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. Gissing achieved a certain literary standing by the 1890s, but his actual remuneration was a pittance compared to the earnings of friends such as George Meredith and H.G. Wells.

Several themes predominate in George Gissing's novels.

In early ones such as Workers in the Dawn (1880), Demos

(1886), and Thyrza (1887), he indicated his desire to better the living conditions of the working poor. For a short time he espoused socialism. However he was soon disillusioned by the demagoguery of opportunistic reformers and the futility of efforts to change human nature as he saw it. In discussing Gissing's writing of Demos, Mabel Collins

Donnelly observed, "Development had been from brother's brother, to brother's keeper, to brother's satirist, and his capacity for sympathy with meliorist groups had dwindled and died" (84).

A concomitant aspect of Gissing's writing was his awareness and description of the crass vulgarity accompanying the material prosperity of an increasingly industrialized society. His novel In the Year of Jubilee

6 (1894) reveals fiercely what Tindall calls "the makeshift nature of Victorian respectability" (256). In an explosive display of crankiness, Stephen Lord, the irate father of the novel's heroine, exclaims:

Wherever you look now-a-days, there's sham and rottenness; but the most worthless creature living is one of those trashy, flashy girls--the kind of girl you see everywhere, high and low--calling themselves 'ladies,' thinking themselves too good for any honest, womanly work. (44)

It is difficult to resist mentioning here that this outburst is obviously related to the misery Gissing was experiencing at that time in his marriage to Edith Underwood, who had metamorphosed swiftly from a seemingly agreeable young working-class girl into a shrewish, complaining wife.

Just prior to this second marriage, Gissing had written to his friend Bertz, "the girl is peculiarly gentle and pliable, with a certain natural refinement which seems to promise that she might be trained to my kind of life"

(Letters to Bertz 115-116). John Halperin comments on this sentence in his biography of Gissing: "Had he forgotten already where such Pygmalion-like experiments might lead, what training someone 'to my kind of life' might involve?"

(140). Halperin adds, "The domestic disorder Gissing dreaded recommenced. He found once again that he could not work; and suddenly he and Edith began to quarrel" (176).

The birth of their first son Walter put an added strain on the already stressed household.

7 In the afore-mentioned novel In the Year of Jubilee,

Gissing exhorts also against the fledgling industry of

advertising. He describes the London Underground as "a

battlefield of advertisements, fitly chosen amid

subterranean din and reek; a symbol to the gaze of that relentless warfare which ceases not, night and day, in the world above" (Tindall 260) . In 1892 Gissing had written to

Bertz:

Impossible to take up a newspaper without being impressed with this fact of extending and deepening Vulgarity. It seems to be greatly due to American influence, but there can be no doubt that the ground is prepared for it by the pretence of education afforded by our School-board system. Society is being levelled down, and with strange rapidity. Democracy ... is triumphing by the force of its appeal to lower motives. (151)

Gissing made the following similar observation in his novel

Born in Exile (1892):

One hears men and women of gentle birth using phrases which originate with shop boys; one sees them reading print which is addressed to the coarsest million. They crowd to entertainments which are deliberately adapted to the lowest order of mind. When commercial interest is supreme, how can the tastes of the majority fail to lead and control? (291)

George Gissing was dismayed also at the encroachment of cities on the countryside and by the sad loss of natural beauty in an English landscape filled more and more with cheap homes and ugly factories. As early as 1880 he had written to his brother:

The possession of land is only a sacred trust, no man can "own" land like he owns his watch, for instance, seeing that land is not a human

8 production made for the individual, but the common and indispensable basis of life. (Letters to Family 84)

Along with his anger at the poor quality of public education, we note Gissing's constant complaints regarding domestic servants. In The Whirlpool {1897) Harvey Rolfe, the principal male character, charges that "All ordinary housekeepers are at the mercy of the filth and insolence of a draggle-tailed, novelette-reading feminine democracy"

{15). Around that time Gissing had written in a letter home,

How domestic life is to go on, I don't quite see. I suppose it will be reduced to the simplest elements. We shall have to live in very bare houses and eat only the plainest food. (Letters to Family 343)

In the same vein Tindall quotes the following from a book by

Gissing on Charles Dickens:

There are those who suspect that our servant­ question foretells a radical change in ways of thinking about the life of home; that the lady of a hundred years hence will be much more competent and active in cares domestic than the average shopkeeper's wife today; that it may not be found impossible to turn from a page of Sophocles to the boiling of a potato, or even the scrubbing of a floor. (264)

It seems never to have occurred to Gissing that a man might someday turn from Sophocles to the boiling of a potato!

One of George Gissing's convictions that is especially appealing to the sensible reader is his fiercely-held anti- war sentiment. He wrote in a letter to Bertz in 1896, "I cannot see any hope for peace, so long as these men of the

9 money market are permitted to control public life--as they now practically do" (213). And again a few years later to the same correspondent:

Does it not amaze one, the perpetual assumption in newspaper writers that all the nations of the world are eager to fly at each other's throats! We know so well that not nations at all, but greedy syndicates and the like, are the cause of this barbarism. The people follow like sheep, and like sheep go to slaughter. (272)

In The Whirlpool Harvey Rolfe comments bitterly, "We may reasonably hope, old man, to see our boys blown into small bits by the explosive that hasn't got its name yet" (450).

Ironically, Gissing's older son Walter died in the fighting during World War I.

A disciple of Schopenhauer and, like so many of his contemporaries, influenced by the writings of Darwin and

Spencer, Gissing lost his belief in religious dogma at an early age, and was agnostic, perhaps even atheistic in his thinking. Yet he felt that women and the uneducated masses needed the guidance and consolation of established religion.

In his first published novel, Workers in the Dawn, Mr.

Tolladay, a very sympathetic character, proclaims,

These faiths, one and all, great and small, from the most grovelling superstition of the cannibal to the purest phase of devotion nurtured in the mind of a Christian, trust me, they are nothing but the remnants of the primeval darkness, clinging to man as he toils laboriously upwards. (1:160)

In Born in Exile, Gissing's protagonist Godwin Peak, a man of humble origins who had planned to advance himself in

10 the world by a career in the church, renounces his position when he loses religious faith. A letter written by Sidwell

Warricombe, an enlightened young woman Godwin is in love with, contains the following lines:

The decay of religious belief is undermining morality, and the progress of Radicalism in politics is working to the same end by overthrowing social distinctions. . . . Though this or that person may be supported by moral sense alone, the world cannot dispense with religion. . . . I would stand on the side of those who are fighting against mob-rule and mob­ morals. (352-353)

George Gissing's views on both religion and on "the servant problem" are related to the aspect of his writings that I wish to explore in this study, namely his attitudes

(plural used deliberately) toward women as revealed in a few of his novels. As I have noted, more than most writers

Gissing can be better understood by some reference to the details of his life. But it is principally by looking at a few of his female characters that we can discover the ambiguity of his attitudes, a mixture of empathy and hostility. His espousal of improved educational opportunities and greater freedom for women contrasts with a certain desire to keep them in a position conducive to his own comfort. Contrary to Jacob Korg, I do not think Gissing

"believed firmly that women were the intellectual and spiritual equals of men" (185). I think he tried very hard at times to believe this, but, as this work will attempt to prove, Gissing's personal experience and the force of his

11 perhaps subconscious needs and desires precluded a complete faith in such an equality.

