Narrative Intimacy: the Confidante in the Nineteenth-Century British Novel a Dissertation Presented to the Faculty of the Gradua

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Narrative Intimacy: The Confidante in the Nineteenth-Century British Novel

A Dissertation

Presented to

The Faculty of the Graduate School of Arts and Sciences Brandeis University

Department of English

John Plotz, Advisor

In Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements for the Degree Doctor of Philosophy

Abigail Arnold

May 2020

This dissertation, directed and approved by Abigail Arnold’s Committee, has been accepted and approved by the Faculty of Brandeis University in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of:

DOCTOR OF PHILOSOPHY

Eric Chasalow, Dean Graduate School of Arts and Sciences

Dissertation Committee:

John Plotz, English Ulka Anjaria, English Aeron Hunt, English, Boston College

2020

Acknowledgments

Just as the heroine needs the confidante to help her tell her story, I needed many other people to help me complete this dissertation. Firstly, I want to extend my thanks to my committee. John Plotz, my advisor and chair, guided me through all stages of this project, from developing the idea to preparing for the defense. His ideas for texts and scholars to explore helped me to develop my understanding of this rich field and to incorporate new points of view into my work; his encouragement to present and participate in scholarly events sparked my intellectual development; his questions and suggestions pushed me to take my thoughts further, to explore new concepts, and to make smaller points into something greater. Ulka Anjaria helped me to expand on parts of my project that were underdeveloped and was instrumental in guiding me to articulate and express the larger stakes of this dissertation. Her advice and aid as Director of Graduate Studies was also a great help to me in navigating my experience at Brandeis and my plans for the future, as was her guidance in teaching. Aeron Hunt’s generous work as my third reader helped me to develop and improve my analysis. She also pointed me towards new resources and was a great person with whom to discuss Victorian literature. Thank you to all of my committee for helping me make this project what it is.

Other Brandeis faculty and staff also helped me towards the development of this project.

Lisa Pannella and Leah Steele always had answers to my questions and made this entire process a lot less overwhelming. They were also extremely helpful in figuring out the logistics for what turned out to be a dissertation defense in the time of coronavirus. Laura Quinney, as a member of my field exam committee, greatly helped me to improve my understanding of nineteenth-century poetry and its connections to other literary genres; she was always helpful in talking me through

new ideas. Sue Lanser, whose graduate seminar I took in my first semester at Brandeis, influenced the direction of my studies immeasurably; she has always provided help and resources, guided me towards exploring women’s intimacies, and gave me the opportunity to sit down and read Clarissa.

My Brandeis peers and colleagues have been wonderful resources and friends over the course of my time in this program. Paige Eggebrecht, my fellow nineteenth-century scholar, recommended texts, read my writing, and helped me prepare for my field exam. My PhD cohort, consisting of Diana Filar, Seolji Han, Pyunghwa Lee, and Reza Pourmikail, were wonderful people with whom to share this experience. I have enjoyed many hours talking with all of them about a wide range of topics, including but not limited to coursework, scholarship, favorite books, future plans, time-wasting television suggestions, seafaring tales, and the number of l’s in life. They have made my graduate school experience an enjoyable and memorable one.

Finally, I would like to thank my family, who have always supported me through my scholarly endeavors. My extended family has cheered me on the whole way. My parents, Ann

Carol Grossman and Geoffrey Arnold, have encouraged me in pursuing this degree and listened to me talking through my ideas, struggles, and triumphs. They have always been there for me when things were challenging and celebrated with me when things were good. I truly could not have completed this dissertation without them.

ABSTRACT

Narrative Intimacy: The Confidante in the Nineteenth-Century British Novel

A dissertation presented to the Faculty of the Graduate School of Arts and Sciences of Brandeis University Waltham, Massachusetts

By Abigail Arnold

“Narrative Intimacy” argues that the figure of the confidante plays a major role in the nineteenth-century British novel through her foregrounding of two factors: the vital importance of female intimacy and the interpersonal development of narrative. Although the confidante is usually a socially marginalized figure—a woman of a lower social class, frequently disabled, who participates in the marriage plots of others rather than her own—she takes a central place in the form of the novel’s narrative through her reception of others’ confidences, which she in turn helps to convey to the reader. Through readings of novels including Jane Austen’s Mansfield

Park, Harriet Martineau’s Deerbrook, Charles Dickens’s Bleak House, Amy Levy’s The

Romance of a Shop, and George Paston’s A Writer of Books, I show how the confidante’s relationship to her confiding friend troubles the centrality of the heterosexual marriage plot.

