suggests that Warburton and Goodwood are essentially rather similar: both “project auras of intense masculinity[,]...sexual potency [and]...phallic energy” (65). While I agree that both suitors possess these qualities (in addition, both are rich and successful) I think it is important to view them on a continuum, with each exhibiting these traits to a different degree. Warburton is a viable Darwinian competitor, but he has been “fertilized by a high civilization” (21); similar to Madame Merle, some of his edges and instincts have been rubbed away by the forces of social convention (199). This may be the reason why his “large hands” have become “quiet” (125); as a “fine specimen of” the “great class” of the “highly-developed Englishman” (291), he is in many ways detached from the struggles of the active, animalistic male.46 Caspar Goodwood, conversely, is a productive, active, ambitious American businessman, who appears as a synecdoche for industrialized America and “New World virility” more broadly (Bender 146; Correa 119-122; Sicker 57). Goodwood represents a more brutal and sexual – and perhaps more purely Darwinian – choice for Isabel. Warburton may have a “well-formed fist,” but Goodwood is “naturally plated and steeled, armed essentially for aggression” (164). It would not be unreasonable to imagine that if there were a physical battle between the two, Goodwood would be the victor. There is a rawness to Goodwood that makes him more dangerous as a competitor, and as a seducer. While Warburton’s breath is the “charged air” of “strange gardens” (119), Goodwood’s is the insistent “hot wind of the desert” which makes the “mere sweet airs of the garden” “drop dead” (579-80). Warburton’s “implement of the chase” is “his mastered emotion”

45 For another reading of the body-mind connection in Portrait, see Sarah Blackwood’s “Isabel Archer’s Body” (2010). Blackwood argues that “the novel imagines Isabel’s body as a cognitive system that reflects, theorizes, and makes decisions...The Portrait of a Lady reimagine[s] consciousness as corporeal” (272). 46 Isabel herself comments on this when rejecting his proposal: she feels that in marrying him she will be separated from “the usual chances and dangers, from what most people know and suffer” (142).

(121), and Goodwood’s is “all the passion he had never stifled” (504); he exhibits less control, but also less deception in his approach to seduction. It is significant that when both suitors reappear later in the novel, Warburton tries to approach Isabel indirectly, by courting her stepdaughter, while Goodwood aggressively grabs her wrist and goes in for the famous lightning bolt kiss. Isabel complains that Goodwood “show[s] his appetites and designs too simply and artlessly” (127). Throughout the novel he lacks Lord Warburton’s civilized veneer and reveals his singular desire to possess and nearly devour Isabel.

Critics have traditionally interpreted Caspar Goodwood as a giant “walking erection” (Kleinberg 3), and with good reason (beyond his suggestive name): he is the most obviously sexual character in the novel. Physically, he is “tall, strong and somewhat stiff” and has “an air of requesting your attention” (49). Isabel repeatedly notes the way the “hardness” of his presence “ris[es] before her” and, with “a disagreeably strong push,” “deprive[s] her of the sense of freedom” (125).47 The strong effect of Goodwood’s sexuality on Isabel is evident from his first appearance in the novel. When Goodwood arrives at Gardencourt, he renews his suit for Isabel’s hand directly after she has been appealed to by Warburton. As a result, she is armed with the theory that she used to divert that British Lord: as Goodwood pleads his case with her, Isabel repeats the “love of liberty” idea that was “as yet almost exclusively theoretic” (172). She tells him that she does not “want to marry” (165) and instead wishes to find out “how to live...for herself” (166). Despite the similar terms of her rejection, Isabel does not deliver these explanations to Goodwood with the same tranquility of mind and spirit as in the scene with Warburton. Instead, after Caspar leaves, she is “trembling all over....like a smitten harp” (172). Like Eliot’s Maggie Tulliver, Isabel is prone to vibration (Correa 111) and this vibration suggests that Goodwood’s sexuality has aroused a corresponding desire in Isabel. While she is relieved that he is gone, there is a “throbbing in her heart” that is “a thing to be ashamed of – it was profane and out of place” (James 172). The narrator goes on to suggest that the profanity of this throbbing stems from “her long discussion with Mr. Goodwood” and the “enjoyment she found in the exercise of her power” (172). Isabel trembles at the pleasure she feels in interacting with Goodwood, the virile sexual male, and also in exerting her own will. She shakes, both from

47 Bender calls Goodwood a “more or less naked sexual force” (146); Lahoucine Ouzgane declares him a “sexual threat” to Isabel (120); and Susan Reibel Moore explains that “Goodwood’s sexuality is so extreme in its expression [that Isabel] cannot, without losing her integrity, accept him” (50-51).

82 the desire he awakens in her, and the sense of her own “victory” (172), as she has managed to escape the fearful pull of his compelling sexual appeal.

Goodwood represents the potential power of sexual desire to efface and overwhelm the heroine of a love plot. When Maggie Tulliver is overcome with desire for Stephen Guest, she enters a dim state of consciousness, characterized by water imagery, in which she loses sight of herself and her individual circumstances. Goodwood is shown similarly to project these experiences onto Isabel when he is under the spell of his own desire. When Goodwood is finally alone with Isabel in the churchyard, after she has married Osmond,

all the passion he had never stifled surged into his senses; it hummed in his eyes and made things swim round him. The bright, empty room grew dim and blurred, and through the heaving veil he felt her hover before him with gleaming eyes and parted lips. If he had seen more distinctly he would have perceived her smile was fixed and a trifle forced – that she was frightened at what she saw in his own face. (504)

Here James represents Goodwood’s sexual passion as effectively blinding him to everything but the force of his own desire. His yearning for Isabel makes things “swim,” “dims” the room, “blurs” his vision, and reduces Isabel to an ill-defined, ghost-like feminine speck with “gleaming eyes and parted lips.” Her individuality is effaced under the force of his desiring vision, and he imagines that she is receptive to his advances when really she is frightened by the raw desire that his look communicates: his desire leaves little room for his apprehension of her consent or choice. Isabel’s instinct of resistance against Goodwood’s advances is also an instinct of fear. She is afraid of the vision of herself – powerless, voiceless, and de-individuated – that blares through his desiring gaze. Through Goodwood, James represents sexual desire as a powerful and dangerous force in human relationships.

This theme reappears with greater intensity later in the novel when Goodwood kisses Isabel at Gardencourt. By this point in the text, Isabel’s relationship to her own choices and freedom has undergone significant change due to years of marriage to Osmond. She is no longer a character who does as she chooses, but rather one who is “trying not to think” (572) and who fears the consequences of her decisions. Just earlier, she had envied Ralph Touchett his dying because it appeared to her that death could provide her with freedom from the struggle of having to choose

– this is a far cry from the Isabel who feared a marriage to Warburton because it would detach her from the “misery” of the world (142). In this state, with her attention “so little at her command” (573), one would expect Isabel to be particularly susceptible to Goodwood’s advances. She notes that he approaches her with the same sexual energy that he had “the other day in the churchyard; only at present it was worse” (577). As she did during Warburton’s proposal in the same spot years ago, Isabel instinctively rises from her seat on the bench as Goodwood nears. However, unlike Warburton, Goodwood does not accept this method of escape: “with a motion that looked like violence...he grasped her by the wrist and made her sink again into the seat” (577). Goodwood, as a dominant Darwinian male, asserts his superior strength and pins down the female for the execution of the sexual act. Although she has an “immense desire to appear to resist” (580), like Nancy Lord she temporarily “obey[s]” (577) the compelling force of sexual desire and of the male’s superior strength. In this scene, the water imagery from The Mill on the Floss converges with the lightning bolt of Dorothea and Ladislaw’s kiss in Middlemarch and Rachel Vinrace’s sense of fatal sinking at the end of The Voyage Out. Isabel feels that Goodwood comes to her “in a rushing torrent” and she believes “just then that to let him take her in his arms would be the next best thing to her dying” (581). She falls into “a kind of rapture, in which she felt herself sink and sink” (581). The water images continue as she notes “the noise of waters...in her own swimming head” (581). She becomes Goodwood’s fantasy lady with gleaming eyes and receptive parted lips, participating in the confusion and watery tumult of sexual desire. As he kisses her, she feels “each thing in his hard manhood that had least pleased her, each aggressive fact of his face, his figure, his presence, justified of its intense identity and made one with this act of possession” (581): in this kiss, in the act of possessing and overtaking Isabel, the evolutionary purpose of Goodwood’s hard, aggressive masculinity is revealed. He is the ultimate animalistic Darwinian male, built for the laws of battle and success in reproduction.

And yet, Isabel does not accept this strong Darwinian suitor, neither before nor after her marriage to Osmond. Her initial rejection of Goodwood, similar to her rejection of Lord Warburton, demonstrates her commitment to resisting the typical narrative of Darwinian human sexual selection. James represents Isabel as believing that she is a different kind of woman: she will not be swayed by physical strength, social success, or sexual attractiveness in making her most important choice. Although these forces interest her, and she feels herself respond to them

84 to different degrees, she believes that she makes a conscious choice to resist these in order to maintain her greater freedom. By rejecting these two suitable suitors, Isabel constructs and imagines herself to be what Ralph Touchett perceives her as: an original, free, and deliberate chooser. She will not bow to the forces of convention or nature, and plans to act according to her own intentions, whatever these may be. Her second rejection of Goodwood, after the lightning bolt kiss, reflects a similar fleeing from the Darwinian sexual plot, but in that instance Isabel runs not away from convention, but towards it, as she (we may assume) returns to her husband, Gilbert Osmond.

Isabel’s resistance to the advances of Warburton and Goodwood makes it especially shocking, to the reader and to Ralph, when Isabel “chooses” Gilbert Osmond. Isabel repeatedly asserts that her marriage to Osmond is a “choice” (345); as she says to Henrietta, “I was perfectly free; it was impossible to do anything more deliberate” (483). However, James makes it clear to the reader that her marriage is a trap, orchestrated by Osmond and Madame Merle. As with Darwin’s animal choosers, the line between a deliberate and a determined choice is blurry at best. Isabel marries Osmond not because she freely chooses him, escaping the usual narrative of human sexual selection, but because he successfully manipulates her with the help of Madame Merle. While he may not appear to be a strong Darwinian competitor, Osmond is in fact the most highly evolved male of all three suitors: while Goodwood and Warburton rely on their personal attractions to appeal to Isabel, Osmond harnesses tools of seduction that extend beyond his own body and self. He utilizes the attractions and social intelligence of Madame Merle, as well as the appeal of his home and daughter, to execute his courtship designs.

Not only do Osmond and Madame Merle conspire to bring Isabel and Osmond together, but, as Ouzgane convincingly explains, together they establish a system of what Rene Girard calls “triangular” or “mimetic” desire, in which “a character desires an object, not for itself, but for the value lent to it by the desire of another” (Ouzgane 115). Ouzgane demonstrates that throughout the novel, despite all of her assertions of originality, Isabel displays a “hypermimetic temperament” (116) and is extremely open to the influence of others (121). She is especially susceptible to Madame Merle, a character who puts her “under an influence” (James 196) and on whom she thinks she ought to model herself (399). Madame Merle becomes Isabel’s “model” and “[w]hat a model recommends becomes inevitably desirable” (Ouzgane 124). Madame Merle is represented as a charming, but also perversely social creature: from her first introduction, we

85 are told that she “was in a word too perfectly the social animal...she existed only in her relations, direct or indirect, with her fellow mortals” (James 199). If, to put things in their simplest terms, Caspar Goodwood represents the sexual, then Madame Merle represents the social. Osmond is able to harness this social power to achieve his own ends in entrapping Isabel. He embodies the shift at the end of Darwin’s Descent in that he relies on social forces to modify the usual plot of sexual selection. In her fundamentally relational subjectivity, and her manipulation of triangular desire, Madame Merle demonstrates the impact of the social – of the “great round world itself!” (255) – on Isabel’s seemingly free, individual choices. This social influence is not instinctive or biological, but it operates on a similarly unconscious or semi-conscious level; that is, it exists in a sphere beyond Isabel’s rational choice. Here, James reveals a parallel between biology and ideology: both operate on individuals without their awareness or consent, and both have considerable power to determine one’s course of action.

However, this raises the question: why does Isabel bow to the social as embodied in Madame Merle rather than that embodied in other relational beings, such as the Misses Molyneux, for example, whom she “took [such] a fancy to” (87)? Why does their version of the social not succeed in serving Warburton’s ends? The answer rests in the way Madame Merle – and her descriptions of Osmond – corresponds to Isabel’s theories and ideas about the world. As Ouzgane explains, the “social fortune” of characters like Goodwood and Warburton, and by extension the Misses Molyneux, appears to be based “in the external world of chance, birth, circumstances, and social status” (123). The “aristocratic situation” of “less conventionally fortunate” characters like Madame Merle and Osmond acquires, “in Isabel’s eyes, a better distinction, a spiritual greatness, based on taste and feeling...it seems to have its roots in the mind” (123). Isabel appreciates that Madame Merle and Osmond’s value is not derived from conventional means: they are not rich, successful, or powerful. Instead, they seem to her to exist in an alternate realm, in which their worth is derived from their “talents” (206) and “taste” (265). These measures of worth greatly appeal to Isabel – they appear to belong to a higher plane – and give direction to her vague ambitions. She perceives that with Osmond she can resist the usual narrative of female choice co-opted by physical and social prowess, and instead select according to more personalized ideals.

It is for this reason that Madame Merle’s representation of Osmond as a “perfect nonentity” (328), with “[n]o career, no name, no position, no fortune, no past, no future, no anything” (203),

86 is so paradoxically appealing to Isabel. In “offer[ing] nothing” (310), Osmond seems to represent a being completely outside of the systems she has rejected in Warburton and Goodwood. With his plan “to be as quiet as possible” (267), Osmond appears to Isabel as a “specimen apart” (264). He does not present the traditional masculinity of Warburton or Goodwood, and as a result, he is less threatening to Isabel’s image of herself and her own independence. As Bender explains, Osmond convinces Isabel “that he has freed himself from the struggle dictated by the laws of sexual attraction” (149) and, I would add, the laws of the market. In aspiring “not to strive or struggle” (James 267), Osmond asserts that he is not moved by the laws of battle that govern political, social, and sexual life. As a result of his seemingly perfect “nothingness” and detachment, Isabel believes that Osmond cannot hurt her (333), and that he will not limit her freedom of choice. When Isabel leaves Rome to travel with her aunt, Osmond says to her, “[y]ou’re under no obligation to come back; you can do exactly what you choose; you can roam through space” (307). To Isabel, the choice to marry Osmond, unlike the choice to marry Warburton or Goodwood, seems to be a true choice: one unclouded by the determining forces of the conventional or the sexual. Unlike Nancy Lord, Isabel is drawn to the suitor who seems to offer her a choice. Osmond is a predator, but he is one she does not recognize. He is not the hero of romance or the overpoweringly masculine Darwinian male, both of whom Isabel perceives as enemies to her freedom. Instead, he appears as a negation, a non-man, a non-threat, and she loves him “not for what he really possessed, but for his poverties dressed out as honours” (346). Isabel marries Osmond on a “factitious theory” (423) that places value on all that he lacks for she believes that this lack will leave space for herself and her agency.

However, as with Isabel’s rejection of Warburton, there is more to Isabel’s choice of Osmond than the fact that he corresponds to her theories: instinct and desire also play a role. Isabel herself recognizes that her “theory...was only half the story” (423). She marries Osmond not only because of her fine ideas about him, but due to a “certain ardour [that] took possession of her” (423). Indeed, when Isabel first encounters Osmond, the scene bears some familiar markers of irrational romantic surrender. Osmond, like Lionel Tarrant, is described as an “indolent” (242), “languid-looking figure” (233) and, similar to Tarrant, he makes his lover feel inadequate, self- conscious, and insecure. When she meets Osmond, Isabel thinks “[i]t would have annoyed her to express a liking for something he, in his superior enlightenment, would think she oughtn’t to like...She was very careful therefore as to what she said” (266). Osmond’s superiority,

87 established in advance by Madame Merle and affirmed by Osmond’s behaviour and collection of “romantic objects” (266), alters Isabel’s usual “natural” self-expression as she curbs herself in order to correspond to his standards. Like Tarrant with Isabel, Osmond harnesses his class and culture to shame Isabel into a position of passivity and relative powerlessness. In response to his gaze, she “efface[s] herself...[and] ma[kes] herself small, pretending there was less of her than there really was” (422). Like Nancy, Isabel seems to fall under a spell which compels her to obey her lover: “Isabel waited, with a certain unuttered contentedness, to have her movements directed” (263) by Osmond. Finally, “she had ceased to attend to what he said; she listened to him with attentive eyes, but was not thinking of what he told her” (266); Isabel enters a state of distraction, in which she focuses on her suitor but cannot understand the meaning of his words. Although the word “dream” does not appear in this sequence, Isabel seems to enter a dream-like state when she meets the “indolent” Osmond, as she temporarily surrenders some of her agency to his excellent taste and beautiful mind.

This surrender is subtly linked to sexual desire and biological urges. While some critics, like Kurt Hochenauer, argue that Isabel’s “marriage to Osmond is essentially asexual” (22), I align myself more with those, such as White, who note that Osmond’s “charm, in its very subtlety and delicacy, is decidedly sexual” and “phallic” (67). Osmond appears on the surface to eschew the sexual in his approach to Isabel – there are certainly no lightning bolt kisses here – but his appeal is still sexual and masculine. While Isabel recognizes that “Madame Merle had had that [similar] note of rarity [to Osmond]...what quite other power it immediately gained when sounded by a man!” (264). Osmond’s masculinity is an important part of his appeal. In first describing Osmond, James’ narrator devotes considerable space to representing Osmond’s beard: it is “cut in the manner of the portraits of the sixteenth century and surmounted by a fair moustache, of which the ends had a romantic upward flourish, [and gives] its wearer a foreign, traditionary look and suggest[s] that he was a gentleman who studied style” (233). This lengthy description is indicative of several of Osmond’s personality traits, not least his very conscious method of self- ornamentation. If Warburton’s “rich adornment” is his simple “chestnut beard,” then he is the sparrow to Osmond’s peacock; while his look may run “a trifle too much to points” (233), Osmond is a competitively adorned Darwinian male.

In addition, as Alfred Habegger compellingly explains, Isabel is attracted to Osmond partially due to his masculine role as a father figure. Isabel, who was raised by a largely absent and

88 irresponsible father, is shown “a picture she cannot get out of her mind, a picture of a father and his daughter” (Habegger 152):

Because Isabel feels much more deserted by her father than she realizes, she is dangerously responsive to the studied self-portrait of the mutually dependent father and daughter. Freedom and fatherlessness have split the heroine into two disconnected halves – a partly factitious determination to be her own master and a dark fascination with images of dominance and submission. (159)

Although, on the one hand, Isabel wants her freedom, she also, Habegger asserts, desires to submit to a stronger, masculine, fatherly force. Isabel chooses Osmond, rather than Warburton or Goodwood, because he simultaneously appeals to both of these wishes. He appears to leave her freedom unencumbered and serves as a dominant father figure.

To further complicate this tangle of psycho-biological motivation, there is also an additional instinctive pull at play in Isabel’s seduction: the maternal. Although Osmond can be read as a sort of father figure for Isabel, there is also evidence that Osmond, and his daughter Pansy, inspire a motherly impulse in Isabel. In her uninhibited freedom, Isabel has discovered that life is “vacant without some private duty that might gather one’s energy to a point” (351). Like Nancy, her “biological destiny” as a woman seems to assert itself as her “high estimate of her independence...[is] absorbed in a more primitive need...[that] came down from above like the light of the stars, and...needed no explanation” (351). All of Isabel’s theories and explanations are here supplanted by the “primitive” and inexplicable “need” of the maternal. Osmond, despite all of his mental “superiority” (266), is somewhat “helpless” (422). As a result, Isabel loves him “for what she [finds] in him,” but also “for what she [brings] to him” (423) and she feels that in being “of use to him [s]he could surrender to him with a kind of humility, she could marry him with a kind of pride; she was not only taking, she was giving” (351). In the joy of providing Osmond with her wealth, Isabel perceives “a kind of maternal strain – the happiness of a woman who [feels] that she [is] a contributor” (423). Isabel also understands Pansy as representing “part of the service she could render, part of the responsibility she could face” (351-2); there is a maternal pleasure in taking on the role of Pansy’s stepmother. Isabel believes that marriage to Osmond will satisfy her maternal urges and fulfil her need to be an active, contributing partner.

These maternal feelings are depicted as instinctive, but also represent a productive outlet through which Isabel imagines she can find space for purposeful activity in her life.

All of these factors at work in Isabel’s selection of Osmond, whether theoretical, psychological, or biological, certainly complicate Isabel’s choice; however, they do not necessarily negate the possibility that she is making a choice. As Darwin explains, though birds may be “led by instinct [in their mating activities], they know what they are about, and consciously exert their mental and bodily powers” (211). The question then becomes: does Isabel “know” what she is about? Does she “consciously exert” her powers in selecting Osmond? These questions are difficult to answer as the moment of selection (Isabel’s acceptance of Osmond’s proposal) is obscured in the text: we see Isabel reject, or at least escape from, Osmond’s initial proposal, as she did with those of Goodwood and Warburton,48 and then she reappears in the story as a married woman. J. Hillis Miller suggests that this elision may be due to there being “something unspeakable or non- narratable about these...moments of decision” (60). It does seem that Isabel’s choice exists on the edge of the representable, as details of it only appear later in self-reflective flashbacks, blurred and coloured by the passing of time. While Isabel insists her choice was “free,” she also admits that she is not entirely sure what she was “about” in making her decision. She tells Goodwood that she is “surprised” at her “intention” to marry (330) and later tells Warburton that “love ha[s] nothing to do with good reasons” (441). Isabel reflects that “Madame Merle might have made Gilbert Osmond’s marriage, but she certainly had not made Isabel Archer’s. That was the work of – Isabel scarcely knew what: of nature, providence, fortune, of the eternal mystery of things” (400). Isabel herself appears unable to decode her reasons for choosing Osmond. This may be a result of their lying behind the purview of her conscious mind, in the realms of biology and ideology.

Isabel’s complicated “mysterious” choice can be contrasted with Osmond’s consistent and single-minded motivations for selecting her: she is to serve as “a silver plate, not an earthen one” (349) on which he can “publish” his style to the world without taking “any of the trouble” (306); her mind is to be a “pretty piece of property for a proprietor already far-reaching” (427). In his representation of Osmond’s choice, James suggests that Osmond, as a highly evolved Darwinian

48 As he declares his intentions and his love for her, Isabel “retreat[s] before [his words]...as she had retreated in other cases before a like encounter” (310). She tells Osmond, as excuse, “I don’t at all know you,” and then she blushes “as she heard herself saying what she had said almost a year before to Lord Warburton” (311).

90 male, has wrested the power of choice in sexual selection from Isabel to become the active, powerful chooser in their relationship. When Ralph describes Osmond, “he tells Isabel that Osmond’s ‘taste’ ‘is exquisite, indeed, since it has led him to select you as his wife’” (Bender 150), indicating that for Ralph it is Osmond, and not Isabel, who is the active selector. Indeed, despite all of Isabel’s assertions to the contrary, it does appear that Osmond is the chooser in their relationship. He has “captured” her with the “firm hand” of his beautiful mind (424). Bender writes:

Dramatizing the way in which Isabel had fled the ‘tall, strong, and somewhat stiff’ Goodwood only to be captured by Osmond’s ‘erect’ personality, James invoke[s] the full authority of Darwin’s theory of sexual selection and celebrate[s] the male’s indomitable power over the female. (150)

The phallic power of Osmond’s mind and manipulation of social forces, rather than the force of his “well-formed fist,” has successfully “seize[d]” Isabel (James 424). This image of successful capture is notable even in his first, seemingly failed, proposal. When Osmond tells Isabel that he loves her, she feels “the sharpness of the pang that suggested to her somehow the slipping of a fine bolt – backward, forward” (310). The symbol of the bolt moving backward and forward is at once suggestive of sexual penetration, and of the insidious click of a lock putting a wild creature in her cage. Even though Isabel walks away from this proposal as a free woman, there is the sense that – unbeknownst to her – she has already been trapped. This may be why her moment of decision is not narrated: it is inconsequential. His declaration of love, and her response to it, was sufficient to entrap her.

It is in this way that, as Bender phrases it, James “out-Darwin[s] Darwin by undercutting Isabel’s pride in her freedom of choice” (150). Isabel’s surrender to Osmond, her enclosure within the cage of his “beautiful mind,” is all the more frustrating because it makes a mockery of her power to make choices, as exhibited in her rejections of Warburton and Goodwood. According to this logic, her rejections of these suitors do not necessarily demonstrate her free will and choice: they may simply show that these suitors were not strong enough or evolved enough to grasp her firmly. They are the males of an earlier Darwinian order, in which males competed and females chose – they preen and fuss, and the choice to accept or reject them ultimately rests with Isabel. Osmond, conversely, is the more evolved human male who has gained the power of selection

91 due to his superior strength and mental capacity, the development of which was facilitated not only physical but by social evolution. Isabel’s relationship with Osmond serves to educate her in the limits of decision-making and choice for women. Isabel quickly learns that “marriage meant that...when one had to choose, one chose as a matter of course for one’s husband” (533). As a married woman in the nineteenth century, Isabel realizes that she must bow to the will of her husband, her “appointed and inscribed master” (457); to disobey his wishes and act independently would constitute a violent break from him and their marriage (533).

While this in some ways appears to be a terrible imprisonment for the heroine who wishes to do as she chooses, James suggests that in many ways this limited freedom suits Isabel and meets her latent feminine desire for powerlessness. Earlier in the novel, Isabel makes the seemingly incongruous statement that her “idea of happiness” is a “swift carriage, of a dark night, rattling with four horses over roads that one can’t see” (174): her fantasy is to be carried away in the darkness by forces beyond her control. At several points in the novel, she feels a “dread of having…to choose and decide” (310), and when she learns of her inheritance she says, “[a] large fortune means freedom, and I’m afraid of that. It’s such a fine thing, and one should make such a good use of it….I’m not sure it’s not a greater happiness to be powerless” (288). James makes the point that part of Isabel – perhaps the part that is “human and feminine” (558) – wishes to abscond the power of choice in favour of submission to the will of another.

In marrying Osmond, however, Isabel learns that there is little pleasure to be found in her powerlessness. The image of being “carried” in the dark by a swiftly moving vehicle reappears later in the novel when Isabel has made her “break” from her husband and is en route to visit Ralph: “[s]he had moments indeed in her journey from Rome which were almost as good as being dead. She sat in her corner, so motionless, so passive, simply with the sense of being carried, so detached from hope and regret” (553). Unlike Nancy Lord, Isabel does not find “contentment” in the subjugation of her will; 49 she learns that being “carried” is not the bliss she had imagined, but instead is akin to being “dead.”

49 One possible reason for this may be her lack of biological children. Nancy seems to derive substantial comfort and contentment from her role as a mother, while Isabel, in comparison, loses her child and is left only with her role as surrogate or step-mother to Pansy.

In light of Isabel’s unhappiness, it is difficult to understand why she returns to Osmond at the end of the novel. Miller writes that while there are several possible explanations (he focuses on her promises to Osmond and Pansy, her fear of Caspar’s masculine power, and the restrictiveness of her contemporary society), the “novel does not tell the reader enough to confirm a reading[: i]t leaves the reader unable to understand [or evaluate] Isabel’s decisions” (79). This is ultimately true. The novel simply does not provide enough information for a conclusive, single reading of why Isabel returns to Osmond. However, reading the novel alongside In the Year of Jubilee and Darwin’s theory of sexual selection reveals that the maternal instinct (or as Nancy calls it more broadly, “Nature’s Law”) plays a significant role in Isabel’s final return, just as it does in Nancy’s remaining with Tarrant.

While Isabel’s maternal role towards Osmond proves to be a farce, James represents her as establishing a meaningful maternal bond with Pansy. Isabel reflects that Pansy’s “dependence [is] more than a pleasure; it operate[s] as a definite reason when motives threatened to fail her” (402). That is, the “rightness” of Pansy’s attachment and childlike “dependence” serves to justify Isabel’s cleaving to Osmond and gives purpose to Isabel’s life. Despite the sins of the father, “from [Pansy] she couldn’t turn away” (543). Although Osmond has treated Isabel like “an applied handled hung-up tool, as senseless and convenient as mere shaped wood and iron” (545), her maternal relationship to Pansy brings a warm, human aspect to an otherwise emotionally barren existence. While some might assert that Isabel’s relationship to Pansy is more sisterly than maternal – both women are circumscribed by Osmond’s overpowering fatherly will – Isabel sees Pansy as a daughter, telling her “I won’t desert you...Good-bye, my child” (549).

But is maternal feeling the ultimate reason why Isabel returns to Osmond at the end of the novel? James is careful not to give a definitive answer to that question. As Isabel tells Henrietta, her promise to Pansy will suffice as a reason to return to Osmond “in default of a better” (557). This suggests that, by the novel’s end, Isabel has ceased to theorize or attempt to account for her decisions, and recognizes that her reasons are the stories she chooses to tell herself and others about her actions. In fact, the complex play of thought, ideological influences, and biological instincts makes it impossible for her to truly articulate a personal, simple, or free reason for any of her choices. This is part of James’s strategy of placing her “consciousness” at the centre of the text: by the novel’s end, his representation of Isabel’s “consciousness” has become increasingly complex, as it accounts for and recognizes forces that lie beyond the conscious and the rational.

Isabel learns that, as actions in the world, choices are determined by forces beyond personal ideals and individual liberty: the social, the biological, and the ideological all work, both within and beyond the limits of her conscious mind, to alter and condition her choices.