12 Chapter I

A Heroine of the Slums

George Gissing often claimed that Thyrza, his fifth published novel {1887), was his favorite among his works. I have been tempted to speculate why this was so. In many of his other fictional works, such as The Nether World and In the Year of Jubilee, Gissing created women mightily endowed with characteristics he most disliked and disapproved of in their sex. In Thyrza he does just the opposite. Three of the book's female characters together embody the idealized qualities that he apparently sought in real women so unsuccessfully for many years.

Some literary critics have praised Thyrza for its realistic picture of life in a London slum:

One of the most vital aspects of the novel is its appreciative view of the positive aspects of working-class life--of its musical traditions, its "friendly lead," and of the resilience and friendship of the factory girl, Totty Nancarrow, one of Gissing's most original creations. (Sloan 70) •

In this vein Jacob Korg says in his introduction to Thyrza,

Instead of exploiting the poor for polemical purposes [Thyrza] examines their way of life with respectful curiosity and even affection. (x) For the first time he offers a variety of temperament and morality among the slum characters

13 that he had perceived before only in middle-class people. (xiv)

An earlier anonymous reviewer noted that Thyrza "does not deal with the lowest class of all, but more especially with the men and women of the working-class, whose wits have been sharpened by long struggle, and whose senses have been alert from childhood in that keenest of competitions--the winning of the daily bread" (Coustillas, Gissing: The Critical

Heritage 104-105).

It is also interesting to observe Gissing's cynical views of reformers who try to alleviate the wretched conditions of the poor. In Thyrza, Gissing contrasts Walter

Egremont's lame attempts at amelioration in the form of high-flown literary lectures to a tired and unappreciative working-man audience with the more efficient methods of the crassly self-serving politician Dalmaine. One of the characters remarks,

"Why, who are the real social reformers? The men who don't care a scrap for the people, but take up ideas because they can make capital out of them. It isn't idealists who do the work of the world, but the hard-headed, practical selfish men." (140)

The first of Gissing's idealized portraits of women in this work is that of Thyrza Trent, the lovely but doomed heroine, a day-dreaming young girl who lives and works in

Lambeth, a poor, working-class section of London. She has been sheltered from the sordidness around her by her older sister Lydia:

14 The type of countenance was so subtly modified, so refined as to become beauty of rare suggestiveness. She was of pale complexion and had golden hair. . . . There was none of the spontaneous pleasure in life which gave Lydia's face such wholesome brightness . . . all tended to preoccupation, to emotional reverie. (34-35) Thyrza was so beautiful, and it seemed to [Lydia) so weak; always dreaming of something beyond and above the life which was her lot; so deficient in the practical qualities which that life demanded. ( 49-50)

In her innocent gratitude for his attentions and respect for his superior knowledge, Thyrza has become betrothed to Gilbert Grail, a much older man of her class, sensitive and bookish in spite of his meager formal education:

To Gilbert the printed page was as the fountain of life; he loved literature passionately, and hungered to know the history of man's mind through all the ages. ( 67)

Grail is one of the many male characters in Gissing's novels who seem to be patterned in varying degrees upon himself--sensitive, book-loving, much put upon by poverty and other misfortunes. When Thyrza becomes deeply infatuated with Gilbert's friend and patron, Walter

Egremont, a young "gentleman" of culture and breeding, she rejects Grail and endeavors to raise herself to Egremont's class. She is defeated in this pathetic attempt by the calculated plan of Mrs. Ormonde, a wealthy, well-intentioned but domineering philanthropist, who prevails upon Egremont to wait two years before asking Thyrza to marry him.

Rejected by Egremont, Thyrza returns to her early

15 surroundings and soon dies, the victim of a weak heart exacerbated by heartbreak.

Annabel Newthorpe, a beautiful young woman of the upper-class, provides a contrast with the naive and natural charm of Thyrza. Annabel, whom Egremont has known for many years, has also been raised with care, in this case by her widowed father, a withdrawn intellectual and friend of

Egremont. Mr. Newthorpe has tried to seclude Annabel from the vulgarities of a materialistic social world. (Is

Gissing suggesting here that women are sensitive plants who must be protected, and who require careful nurturing to bring them to perfect bloom?) Usually we come upon Annabel with a book in hand. She may be studying the classics, or perhaps reading some Ruskin. Struggling with Virgil, she exclaims to Egremont, "Oh, why have we girls to get our knowledge so late and with such labour! . You learn

Greek and Latin when you are children; it ought to be the same with us" (18). Later, Mrs. Ormonde, who is a mutual friend of Walter and Annabel, informs Egremont that Annabel

"is deep in Virgil and Dante--what more could you wish her?"

(78). Much further along we find Annabel scolding herself:

A London season--and I still have Homer to read! Still have Sophocles for an unknown land! My father, I have gone far, very far astray, and you did not so much as rebuke me. (365)

At the novel's end the reader learns that though

Annabel and Walter are fond of each other and will ultimately achieve a successful marriage, Walter will never

16 experience the deep passion and transcending bliss that might have been his in a union with Thyrza, however brief because of her physical frailty.

A glance at the third figure in this multiple portrait of admirable women is essential to an understanding of

Gissing's complex and ambivalent attitude toward women even at this early period, an attitude that he held in varying degrees throughout his life. Mrs. Poole, an incidental character, is the cheerful wife of a humble workingman. She keeps a clean and tidy home and takes great pleasure in caring for her healthy, boisterous children:

Her sleeves were always rolled up to her elbow, and at whatever moment surprised she wore an apron which seemed just washed and ironed. (94) The youngsters were stripped and nightgowned, and ready to say their reluctant good-night. Their mother carried them upstairs, one on her back and one in her arms--good strong mother. (408)

Whereas Thyrza and Annabel seem embodiments of Gissing's erotic and spiritual longings, we find in Mrs. Poole the picture of a happy housewife. This figure is a direct contrast to the harsh reality of the two women whom Gissing himself married. I agree in large part with George Orwell's comment,

In his heart, Gissing seems to feel that women are natural inferiors. . . . On the whole, the best women in his books are the self-effacing, home­ keeping ones. (Coustillas, Collected Articles 54)

Gissing's strong opinions concerning woman's principal role as wife and mother did not prevent him from creating female characters of individuality and interest. Totty

17 Nancarrow, mentioned earlier, is a workgirl friend of

Thyrza's, high-spirited and fiercely independent, a "lad in petticoats" (38). When an admirer invites her to the local music-hall, she acquiesces on one condition. "I pay for myself, or I don't go at all. That's my rule" (94). A practicing Catholic, she is fond of the motherless children of Mr. Bunce, a rabidly atheistic fellow-tenant in the building where she lives. Through a somewhat unskillful contrivance by the author, there is a small inheritance which Totty can only receive when she marries. Totty proposes in a roundabout way to the mellowing Mr. Bunce, and the oddly-assorted couple are happily wed.

