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Individualism, the New Woman, and Marriage in the Novels of Mary Ward, Sarah Grand, and Lucas Malet Tapanat Khunpakdee Departmen

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Individualism, the New Woman, and Marriage in the Novels of Mary Ward, Sarah Grand, and Lucas Malet Tapanat Khunpakdee Departmen Individualism, the New Woman, and marriage in the novels of Mary Ward, Sarah Grand, and Lucas Malet Tapanat Khunpakdee Department of English Royal Holloway, University of London Submitted for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy in English 2013 1 Individualism, the New Woman, and marriage in the novels of Mary Ward, Sarah Grand, and Lucas Malet Tapanat Khunpakdee Department of English Royal Holloway, University of London Submitted for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy in English 2013 2 Declaration of Authorship I, Tapanat Khunpakdee, hereby declare that this thesis and the work presented in it is entirely my own. Where I have consulted the work of others, this is always clearly stated. Signed: Date: 17 June, 2013 3 Abstract This thesis focuses upon the relationship between individualism, the New Woman, and marriage in the works of Mary Ward, Sarah Grand, and Lucas Malet. In examining how these three popular novelists of the late nineteenth century responded to the challenge of female individualism, this thesis traces the complex afterlife of John Stuart Mill’s contribution to Victorian feminism. The thesis evaluates competing models of liberty and the individual – freedom and self-development – in the later nineteenth century at the outset and traces how these differing models work their way through the response of popular writers on the Woman Question. Ward’s Robert Elsmere (1888) and Marcella (1894) posit an antagonism between the New Woman’s individualism and marriage. She associates individualism with selfishness, which explicates her New Woman characters’ personal and ideological transformation leading to marriage. The relinquishing of individualism suggests Ward’s ambivalent response to the nineteenth-century Woman Question. While Grand’s The Heavenly Twins (1893) and The Beth Book (1897) prioritise individualism over marriage when the husband proves immoral or violent, Malet’s unconventional representations or marriage in The Wages of Sin (1890) and The History of Sir Richard Calmady (1901) articulate her advocacy of female individualism. Malet’s New Woman heroines are free to carry on with the purity politics and sexual inversion which respectively characterise their individualism. Thus, the fact that Ward, Grand, and Malet focussed on the notion of female individualism in response to contemporaneous debates about marriage and the New Woman demonstrates its significance. Yet, based on their varied perspectives – Ward’s conservative rejection, Grand’s conditional endorsement, and Malet’s definite promotion – female individualism emerges as a still evolving concept. Reflecting the time in which they were written, these novels anticipated positive change in women’s situation while acknowledging that the New Woman, once married, must sacrifice her individualism unless her marriage proves to be companionate. 4 Acknowledgements I am greatly indebted to Dr Ruth Livesey and Professor Adam Roberts, my supervisor and advisor at the Department of English, Royal Holloway, University of London, for their valuable advice on my PhD thesis, and for being an unfailing source of inspiration and encouragement since I started my master’s degree programme. My special thanks are due to Professor Ann Heilmann at the Cardiff School of English, Communication and Philosophy, and Dr Naomi Hetherington at the Department of English and Humanities, Birkbeck, University of London, for examining my thesis. I am grateful for their time and comments which make the thesis all the more complete. I express my heartfelt thanks to Mrs Lynne Worthington, my personal tutor, and Mr Andrew Bent, my English Literature tutor, for the knowledge, encouragement, and above all, for making me feel at home while I was studying at Cambridge Tutors’ College. My thanks extend to the staff at the Department of English, University of Sussex, for providing me with the academic skills necessary for higher education. I thank the Royal Thai Government for the scholarship that has financed my studies in the United Kingdom, from A-Levels through to the completion of my doctoral degree. I wish to thank everyone at the Office of Educational Affairs (London) and the Office of the Civil Service Commission (Bangkok) for their advice and friendliness. I am also truly grateful for the generous study leave and good wishes from my colleagues at the Department of English, Faculty of Arts, Chulalongkorn University. My profound gratitude is especially due to Aunt Sothita, Aunt Plymas, Aunt Saipan, and Aunt Panuttha, for kindly welcoming me to their home during my writing up period. I am very thankful for their care, advice, and encouragement. I am especially indebted to Auntie Mas for the invaluable advice, generosity, and sacrifice as she devotes her time, energy, and resources to guiding me through these final stages. Without her help, I would not have been able to complete the thesis in time. Above all, I would like