The narrative of limited feminine choice in love is presented in miniature in the character of Henrietta Stackpole. Henrietta, a modern New Woman-type, originally appears to have “a reason for everything she did; she fairly bristled with motives” (482). Yet, she later “confesse[s] herself human and feminine” (558) by falling in love with Mr. Bantling. As she tells Isabel, “I’ve come to it little by little. I think I know what I’m doing; but I don’t know as I can explain” (558). In choosing Bantling, motives appear to escape Henrietta, as she is incapable of rationalizing or justifying her attachment. While she thinks she knows what she is about, she cannot be sure. Isabel notes that this engagement is evidence that Henrietta is not a “disembodied voice”; she is a fleshly, biological being “subject to common passions” (558). As an embodied female, Henrietta “lacks the power of sexual choice” (Bender 151) and cannot assert a definite causal link between motives and actions. Henrietta’s choice of Bantling, like Isabel’s choice of Osmond, is over- determined, complicated, and somehow unrepresentable.

In The Portrait of a Lady, James demonstrates the limits of female choice in sexual selection: the novel dramatizes and responds to Darwin’s final turn away from sexual selection at the end of The Descent of Man. Isabel Archer, a female character determined to choose and decide for herself, is influenced by instinctual and social forces, and ultimately overtaken by the power of the strongest male to capture her. Isabel is presented with three strong Darwinian competitors, Warburton, Goodwood, and Osmond, and while she appears to have the capacity for choice in rejecting the first two, this power is revealed to be illusory as she is seized by the more highly evolved male, Gilbert Osmond. Osmond captures Isabel not with a “well-shaped fist” or a violent grab at the wrist, but with the more subtle and insidious force of his beautiful mind and his manipulation of the social. By creating the illusion that in choosing him Isabel is deciding for herself, Osmond succeeds where his rivals had not in placing this “wild, caught creature in a vast cage” (120). While The Portrait of a Lady is focused on the consciousness of a young woman, it is equally interested in the unconscious forces, biological and social, which limit and bound a woman’s capacity for independent choice.

4 Conclusion

There are obvious differences between Gissing’s In the Year of Jubilee and James’s The Portrait of a Lady: most prominently, James’s novel is a character study, while Gissing’s is focused on providing a pointed critique of marriage and the marriage plot. However, as this chapter demonstrates, both texts follow a similar structure that is reflective of an anxious and punitive response to the suggestion of female choice in Darwinian sexual selection. Both novels begin with a New Woman-type heroine who asserts her desire for choice, freedom, and independence; both novels elide the moment of consent to love and marriage; and both conclude by representing the inevitable entrapment of the heroine, due to biological and social forces beyond her control. In In the Year of Jubilee and The Portrait of a Lady, free female choice in love is depicted as nearly impossible to achieve, and, even more insidiously, undesirable to the heroine herself. Nancy Lord and Isabel Archer are punished by their narratives for their initial longings for independence as they are shown to possess a latent and instinctive desire for feminine powerlessness. Nancy “rationally” acquiesces to this state, as she accepts Nature’s law, while Isabel learns the difficult lesson that passivity is not always pleasurable; however, she is compelled to remain married to Osmond as she bows to the combined forces of fear, convention, and maternal feeling. The courtship and marriage plots of In the Year of Jubilee and The Portrait of a Lady reflect a post-Darwinian literary landscape, as they work anxiously to limit and negate the possibility of female choice in sexual selection.

Chapter 3 The Unconscious in Sarah Grand’s The Heavenly Twins and Kate Chopin’s The Awakening

1 Mental Physiology: Dreams and The Unconscious

The biological understanding of instinct outlined in Darwin’s The Descent of Man was not the only, nor even the primary, approach to the problem of unwilled or unconscious actions during the nineteenth century. Psychologists and mental physiologists were deeply concerned with distinctions between consciousness and unconsciousness, between choice and automatic action, and the possible moral ramifications of actions undertaken in different states of mind. These debates are particularly relevant to an analysis of representations of women in love in nineteenth- century novels. The love scenes discussed so far in this dissertation are peppered with references to dream and the unconscious. What does it mean for Maggie Tulliver to slip into a “dim, dreamy state” (426) when she is with Stephen Guest? For Rachel Vinrace to wonder if her engagement to Terence Hewet is “true” or if it is “a dream” (234), or for Nancy Lord to subdue her “will to dreamy luxury” (96)? How does a dreamy emotional and mental state affect a female character’s capacity for choice and moral action?

This section seeks to explore the transatlantic discourses surrounding the interrelated psychological concepts of the unconscious and dreams in order to unpack the historical significance of this vocabulary. In addition to providing context as to what these words may have connoted during their time, this chapter conducts sustained analyses of the representations of the unconscious and dreams in Sarah Grand’s The Heavenly Twins (1893) and Kate Chopin’s The Awakening (1899). Despite their formal differences, these two novels explore common themes as they play with and subvert conventional notions of female passivity to explore ways in which dreamy unconsciousness, which pervades representations of women in love, could work to destabilize patriarchal structures.50 According to the psychological texts of the time, actions

50 While there is considerable debate on the subject, some read this harnessing of the unconscious for feminist ends as implicit in Freudian psychoanalysis. The Freudian emphasis on listening to women, and analysing women’s unconscious or semi-conscious desires, for some “pro-psychoanalytic” feminists, “mark[s] the starting point of what was to be an undoing of every bourgeois or patriarchal assumption as to the biological naturalness of heterosexual attraction” and notions of essential masculinity and femininity (Bowlby 45-46). Others, however, interpret Freudian

96 undertaken in a dreamy state could not be considered rational, moral, or ethical. This places the “decisions” of the woman in love – which often lead to engagement, marriage, and motherhood – in dubious ethical territory: at best she is a dreamy automaton, “following her heart,” and at worst she is insane, acting according to deviant or unspeakable unconscious forces. While neither Grand nor Chopin clearly represents unconscious decisions as a completely viable alternative to traditional political action, both explore the possibility of meaningful, ethical action that can occur without the intervention of the conscious, controlling will.

While the unconscious mind and powers of agency have been topics of philosophical discussion for hundreds of years, it was only in the nineteenth century that “mental science” or “mental physiology” was consolidated as an important intellectual and medical field in the Anglo- American world (Taylor and Shuttleworth xiv; Thrailkill 6-8). Numerous psychological journals emerged during the century, and the findings of mental physiology were brought to an even wider readership through articles in popular magazines.51 This burgeoning conversation was not limited to national borders: Scottish physician Robert Macnish’s discussion of double consciousness in The Philosophy of Sleep (1830) is based on an example from a famous case study published fourteen years earlier in an American journal; 52 American psychologist William James’s The Principles of Psychology (1891) engages with the ideas of British mental physiologist William Carpenter (vol. I, 118); and British Havelock Ellis’s Studies in the Psychology of Sex (1897) was first published in America and not England because, as Ellis comments in the preface to the first edition, his work received “generous sympathy...in America, [so he decided to seek] the wider medical and scientific audience of the United States” (vol I,

psychoanalysis as a discourse “which was doing no more than reconfirming the prevailing sexual norms” (45). See also Gayle Rubin’s “The Traffic in Women” (1975). 51 Jenny Bourne Taylor and Sally Shuttleworth explain that “[p]rofessional journals, such as the Asylum Journal, which became the Journal of Mental Science, the Journal of Psychological Medicine and Mental Pathology, the Medical Critic and Psychological Journal, Mind, and The Brain, were all started during the nineteenth century, but many of the ideas that they discussed were not only reported but developed in articles aimed at a wider readership. These included serious journals, such as Blackwood’s Edinburgh Magazine, the Quarterly Review, the Fortnightly Review, the Westminster Review, and more popular magazines aimed at a middle-class family readership, such as Household Words and Macmillans Magazine” (xv). 52 He references the case of Mary Reynolds, which was published in the Medical Repository in 1816 by S.L. Mitchell (Taylor and Shuttleworth 123).

Preface). There is considerable evidence that the discussions regarding psychology and mental physiology in the nineteenth century were transatlantic in impact and scope.53

In bringing this discourse into conversation with the literature of the period, I am not suggesting a narrative of direct influence or mere reflection. As Jill Matus and Jenny Bourne Taylor explain, the relationship between literary and psychological texts is “reciprocal” (Matus 12): novels “shap[e] the ways in which mental physiologists write about the powers and mysteries of the mind” (Matus 12) and “push these theories to their limits, reinforcing and upsetting their implications” (Taylor 141). Psychological theorists across time have relied upon literature, and narrative more broadly, to convey and substantiate their claims: Carpenter and Ellis deploy masses of anecdotal evidence, Freud utilizes literary examples, and, even today, Martha Nussbaum insists that novels are necessary to understanding the “cognitive structure” of emotion (2). As I will demonstrate in this chapter, the use of the language of the unconscious in fictional love scenes goes beyond echoing contemporary ideas: these novels noticeably modify the theories of their time to articulate their own psychologies of love and desire.

To understand these modifications and their significance it is important to begin by fleshing out nineteenth-century definitions of the recurrent terms used to describe the actions and feelings of women in love: “unconscious,” “mechanical,” “semi-conscious,” “instinct,” and “dream.” While these explanations may seem laborious at times, it is helpful to have a working understanding of these terms in order to truly capture the connotations of their use in the love plot.

Although the unconscious is often thought of as a Freudian discovery (Taylor 140), there was a great deal of work conducted during the nineteenth century on the characteristics and capabilities of the unconscious mind (Rand 286). Distinctions between Freudian and nineteenth-century models of the unconscious hinge on two factors: the essential function of the unconscious, and its relationship to the conscious mind. While the Freudian unconscious is a “repository of repression, fantasies and disallowed or taboo knowledge” (Matus 24), the Victorian unconscious is “an altogether productive institution” (J. Miller 28) that works with the conscious mind in order to ensure human efficiency. For example, the unconscious may solve a difficult problem

53 In her study of trauma in Victorian British literature, Jill Matus comments that, while her “focus on literary texts is restricted to Victorian Britain, the terrain of scientific, psychological and medical literature relevant to [her] study is at times Continental and American” (14), testifying to the transnational nature of this field.

98 during one’s sleep, or direct the movements of one’s legs when one is walking. Actions of these types, which Carpenter terms “unconscious cerebration” (515), take place without full conscious awareness or explicit intention.54 Carpenter compares the relationship between the conscious and unconscious mind to the “independent locomotive power of a horse under the guidance and control of a skilful rider” (24). The unconscious exists not to house the unknowable, traumatic, and perverse in a realm completely separate from consciousness, but to take part in an effective “division of labour” (Matus 24) by cooperating with the conscious mind to manage actions and responses that do not “require comprehensive awareness” (J. Miller 29). The mind is therefore divided into two parts. On the one hand, there is the conscious mind, which registers awareness, makes decisions, and is typically seen as synonymous with the will (Carpenter; Cobbe; Wigan; W. James).55 On the other hand, there is the unconscious, which consists of those mental functions of which we are not aware, and controls a range of behaviours and mechanisms that need not involve the will, including automatic or “mechanical” actions, and instinctive responses.

Automatic or mechanical actions appear several times in the novels under study thus far. When Stephen Guest is overwhelmed by his attraction to Maggie, for instance, he “hardly knew what happened, or in what automatic way he got through the duties of politeness in the interval, until he was free and saw Maggie seated alone” (461). Similarly, when Maggie tells Stephen that she must leave him after the boat ride, she “was not conscious of a decision...it was like an automatic action that fulfils a forgotten intention” (503). In these scenes, Maggie and Stephen move and act without the interference of their conscious selves; their unconscious minds take over as they complete tasks “automatically.” “Automatic actions” were a much-discussed topic in the literature of nineteenth-century mental physiology. They are those movements or responses that are called forth sequentially “by Suggestion, without any interference from the Will” (Carpenter 15). Automatic actions encompass a range of behaviours, including reflex actions such as

54 Awareness is the deciding factor in determining whether an action or thought is conscious or unconscious. This reasoning applies even to those who, like William James, seek to disprove the existence of unconscious thought. James argues that there is no such thing as unconscious thought; either we have forgotten these thoughts (vol. I, 165), or we are not paying attention to them (114), or they exist in a separate, but still conscious, mental realm that we are not aware of (165). 55 There is, logically, a grey area here: one could imagine thoughts or actions of which one is aware but over which one has no willful control. However, the theorists of the period rarely address this possibility aside from the discussions of pathologies such as hysteria or insanity. In normal, functioning people, the conscious mind is equated with a fully functioning and powerful will. To be conscious, as a human being, is to choose, exercise volition, and act according to intentions (W. James vol. I, 139).

99 blinking or breathing, and learned actions that have become automatic by dint of habit and experience, such as walking or playing the piano. These actions are “performed in respondence to an internal prompting of which we may or may not be conscious, and are not dependent on any preformed intention, - being executed, to use a common expression, ‘mechanically’” (16). Therefore, when Maggie turns away from Stephen “automatically,” there is the suggestion that she is not totally conscious of her actions in doing so. While automatic actions need not be unconscious by definition, they are often so by default as “our Sensorium is [usually] otherwise engaged” (15); automatic actions become unconscious because we do not pay attention to them.

Automatic actions can be classified along a continuum of consciousness and willfulness. Lowest on the scale are the purely automatic reflex actions. These actions, such as the beating of the heart or digestion, are performed unconsciously and involuntarily – even when noticed, they cannot be controlled by the will (Cobbe 310). Next, there are other reflex actions, such as blinking or swallowing, that fall somewhat higher on the scale and can be classified as semi- automatic or semi-conscious.56 James points out that while an action such as blinking may appear to be unconscious, it does not exist entirely within an unconscious realm as we can choose to direct our consciousness to and control these actions (W. James vol. I, 13). Further along the scale are those semi-conscious, semi-automatic actions that are “voluntary,” that is “made by permission of the Will” (Cobbe 310) and “preceded by a consciousness of the purpose to be attained” (W. James vol. I, 13). This is likely the type of automatic action Maggie is engaging in when she leaves Stephen: her will sets the action in motion, but she conducts the leave-taking “automatically” as though fulfilling “a forgotten intention” (Eliot 503). These types of semi-automatic actions also include the series of movements involved in a learned behaviour such as walking or playing the piano: these acts are initiated by the will, but conducted automatically, without its sustained “conscious activity” (Cobbe 310).57 This is where the true efficiency of the nineteenth-century unconscious becomes visible: the unconscious can take care of complex automatic actions, while the conscious mind can focus on other, presumably more important, matters.

56 The discussion of reflexes is even more nuanced than this. According to Carpenter, reflexes fall into two categories. When reflexes are motivated by emotions, they are “emotional,” and when they are motivated by ideas, they are “ideo-motor” (105). The term ideo-motor also comes up in the work of William James, who uses it to describe an action that “unhesitatingly and immediately [follows] the notion of it in the mind” (Vol. II, 522). 57 Highest on the scale are the non-automatic, volitional actions that require the conscious exertion of the will at every step (Carpenter 19; Cobbe 310)

100

An additional category of unconscious or automatic action that is particularly relevant to the representation of women in love is that of instinct. The previous chapter, in its discussion of Darwinian sexual selection, relies on the language of instinct as opposed to free choice. This (potentially fraught) dichotomy exists not only in the realm of evolutionary science, but in that of nineteenth-century mental physiology. Instinctive action, across the works of a variety of Anglo- American psychological thinkers, is defined as a “primarily-automatic” (Carpenter 56) mental (or perhaps chemical)58 function that is deeply tied to personal and racial biology. Carpenter defines the term “instinctive” as follows:

This designation is now properly restricted to actions which, being performed without any guidance from experience, and executed in precisely the same manner (when the circumstances are similar) by all the individuals of a species, must be regarded as proceeding from an innate or constitutional tendency. (56)

James and Ellis echo this definition, asserting that instincts “conform to the general reflex type” (W. James vol. II, 384), are particular to an individual’s sex and race (Ellis vol. III, pt. 1), and are characterized by a lack of “foresight” of ends (W. James vol. II, 383) and a dearth of education or experience (W. James vol. II, 383, Ellis vol. III, pt. 1). When Nancy Lord and Isabel Archer demonstrate “an instinct of resistance” (Gissing 101) in response to the approaches of their suitors, they can be read as enacting an automatic action that is unlearned, unintentional, and determined by biology.59

As automatic actions, instincts are, by definition, unconscious or semi-conscious. Most theorists agree that while an instinct may be unconscious in its initial manifestation, it is possible to direct our attention to an instinct and attempt to control or curb it by force of habit, social norms, or personal willpower (W. James vol. II, 390-4; Ellis vol III, pt. 2.1). We can recognize and direct our hunger, or attempt to repress our competitive drives. There is, however, a critical difference between instincts and other semi-conscious automatic actions. While it might be possible to control instincts through an exercise of the will, instincts cannot be set in motion by the will –

58 Havelock Ellis comments that brain science has largely become “a question of physiological chemistry...the part played by the brain is now often regarded as chemical, the brain being considered a great chemical laboratory” (vol. III, pt. 1). 59 This instinct of resistance can be understood as a manifestation of the “instinct of modesty.” For further reading on this particular instinct, consult the section on “The Evolution of Modesty” in Ellis’s Studies in the Psychology of Sex, volume I.

101 they are not and cannot become voluntary. Isabel cannot will herself to have the “impulse” to accept Lord Warburton, for example, though theoretically she could suppress her instinct of resistance to her suitors. An additional quality that differentiates instincts from other non-willed reflex actions (such as digestion) is that instincts typically affect a sphere beyond the body of the individual in question: “the instinctive reaction is apt to...enter into practical relations with the exciting object” (W. James vol. II, 442). Finally, instincts work not upon sole individuals, but entire races and species. It is telling that Nancy and Isabel, across two different works of fiction, exhibit similar “feminine” instincts and drives. As Carpenter explains, “[i]n proportion as Instinct predominates, we may predict with certainty the actions of the individual, when we know the life-history of the species; its whole aim being to work out a design which is formed for it, not by it” (57). An instinct is an automatic action set in motion not by the individual will, but by biological forces; it is unconscious cerebration on a species-wide scale. Instincts, therefore, have tremendous – and potentially dangerous – power and scope. They are automatic actions that cannot be fully controlled by the will, and they can have a very real impact on the material world.

The instinct that is most central to the love plot is the sexual instinct. Despite William Acton’s famous declaration that “the majority of women...are not very much troubled with sexual feeling of any kind” (179), several nineteenth-century thinkers acknowledge and theorize the nature of the female sexual impulse as not only a physical but a “nervous and psychic fact” (Ellis vol. I pt. 3.2). Female sexual desire was considered to be instinctive, spontaneous, periodic, diffuse, and in need of being fulfilled and expressed (Ellis vol. III pt.1, vol. III pt.3.2; W. James 437; Graham 187). Although the sexual instinct can be conscious or unconscious (Ellis vol. I Preface) – that is, one may be aware of it or not – Ellis notes that female sexual desire is more likely to remain unconscious (expressed only in autoerotic dreams) until awakened “by a lover’s caresses” (vol. I pt.3.1; vol. IIII pt. 3.2). Women’s erotic thoughts and wishes were thought to remain latent as a result of “false conventions” that keep them “extremely ignorant of the whole question of sex” (vol. III pt. 3.1). According to Ellis, the female sexual instinct has not and cannot be completely eradicated,60 but it has been curbed and modified by social restrictions and conscious control.

60 Ellis does discuss “sexual anesthesia” and “sexual frigidity” in women, but dismisses these as “abnormal” (vol. II pt. 3.1).

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Ellis presents the sexual instinct as one with a complex relation to social convention. At some points, he traces a logic of development in which instinctive behaviours, such as female modesty and mating dances, morph into corresponding social customs. At others, however, he complicates this narrative by focusing on how nineteenth-century courtship has “disguised and perverted” natural processes, by denying female choice and female sexual pleasure (vol. III pt.3.1; vol. III pt. 2.1). Despite this focus on the relationship between “civilization” and the sexual impulse, Ellis does not discuss the ways in which conventions shape not only desire’s forms of expression, but its direction. In discussing women’s erotic dreams, Ellis reflects on their common narrative:

To abandon herself to her lover, to be able to rely on his physical strength and mental resourcefulness, to be swept out of herself and beyond the control of her own will, to drift idly in delicious submission to another and stronger will – this is one of the commonest aspirations in a young woman’s intimate love-dreams. (vol. III pt. 2.1)

Rather than tying this desire to the conventions of romance and gender roles, or to the role of the love plot in nurturing this type of fantasy, Ellis explains that the “feminine tendency to delight in submission” is rooted in “the ancient traditions when the male animal pursued the female” (vol. III pt. 2.1). In other words, Ellis relies on instinct, rather than convention, to account for what he sees as the primary female sexual fantasy. This suggests that the female sexual impulse, though modifiable by social convention, was considered fundamentally instinctive, automatic, and beyond the purview of individual will and choice. This may account for why theorists like Acton insisted on the non-existence of the female sexual impulse: if such an instinct did exist, it might prove difficult to discipline and control.

Despite this undertone of anxiety in nineteenth-century discussions of automatic actions (particularly instincts), little overt attention is given to these fears in the psychological texts of the time. As Matus puts it, “despite some necessary concessions to automatic mental process...most Victorian mental physiologists balked at accepting the agency of the unconscious mind” (24). The unconscious mind does have the capacity to direct and instigate action, but most theorists emphasize instead the controlling force of the conscious will. The will is the power of directing attention (Carpenter 25; W. James vol. II, 562) towards the achievement of a chosen

103 end (Carpenter 376). As there are always numerous stimuli at work both within and outside of the human body and mind, the conscious will is by definition a “selecting agency” (W. James vol. I, 139): it chooses particular ends, responses, and methods among many and directs attention and volition to these over others. While animals exhibit signs of will, the will is most developed and pronounced in human beings.

The will “exerts its domination” (25) over the automatic and the unconscious by directing attention and controlling actions. While the will is represented as somewhat innate to conscious beings (W. James vol. I, 139), wilfulness is a skill that needs to be finessed and developed. As Carpenter counsels, “the acquirement of this power, which is within the reach of every one, should be the primary object of all mental discipline” (25). It is worth noting that the full title of Carpenter’s book is Principles of Mental Physiology, With their Applications to the Training and Discipline of the Mind, and the Study of its Morbid Conditions. Carpenter is not the first to advise the training of the will; writing thirty years earlier, Arthur Ladbroke Wigan explains that “the power of the higher organs of the intellect to coerce the mere instincts and propensities...may be indefinitely increased by exercise and moral cultivation” (126). If the conscious will is the “rider” of the “horse” of the unconscious, as Carpenter describes it, then it is important that the will be properly equipped to rein in a run-away unconscious. Carpenter writes:

Now and then, it is true, some unusual excitement calls forth the essential independence of the equine nature; the horse takes the bit between his teeth, and runs away with his master; and it is for the time uncertain whether the independent energy of the one, or the controlling power of the other, will obtain the mastery. (24)

Sometimes, during states of “unusual excitement,” the unconscious may gain control of mind and body. Despite this danger, a strong, normal (non-pathological)61, and well-trained consciousness can exert its powers of will to subdue, calm, and direct the wayward force of the unconscious. While Victorian thinkers are interested in the unconscious and its functions, they

61 James identifies two primary perversions of the will: “the obstructed will,” in which normal actions are rendered impossible; and “the explosive will,” in which abnormal actions are irrepressible (vol. II, 537).

104 focus much of their energy on the self-improvement required to maintain a strong, controlling will.

This mental training is so important because it is closely tied to issues of morality and ethics. Carpenter explains that without the exercise of the conscious will there can be no judgment or choice (390), and choice, he insists, is essential to moral responsibility. In the preface to the fourth edition of Principles of Mental Physiology (1876), Carpenter tells the story of a sergeant who suffers a head injury and, as a result, enters a state characterised by “the suspension of the directing and controlling power of the Will; so that the whole course of action is determined Automatically by Suggestion” (xx). If the sergeant were to do something questionable, such as stealing, while in this state, could he be held morally responsible? Carpenter answers as follows: “we should hold the French Sergeant fully ‘responsible’ for any theft he might commit when in full possession of his wits; and yet for the very same action performed in his Automatic state, we should be ready to admit the excuse that he had no power of self-control” (xxi). According to this logic, the conscious will is the seat and prerequisite for morality and moral responsibility. If we do not take heed and train our wills to control our unconscious, we enter dubious moral territory: we cannot be held morally accountable, or perhaps even commit truly moral actions, when in an unconscious state.

This brings us to the most notable unconscious state depicted in the love plot: that of dream. The language of dream is perhaps the most pervasive feature of the love scenes under study in this project. But what does it mean for love to feel like a dream? What are the implications (moral and otherwise) of being in a dream state? Dreams and dreaming were significant topics of psychological discussion during the nineteenth century, up to and including the publication of Freud’s The Interpretation of Dreams in 1899. There is a fair bit of critical consensus around the definition of the dream: most theorists agree that dreaming is an unconscious or semi-conscious automatic mental function (Carpenter 391; Cobbe 321; Macnish 102; Holland 107; Sully 116- 117, Freud Ch 6, Pt 1)62 that involves a suspension of the will (Cobbe 335; Carpenter 584; Freud Ch1 Pt 2; Macnish 102). Dreams are “nightly miracles of unconscious cerebration” (Cobbe 312) in which thoughts move along their own courses of suggestion, uninterrupted and unmotivated by the conscious will (Carpenter 584). In this way, dreams represent an example of those

62 James, in his denial of the existence of unconscious thought, insists that dreams are conscious but forgotten (vol. I, 166).

105 dangerous moments in which the “horse” of the unconscious outruns the power of its “driver”; dreams are mental activity completely detached from conscious volition and “Moral Law” (Cobbe 314). While we can gain consciousness and memory of some of our dreams, we cannot, despite our “utmost effort” and mental training, “direct our unconscious brains into the trains of thought and fancy wherein we desire them to go” (Cobbe 327). As a result, dreams are figured as passive states (Cobbe 361; Ellis vol. I, pt. 3.1; Freud Ch1, Pt 2), in which the will is “dormant” (Cobbe 314) and the unconscious takes the reins.

This passivity of the will has the potential to make the dream a particularly dangerous state. Not only can dreams, like instincts, not be set in motion by the will, but they also cannot be curbed or controlled through conscious intention and attention.63 In a way, this makes dreams even more perilous than instincts: they represent a true form of unconscious agency that cannot be checked by the will. When Nancy Lord and Rachel Vinrace state that they can “hardly remember” getting married, and that the experience is “like having dreamt that [they were] married” (Gissing 129), there is the insidious suggestion that these decisions have been made without any intervention of the conscious mind or will. However, the agency suggested by the dream state usually is limited by the (typically) immobile and unresponsive sleeping body; a dream is unlikely to have tangible effects on the material world. Despite these limitations, it was believed that dreams – and women’s dreams in particular – could affect the real world. Writing about erotic dreams, Ellis explains that “[o]ne of the most interesting and important” differences between women’s and men’s dreams is the propensity of women, even if they are “healthy and normal,” to interpret their dreams “as a reality” and act upon them in the real world (Vol. I, pt. 3.1).64 While Ellis does not provide an explanation for this phenomenon, one might think of the feminine susceptibility to literature described in chapter one; as highly emotional beings, women were considered more apt to confuse fiction and reality in ways that were often seen as dangerous and destructive.

In analysing what happens in dreams – what occurs when the unconscious directs chains of thought – nineteenth-century theorists begin to articulate a more complex theory of the unconscious. While the unconscious is elsewhere figured as part of an efficient division of

63 There is also the gray area, or liminal category, of the waking dream or day-dream. These bear similarities to dream, but can be set in motion and controlled by the conscious mind. 64 He gives the example of women having erotic dreams and then accusing men of sexually assaulting them in real life.

106 mental labour, in dream, this assumption rarely holds. Instead, the unconscious displays more complicated, fanciful, and primal functions, which prefigure its Freudian definition. The first of these functions is that of “myth-making” or storytelling (Cobbe 339). During sleep, the “unconscious cerebration” of dreams weaves stories, or “myths” (338), that draw on memories or experiences of which we may or may not be consciously aware (359). This demonstrates two important characteristics of the unconscious mind: first, the unconscious mind is a repository for unknown or unremembered thoughts and feelings, and second, the unconscious mind may use or play with these mental elements for non-utilitarian purposes. While thinkers such as Cobbe point to moments when problems from the day are solved in dreams, many dreams lack this direct type of functionality and their role within the mental division of labour becomes less clear.

A third characteristic of the unconscious mind is revealed when attention is paid to the specific content of dream-myths. While there is a great deal of variety in individual dreams, many commentators begin to note patterns and conclude that dreams are expressive of regressive or child-like emotions (Sully 116; Freud Ch7, pt.1), and primal instincts (Cobbe 315; Sully 118). As James Sully phrases it, “[o]n entering dreamland we leave much of the later and maturer intelligence behind us, and survey the spectacle with the pristine directness, with the pure elemental emotions of little children” (116). In addition to bringing us back to childhood, dreams recall the “animal elements of our nature” (Cobbe 315): dreams “bring up from the dim depths of our sub-conscious life the primal, instinctive impulses, and disclose to us a side of ourselves which connects us with the great sentient world” (Sully 118). The unconscious, then, as manifest in dreams, is a repository for many regressive and primal aspects of the human mind. This may account for the fact that sexual feelings, in the cases of Maggie, Nancy, and Rachel, are all represented as existing within a dream-like state: these primal, instinctive aspects of their natures are more likely to be expressed and made manifest in an unconscious or semi-conscious state.