In this fairly early novel Gissing appears to treat even the female characters of whom he is critical more gently than in his later, more bitter works. Paula Tyrrell,

Annabel's cousin and the pretty, frivolous daughter of a well-to-do, fashionable London family, is mocked with a light touch as to her ignorance and superficiality. The narrator tells us,

Since she could formulate desires, few had found impression on her lips which were not at once gratified; an exception caused her at first rather astonishment than impatience. (134)

Encouraged by her parents, Paula becomes engaged to the coming politician Dalmaine. "The two seemed to get on very well together. Paula was evidently exerting herself to be charming. Dalmaine was doing his best to trifle" (138).

After they are married, Paula's babbling about politics to

18 an important member of Parliament prompts her husband to remonstrate:

If you take my advice, you'll cultivate talk of a light, fashionable kind. . . . You'd better read the Society journals carefully. In fact, keep to the sphere which is distinctly womanly. (296)

In the writing of Thyrza, Gissing can never be accused of any strong feminist intent. Thyrza embarks on a program of intense self-education during the two years that Egremont has promised to wait, cultivating her natural talent for singing and reading works of literature, all this with the hope of giving pleasure to the man she loves and becoming a fitter companion for him. Annabel's intellectuality prepares her for the role of muse, a source of spiritual inspiration to Egremont. Bustling, housewifely little Mrs.

Poole is glorified as the happily self-denying wife and mother.

For his time I think that Gissing stood somewhat in the position of an enlightened despot. I doubt that he ever dreamed of the complete equality and emancipation of women.

Such an eventuality would have been more in the nature of a nightmare. Yet Gissing felt strongly that something must be done to alleviate women's oppression and ignorance. A woman should be better educated, thereby becoming a fitter companion to man, but not over-educated, lest she lose her zest for taking care of the home, where he believed she belonged, and where he believed she would be most fulfilled and happiest. As Gilbert Grail says to himself,

19 Books, books, and time to use them, and a hearth about which love is busy--what more can you offer son of man than these? (144)

I believe this thought expresses the somewhat selfish philosophy revealed in this work.

20 Chapter II

Odd and Even Women

"Odd women. . . . I look upon them as a great reserve. When one woman vanishes in matrimony, the reserve offers a substitute for the world's work." (The Odd Women 37)

More than most of George Gissing's highly ideological fiction, The Odd Women (1893) is principally a novel of ideas: ideas about the education of women, about the roles and possibilities to be made available for women who do not marry, and most revealingly, Gissing's ideas concerning the married state. Around the time that The Odd Women was being published Gissing wrote in exasperation to his German friend and confidant, Eduard Bertz:

My demand for female "equality" simply means that I am convinced there will be no social peace until women are intellectually trained very much as men are. More than half the misery of life is due to the ignorance and childishness of women. The average woman pretty closely resembles, in all intellectual considerations, the average male idiot. I speak medically. That state of things is traceable to the lack of education, in all senses of the word. . . . I am driven frantic by the crass imbecility of the typical woman. That type must disappear, or at all events become altogether subordinate. And I believe that the only way of effecting this is to go through a period of what many people will call sexual anarchy. (Letters to Bertz 171)

21 These bitter words were written at a time of mounting unhappiness in Gissing's unfortunate second marriage. Edith

Underwood, an uneducated, seemingly docile young woman with whom he shared few interests, swiftly turned into an ailing and complaining wife. At least to some degree, Gissing's misery at that time seems to me a likely catalyst for some of the unorthodox opinions and socially controversial measures suggested in The Odd Women. Halperin observes, regarding Gissing's discomfort at the time he was writing this novel:

Widdowson's disillusionment in his marriage reflects Gissing's in his during the summer and autumn of 1892, and there is perhaps a touch of authorial wish-fulfillment at the end of the book in Monica's death in childbirth. This would have been a convenient end to Gissing's domestic troubles. Death had saved him once; perhaps, subconsciously, he was counting on it to do so again. ( 187)

Gillian Tindall writes that "The Odd Women is a shining example of the extent to which a writer may feel depressed and limited by his personal experiences and yet be capable on paper of rising to heights of disinterested lucidity and sympathetic characterization" (169). I do not think that

Gissing, notwithstanding his undoubted ability, was ever able to distance himself sufficiently from his writing to be capable of "disinterested lucidity." It is my conviction that Gissing's work was always driven by his personal needs and circumstances.

22 Contrary to his usual habit of working slowly and

painstakingly on a novel, Gissing records in his diary, "The

year 1892 on the whole profitless. . . . The one piece of work, The Odd Women, scribbled in six weeks . and I have

no high opinion of it" (Letters of George Gissing to Members

of His Family 331). This book, however, has been acclaimed,

by some feminist critics in particular, as one of his most

important works. Wendy Lesser declares, "Gissing's The Odd

Women ... is one of the best portrayals of the women's movement, old or new" (210) . In her introduction to the

Norton edition of this text, Marcia R. Fox proclaims it, "an acknowledged minor masterpiece" (The Odd Women v) . Patricia

Stubbs calls the novel Gissing's "most impersonal and finely controlled work" (151).

Although I take issue with the word impersonal when

speaking of this novel, in one respect it rings true. The principal characters do not come alive for most readers. As

Karen Chase says, "Throughout The Odd Women ... Gissing makes only the most perfunctory gestures toward physical description or psychological portraiture" (232}. Moreover,

I find the book lacking in the thoughtful depth, the realistic rendering of a milieu, the sardonic humor found in some of his working-class novels, such as Thyrza or The

Nether World and in the later work The Whirlpool.

The two main characters in The Odd Women represent feminists of the period. Mary Barfoot, a mild-mannered yet

23 strongly partisan woman of culture, espouses the better

education and training of middle-class women who for one reason or another do not plan to marry. Her younger partner, Rhoda Nunn, is more radical in her approach to the problem of the "odd" women of the title. It is Rhoda who voices some of Gissing's provocative suggestions about love and marriage.

The third female character of importance to the story,

Monica Madden, later Monica Widdowson, seems somewhat more convincing, perhaps because of her very human fallibility.

Monica, the youngest and prettiest of six unmarried daughters, is left financially insecure upon the sudden death of her physician father, who has failed to provide for his family. Thrust into the world without much education or training, Monica has no will to profit by the regimen of hard study offered by Barfoot and Nunn in their school. She chooses instead the false security of marriage to an older man of some means, but she discovers too late that she cannot bear to live with him. Seeking romance and escape with a weak young man who ultimately leaves England without her, Monica finds herself in a position of shame and disgrace. Gissing conveniently disposes of her by death following the birth of her child.

The minor female characters also exemplify Gissing's view of the pitfalls and narrow range of possibilities for single women in his time. The two other surviving Madden

24 sisters (three are speedily dispatched in the first few pages by early sickness and death} are a sad example of the miserable living conditions for governesses and school teachers, the principal occupations for genteel spinsters.

Alice is underfed and ill; Virginia secretly takes to drink.

