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The Single Woman, Feminism, and Self-Help

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The Single Woman, Feminism, and Self-Help On Their Own: The Single Woman, Feminism, and Self-Help in British Women’s Print Culture (1850-1900) by Melissa Walker A Thesis presented to The University of Guelph In partial fulfillment of requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy in English and Theatre Studies Guelph, Ontario, Canada © Melissa Walker, May, 2012 ABSTRACT ON THEIR OWN: THE SINGLE WOMAN, FEMINISM, AND SELF-HELP IN BRITISH WOMEN’S PRINT CULTURE (1850-1900) Melissa Walker Advisor University of Guelph, 2012 Susan Brown Cultural and historical accounts of self-help literature typically describe its development and focus in terms of the autonomous, public male subject of the nineteenth century. This literary study recognizes that as masculine self-help discourse became widely accessible in the mid nineteenth century, mid-Victorian feminist novels, periodicals, and tracts developed versions of self-help that disrupted the dominant cultural view that the single female was helpless and “redundant” if she did not become a wife and mother. I argue that the dual focus of Victorian self-help discourse on the ability to help oneself and others was attractive for Victorian feminist writers who needed to manipulate the terms of the domestic ideal of woman as influential helpmeet, if women’s independence and civic duty were to be made culturally palatable. Chapter One focuses on how Dinah Mulock Craik drew on self-help values popularized in mid-century articles and collective biographies by Samuel Smiles, while rejecting the genre of biography for its invasiveness into female lives. By imagining a deformed single artist heroine in the context of her 1851 bildungsroman, Olive, Craik highlighted and contested the objectification of women within Victorian culture while reproducing other forms of female difference based on dominant constructions of class, sexuality, and race. Chapter Two extends formal and thematic considerations of self-help discourse to a comparison of masculine colonial accounts of class- climbing and the projection of a self-reliant, yet deeply unstable, domestic female by Maria Rye and the Female Middle-Class Emigration Society. Chapter Three exerts critical pressure on the tension between individual and mutual help by charting the debate that raged between liberal individualism and collectivism in the labour movement, particularly in The Women’s Union Journal. Returning to a focus on the binary of female aberrance and normalcy within Victorian culture, Chapter Four analyzes late-century case studies of nervous illnesses alongside Ella Hepworth Dixon’s 1894 New Woman novel that promoted self-help for women as desirable yet unattainable in a society still largely structured around the domestic ideal. At its broadest, this dissertation explores points of convergence and departure between Victorian masculine and feminine self-help texts, and touches on reverberations of this Victorian discourse in today’s self- help works directed at women in Western culture. iv Acknowledgements Thank you first to Micah for his amazing ability to make me laugh and for all his love and support. My heartfelt gratitude also goes to my parents, who are the brightest, most discerning, and kindest proofreaders around, and to Joanna and James for providing a place to stay and research help from time to time. Thank you also to the rest of my family, including the entire Hussey clan, and to my friends John Smallwood, Angela Loucks-Atkinson, Deanna Kiar, Emily O’Connor, Jill Young, and Lisa Cairncross for their unfailing interest and moral support. Many thanks to the members of my dissertation committee, including Drs. Susan Brown, Michelle Elleray, Maria DiCenzo, and Linda Mahood, for their commitment to my work, and for their insightful feedback. Thank you also to the external examiner, Dr. Susan Hamilton, for her dedication to this project. I gratefully acknowledge the generous financial support I have received during my doctoral studies, which has included an Ontario Graduate Scholarship, a Board of Governors’ scholarship, a University Graduate Scholarship, and extensive travel support from the School of English and Theatre Studies and the College of Arts. My research trip to England last year was the highlight of my degree program. Thank you as well to various other PhD students, including Paul Danyluk, Rob Zacharias, Sally Booth, Elizabeth Groeneveld, and Lee Baxter, for their input and camaraderie. I must also recognize some popular cultural forms that have kept me sane, including the British band Elbow, especially the album “The Seldom Seen Kid;” Micah’s legendary band, Boy In December; and the BBC version of Pride and Prejudice; (yes, Bridget Jones, I’m thinking of the Colin Firth pond scene at Pemberley). Finally, thank you once again to Susan Brown. Her intellectual rigour, patience, generosity, and friendly “Cheers” at the end of