In The Interpretation of Dreams, Freud introduces a fourth, related characteristic of the unconscious mind: it is primarily focused on wish-fulfilment. Freud explains that dreams are sublimated or condensed representations of “unconscious wishes” (Ch6, pt.2) and that “[w]hen the work of interpretation has been completed the dream can be recognized as a wish fulfilment.” (Ch2). According to his theory, dreams are indicative of repressed, unconscious wishes that seek expression and fulfilment. Perhaps, then, to marry in a dream is to fulfil a long repressed wish for sexual satisfaction, for passivity and surrender to the “charming” feeling of being “taken care

107 of...by someone taller and stronger than oneself” (Eliot 399). Freud continues to explain, along the same vein as Ellis, that “the majority of the dreams of adults deal with sexual material and give expression to erotic wishes” because “[n]o other instinct has had to undergo so much suppression” (Ch6, pt.2). As the sexual instinct is repressed, it is forced into the unconscious, where it seeks fulfilment through the mode of the dream. The link between love and dream, therefore, can be read as a result of sublimated sexual desire that can only find expression in a semi-conscious state.

In general, the expression of these wishes in dream form is considered to be healthy and normal: dreams provide a “safe” and “non-pathogenic” outlet for excess excitation when one is able to distinguish dream from reality (Breuer 42). However, when dreams start to bleed into reality, when “hypnoid states” such as the waking dream or reverie “intrude” or blur into the waking life, then we enter the realm of pathology and hysteria (13). According to Josef Breuer, the combination of high affective excitations, such as the experience of “falling in love” (200), and “states of abstraction and dreaminess” (218) can be dangerous. Breuer’s theory of the emotions can be likened to an erection-orgasm model: feelings build up and need release. If they are denied release, then dire mental consequences await. When intense affects, such as the feeling of being in love, are experienced in a realm of dreaminess or reverie,

Concentration on the affective group of ideas begins by producing ‘absence of mind.’ The flow of ideas grows gradually slower and at last almost stagnates; but the affective idea and its affect remain active, and so consequently does the great quantity of excitation which is not being used up functionally. (218)

The dreamy subject in love enters a “‘rapt’ state of mind, causing his real environment to grow dim, and then bring his thinking to a standstill charged with affect” (219). The emotional day- dream constitutes an obsessive “build up” of strong emotions that cannot be adequately released. Because the state of reverie is separate from full consciousness, it is not governed by the will; intense emotions experienced through dream develop in a vacuum, sealed off from usual associations, contexts, and rational limits. When these dream-states begin to predominate, and take control of “the muscular apparatus and over speech” (229), then the “splitting of the mind” characteristic of hysteria is manifest (225).

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In comparing love to a dream, and locating love within a dreamy state, nineteenth-century novelists are depicting love and desire as conscious experiences that blur into the realm of the unconscious, and risk becoming pathological. While heroines like Maggie Tulliver, Rachel Vinrace, and Nancy Lord are awake during their love scenes, their controlling and moral wills are “dormant”: the experience of love and sexual desire involves a suspension of the will, and an expression of primal instincts and emotions. The “horse” of the unconscious has outrun its master, making it difficult for these heroines to make wilful choices based on preset intentions. Instead, the actions undertaken while under the spell of love represented as are “automatic,” “semi-conscious,” and “mechanical.” However, unlike in moments of actual, sleeping dreams, the actions completed during the “dream” of romance can and do have tangible effects on the world. The “choices” made during the “dream” of love lead to an engagement in Rachel’s case, marriage and motherhood in Nancy’s, and damaged family and social ties in Maggie’s. In expressing love as a dream, these novels point to the freeing wish-fulfilment of romantic encounters, but also the frightening problem of life choices made during moments of suspended volition. In The Heavenly Twins and The Awakening, Grand and Chopin play with this trope, and experiment with the possibility of a dreamy state that could lead not to amoral choices, but to meaningful change for women.

2 The Heavenly Twins

The way of the world has been to make a sphere of an invariable size and shape for all girls indiscriminately according to their class. If it does not fit, the girl is held to be at fault, and the educator is expected to alter her, to take her in, like a dress, if necessary rather than to enlarge her little sphere. If possible she is forced into it and kept there; and in one case her spirit will be broken, her development checked, and her chances of happiness lost; in another, she will outgrow it in spite of herself, but will become distorted in the effort, like cedar-trees dwarfed by Chinese gardeners to grow in flower pots.

Sarah Grand, “The Modern Girl” (43)

In The Heavenly Twins, Sarah Grand illustrates the two fates of the “modern girl” forced to fit into the cramped “woman’s sphere”: marriage and traditional feminine gender roles break the spirit of rational, thoughtful Evadne Frayling and dwarf the potential of rebellious, ambitious

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Angelica Hamilton-Wells. Despite her representation of marriage as an institution that damages, punishes, and stunts her female characters (Heilmann “Narrating” 124; Kucich 268), Grand is often labeled as a conservative (Heilmann NW Strategies 14; Kennedy 259; Ledger 117) or essentialist (Cothran 49) who “ultimately remained constrained by the ideological frameworks she sought to subvert” (Heilmann NW Strategies 17). As a New Woman novel, 65 The Heavenly Twins is engaged with questions about the nature of gender, and the roles suitable for women within public and private life. However, while the novel challenges the status quo, it also participates in the “social purity” discourse which locates female value and identity in motherhood (Richardson 230; Heilmann NW Strategies 17-18). In addition, both Evadne and Angelica fail to meet their feminist potential, and end up married to much older, paternalistic husbands; it is debatable whether these are intended as “happy” endings. Much critical discussion, therefore, is focused on the limits and contradictions of Grand’s feminism. This chapter seeks to add to that conversation by analysing the role of the psychological concept of the unconscious in the novel’s approach to sensuality, love, and social change. I argue that while Grand’s journalistic writing emphasizes an “unconscious” move away from traditional gender roles, The Heavenly Twins problematizes the unconscious as a route to enlightenment; the novel’s conservative feminism can be attributed to Grand’s ambivalent depiction of the unconscious as a driver of personal and social change.

In addition to being a best-selling novelist,66 Grand was a prolific journalist who wrote about women’s issues in a wide variety of publications which catered to diverse audiences. As Ann Heilmann summarizes, “Grand’s articles fall into two distinctly different categories: pieces which promote the New Woman and contemporary feminist concerns, and problem-and-advice pages on fashion, education, partnership, marriage and employment” (“General Introduction” 5). In balancing the imperatives and viewpoints of her “traditional and progressive female audiences” (5), Grand often appears to have several journalistic personae (NW Strategies 21), as she provides fashion and beauty advice in some publications, and publishes more reformist articles about women in the workplace and the rise of the New Woman in others. Heilmann

65 Grand herself is credited with coining the term “New Woman,” which she first used in “The New Aspect of the Woman Question,” published in North American Review in 1894. Within two months of the article’s publication, the phrase “New Woman” began appearing with capital letters (Dunst 251). 66 The Heavenly Twins was a massive commercial success; it was reprinted six times in 1893 and sold 20,000 copies in Britain within its first few weeks. More than five times as many copies were sold in the United States (Richardson 232-3).

110 argues that this was a particular discursive strategy designed to appease and appeal to more conservative readers (“General Introduction” 5). For instance, in “Should Married Women Follow Professions?,” which appeared in Young Woman in 1899, Grand states that “a woman should have the same chances in the professions as a man,” but insists “that woman is neglectful of her best interests who goes out into the world to work when she can get a nice man to do the work for her” (125). Grand consistently points out that the women’s movement does not put “true womanliness...in danger” and that women will continue to perform “the sacred duties of wife and mother” (“New Aspect” 33) even when they have been emancipated. This desire to retain something of “natural” femininity can perhaps account for Grand’s argument that the seeds of feminist change are “unconscious” and “involuntary.”

In her journalistic writing, Grand locates the motivating force behind the women’s movement somewhere in the recesses of woman’s unconscious mind. She reclaims the unconscious, which was so often associated with womanly instincts, roles, and intuitions (and, of course, falling in love), for feminist purposes. In “The New Aspect of the Woman Question” and “The Modern Girl,” Grand describes the process by which “women were awakening from their long apathy” (“New Aspect” 30) to claim their rightful place in the world. She writes, “there is that in ourselves which forces us out of our apathy; we have no choice in the matter” (32); “forced forward by impulses which are strange to herself and new to the race, [woman] is gradually and involuntarily raising herself” (“Modern” 36). Women are “involuntarily” learning (36) and while they are “becoming conscious that some great change is taking place...they are as yet unaware of the nature of it” (37). This language of the unconscious bizarrely insists that women bring about social change “involuntarily,” without choice or conscious awareness. Women in this formulation are not rational thinkers, strategically advocating for their rights on the basis of argument, but rather vehicles of some force within themselves that they do not recognize or control. The impetus for change is like an automatic action, reflex, or instinct: while it can be controlled by the will, the will cannot initiate this action, nor is this action actively directed by the conscious mind. As Evadne says, the women’s movement is “[n]ot ‘revo’ – but evolutionary” (Grand 230). This at once protects New Women against claims of “unwomanliness,” by continuing to associate them with intuitive thinking and nature, and robs the movement of some of its radical thrust: in arguing that woman is “gradually and involuntarily raising herself,” Grand

111 echoes “the Bawling Brotherhood” who believes that women are incapable of rational, conscious argument and choice.

Grand’s preoccupation with the unconscious, and with the language of psychology more broadly, is also evident in The Heavenly Twins. The Heavenly Twins contains numerous characters and subplots, but focuses primarily on the stories of three women, Evadne Frayling, Edith Beale, and Angelica Hamilton-Wells. Evadne is a bright, earnest, and independent-minded young woman who, through extensive reading, develops progressive and highly logical notions about the ways of the world and a woman’s place within it. However, her development is severely stunted when she falls in love – or more precisely, in lust – with Colonel George Colquhoun. When Evadne is made aware of Colquhoun’s illicit sexual past directly after their wedding, she refuses to consummate their marriage; she agrees to live with him only after extensive pressure from him and her family. During their marriage, she becomes increasingly interested in the women’s movement, but promises Colquhoun that she will not publish during his lifetime. This silence, along with her continued celibacy, has a debilitating effect on Evadne’s physical and mental health. Although she remarries after Colquhoun’s death, Evadne devolves into hysteria, and begs her second, doctor husband to protect her from having to think.

Alongside this plot is that of Edith Beale, a comparatively minor character whose story parallels and influences those of Evadne and Angelica (Mangum 91). Edith is a beautiful, pure, and ignorant young woman, emblematic of the “Old Woman” type who knows nothing of ugliness and “live[s] only to be loved” (Grand “New Woman and the Old” 75). Edith, like Evadne, falls in love (or into intense attraction) with a military man with a coloured past, Mosley Menteith. While her parents are aware of Menteith’s pre-marital relations, they brush this knowledge aside and encourage the relationship as a “good match.” Edith’s marriage, however, ends in tragedy: Menteith has syphilis and transmits this disease to Edith and their child. Edith dies, ill and raving mad, bewailing the state of the world that sacrifices women to men.

Finally, there is Angelica, a character often claimed as the protagonist who “points the way to the ‘androgynous’ life of action, transformation, and subversion of the more optimistic New Woman” (Mangum 139). Angelica is a twin and spends much of her childhood exchanging places with her brother Diavolo. She demands that she be educated in the same way as her brother, and, as the taller, stronger, and more mischievous of the two, she defies gender

112 expectations with her pranks and ambitions. However, once she reaches puberty, Angelica is forced into the “deep and narrow...groove” of conventional womanhood (Grand 450). In an effort to maintain some autonomy, she proposes marriage to a much older family friend, Mr. Kilroy, on the condition that he will let her do as she likes. Despite Mr. Kilroy’s lenience, Angelica is restless and dissatisfied with her life. In an extended, dream-like cross-dressing sequence, titled “The Interlude,” Angelica disguises herself as her brother and befriends the village tenor. Their relationship is laden with ambiguous sexual connotations, and results in the Tenor’s death and Angelica’s conversion to “true womanhood.” She returns to her husband – whom she calls “Daddy” – with a passionate embrace, “grateful for the blessing of a good man’s love” (551), and goes on to write speeches for him to deliver in parliament.

In all three of these narratives, marriage is shown to be a limiting and dangerous institution, and the language of the unconscious is interlaced with the heroines’ development and experience of love and sensuality. The influence of psychology is most evident in the final section of the text, which is narrated by Evadne’s psychologist and second husband, Dr. Galbraith, as he struggles to treat her hysteria; however, references to the unconscious mind appear throughout this massive novel. Evadne’s growth as a reader is described as largely “unconscious” (12, 14), Evadne’s and Edith’s experiences of sensual attraction are represented as magnetic and semi-conscious (45, 52, 169), Mr. Price describes the New Woman movement as arising “involuntarily” (219), and the text includes several detailed and highly symbolic dreams (156, 293) and day-dreams (625-7). Together, these references to and representations of the unconscious mind paint a far more ambivalent picture of involuntary action than that presented in Grand’s journalistic writings. While unconscious decisions can lead to positive or even revolutionary change, they more often result in stagnation or entrapment. In The Heavenly Twins, Grand is deeply interested in exploring – and ultimately incapable of resolving – the balance between “thinking,” “feeling,” and “doing” that is necessary for the success of the New Woman.

Grand’s depiction of Evadne’s awakening as a thinking New Woman corresponds with the arguments made in her journalistic writings, and with the assertion of Mr. Price, a fictional New Woman supporter in The Heavenly Twins, that women “never even tried to think – until one day, when, quite by accident...one of them found herself arriving at logical conclusions involuntarily. Her brain was a rich soil, although untilled, which began to teem of its own accord” (219). This is indeed the case with Evadne. Although she grows up in a staunchly conservative, misogynistic

113 household, and her father (whom she adores) tells her repeatedly that she cannot learn, she does learn. She begins to read her brother’s old school books, and voraciously studies a broad variety of topics, focussing in particular on a search for evidence of women’s limited intellectual capacity. When she finds none, and finds counterevidence in the very workings of her own mind, she begins silently to refute her father’s arguments, as she develops her own opinions on the matter.

The subversive potential of Evadne’s learning, however, is curiously undercut by the narrator’s continual assertion that her inquiry was of no “set purpose; she was not even conscious of the particular attention she paid to the subject” of women’s rights and intelligence (13). As Evadne records her responses to her reading, and her budding feminist opinions, in her Commonplace Book, the narrator again comments that “she had no more consciousness of purpose in her writing than she had in her singing...The one was as involuntary as the other, and the outcome of similar sensations. It pleased her to write, and it pleased her to sing, and she did both when the impulse came upon her” (13-14). In comparing Evadne’s writing to her singing, the narrator argues that both are sensual impulses, completed without purpose or agenda and responsive to momentary whims. Although Evadne reads and writes “with the utmost deliberation, and with intellect clear and senses unaffected by anything” (23), her motivations and extremely thorough and programmatic methods of investigation are insistently characterised as “unconscious” and “involuntary.” This use of the language of the unconscious can be read as an incisive reversal of the usual narrative of the feminine unconscious, which leads a woman away from rather than towards critical thinking, but it also paradoxically places Evadne’s thinking beyond her rational control. Although these references to the unconscious assert the inevitability of a gender (r)evolution, and can be interpreted as an attempt to keep Evadne from appearing “unwomanly” in her scholarly pursuits, they also work to undermine the active independence of the New Woman’s mind.

Angelica’s awakening to the women’s movement also occurs within the realm of the unconscious: she first conceives of broader activism in a dream. Angelica, like Evadne, is well- educated and well-read; however, unlike Evadne she does not need to fight for these privileges alone or in secret. At a young age, Angelica tricks and argues her way into receiving the same education as her brother Diavolo. These machinations are not figured as “unconscious” or “involuntary,” but their deliberateness, and their revolutionary potential, is similarly obscured, in

114 this case by humour and exceptionalism. Angelica’s subversive actions are figured as funny 67 and her father acquiesces to her demands not because she makes a rational argument that sways him, but because she amuses him (126). Within her household and social circle, Angelica’s rebellion is amusing rather than disturbing because of her age – similar tricks are received far differently once she becomes a “woman” – and because of the somewhat less traditional gender roles modeled for her by her parents. Angelica’s cross-dressing points to the constructed and performative nature of gender (Heilmann NW Strategies 45; Kucich 257; Mangum 126), but so too does the characterization of Mr. Hamilton-Wells. Mr. Hamilton-Wells is presented as highly effeminate: he adores the ritual of making and serving tea (Grand 488) and Dr. Galbraith comments that he “was not in the habit of thinking of him as either a man or a woman...but as a specimen of humanity more broadly” (611). While she is not a feminist per se, Mrs. Hamilton- Wells wonders if it is “right” to sacrifice good women to bad husbands (233), as she begins to feel her way (perhaps unconsciously) towards supporting social change for women. Finally, Angelica’s childish gender subversion is rendered less threatening because she is focused not on women at large, but on herself: at this stage of her development, Angelica is represented as profoundly selfish (beyond her love for Diavolo, whom she conceives of as part of herself, she has few sympathies).68 It is only after she sees Edith’s and her child’s illness that Angelica begins to conceive of making a difference for her gender in the larger world.

When Angelica witnesses Edith’s ordeal, she becomes interested in the struggle of women more broadly and begins, for the first time, to think beyond herself and Diavolo. The birth of this more socially aware feminist thought occurs within her unconscious mind, in a highly symbolic dream. In this dream, Angelica meets a lover who, for the first time, inspires her with “a throb of passion,” even as he taunts her for progressive ideas (293). Yet, this is not one of Ellis’ erotic dreams of submission to a strong man. Gradually, the lover’s face begins to morph into those of the great men of the Bible, Greek and Roman history, and classical literature. Next, the Pope of Rome appears and shouts at her: “HOME IS THE WOMAN’S SPHERE!” (295); she questions

67 In her 1923 preface to The Heavenly Twins, Grand writes of her intention to “‘compound an allopathic pill’ for the general reader ‘and gild it so that it would be mistaken for a bonbon and swallowed without suspicion of its medicinal properties’” (Richardson 242). Many reviewers (famously, George Meredith) commented on the balance between the comedy of the twins (the bonbon) and the heavy seriousness of Evadne and Edith’s plots (the medicine). 68 Echoing Catherine in Wuthering Heights, Angelica tells Diavolo’s tutor “the fact of the matter is that I am Diavolo and he is me” (124).

115 his authority, squirts water in his ear, and tries to ignore him. She then turns to the women of the world, crowded together in their sphere, and declares, “I am not Esther, most decidedly! But I am Judith. I am Jael. I am Vashti. I am Godiva. I am all the heroic women of all the ages rolled into one, not for the shedding of blood, but for the saving of suffering” (296). She then awakes to the sound of Edith’s deranged screaming (she is shouting “murder!” as she calls for the death of her husband).

This dream illustrates Angelica’s unconscious reaction to Edith’s tragedy: Edith’s suffering initiates Angelica into a world that conceives of her as a woman (with all of the restrictions and dangers that entails), introduces her to the masculine powers of church, history, literature, and heterosexual desire that aim to oppress her, and arouses her ambition to do something for the women of the world. Her dream builds a myth, as Cobbe suggests, out of various memories and thoughts of which she may not have been consciously aware. As Teresa Mangum explains, in this dream Angelica is drawing upon “sources of power: in the female literary tradition, in the cataloging of powerful women, and in the separatist potential of the women’s movement” (133). This constitutes a substantial rewriting of the potential of unconscious thought, and also of the content of women’s dreams. Instead of dreaming of leaning on a stronger power, Angelica’s dream of sexual attraction blossoms into a broader, socially-aware concern with the status of women in society. The dream is extremely powerful and, over the four pages it spans, it seems to swell with energy and purpose. The reader feels that this is a turning point and that something momentous is to follow. However, it is important to remember that Grand places this feminist revelation within a dream and not in dialogue or lucid thought. These are not Angelica’s conscious ideas and plans; they are represented as an involuntary manifestation of her unconscious mind processing the trauma of Edith’s story. When Angelica awakes, she is terrified and runs to hide from the sound of Edith’s voice. She finds the Bishop and begs him to placate her with “talk about God and good angels, and that kind of thing” (Grand 297). When she later recovers her equanimity, she does do something to express her newfound desire to help the women of the world: she throws a “heavy quarto Bible” at Menteith’s face and breaks his nose (301). This small-scale revolution69 is short-lived; soon after she has been “baptized into the world of anguish” (305), Angelica proposes to Mr. Kilroy in an attempt to negotiate some safety

69 Heilmann also comments on Angelica’s “toned down” rebellion: “instead of turning herself into the heroic woman of her dreams...she impersonates her absent brother” (NW Strategies 65).

116 and freedom for herself within the conventional “woman’s sphere.” While her dream awakens her to feminist thought, it has few effects on the material world; while the unconscious mind can generate revolutionary ideas, these are not ideas as such as they are located beyond the purview of the selecting will.

Both Evadne’s and Angelica’s initiations into feminist thought occur within the realm of the unconscious, and both lead to disappointing, or limited, action. Anna Maria Jones suggests that we “think of Evadne’s plot less as adhering to a structure than as imitating a movement; like the swell and crash of a wave on the shore, her story moves forward, gaining momentum before crashing and receding” (237). The same can be said of Angelica’s plot. Both heroines experience awakenings filled with potential for radical change, and yet Evadne concludes the novel as a hysteric who refuses to read or think, and Angelica returns to “True Womanhood” and an “acceptance of her womanly role” (Pykett 160). Critics generally ascribe the failure (or at least very limited success) of Evadne’s and Angelica’s feminisms to Grand’s conservatism.70 The novel itself suggests, as one might expect, that Evadne and Angelica are constrained by the social structures in which they live. I would like to argue, however, that an important factor that limits Evadne’s and Angelica’s potential for change is the placement of their revolutionary thought within the bounds of the unconscious. What is the nature of an “awakening” that occurs within a dream? As illustrated in the earlier section of this chapter, although the unconscious mind can create action in the world, that action – especially in the context of nineteenth-century mental physiology – is considered to be devoid of intentionality and, therefore, of morality. While Grand considers the possibility of revolution born in the unconscious, in this novel, she does not move past contemporary definitions and limits of the conscious mind. In locating the seeds of social change within the unconscious, Grand limits the possibility of effective transformative action for her heroines.

Grand’s critique of unconscious motivations is more overtly expressed in her description of sensuality, love, and sexual desire. In The Heavenly Twins, Evadne and Edith’s experiences of

70 For a different interpretation of the novel’s failures, see Anna Maria Jones’ “‘A Track to the Water’s Edge’: Learning to Suffer in Sarah Grand’s The Heavenly Twins.” Jones figures the disappointment of reading The Heavenly Twins as intentional and productive; she argues that the experience of suffering involved in reading the novel is meant to “educate and transform” the reader, to prepare them for the “new” fiction that is to come (221).

117 the sensual are closely tied to the church, of which the novel is extremely critical:71 both sensual and spiritual experience are represented as privileging feeling over thought. As the narrator comments, “[i]t is a nice question that, as to where the sensuous ends, and the spiritual begins. The dovetail is so exact just at the junction that it is impossible to determine” (Grand 48).72 Evadne and Edith are both drawn involuntarily to the sensual pleasures of the church, which prepare them for the pleasures of (ill-fated and unreasoned) sexual attraction.

The link between the sensual and spiritual is most pronounced in descriptions of Edith, whose experience of religion is decidedly sexual. After meeting Menteith, her future husband, Edith wants to “recall the pleasurable sensations of the day, and to prolong them” (168). To do so, she turns to her picture of the Good Shepherd and induces in herself what can only be called a religious orgasm. As Jones puts it, for Edith “prayer is an orgasmic fantasy, and spirituality is passionate enough to be indistinguishable from the physicality of vice” (226). Edith stares into the eyes of the Good Shepherd until she

felt herself filled with the serene intensity of his holy love. She recalled...the beauty of his person, and revelled in the thought of it, till suddenly a deep and sensuous glow of delight in him flooded her being, and her very soul was faint for him. She called him by name caressingly: ‘Dear Lord!’ She confessed her passionate attachment to him...[and] sank into a perfect stupor of ecstatic contemplation. (Grand 169)

For Edith, spiritual devotion is nearly identical to the ecstasy of sexual orgasm; both are profoundly sensual, take her outside of herself, and diminish her capacity for rational thought. Grand suggests that the “ecstatic contemplation” that Edith experiences is not “contemplation” at all, but a permutation of animal pleasure.

In describing Edith’s religious sensuality, Grand establishes a division between the workings of thought and those of feeling. While earlier depictions of Evadne’s reading suggest that thought can be unconscious, the scenes of sexual attraction and religious devotion in the novel insist that

71 For an interesting reading of Grand’s critique of the church, see Naomi Lloyd’s “The Universal Divine Principle, The Spiritual Androgyne, and the New Age in Sarah Grand’s The Heavenly Twins.” 72 The narrator goes on to conclude that the difference lies in terms of continuity and repetition: while we tire of sensual pleasures, we do not tire of spiritual ones.

118 deliberate, conscious thought is the antidote to and opposite of unconscious or semi-conscious feeling. The two mental functions appear to exist in entirely different realms. As the narrator reflects, in her joy at falling in love with Mentieth, Edith “did not think” and “she did not want to think” (168). She finds that she “could not reason about [Mentieth]” (190) as she is overwhelmed by the combined affective powers of the sentimental and the sensual. This is analogous to her experience of religion as “a thing apart from all her knowledge and opinions, something to be felt, essentially, not known as anything but a pleasurable and elevating sensation” (223). The unthinking pleasure of sensuous religion prepares Edith (just as much as her lack of education about the world) to fall in love with Menteith.

A similar narrative of influence occurs in the case of Evadne. Given Evadne’s characterization, it is highly surprising that, as Naomi Lloyd phrases it, “Evadne’s rationality is...sabotaged in an Anglican church service” (183). In a dream-like post-puberty scene, Evadne is drawn towards an Anglican church by the beauty of the surrounding landscape; she walks towards the church “without design, but drawn insensibly as by a magnet to the sea” (Grand 45). This metaphor of the magnet is explicitly linked to her budding sexual desire. According to the narrator (quoting an unnamed “professor”), Evadne has “now arrived” at the point in her life in which “all excitements run to love...An electrical current passing through a coil of wire makes a magnet of a bar of iron lying within it, but not touching it. So a woman is turned into a love-magnet, by a tingling current of life running round her” (52). This magnetic force is strongly associated with the sensual, affective unconscious. Although Evadne had always imagined that she would “decide with her mind” when it came to choosing a spouse, she is surprised to find that she could be “overcome by a feeling which is stronger than reason” (52). Though this feeling is not unconscious per se, it can be characterized as semi-conscious as it is difficult for Evadne to control and seems to arise from a part of herself that she does not recognize.

This “magnetic” experience of being “overcome” is prefigured in Evadne’s experience of spirituality. Once she reaches the church, Evadne enters a mental state not unlike Maggie’s on the boat with Stephen:

her mind attuned itself involuntarily to the habit of holy thought associated with the place, while the scents and sounds of nature streamed in upon her, forming now a soft undercurrent, now a delicious accompaniment which filled the interval

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between what she knew of this world and all that she dreamt of the next...Her intellectual activity was suspended – her senses awoke. (46)

Evadne’s “intellectual activity” is “suspended” as she succumbs “involuntarily” to the “soft,” “delicious” stream of dream-like sensual pleasure. She becomes addicted to this feeling and begins to attend church regularly in “a delicate, dreamy way...but...a sensuous way nevertheless” (47). This sensual initiation prepares her for the “St. Valentine’s Day of her development” (48), her coming engagement to Colonel Colquhoun.

Tellingly, Evadne meets and falls in love with Colquhoun during a church service. She had lately been praying for “some sign” by which she should know her “future husband” (53). When her eyes are “inevitably” drawn to Colquhoun’s at church, she perceives that she has received her sign: “[h]er heart bounded – her faced flushed. This was the sign, she was sure of it” (53). Evadne connects the sensual pleasure of attraction to Colquhoun with the “holiness” of her experience of the church and she accepts her sign with the complacence of a confident believer, thinking “it was inevitable – that the sign must be fulfilled. So Evadne folded her hands as it were, and calmly awaited the course of events” (54). This language of “inevitability” is similar to that of the “involuntary”; both descriptors place the resulting action in a sphere beyond rational control and beyond moral culpability and choice. Just as Evadne’s “involuntary” foray into reading changes her, so too does her “inevitable” experience of desire. She seems to become a different person entirely as, “without thought” (58), she enters a “dreamy” (59) state in which “she ha[s] no consciousness” of the passing of time (58). Like Edith, she perceives her lover through “such as a haze of feeling as to make the seeing practically null and void” (110). It is only when she becomes aware of his past indiscretions that the spell is broken and “the misty veil of passion [is] withdrawn from her eyes” (111).

That Evadne and Edith both fall in love (or, more correctly, in lust) with soldiers speaks to the role of convention in shaping the direction of sexual desire, and the primary myth of a young woman’s sexual dreams. Just as Ellis suggests, Evadne and Edith – two very different women – experience the same erotic fantasy of surrendering to a strong man, in both cases a soldier. This fantasy appears to them to be natural and inevitable, but leads to unnatural and avoidable tragedies. An anonymous contributor to the Journal of Psychological Medicine and Mental Pathology (1851) comments on the soldier’s sexual appeal: “the soldier is par excellence the

120 most attractive to the sex; his warlike profession, his manly moustache, the scarlet and gold, the nodding plume, the burnished helm of his uniform, his glittering arms, and the tout-ensemble of his accoutrements” work like the coloured feathers of birds to attract members of the opposite sex (172). These beauties play on women’s “special susceptibility to the sexual influence of form and colour” to awaken “strange mysterious emotions in the young female just bursting into womanhood” (172). Again, this language echoes Ellis: this anonymous theorist locates the source of the soldier’s attraction in women’s biological instincts. Yet this desire for a soldier is also highly conventional; Evadne and Edith’s interest in Colquhoun and Mentieth respectively are shaped by their biological instincts, but also by socially and religiously informed conventions that direct and give shape to their nascent sexual urges. These social norms are naturalized and expressed as unconscious and instinctive, despite their thoroughly civilized origins. In describing both heroines’ desire for a soldier, Grand demonstrates how the unconscious is not only a repository for the primal but also for the social; institutions like the church and the military are closely linked to the unconscious and instinctive desire of Grand’s young female characters. This creates space for the possibility that a social revolution may indeed have its roots in the unconscious – the unconscious is not completely divorced from the social, but rather entwined with its conventions.