In contrast to these pathetic two, Winifred Haven and

Mildred Vesper typify the "new" young women being prepared for a rewarding career in business and for consequent single blessedness.

An important aspect of the narrative involves the complexities of the relationship between the outspoken, advanced-thinking Rhoda Nunn and Everard Barfoot, Mary's attractive, cosmopolitan bachelor cousin. At first Everard muses, "There would be something piquant in making vigorous love to Miss Nunn" (The Odd Women 94}, and the narrator notes, "His concern with her was purely intellectual; she had no sensual attraction for him, but he longed to see further into her mind" (101}. Later he thinks, "A contest between his will and hers would be an amusement decidedly to his taste" (127). In a short while he realizes, "Rhoda he was beginning to class with women who are attractive both physically and mentally. . But this was something very like being in love, and he by no means wished to be seriously in love with Miss Nunn" (142-143}.

Rhoda, whose interest in Everard has also been growing, thinks,

25 She did not love Everard Barfoot, and saw no likelihood of ever doing so. . Nor could he seriously anticipate an assent to his proposal for a free union. . . . But if he loved her these theories would sooner or later be swept aside; he would plead with her to become his legal wife. To that point she desired to bring him. (148)

The relationship between the two reaches a climax when

Everard joins Rhoda, who is vacationing on the northeast

coast of England. They spend a few platonic days together

enjoying the natural beauty of the Lake District and

continuing their contest of wills regarding the terms of their possible union. Even after Everard agrees to a legal marriage, they each still have some reservations. Everard wonders,

She had great qualities; but was there not much in her that he must subdue, reform, if they were really to spend their lives together? . . . Marriage would after all be a compromise. He had not found his ideal--though in these days it assuredly existed. (268-269)

On Rhoda's part,

[She] visited her soul with questionings no less troublesome. . . . Was it not a bad beginning to rule him against his conscience? . . . Was he in truth capable of respecting her individuality? Or would his strong instinct of lordship urge him to direct his wife as a dependent, to impose upon her his own view of things? (269-270)

Gissing arranges for the breakup of this tenuous pairing by means of the mistaken accusation by an enraged

Widdowson that Everard is the man involved with his wife.

Easily convinced by this piece of gossip, Rhoda rejects

Everard and returns to her work on behalf of other women, saddened by her loss but sustained in the knowledge that a

26 man of Everard's caliber has sought her in marriage.

Everard, on his part, recovers quite speedily and marries a more amenable young woman.

In The Odd Women Gissing presents some ideas about

love, sex, and marriage that seem quite daring for his time.

Speaking of one of her disciples who, corrupted by the reading of sentimental novels, has made the fatal blunder of falling in love with a married man, Rhoda Nunn says,

There is the sexual instinct, of course .. The novelists daren't talk about that. The paltry creatures daren't tell the one truth that would be profitable. The result is that women imagine themselves noble and glorious when they are most near the animals. (58)

In the same chapter Rhoda announces, "I am seriously convinced that before the female sex can be raised from its low level there will have to be a widespread revolt against sexual instinct" (61). This statement is somewhat prophetic of her eventual renunciation of Everard. Later, Rhoda perceptively comments, "When all women, high and low alike, are trained to self-respect, then men will regard them in a different light, and marriage may be honourable to both"

(99-100). She goes on to say, "I am convinced most marriages are hateful. But there will be no improvement until women have revolted against marriage, from a reasonable conviction of its hatefulness" (104). To which

Everard counters, "My own ideal of marriage involves perfect freedom on both sides" (104).

27 In a speech to her assembled pupils Mary Barfoot pleads

movingly for woman's growth to her full potential:

We have to ask ourselves, What course of training will wake women up, make them conscious of their souls, startle them into healthy activity? It must be something new, something free from the reproach of womanliness. I don't care whether we crowd out the men or not. I don't care what results, if only women are made strong and self­ reliant and nobly independent. . . . Most likely we shall have a revolution in the social order greater than any that yet seems possible. (136)

Though The Odd Women may be considered impersonally written, to the extent that the characters and situations

are formulaic and somewhat contrived, in another respect it

is one of the most personal that Gissing wrote. In it he

gives vent to his bitter cynicism and to his impatience and

fury against the marriage in which he felt so trapped.

There are many blighted, desperate couples in this novel,

the Widdowsons being the primary example. In chapter 8, however, Everard recounts a series of unhappy alliances he has observed, starting with his brother Tom, whose wife is a hypochondriac. He next describes the Poppletons. Mr.

Poppleton has landed in a lunatic asylum, caused, Everard

suggests, by his having to explain every joke to his wife, who "had no palate for anything but the suet-pudding of talk" (79). Then there are the Orchards. Mr. Orchard

"abandoned all his possessions to Mrs. Orchard and went wandering about the shores of the Mediterranean like an uneasy spirit'' (80) because "Mrs. Orchard discoursed of one subject--the difficulty she had with her domestic servants"

28 (81). At the conclusion of these cautionary tales Rhoda

asks, "Why will men marry fools?" (81). Why, indeed, Mr.

Gissing.

A little further on in the novel Gissing anticipates and excuses his own behavior a few years after he wrote The

Odd Women:

Many an intelligent and kind-hearted man has been driven from his wife notwithstanding thought for his children. He provides for them as well as he can--but, and even for their sakes, he must save himself. ( 103)

I find myself in agreement with Karen Chase when she declares in her essay on "The Literal Heroine: A study of

Gissing's The Odd Women" that "The struggle between the sexes turns on the use of language and becomes a rhetorical struggle," (232), for indeed a war of words and meanings takes place in the sparring between Rhoda and Everard, whether theirs shall be a "free union" or the "bondage" of a legal marriage. I disagree with Chase when she lessens the importance of the novel by writing that "The great claim that The Odd Women has on our attention is that it recognizes new imaginative possibilities in the condition of the clerk" (235). Chase stretches her metaphor too far when, portraying Rhoda as a clerk, she declares that

"Rhoda's chief attribute is her literalism" (238), and when she describes the ludicrous Mrs. Poppleton as Rhoda's

"precursor" (239). For me, Rhoda Nunn's chief attribute

29 lies in her valiant defense of her belief in woman's inherent dignity and worth.

Although The Odd Women can be recognized as a cathartic process for the distraught Gissing of 1892, it is nevertheless a landmark work of fiction. Writing as he did in a chaotic household mismanaged by a neurotic, complaining wife and with a crying baby in the background, Gissing produced a novel that abounds in provocative and challenging suggestions concerning women's roles and the pitfalls of marriage for women and men alike, a subject that is of continuing interest in our own time of changing mores and lifestyles.

30 Chapter III

Victims of the Vortex

In 1896, while distressed more and more by domestic problems, George Gissing wrote The Whirlpool. John Halperin has called this novel "the spiritual autobiography of one awful year of Gissing's life" (247). A contemporary reviewer, Greenough White, noted, "In Mr. Gissing's work our generation may see itself photographed" (360} . Myfanwy

Evans wrote that "The Whirlpool was the last serious modern novel that [Gissing] published" (The Whirlpool xi) . Mabel

Collins Donnelly described the book as "the final comment of a thoughtful man about man as a social animal" (182}.

