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Full Screen View BENEVOLENT DESPOT: GEORGE GISSING'S AMBIVALENCE TOWARD HIS WOMEN CHARACTERS IN THREE NOVELS by Anne Hertz A Thesis Submitted to the Faculty of The Schmidt College of Arts and Humanities in Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements for the Degree of Master of Arts Florida Atlantic University Boca Raton, Florida April 1992 €)copyright by Anne Hertz 1992 ii BENEVOLENT DESPOT: GEORGE GISSING'S AMBIVALENCE TOWARD HIS WOMEN CHARACTERS IN THREE NOVELS by Anne Hertz This thesis was prepared under the direction of the candidate's thesis advisor, Dr. Jan Hokenson, for the Department of English and Comparative Literature and has been approved by the members of her supervisory committee. It was submitted to the faculty of The Schmidt College of Arts and Humanities and was accepted in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Master of Arts. SUPERVISORY COMMITTEE: English and Comparative Literature Dean, The Schmidt College of Arts and Humanities iii ABSTRACT Author: Anne Hertz Title: Benevolent Despot: George Gissing's Ambivalence Toward His Women Characters in Three Novels Institution: Florida Atlantic University Thesis Advisor: Dr. Jan Hokenson Degree: Master of Arts Year: 1992 Critical estimates of George Gissing's position on "the woman question" range from "pro-feminist" to ''misogynist." Three novels reveal an ambivalence that is best characterized as the attitude of a benevolent despot. In Thyrza he glorifies two female characters as respective embodiments of loveliness and wisdom. A third woman is a paragon of housewifeliness. In later novels Gissing vents the frustrations of his own unhappy marriage. The Odd Women presents two feminists advocating better education for women who do not marry, and also discusses radical ideas about marriage. In The Whirlpool Gissing reveals a patriarchal stance in his story of two married women led astray in a metropolitan "whirlpool" because of too much liberty granted by their husbands. The happiest home in the novel is a rural one with a home-loving wife and mother at its center. iv TABLE OF CONTENTS Introduction . 1 Chapter I A Heroine of the Slums ..... 13 Chapter II Odd and Even Women ......... 21 Chapter III Victims of the Vortex ...... 31 Conclusion . 41 Works Cited ............................ 51 v Introduction In this study I propose to discuss the ambivalent attitude toward women revealed in a few of his novels by the somewhat neglected nineteenth-century writer George Gissing. Critical estimates range from his being an advocate of greater education and freedom for women to the label "misogynist." I wish to examine not so much his articulated aims on the ''woman question" as his representation through his female characters of woman's role in life and her potential. I will attempt to show that both estimates of him, as woman's advocate and as a writer hostile to women, have each some validity. Due principally to pressures in his personal life he seems to have regressed from an early liberal, somewhat idealistic view that espoused better education for women and a lifting of oppression from their lives, recognizing women as bound by the hypocritical strictures of Victorian mores, to an attitude later in his life that delimited the optimum role of woman to motherhood, home, and hearth. In the present understanding of the word, Gissing is not to be counted as a feminist writer. What interests me is to note 1 the suggestion of feminist aims in some of his works, in his early desire that women be treated more equitably, and to mark how that view changed to a more conservative, patriarchal approach. One should bear in mind that Gissing was critical also of conditions endured by the men of his time, the bleak lives led by many, the distorted values. Gissing's often subtle comments on human nature and his ironic perception of the crass vulgarity that accompanied nineteenth-century industrialism, the superficiality of mass public education, the brutality of war, the heedless spoliation of nature, all these are timely subjects for the present-day reader and a rich source of continuing interest. George Gissing was born on November 22, 1857, the first child of Thomas Waller Gissing and his wife Margaret Bedford Gissing. Thomas, a dispensing chemist and proprietor of a small shop in Wakefield in the Yorkshire district of West Riding, was an amateur botanist of some note. In the few years allotted to him (he died when George was 13), Thomas instilled in his oldest son a love of books and study, and of nature. A bright, ambitious schoolboy with a talent for drawing, Gissing won a scholarship to owens College in Manchester. There, in his teens, living away from home for the first time and perhaps falling victim to his growing sexuality and to a misplaced idealism, Gissing committed an unfortunate misdeed