Margaret Oliphant: Gender, Identity, and Value in the Victonan Penodical Press

University of Alberta Margaret Oliphant: Gender, Identity, and Value in the Victonan Penodical Press Rhonda-Lea Carson-Batchelor O A thesis submitted to the Faculty of Graduate Shidies and Research in partial fulfillrnent of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy. Department of English Edmonton, Alberta Fa11, 1998 National Library Bibliothèque nationale 1+1 ,mada du Canada Acquisitions and Acquisitions et Bibliographie Senrices services bibliographiques 395 Wellington Street 395, ~e Weilington OttawaON KIAW Ottawa ON KIA ON4 Canada Canada The author has granted a non- L'auteur a accordé une licence non exclusive licence allowing the exclusive permettant à la National Library of Canada to Biblothèque nationale du Canada de reproduce, Loan, distribute or sell reproduire, prêter, distribuer ou copies of this thesis in microform., vendre des copies de cette thèse sous paper or electronic formats. la forme de microfiche/lfilm, de reproduction sur papier ou sur fonnat électronique. The author retains ownership of the L'auteur conserve la propriété du copyright in this thesis. Neither the droit d'auteur qui protège cette thèse. thesis nor substantial extracts fiom it Ni la thèse ni des extraits substantiels may be printed or otherwise de celle-ci ne doivent être imprimés reproduced without the author's ou autrement reproduits sans son permission. autorisation. Abstract The Victorian penod saw the rise of many women to professiond eminence in literary fields. Margaret Oliphant (1 828- l897), novelist, biographer, literary critic, social commentator, and historian, was just one who participated in the cultural debate about the changing place, role, and value of women within society and the workplace--'the woman questiony--buther conservative and careful feminism has attracted linle critical attention (or esteem) to her fiction. Her nonfiction submissions to penodical literature have been examined even iess ofien than her fiction conûibutions. Critical biographers like Vineta and Robert Colby and Menyn Williams account for this neglect by citing (to uphold) her posthumous and enduring relegation to the category of 'hack' writer. Because she wrote 'on demand' for the most mainstrearn (and prestigious) journals of the day-Blackwood S Magazine (her primary employer), Macmillan S Magazine, Cornhill Magazine, Contemporary Revzew, Edinburgh Review-her work is perceived to be complicit in the literary industry's pamarchal marginalisation of women as individuals and as cultural producers. This dissertation argues against these perceptions by examining Oliphant's strategies of self-representation in a selection of her nonfiction: The Autobzography and Lelters of Mrs. Margaret OIiphan~, WiIliurn Blackwood and His Sons: Annals of a Publishing House, and six essays about 'the women question' Wntten across the span of her forty-five year career. 1 show how Oliphant negotiated the ideological limits inscribed around womanhood to create and appropriate a suggestively domestic space for the professional woman, a figure fiaught with sexual and moral suspicion at the tirne, in the masculine literary domain of cultural reproduction. As this staternent implies, then, I consider the effects of and on the value perceived to inhere to specifically gendered (and genred) identities available for realisation withh the capitalist operations of the periodical market place. I demonstrate how Oliphant capitalises on the orthodoxies of the middle-class ideal of womanhood she claimed to embody in order to guarantee her safe authority as a cornmodifier of cultural products and to prevent her labouring body fiom being implicated in that process of cornmodification. h addition, 1 show that whereas her valued identity depended on the seclusion of her (re)productive body within the domestic confines of idealised maternity, the identities available to men of letters accrued value according to the degree to which they were able to establish an individualised command of the literary and cultural market. Since much Victorian Iiterature first circulated in periodicals, it seems imperaiive that the industry itself corne under closer scrutiny as an influential intersection of cultural, market, and social interests and reqwements. I will do some of the groundwork by establishing that intersection as highly gendered in its determinations of value and permitted modes of public self-expression. This work is dedicated to the memory of rny grandrnother, Sessie Robinson, and to my mother, Lea Spence: women of wisdom and strength. Table of Contents Introduction ..................................................... 1 Chapter One: "Wlaking pe~y'worthsof myself'. ...................... -27 Chapter Two: "A perfectly artless art" ................................ -67 Chapter Three: "The sober man of business" .......................... 127 Chapter Four: Contributors of "grist to the rnills of 'Maga' ................185 Chapter Five: "[Gleneral utility woman" ............................. -224 Conclusion .................................................... 252 Bibliography ................................................... 268 Appendix: Chronology of Oliphant's Life ............................. 286 Introduction As the Victcrian period began, the many changes to the production of belles lettres were a reaction to the eighteenth century's perception of wnting as the gentlemanly occupation of a presumed social elite. This class's defining abundance of leisure and economic independence was thought to ensure authorid 'disinterestedness'. The necessisr for this quality was entrenched enough by 1865 for Matthew Amold to formalise it with his hierarchising opposition between Philistines and the cultural children of light. The anxiety which at once energised and stabilised this polarisation sprang fiom two sources: the eighteenth-century's middle-class takeover of culture and that group's wholesale conversion of cultural production to a variation of industrial capitalism (Feltes Modes 3). In the hands of these self-defined sovereigns of commerce, both literature and its producers became overtly subject to al1 the market forces of cornmodification. In the early years of the nineteenth century these forces included the industry-wide escalation of literary pay rates to secure the kind of intellectual product which could be expected to generate a hi& retum for the publisher in either economic or cultural tems. On the one hmd, this change immediately democratised the profession of letters. The possibility of making a living fiom writing opened the floodgates to an educated group previously excluded by virtue of its need for assured eamings. On the other hand, the change also permitteci suspicions about the economic motives of intellectual labour to continue to situate professional writers within a hierarchy of cultural producers. Nowhere was this tension between literary and market orientation more acute than in the nineteenth century's expanding penodical industry. Its origin, however, was not contemporary with that increase. The tension itself is apparent in the eighteenth-century's enduring association of the commercial press with locales like Grub Street and of paid writers with categories like 'hack.' Labels of this nature threatened to implicate not only the periodicals and their employees, but their aspiring editors and proprietors as well. As a result, nineteenth-century founders of new joumals, particularly of specialist and literary journals, began to negotiate public identities for thernselves which acknowledged their market expertise, but to constnict that capacity as the necessary means of disseminating their papers' distinctive participation in cultural regdation. Thus, the cornpetition underwriting successful domination of the literary market place imbued the editorial figure with a form of valued madiness that resonated with the comelative materidities implicit to both capitalisrn's economic basis and reproductive manhood. This particularly entrepreneurid method of self-realisation remained unavailable to writers because market-innocence was essential to their acquisition of cultural authority. Consequently, they needed to disavow cognizance of their economic potential. Relative to the patriarchal figure of the editor, then, the literary producer was a feminised subordinate whose statu within the field of writers rested at least partly on the perceived value of the genre chosen for public self-expression. The nineteenth century was also the period during which many women began to make an acceptable living wriîing novels. In spite (or perhaps because) of its economic utility, fiction came to be the most devaluable of literary forms. This depreciation owed as much to the genre's association with 'women's work' as it did to fiction's necessary capture of a large readership as the primary measure of worth. Certainly, many authors of both sexes gamered much credit and celebrity for themselves and their publishers. One need only consider the careers of Charles Dickens, George Eliot, the Trollopes, Bulwer-Lytton, and Samuel Warren. But even these stars always remained several cultural cuts below such writen of nonfiction as Carlyle and Arnold. The increasingly specialised journals played a large role in maintainhg this gendered hierarchy of genres. Because prose commentary in and of itself possessed little mass appeal, its inclusion in a periodicd tacitly expressed the editor's intention to transcend market interests in favour of cultural service. Such a gesture in seeming

Load more