Although at first glance The Whirlpool appears to be written in a style and vocabulary very much of its era, there is a fresh note here, a suggestion of "stream of consciousness" to come. As White pointed out in 1898, "Our author's strength is in his psychology, his exposure of the silent thoughts of his characters, their half-concealed, half-revealed motives, their manner of expression" (363}.

The content of the novel still seems modern. It is

Gissing's premise that a large metropolis such as London, with its crowds, its temptations and false values, is a

31 destructive force in human lives. As Patrick Parrinder has written,

The initial reference is to the lure of fashionable metropolitan life, which destroys the economic and moral stability of those who are sucked into it. (xiii)

At the outset Gissing describes the pitfalls of the

Stock Exchange, the unhappy results of speculation in ventures engineered by unscrupulous men of business. A few months earlier Gissing had written to his friend Bertz:

The so-called civilized world is of course filled with rampant barbarians--most of them reckless of everything in the furious chase after wealth and power. {210)

Along with this theme of the acquisition of riches by exploitation, Gissing describes the artificiality of an affluent social class whose morals deteriorate while it pursues its frivolities and petty rivalries.

Interwoven in this web of greed and vanity Gissing has written a compelling study of a marriage, a study described in its time as "startlingly modern" (White 360) , and one that is of continuing interest in its degree of psychological understanding. Parrinder notes that,

The Whirlpool offers a vivid and painstaking reflection of late-Victorian middle-class life, of its over-refined women and atavistic men and the destructive tensions which exist between them. (xxii)

At the outset of the narrative, Harvey Rolfe, a longtime bachelor of independent means ("From the supreme folly of hampering himself by marriage a merciful fate had

32 guarded him," 26}, is a much-travelled man, bookish and introspective. He longs for a simple, retired life, preferably in a small country town. However, he has become attracted to Alma Frothingham, the daughter of a bankrupt financier who had committed suicide and brought scandal upon his family. The stresses and strains of Harvey and Alma's eventual marriage and the malevolent influence of a decadent and materialistic society upon Alma's character comprise the main subject of the novel.

I find Alma one of the most complex and well-perceived of Gissing's heroines. A beautiful young heiress, spoiled by the attentions of a fawning society into thinking that she has great talent as a violinist, Alma finds herself suddenly impoverished and disgraced by her father's debacle.

She decides to go to Germany to study music:

The shock of sorrow and dismay had broken innumerable bonds, overthrown all manner of obstacles to growth of character, of power. She gloried in a new intoxicating sense of irresponsibility. She saw the ideal life in a release from all duty and obligation--save to herself. ( 66}

While abroad Alma meets by chance Cyrus Redgrave, a wealthy

London acquaintance. Daydreaming of becoming his wife, she is rudely shocked back to reality by Redgrave's suave offer for her to become his mistress.

On Alma's return to England, Harvey finds himself more and more drawn to her:

Her hair, her lips, her neck, grew present to him, and lured his fancy with a wanton seduction. In

33 self-defense--pathetic stratagem of intellectual man at issue with the flesh--he fell back upon the idealism which ever strives to endow a fair woman with a beautiful soul. (102)

They marry, and in the first bloom of marital love each

eagerly accedes to the wishes of the other. Alma agrees,

indeed she yearns to leave London and go with Harvey to live

in a small, secluded house in Wales. Harvey, for his part,

is determined to be a modern husband:

"I mean what I say when I speak of sharing liberty. Heaven forbid that I should put an end to any aim or hope of yours--to anything that is part of yourself. I want you to be yourself. Many people nowadays revolt against marriage because it generally means bondage. . . . I don't want to shape you to any model of my own. I want you to be your true self, and live the life you are meant for." (117-118)

These fine words, spoken in a key so familiar to us today,

Harvey soon comes to regret.

A woman of many enthusiasms that are quickly taken up

and soon tired of, Alma is of a generally amiable

disposition. She romanticizes about being a great violinist

but does not have the will or persistence necessary to

develop her small talent. In her rather weak, distracted way she seems to love her husband. Later, when she is

troubled by the tangled intrigue engendered by her foolish

actions, Gissing writes of her,

Though but darkly, confusedly, intermittently conscious of the feeling, Alma was at heart dissatisfied with the liberty, the independence, which her husband seemed so willing to allow her. (253) [my italics]

34 It would seem that beneath the surface of the text to

Gissing's narrator marriage is not a union of two freedoms.

It is a man's world, and any freedom the wife may enjoy has been bestowed upon her by her husband.

An interesting and realistic thread running through the novel, one which has not been much commented on by other readers, is Alma's growing jealousy of a Mrs. Abbott, a woman of noble character and straitened circumstances whom

Harvey is secretly helping to raise two orphaned children.

In Alma's painful suspicions regarding Harvey's possible feelings toward Mrs. Abbott and concerning the parental origins of the children, I find a touching bit of psychological insight. In this jealousy motif Gissing seems to suggest an element of paranoia in Alma's makeup. This tendency is further brought out by her growing rivalry and hatred, based on little evidence, of her erstwhile friend,

Sibyl Carnaby. Alma has been flirting with the wealthy and influential Redgrave in an effort to entice him into subsidizing her musical career:

He was to aid her in winning fame as a violinist; and to this end, all possible use (within certain limits) was to be made of the power she had over him. . . . She was playing with fire; knew it; enjoyed the excitement of it; trusted herself with the completest confidence to come out of the game unscorched. (226)

Alma suspects, however, that at the same time, Sibyl has been having an affair with Redgrave, who by coincidence has invested in a business partnership with Sibyl's husband.

35 Melodrama ensues as Hugh Carnaby, enraged by gossip about his wife, accidentally kills Redgrave in a confrontation with him.

Sibyl Carnaby, in contrast to Alma, is an older, more sophisticated, luxury-loving woman who "always declared that she could not eat a dinner she had had the trouble of ordering, and she seemed unaffectedly to shrink from persons of the menial class as though with physical repulsion" (56).

In Sibyl's favor is her loyalty to her husband throughout his many financial setbacks. Gissing leaves unanswered the question of Sibyl's infidelity. As Greenough White wrote,

"We do not know whether she is innocent, or an incarnation of serpentine wisdom, of dissimulation so profound that it has become her second nature" {366). A close reading of the text suggests that Sibyl and Redgrave had indeed been lovers, in a dalliance that fits neatly into the picture of a corrupt society that Gissing wishes to describe.

Another facet of the novel is the development of strong paternal feeling in Harvey, who had remarked in his bachelor days that "People talk such sentimental rubbish about children" {13). The birth of little Hugh touches a deep chord of love and responsibility in Rolfe:

That first wail of feeblest humanity, faint­ sounding through the silent night, made a revolution in his thoughts, taught him on the moment more than he had learnt from all his reading and cogitation. {135)

The narrator later adds,

36 Harvey liked to gaze long at the little face, puzzled by its frequent gravity, delighted by its flashes of mirth. (143)

Harvey becomes more and more involved in the child's welfare and development as he perceives Alma's indifference to her son, preoccupied as she is with her own interests and problems.