that profoundly affected the course of 2 his life. While subsisting on a meager allowance, Gissing foolishly stole money from fellow students in order to buy a sewing machine for his prostitute sweetheart, so that she might earn an honest living. When his guilt was discovered, Gissing was given a jail sentence of one month; he was also deprived of his scholarship and the university career in classics that had previously been assured him. Besides causing the loss of a university degree, this disgrace left a psychological mark that permanently colored his view of himself as well as his relations with others. Although the offspring of a respectable middle-class Victorian home, Gissing was always to feel a declassed outsider from society. According to Bernard Bergonzi in his 1968 introduction to Gissing's New Grub Street, His brilliant academic career at Owens College, Manchester, was cut short when he was discovered in an act of theft. Gissing felt that his whole life had been branded by this experience. (12) John Halperin argues in his biography of Gissing that "An understanding of the motive for the theft and of the importance of this moment of his life is central to any examination of his life and art" (11-12). Halperin goes on to say, Overnight he was transformed from a respectable college student to a common felon. The effects of this mighty and sudden transformation were ... to last throughout Gissing's lifetime and to determine many of his most characteristic social attitudes. (18) 3 Like many another brilliant thinker, Gissing was notably deficient in good judgment when it came to the decisions of everyday life. Gillian Tindall has observed trenchantly, "A crippling lack of common sense was undisputably a part of George Gissing's makeup" (54). In 1879, a year or so after his return to England from a brief exile in America where he almost starved to death, Gissing committed the fatal error of marrying his young Manchester mistress. In spite of his efforts to reform her, Helen Harrison Gissing became a confirmed alcoholic and proved in every way an unsuitable mate whom he hid away from friends and family. This tragic union (Helen, or Nell, died of drink and disease some years later), followed by a second precipitous marriage, gave rise to a significant figure in his writings: the poor, struggling writer who cannot afford to marry a woman of his own class and is therefore always ashamed of his uneducated, lower-class wife. Because he was unable to divorce his second wife Edith, Gissing's third marriage in 1899 to Gabrielle Fleury could not be a legal one. A well-bred young French woman with literary tastes, Fleury provided Gissing's last years (spent mostly in France because of her ailing mother) with a measure of the loving companionship and domestic tranquillity that he had sought for so long. Gissing died in France on December 28, 1903 at the age of 46 of complications from emphysema and pneumonia. 4 A number of critics have agreed that, compared to most writers' lives, Gissing's has bearing on his work. Robert Shafer wrote in his introduction to the 1935 edition of Workers in the Dawn, "To a peculiar extent [Gissing] lived what he wrote, and made the study of his books inseparable from the study of their author" (xxviii) . Tindall has noted similarly: While it should never be assumed that Gissing "put his life" and the lives of others straight into his books in an unworked, unprocessed form, it is certainly fair to say that he is one of those novelists whose books are closely associated with his life, and act therefore as a running commentary on it. (25) In a 1989 article on Gissing, David Grylls observed, "Despite the Barthesian 'death of the author,' some authors have died less willingly than others" (459). A notable characteristic of Gissing's writing is the unrelenting honesty with which he portrayed the lives of the London slum-dwellers among whom he lived for a number of years. This grim truthfulness did not endear him to most readers of novels in the 1880s and 1890s, but Gissing refused to compromise either his style or his views in order to sell more books. As an anonymous critic in The Times Literary Supplement of 28 December 1956 stated, "He clung desperately to his intellectual integrity and artistic independence when there was little else for him to cling to" (780) . In his time only a few thoughtful persons appreciated his novels, and of course small sales meant 5 small financial reward. on completing a manuscript Gissing was always so in need of cash that he was completely at the mercy of his publishers. Ironically, in the few cases where his books achieved some popularity, such as Demos, Thyrza, and New Grub Street, he was unable to reap any profit, since he had always sold the novel outright for as much money as he could get at the time of publication.
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