Instead, these novels emphasize women’s intimacies with each other and thus queer the marriage plot, leading to such conclusions as a non-traditional found family (as in Bleak House) or a woman finding refuge with a female friend after the collapse of her marriage (as in A Writer of

Books). Furthermore, the confidante serves to facilitate the telling of the novel’s story. Her presence allows other characters to express their thoughts, feelings, and secrets, which the reader then receives access to, usually through the confidante’s own perspective or narration.

This study builds on scholarship on both nineteenth-century women’s relationships and narrative theory in order to illustrate how the two combine: how the novel’s narrative is built on the passing along of confidences between intimates and thus foregrounds that intimacy. The conclusion of the confidante plot varies from text to text and develops over time. In Mansfield

Park and Deerbrook, while the form of the novel emphasizes female intimacy, its ending returns to the heterosexual marriage plot; Bleak House, by contrast, presents a continuum of relationships in which queer female intimacy and heterosexual marriage exist in non-hierarchical harmony. The Romance of a Shop and A Writer of Books portray female intimacies developed in the world of work, and their heroines must choose between this realm and the domestic space.

While these conclusions present alternate fates for the confidante, I argue that she remains central to the reader’s understanding, both for her foregrounding of alternate queer intimacies and her shaping of the novelistic form.

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Table of Contents

Introduction

The Development of Confidences ...... 1

Chapter One

The Margin Plot: Narrative Positioning and Disability in Mansfield Park and Deerbrook ...... 26

Chapter Two

The Confidante’s Self-Expression in Bleak House ...... 80

Chapter Three

Confidantes at Work in The Romance of a Shop and A Writer of Books ...... 130

Conclusion

Emotional Labor and Later Confidantes ...... 179

Works Cited ...... 192

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Introduction

The Development of Confidences

Samuel Richardson’s Clarissa, or, The History of a Young Lady (1747-1748), one of the earliest English novels, is likely best known for its fraught pairing between the virtuous heroine

Clarissa and the wicked Lovelace. Their battle between goodness and sin occupies much of the text, culminating in the deaths of both. While their interactions are central to the novel’s content, another relationship governs its form: that between Clarissa and her best friend, Anna Howe.

Through the device of the novel’s epistolary form, Clarissa constantly confides in Anna about what is happening to her; their separation and exchange of letters allows the story to unfold.1

Thus, in this formative early novel, Anna Howe, the confidante, takes a central position.

As confidante, she has an important place in both the novel’s story and its form, prefiguring the many later confidantes who appear in the novels of the nineteenth century. The intimacy between the two women both helps sustain Clarissa through her trials and serves to shape Clarissa’s progress, affecting our understanding of the narrative’s movement, the players in its marriage plot, and its expectations of femininity. The confidences between the two friends drive the novel’s narrative. Readers are able to know what happens to Clarissa because Anna exists: she provides a way for Clarissa to express not only what happens to her but how she feels about it.

Anna performs vital work, not only by reading Clarissa’s letters, but by providing counsel in her responses; even when Clarissa does not listen to Anna, the letters suggest possible alternate paths

1 Mary A. Favret examines the traditional construction of epistolary forms as feminine and private, arguing that they also interact with the public sphere (10-11). Here, Anna and Clarissa’s letters serve as a form that makes Clarissa’s private suffering public.

for the story, thought experiments for the reader to explore even when the novel forecloses them.2 One such alternate path is that of a marriage plot between Clarissa and Anna, rather than

Clarissa and Lovelace. Anna suggests a possible escape for the two women—she asks Clarissa,

“Whether you choose not rather to go off with one of your own sex; with your ANNA HOWE— than with one of the other; with MR LOVELACE?” (Richardson 356). Furthermore, she expresses her own affection for Clarissa in terms suggestive first of sexual passion, writing “I love you, as never woman loved another,” and later of marriage: “My better half is torn from me,” she laments after Clarissa’s death (Richardson 40, 1404). While Clarissa resists Anna’s plans as possibly discreditable, this potential queer marriage plot continues to occupy space in the novel, despite what Susan S. Lanser describes as attempts at the “containment” of female- female desire in the domestic novel (169).