The comparison between Evadne’s “involuntary” learning and her and Edith’s “involuntary” attraction, however, problematizes the unconscious as a route to social enlightenment or revolution. The novel asks: can meaningful feminist action truly be achieved if it is born in an unconscious, unreasoned realm of the mind? Evadne asserts that decisions made while in this state ought not to be considered decisions at all: in speaking of her marriage, she says that her unthinking ignorance “inveigled [her] into consenting” and thus “the vow [she] made...[has] nothing holy or binding in it...every law of morality absolves [her] from fulfilling [her] share of the contract” (89). While Evadne is here overtly referring to her lack of knowledge of Colquhoun’s past, this can also be interpreted as a refusal to accept consent given in an irrational, overly emotional, or semi-conscious state of mind. Like Maggie, Evadne insists that she did not consent with her “full mind” and therefore believes that any actions she has undertaken ought to be undone and considered invalid. This brings into question the validity of progressive feminist actions undertaken involuntarily or unconsciously. Lasting love, and binding marital contracts, ought to be based on the decision of “the mature mind; it is a fine compound of inclination and

121 knowledge, controlled by reason, which makes the object of it, not a thing of haphazard, but a matter of choice” (233). Evadne argues that true love needs to be a “matter of choice,” “controlled by reason” and not feeling. This echoes Grand’s pronouncements in “On the Choice of a Husband,” published in Young Woman in 1898, in which she states that girls are too often left with their “feelings [as their] only guide” in selecting a husband (106). Instead, a woman needs to learn about her partner, and receive advice from disinterested parties, so that “the force of her feelings” does not lead “to her own destruction” (106-107). Indeed, this “destruction” is what comes to Evadne and Edith: both are guided by their experience of the sensual (sanctified by the church and other social conventions) to select husbands that are diseased and morally beneath them. This affective and un- or semi-conscious sensuality leads directly to Edith’s death and, indirectly, to Evadne’s hysteria.

In proposing to Mr. Kilroy, who has no place in her “day-dreams” (467), Angelica attempts to avoid the unthinking sensuality which doomed Edith and, to an extent, Evadne. Yet, despite this protective measure, she too is shown to make important decisions under the spell of the unconscious. After the death of the Tenor, and the end of that dream-like episode in her life, Angelica “converts” to “true womanhood.” This capitulation is often figured as a result of her discovery of maternal feeling (Cothran 48; Pykett 160; Heilmann NW Fiction 142), but I want to suggest a somewhat broader reading. It is possible to interpret Angelica’s surrender to the “woman’s sphere” as an “unconscious decision” resulting from her initiation into the world of unconscious or semi-conscious feeling divorced from thought.

In her relationship with the Tenor, Angelica enters a twilight world of feeling and sensuality. While the Tenor awakens Angelica’s “loving consciousness” (452), it is difficult to ascertain whether or not she, in her disguise as the Boy, is in love or even in lust with the Tenor. There have been numerous critical readings of the Interlude – it is probably the most studied part of the novel – and a great deal of attention has been paid to the evidence and role of homosexual desire between the Tenor and the Boy (Bogiatzis 47; Heilmann NW Strategies 65; Heilmann NW Fiction; Mouton 193; Pykett 159-160). The Boy, however, denies and continually attempts to defuse this sexual tension, insisting that the entire relationship is an experiment in “calm human fellowship, the brotherly love undisturbed by a single violent emotion” (423). In her gender masquerade, Angelica attempts to experience “sexlessness,” or perhaps more accurately, a hybrid sexual identity that blurs and blends male and female, and leaves no room for desire. She will

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“have no sex in [her] paradise” and deprecates the sensual (423). However, sex and the sensual pervade the entire cross-dressing episode. As Lloyd points out,

music-making becomes the vehicle for the Tenor and the Boy’s articulation of desire. The Boy asserts that he will make the Tenor quiver with ‘these delicate fingers of mine,’ and is said to ‘make music that steeped the Tenor’s whole being in bliss’...The Tenor, in turn, sings songs that leave the Boy ‘speechless with pleasure.’ (190)

The fact is not that the enjoyment of the sensual does not exist in the Interlude, but that Angelica insists she is unconscious of its force or presence.73 She, like Evadne, is “carried away” (Grand 403) by the beauty of nature as she drifts unconsciously “from one thing to another” (449) with the Tenor. As she and the Tenor sing and play music for one another, floating sleepily over the water under the light of the moon, Angelica/the Boy is participating in a sensual experience without consciously acknowledging it.

This experience of sensuality and desire, far more repressed and subversive than Edith’s or Evadne’s, brings Angelica into a world of feeling divorced from thought. In becoming involved with the Tenor, Angelica is not operating according to a set plan or intention: as she tells him, “I had no object. I am inventing one now because you ask me” (449). She is drawn into the Interlude almost magnetically, with no design on her part, and the experience “arouse[s in her] that feeling” of truly being able to love a fellow creature (452-3). She does not stop to think about her emotions, or their consequences, which partly accounts for the oft-remarked “dreamy,” “fairy tale” tone of the sequence (Lowenstein 434; Mouton 187; Mangum 136). After the Tenor dies, the traumatized and grieving Angelica desperately wishes to stop thinking and acting: “I just want to drift,” she repeats over and over again in an extended stream of consciousness sequence (Grand 525). She is at once represented as processing her emotions and the trauma of loss, and yearning to return to the dreamy, drifty state of being with the Tenor on the water.

Angelica is briefly able to let go of thinking at the chapel at Morne, when “her mind and memory bec[o]me a blank, and for a blissful interval she [can] not think, she [can] only feel” (529). In

73 The Boy makes a fine distinction between the “sensuous” and the “sensual” (423) and insists he is the former and not the latter; however, in the rest of the novel these two terms are used interchangeably.

123 this moment, she becomes like Edith; overcome by the force of feeling (in a place of worship), she sheds her thinking mind. It is in this instance that she “[finds] herself renewing” her final vow to the Tenor to “be true” and return to true womanhood (529). The passive structure is important here: Angelica does not “renew” her vow, but “finds herself renewing” it. This passivity is repeated when she experiences another, similar epiphany in conversation with Lady Fulda. In this exchange, which Casey Cothran usefully labels as a kind of “conversion narrative” (48), Lady Fulda attempts to force Angelica to “choose” between “good and evil” (537). It is not entirely clear what these terms mean, but “good” appears to align with the idea of “true womanhood,” an ambiguous concept linked to maternity and wifeliness.74 As Lady Fulda repeats her question, Angelica is reminded of her vow to the Tenor and “[s]he did not wait to think again. The mere repetition was a renewal of her vow, and in the act she had unconsciously decided” (539-540). Without thinking, Angelica “unconsciously decides” to “be true,” and returns to her husband with a passionate embrace; her experience of unconscious desire somehow translates to an unconscious decision to accept the traditional gender roles she flouted in her masquerade.

Unconscious motivations lead Angelica back to her husband, Evadne to her books and feminist thought, and Edith and Evadne into their marriages. In The Heavenly Twins, Grand explores the role of the unconscious in a woman’s life as she expands upon and complicates the narrative of unconscious enlightenment posited in her journalistic writing. The problematization of the unconscious is most apparent in her description of Evadne’s hysteria. Evadne figures her hysteria as a process by which her pleasurable daydreams overpower her conscious will and oppress her. As she tells Dr. Galbraith,

I wanted to do some good in the world...and that kind of thought naturally resolves itself into action, but before the impulse to act came upon me I had made it impossible for myself to do anything [she is referring to her vow to Colonel Colquhoun that she will not publish in his lifetime], so that when it came I was obliged to resist it. (626)

Her convictions call her to action, but this action must be repressed and becomes sublimated into a stream of pleasant daydreams. These daydreams represent a sort of wish-fulfilment; she

74 “True Womanliness” is likely also linked to the social purity movement.

124 imagines herself as an active member of the social world, working to change society. Slowly, these dreams “intoxicate” her as her life becomes “absorbed in delicious imaginings,” whether she wills them or not (626). Eventually, her conscious mind is no longer able to control her dreams; as she says, “by degrees they mastered me; and now I am their puppet, and they are demons that torment me” (627). Evadne’s hysteria is a textbook case: repression leads her to daydreams, and these daydreams gradually take over her mind. Her illness demonstrates the psychological havoc that can be wreaked when the horse of the unconscious runs away from its rider.

In representing Evadne’s hysteria, Grand explores the problem of actions directed by the unconscious mind (Evadne continually attempts suicide and the murder of her child), and also the problem of thoughts and feelings without corresponding actions. In a way, the narratives of the three heroines are interested not only in the limitations and potential of unconsciously motivated action, but in the relationship between thoughts or ideas, feelings or instinctive pulls, and actions in the world. Angelica, Edith, and Evadne all suffer from experiencing feeling without thought; they follow attraction where it leads without thinking and without conscious intention. Evadne’s hysteria adds a third term to Grand’s exploration of dangerous, or even pathological, psychology: action. Evadne feels strongly that she ought to help alleviate the suffering of the world, and this feeling is based on knowledge and rational thought; however, she is prevented from expressing these thoughts and feelings in meaningful action. This blockage of action – her inner state can find no natural release or discharge – leads to the dreams which colonize her consciousness and result in her hysteria. Treatment of hysteria at the turn of the century was generally split into two camps: those who practised the rest cure (famously described in Charlotte Perkins Gilman’s “The Yellow Wallpaper”75) and those who followed a more “proactive,” action cure (Lowenstein 439). The action cure, which Evadne’s second husband and doctor Dr. Galbraith undertakes to an extent and which Grand seems to endorse, follows Josef Breuer’s assertion that affect needs to be expressed and discharged (Breuer 8). Feelings can become toxic if they are not adequately expressed. Breuer notes the prevalence of daydreams in inactive women (13), and explains that when these dreams become “inadmissible to consciousness,” the consciousness becomes split and passes into pathology (234). This is what

75 Ann Heilmann points to several parallels between Gilman’s short story and the final section of The Heavenly Twins (“Narrating” 123).

125 happens in Evadne’s case.76 Her hysteria is evidence of the dangers of the unchecked unconscious, and also of unexpressed convictions.

Dr. Galbraith’s progressive, action-based cure, however, is not enough to end Evadne’s hysteria: this is because he suggests that she “act, and not think” (673). Dr. Galbraith’s solution is again to detach thinking (and feeling) from action, as he sends Evadne to cheer up patients at his hospital. Despite his seemingly good intentions,77 Galbraith is unable to understand the balance and connection between thinking, feeling, and acting that The Heavenly Twins suggests is essential not only to mental health, but to meaningful social change. It seems that by the end of the novel, Evadne and Grand have shifted from an “evolutionary” understanding of progress as slow and involuntary, to a “revolutionary” understanding of change as passionate action motivated by strongly held convictions. During her madness, Evadne turns to her husband and says,

I can be the most docile, the most obedient, the most loving of women as long as I forget my knowledge of life; but the moment I remember I become a raging fury; I have no patience with slow processes; ‘Revolution’ would be my cry, and I could preside with an awful joy at the execution of those who are making the misery now for succeeding generations. (672)

Knowledge of life (thinking) leads to passionate rage (feeling) and to meaningful, if violent, action. Gone is the involuntary and inevitable evolutionary change and in its place is something far more radical, and potentially far more powerful. However, in The Heavenly Twins, this kind of passionate, revolutionary motivation only finds its place in the unconscious – in Evadne’s and Edith’s hysterical ravings, and in Angelica’s dreams.

The conservative feminism often noted in Grand’s The Heavenly Twins can be attributed to the novel’s ambivalent representation of the unconscious and its relationship to sensuality and decision-making, and to thinking, feeling, and acting. The unconscious is both the route to social

76 As Heilmann points out, this is not evidence of direct influence: Freud and Breuer’s Studies in Hysteria was published in 1895, two years after The Heavenly Twins, and was not fully available in English until 1955 (“Narrating” 133). 77 There is some critical debate as to whether Dr. Galbraith is presented as a sympathetic character (Mangum 122-3) or as a more manipulative (or at least mistaken) symbol of patriarchal control and authority (Mouton 199-200). Dr. Galbraith does curtail Evadne’s reading, and largely treats her as though she is incapable of caring or thinking for herself; however, he does love her and his actions are motivated by kindness. Perhaps his portrayal is a reflection on the ways in which personal feelings, such as love, can modify abstractly held beliefs: Dr. Galbraith’s love for Evadne causes him to treat her in ways that belie his feminist convictions and leanings.

126 change and enlightenment, and a dangerous, restrictive force in the psyches of Evadne, Edith, and Angelica. While Grand’s journalistic writing asserts that the woman’s movement is born in the unconscious, The Heavenly Twins complicates this narrative in its representation of unconscious motivations and their effects. Grand seems to be playing with the possibility that feminine unconsciousness, so often associated with powerlessness and submission, could be harnessed to achieve feminist goals. Ultimately, however, the plots of the three heroines recognize and work through the limits of unconscious ideas and decisions. While the unconscious may have revolutionary potential, that potential is undercut by the lack of choice involved in unconscious thought. The Heavenly Twins suggests that change – and happy marriages – can only be wrought through affective, rational action; the novel, however, does not fully resolve or explain how this can be achieved.

3 The Awakening

One never really knows the exact, definite thing which excites love for any one person, and one can never truly know whether this love is the result of circumstance or whether it is predestination. I am inclined to think that love springs from animal instinct...One can never resolve to love this man, this woman or child, and then carry out the resolution unless one feels irresistibly drawn by an indefinable current of magnetism...I am sure we all feel that love – true, pure love, is an uncontrollable emotion that allows of no analysation [sic] and no vivisection.

Kate Chopin, “Is Love Divine?” (1898) (205)

Kate Chopin’s reflection that love is uncontrollable, inexplicable, and based on animal instinct is echoed by Edna Pontellier, the heroine of The Awakening (1899), who tells Mademoiselle Reisz that a woman cannot “know why she loves” or elect to “select” a particular man for her affections (127). Chopin formulates love as a form of “unconscious selection”78 – Edna cannot articulate “why” she loves Robert Lebrun; she simply loves him (128). Edna’s feelings for Robert arise as a result of a combination of “accidents,” “Fate,” and desire, which is figured not only as physical, but as psychological and profoundly unconscious. While The Awakening is a

78 Chopin uses this term to describe her writing process: “Story-writing – at least with me – is the spontaneous expression of impressions gathered goodness knows where...There are stories that seem to write themselves, and others which positively refuse to be written...I am completely at the mercy of unconscious selection” (qtd. in Seyersted, Complete Works 722).

127 story about Edna “becoming herself” (101) and “realiz[ing] her position in the universe as a human being” (52), this process is represented not as an assertion of will and choice as many critics contend (Andrews 33; Jacobs 80; Ewell 164; Boren 181; Margraf 106; Seyersted 147), but as a surrender of the will to the unconscious. Chopin, like Grand, explores the revolutionary potential of the unconscious in The Awakening. Edna’s awakening, to the ties of children and husband, to sexual desire, to feelings of ennui and anguish, is presented not as a rousing to consciousness but as a slipping into the semi-conscious world of dream: her transformation is wrought not by rational decision, will, or choice, but by an emotional, dream-like, and amoral logic of association and appetite. This section considers The Awakening in the context of late nineteenth-century mental physiology and psychology to argue that the novel’s oft-remarked- upon “amoral” tone is a reflection of its interest in the question of what it means to awaken to the unconscious.

While many contemporary reviewers worried about the immorality of The Awakening,79 of equal concern was the novel’s amorality, and the lack of moral guidance it provided to its readers. One reviewer, writing in the St. Louis Daily Globe-Democrat, reflected that if the text “points to any particular moral or teaches any lesson, the fact is not apparent” (208). This moral ambiguity was generally attributed to the narrative voice; “throughout the story [there is] an undercurrent of sympathy for Edna, and nowhere a single note of censure of her totally unjustifiable conduct” (Times-Democrat 212). This left many readers wondering if Chopin’s novel was meant to be read as a portrait of “the character of a selfish, capricious woman” or a manifesto on “the doctrine of the right of the individual to have what he wants” (Los Angeles Sunday Times 214). Although most twentieth- and twenty-first-century critics are less inclined to read The Awakening as an indictment of its heroine, scholars still point to the narrator’s “amoral,” “detached,” and non-judgmental attitude towards her characters (Seyersted 111; Andrews 32); for example, while opposing images of womanhood and marriage are presented in the characters of Adele Ratignolle and Edna Pontellier, the narrator does not seem to endorse one model over the other. The narrator does not guide the reader to a particular moral lesson that is meant to be gained from the text.

79 The novel was widely considered to be inappropriate for young readers and was labelled “unhealthy,” “morbid” (St Louis Daily Globe-Democrat 208-9), “sad and mad and bad” (Deyo 210), “essentially vulgar” (Literature 213), and “not altogether wholesome” (Payne 217).

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Chopin may have chosen this “amoral” strategy due to her distrust of the “preachy” rhetoric of New Woman novelists like Sarah Grand, whose social problem novels were designed to articulate a criticism of conventional gender roles (Showalter 42).80 Some late-nineteenth- century reviewers, however, did read the novel as a pointed feminist critique of “existent conditions” (St. Louis Daily Globe-Democrat 208) and an exposé of “the dreadful consequences of marriage without real love” (Boston Beacon 213). The Awakening is sometimes associated with the New Woman movement, but such studies generally note that The Awakening is a hybrid form of New Woman fiction (Heilmann; Glendening; Gilmore). While the novel is preoccupied with issues such as marriage, motherhood, and female self-determination, The Awakening, like Grand’s The Heavenly Twins, is ambiguous in its valuation of traditional femininity in ways that are similarly tied to an ambivalence about the role of the unconscious in desire and in the precipitation of a feminist awakening.

Throughout the novel, Edna’s awakening is described in dream-like terms that echo the semi- conscious scenes of falling in love traced in the earlier chapters of this dissertation. Chopin seems to have recognized the prevalence of these tropes and toys with and reverses them, to explore the subversive potential of unconscious, dreamy attraction. In particular, Edna’s awakening is closely linked to the powers of music and water, two symbols that also feature prominently in the love sequences in George Eliot’s The Mill on the Floss and Virginia Woolf’s The Voyage Out. Edna, like Maggie and Rachel, is susceptible and responsive to the “sensuous” voice and touch of the sea (44, 53, 164), and the passionate tones of music (67, 108, 126). These forces are symbolic of her latent sexuality,81 and also function as instigators of her transformation. Edna is figured as a “receptive vessel” (Wolff 466) or conduit through which the forces of water and music move: the rhythms of music and the waves arouse corresponding “passions...within her soul” as she “sways” and is “lashed” under their influence (Chopin 67).82 The waves and Mlle Reisz’s piano playing “enfold” (53) and “penetrate” Edna, as they “prepare” her for her sexual awakening (126). As with Evadne and Edith’s experiences of organized religion in Grand’s The Heavenly Twins, Edna’s responses to the sea and Mlle Reisz’s music

80 Chopin was familiar with The Heavenly Twins and commented on the novel in her diary (Seyersted 102). 81 For a very helpful and interesting reading of the use of surging bodies of water to represent female sexuality, see Joseph Allen Boone’s Libidinal Currents: Sexuality and the Shaping of Modernism (1998). 82 Jane Thrailkill notes the centrality of moments of “incantory rhythm” in The Awakening, pointing to the prevalence of “whispering waves, dreamy reveries, rocking babies, crooning voices, and the sensuous strokes of arms through water, bristles through hair, fingers on flesh” (172).

129 initiate her into a “state of passive drift” that “facilitate[s] the emergence of desire” (Boone 71). The seductive voice of the sea, and the passionate notes of Mlle Reisz’s piano playing move Edna to experience emotions she did not know she could access, as she is pulled back into the state of the “unthinking child...following a misleading impulse without question” (56). She loses access to her rational thoughts and will, as she drifts into a dream-like state of consciousness. Edna’s experiences of water and music train her – counter to the teachings of mental physiologists such as William Carpenter and Arthur Ladbroke Wigan – to relax the control of the will and enter the passive, passionate, sensuous, and semi-conscious state in which desire can be expressed and fulfilled, and in which she can throw off the restrictions of her roles as mother and wife.

Through her awakening, Edna acquires a paradoxical dream-like agency that rewrites and revises the contemporary idea that intentionality and will are necessary for meaningful moral action in the world. When Edna learns to swim, for example, she feels “exultation” as she believes she has suddenly gained “control [over] the working of her body and her soul” (68). As John Carlos Rowe explains, there is the suggestion that Edna has recovered active agency in learning to swim, as she regains control of her body and her labour, which had been co-opted through marriage and motherhood (127). Yet, despite the agency involved in swimming, Edna’s forays into the water are described as dream-like (Chopin 70) and as ways not of gaining the self, but of letting it go. The voice of the sea “invit[es] the soul...to lose itself” (53), and, as she swims, Edna “seem[s] to be reaching out for the unlimited in which to lose herself” (69). Though she exhausts her limbs in swimming out into the sea, her goal is not to cut through the water but to enter it, not to swim, but to drift.83 Edna’s experience of water and swimming is one of desirable dissolution, not into the individual selves of husband, lover, or children as endorsed by conventional ideals of femininity, but into a broader natural system that seems to envelope and incorporate her into its rhythms.

This emphasis on participating in large natural systems, and on water and music, suggests a Darwinian influence.84 In a Darwinian context, water represents the seat of development and

83 Several critics have noted the prevalence of drifting throughout the text (Arms 217-18; Boone 87; Wolff 466; Schweitzer 161-2). 84 Bert Bender makes a strong case for the influence of Darwin’s The Descent of Man on The Awakening. He points to the repeated images of birds, the ways in which Leonce Pontellier demonstrates the desirable qualities of a

130 evolution; in swimming out to sea, or joining the sea, Edna is striving to return to the “vague, tangled, [and] chaotic” “beginning of things, of a world” (53). Similarly, in responding passionately to music, Edna is swaying and crying not only due to her particular love for Robert, but due to the “strong emotions of a long-past age” that Darwin argues are expressed, “vaguely and indefinitely,” in “musical tones” (Darwin 572). Edna’s almost magnetic attraction to the sea and to music demonstrates a latent desire to return to a primal, asocial, non-individualistic state of being governed not by social convention, but by instinct. Her unconscious mind is, then, a potential source of revolution and change, as it leads her to throw off the false nature of convention in favour of a “true” or primal nature, which can free her from the restraints of a defined selfhood and individual will. In his reading of Chopin’s response to Darwin’s The Descent of Man, Bert Bender concludes that Chopin “argue[s] mainly that the female plays a far more active and passionate role in the ‘sexual struggle’ than Darwin had suggested” (198). He contends that Edna’s sexual awakening is an awakening into increased (and increasingly passionate) agency in sexual selection. This prompts an interesting question that Bender does not address: what is the nature of Edna’s newfound, passion-driven agency in sexual selection? Is Edna a “deliberate chooser” making choices based on her individual will and preferences or is she an “unconscious selector” choosing based on the instincts of her species?

While some critics interpret Edna’s awakening as reliant on her “strength of will and her power of choice over her own destiny” (Margraf 106), this reading is difficult to reconcile with Chopin’s overwhelming emphasis on the unconscious and instinctive nature of Edna’s agency in love and sex. When Edna experiences sexual attraction, she is represented as “blindly following whatever impulse moved her, as if she had placed herself in alien hands for direction, and freed her soul of responsibility” (Chopin 73). She moves “instinctively” on her island adventure with Robert (77), and, when Arobin shows her a scar on his wrist, a “quick impulse that was somewhat spasmodic impelled her fingers to close in a sort of clutch upon his hand” (122). Edna’s desire is diffuse, instinctive, and (once awakened) uncontrollable: although she does not really care for Arobin, she cannot help but desire him; although she is in love with his brother, Victor’s kiss on her hand leaves a “pleasing sting” (137). When Robert confesses his love for Edna and speaks of his impossible dream of marrying her, Edna replies that he is a “very, very

civilized Darwinian male, the pronounced interest in music, and the descriptions of the pigeon house, canine teeth, and the laws of inheritance (215-26).

131 foolish boy” for “wasting [his] time dreaming of…Mr. Pontellier setting [her] free” – Edna proclaims that she is “no longer one of Mr. Pontellier’s possessions to dispose of or not.” As she insists, “I give myself where I choose” (156). This assertion of will and self-possession seems to astonish and even distress Robert – his face grows “white” as she speaks (156) – he, like Leonce, is aghast at Edna’s emphasis on her power to make her own choices. Yet, once she is free from Leonce’s social and sexual claim, it is not entirely clear that Edna is able to give herself “where she chooses”: as the novel progresses, Edna appears less and less able to control the direction and expression of her desire. This echoes the idea expressed in the epigraph of this section: for Chopin, love (and sexual desire, it seems) is instinctive, “magnetic,” and does not bow to the tenets of reason, circumstance, or even personal choice.

This representation of instinctive desire corresponds to the theories of instinct expressed in contemporary mental physiology and psychology. As mentioned at the start of this chapter, instinct was considered to be an automatic mental function closely tied to an individual’s sex and race, and characterized by a dearth of education or experience, and a lack of foresight of ends. In other words, an instinct is a type of action committed without the intervention of the controlling will; instinctive acts are semi-consciously or unconsciously executed and while they can sometimes be curtailed by the will, they cannot be initiated by it. Thus, when Edna impulsively, “spasmodically” grabs Arobin’s wrist, she is represented as acting automatically, as she follows the tenets of instinct inscribed not in her conscious mind but in the communal unconscious of her race and sex. In figuring Edna’s desire as primarily instinctive, Chopin locates it beyond the jurisdiction of conscious will and choice. Yet, this desire is also a source of Edna’s power and transformation: in awakening to sexual desire, Edna awakens to her position in the world as wife and mother and takes action to change her life.

Chopin’s depiction of Edna’s instinctive desire also asserts a division between the unconscious and conscious mind that appears in much of the psychological literature of the time. Throughout the novel there seems to be a part of Edna’s psyche that is somewhat inaccessible to her and that exists beyond the control of her active will: she is often happy or sad “without knowing why” (101), as these feelings well up from “some unfamiliar part of her consciousness” (45) “like something extraneous, independent of volition” (135). She has a conscious mind that knows, thinks, and is aware, and an unconscious mind that impels her to choices and emotions she seldom understands and rarely can control. As mentioned, she cannot explain why she loves

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Robert, and, when she considers why she has decided to leave her husband’s house, she reflects only that “instinct had prompted her” (126). The central binary in Edna’s characterization is not a Cartesian one between mind and body, but a division between conscious and unconscious that came to the fore first innocuously in the nineteenth-century “division of labour” model of the psyche and later, more insidiously, in the repression model delineated by Freud. In both systems, the body becomes curiously aligned with the unconscious; after all, it is the unconscious that governs instincts and reflexes, two types of actions that are so unwilled as to be almost entirely physical. For Edna, not only is her body primarily linked to her unconscious (especially in terms of sexual desire), but also her emotions are expressed as unconscious or semi-conscious, and are made manifest through bodily responses such as tears and sexual attraction. Interestingly, Edna only recognizes that she has been infatuated with Robert after he departs for Mexico (88). This relates to a literary myth of love in which absence or lack creates desire (Boone 87; Seyersted 141); however, it also points to a psychic block or division between parts of consciousness: her bodily responses reveal to her, after the fact, what has been taking place in her emotional unconscious. Edna’s awakening, then, can be understood as a process by which her previously unconscious thoughts and feelings enter the conscious realm and gain physical expression.

Within this process, it is worth considering the role of Edna’s will: does Edna choose to awaken? Is it her will that moves affects and motivations from the unconscious to the conscious realm? Hers appears to be the story of a nature in which the “horse” of the unconscious has run away from its “rider,” causing mayhem as the unconscious gains control of the self. However, in The Awakening, Chopin makes an important modification to the scheme articulated by thinkers such as Carpenter, Cobbe, Wigan, and James: while these theorists tend to represent will and choice as synonymous with the conscious mind, Chopin aligns Edna’s will with her unconscious. When Edna refuses to leave the hammock and come to bed when Leonce tells her to, she “perceive[s] that her will had blazed up, stubborn and resistant.” In this moment, “she could not...have done other than denied and resisted” (72). Edna’s will is represented as a force within herself that has gained control of her mind and body without her consent. It “blazes up” – she does not choose it – and she cannot but follow its decrees. Edna is not represented as consciously choosing to disobey her husband, but rather as having no choice but to obey her will. Her will appears almost instinctive, not unlike her desire, as she seems unfamiliar with it and unable to control its influence and direction. Instead of appearing as a rebel in this scene, Edna is depicted as more of

133 a sensorily connected spectator: while she experiences what it feels like to disobey Leonce, she also seems to be watching the sequence unfold from a distance, unable to control its trajectory. While readers can (and perhaps should) be critical of this unwilled will, it is interesting and important to note how this constitutes a revision, and harnessing, of the unconscious for feminist ends. Edna’s unconscious (female) will, so often aligned with passivity or pathology in psychological and fictional texts, here is a source of defiance and subversion.