The unravelling complexities of the plot, and Harvey's gradual recognition of his wife's indiscretions and his own culpability in not having been more "strict" with her, leave

Alma in a much-chastened, more compliant mood, ready to live the life of a domesticated, home-loving woman:

They were content with each other this evening, and looked forward to pleasures they might have in common. For Harvey had learned to nourish only the humblest hopes, and Alma thought she had subdued herself to an undistinguished destiny. (368)

By this time, however, a distraught Alma has been troubled by many sleepless nights. She dies from an overdose of a sleeping draught, and Harvey, saddened and wiser, withdraws to a more wholesome rural existence with his little boy.

Parrinder has called The Whirlpool "a study of a would- be unfaithful woman driven to suicide" (xvi). I take issue with this over-simplification. Alma is not a would-be adulteress. She is a foolish woman who, in seeking to manipulate Redgrave, certainly put herself in danger of being seduced. I think too that she is far from suicidal and there is no textual evidence of that. Alma is merely the victim of her escapist use of sleeping aids. I also

37 disagree with Parrinder when he declares that, "her one good deed . . . lies in matchmaking for Mary Abbott" (xvi} . The motive for this "good deed" lies solely in the fact that, in her continuing jealousy, Alma wanted to get Abbott out of the way. Finding a husband for her was a convenient solution.

With the writing of The Whirlpool it seems to me that

Gissing retreated from any view that he might ever have had that women are to be treated as equals with men. It would appear that they have poor judgment in general and are to be guided and controlled like children. This novel makes one wonder whether he liked women at all, or perhaps just considered them a necessary evil, for Harvey ruminates at one point,

Happiness in marriage is a term of such vague application; Basil Morton, one in ten thousand, might call himself happy; even so, all things considered, must the husband who finds it just possible to endure the contiguity of his wife. (335}

In The Whirlpool we find several fairly negative sketches of incidental women characters. Before his marriage Harvey employed a housekeeper, a Mrs. Handover, of slovenly, slapdash habits:

It seemed to [Harvey] not impossible that Mr. Handover's present condition of vagabond pauper might be traceable to his marriage with a woman who had never learnt the elements of domestic duty. (24}

There is also the malignant gossip, Mrs. Strangeways:

38 It was her habit to speak in superlatives, and to wear a countenance of corresponding ecstacy. Any casual remark from either of the ladies she received with a sort of rapture; her nerves seemed to be in a perpetual thrill. (178)

In contrast to these unsavoury females we read of the idyllic marriage of Basil Morton, a childhood friend of

Harvey's who still resides in their native town of

Greystone. Basil has had the good sense to wed a paragon of motherly love and housewifeliness. In a recent book on

Gissing, Robert Selig comments,

Of all the women in the novel only Mrs. Morton receives unmixed praise. . . . The contrast with the novel's hostile portrayal of emancipated wives seems even more striking when one recalls The Odd Women's female reformers. In just four years Gissing had moved from an ambivalent sympathy towards feminism to a surprisingly strong resentment against its basic assumptions. (86)

Thus in a conversation with Morton, Harvey speculates,

The stomach is very powerful in bringing people to common-sense. When all the bricklayers' daughters are giving piano lessons, and it's next to impossible to get any servant except a lady's­ maid, we shall see women of leisure developing a surprising interest in the boiling of potatoes. (The Whirlpool 341)

Women of leisure, too, are to be kept safely in the kitchen.

I agree basically with Alice B. Markow when she says that,

Gissing refuses to take women seriously as real professionals and, as usual, suggests that the new woman's motive is mere vanity. . . . The message seems clear that women cannot handle freedom and should remain in their place in the home. If they abandon the traditional roles, they find themselves in serious difficulties. (66)

39 Or, as Pierre Coustillas wryly puts it, "In The Whirlpool the way to freedom does not lead to the palace of wisdom"

("Gissing's Feminine Portraiture" 139).

In this work the reader is left to conclude that Harvey and his friend Hugh have erred in allowing their spouses too much freedom to lead their own lives, that Alma and Sibyl are morally weak and should have been kept under tighter control.

Writing about the novel in a more positive vein,

Parrinder comments,

The Whirlpool offers the pleasure of historical precision: London's musical life, its suburban growth and the euphoric imperialism of the years preceding the South African War are all faithfully recorded. But it offers much more than this, since Gissing reveals the economic insecurity and the frivolous cultural pretensions of middle-class opulence. (xii)

Although it is true that The Whirlpool contributes to our understanding of late Victorian society and carefully studies a disintegrating marriage and a decaying urban scene, yet with the portrait of Alma as a vain and foolish woman, and with a picture of other more blatantly malicious women characters, one is left with a strong impression of

Gissing's general crankiness toward women and toward the world of that time in general, and of a wish-fulfillment or longing to escape in his euphoric description of the

Mortons' life.

40 Conclusion

Here was a voice that spoke straight and shapely words at its natural pitch, and carried their meaning by the impulse of some rare sincerity to the recesses of the mind. (Guardian) Virginia Woolf

In this study I have tried to examine George Gissing's portrayal of a few of his women characters. His view seems to have progressed (or rather regressed) from the idealized figures in Thyrza, a beautiful and talented girl of the slums and a bookish young woman of the middle class, to two staunch female reformers and a wife trapped in a loveless marriage in The Odd Women, and on to a picture in The

Whirlpool of a hapless young woman who tried to combine marriage and a career only to fail miserably in both.

As Patricia Stubbs has written,

Chronologically . . . a pattern does emerge. . . . In the earlier works he is more likely to support the idea of education and emancipation for women, in the later ones . . . the traditional idea of woman solely as wife and mother, the centre of home and family. (144)

In a similar vein Alice Markow, in her essay on Gissing as "provocateur" of the women's movement, agrees that

"Gissing was of his age in demanding improved education for women, but it is equally apparent that he did not believe

41 that women were capable of the same intellectual rigor as men" ( 62) .

In summarizing her conclusions about Gissing's work,

Markow comments,

Gissing seems to have presented a strangely divided mind on most public issues . . . religious doubts, mass education, the plight of the working class poor, growing materialism, shifting class lines. He was never passionately or profoundly concerned with the movements of his time. (69)

With the clear vision of hindsight, Markow in 1982 criticizes Gissing for not having supplied "a logical and ordered conspectus of feminist issues" (72) . I do not believe that Gissing ever had such an intent. From today's standpoint, his notion of woman's position in society may have been somewhat retrograde, but he wrestled with this and other questions of his day with honesty, with a sardonic humor, and with some grace. Markow faults Gissing for not having been an activist espousing causes. But we must recognize that Gissing was not a "joiner" or a polemicist.

Writing in the realist, bordering on the naturalist mode, he endeavored to present a picture of life and of human beings as he saw them. If, as Markow claims, he was unable to be

"firmly committed or passionately partisan" (69), it was because as a thoughtful writer he knew that answers to problems are never simple. Although his views on various issues of his time may seem occasionally weak, contradictory, even eccentric to the reader of today, they are his views honestly pursued, not some formulaic solution.