At the same time, however, Anna’s role is not solely to disrupt conventional heterosexual marriage and women’s domestic positions. The end of the novel, in which Anna marries a man and takes over all of the late Clarissa’s charities, suggests that she has found her place in the world of female-coded labor. However, Anna’s earlier work of listening to, comforting, and advising Clarissa—prioritizing her friend over herself—also has a traditionally feminine dimension. This intimacy in some ways disrupts heterosexuality, as Anna and Clarissa focus on their own relationship over those with men. However, these aspects of their relationship also prefigure the Victorian intertwining of female intimacy and the place of woman as wife that

2 Gillian Beer discusses this novelistic feature in her examination of Thomas Hardy: “a succession of ghost plots is present. The persistently almost-attained happy alternatives are never quite obliterated by the actual terrible events” (239). Andrew H. Miller further explores this idea, writing of the “recognition that there are counterfactual lives each character is pointedly not living” and arguing that “such counterfactual imaginings were built into the realistic novel as a part of its very structure” (“Lives Unled” 119, 120). He also emphasizes the way in which the novel’s perspectives are influenced (BoP 25) by the idea of “moral perfectionism” (BoP 14). We will see alternative possibilities to the heterosexual marriage plot offered throughout these novels by the confidante plots, even when they do not come to fruition at the novel’s conclusions.

Sharon Marcus discusses in Between Women, in which she writes, “Victorians accepted friendship between women because they believed it cultivated the feminine virtues…that made women into good helpmates” (26). We cannot simply say, therefore, that Anna and Clarissa’s intimacy is either wholly subversive or wholly conventional; instead, it serves to facilitate the potential for both a traditional heterosexual marriage plot and for an alternative queer one.

As Lanser points out, the form of Clarissa—and of many eighteenth-century novels— supports its portrayal of confidence and of female intimacy. She writes, “Homodiegetic narrative

[in which the narrative consists of letters or other ‘documents’ created within the text] allows direct representation of female intimacy in a way that heterodiegetic narration [using an outside point of view] more readily attenuates. Certainly heterodiegesis turns the novel away from the dialogic structure of female confidence, walling off same-sex narration along with same-sex event” (190). Through the eighteenth century’s popular forms of epistolary narratives and other narratives that are formed around documents (such as journals), the novel makes confidence a part of its structure, necessary to its telling; through this, it makes female intimacy at least implicit in all that occurs. As the nineteenth-century novel began to engage more with free indirect discourse or the first-person narrative, the confidence might not play as obvious a role in the novel’s structure.3 Instead of the novel being constructed out of “written” confidences, it instead represents them among other elements of life.

Nevertheless, despite Lanser’s argument, the confidante continues to play a major role in the nineteenth-century British novel, and her position replicates many of the features of Anna

3 Some novels retain these forms throughout the nineteenth century: novelists such as Mary Shelley, Wilkie Collins, and Bram Stoker use “documents” from different narrators to make up their texts, and many first person-narratives, including Charlotte Brontë’s Jane Eyre (1847) and Charles Dickens’s David Copperfield (1850), are constructed as alleged autobiographies that their narrators are “writing.” The document narrative ceases to be the dominant form to the extent that it was in the eighteenth century, however.

Howe’s. Even with shifts in the novel’s form, we can see that multiple types of narrative are built around confidence. The confidence may, as with letters, occupy the central position in the novel’s construction, or, as with free indirect discourse, be one event among many (Jane

Austen’s Pride and Prejudice (1813), one of the prototypical novels of free indirect discourse, represents Elizabeth and Jane Bennet’s private confidences about their potential lovers, but it also represents a broad variety of balls, family gatherings, and elopement panics). Either way, however, the confidence plays a similar role in shaping the story. Confidence, or the sharing of personal information, serves as a device that allows the transmission of information, providing a vital sense of what characters are thinking and feeling. At the same time, it creates an important role for a female figure in receiving and passing on this information and thus in forming narrative. It makes female intimacy—the relationships that exist between pairs or groups of women, usually when men are not present—into an essential aspect of the novel as well, one that can vie for precedence with the heterosexual marriage plot.

While the confidante as an individual is often a marginalized person, we can thus see that the figure of the confidante, far from being a marginal one, has its roots in the early development of the English novel. From the start, in Clarissa, two essential elements of the confidante figure are linked. The confidante exemplifies female bonds, participating in a central female pairing that adds a queer dimension to the novel’s construction of intimacy and suggests that such pairings are at least as important as heterosexual marriage. And through her work of listening, advising, sympathizing, and sharing, the confidante serves to form the novel’s narrative, allowing the conveyance of information to take place and the story to unfold for the novel’s reader. These two layers of connection—between the confidante and her female friend and between the confidante and the reader—emphasize the idea of the confidence as a form of

storytelling that also builds connections between individuals. As Patricia Meyer Spacks writes,

“Novelistic narrators often arouse in readers the kind of intense interest in personal detail that gossip generates, and they may attempt to establish with their reader a kind of relationship approximating that of gossip” (10). This sort of connection between personal exchange and fictional narrative serves to define the confidante’s role: she builds intimacy with her female friend through confidences, and this forms a narrative in which that intimacy is at the center.