According to the psychological discourse of the time, Edna’s unwilled will, and her split consciousness, would likely be classified as pathological. Yet, as mentioned, the narrator does not pass judgment on Edna or her condition and it is not explicitly suggested that she is ill.85 This lack of judgment is not only due to Chopin’s aversion to “preachiness”: Chopin portrays Edna’s unwilled will and divided consciousness in order to experiment with the boundaries of psychological realism, and to explore what it might mean for meaningful change to be motivated by the unconscious or in a dream-like state. While my intention is not to argue that the entire novel is meant to be read as a dream sequence (I do not believe it is), I do want to emphasize the text’s profound interest in sleep and dream, and to point out that Edna’s lack of understanding of her own motivation, and her perception of her own will as a foreign, unfamiliar force, corresponds to the logic of dreams. According to Cobbe, while dreams are profoundly affective, “we have actually less to do in concocting them than in dozens of mental processes which go on wholly unperceived in our brains” (327); in dreaming, we enter a state of “entire passivity” and the passions we experience can often seem “altogether foreign to our natures, past and present” (359). There is the suggestion that in “awakening,” Edna is slipping into the intensely affective, mythical, and strangely unwilled state of the dreamer.

Indeed, for a text ostensibly about waking up, The Awakening spends a lot of time representing Edna as sleepy, falling asleep, or fast asleep: she falls asleep on the little island with Robert and imagines she has entered the Sleeping Beauty story, she falls asleep reading Emerson at home, and she sleeps deeply after Arobin leaves her, to list only a few examples.86 Despite her

85 When she speaks with Doctor Mandelet at the end of the novel, it is unclear whether he wants her to visit him because he believes she needs his medical help, or because, as he says, he “would understand” and speak to her of “things [she] never [has] dreamt of talking about before,” things that would do them “both good” (160). 86 The example of Edna falling asleep while reading Emerson stands out from the others: this is ostensibly not a sleepiness linked to the sensuality of the body, but to intellectual pursuit. While Chopin does not inform her readers of what Emerson text her heroine is reading, the image of Edna growing sleepy over a work such as “Self-Reliance” suggests that perhaps the intoxicating notion of American, “masculine” independence has a similar sleep-effect to

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“impassioned, newly awakening being” (88), Edna “resembles a sleepwalker much of the time” (Walker 62), and, as Ruth Sullivan and Stewart Smith argue, it seems that “the awakening Edna most desires is to sleep and dream” (70). The link between desire and sleep is especially pervasive as Edna’s experience of sexuality often quite literally puts her body to sleep, or brings her into a state akin to sleep. For instance, Arobin’s kiss on her hand “act[s] like a narcotic upon her” and that night she “sl[eeps] a languorous sleep” (123). This imagery recurs again when the touch of his “magnetic hand” on her hair nearly puts her to sleep in another scene (139). Similarly, after seeing Robert when he returns from Mexico, Edna falls into “a kind of reverie – a sort of stupor” (150), as she drifts into a dream of romantic and sexual fulfilment. Edna’s experience of sexual desire, like Edith’s and Evadne’s, is decidedly dreamy; as such, it involves a suspension of the will and a paradoxical passive agency that is characteristic of her unwilled, sleepy awakening.

Edna’s illicit experiences of sexuality and desire with Arobin and Robert are not the only scenes described as dream-like. Curiously, there is a shifting symbolism of dream and reality throughout the novel. At some points, dream is associated with romance and desire – not only are her encounters with Robert and Arobin described as dream-like, but her earlier fantasies about the tragedian or the cavalry soldier,87 for example, are associated with “the realm of romance and dreams” (58) – and reality is equated with the social world and her passionless marriage to Leonce Pontellier. At others, however, the binary is reversed: her life with Leonce is the dream and desire is the reality. She begins “to feel like one who awakens gradually out of a dream” (73); the years spent with Leonce and the children “seem like dreams” (160). While this slippery binary seems to suggest a shift in reasoning across time – earlier in the novel, Edna is more prone to associate romance and desire with dream, and later, these appear the most real to her – the narrative is not nearly so linear. Edna’s meetings with Robert later in the text, for example, make her feel “dreamy” (150) and as though “all sense of reality had gone out of her life” (152). It is difficult to arrive at a stable interpretation of this language of reality as opposed to dream and this is likely intentional on Chopin’s part: the line between dream and reality, between conscious and unconscious, is mutable and permeable.

the intoxicating release of physical pleasure. Both suggest a type of selfhood that appeals to her unconscious desires and drives, but about which she cannot reason. 87 It is interesting to note that Edna (like Evadne and Edith) fantasizes about an attractive soldier.

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This permeability is indicative of a larger experiment in form and style that Chopin is conducting in The Awakening: the novel is often classified as realist or naturalist (Walker; Margraf) but its rhythms are less inclined towards the cause-and-effect of classic realism or the biological determinism of naturalism, and more interested in replicating the fluid logic of association of dream, the mental space between consciousness and unconsciousness. Joseph Allen Boone argues that Chopin presents “sequences of seemingly ‘real’ events that turn out to be connected less by the linearity of cause and effect than by a process of association that approximates what we now call Freudian dream-logic” (70). Boone reads the dream-logic of The Awakening to assert that “external events thus repeatedly become indices, when not projections, of interior states” (70). While I agree that the structuring logic of the text is dreamy and characterized by association (and, I would add, appetite), I am less certain that external events can truly be read as “projections” or “indices” of internal states in The Awakening. Rather than interpret the events of the text as symbolic manifestations of Edna’s unconscious, I want to consider the ways in which the novel moves along according to the thought pattern of dreams identified by Cobbe and Carpenter: “there is an entire suspension of volitional control...[and thought] flows-on automatically, sometimes in a uniform, coherent order, but more commonly in a strangely incongruous sequence” (Carpenter 584). It is this “automatic” flow and “incongruous sequence,” rather than a model of interiority and projection, that I argue structures the novel.

Dreams follow an obscure logic of association and appetite by which primal desires and old memories enter the dreamer’s consciousness, and seemingly innocuous events are granted overwhelming significance. One thing leads to another in a pattern that is sometimes difficult for even the dreamer to understand, and always impossible for her to control. The proto-modernist style of The Awakening expands the boundaries of psychological realism by adhering to a logic of flow and association, rather than one of cause and effect. Boundaries between objects and ideas are permeable, as events and images sometimes seem to bleed into one another. The novel moves according to the rhythm of long-forgotten memories, of connections fostered in the unconscious rather than the conscious mind. Chopin demonstrates this logic in representing Edna’s flow of remembrances when she sings Robert’s song while painting: the tune “move[s] her with recollections,” causing her to

hear again the ripple of the water, the flapping sail...[to] see the glint of the moon upon the bay, and...[to] feel the soft, gusty beating of the hot south wind. A subtle

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current of desire passe[s] through her body, weakening her hold upon the brushes and making her eyes burn. (101)

Suddenly, the song transports Edna from her studio to Grand Isle. Edna’s experience of this memory resembles that of a dream: it is visceral – she feels it on a sensory level – and she lacks control over the direction in which her mind takes her. The type of associative logic that governs Edna’s remembrances appears in the narrative voice as well; the refrain of the phrase “the voice of the sea is seductive” (53, 163), for instance, first appears following a sentence about the “tangled” and dangerous “beginning of things” (53); the two images do not necessarily follow logically, but one suggests the other, as the idea of a tumultuous beginning bleeds into the movement of the “murmuring” (perhaps Darwinian) sea. On the level of plot, this kind of “incongruous” sequencing can be read in Robert’s repeatedly accidental meetings with Edna after he returns from Mexico. His appearance at Mlle Reisz’s home is not a projection of Edna’s inner state but a natural next step in the associative logic that connects Robert to this place, and this music. His seemingly random appearances become imbued with ideas of fate, and destiny (153), as they acquire particular, nearly mythical, significance to Edna. The Awakening is not only interested in representing the role of the unconscious and dream in the awakening of self- awareness and desire, but also in experimenting with the possibility of a novel structured according to the associative, and sometimes seemingly random, logic of dreams. The novel’s structure is that of the dream-myth: it explores the subversive potential of dream to rewrite conventional narratives and make space for revolutionary actions – such as leaving one’s husband and children – that may not be permitted by the disciplined will and the conscious mind.

Nowhere is the dream-logic that governs the text more apparent than in the representation of Edna’s suicide which ends the novel. This act, which is so often read as a “choice” (Ewell 164; Streater 406), a “passionate assertion of her new-found identity” (Heilmann “The Awakening” par. 3), and a “triumphant assertion of her inner liberty” (Seyersted 149), is described as an automatic action undertaken by Edna’s semi-conscious, dreaming mind. When Edna walks towards the beach, she does so “mechanically” and without “any particular train of thought” (163). As Lynda Boren phrases it, Edna swims to her death like a “somnambulant child” (195); she moves like a sleepwalker, following an unconscious impulse rather than a conscious choice. It is important to consider the gap between thinking and knowing in this passage: although Edna “underst[ands] clearly” that there is a way to “elude” the demands of her children and

137 motherhood, she is “not thinking of these things when she walk[s] down to the beach” (Chopin 163). While Chopin does present a motive for Edna’s suicide, it is not conscious; she is not “thinking of” it as she moves towards the water. Edna seems driven to the water’s edge not by conscious decision or self-assertion, but by her unconscious mind.

As she swims farther out, the logic of association takes over the narrative completely as seemingly unconnected memories of Leonce and the children, of Mlle Reisz and Dr. Mandelet, bleed into the voices of her father and her sister, of a barking dog tied to a tree, and the clanging spurs of the cavalry officer. Finally, even these personal memories fade away as the reader is left with “the hum of bees, and the musky odor of pinks” (164). Ivy Schweitzer points out that in this final sequence “even Edna’s perceptual agency is shed” as the sounds and scents of Edna’s memories appear “as subjectless” (186). This depersonalization is indicative of the mental process Edna is undergoing in this moment – she is not asserting her individual identity, but rather blurring herself into the larger being of the ocean and the “tangled” primal universe it stands for – and it also serves to envelope the reader in the experience of the dream. In structuring the text according to an associative logic, and in presenting near-subjectless sounds and speaker-less phrases at the end of the novel, the narrator of The Awakening forces the reader to enter and inhabit Edna’s unconscious. Indeed, many nineteenth-century reviewers commented on the “spell of the book” upon its readers (Porcher 207); I would argue that much of the power of The Awakening comes from the way it brings its readers into the logic of Edna’s dream- consciousness, stretching the boundaries of psychological realism in its embodiment of the tumult and dream-like madness of the unconscious mind.

In positioning Edna’s awakening, sexual and otherwise, within the realm of her unconscious mind and utilizing the logic of dream as a structuring principle, The Awakening is difficult to evaluate as a moral text. Ought Edna to be held morally accountable for actions undertaken without the intervention of her conscious mind? Can the dream state, which is isolated, self- centred, and inward-looking, lead to meaningful social change? As she awakens, Edna recognizes that she only wants her “own way” (160). While she dreams of her beloved, she soon recognizes that even he will fade away, or be replaced by another (163). The dream state represents an awakening to her “relations as an individual to the world within and about her” (52), but also leads to a failure of sympathy. As she awakens to the imprisonment of her conventional female relational identity, according to which she is defined as wife, mother, and

138 mistress, the people who constituted important social ties in her life fade into the “great unnumbered multitude of souls that come and go” (158). The dream state in this novel, unlike in many of the other texts analysed thus far in this dissertation, does not facilitate or accompany love and relation, but rather entails the collapse of the sympathetic bonds so essential to the Victorian social order. Yet, because this collapse takes place in a dream, as Edna pleads with Doctor Mandelet, she ought not to be held responsible. Edna tells Mandelet not to “blame [her] for anything,” to which he replies “I don’t want you to blame yourself, whatever comes” (160). Edna’s awakening to a dream state severs and modifies social ties, but because it is unwilled, her actions seem to exist outside a recognizable moral field of blame and responsibility.

Most nineteenth-century mental physiologists and psychologists agree that the will, the seat of morality, is dormant in dream. Therefore, dream is a realm in which true, conscious choice is impossible; this necessarily limits the ethical implications of an action undertaken in a dream state. This interest in representing a seemingly amoral mental state may be traced to the connection between “natural femininity” (or, as Grand phrases it, “true womanhood”) and the unconscious. In nineteenth-century discourse, mothering, loving, and caring were thought to be things that women did naturally, without the intercession of their governing will. Even Darwin asserted the incredible strength of this mothering and altruistic instinct in females. Chopin represents this image of “true” or “natural” womanhood in her “mother-woman,” Adele Ratignolle. For Adele, merging with husband and children is natural and pleasurable. But what of unconscious drives that pull a woman in other directions? Impulses that make one long to know, as in the case of Evadne, or that make one long to join into a broader universe and leave the self behind, as in the case of Edna? How can readers evaluate the unconscious forces that move female characters towards roles not quite as socially sanctioned as that of Adele Ratignolle? In The Awakening, Chopin is not presenting a grand feminist revolution – the awakening is limited to a single woman (rather than an entire gender) and is, like in The Heavenly Twins, represented in an ambivalent fashion due to its location within the unconscious mind. The novel’s emphasis on sleep, dream, and the unconscious serves as a meditation on the limits of morality, and the role of the unconscious in motivating action. The text, more so than Grand’s, tests out the possibility of revolutionary action inspired by the unconscious mind, and explores the unconscious as a seat of meaningful change. The Awakening also revises contemporary psychological discourse, in positioning the will within the purview of the

139 unconscious rather than the conscious mind. While Edna’s unconsciously motivated feminist actions lead to her death, this death is often interpreted less as a dire end than as a peaceful beginning. There is the sense that, strangely enough, this dream has ended happily and Edna is free.

4 Conclusion

Sarah Grand’s The Heavenly Twins and Kate Chopin’s The Awakening are both pervaded by the language of sleep, passivity, and the unconscious, as each author explores the possibility of a feminist revolution – or perhaps evolution – born deep in the realm of the unconscious, apart from the force of the controlling will. Although these two nearly contemporaneous novels are formally quite different, both explore common themes and hinge on a central question: is it possible for meaningful, ethical action to occur without the intervention of the conscious, controlling will? Can social or personal change be brought about “automatically”? Neither Grand nor Chopin clearly represents unconscious dreaminess as a completely viable alternative to traditional political activity. However, both novelists work to play with and subvert conventional notions of female passivity (particularly in love) to explore ways in which that same dreamy unconsciousness could work to destabilize patriarchal structures and privileges.

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Chapter 4 Consent, Contract, and the Law in Thomas Hardy’s Tess of the D’Urbervilles and Edith Wharton’s Summer

1 Consent, Contract, and Liberalism

In George Eliot’s The Mill on the Floss, as Maggie Tulliver and Stephen Guest drift away on the boat together, Stephen feels that “life hung on her consent” (490) and he searches her face and body for signs of “tacit assent” (496). As discussed in Chapter 1, once Maggie awakens from her “subjection” and the “submergence of [her] personality by another” (490), she tells Stephen that she “couldn’t choose yesterday” (497) and that she “never consented...with [her] whole mind”; she “never deliberately consented” to running away with him, or to falling in love with him (500).

What exactly is the nature of the “consent” that Stephen seeks, and that Maggie insists she has not given? What might it mean for consent to be “deliberate” or “tacit,” or given from a “whole heart and soul” as opposed to from a “whole mind”? Maggie makes a distinction between the partial consent of “the momentary triumph of [her] feeling for” Stephen and the consent that comes from the “will” and from “choice,” the consent of the “whole mind” (500). This scene crystallizes a problem that underlies the readings of women falling in love in the earlier chapters of this dissertation: can a woman in love truly choose or consent? Do love and desire, as they are represented in these novels, preclude consent? According to the OED, consent is the “voluntary agreement to or acquiescence in what another proposes or desires” (“consent”). While consent is figured as a choice (it is “voluntary”), it is a relatively passive and receptive form of willed action; consent is a speech act that creates things in the world, but it does so by complying, receiving, or giving permission, rather than by negotiating, debating, or initiating.88 Also, although consent is a choice, it is “not a freefield”: the consenting party is limited to two options

88 This is likely a partial explanation for the continued gendering of consent in public and academic discourse. It is assumed, in most contemporary discussions about sexual consent, that “women give consent to men” (Beres 96) rather than the other way around. For example, in rape trials, the onus is often placed upon the woman to “prove she did not consent” (96); even in more progressive sexual assault policies, such as those advocated by Lois Pineau’s communicative sexuality and Antioch College’s infamous “Ask First” policy, the focus is still on instructing men on how to solicit consent from their female partners, without considering an alternative narrative in which women might initiate sex and solicit consent (Beres 102; Haag xiv). This gendering of consent is related to traditional understandings of the male/female, active/passive binary: in sex and in life, men are associated with the more active forms of choice (initiation, for instance) and women with the more passive (consent).

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– yes or no (Rosenfelt 5). During the nineteenth century, consent was often closely linked with theories of liberalism and the idea of contract: one could consent to a business contract, to the social contract, and – crucial to the purposes of this project – to the marriage contract. This chapter will explore nineteenth-century notions of contract and consent, and conduct readings of Thomas Hardy’s Tess of the D’Urbervilles (1891) and Edith Wharton’s Summer (1917) to argue that the representation of women in love, or experiencing desire, as sleepy and semi-conscious89 is complicit with a discourse according to which women are excluded from the exercise of rational, active consent.

While liberalism and contract theory are products of Enlightenment thinking, these ideas became particularly relevant, in England and the United States, during the nineteenth century. The rise of industrialization and urbanization led to an increased emphasis on the individual that was characterized by liberal notions of contract-exchange, personal freedom, and possessive individualism (Stanley x).90 Contract functioned not only as an agreement between consenting parties, but as a “worldview” or “creed” that defined the century (Stanley x; Singh 1; Thomas 1). Contract was often figured as evidence of progress and civilization: a shift to contract was a shift away from older modes of social relations organized around status and descent (Jones “Feminism” 405; Stanley 2; Dillon 11; Grossberg 19). English jurist Sir Henry Maine wrote that “progressive societies moved ‘from Status to Contract’” (qtd. in Stanley 2) and in post-bellum America, contract was emblematic of the possibilities of individual freedom and slave emancipation. What Brook Thomas terms “the promise of contract” is the promise of increased freedom, self-determination and class mobility that would come from a world “in which people freely bound themselves to others” (1). For many, contract promised a world order in which class and heredity would be superseded by personal agency and choice. In writing about the evolution of American culture, Werner Sollors articulates this shift as one from descent to consent, from a system that emphasizes “hereditary qualities, liabilities, and entitlements” to one that “stresses

89 In Still Life: Suspended Development in the Victorian Novel (2015), Elisha Cohn conducts a sustained analysis of these moments, which she terms “still-life.” These sequences within the Victorian novel represent moments of “reverie, trance, and sleep” which “privilege feeling over action, and find plenitude in sensation” (3). Similar to my own analysis of female characters falling in love, Cohn argues that these “still life” moments are ambivalently represented, and “associated with uncertain agency” (5). 90 As Gillian Brown explains, “C.B. Macpherson has identified the ‘possessive’ nature of the individualism associated with the rise of the liberal democratic state. According to this concept of self evolving from the seventeenth century, every man has property in himself and thus the right to manage himself, his labour, and his property as he wishes. As Macpherson stresses, this is a market society’s construction of self, a self aligned with market relations such as exchange value, alienability, circulation, and competition” (Brown DI 2).

142 our abilities as mature free agents and ‘architects of our fates’” (6). Consent and contract were therefore integral not only to business and legal agreements, but to an imagined future of free, voluntary, and equitable social organization.

Indeed, definitions of contract are often expressed using the language of freedom and volition. E. L. Godkin, writing in the North American Review in 1867, explains that “a contract, both in law and in political economy, is an agreement entered into by two perfectly free agents, with full knowledge of its nature, and under no compulsion” (qtd. in Stanley 2). Contract theory imagines a world in which “obligation [is] created by free will rather than arising from relations of authority and subjection” (5); individuals are presumed to be equal in personal freedoms (and property, in their own bodies), ability to contract, and rational understanding. The element of rationality is especially important to the question of love and consent, since, as shown in the previous chapters, the woman in love is rarely represented as a rational being. As American sociologist William Graham Sumner writes in What Social Classes Owe to Each Other (1883), contract is “rationalistic[,]...realistic...and matter of fact” (qtd. in Stanley 1). Individuals truly consent to a contract when they have full freedom to do so and full rational knowledge of the arrangement into which they are entering.

This formulation, however, leads to problems and exclusions in a decidedly unequal world. The idealized contract relation positions both parties as equal; however, as mentioned, there is a distinction between the position of those who propose or offer the contract, and those who choose between assent and refusal. There is often a profound inequality between the two parties to a contract. While a wage contract is ostensibly balanced in that both the master and the labourer offer something that the other needs, “paternal dominion” is still vested in the master; 91 similar paternalism is inherent in the marriage contract, which purportedly exchanges the husband’s protection for the wife’s obedience (Stanley 10; Pateman 111-112). As Carole Pateman explains in The Sexual Contract, the inequalities embedded in liberal contract theory are distinctly gendered, with the sexual contract – “a story of [women’s] subjection” – underlying the social contract’s “story of [masculine] freedom” (2). The civil freedom granted by

91 In post-bellum America, the wage contract became “a metaphor of freedom” as former slaves could finally act as legal persons and enter into “free” working relationships in which they could control and benefit from their labour. However, many found that entering a wage contract resulted in little material improvement of conditions, as the terms of the contract remained unequal and oppressive (Stanley 2, 21).

143 the era of contract “is a masculine attribute and depends upon patriarchal right” (2). Rather than ushering in a new age of universal equality, the law of contract often functions to legitimate pre- existing “social and economic inequities” (Thomas 2), particularly between men and women.

While liberal theoretical claims seem to be “transhistorical, transcultural, and most certainly transracial” (Singh 51), liberal theory explicitly and implicitly excludes several groups from the status of individual, including women, children, slaves, racial others, madmen, and idiots (Singh 59; Dillon 2; Blackstone 438; Pateman 171). Women have customarily been barred from liberal selfhood due to their perceived lack of rationality and relational social and biological identities: women were thought of as “inherently lacking in autonomy, conjoined to children and dependent upon men” (Dillon 12). During the nineteenth century, prior to laws such as the Married Women’s Property Acts, a woman’s body was ostensibly the only piece of property that she truly possessed, and even this was not figured as truly hers to exchange and contract with. As Gayle Rubin explains, in marriage, it is women “who are being transacted”; they are the “gifts” and men are the “exchange partners” and “beneficiaries of the product of such exchanges – social organization” (44-45). Women were understood to be the property of their fathers, and, subsequently, their husbands.

As several critics have noted, the exclusion of women from liberal individualism renders women’s consent to the marriage contract especially paradoxical (Pateman 50; Brown CG 134). Women, categorically excluded from liberal selfhood and thus from contracting and consenting, are expected to consent to one particular contract: the marriage contract. William Blackstone explains in his Commentaries on the Laws of England that the “law considers marriage in no other light than as a civil contract”; a marriage contract is valid when the parties were “willing to contract,” “able to contract” and “did contract, in the proper forms and solemnities required by the law” (434). According to Blackstone, “the law treats [marriage] as it does all other contracts” (433). The marriage contract in the nineteenth century, however, is patently not like all other contracts: according to the laws of coverture, the wife is agreeing to “suspend” her “very being or legal existence” during the marriage (441). In the terms of the law at least, she is consenting to efface herself, something that seems diametrically opposed to John Locke’s understanding of the purposes and nature of contract. While a man “cannot, by compact, or his own consent, enslave

144 himself to any one, nor put himself under the absolute, arbitrary power of another” (Locke Second Treatise 29), a woman can somehow consent to marriage and to coverture.92

In addition, there are other somewhat unique and problematic aspects of the marriage-as-contract model. As Elaine Scarry points out, a marriage contract is a “contract that has very little specified content” (884). Unlike a business contract, which sets out terms, obligations, and responsibilities, the marriage contract is ambiguous and its contents are assumed rather than explicitly stated or negotiated. Additionally, the marriage contract, unlike a typical business contract, was extremely difficult to dissolve throughout the nineteenth century (Marcus 215). In these ways, the marriage contract resembles the unspoken theoretical social contract of liberal theory, according to which individuals sacrifice power and autonomy for social peace and protection. Supposedly, all individuals consent to this contract even though they have never seen it and the explicit consent took place in a long-past, likely theoretical, age. In consenting to marriage, many women were also entering a contractual relation that was poorly defined, non- negotiable, and difficult to exit. While the decision to consent to a particular marriage was not literally made by ancestors in a mythical past, the structure of marriage – and the status relations it involved – had little to do with a woman’s personal volition, and more to do with a cultural history divorced from her individual consent. As Gillian Brown points out, consent is often affiliated with knowledge and experience; terms such as “informed consent” and “the age of consent” point to the ways in which consent represents a willed agency based on knowledge and judgment (CG 18). The marriage contract is a contract that many nineteenth-century women entered with neither.

While the marriage contract is ostensibly based on the consent of both parties, John Stuart Mill complains that little was done to ascertain if consent to marriage was truly voluntary; while a woman in the Catholic marriage ceremony was required to say “yes,” there was nothing to show that this consent was not coerced (56). Perhaps even more troubling is the problem of tacit consent. According to the liberal theory of consent, a verbal or written “yes” is not always necessary to demonstrate consent; Locke’s theory of tacit consent through residence posits that a man’s bodily presence within the borders of a particular country – or, by extension, a woman’s bodily presence at the altar – could arguably constitute evidence of consent (Locke Second

92 Many feminists, from the nineteenth century to the present, have compared marriage to slavery. See, for example, John Stuart Mill’s The Subjection of Women (1869) and Charlotte Perkins Gilman’s Women and Economics (1898).

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Treatise 71; Brown CG 20; Scarry 874). The very notion and acceptance of tacit consent locates consent so completely in the body as to potentially negate the validity of theories of consent based on rationality and choice. While theorists such as Hanna Pitkin argue that the acceptance of tacit consent “destroy[s] the very substance and meaning of consent” (I 994), others, like Elaine Scarry, suggest that moments such as these point to the essentially passive, embodied nature of all consent (874). Tacit, bodily consent transforms (or reveals) voluntary, choice-based consent into (as) an automatic action; tacit consent is a form of consent that requires no intercession from the will and can either be figured as unconscious or purely bodily and largely passive. One’s physical existence within a particular space may be voluntary, but also may be coerced, or affected by forces beyond one’s control. As I have shown in this dissertation – and will continue to demonstrate in this chapter – nineteenth-century love plots consistently explore the problem of women’s consent to love and marriage, by representing women’s marital consent as tacit or coerced, or, even more often, by completely obscuring the moment of consent, drawing attention to the ambiguity and potentially un-representable nature of this moment.

Although women were technically excluded from liberal selfhood, and despite the many problems that modern critics identify with the marriage contract, many nineteenth-century Anglo-American feminists insisted that contractual marriage was essential to women’s rights. Indeed, while Blackstone asserts that the marriage contract is like all other contracts, this was not an axiom that was universally accepted in nineteenth-century discourse: debates about marriage often centered on its particular status as a contract. Ought a marriage actually be treated like other contracts? What might this mean for the possibility of easy and accessible divorce? Traditionalists of various camps argued that the marriage contract ought not to be easily dissolvable because it is not simply based on the volition of two consenting parties. Many argued that there are “three parties” to the marriage contract (Thomas 63). Some, like Justice Thomas M. Cooley of Michigan, believed that these are “the husband, the wife, and the state” (People v. Dawell 1872, qtd. in Thomas 63), while others, such as spiritualist Victoria Woodhull, argued that God was the third party (134). The existence of a third party, whether divine or statutory, renders the marriage contract “transcendent and irrevocable in ways that [other] contracts [are] not” (Marcus 213). Victorian feminists, therefore, saw the adoption of a more standard contractual model of marriage – between two consenting parties – as a progressive move towards women’s emancipation. Feminists such as Mona Caird believed that contract-marriage could

146 lead to increased agency and equality for women (Marcus 212). If women could make the marriage choice and consent to the marriage contract – if their consent was essential to the very basis of marriage – this theoretically could result in greater equality, and the recognition and legalization of women’s ability to contract more broadly.

To return, then, to the question of the type of consent that Stephen and Maggie are discussing in The Mill on the Floss: it appears that the “tacit assent” (496) which Stephen seeks is the bodily, tacit consent of liberal theory. Stephen “longs” to believe in this tacit assent, to believe that Maggie’s bodily presence on the boat with him indicates her consent to run away with him and marry him. Yet Maggie pointedly rejects this kind of consent, associating it with the “subjection” and “passiveness” (490, 496) brought upon her by her strong feelings and attraction to Stephen. Instead, she insists upon a model of voluntary, willed consent grounded in her “whole heart and soul” and her “whole mind” (500); as she says to him, “it has never been my will to marry you” (500). Maggie believes she must put aside “the joy of love” in order to act in accordance with her beliefs, her conscience, and her will (500).

Maggie here adheres to a definition of consent as aware, rational, and based in the will. Her experience of desire and love, however, temporarily subsumes her powers of will and rationality and lulls her into a momentary tacit assent to Stephen’s proposal. Eliot and Maggie seem to judge this “tacit assent” as an inferior and decidedly limited form of consent, as Maggie soon awakens from her stupor and attempts to reverse her actions and deny her choice in the matter. Eliot’s representation of Maggie’s desire, and its relationship to consent, dramatizes a crisis in liberal theory: it brings to light the essential contradiction of a system of consent that valorizes rational consent (and excludes from liberal selfhood individuals who are deemed incapable of such consent), while simultaneously accepting tacit consent as the basis of the social contract. By depicting this crisis through the love plot, Eliot connects this larger liberal paradox to a particular, gendered context: in the nineteenth-century novel, can rational, aware, willed consent occur when one is a woman falling in love or experiencing desire? When Maggie is under the influence of “delicious visions” which “flow over her like a soft stream and [make] her entirely passive” (493), is she capable of any type of consent other than the tacit and the bodily? The answer, in this case and others, appears to be a decided “no.” In this scene, Eliot makes a point echoed by contract theorists from the nineteenth century to the present: “true” consent is willed

147 and rational, yet bodily, tacit consent often stands in for rational consent and therefore constitutes a grey area that is viable in practice, but theoretically and ethically problematic.