42 In an 1895 essay on "The Place of Realism in Fiction"

Gissing showed himself to be consummately aware of these issues:

Let the novelist take himself as seriously as the man of science; be his work to depict with rigid faithfulness the course of life, to expose the secrets of the mind, to show humanity in its eternal combat with fate. • . . The artist has no responsibility save to his artistic conscience. The only question is, has he wrought truly in matter and form? . . . Every novelist beholds a world of his own, and the supreme endeavour of his art must be to body forth that world as it exists for him. The novelist works, and must work, subjectively. The demand for objectivity in fiction is worse than meaningless, for apart from the personality of the workman no literary art can exist. (Gissing, Selections 218-219)

These are nobly expressed aims, on whose achievement

Gissing's literary efforts must stand or fall. To me, these words have validity in all the arts, in all human efforts to create.

In view of Gissing's goal of total honesty and sincerity in his writing, Gillian Tindall offers an interesting observation on some of his later women characters:

Perhaps it would be fair to say that, in that, by the latter part of his writing career, he saw more clearly and intimately into women's lives than most of his contemporaries, he was often bound to show them in a way that while it did not necessarily condemn, did not flatter either. No man is a hero to his valet--and nor is the central woman character of a novel a "heroine" to any author who attempts an adequate portrait of her. {227)

The actions of Gissing's heroines discussed in this study certainly have revealed these women with all their

43 human weaknesses. First there is Thyrza, who is constantly day-dreaming and soon obsessed by her infatuation with

Egremont, so much so that in spite of her shyness she ventures to spy on him while he is at work in his library and even forces an encounter with him. Monica in The Odd

Women chooses the relative ease and security of marriage to a man she does not love in preference to a more challenging if more difficult life as a bachelor working woman. When that decision proves unpleasant, she seeks escape in a nebulous relationship with a weak young man. Alma, in The

Whirlpool, is self-centered, willful, and consumed by baseless jealousies. These Gissing "heroines," whose actions are based largely on emotion rather than reason, seem very lifelike to me, pathetic perhaps, but humanly fallible.

When one considers in addition the gallery of foolish and shrewish wives listed by Everard Barfoot in The Odd

Women, the appalling coarseness and ignorance of the French sisters in In the Year of Jubilee, and the unpleasant incidental women characters found in The Whirlpool, one is forced to conclude that Gissing's increasing personal bitterness during the years he wrote these novels provoked a growing chauvinism and even hostility toward women in his work. Marcia R. Fox writes in her introduction to The Odd

Women, "Later in life when he had finally found some measure of romantic happiness with a cultivated Frenchwoman,

44 Gabrielle Fleury, Gissing was embarrassed by the misogynistic tone of his earlier works" (vi) .

The "woman question," or the manner in which George

Gissing viewed the situation of women in his day, their

inadequate educations, their needs and responsibilities in relation to men and to their children, is only one of many facets of his fiction. In early works such as Workers in the Dawn, Thyrza, and The Nether World, Gissing shocked his readers with vivid pictures of the sordid living conditions of the London poor. In his ponderous fashion, Henry James expressed an admiration for this aspect of Gissing's writing:

He reeks with the savour, he is bowed beneath the fruits, of contacts with the lower, with the lowest middle-class, and that is sufficient to make him an authority--the authority in fact--on a region vast and unexplored. (439}

James continued,

It is impossible not to be affected by the frankness and straightness of Mr. Gissing's feeling for his subject, a subject almost always distinctly remunerative to the ironic and even to the dramatic mind. He has the strongest deepest sense of common humanity, of the general struggle and the general grey grim comedy. He loves the real, he renders it, and though he has the tendency to drift too much with his tide, he gives us in the great welter of the savourless, an individual manly strain. (443}

Gissing was indeed a careful observer of human behavior, and James rightly notes Gissing's "strongest deepest sense of common humanity." In Thyrza we meet Mr.

Bower, a self-satisfied laboring man whose earnings have

45 been augmented by profits from his wife's small shop selling

food and other necessities to their neighbors:

The man was a fair instance of the way in which prosperity affects the average proletarian; all his better qualities--honesty, perseverance, sobriety--took an ignoble quality from the essential vulgarity of his nature, which would never have so offensively declared itself if ill fortune had kept him anxious about his daily bread. (85)

Speaking of the principal character, the man "born in exile"

in his novel of the same name, Gissing writes,

He tasted something of the tranquil self-content which makes life so enjoyable when one has never seen a necessity for shaping original remarks. No one in this room would despise him for a platitude, were it but recommended with a pleasant smile. (Born in Exile 186)

In the same novel Gissing describes the thoughts of one of

the other characters regarding his religious faith:

As the realm of science extended, as his intercourse with men who frankly avowed their 'infidelity' grew more frequent, he ever and again said to himself that one of these days he must sit down and 'have it out' in a solemn self-searching. But for the most part he got on very well amid his inconsistencies. Religious faith has rarely any connection with reasoning. Martin believed because he believed, and avoided the impact of disagreeable arguments because he wished to do so. (246)

Like Henry James, Virginia Woolf also bestowed upon

Gissing approval of a grudging sort. The words quoted at

the opening of this chapter were written early in her

career, before her very individual fictional style had been

formed. Later, perhaps because of her own development of a more impressionistic manner, it was difficult for her to

46 appreciate Gissing's work. In her introduction to a selection of Gissing's writings assembled by his son Alfred

in 1929, Woolf wrote somewhat harshly:

He so reverenced facts and had no faculty it seems (his language is meager and unmetaphorical) for impressions. (10) . . . With all his narrowness of outlook and meagreness of sensibility, Gissing is one of the extremely rare novelists who believe in the power of mind, who makes his people think. . • . Is it possible that we are going to talk of other things besides falling in love, important though that is, and going to dinner with Duchesses, fascinating though that is? Here in Gissing is a gleam of recognition that Darwin had lived, that the telegraph had been invented, that people read books and talk and look at pictures. . . . When we have finished one of Gissing's novels what we have taken away is not a character, nor an incident, but a comment on life as life seemed to a thoughtful man. (Gissing, Selections 12-14)

These words of Virginia Woolf reveal to me the reverberations of one brilliant mind responding to another fine intellect. Woolf confirms what I consider to be

Gissing's greatest appeal today, a picture of the conditions of life in his time as they existed for certain groups of people, mainly the poor and the middle class, a picture filtered through a sensitive intelligence and accompanied by a wry and ironic commentary.

Royal Gettmann in his book on the friendship between

Gissing and H.G. Wells observed about Gissing's work,

There are in all these novels eloquent passages, tender passages, passages of free and happy humour, and a pervading irony that will certainly secure them a permanent, though perhaps a dusty place, in the storehouse of English literary achievement. (269)

47 Gettmann' s "dusty place'' unfortunately symbolizes the fact that Gissing's books are largely out-of-print at present.

There have been one or two small attempts, mainly in

England, to reprint his novels, but sadly these have been largely unsuccessful in the economics of today's publishing.

His work is still difficult to obtain.