Who Is the Confidante?

While she has yet to be discussed in a book-length study, the confidante is ubiquitous in the nineteenth-century British novel. The device of the heroine and her friend, sharing their feelings about potential romances, is a particularly common one and perhaps the first that springs to mind, but in fact the confidante’s position in the novel and interaction with others can take many forms. To begin this study, I will first give a working definition of the confidante and a description of her general traits, her possible positions within the narrative, and some different forms her role can take.

The confidante is a character who receives, from her intimates, information about events, emotions, and entanglements in their lives, often ones to which she is not considered directly a party. Her “confider” is a character who shares such information, at times seeking the confidante’s help, at times merely wishing to unburden herself.4 While the confidante frequently has multiple confiders, she is also usually paired with a particular female friend, with whom she has her primary interactions. The two each experience life differently, especially as it relates to

4 The “confider” in these texts is most frequently another woman, but sometimes the confidante has male confiders as well; in such cases, the male confiders are usually paired romantically with the female confiders, and they share details of their joint romance.

the marriage plot, in which the friend who confides has frequently advanced further; the confidante must listen to accounts of experiences that she has not had and often seems unable to have. She is expected to take in and manage the feelings of others, and often to provide them with advice about how to handle them, while keeping her own feelings in check. Her role seems to be merely to listen, to be on the periphery of others’ lives, feelings, and relationships—to receive accounts of others without being afforded the opportunity to provide them with an account of herself.

The confidante’s position as a marginal figure frequently has to do with her social status.

Her role of placing others’ needs first is connected to her role as a female worker: she is frequently a governess or companion. As Lauren N. Hoffer writes, the nineteenth-century companion’s job was to show sympathy: “Employing a companion could permit a Victorian lady with enough disposable income the opportunity to receive sympathy, without the necessity of reciprocation” (193). Beyond the demands of this role, she is removed from her desired marriage plot, at least early on in the novel, because of what the text constructs as a form of material inadequacy. She is disabled or sickly (Deerbrook’s Maria Young or Mansfield Park’s Fanny

Price), disfigured (Bleak House’s Esther Summerson), or physically unattractive (The Woman in

White’s Marian Halcombe). In addition, her financially dependent position forces her to concentrate on working for others or maintaining herself, rather than on the social interactions that might lead to marriage. Because the confidante is seen as a nonviable marriage partner— usually both by those around her and by herself—she seems a natural fit for the role of the listener and the facilitator of the marriage plots of others. Her social role and her place in the novel’s plot seemingly lead her to occupy the minor “character-space” described by Alex

Woloch, in which she is “juxtaposed” with more major characters in order to enable the telling of

their stories (14, 43). This is particularly true if we read the marriage plot as the central concern of the nineteenth-century novel. Such a reading would generally make the confidante a supporting player in bringing others towards the conclusion of this plot.

Indeed, the confidante is intertwined with the novel’s marriage plot, whatever her ultimate status as a character. Through her position, she serves to triangulate the heterosexual romance, forming intimacies with both partners through listening to their accounts. She synthesizes their stories and helps to form a judgment on the viability of their relationship. In novels such as Jane Austen’s Mansfield Park (1814) and Charles Dickens’s Bleak House (1853), for example, both the female and male lovers confide in the confidante; she serves as an outlet for them to express feelings which they cannot express to each other. This process makes the confidante a central participant in the marriage plot, rather than merely a side figure. She is essential to its progress and functions as the only character who can see all the cards.

The confidante’s presence also serves to put pressure on the centrality of the heterosexual pairing. Her intimacy with her female friend becomes at least as important as the marital pairing itself, and the novel finds various ways to either break down or instantiate this new centrality. At one extreme, Mansfield Park allows Fanny, once the confidante, to supplant her friend Mary as the heroine of the marriage plot and banishes Mary from the family circle; at the other, Bleak

House concludes with a larger network of intimacies in which Esther’s ultimate marriage exists alongside her continued love for her friend Ada and their co-raising of Ada’s child. While marriage and female intimacy are sometimes opposed, they also exist as paired powerful forces, both serving to shape the novel’s development and creating alternate paths for the heroine’s loyalties. This pairing of intimacies is in line with Marcus’s analysis (26), and these novels additionally posit queer female intimacies that can supplant or exist alongside marriage; they

suggest that the confidante plot can be equally as important as the marriage plot, if not more so.

