Beautiful Stranger: the Function of the Coquette in Victorian Literature
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Beautiful Stranger: the Function of the Coquette in Victorian literature. Submitted by Maria Ioannou, to the University of Exeter as a thesis for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy in English, March 2009. This thesis is available for Library use on the understanding that it is copyright material and that no quotation from the thesis may be published without proper acknowledgement. I certify that all material in this thesis which is not my own work has been identified and that no material has previously been submitted and approved for the award of a degree by this or any other University. (signature) ......................................................................................... Abstract Theories of beauty normally engage with beauty in the abstract, or with reactions to beauty - beauty’s effect on others. This thesis considers how coquettish female beauty has been embodied in Victorian literature by the Brontës, Dickens, George Eliot, Christina Rossetti, and to a lesser extent women’s periodical literature. It argues that the figure of the coquette addresses antithetical discourses on the Victorian woman and assimilates them in such a way as to express a subversive beauty discourse, in which beauty consolidates differing female experiences and formulates the search for identity as a collective female effort. The coquette is linked with controversial women’s issues such as marriage failure, domestic abuse and female eroticism; the ambivalence of her relationship with the text’s heroine shows the scope and limits of female autonomy. The dialectic between rejection and acceptance in which the coquette participates in specific narrative strategies shows women engaged with women’s problems, their erotic potential, and their relationship(s) to each other. The thesis also reflects on feminist literary theory, especially current ideas on female writing, broadly defined as a search for female belonging. Recent criticism holds that the Victorian coquette operates either to show that eroticism was part of the Victorian woman’s identity, or as a passive surface upon which certain aspects of the protagonist are illuminated. This thesis argues that this is only part of the story; additionally, the issue of eroticism is installed within a framework of women’s social, political, and legal concerns, and the coquette can be read as an active site in which aspects of both the coquette and the protagonist are combined to form an innovative way of seeing the Victorian woman. List of Contents Abstract 2 List of Illustrations 4 Introduction: the function of the coquette in Victorian literature 5 Chapter 1. Ginevra Fanshawe in Charlotte Brontë’s Villette 47 Chapter 2. Rosalie Murray’s plight in Anne Brontë’s Agnes Grey 78 Chapter 3. Frivolous Beauty in Charles Dickens’s David Copperfield 110 Chapter 4. Rosamond Vincy in George Eliot’s Middlemarch 135 Chapter 5. Spectacular Beauty in Charles Dickens’s Great Expectations 159 Conclusion: Beauty, mirrors, fashion: the coquette in Victorian literature 185 Bibliography 194 List of Illustrations Figure 1. “Dresses, Table and Jewel Case”. Harper’s Bazaar. 12 Sept. 1885. 40 Introduction The function of the coquette in Victorian literature. This thesis examines the function of the coquette in Victorian literature, and suggests that she operates to reflect controversial issues of the day concerning women, in a manner which indicates the fracture these issues caused in women’s perception of their own experience. In the novels examined here the coquette is attached to controversial social and moral women’s issues, such as marriage failure and a woman’s right to divorce; the protagonist’s reaction to the coquette is an exposition of how Victorian gender ideology urged women to interpret instances of legal and societal failure to cater for the female experience as instances of personal, and often moral, failure on the part of the woman herself. Coquetry thus articulates both the discourse of discipline, and a female- centred discourse which clarifies what is problematic about disciplining, and also how this disciplining operates upon the women themselves. Current work on Victorian coquetry holds the coquette either as the erotic aspect of the protagonist (of the Victorian woman, if the subject is periodicals and fashion illustrations) and/or as evidence of how relationships between women further or not the plot of marriage in a novel. This thesis argues that the coquette functions additionally as a female-centred evaluation and assessment of the wider social, legal and moral context which surrounded and defined the lives of women. In novels where the protagonist has ambivalent or even hostile feelings for the coquette – as in Charlotte Brontë’s Villette (1853) and Anne Brontë’s Agnes Grey (1847)– authorial treatment and narrative strategy suggest that the coquette encapsulates the forceful manner in which the erotic and playful aspect of woman is disciplined, in part by the woman herself, and also anxiety over this form of prejudicial