In the case of the social contract, the difficulties associated with tacit consent are sometimes resolved by relocating the basis of contract from consent to a consideration and evaluation of the legitimacy of a particular government. According to Pitkin, contract theorists such as John Locke and Joseph Tussman ultimately assert that

your obligation depends not on any actual act of consenting, past or present, by yourself or your fellow-citizens, but on the character of the government. If it is a good, just government doing what a government should, then you must obey it; if it is a tyrannical, unjust government trying to do what no government may, then you have no such obligation. Or to put it in another way, your obligation depends not on whether you have consented but on whether the government is such that you ought to consent to it[.] (II 39)

To submit to a government without explicitly consenting is not ethically wrong if the government is deserving of consent; whether or not consent was actually given becomes irrelevant to contract. Therefore, we submit to the social contract not necessarily because we have given some kind of tacit consent, but simply because the government is worthy of our consent, or the theoretical consent of our long-past ancestors. If we extend this idea to consider it in the terms of the marriage contract and love plot, this suggests that the legitimacy of a marriage contract may be determined not by consent, but by a consideration of whether or not the marriage is a “good” marriage, and the husband is a “good” husband – if the marriage is one to which one “ought” to consent, then the contract is legitimate. This functions, at least logically, to circumvent the paradox of women’s consent to the marriage contract.

This mode of thinking does, however, raise questions about how the “goodness” or legitimacy of a marriage ought to be measured, and who ought to measure it. While many progressive nineteenth-century thinkers suggested that love, freely given by consenting adults, was sufficient to constitute the basis of a legitimate marriage (Jones “Feminism” 404), novels such as The Mill on the Floss present a more complicated picture. Maggie’s tacit, bodily consent to Stephen, as figured by her presence on the boat, is not necessarily invalid because it is non-verbal, passive, and motivated by feeling, but because a marriage to Stephen, according to Maggie’s “whole

148 heart” and “whole mind,” would not be worthy of her consent. Maggie does love Stephen, and as the narrator wryly remarks, her community would have forgiven her indiscretion had she returned as a wealthy married woman. However, to marry Stephen would constitute a turn away from her personal ideals and morals, as well as her feelings for and obligations to Philip and Lucy. This suggests that, in order to consent, Maggie does not necessarily need to leave behind the pleasant, delicious passivity of love and desire: what she needs is for those feelings to lead her to a legitimate union that she can reconcile with her “soul” and “mind.” This would enable her to, like Dorothea Brooke in Middlemarch, enter a marriage that (while less than ideal in the eyes of some readers) begins with a lightning bolt kiss and leads to a happy ending that reconciles desire and morality.

While this model of marriage based on the legitimacy of the union, rather than on explicit consent, does in some ways help us to conceptually avoid the problem of tacit consent, it does not negate the legal paradox of nineteenth-century marriage: marriage was figured as a contract, and yet women were legally incapable of consent. The nineteenth-century novel locates this inability to consent not in the tenets of law or liberal theory, but in the feminine experience of love and desire, which it typically represents as fundamentally at odds with rational, liberal consent. Indeed, in his theorization of consent, Locke brings up the problem of passion. Locke “soldered consent to the faculty of reasoning” (Brown CG 109); in The Conduct of the Understanding, he explores the ways in which passion – Locke cites romantic love as a primary example – could prevent the “full mastery over our own thoughts…[which is] crucial to the exercise of consent” (Locke Conduct 97). Locke imagines passion as a rogue force that enters the mind and rules it as though it were “the sheriff of the place” (97); “men thus possessed…lay under the power of an enchantment” (98) as they lose the ability to control their own thoughts. Although Locke describes “men” under the force of this enchantment, “the susceptible individual is usually female” (Brown CG 112); women were thought to be overly emotional and to have an “excessive capacity for feeling” (Jones Consensual 51). This ideology allegorizes a difference within a subject as a difference between sexes, with women relegated to the realm of passionate, irrational enchantment. In order to properly exercise consent, all people, but women in particular, needed to tame their passions, and regain the ability to control their own minds.

The cultural ideals of romantic, passionate love and rational, contract-marriage rely on contradictory impulses, which novelists of the period, including Thomas Hardy and Edith

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Wharton, take up and explore. The love plot in many ways serves as an ideal tool to explore nineteenth-century anxieties about consent, as the moment of falling in love represents a moment of consent that is almost necessarily limited or derailed by passion. In the pages that follow, I analyse the ways in which Hardy and Wharton interrogate the links between sleepy, semi- conscious feminine passion, and systems of law and order that rest on ideals of volition and “free” choice.

2 Tess of the D’Urbervilles

In the past two decades, there has been a growing critical discussion of Thomas Hardy’s interest in the law, and the legal issues at work in his fiction.93 Hardy was a practicing magistrate, and in this role he presided over many criminal cases covering a range of legal issues (Davis Thomas 17). Hardy owned and heavily annotated many legal books, including Blackstone’s Commentaries, and was interested in ensuring the legal veracity of his fictional works – he famously consulted the Home Secretary regarding the ending of Tess of the d’Urbervilles (Ferguson 3,7). Legal readings of this text often test out the contemporary legality of plot events: would the scene at the Chase have been classified as rape or seduction? Would Tess have been held criminally responsible for Alec’s murder? Would ’Liza-Lu and Angel have actually been able to marry?94 In the pages that follow, I rely on this often fascinating law-and-literature work in order to advance a somewhat different type of argument about the role of consent in Tess. In representing events such as Tess’s rape/seduction, Angel and Tess’s marriage, and Alec’s murder, Hardy provides readers with opportunities not only to explore the historical-legal contexts of these fictional events, but to consider the limitations of the legal system and the parameters it assigns to human behaviour and motivation. In trying to interpret and prove issues of consent and intent, the law establishes and enforces a binary between body and mind, between descent and consent, between instinct and will. Yet this binary does not hold: descent bleeds into consent, instinct is often undistinguishable from the will. With its emphasis on moments of sleepiness and “still life,” Tess of the d’Urbervilles demonstrates the dangerous and tragic

93 See, for example, Trish Ferguson’s Thomas Hardy’s Legal Fictions (2013), Nicola Lacey’s Women, Crime, and Character: From Moll Flanders to Tess of the d’Urbervilles (2008), William A. Davis’s Thomas Hardy and the Law (2003), Melanie Williams’s “Is Alec a Rapist?” (1999), and Penelope Pether’s “Sex, Lies and Defamation: The Bush Lawyer of Wessex” (1994). 94 While the first two questions are contentious, the answer to the last is fairly clear: a marriage between Angel and ’Liza-Lu would have been “illegal” and “tainted with the stigma of incest” (Boumelha 126).

150 consequences of the sexualization of feminine semi-conscious drowsiness; the novel represents women’s desire as an irresistible pull into a panting, drifting passivity, and – with its pressure and emphasis on lineage and inheritance – stymies the legal impulse to place blame and assign responsibility. To attempt to pin down the role of Tess’s choice and consent at the Chase, in her marriage to Angel, and at the time of Alec’s murder is to force legal classifications onto opaque and often un-represented scenarios that pointedly evade such categorization.

In the texts analysed thus far in this dissertation, I have identified a pattern in the representation of women falling in love: the female lover is described as sleepy or drifting; she is frequently depicted as a dreamer; and she is often lulled/aroused by the influence of music or water. Tess of the d’Urbervilles is no different. When Tess is eating strawberries with Alec, she “obey[s] like one in a dream” (73); when she is with Alec at the Chase, she has just left a music and “vegeto- human pollen”-filled dance (93) and she is not only sleepy but, at the crucial moment, “sleeping soundly” (102). Yet this hazy sleepiness is not evidence of Tess falling in love with Alec. As the narrator explains, Tess “had never wholly cared for [Alec]…She had dreaded him, winced before him, succumbed to adroit advantages he took of her helplessness…[and] had been stirred to confused surrender awhile” (111).95 Many critics read this passage and the scene in which Alec feeds Tess strawberries as evidence of Tess’s sexual attraction to Alec (Brady 130; Claridge 327; Daleski “Tess” 334; Daleski Thomas 163; Davis “The Rape” 228; Gregor 182; Sutherland 209): although she may not love him, her “succumb[ing]” to “confused surrender” is often interpreted as desire and sexual responsiveness. This type of reading makes sense, particularly in the context of the fiction under study thus far in this dissertation: does Nancy Lord not “succumb” to a “confused surrender” with Lionel Tarrant, or Maggie Tulliver with Stephen Guest? While these moments may not end well for the heroines in question, they are moments characterized by desire; it is desire that blurs the vision of these heroines, that hypnotizes them into a trance-like passive state. But Tess’s “confused surrender” to Alec is not an indication of her slip into the delicious passive dreaminess of Victorian representations of female desire. Instead, I interpret these sleepy moments as markers of her unwilled vulnerability to Alec’s advances; Hardy’s representation of Tess’s semi-conscious state when she is with Alec can be read as a critique of a

95 This explanation of Alec and Tess’s affair is one of the many passages that is different across editions of the novel and does not appear in the Graphic serial version.

151 romantic system in which passivity and refusal can be interpreted as sexual desire, and the tacit consent of the sleepy female body often constitutes sufficient evidence of female compliance.

In the novel, Alec is continually associated with the sexual. His “swarthy complexion,” and “full,” “red,” “smooth” lips seem to ooze with the “singular force” of masculine, if somewhat debased and primal, sexuality (Hardy 71). As H. M. Daleski and D. H. Lawrence note, Alec is a creature of the body and the senses (Daleski “Tess” 327; Lawrence 96). Even during his temporary conversion, the “seductive” and “sensuous” lines of his face seem “to complain” as they are “diverted from their hereditary connotation” (Hardy 311-12). Tess’s time with Alec can, therefore, be read as her initiation into, and confrontation with, a form of potentially violent masculine sexuality. For Alec, sexuality is inextricably linked to domination; his kiss is the “kiss of mastery” (85) and he seeks to master Tess just as he masters his horse. For him, pleasure is about power. Daleski, in his argument that the event at the Chase is not a rape, and that Alec is not a rapist, writes that this will to mastery reflects a desire “fired by opposition, not submission” (“Tess” 335). Daleski uses this reading of Alec’s dominant sexuality in order to vindicate him against charges of rape: while Victorian law would read sex with a sleeping partner as rape, Daleski wishes to argue that Alec’s sexual will to dominate is not aroused by the sleepy, submissive Tess, but by the fiery, refusing Tess, who tricks and pushes Alec and who wipes his kisses from her cheeks. In this way, Daleski seeks to remove the elements of mastery, domination, and violence from Alec’s violation of Tess at the Chase.

Yet, there is evidence that Tess is the victim of Alec’s domination and violence at the Chase, despite the narrator’s comment that Tess’s ancestors were “doubtless” “more ruthless” (104) and despite the “tender” way in which Alec wraps her with his overcoat (103). Alec commits the violence of denying Tess’s voice and rendering her consent, and her conscious active will, impossible and irrelevant. Alec’s courtship of Tess is characterized by her refusals. Although Alec and his cigar smoke fill the air with a “blue narcotic haze” (Hardy 73) that encompasses Tess, Hardy consistently represents Tess as saying “no” through this mist. While Alec repeatedly asks her questions such as “why do you always dislike my kissing you?” and “I haven’t offended you often by my love-making?” (100), he does not seem to care about or listen to her answers. When he tries to feed her strawberries, her first response is a quick, distressed “No-no!” (72); when he tries to kiss her on the gig she cries and implores, “but I don’t want anybody to kiss me,

152 sir!” (85). Tess’s response to Alec, though sometimes mixed and ambiguous, is marked by a striking number of verbal refusals and resistance.

When Tess’s no’s dissolve into “no further negative” (101), critics often interpret this as a sign that Tess is under the sway of desire, of an “inner sexuality” (Claridge 330) and sexual awakening that “overcomes” her power of resistance (Daleski Thomas 163). Laura Claridge and Daleski argue that Tess’s moments of resistance demonstrate that she “knows what she is about” and that she is therefore complicit in and partially responsible for what happens to her when she no longer resists (Claridge 330; Daleski “Tess” 333). Yet Tess’s “no further negative” – her tacit consent – is pointedly not informed. As Tess says to her mother, “How could I be expected to know? Why didn’t you tell me there was danger in men-folk?” (112); as she tells Alec, “I didn’t understand your meaning until it was too late” (107). Tess lacks the knowledge and awareness to give informed consent. She is also in a position in which she feels she cannot deliver a “yes or no” (101). When the “inexpressibly weary” Tess (100) is pressed yet again by Alec’s near- meaningless question of “Mayn’t I treat you as a lover?” Tess “writh[es] uneasily in her seat” and murmurs, “I don’t know – I wish – how can I say yes or no when-”; Alec “settle[s] the matter by clasping his arm round her as he desired” (101). In this moment, Tess does not give consent, nor is she given much opportunity to, as Alec quickly “settles the matter” without waiting for her response. Her tacit consent – her bodily presence with Alec – is sufficient for him; his question of if he may treat her as a lover is a mere formality in a relation that, for him, has already been decided by her proximity. In this scene and others like it, Tess is overcome less by desire than by a sense that her ability to refuse has been hampered as Alec is unable and unwilling to register her responses. This is due to a complex network of factors; he is a man and her superior, he has set himself up as the benefactor of herself and her family,96 and he, like Angel as we will see later on, seems to ascribe to a narrative of seduction that interprets feminine no’s as preludes to future yes’s. Tess’s surrender to passivity with Alec is not a sign of sexual responsiveness but rather of her own vulnerability: as her resistance remains unheard and unhearable, she slips into a “mechanical” (105), “puppet”-like (106), “dazed” (107), and

96 Marcia Baron compares Alec’s techniques with those of twenty-first-century date rape: “The techniques Alec employed are familiar features of acquaintance and especially date rape…:cultivating in Tess a sense of indebtedness to him; acting as if it is a personal affront to him that she, a ‘mere chit,’ rebuffs his advances; acting as if she wrongs him if she does not fully trust him; engendering a worry that perhaps she has been unfair and that his motives are kinder than she thought; playing on her sympathy” (139).

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“unconscious” (108) state of unaware, detached compliance, a state that corresponds to the realities of a situation in which her rational, informed consent has become irrelevant.

It is therefore telling that, during our final glimpse of Tess at the Chase, Tess is fast asleep.97 This state is an externalization of her complete passivity at this point. As William Davis notes, Tess’s “sleep and her lack of verbal response” establish “her lack of consent to Alec’s advances” (“The Rape” 223). Tony Tanner explains that Tess’s sleep, as well as the dense fog that envelopes the Chase that night, demonstrates how “consciousness and perception are alike engulfed and obliterated” (223). Tess’s sleepiness illustrates the dangerous vulnerability that comes with the dazed dreaminess of Victorian representations of female desire. These representations establish an accepted narrative of romance in which feminine dreaminess can be read as desire. Alec could interpret Tess’s silent, sleeping body as the passive, drifting figure of the fictional woman-in-love. The sleepy posture of the woman-in-love, taken to extremes in Tess’s sound sleep, makes it nearly impossible to interpret and validate her rational consent: while her body is present, her conscious mind is absent. Tess’s sleeping body can be read as a dramatization of the bizarreness of the tacit consent “given” by the desire-fuelled, sleepy female bodies of protagonists such as Maggie and Nancy. The heated readerly and critical debate about Tess’s consent or lack thereof, which has extended from the novel’s publication to the present day, illustrates Scarry’s argument that, despite the “active” sovereign powers of consent, questions of consent arise most often “at the point where by any conventional description there seems to be an extreme of passivity” (873). Consent seems to “mystify” the division between categories of active and passive (868) as it becomes “inseparable” not from understandings of the mind and intention, but from actions and welfare of “the physical body” (884). Fast asleep, Tess becomes a passive body vulnerable both the Alec’s sexual aggression and to divergent legal interpretations of culpability and consent.

As Davis and Melanie Williams explain, the vulnerability of the sleeping female body was recognized by Victorian law. Davis cites Mews’s Digest of English Case Law (1898), which explains that “to constitute rape, it is not necessary that the connection with the woman should be

97 It is not clear whether Tess is asleep throughout her rape/seduction, or if she wakes up and responds positively/negatively to Alec’s advances. The narrative drops off directly after we see Alec kneel close to Tess, recognizing that she is asleep.

154 had against her will; it is sufficient if it is without her consent” (qtd. in Davis “The Rape” 223). As Davis writes,

The law specifically addressed several situations in which it might be assumed that a woman had not given or could not give consent. Among these is the situation of a woman who is asleep: ‘If the woman is asleep when the connection takes place, she is incapable of consent, and although no violence is used, the prisoner may be convicted of rape, if he knew she was asleep.’ 98 (223-24)

Davis and Williams both go on to cite a variety of nineteenth-century legal cases in which this rule was upheld in practice. Alec, who calls to Tess and brings his cheek to hers to see her “sleeping soundly” (103), clearly knows that Tess is asleep and could, by this logic, be convicted of rape.99

While Victorian law seems to speak quite clearly on this subject, there have been numerous literary critics, from the Victorian period to the present, who interpret Tess’s sleep in a rather different way. In perhaps the most shocking reading, Daleski argues that Tess “must be seen as abandoning herself to the sleep which overtakes her, despite the fact that she knows she should stay awake. There is, after all, a point at which one allows oneself to fall asleep” (“Tess” 330). Daleski suggests that in some way Tess is consenting to falling asleep, and to what happens to her once she does. But, can one truly be figured as rationally consenting to something that the body wants and needs? Along a similar vein, John Sutherland cites an earlier scene in which Tess dozes off in the saddle and Alec puts his arm around her – in this instance, she wakes up and repulses him. Sutherland argues that this is evidence that “even when her body is dormant, Tess’s purity is vigilant and well capable of defending itself” (206). Both of these readings suggest that there is rational agency in Tess’s sleeping body: both argue that, despite Tess’s sleepiness, she consents to sex with Alec; these critics interpret the scene not as a rape, but as a seduction. While the distinction between rape and seduction may sound unfamiliar to modern

98 Here, Davis is quoting Halsbury’s The Laws of England: Being a Complete Statement of the Whole Law of England (1907). 99 There is interesting evidence that Hardy was aware of the legality involved in a case like Tess’s. Davis notes that Hardy copied down the 1826 trial of one “Sarah G” in his notebook; this case bears numerous resemblances to Tess’s and “suggest[s] strongly that Hardy viewed Tess’s situation as one of rape rather than seduction” (Thomas 29). Yet, this is complicated by Hardy’s own remarks on the novel; in an 1891 letter to Thomas Macquoid, he calls the scene “seduction pure & simple” (83).

155 readers, seduction was a crime during the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Though rarely prosecuted, in some jurisdictions seduction was punishable by up to twenty years in prison (Humble 150). Seduction is “the act of a male person in having intercourse with a woman of chaste character under promise of marriage, or by the use of enticement or persuasion” (144-45). In other words, seduction is sex by uninformed, reluctant, or coerced consent. As H. W. Humble notes, this definition is so broad as “to cover practically every case of intercourse with consent” (146). Seduction suggests that consent is not quite black-and-white or yes-and-no; the crime implicitly relies on a spectrum of consent and of non-consensual sexual activity. One effect of the category of seduction is a narrowing of the territory of rape: seduction is less-than-consensual but non-violent sex, while rape becomes the province of sex-without-consent that is also violent.

The answer to the question of whether Tess is raped or seduced, whether she gives reluctant, uninformed, or coerced consent, or whether no consent is given and additional violence is involved, cannot definitively be answered because the crucial moment of intercourse is omitted. We ultimately do not get to see what happens at the Chase, nor do we get to hear the story in Tess’s own voice; the omission is repeated when we are not made privy to Tess’s confession to Angel later in the novel (Hardy 241). All we have access to are various “clues” that Hardy added and removed over the course of the many editions of the novel. In the Graphic serialized version, often recognized as a “bowdlerized, sanitized text, something that a cynical Hardy had to produce in order to get the novel into the serial market” (Davis Thomas 69), Alec arranges a sham marriage to Tess. This would clearly place whatever sexual interaction they had at the Chase under the category of a seduction. In the 1891 edition, Alec gives Tess a druggist’s cordial to drink before they enter the Chase – in most courts of law, this would weigh heavily in favour of a rape conviction.100 The mention of a cordial was later removed in the 1892 edition. Those who interpret the event as a seduction often cite the fact that Tess stays with Alec for several weeks after the rape/seduction; others, who argue that the event is a rape, look to the comment from a field-worker about Tess’s child, Sorrow: “A little more than persuading had to do wi’ the coming ‘it, I reckon. There were they that heard a sobbing one night last year in The Chase; it mid ha’ gone hard wi’ a certain party if folks had come along” (Hardy 119). The abundance of revisions, omissions, and contradictory evidence suggests that perhaps Hardy wanted to keep this

100 Davis cites Halsbury’s The Laws of England, which notes that “if a person by giving a woman liquor makes her intoxicated to such a degree as to be insensible, and he has connexion with her, he may be convicted of rape, whether he gave her the liquor to cause insensibility or only to excite her” (“The Rape” 226).

156 moment deliberately ambiguous and opaque. This has lead some critics, such as Ian Gregor, to conclude that the scene at the Chase “is both a seduction and a rape” (182); while others, such as Kristin Brady, argue that it is “impossible to ascertain precisely what happened during that September night on The Chase” (131).

Why might Hardy want to represent this central moment with so much ambiguity? One explanation is that a blurred or confused line between seduction and rape enables readers to think about the value of such a distinction in the first place. As Marcia Baron and Ellen Rooney contend, “one effect of the ambiguity is to push us to reflect on what differentiates seduction from rape and to notice the coerciveness of many a seduction” (Baron 126). Both seduction and rape involve a coercive male and a “passive female figure, a female subject barred from desire, left only with the task of consenting to (or refusing) another’s desire” (Rooney 463). Both narratives relegate the female subject to the relatively passive – and desire-less – role of consenting or refusing and position the male as the sexual aggressor. As Rooney convincingly argues, this makes visible a “continuity” between rape and seduction, rather than a “radical break” (268) and demonstrates the silencing of women in the courtship narrative more generally. Rooney contends that Tess is not shown telling the story of what happened at the Chase from her own perspective because Hardy systematically denies Tess’s voice in order to maintain her status as a “Pure Woman” – to make Tess a speaking subject would be to render her a potential subject of desire (466). The ambiguity of the rape/seduction scene at the Chase demonstrates the fundamental similarities between rape and seduction, and points to the gendered, active-passive narrative of romance and sexual intercourse.

The representation (or lack thereof) of the scene at the Chase also reflects the limits of the legal system. Legal terms such as rape and seduction are difficult to apply to a slippery situation like Tess’s, in which Alec – as some critics argue – does not appear to be a “rapist”-type (Daleski “Tess” 331; Daleski Thomas 160-1; Baron 135), Tess’s complicity or desire for Alec appears (again, to some) to be arguable, and there are no immediate witnesses to the situation beyond the two parties involved. Hardy does not grant us the clarity of an omniscient narrator’s realistic representation of the scene: instead, we nearly fade to black, as the narrator keeps the details of the sequence beyond our field of vision. The readers, like the legal system, cannot see the event that took place; we can only hear gossip and rumours, appreciate the consequences of the crucial

157 moment, and – interestingly – hear from the man’s perspective. While we are not given Tess’s story of what took place at the Chase, we are privy to a limited admission of guilt from Alec:

Scamp that I was to foul that innocent life! The whole blame was mine - the whole unconventional business of our time at Tantridge…what a blind young thing you were as to possibilities! I say in all earnestness that it is a shame for parents to bring up their girls in such dangerous ignorance of the gins and nets that the wicked may set for them. (Hardy 320)

In this passage, Alec acknowledges that Tess was “ignorant,” “blind,” and uninformed, and that the guilt is his for “foul[ing]” an “innocent life.” He seeks to take responsibility for his actions, and right his wrongs by marrying Tess.101

While this confession may not have taken place in a court of law, the logic of Alec’s proposal, and the primacy of his voice in the rape/seduction narrative, reflects Victorian legal practice. While a seduction conviction could theoretically result in jail time, this rarely happened as, “in several jurisdictions, the defendant may prevent his being punished by marrying the woman in the case even after a verdict of guilty has been returned against him” (Humble 144). By admitting to seduction and proposing to Tess, Alec is in many ways following the dictates of the Victorian justice system. But, while this might constitute justice in a court of law, it is not justice for Tess. Tess does not want to marry Alec as she feels no “warmth” for him (334) and also because he has not changed: when she turns him down, he responds with the threat of further mastery and possession, stating “Remember, my lady, I was your master once! I will be your master again. If you are any man's wife you are mine!” (336). This reminds Tess of her vulnerability to Alec: after he leaves her, she slips into the state of “one in a dream” (336) and writes a passionate entreaty to Angel to return. Alec’s – and the legal system’s – notion of justice in a rape/seduction trial does not serve Tess’s interests, but rather further inscribes her position as one mastered and owned.

This legal narrative of woman-as-property continues in the predominantly male voice of the description of damages and consequences. After her rape/seduction, Tess is in many ways able to recover. The narrator comments that if she were “alone in a desert island” she would not be so

101 This impulse is motivated not only by a sense of justice, but also by his intense attraction to Tess.

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“wretched at what had happened to her” (120). Tess’s “invincible instinct towards self-delight” (128) “transmut[es]” (131) her experience and she is able to move on and to continue to find joy and thrive in the world. The damages wrought by the incident are not expressed in Tess’s voice, but in Angel’s. It is Angel – who thinks he “understand[s] the law” (252) and who possesses an inner “hard logical deposit” (254) – who asserts that Alec is Tess’s “husband in nature” (256) and that Tess is no longer the woman he married (243). According to Angel, the relevant damages accrued in the case are not damages to Tess-as-individual, but to Angel through Tess, or Tess-as-property/wife. This mirrors the proceedings of rape trials in the nineteenth century, at which female victims were rarely permitted to speak and damages were awarded to the father.102 As Williams explains, the victim of a rape or seduction “is clearly identified as the father whose property has been interfered with” (308).103 The problem is not that Tess has been violated, but that Tess, as Angel’s wife/property, has been revealed as a damaged good or commodity.104 Hardy’s opaque and ambiguous representation of the scene at the Chase reflects court-room practices and demonstrates the limits of the legal system in cases of seduction and rape.

Another interesting aspect of the hazy, sleepy representation of Tess at the Chase is that it mirrors the imagery used to describe Tess and Angel’s courtship later in the novel. Though Alec is the “wrong man” (104) for Tess and Angel is potentially the “right,” Angel and Tess’s relationship is characterized by analogous imagery of sleepiness, dream, mist, and music. At the Chaseborough dance where Tess sees Alec, she is entranced by music and surrounded by “vegeto-human pollen” (93); similarly, when Tess approaches Angel at Talbothays, she walks towards the sounds of his harp-playing as though in a trance, “conscious of neither time nor space” (149). As she moves in his direction, she is stained by the smells and colours of a “rank,” “damp,” “uncultivated” garden “which sent up mists of pollen at a touch” (148). Also, the Chase scene and Angel and Tess’s early mornings together are both pervaded by images of haze and mist: at the Chase Alec and Tess are enveloped in a dense fog, and Angel and Tess meet on mornings when the heavy mists make the meadows look like a “white sea” (157). In both scenes, Tess’s eyelashes are dotted with liquid: when Alec violates the sleeping Tess at the Chase, tears

102 Damages to husbands were rarely recognized, as rape could only occur when a woman was of “chaste” character, or a virgin (MacKinnon 648). 103 In the United States, this changed in 1880, when women could claim damages for seduction (Grossberg 48). 104 Interestingly, Davis investigates relevant case law and argues that despite this, Angel could not have “mention[ed] the name of Alec d’Urberville in court as a reason for deserting his wife” (Davis Thomas 96). Apparently, at that point, Angel’s legal obligation to Tess as his wife would trump any assertion of damages.

159 cling to her lashes (103); during her mornings with Angel, “[m]inute diamonds of moisture from the mist hung, too, upon Tess' eyelashes…like seed pearls” (157). These mirrored images are evidence of not only Hardy’s repetitive, cyclical writing style, but of a fundamental similarity between the two seemingly different suitors and courtships.

Both male characters – and, interestingly, the narrator – seem to be aroused by Tess’s sleepiness. As the narrator describes, when “her face [is] flushed with sleep, and her eyelids [hang] heavy over their pupils,” “the brim-fullness of her nature breathe[s] from her. [During this] moment…[her] woman’s soul [is] more incarnate than at any other time; …sex takes the outside place in the presentation (190-1).105 Penny Boumelha comments on this, explaining that the narrator represents Tess as “most herself – and, that is, most woman – at points when she is dumb and semi-conscious” (122). These moments of sleepiness allow an impersonal/personal truth, a highly gendered sexual energy, to emanate from Tess without the intercession of her conscious will or her vigilant purity. Several critics have noted the narrator’s sexual attraction to Tess; Boumelha argues that the narrator exhibits an erotic attraction to Tess that is “parallel” to that of her two lovers (120) and Brady also comments on the narrator’s “undeniable erotic fascination with Tess” (129). This “erotic fascination” is especially evident in moments when Tess is asleep, sleepy, waking up, or falling asleep and evinces a larger sexualization of the state of feminine semi-consciousness. Alec approaches Tess when she is asleep at the Chase; Angel first kisses Tess when he spots her milking a cow in a “trance” state of “dream-like fixity” (173); and the narrator waxes poetic about Tess’s half-sleeping figure. In the vulnerability and relaxation of sleep, Tess exists in a state between self and not-self, a state in which she appears to represent not only a vision of herself, but of all of womankind, in the eye of the beholder. This projection takes place without Tess’s awareness and without her agency; it is simply an effect of “the fleshly tabernacle with which Nature had endowed her” (315). When she is sleepy, Tess appears most desirable to her suitors as she seems to become a Platonic form of the female body, an avatar of all sexual, semi-conscious womankind. While the novel’s plot can be read as a critique of systems that sexualize the sleeping female body, through his narrator, Hardy participates in this problematic sexualisation, encouraging the reader to gaze at Tess with the eyes of a desiring male, projecting visions of perfection onto her passive form.