every email have been continually noted and appreciated. I must also extend a general thank you to the University of Guelph, especially to the English faculty who provided me with excellent training during my undergraduate and doctoral degrees. I’d also be remiss if I didn’t acknowledge Food Services, the Arboretum, and the R. M. Rutherford greenhouse for the sustenance and quiet oases during study breaks. v Table of Contents Abstract Acknowledgements Introduction On Their Own 1 Chapter 1 “A Faithful and Most Loving Mother”: Disability, Self-Help, 42 and Cultural Maternalism in Dinah Craik’s Olive Chapter 2 Self-made Maids, Hardy Pioneers, and the Narratives of Self-Help 83 Chapter 3 Two Branches of the Same Tree: Individualism, Collectivism, 136 and Self-Help in Women’s Trade Unionist Literature Chapter 4 Nervousness, The Case Study, and Self-Help 172 in Ella Hepworth Dixon’s The Story of a Modern Woman Conclusion Rerouting the “Self” in “Help”: 212 Consciousness Raising, Recovery, and Feminism Works Cited 248 1 Introduction ON THEIR OWN While Bridget Jones is in the first glowing stages of dating Mark Darcy in Helen Fielding’s novel Bridget Jones: The Edge of Reason (1999), her girlfriend Sharon, nicknamed “Shaz,” rings her up while Mark Darcy is standing in the heroine’s living room. As Bridget desperately tries to get Sharon off the phone so she can get back to her date, Sharon expounds on the latest theory of male sexuality that she has picked up from the self-help book What Men Want, at which point Bridget interrupts, “Shaz, can I call you back later?” When Bridget recounts this telephone conversation in her diary, she describes the heated argument that ensued between Sharon and herself on the topic of feminism: Next thing Shaz was accusing me of being obsessed with men when I was supposed to be a feminist. So I said, if she was supposed to be so uninterested in them, why was she reading a book called What Men Want? It was all turning into a hideously unfeminist manbased row when we realized it was ridiculous and said we’d see each other tomorrow. (Fielding 16) This passage from the sequel to Bridget Jones’s Diary highlights a contradiction that runs throughout both novels but especially in the second work. Bridget and her friends label themselves as feminists, a term that Bridget interprets as the ability to stand on one’s “own two feet” (215; 231) without needing a man (299), but their bookshelves are chock- 2 full with self-help titles like Beyond Co-dependency with a Man Who Can’t Commit, Loving Your Separated Man Without Losing Your Mind, Happy to Be Single, How to Find Your Perfect Partner in Thirty Days, and Buddhism Made Simple. Helen Fielding’s series draws attention to an enigmatic ideological gap that exists between feminism and the enormous modern-day self-help market that is aimed at a twenty to thirty-something single female demographic. Whether intentionally or not, Fielding’s astute observation of the contradictory position of the modern woman—who is determined to stand alone without the need of a man while still feeling driven, partly by culture, to find a meaningful loving heterosexual relationship—meant that she was able to cash in hugely on the self-help market. Her anonymous column on Bridget Jones, a sarcastic, 30-something Londoner who worried about her career, love life, weight, and nicotine and alcohol consumption, became a regular column in the British newspaper The Independent and, later, in The Telegraph, receiving a mass readership, which was followed by her successful novels and their movie adaptations. Bridget Jones is just one of various examples of bestselling print forms turned Hollywood Blockbusters aimed at the single or newly divorced woman seeking emotional and spiritual fulfillment—Under the Tuscan Sun, He’s Just Not that Into You, and Eat, Pray, Love being some other recent examples. As Stephanie Merritt noted in 2008, “Self-help and advice is one of the biggest genres in publishing, netting over £50m per annum in the UK for the past four years” (Merritt), while the U.S. self-help market in 2008—the books, CDs, seminars, coaching and stress-management programs—was an 11-billion dollar industry (Lindner). Of course a great deal of the self-help market is aimed at a general audience and covers a range of topics, including physical and mental health, financial management, beauty makeovers 3 and home improvement, and spirituality. Nonetheless, recent literature on self-help books suggests that a considerable section of the industry is directed at women. As Joann Klimkiewicz noted in an article on self-help relationship books in The Toronto Star in 2006, “According to Barnes & Noble, 80 per cent of those who buy books on relationships are women. Relationship books for women outsell those for men by a ratio of 4 to 1” (L4).1 I bring up the example of Bridget Jones, in particular, because Fielding’s works draw attention to the problematic relationship between feminism and the self-help industry.
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