A number of feminist critics have found the subject of

Gissing's ambivalence on woman's role a source of interest and exploration. Gillian Tindall observes,

Intellectually he inclined to enlightened views on 'the women question,' but emotionally he was attracted to the idea of an older, simpler mode of life in which women inevitably played a subservient role. . . . However, the defeatist dream of the woman reduced to an undemanding nanny ignored the sex-imperative, which was an equally important part of Gissing's makeup. (223}

Patricia Stubbs concludes her discussion of Gissing by saying,

Gissing's domestic saint is worth emphasizing because she is carefully assembled from practically every available component of the dominant stereotype. She is virtuous, industrious, selfless and homely. . . . But her contradictory co-existence alongside the numerous selfish, unfeeling and thoroughly unpleasant women who form the central focus of so many of the novels does point to a genuine conflict between ideology and reality. It was a conflict which Gissing could never resolve. (155)

I believe that Gissing could not resolve this conflict, a conflict in many ways related to the age-old male image of woman as either a saint or a sinner, because, contrary to

Tindall's view with reference to The Odd Women and New Grub

Street that "the personal is fully dissolved in the chemical

48 liquid of creative fiction" (168), it is precisely his

personal emotion that Gissing was unable to keep out of his

writing, even in his critically acknowledged "most

impersonal" novel The Odd Women. In this vein, I agree with

a comment by the anonymous author of an article on Gissing's

heroines to the effect that Gissing's book on Dickens, which

the writer deems "still the best criticism of Dickens

extant," yet "proves, by the extraordinary vehemence of the

chapter on Dickens's women, how hard it was for him to

subdue the bitterness of his personal experience" (in

Coustillas, Collected Articles 61).

Alice Markow suggests that Gissing approves to a large

extent of the character of Mary Barfoot in The Odd Women

"because she represents moderation and feminity . . . and

because she represents his own view concerning woman's

place" (65). With Rhoda Nunn, on the other hand, "He begins

in sympathy, but ends in a parody of the Victorian radical

feminist" (65). If it is true, as Markow adds, that

"Gissing almost certainly intends Nunn's outspokenness as an

example of the indelicacy of speech which he abhorred" (68),

then, in spite of himself and because it is in Gissing's

character to strive for fairness and realism in his writing, he was able to create a strong female figure who can speak

for and to us today.

While it may be true that, as Markow concludes,

Gissing's novels reveal "an implicitly negative judgment

49 concerning the possibilities for real equality between the sexes" (72), yet I would like to emphasize that what we have in the case of George Gissing is a sensitive, injured, puzzled, perhaps desperate man trying honestly to assess all sides of a question. Because of his personal problems, and more as wish-fulfillment than genuine conviction, Gissing ultimately comes down on the side of male superiority and domination. In the 1890s, while coping with a disastrous marriage, he nevertheless pointed the way, particularly in

The Odd Women, to a new, more open relationship between men and women, in spite of the fact that his own emotional and physical requirements distorted his viewpoint and weakened somewhat the ideas that he had arrived at intellectually.

50 Works Cited

Bergonzi, Bernard. Intro. New Grub Street. By Gissing.

9-26.

Chase, Karen. "The Literal Heroine: A Study of Gissing's

The Odd Women." Criticism 26 (3) Summer 1984: 231-244.

Coustillas, Pierre, ed. Collected Articles on George

Gissing. London: Cass, 1968.

"Gissing's Feminine Portraiture." English Literature in Transition 6 (1963, no. 3): 130-141.

Coustillas, Pierre, and Colin Partridge, eds. Gissing: The

Critical Heritage. London: Routledge, 1972.

Donnelly, Mabel Collins. George Gissing: Grave Comedian.

Cambridge: Harvard UP, 1954.

Evans, Myfanwy. Intro. The Whirlpool. By Gissing. v-xi.

Fox, Marcia R. Intro. The Odd Women. By Gissing. v-viii.

Gettmann, Royal A., ed. and intro. George Gissing and H.G.

Wells: Their Friendship and Correspondence. Urbana: U

of Illinois P, 1961.

Gissing, George. Born in Exile. The Nelson Library of

Copyright Novels. Thomas Nelson and Sons. n.d.

51 In the Year of Jubilee. Intro. Gillian Tindall.

Reprint of 1895 ed. Rutherford, NJ: Fairleigh

Dickinson UP, 1976. The Letters of George Gissing to Eduard Bertz 1887- 1903. Ed. Arthur c. Young. New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers UP, 1961.

The Letters of George Gissing to Members of His

Family. Collected and arranged by Algernon and Ellen Gissing. Boston: Houghton, 1927. New Grub Street. Ed. and intro. Bernard Bergonzi.

Harmondsworth, Middlesex: Penguin, 1976.

The Odd Women. Intro. Marcia R. Fox. New York:

Norton, 1977.

Selections Autobiographical and Imaginative from the

Works of George Gissing: With Biographical and Critical

Notes by His Son. Intro. Virginia Woolf. New York:

Cape, 1929.

Thyrza. Ed. and intro. Jacob Korg. Rutherford, NJ:

Fairleigh Dickinson UP, 1974.

The Whirlpool. Intro. Myfanwy Evans. London:

Watergate Classics, 1948.

Workers in the Dawn. Ed. Robert Shafer. 2 vols.

Garden City, NY: Doubleday, 1935.

Grylls, David. "The Teller not the Tale: George Gissing and

Biographical Criticism." English Literature in

Transition 32 (1989): 454-470.

52 Halperin, John. Gissing: A Life in Books. Oxford: Oxford

UP, 1982. James, Henry. Notes on Novelists; With Some Other Notes.

New York: Biblo, 1969.

Korg, Jacob. George Gissing: A Critical Biography.

Seattle: U of Washington P, 1963.

Intro. Thyrza. By Gissing. ix-xxi.

Lesser, Wendy. "Even-handed Oddness: George Gissing's The

Odd Women." Hudson Review 87 (2) 1984: 209-220.

Markow, Alice B. "George Gissing: Advocate or Provocateur

of the Women's Movement?" English Literature in

Transition 25 (2): 58-73. Parrinder, Patrick. Intro. The Whirlpool. By George

Gissing. Rutherford, NJ: Fairleigh Dickinson UP, 1977.

Selig, Robert L. George Gissing. Twayne's English Authors

Series 346. Boston: Twayne, 1983.

Shafer, Robert. Intro. Workers in the Dawn. By Gissing.

vii-xliii.

Sloan, John. George Gissing: The Cultural Challenge. New

York: St. Martins, 1989.

Stubbs, Patricia. Women and Fiction: Feminism and the Novel

1880-1920. London: Methuen, 1981.

Tindall, Gillian. The Born Exile: George Gissing. London:

Temple Smith, 1974.

White, Greenough. "A Novelist of the Hour." Sewanee Review

6 (3) July 1898: 360-370.

53 Woolf, Virginia. Intro. Selections Autobiographical. By

Gissing.

Rev. of Gissing's The Private Papers of Henry

Ryecroft. Guardian 13 Feb. 1907: 282-283.

54