105 Hardy’s narrator is not the first to sexualize the image of a sleeping woman. This was a popular trope in visual art at the time. See, for example, Frederic Leighton’s Flaming June (1895).

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Angel participates in this sexualization of Tess’s body through his repeated attempts to call her the names of Greek goddesses during their early mornings together. In the “gray half-tones of daybreak,” she appears to him as “no longer the milkmaid, but a visionary essence of woman – a whole sex condensed into one typical form” (156). Angel calls Tess “Artemis, Demeter, and other fanciful names half-teasingly” and Tess does “not like” this (156). She asks him to call her Tess, and, as the sun rises, it grows “lighter, and her features would become simply feminine” and cease to represent “divinity” to Angel (156). Hardy depicts Angel, like Alec, as not really seeing Tess or allowing her to speak; he similarly reads her silent body, in the sleepy light of the early morning, as representing a feminine ideal that has little to do with Tess’s individual self and volition. Angel’s misreading of Tess, and his erasure of her individualized subjectivity, is partially responsible for her tragic fate at the end of the novel. Angel, like Alec, is complicit in a patriarchal system that denies the validity of female consent, and locates femininity in the semi- conscious, silent, and passive female body.

However, Tess still seems to be comparatively safe with Angel. Angel, unlike Alec, appears to be particularly solicitous of Tess’s will. When Angel carries Tess across high waters, he is tempted to reach in and kiss her. However, he feels “that he was somewhat unfairly taking advantage of an accidental position; and he went no further with it” (169). Later, when he is overcome by desire and does embrace her suddenly, he says “Forgive me, Tess dear!...I ought to have asked…I do not mean it as a liberty” (174). Angel seems interested in asking Tess’s permission, in securing and respecting her consent. However, despite this, Angel devalues Tess’s consent by believing that a “no” will lead to a future “yes.” When Tess rejects Angel’s marriage proposal, he feels that “his experience of women was great enough for him to be aware that the negative often meant nothing more than the preface to the affirmative” (195). Despite his apparent interest in Tess’s consent, Angel, like Alec, participates in a system that denies Tess’s voice and pays little mind to women’s active, rational consent.

Even more troubling, however, is that Tess’s willed consent becomes increasingly irrelevant to her relationship with Angel as she is overcome by a desire that makes her rational consent impossible. Feminine desire in Tess is represented as an irresistible force that erases differences among women, and stirs them into a panting, drifting, irrational state. When Izz, Marian, and Retty experience desire for Angel, they

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[writhe] feverishly under the oppressiveness of an emotion thrust on them by cruel Nature’s law – an emotion which they had neither expected nor desired…The differences which distinguished them as individuals were abstracted by this passion, and each was but portion of one organism called sex. (170)

The “passion” these girls feel is unwilled, and it renders them miserable, as they know their love is hopeless and will remain unreciprocated. As Boumelha comments, Tess too is “trapped by a sexuality which seems at times almost irrelevant to her own experience and sense of her own identity” (125). This sexuality is a result of “Nature’s law”; as women, Izz, Marian, Retty, and Tess alike, are susceptible to the power of desire. Feminine desire is represented as an impersonal, natural force stirred to a frenzy by the “oozing fatness and warm ferments of the Froom Vale, at a season when the rush of juices could almost be heard below the hiss of the fertilization” – the “ready bosoms” of Tess and the other milkmaids are “impregnated by their surroundings” (171) as nature figuratively penetrates the girls. Desire, a natural, instinctive and amoral force, hijacks the bodies of these female characters, and renders them incapable of rational, individual thought.

It is in this state of natural, feverish desire, that Tess “drifts” into her engagement and marriage to Angel (198). When Tess finally “consent[s]” to Angel’s proposal, she figures it as a “giv[ing] way”; she does not decide to marry Angel, but rather “let[s]” herself marry him. As she “jealously pant[s], with her hot face to the pillow,” “I cannot help it!” (199). Tess had initially resisted Angel’s proposal because she believed that she ought not to marry him after what happened with Alec. However, “the ‘appetite for joy’ which pervades all creation, that tremendous force which sways humanity to its purpose, as the tide sways the helpless weed, was not to be controlled by vague lucubrations over the social rubric” (210). Tess is overcome by her desire, her natural “appetite for joy,” and she allows herself to surrender to her feelings and marry Angel. During their engagement, she moves “without the sense of a will” (220). She exists in a state outside of awareness as “the mastering tide of her devotion to him” prevents “meditation” (229). The language of water and mastery in these passages harkens back to earlier scenes with Alec. Here, however, Tess is mastered not by the force of her lover’s will, but by the overwhelming experience of a desire seemingly divorced from her independent, conscious agency. Under this influence, Tess marries Angel in a “luminous mist” (229), that references the dense fog of the Chase and the thick mist of early mornings at Talbothays.

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While the narrator uses the word “consent” to describe Tess’s acceptance of Angel’s proposal, the consent that Tess gives is quite different from the consent of the “whole mind” that Maggie describes in The Mill on the Floss. Tess’s mind and will appear to be partially absent as she “drifts” into marriage with Angel. Tess’s hazy, unaware, unwilled movement into marriage with Angel comprises a “confused surrender” not dissimilar to that which she experiences with Alec. In this case, however, Tess’s rational consent is rendered impossible not by the force of masculine sexuality and greater social power, but by the equally violent, nearly hypnotizing force of her own instinctive desire, and “invincible instinct towards self-delight” (128). These forces lull her into a dream-like, semi-conscious state. While Tess is relegated to tacit consent with both Alec and Angel, there is the suggestion that marriage to Angel is somehow more “right” and legitimate than a union with Alec. After all, Tess loves Angel. In some ways, this union seems to pass the test of a marriage based on legitimacy: Tess’s explicit consent may not be necessary because her feelings for Angel, and his kind treatment of her, in some ways legitimize their relationship. However, the “naturalness” and “unreflecting inevitableness” (174) of Tess’s desire do not protect her from danger, nor do these features mark this sentiment as “good.” Tess’s relationship with Angel may blossom in the ripe, beautiful valley of Talbothays, but the “damp and rank” juices of “tall blooming weeds” that stain Tess as she walks towards Angel’s harp-playing exude “offensive smells” (148): nature’s beauty is not a marker of morality or goodness in Tess. As Beer argues, nature’s plots, as Hardy understands and represents them, are “designed without the needs of individual life in mind” (223). Tess’s “natural” desire for Angel indirectly results in her abandonment and death by hanging. The forces of nature and instinct that compel Tess’s “consent” to Angel are amoral and impersonal – they are part of a broader cycle that exists apart from Tess’s individual agency and decision-making power.

In the novel, Tess’s consent is central to the rape/seduction question and to her engagement and marriage to Angel; however, her consent is ambivalently and obscurely represented. When she is not under the sway of desire, Tess’s consent (or lack thereof) is over-ruled by the power and mastery of a masculine sexuality; when she does experience desire, her consent is similarly mastered, but by natural forces seemingly beyond her control. This suggests not only the irrelevance of the category of rational consent to Tess’s sexual experiences, but also the slipperiness between categories of consent and descent. As mentioned earlier in this chapter, many theorists associate contract with a shift from descent to consent: in theory, a contract-

163 system would enable relations to be determined by rational, willed consent, rather than by blood or inheritance. However, in Tess, the line between the independent will and the force of heredity is often blurred. Tess’s “consent” to Angel, for instance, is governed by her individual preference for him, but also by an instinctive feminine desire that she, like the other milkmaids, inherits from the land and from the historical rhythms of “Nature’s law.” Her experience at the Chase with Alec is spurred not only by Alec’s desire, but by a feminine sexual energy emanating from Tess that she “inherited…from her mother” (73).

The complex dynamic between Tess’s heredity and her decision-making is rendered most visible in the representation of her murder of Alec. At Sandbourne with Alec, Tess is portrayed as having entered a dream-like state similar to that she experiences after the rape/seduction at the Chase. Tess “seemed to feel like a fugitive in a dream, who tries to move away but cannot” (379); Angel notices that “Tess had spiritually ceased to recognize…[her body] as hers – allowing it to drift, like a corpse upon the current, in a direction dissociated from its living will” (379-80). The image of a body “drifting” on a “current,” without the intercession of the “living will,” is analogous to Tess’s earlier sleepiness, and her experience of the “mastering tide” of desire. At Sandbourne, Tess has given way to the larger forces that propel her forward, and appears to have surrendered her will and body to Alec and circumstance, as she enters a semi- conscious state of acquiescence. As Tanner phrases it, “her spell in this place is a drugged interlude; she seems finally to have come to that state of catatonic trance which has been anticipated in the previous episodes” (235). It is arguably in this state that Tess murders Alec. The question that then arises is: does Tess choose/intend to murder Alec, and ought she be held responsible?

During the nineteenth century, intentionality was becoming increasingly important in criminal trials, as the modern idea of “mens rea…came slowly through case law” (Lacey 108). It was not enough for the body of an individual to have committed a crime: the mind also had to be found responsible, and found guilty. As Nicola Lacey explains, “an increasing importance was being attached to advertence…the idea that the essence of responsibility for crime lies in the offender’s subjective mental state” (107). This is reflected in the mid-nineteenth-century emergence of the insanity defense in criminal trials. In 1843, Daniel McNaughten killed Edmund Drummond, under the delusion that Drummond was Sir Robert Peel and the Tories were his enemies. The judge urged the jury to acquit and, “without retiring to deliberate, the jury return a verdict of not

164 guilty on the ground of insanity” (Ferguson 51). This resulted in the establishment of the “McNaughten Rules,” which sought to delineate the category of legal insanity based on a “defect of reason” (52) or “monomania or delusion” (69). The Rules attempted to define “the extent to which a subject’s will is involved in a crime” (52) and relied on the notion that “criminal actions could occur without consciously being carried out” (78). As Justice Stephen explains, “if a man killed another in his sleep, there would be no crime, because there would be no intention, and therefore no action. A series of voluntary bodily motions would have taken place, but they would not have been co-ordinated by the mind towards the result which they actually produced” (qtd. in Ferguson 78). Criminal law during the nineteenth century was engaged in defining the role of conscious, willed agency in action, as it increasingly associated criminal responsibility with awareness and intention.

A theoretical insanity defense of Tess in the case of Alec’s murder would likely rest on three factors: 1) her dream-like state of mind at Sandbourne, 2) her “monomaniacal delusion that Angel will love her again now that she had killed Alec” (Ferguson 81), and 3) her family history of insanity and brutality. While some critics, such as Sutherland, deem the act a “willful murder” (212), many argue, like Angel, that some “obscure strain in the d’Urberville blood had led to this aberration” (Hardy 385). Gregor and Lisa Rodensky assert that Tess’s murder of Alec is “instinctive” and “dissociated from her will” (Gregor 38; Rodensky 214), while J. Hillis Miller writes that the “murder is not her act, but is performed by her ancestors acting through her” (103). Indeed, Angel and the narrator often comment on the role of Tess’s heredity in determining her actions: Tess has an “incautiousness of character inherited from her race” (119) and follows an “instinct of self-preservation” (208) – there is “something of the…wild animal in the unreflecting instinct with which she rambled on” after Angel leaves her (286). The frequent mentions of the legend of the d’Urberville coach murder (230, 356) and Angel’s “conviction that all this desolation had been brought about by the accident of her being a d’Urberville” (272) point to a seemingly deterministic explanation of Alec’s murder, in which Tess’s ancestry, combined with a “moment of mad grief” cause her mind to lose “its balance” (385). Here, Tess’s “descent” and forces within her body and unconscious mind arguably overpower her capacities for intent, consent, and willed action.

While Hardy provides details that point to Tess’s lack of agency, and to a defense of hereditary insanity, he pointedly omits Tess’s trial and the novel ends with Tess hanged for murder. Similar

165 to questions about what took place at the Chase, questions about Alec’s murder are difficult to answer definitively because we are not privy to the scene itself. As Trish Ferguson explains, “third-person narrative has the privileged ability to mind-read characters and narrate them from the inside out, but Hardy rejects this practice in Tess of the d’Urbervilles in a confused and entirely external representation of the murder of Alec and its aftermath that provocatively denies us Tess’s consciousness” (44). Alec’s murder, like the scene at the Chase, is largely omitted from the narrative. We witness Mrs. Brooks’ discovery of the blood spot, and hear Tess tell Angel, “I have done it” (384), but we importantly do not have access to Tess’s mind during this sequence, and cannot therefore evaluate what truly took place or what she intended. Hardy deliberately chooses to render this scene opaque and to place it on the boundaries of representation.

This lack of representation and the hints of hereditary insanity frustrate the legal and moralizing impulse to place individual blame and assign responsibility. By representing the legal consequences of Tess’s case – her death by hanging – without providing the details of the case itself or even a clear vision of the crime, Hardy prompts readerly reflection on the limits of the legal system and the extent to which it sets out to classify the unclassifiable. Legal categories such as consent and intention (mens rea, in this case) rest on a presumed understanding of the human mind, yet the mind is a complex and unrepresentable terrain, influenced by diverse factors including individual intention, social codes, nature, and heredity. What is the line between consent and descent? Between willed acceptance and dreamy acquiescence? How can that line be determined in a court of law that ultimately only has access to external evidence of bodies and actions and select, hearable, personal testimonies? Nineteenth-century realist fiction so often offers the perfect legal fantasy: a complete understanding of the psychology and motivations of others. Hardy’s omission-laden representation of legal moments such as the rape/seduction at the Chase, Tess’s wedding to Angel, and Alec’s murder refuses to satisfy this readerly and legal desire and points to the limits of any system that attempts to definitively categorize and evaluate human thought and behaviour.

In focusing this narrative of unknowable intentions on a female figure, Hardy’s novel makes a point not only about the difficulty of ascertaining human intention, but of evaluating women’s choice and sexual consent in particular. The novel’s plot can be read as a critique of systems that eroticize the sleepy, passive female body. Despite their differences, Alec and Angel both contribute to Tess’s tragic end by projecting their own desires onto Tess’s sleeping figure. Hardy

166 represents Alec, Angel, and even the narrator as complicit in sexualizing Tess’s passive body and denying women’s ability to actively choose and consent. Tess’s semi-conscious sleepiness represents a state in which her consent is most difficult to give and also most necessary, as her dreaminess renders her vulnerable to potentially unwanted advances and dangerous actions. Her sleepiness spurs masculine desire and is also a consequence of her natural experience of desire; therefore, it is tempting to read it as a natural and necessary feature of the love plot. It seems that the woman-in-love, or the desiring woman, is ultimately relegated to tacit consent, as her sexual instincts preclude her from a more explicit, rational consent. According to this reasoning, Tess, and any heroine, will fall into dreaminess in moments characterized by desire – this dreaminess in many ways functions as a stand-in for consent. However, what happens when desire is one- sided, and sleepiness is misread as consent? Or when a sleepy surrender to desire pulls one in directions that are directly opposed to one’s mind and conscious will? In demonstrating the dangerous and tragic consequences of a literary and cultural system that sexualizes feminine sleepiness, Tess of the D’Urbervilles functions as a critique of this narrative; however, the novel’s representation of feminine desire continues to perpetuate the image of the woman-in-love as incapable of rational consent. While the novel’s plot is critical of a system that relegates women to passive, tacit consent, Hardy seems unable to articulate a version of female desire that could make space for rational consent. This inability is due to a fundamental theoretical division between the workings of the body and mind: desire, as a feature of nature, heredity, and the body, is represented as antithetical to ideas of morality, agency, and choice. Hardy employs Tess’s female body, and the tragic love plot as a whole, to dramatize a larger issue in liberal theory: the paradox of accounting for the body in a moral and legal system that attempts to evaluate human agency according to tenets of rational intention.

3 Summer

Edith Wharton’s Summer (1917), like Hardy’s Tess of the D’Urbervilles, can be read as an interrogation and critique of legal categories of intentionality and consent. In Wharton’s novel, however, legal systems are not brought into the text through trials and hangings, but through the representation of Lawyer Royall, heroine Charity Royall’s guardian and eventual husband. In the character of Lawyer Royall, Wharton develops an ambivalent portrait of the forces of patriarchal law and exchange, and their effects on an uneducated, lower-class, “natural” young woman. Charity’s story demonstrates the blurred line, and ultimately the complicity, between descent and

167 consent, and between sleepy, feminine desire and the limited form of feminine consent required by the marriage contract. In this reading, I argue that Wharton represents women’s consent as inextricably linked to their descent: Charity’s heritage conditions her to be capable only of the tacit consent of the body, and her sexual awakening, which she naively imagines exists outside of social and legal systems, similarly shapes her into the passive, weakened, and sleep-walking body that “consents” to marry Lawyer Royall, and entraps her in the domestic space she so despises at the beginning of the novel. As a woman, Charity cannot exist as a purely rational, consenting mind: her body – in its complex, mixed inheritance, its experience of desire, its potential for maternity, and its way of being read by patriarchal and social systems – restricts her ability to explicitly and rationally consent. In this novel, contract is not an impersonal system that erases status and governs interactions between rational equals; rather it is a deeply personalized, flawed, and paternal force that profits from and works in concert with the bodily, natural rhythms of inherited, gendered traits.

Summer is the story of Charity Royall, an inarticulate, dissatisfied young woman brought down from the lawless Mountain at the age of five by Mr. Royall. Royall and his wife raise Charity in sleepy North Dormer and, when Mrs. Royall dies, Charity and Royall are left alone in their “sad house” where they together “sound the depths of isolation” (15); the novel begins with Charity leaving the red house, exclaiming twice, “How I hate everything!” (4, 6). Royall desires his young ward, and, one night, tries to force his way into her room. This is followed by the first of three marriage proposals from Mr. Royall. Meanwhile, while working at the local library, Charity meets Lucius Harney, a handsome young architect from the city. The two begin a sexual affair. When Royall discovers the affair, he tries to coerce Harney into marrying Charity. Harney, however, is engaged to another girl of his own class, Annabel Balch. He leaves town, promising to return. While he is away, Charity discovers that she is pregnant. She attempts to run away to the Mountain and arrives just in time to witness her mother’s funeral. The next morning, on her way back down the Mountain, Charity encounters Royall who has again come to rescue her. A “feeling of complete passiveness” (176) overtakes her and, in a daze, she goes to town with Royall and the two marry. The novel ends with Charity and Royall driving up to the door of the red house in North Dormer, where the story began.

Lawyer Royall – he is given no first name beyond the title of his profession – is a representative of patriarchal law and order. As nearly every critic of the novel comments, his name suggests his

168 position as a “regal law-giver” (Gilbert 367), and a symbol of “patriarchal social organization” (Hall 15), “sovereignty” (Weingarten 353), and “order and authority” (Hutchinson 230). As a representative of both the law and of a history of patriarchal, imperialist “royalty,” Royall suggests a world order that integrates the law of contract with the oppressive forces of traditional patriarchal/paternal power. While the idea of contract implies an equalizing trend in social organization, according to which relations are governed not by position but by free exchange of goods and services, the concept of royalty implies that class, birth, and racial advantages remain firmly entrenched within the social system. This intermixing of traditions is representative of some of the problems with the discourse of marriage-as-contract. As mentioned, contract, and liberalism more broadly, imagines a shift away from “status”: “liberalism imputes an equality of agency among all individuals who engage in contracts and thus defines the subject in terms of his or her fundamental human capacity to make choices” (Dillon 11). Contract, with its basis in human choice, is purportedly an equalizing force that erases or supersedes status. This ideal in part explains the nineteenth-century feminist interest in marriage-as-contract. Yet, the marriage contract, and the marriage choice that precedes it, creates a status for the female party that pointedly removes her capacity to make further choices and engage in future contracts. As Naomi Morgenstern writes, “the marriage contract is, for women, the contract to end all contracts: It is the first and last contract a woman will make” (“Marriage” 110). The marriage contract does not erase status for women, but further entrenches a status based on submission and sexual difference. The name Lawyer Royall, like the marriage contract, demonstrates the continued existence of patriarchal dominion and status alongside ideals of contract and the law.

Yet, if Royall is a representative of patriarchal law, he is an embodiment of that system “in crisis” (Weingarten 353; Bauer 37; Ammons “Introduction” xxiv). Although Lawyer Royall is the “biggest man in North Dormer” (Wharton 13), he rarely practices his profession, struggles to earn a living, indulges in alcohol and prostitutes, and makes quasi-incestuous sexual advances upon his young ward, culminating in a marriage ceremony that legally legitimates these troubling desires.106 Lawyer Royall is a symbol of patriarchal power and yet he often appears impotent in

106 Interestingly, Royall’s marriage to Charity might have been considered illegal. By the end of the nineteenth century, American family law “prohibited marriages between adopted children and their new parents” (Grossberg 145). While Royall gives Charity his last name, and raises her for years, he never legally adopts her – this may provide the legal loophole that allows Lawyer Royall to wed his ward. Still, this marriage would likely have been frowned upon, and a case could be made that while no legal adoption took place, Royall is effectively Charity’s adoptive parent.

169 the text; Charity mocks him for desiring her and responds to his sexual advances not with fear but with a “deep disgust” (18) as she is easily able to keep him out of her bedroom. Royall’s lack of power throughout much of the novel is attributed to his mysterious choice to leave the larger town of Nettleton – it is suggested that this was due to his late wife (17) – and thus largely exempt himself from systems of capital and cultural exchange. As a lawyer, his power relies on his understanding and manipulation of contract: his skill is brokering and negotiating relations of exchange. Living in sleepy North Dormer, which exists apart from technological and material advances, Royall is unable to participate and fully engage in the economic and legal marketplaces.

This legal, contract-based, exchange model also has limited power to negotiate a relationship with Charity. From the time that Royall first brings Charity down from the Mountain, he sets her up as a being outside of contract.107 In naming her “Charity,” Royall and his wife establish their young ward as one existing outside of relations of exchange; “charity” implies a gift without the expectation of something in return. As Walter Benn Michaels explains, the “difference between a gift and a payment…was one of the central issues” of nineteenth-century Anglo-American contract law, for this distinction “determined what came under the purview of law” (505). Michaels cites Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr.’s The Common Law (1881) to explain that, “if there was no promise of reward, no ‘understanding that the service was to be paid for,’ then, ‘the service was a gift’ and there was no contract and no legal obligation to be enforced” (505). In other words, the law of contract governs relations of mutual exchange: one party gives something in return for something else from the other party, whether that thing be a good, a service, or a promise of some kind. A gift or “charity,” however, represents a one-sided exchange that appears to remain outside of the jurisdiction of contract and the law. Gifts “do not require consent” and rupture “economy, reciprocity, and temporality” (Morgenstern “Afterlife” 113). Yet, it is questionable whether Royall actually intends his “charity” to go un- repaid; “did he bring her down from the Mountain as a gift or in return for some

107 Royall’s adoption of Charity would have likely been considered legal. It is suggested that both of Charity’s birth parents consent to her adoption (her father asks for her to be taken, and her mother seems not to care) but even if they did not, their consent would not have been necessary given their habits and lifestyle. By the end of the nineteenth century, most states “waived parental consent ‘from a father or mother deprived of their civil rights or adjudged guilty of adultery, or of cruelty, and for either cause divorced, or adjudged to be a habitual drunkard, or who has been judicially deprived of the custody of the child on account of cruelty or neglect.’” Also, “leaving children in the care of adoptive parents for an extended time also led to a forfeiture of natural parent rights” (Gorssberg 275).

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‘consideration’?” (Michaels 505). As Miss Hatchard reminds Charity, “whatever be[falls] her in North Dormer, she ought…to remember that she had been brought down from [the Mountain], and hold her tongue and be thankful” (6). In naming her “Charity,” Royall chooses to continually remind Charity and the people of North Dormer of her deep obligation to him.

Indeed, much of Royall and Charity’s relationship is predicated on ideas of contract and exchange. Despite the ostensible disinterestedness of his “charity” in bringing Charity down from the Mountain, Lawyer Royall does feel that Charity owes him something and that he possesses a certain right to her. Royall attempts to inculcate Charity into a system of exchange relations, in order to make her aware that his initial act of kindness ought to yield a certain return. When Miss Hatchard arranges for Charity to attend boarding school, Royall intervenes, calling the school to ensure that there is no place for her there. He is simply too “lonesome” (15) to lose her. Days later, Miss Hatchard tries to make arrangements for Charity to go to school in Nettleton, without the involvement of her guardian, and Charity refuses to go – she pities Royall’s loneliness and does not want to abandon him. There are two possible readings of this decision: either Charity is attempting to repay Royall’s initial gift of rescue, or she is offering him a gift, motivated by her “pity” (15), with no expectation of anything in return. Either way, it is important to note that Royall responds with his own gift to Charity: he buys her the Crimson Rambler (16). Royall buys this plant for Charity to thank her but also to insert their dealings into a recognizable exchange model. By giving her something in return for her decision to stay with him, he demonstrates to Charity that exchange ought to be mutual, and he ensures that he is not in her debt and, by extension, her power.

Royall also believes that Charity’s residence in his home grants him a certain “right” over her. As Alicia Renfroe points out, when Royall insists that Harney marry Charity, he uses the “legal discourse…[of] contractual obligation and rights” to argue his case (193). Royall says to Charity,

See here, Charity – you’re always telling me I’ve got no rights over you…All I know is I raised you as good as I could, and meant fairly by you always – except once, for a bad half-hour. There’s no justice in weighing that half-hour against the rest, and you know it. If you hadn’t, you wouldn’t have gone on living under my roof. Seems to me the fact of your doing that gives me some sort of right; the right to try and keep you out of trouble. (133)

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Here, Royall relies on an idea of “justice” – based on weighing his intentions and actions towards Charity across their time together – and a notion of tacit consent. As Renfroe explains, “according to Royall, Charity’s actions (or lack thereof since she continues to live with him) amount to tacit consent, an unwritten contract that provides for the terms of their relationship” (197). Royall believes that, by continuing to reside with him, Charity has tacitly consented to a particular set of obligations towards him. He subscribes to Locke’s idea of tacit consent through residence, and believes that Charity’s living in his house grants him the right to ensure that she stay “out of trouble.”

The “trouble” that Charity has gotten into is that she has given herself to Harney without the expectation of anything in return. Charity imagines that her affair with Harney exists outside of systems of contract, exchange, and the law: although she initially dreams of marrying Harney (24), that fantasy quickly fades (183) as she instead relishes the way in which her passion seems to create a world of its own, separate from language, thought, and the usual social mores represented by Royall and North Dormer. Charity’s time with her lover appears to her as a “dream...isolated in ecstasy” (97) and is characterized by “indolent gestures” (40), “sleepy smiles” (132), and “drowsy lassitude” (108). Charity’s romance with Harney, perhaps more than any other discussed in this dissertation, is replete with images of sleep, dream, and surrender. During their affair, when Charity thinks of Harney and their love “she felt as she sometimes did after lying on the grass and staring up too long at the sky; her eyes were so full of light that everything about her was a blur” (113). When she is with Harney, Charity feels as though they “were the only living beings in the great hollow of earth and sky” (51); together they live in a “new world” (118) apart from the rules and exchanges that characterize North Dormer. Not only is her time with Harney in the little house dream-like, but it renders the world beyond the dream even more unreal: “everything unrelated to the hours spent in that tranquil place was as faint as the remembrance of a dream” (116). The Charity who lives on in North Dormer is described as an “unconscious” (112) character in a “trance” (114), a “ghost” (118) “suspended in the void” (112). Charity imagines that her relationship with Harney exists in a world apart from time, the law, and typical social rules. In the liminal space of the little house between North Dormer and the Mountain, Charity thinks not in the social language of marriage or the future, and but in a “private language” of sleepy looks and touches (83).

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Charity’s sexual relationship with Harney is overwhelmingly characterized not only by a dreaminess but by a profound passivity and submissiveness. Early in the novel, Charity appears as a woman of (limited) power: “in her narrow world she had always ruled” (13). Despite Royall’s dominance over her as her guardian and rescuer, she “rules” in his house – “she [knows] her power, [knows] what it [is] made of, and hate[s] it” (14). Royall’s desire for Charity gives her a sort of power over him, which she despises for she knows its source. With Harney, however, Charity feels for the “first time...what might be the sweetness of dependence” (14). In the heat of her attraction to Harney, Charity becomes submissive. When Harney forcibly kisses Charity during the fourth of July fireworks, she feels that “an unknown Harney had revealed himself, a Harney who dominated her” (97). This domination entails her passivity and the resignation of her will:

Since that evening in the deserted house [when Charity and Harney first have sex] she could imagine no reason for doing or not doing anything except the fact that Harney wished or did not wish it. All her tossing contradictory impulses were merged in a fatalistic acceptance of his will. It was not that she felt in him any ascendancy of character – there were moments already when she knew she was the stronger – but that all the rest of life had become a mere cloudy rim about the central glory of their passion. (113)

Despite her strength, Charity becomes deliciously, deliriously dependent on Harney, as she seems to submit naturally to his will in the experience of desire. She notices, as she surrenders to Harney, that when he is overcome by desire “he [is] utterly careless of what she was thinking or feeling” (106) and he “no longer listen[s]” to what she is saying (108). Charity, however, does not dwell on this thought; instead, she focuses on the pleasure and “warmed splendour” of his gaze, which enables “the wondrous unfolding of her new self, the reaching out to the light of all her contracted tendrils” (116). She feels herself growing and changing in the warm glow of their love, and surrenders to it as something inevitable; she perceives that “the power that had swept them together had been as far beyond resistance as a great gale loosening the leaves of the forest” (150). To Charity, her feelings for Harney are like a force of nature; her response to him is akin to her response to the summer sun and the warm winds, and she submits to his dominating desire with pleasure.