disciplining. In novels where the female protagonist is attached to the coquette –as in Charles Dickens’s David Copperfield (1849-50) and George Eliot’s Middlemarch (1870-72)—the latter figure illustrates an understanding between women which revises stereotypes and lodges female belonging within the workings of a female community. Beauty becomes a space in the narrative where women are not objectified but act as subjects of controversy and desire. Rather than exhibiting the discipline of form, beauty exhibits the un-discipline of content. It becomes the common denominator for antithetical discourses on the female self. Interestingly, the Oxford English Dictionary indicates that the first use of the term “feminism” in English links it with a woman’s coquettish behaviour. The term “feminism” first appeared in the April 1895 issue of the Athenaeum, which spoke of a woman’s “coquettings with the doctrines of ‘feminism’”1. If feminism has been described as an expression of coquetry, this thesis situates coquetry as a feminist expression of Victorian womanhood and a participation in the ongoing debate about women’s rights. I begin the Introduction by defining the term “coquette”, and providing a literature review of coquetry in Victorian Studies; then I discuss the coquette in relation to Beauty Theory and current developments in feminist studies. This is followed by a section on the historical background to the thesis, and a reading of Christina Rossetti’s Goblin Market (1862) and of a fashion illustration which combines issues raised by my argument and the historical material. The Introduction closes with a note on chronology, and a chapter outline. Defining the Coquette and the Selection of texts The term coquette, or spectacular woman, is used in this thesis to refer to women characters in fiction who are not only beautiful, but also conscious of and comfortable with their own beauty. They enjoy being beautiful; they enjoy admiration, and like to flirt with men, perhaps with no more serious purpose in mind than flirting itself. They love luxury and fashion, are gifted in music and dance, and are drawn to laughter and pleasure rather than domestic sobriety. As we shall see, these women have been traditionally trivialised by critics, perhaps not unsurprisingly, since the trivialization of beauty goes hand in hand with the trivialization of the feminine, as Susan Sontag has explained2. For Sandra Lee Bartky, this trivialization extends to the beauty rituals of femininity – women are stereotypically condemned for their concern with physical attractiveness, clothes, hair-styles and ornament3. In the Victorian era, coquettish women could also run counter to dominant 1 “Feminism”, OED online, 2009, Oxford English Dictionary, 15 Feb. 2009 <http://0-dictionary.oed.com.lib.exeter.ac.uk/entrance.dtl>. 2 “Beauty can illustrate an ideal, a perfection. Or, because of its identification with women […] it can trigger the usual ambivalence that stems from the age-old denigration of the feminine. Much of the discrediting of beauty needs to be understood as a result of the gender inflection”. Susan Sontag, “An Argument About Beauty”, Susan Sontag: At the Same Time; Essays and Speeches , eds. Paolo Dilonardo and Anne Jump (London: Hamish Hamilton, 2007) 10. 3 Woman’s concern with beauty rituals “partakes of the general depreciation of everything female. […] [W]omen are ridiculed and dismissed for the triviality of their interest in such ‘trivial’ things as clothes and make-up”. Sandra Lee Bartky, Femininity and Domination: Studies in the Phenomenology of Oppression, Thinking Gender (New York: Routledge, 1990) 73. Sontag concurs: “… if women are worshipped because they ideals of female modesty and selflessness. The OED suggests that the noun “coquette” has been usually used to describe women who behave heartlessly, though it seems that this heartlessness comprises no more than “trifling” with the affections of men4. Thus, the coquette’s heartlessness carries with it ideological undertones; it is defined in relation to the assumption of male power and superiority. In the Victorian era, women who did not devote themselves to the happiness of others (especially that of their husband and children or other male relatives) but instead focused on their own, could not be “improperly” regarded as monsters – as influential conduct-book writer Sarah Stickney Ellis pointed out5. However, the spectacular woman can neither be called an angel, nor a monster. She loves pleasure and, in this sense, she is a sensual woman6; but she is not fallen, are beautiful, they are condescended to for their preoccupation with making or keeping themselves beautiful”. Women are associated with frivolity, beauty and the beauty industry with the “’merely’ feminine, the unserious, the specious”. Sontag 10. In the Victorian era, a coquette would be doubly criticized, given the pressure on women to remain inconspicuous; nevertheless, the idea of the modest woman who made herself invisible may not have been as absolute as has traditionally been thought. This issue will be discussed below. 4 “Coquette”, OED online, 2009, Oxford English Dictionary, 15 Feb.