to express my utmost gratitude to my parents, Associate Professor Nandha and Mr. Poramed Khunpakdee. I thank them for their love and support, for instilling in me the love of language and reading, and for proving such positive influences in my pursuit of higher education. I would like to dedicate this thesis to them as a token of my love and absolute gratitude. Tapanat Khunpakdee 17 June, 2013 5 Table of Contents Page Declaration of Authorship 2 Abstract 3 Acknowledgements 4 Table of Contents 5 Introduction 6 Part One: Mary Ward 55 Chapter 1 Robert Elsmere (1888): Individualism, the New Woman, and the Feminine Ideal 56 Chapter 2 Marcella (1894): Individualism, the New Woman, and the Representation of Marriage as Conservative Modernity 88 Part Two: Sarah Grand 129 Chapter 3 The Heavenly Twins (1893): Individualism, the New Woman, and Desire 130 Chapter 4 The Beth Book (1897): Individualism, Duty, and Violence 171 Part Three: Lucas Malet 211 Chapter 5 The Wages of Sin (1890): Individualism, the New Woman, and the Absence of Marriage 212 Chapter 6 The History of Sir Richard Calmady (1901): Individualism, the New Woman, and Unconsummated Marriage 251 Conclusion 292 Bibliography 307 6 Introduction The last three decades have witnessed a distinct growth of scholarly interest in the late Victorian period and in particular, the literature and social debates surrounding the ‘New Woman’. The early ground-breaking work of 1970s critics was developed further in the 1990s and beyond by Ann Ardis, Ann Heilmann and Sally Ledger, and has been followed by more specific studies by Iveta Jusov , Teresa Mangum, and Angelique Richardson.1 While early studies did much to recover near-forgotten women writers and establish key themes within their fiction, later works have focussed on individual authors and extra-textual contexts (such as eugenics in Richardson’s case). This study extends and develops this rich field in two ways. First, it brings together an unexpected grouping of popular women writers, who, I argue, were responding to the widespread discourses and debates surrounding the late-nineteenth-century Woman Question. Although Sarah Grand is at the centre of most studies of the New Woman phenomenon, the works of Mary Ward and Lucas Malet are rarely studied in this light. I shall suggest that these latter two writers provide important insights into the wider ramifications of the Woman Question in late nineteenth-century fiction. Both Ward and Malet, in very different ways, deploy iterations of the New Woman heroine to test established plot formats, such as the Bildungsroman, and explore the question of marriage and sexual relations in their works. 1 Ann Ardis, New Women, New Novels: Feminism and Early Modernism (London: Rutgers University Press, 1990); Ann Heilmann, New Woman Fiction: Women Writing First-Wave Feminism (Basingstoke: Macmillan, 2000); eta uso The New Woman and the Empire (Columbus: The Ohio State University Press, 2005); Sally Ledger, The New Woman: Fiction and Feminism at the Fin de Siècle (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1997), hereafter abbreviated as NW; Teresa Mangum, Married, Middlebrow, and Militant: Sarah Grand and the New Woman Novel (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2001); Angelique Richardson, Love and Eugenics in the Late Nineteenth Century: Rational Reproduction and the New Woman (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2003), hereafter abbreviated as LELNC. 7 The second key contribution this thesis aims to make is to consider these reworkings of the New Woman and the marriage plot in relation to individualism. As will become clear through the thesis, the liberal understanding of individualism – the duty to act for the self over and above the needs of community – had been central to the formation of the ‘Woman Question’ earlier in the nineteenth century: with particular reference to married women’s property, the campaign to repeal the contagious diseases acts and the wider question of women’s legal status in marriage. This political concept of individualism, which I have considered during the preliminary research and will use throughout this thesis, interacts and informs the textual representation of individuality of each central female character; it also serves as another clear and crucial factor to help reconstruct the cultural history of that time for our modern-day comprehension. The aim of this thesis is thus to arrive at a broader and deeper understanding of progressive change in women’s position as it was imagined across a spectrum of popular literary texts of the 1880s and 1890s. This is, in other words, a development in the field of the New Woman study. But before establishing a conceptual framework of individualism within which to read the selection of novels, the Victorian era must first be contextualised. I. The Late-Victorian Period As a result of the Industrial Revolution of the mid eighteenth century, the early Victorian period underwent immense transformation, mostly in terms of urbanisation and the difficulties it entailed. A connection between the economic and social effects the revolution had on people may be seen in inequities and injustices, which were the fruit of the great divide between the rich and the poor.
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