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Charity’s experience of love and desire with Harney is predicated on her sensual response to nature. Charity often retreats from North Dormer to “lay down on the slope, [toss] off her hat and [hide] her face in the grass” (12).108 Here she lies “immersed in an inarticulate well-being” and not “think[ing] of anything” (13) as she allows pleasurable sensations to roll in upon her:

She was blind and insensible to many things…but to all that was light and air, perfume and colour, every drop of her blood in her responded. She loved the roughness of the dry mountain grass under her palms, the smell of the thyme into which she crushed her face, the fingering of the wind in her hair and through her cotton blouse.... She often climbed up the hill and lay there for the mere pleasure of feeling the wind and of rubbing her cheeks in the grass. (12-13)

As Charity lies on the hill, “passive and sun-warmed as the slope on which she lay” (35), she enters a pleasurable, sensual state. “Every drop of her blood” responds to the stimulus of nature, and the wind, grass, and sunlight combine to form a non-human lover, compared to a “huge sun- warmed animal” (35), who rubs against her and “fingers” her “through her cotton blouse.” Critics have noted the sexual undertones of Charity’s “contact with the earth” (Hall 12; Stevenson 422)109 and indeed they are undeniable. What few critics comment upon, however, is the passivity of Charity’s sensual response to the natural world. While it is she who rubs herself in the grass, the “currents of the grass [run] through her”; she lies on the slope while the forces of nature “bubble” and “slip” around her (34). Charity immerses herself in the natural world and enters a non-rational state in which she passively allows the elements to move around and through her body.

Charity’s intense and sensual response to nature is represented as being a result of her Mountain inheritance; it is that “blood” within her that responds to the caress of nature. As with Tess, it is unclear whether Charity’s actions are the result of her conscious choices or of her descent. As a descendant of the Mountain “herd,” which is characterized by sloth, poverty, and a “passive promiscuity” (170), Charity is predispose[d]…to respond to nature and not to culture” and to

108 The removal of her hat foreshadows Royall’s later drunken slur of Charity, when he sees her with Harney and calls her a “bare-headed whore” (98). It is then, when she is bareheaded, that Harney first kisses her. Charity’s hatless head represents a sexual openness and a rejection of social mores and restrictions. 109 In an interesting and convincing reading, Carol Singley connects Charity’s sensual experience of nature to the transcendental poetry and ethos of Walt Whitman; “Charity Royall embodies the connection to nature that Whitman celebrates in his poetry” (152).

174 have a wild and “open” sexuality (Hall 12). Several critics comment on Charity’s “nature-based identity” (Scott 3) and, indeed, she is often compared to plants and birds, and her movements are frequently figured as determined by instincts, of “flight” (Wharton 183), “animal secretiveness” (65, 82), and a desire for the “pleasant animal sensations of warmth and rest” (176). Charity’s Mountain heritage also predisposes her to a profound inarticulateness. Although she is not illiterate, throughout the novel, Charity struggles to understand language and to express herself using language.110 In nature, Charity is freed from this struggle and can relax into a sense-driven communion that she seems to be biologically suited for. As a descendant of the Mountain, Charity’s passively sensual response to nature and to Harney appears predetermined by her lineage.

However, the dichotomy between civilized, cultured North Dormer and the wild, natural Mountain is not always as clear as it immediately appears. Several critics point to the biological determinism at work in the novel (Scott; Singley; Stevenson), and Wharton does make a connection between Charity’s Mountain heritage and her sexuality, but the line between biological and social influences is muddy at best.111 From the start of the novel, an opposition is set up between North Dormer and the Mountain that “cast[s] its shadow” over the town (6). North Dormer is framed by Lawyer Royall’s house on one end and “the white church…at the other”: as Deborah Hecht explains, these “two structures are law-related and they are given equal weight: North Dormer is framed or supported by the laws of man and the laws of God” (89). This is contrasted with the lawlessness of the Mountain, where “there are no schools and churches; nor do they have a post office or a sheriff; [and] taxes are never collected” (Weingarten 353). North Dormer is aligned with chastity, culture, and civilization, while the Mountain is a place of promiscuity, animal dumbness, and chaos. Yet, the residents of North Dormer rarely withdraw any books from the local library (Wharton 13), choosing instead to use the space as a trysting spot (30); although Miss Hatchard “blushe[s] to the roots of her blonde cap” (16) at the mere hint of anything sexual, young couples in North Dormer are granted a great deal of “latitude” (30), which results not only in Charity’s pregnancy, but in Julia Hawes’s and

110 Mr. Miles’ explanations “prevented her from understanding” (5) the pictures at Nettleton; Harney’s talk is “unintelligible” to her when they first meet and his words cause “the weight of her ignorance [to] settle down on her again like a pall” (10); in the Hatchard Memorial Library, North Dormer’s “temple of knowledge” (12), she feels dead and imprisoned (7). 111 For example, Charity’s inarticulateness may be a result of her wild Mountain heritage, but also of her lack of a proper education.

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Rose Coles’s. In addition, although the Mountain is a lawless place, it is not a place without personal property; at Charity’s mother’s funeral, members of the Mountain tribe squabble over who will take Mary Hyatt’s stove, with each asserting their “right” to it (164). Finally, as Jennie Kassanoff and Michaels point out, Royall’s quasi-incestuous relationship with Charity blurs the line between town and Mountain: as Michaels phrases it, “if the Mountain, as the site of ‘passive promiscuity’…is a place where one might end up sleeping with a member of one’s family, North Dormer turns possibility into fact” (519). The distinction between town and Mountain is not always definite in Summer.

Furthermore, Charity’s mixed ancestry and influences complicate the argument that Wharton adheres to a strict biological system of causality. Even though the narrator and the people of North Dormer mark Charity as an outsider as a result of her racial difference and Mountain lineage, her parentage is in fact quite mixed. Born on the Mountain and raised in North Dormer, she is represented as naturally pre-disposed to the wildness and sensuality of the Mountain, and yet socially conditioned to care what the people of North Dormer think (40, 101-2), to compare herself to other women (4, 6, 7), and to value her “honour” (69). Also, while she is the daughter of a “drunken convict and of a mother who [isn’t] half-human” (47), this not “half-human” mother is in actuality “a woman from the town of Nettleton, that followed one of those Mountain fellows up to his place and lived there with him like a heathen” (135). Charity’s mother is a woman from the highly civilized and cultured Nettleton who elects to live on the Mountain, while Charity is a child born on the Mountain who feels that “every instinct and habit ma[kes] her a stranger among these poor swamp-people living like vermin in their lair” (55). As Jacquelyn Scott, Veronica Makowsky and Lynn Z. Bloom argue, Wharton ultimately rejects “biology as destiny” (Makowsky and Bloom 227). Neither Charity’s fate nor her mother’s is a direct result of her place of origin or biological inheritance. Although Charity was born on the Mountain, the mores and habits she learns growing up in North Dormer affect her “instincts,” causing her to recoil from the filth and chaos of Mountain life. While her biology may predispose her to a passive sensuality, it is this combined with her learned understanding of systems of law and exchange that disenfranchises her, excludes her from liberal selfhood, and leads to her marriage to Royall at the end of the novel.

The link between Charity’s passive sensuality and her marriage to Royall points to the ambiguous valuation of sexuality in the novel. Summer is often described as “one of Wharton’s

176 most sexually explicit works” (Weingarten 352) and as a celebration of “sensuality and passion” (Ammons “Introduction xiii). The scenes depicting Charity’s response to Harney, and the pleasure she derives from his body, are lush and bright and do celebrate women’s sexual passion. Yet, despite Charity’s belief that her desire exists in a space outside of language, the social world, and the law, Wharton represents Charity’s desire as preparing her for the feminine legal status created by marriage and coverture, and the tacit consent that the law is so ready to accept from women. The sleepiness of Charity’s passion renders her a being incapable of rational, active consent, and her fatalistic acceptance of her lover’s will suggests that female sexual passion is characterized by the same self-erasure demanded by the marriage contract. Charity’s desire erodes her individual will and self; her experience of supposedly lawless passion prepares her to be a docile subject of both the marriage ceremony and the wedded relationship.

Although Charity imagines that her love for Harney creates a space apart from the struggles of the social world, Wharton insists that such a space cannot exist. Lucius Harney is a character firmly entrenched within social structures and the world of class, exchange, and the law. Harney speaks the intimidating language of educated society, travels to far places, and eventually marries Annabel Balch, an appropriate girl of his own class.112 In addition, several critics note the triangle of desire between Harney, Royall, and Charity (Bauer 40; Gilbert 368; Kassanoff 140; Scott 7): when Charity tells Harney about Royall’s advances, he comes close to her and catches “her to him as if he were snatching her from some imminent peril” (108). Royall’s desire for Charity allows Harney to position himself as Charity’s hero or champion in relation to Royall-the-villain, and thus heightens his desire for her. Also, as Bauer explains, Royall’s “attempted seduction” suggests “that the patriarch’s acknowledgment of Charity as an object of someone else’s sexual desire sanctions [Harney’s] own” (40). Although Harney and Charity’s affair takes place in the little house between town and Mountain, it does not and cannot exist in a space apart from the social.

The social world of contract and exchange always exists on the fringes of Charity and Harney’s relationship. This is apparent during Charity and Harney’s trip to Nettleton. When Harney and

112 Harney would have been legally bound to Annabel from the moment of his proposal. While he does leave Charity promising to break off the engagement and return to her, this would have been a difficult disentanglement: “once matrimonial pledges had been exchanged, they became legally binding and actionable contracts” – “the legal system [could come] to the aid of the jilted man or woman…upon his or her complaint” (Grossberg 34).

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Charity travel to Nettleton on the fourth of July, Charity is delighted by the rows of windows advertising beautiful goods for sale; she is overwhelmed by the kaleidoscopic splendour of capitalist material culture. However, when Harney buys her the gift of the blue brooch, her immediate “leap of joy” is followed by a “sudden dread” that Harney might believe she had “plan[ned] to extract” such a present from him (87). Charity is attracted to the beauty of the items for sale in Nettleton but also recognizes the obligation and relations of status that the purchase and exchange of these items can create. She has learned from Royall and North Dormer that gifts are rarely given without an expectation of something in return. In accepting a gift, she sees the familiar danger of re-entering a contract-exchange system.

The effect of a contract-exchange model on Charity and Harney’s relationship is most visible when Royall enters the little house and demands that Harney marry Charity. The dream of Charity’s escape from the law and from exchange relations turns to a nightmare as Royall forcibly brings the discourse of marriage into the lovers’ space. The room turns “grey and indistinct and an autumnal dampness [creeps] up” (136), replacing the sunny summer light that had previously characterized their romance. Her dream becomes “leaden” (140) and the image of being “caught up in the stars” (96) – the symbol of Charity’s ecstatic joy on the fourth of July – is transformed into the tortuous terror of being “bound to those wheeling fires [the stars] and swinging with them around the great black vault” (143). With the mention of marriage, their passive, sleepy poses become a tableau of “confined endearment, as if some strange death had surprised them” (136) and they feel as though they are “being sucked down together into some bottomless abyss” (137). Their lawless passion becomes the “confined endearment” of love made to fit within the boundaries of the law, and something between the lovers dies. Charity recognizes this change as being the result of the intrusion of the social into their union: “now her first feeling was that everything would be different…Instead of remaining separate and absolute, she would be compared to other people, and unknown things would be expected of her” (138). Royall’s intrusion and mention of marriage return Charity to a social world based on contract and exchange. Their relationship enters the marriage “market” and Charity finds herself in competition with others,113 and facing relations of obligation. In this moment, Charity begins to become aware of her limited exchange value and purchasing power in the social world; as a

113 For an interesting analysis of Charity’s homosocial conflicts in the novel, see Meredith Goldsmith’s “‘Other People’s Clothes’: Homosociality, Consumer Culture, and Affective Reading in Edith Wharton’s Summer” (2010).

178 poor, uneducated girl of a lower class than Harney, she is unable to compete with other women, and unfit to be exchanged to him in marriage.

Furthermore, the intrusion of marriage and the law makes Charity aware of her limited capacity for free choice. Her earlier passive but pleasurable acceptance of Harney’s will is transformed into a frightened fatalistic acceptance of the law of the social world, which dictates that Charity has no “claim” to Harney and that Annabel Balch is the type of girl he ought to marry. With the mention of marriage, Charity feels that a “sense of fatality weigh[s] on her: she [feels] the uselessness of struggling against the circumstances” (143); “she [feels] herself too unequally pitted against unknown forces” (144) to act independently or resist. In awaiting Harney’s return, she believes that she is “passively awaiting a fate she could not avert” (139). Dianne Chambers explains that Charity experiences this sense of inevitability because she is unable to “script the narrative that will save her” (121) due to her inarticulateness and struggle with language. During her romance with Harney, Charity allows his words to give her “a verbal identity that adequately counters the shame and self-doubts raised by North Dormer and Royall” (109). Once that counter-narrative is shown to be powerless against the tenets of law and order, represented by Royall and the communities of North Dormer and Nettleton, Charity becomes subject to Royall’s narrative of marriage, contract, and exchange. Charity, like Tess, is continually “subject to and the subject of” the discourse of the men in her life, but “never a speaker”: she “is left without any voice” and is increasingly unable “to defend herself against the narratives of Royall and North Dormer” (118-19). As the narrator comments, talking to Mr. Royall “strip[s] her of her last illusion, and [brings] her back to North Dormer’s point of view” (Wharton 152), concluding her romantic fantasies of escape from time and the social with Harney.

There is, however, one point in the narrative at which Charity can truly picture a life in which her love for Harney could be translated into the language of the law: when she realizes she is pregnant with Harney’s child, “everything seem[s] to have grown suddenly clear and simple. She no longer had any difficulty in picturing herself as Harney’s wife now that she was the mother of his child” (148). The physical fact of her maternity makes it seem, at least for a brief period, that her claim upon Harney is stronger and more valid than Annabel’s. Charity appears to be instinctively drawn towards the foundations of the legal institution of marriage; many historians of marriage agree that the “ends of matrimony” are the production of legitimate heirs – marriage was created in order to protect and proclaim paternity (Grossberg 108, 198). Once Charity knows

179 that “they [are] building a child in her womb” (150), she feels that “compared to her sovereign right Annabel Balch’s claim seemed no more than a girl’s sentimental fancy” (148). Yet, this “sovereign right” is not as immutable or straightforward as it may seem: Charity’s visit to the abortionist Dr. Merkle points to the ways in which pregnancy is reversible, and her understanding of “the fate of the girl who [is] married ‘to make things right’” (153), allows her to see how a “civilized” society like Dormer would perceive her union. Charity struggles to find the words or the conviction to write to Harney to let him know that she is pregnant, as she recognizes that within the social world, her pregnancy has only further lowered her exchange value on the marriage market.

Charity’s burdened pregnant body, as well as her passive experience of sensuality and desire, determine her eventual “consent” to Royall’s final marriage proposal. When Royall rescues Charity from the Mountain for the second time, she slips into a completely passive, childlike dependence, which in many ways resembles her experience of love and passion with Harney, and her passive pleasure on the hillside. Charity moves with Royall through a “confused dream,” silent and submissive “as a tired child” (180). As Charity and Royall travel down the Mountain, “there were moments when she lost the exact sense of things, and seemed to be sitting beside her lover with the leafy arch of summer bending over them” (179). The two incongruous scenes blur into each other and, similar to her time with Harney, Charity is overcome by a profound “sense of unreality” (180) as she sinks into a “feeling of complete passivity,” only conscious “of the pleasant animal sensations of warmth and rest” (176). Charity knows that Royall can offer her “warmth, rest, silence” after her struggle and, in her vulnerable state, this is “all she want[s]” (179). Charity’s childlike submission to Royall’s greater strength resembles her experience of desire; both involve an escape from thought and the need to choose and act. Charity feels that her surrender to Harney is dream-like, while her dependence on Royall is nightmarish, yet both rest on a similar self-erasure. Female desire here appears to be complicit with female submission and self-abnegation. Similar to her experience of love with Harney, Charity believes that in going down the Mountain with Royall, she is enacting her inevitable fate; she feels that she has no choice in the matter and experiences their descent as the “confused sensation of slipping down a smooth irresistible current” (179) – an image that harkens back to the “great gale” that seemed to bring her and Harney together (150). Both movements appear to her to be natural and beyond her control, and are characterized by an instinctive pull towards warmth. When Royall proposes

180 marriage, Charity can only “sit motionless, a leaden weight upon her lips” (176). She appears to be enacting a script set out for her in which her role is simply to be silent and adhere to the inexorable social and natural laws of the universe.

Yet Charity does, briefly, speak up. When Royall proposes, Charity’s response is not so different from Tess’s response to Alec: “‘Oh, I can’t – ’ she burst[s] out desperately” (177). Similar to Tess, Charity is unable to articulate a clear yes or no answer in the face of the superior power of her male lover, who cuts her off and settles the matter. The narrator of Summer, however, grants us more access to Charity’s subjectivity than we are given to Tess’s. Readers can enter Charity’s jumbled thoughts to see that she does not know what she “can’t” do or what she really wants; “she was not sure if she was rejecting what he offered, or already struggling against the temptation of taking what she no longer had a right to” (177). She starts to try to tell him what she wants, but trails off, as her words “fail her” (177). Royall responds,

‘Do you know what you really want? I’ll tell you. You want to be took home and took care of. And I guess that’s all there is to say.’

‘No…it’s not all…’

Charity again trails off, and begins to cry. As a result of her general inarticulateness, Charity struggles to express herself using language at this crucial moment of consent, and Royall, as an educated, powerful, patriarchal figure, fills the gaps in her speech by speaking for her. Charity feels “her resistance melting, her strength slipping away from her as he spoke” (177). The firmness of his tone feels “like a supporting arm around her” (177) and she relaxes into the comparative safety of his embrace. As Karen Weingarten argues, Royall’s words, and the words of the law, which he represents, offer Charity a “legible” form of human life (366). While Royall and the law may speak for Charity, this process allows Charity to find a place within the social order, and to be granted a limited form of protection for herself and her unborn child.114

114 Charity’s marriage to Royall would have effectively protected her child from claims of bastardy: American law during this period was very reluctant “to stigmatize children as illegitimate…[it was] extremely difficult to bastardize the child of a married woman. Under the early common law, only uncontroverted proof that a husband had no sexual access to his wife prior to the child’s birth could rebut the presumption of legitimacy” (Grossberg 201).

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Charity’s childlike submissiveness only intensifies during the marriage ceremony. It is strongly implied throughout this sequence that Charity is semi-conscious and nearly asleep. After the wedding, she experiences “the sudden acuteness of vision with which sick people sometimes awake out of a heavy sleep” (Wharton 183). In portraying Charity’s wedding as taking place during “a heavy sleep” and a state of comparative blindness, Wharton’s novel problematizes the notion of marriage as a contract based on consent. The wedding ceremony scene, laden with images of sleepiness, passivity, and confinement, reminds Charity of the funeral service performed for her mother on the Mountain the previous day. During the wedding, in “her dazed mind there rose the memory of Mr. Miles [the local priest], standing the night before in the desolate house of the Mountain, and reading out of the same book words that had the same dread sound of finality” (182). Charity catches only fragments of the words (182) as she drifts in and out of awareness, in a semi-conscious and passive haze. In likening the wedding ceremony to the funeral, Wharton criticizes and questions the contemporary legal definition of marriage as a contractual relation between consenting individuals.115 Just as a religious funeral serves to transmute the subject from a physical body to a freed spirit – obviously and inherently without the subject’s explicit consent – the wedding ceremony converts Charity to a wife with a similar lack of consent. Charity is as mute in the face of contract as her dog-like dead mother. The dead body and the bride’s physical presence serve as markers of their tacit consent to the ceremonies of the funeral and the wedding that transform their status.

Charity’s inability to consent to the marriage contract is linked to her struggle with language. The space in which the marriage ceremony takes place harkens back to the tomb-library of North Dormer – notably, the wedding occurs “in a room full of books” (181). The library, which Charity compares to a “grave” and a “prison-house” (7) earlier in the novel, is filled with texts she cannot understand. Similarly, she does not fully comprehend the words of the marriage rites. She is so passive and confused during the ceremony that a “lady on the bench” has to stand up and take “her hand [to] put it in Mr. Royall’s” (182). It is only then that she understands “that she [is] married” (182). The language of culture, law, and contract is so foreign to Charity that she cannot process or participate in her own marriage ceremony, and she goes through the motions like a silent automaton or an “obedient” (181) child.

115 See Laura K. Johnson’s “Edith Wharton and the Fiction of Marital Unity” (2001) for an analysis of Wharton’s critique of the marriage contract in The House of Mirth and The Glimpses of the Moon.

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Charity slips into this passive state because of her inarticulateness and the profound “physical weakness” (181) caused by her pregnancy and difficult journey, but also due to the effects of her romance with Harney. Charity’s passive love for Harney has pre-conditioned her for the kind of submission to a lover that she had earlier denied Royall. The delicious feeling of being dominated by Harney here reappears as a nightmarish self-erasure in the face of Royall’s superior power, and offer of warmth and care. Also, as mentioned, the abrupt ending of her affair with Harney forced Charity to recognize her limited exchange value within the codes of civil society; she has little to offer in relationships of contract and exchange. When Royall proposes for the third and final time, she perceives that even her body, her ostensible offering in the marriage contract, is not truly hers to give as she is carrying Harney’s child. This is why Charity feels she may not “ha[ve] a right to” accept Royall’s proposal (177). As an individual without access to language, and with little to give in a contract of mutual exchange, Charity is excluded from active participation in and consent to the marriage contract.

There has been considerable critical debate about how to morally evaluate Royall and his marriage to Charity. As Elizabeth Ammons, Makowsky and Bloom, Hecht, and Carol J. Singley point out, Royall is not portrayed as a wholly negative or evil character (Ammons Edith Wharton 137; Makowsky and Bloom 221; Hecht 96; Singley 160). His portrait is ambivalent, and many critics note that he appears to genuinely care for Charity. Yet, despite his ostensible kindness in marrying Charity, as Rhonda Skillern points out, his act of kindness – marrying a woman carrying another man’s child – can only be read as such within a patriarchal system (133). Also, Skillern notes that “we must wonder at his haste: undoubtedly he senses that Charity’s resistance is down” (133).116 Royall may be motivated by affection and good intentions in marrying Charity, but he participates in – and is representative of – a system that denies her will and active consent. Royall’s marriage to Charity represents not only individual coercion, but systemic coercion. Royall is a symbol of an entire legal and paternalistic social code that is content to operate with only a dumb pantomime of female consent. For, despite her sleepiness and silence, Charity does indeed marry Royall; the legal system accepts her mere presence at the ceremony as sufficient consent to the marriage contract. This again resembles Locke’s notion of tacit consent through residence that Royall invokes earlier; by simply “residing” at the marriage ceremony, Charity’s tacitly consents to marriage. By representing such consent as involuntary and dream-

116 It is also possible that he worried about legal charges of incest.

183 like, Wharton delivers a strong critique of the notion of tacit consent. While Chambers and Makowsky and Bloom write that the end of the novel constitutes a “decision” or “choice” made by the heroine (Makowsky and Bloom 228; Chambers 99), and Cynthia Griffin Wolff argues that the text is a “hymn” to marriage (293), I contend that, by portraying Charity as sleepy and inarticulate during the marriage ceremony, Wharton criticizes the legitimacy of tacit consent, particularly to marriage. Charity patently does not choose to marry Royall – she is completely bewildered and barely aware of the proceedings. Without choice, there cannot be meaningful consent: a consent that is relegated to the body signifies little beyond Charity’s limited options and vulnerability as a pregnant, working-class woman inculcated into the rules of contract and exchange, but lacking in agency and value within those systems. Unable to understand contract and mentally absent from the ceremony, Charity does not truly consent to marry Royall. Instead, she is driven to marry him by forces beyond her control. The marriage ceremony reveals the darker, nightmare side of Charity’s dream of sleepy and inarticulate passivity and the fatalistic acceptance of a man’s will, as Charity is compelled to accept not only Royall’s will, but the dominating structure of an entire patriarchal legal system that locates her agency in her compliant, silent body.

Upon marriage, Charity is able to re-enter the social world of contract and exchange. Royall offers her money and sends her to the shops she once longed to enter, to outfit herself so as to “beat all the other girls” (Wharton 186). Marriage, as Charity had expected it would with Harney, brings Charity into competition with other women and, in this case, gives her the means to compete. Yet this new purchasing power does not represent freedom – Royall gives Charity money so that she can best represent his wealth and power, not her own autonomous self. She is able to contract, in a very limited way, as a symbol and extension of Royall’s property and person. While marriage to Royall has garnered Charity a place in a world of exchange, this is not a place that makes her, as an individual, an active participant in contract. As Pateman explains, the marriage contract incorporates women into the civil order not as individuals but as women, and “natural subordinates” (181). Charity’s engagement in the world of contract and exchange is always shaped by her gender. That Charity uses the money to retrieve the brooch that Harney purchased for her can be read in some ways as indicative of her independence; Skillern argues that this purchase “suggests that she has preserved a space within herself that neither Lawyer Royall nor the Law of the Father can invade” (134). However, this ignores the original

184 provenance of the brooch. The brooch is not a representation of Charity’s independence or even her preference: Harney purchased the item for her and selected it according to his taste, not hers. Charity has merely traded one pleasurable dependence for another that offers dubious consolation.

While the incestuous element of Royall and Charity’s marriage would seem to mark the ending as “not merely depressing” but “sick” (Ammons Edith Wharton 133), there is evidence that Wharton may have intended the ending to be read as hopeful (Blackall; Kassanoff; Singley; Wershoven; Wolff). Wolff and Wershoven write that there is the “the beginning of love” (Wolff 291) between Royall and Charity, and Kassanoff convincingly argues that the novel operates according to a “conservative politics of incest” (137) according to which incest is perceived as “neither erotic nor tragic” but “beneficent and familial” (149).117 When Royall does not join her in their marital bed on their wedding night, Charity feels deeply thankful and “a stir of something deeper than she had ever felt in thinking of him flitted through her tired brain” (Wharton 186). She sees something in his eyes that makes her “feel ashamed and yet secure” (190). However, this feeling of shame and security is not, as Wershoven argues, an indication of a new “adult” love (6) that will “allow her to be free of illusions and free to redefine herself” (8). Although the patriarchal law that Royall represents can be kind, beneficent and offer safety, it does so at the expense of clipping Charity’s wings: when the “old impulse of flight” sweeps through Charity after their marriage, “it was only the lift of a broken wing” (Wharton 183-4). Although Charity can be safe and legible within the law, she cannot be free or autonomous. As Singley explains, while Royall may offer Charity a form of love, it is still the paternalistic love based on “male authority over a younger, vulnerable woman” (161). The dialogue that ends the novel, in which Royall says “You’re a good girl, Charity” and Charity responds “shyly and quickly” with “I guess you’re good, too” (190) is not indicative of a growing equality between the two but of Royall’s continued scripting of Charity’s life and self. The ending represents a form of safety for women and their children within the structures of patriarchal law, but one that comes at the cost of personal freedom.

117 The incestuous ending, according to Kassanoff’s reading, represents “an uplifting account of eugenic reproduction, timely legitimization and racial restoration” (113). In this novel, “incest need not be an act of perversion…rather, it can be an aristocratic, recuperative response to racial emergency, a way of repopulating the elite home” (149).

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Edith Wharton’s Summer demonstrates the ways in which patriarchal law – and the marriage contract – limits female self-definition. Charity’s active, rational consent to the marriage contract is nearly irrelevant, as the presence of her body is sufficient to demonstrate her tacit consent to a contract that seeks to erase her individual identity. What is interesting is that desire does not constitute an escape from this system in the text. Charity’s experience of sexual passion, so seemingly natural and instinctive, prepares her for a legal system that rests on the fatalistic acceptance of a man’s will. Charity’s affair with Harney is in many ways complicit with her eventual quasi-incestuous marriage to Royall: both are part of a similar social system that measures women as units of exchange, and denies female choice and consent. The sleepiness that characterizes Charity’s experience of desire disenfranchises her and excludes her from consent even before she sleepwalks her way through the marriage ceremony.

4 Conclusion

Despite their differences, Thomas Hardy’s Tess of the D’Urbervilles and Edith Wharton’s Summer can both be read as engaging in a critique of patriarchal systems that sexualize the passive female body, and deny women’s capacity for active, rational consent. Both texts represent the limits of the legal system and both question the liberal distinction between consent and descent, arguing for a more complex, and ultimately muddier, picture of individual motivation and social consequences. While liberalism imagines its subjects as rational willful beings, uninfluenced by heredity or instinct, these novels reflect on the ways in which body and mind are closely tied, particularly when the body in question is female and the central choice – that of whether or not to consent to marriage – is affected by desire and passion. Both novels represent desire as sleepy and thus strangely complicit with patriarchal systems: in both texts, feminine desire is a spell that renders women incapable of exercising their independent wills and that limits them to tacit, bodily consent. Tess and Charity experience desire as a natural version of the self-abnegation and self-erasure required by the marriage contract and the doctrine of coverture. Both novels demonstrate the tragic and dangerous consequences of a romantic system that enables passivity to be read as consent; Tess is ultimately hanged and Charity is trapped in a near-incestuous union. This suggests that while novelists such as Hardy and Wharton were becoming increasingly conscious and critical of the ways in which patriarchal law and order oppressed and limited women, they were still unable or unwilling to imagine and represent female desire in a way that would allow more possibilities for female agency and self-

186 determination. Despite their critiques of patriarchal law and order, and their ambivalent portraits of the eroticized, passive female body, these texts continue to insist that the woman in love is incapable of the rational, active consent that defines the liberal individual.

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