For example, George Paston’s 1890s novel A Writer of Books portrays its heroine, Cosima

Chudleigh, finding refuge in a female friend after leaving her husband, which allows her to return to the life of a writer that her marriage stifled. The relative places of confidante and marriage plots can thus take different forms. While Bleak House incorporates both relationships into a single household, A Writer of Books suggests that its heroine must make a choice—but, notably, that marriage is not the best option.

The different paths the confidante can take also serve to shape the space she occupies within the novel. Here, I draw on Woloch’s concepts of the “character-space” occupied by each character in a novel and how these make up the “character-system,” while emphasizing the extent to which a character’s position within a novel is not, in fact, fixed (14). While the confidante and the heroine might seem like complementary roles, they are in fact porous and shifting. The confidante may begin as a secondary character and then shift to the central role. She may supplant the heroine in the marriage plot, or she may remain outside the marriage plot while still occupying a central space in the reader’s consciousness of the text and suggesting that the marriage plot is not, in fact, the novel’s sole important concern. The confidante’s shifting positions are also influenced by her relationship to the recounting of the novel’s narrative.

Through serving as listener, she conveys events in other characters’ lives to the reader. This is particularly pronounced when the confidante also serves as narrator, as in Bleak House, but even texts that are told through third-person narration make use of the confidante to bring forward other characters’ thoughts and secrets. In line with Spacks’s analysis of gossip and narrative (10), just as the process of confiding serves to cement the connection between the confider and the confidante, the transmission of these confidences to the reader serves to cement the connection

between the confidante and the reader. This makes the confidante loom larger in our conception of the novel, particularly as we come to know her through her responses to what she hears. In

Mansfield Park, when Mary confides in Fanny, we learn not only of Mary’s thoughts and requests but of Fanny’s internal feelings: her “distressing” uncertainty or the fact that she “would rather not have been asked” to write to Mary, even though she agrees to do so (“MP” 625). This moment thus serves to let the reader know what Mary says and what Fanny thinks of it. It builds not only the reader’s store of information but their understanding of Fanny, into whose mind the narration gives insight.

While the confidante does share some general traits across different texts, there are also a variety of narrative forms that her story can take, and indeed we can see elements of the confidante in many nineteenth-century novelistic heroines who have not previously been viewed as part of this category. The first form is that of the romantic triangle. Here, the confidante interacts with a heterosexual romantic couple, both of whom typically confide in her, while harboring her own romantic feelings for the male partner. Such a plot can end in one of two ways: with the original confidante somehow replacing the female partner to join in the marriage plot or with the confidante left on the outside. Examples of the first type include Fanny’s supplanting of Mary in Mansfield Park and Agnes’s marriage to David after Dora’s death in

Dickens’s David Copperfield (1850); examples of the second type include Maria in Harriet

Martineau’s Deerbrook (1839) and Lucy Snowe in Charlotte Brontë’s Villette (1853). The confidante’s exclusion from the romance plot often seems linked to her role as a domestic worker (Maria and Lucy are both teachers or governesses), particularly to her self-perception as such: she views herself as an unworthy outsider.

However, this is not always the case: the figure of the worker as confidante also figures in novels of a second type, in which the confidante participates in a triangle without wishing to disrupt it. Here, the confidante also interacts with a heterosexual romantic couple but does not have romantic feelings for the male partner; rather than interfering with their romance, she helps to facilitate it, and her connection to the partners becomes as important as their connection to each other. Esther in Bleak House is the most prominent example of this; as housekeeper and companion, she makes being a confidante itself almost her profession. This professionalization of confidence can also take other forms—in Dickens’s Little Dorrit (1857), Mrs. General makes her living as a companion; in Anthony Trollope’s The Duke’s Children (1880), the duke attempts to assign his friend Mrs. Finn to the role of his daughter Mary’s substitute mother, putting her in a difficult position when Mary wants her to keep secrets. Within the domestic space, sharing and keeping confidences becomes one of a woman’s professional roles, one which she must balance with her other duties of romance, family, and friendship.5

While romantic triangles may end in the rejection of the confidante or in using her to replace the previous heroine, there is also a third option: the triangle may expand to include her, creating another form of relationship between same-sex intimacy and heterosexual marriage. In

Wilkie Collins’s The Woman in White (1860), Marian Halcombe serves as confidante and aid for her sister Laura and Laura’s lover Walter; when the two marry, Marian moves into their home with them, and the novel’s final line—“Marian was the good angel of our lives—let Marian end our Story”—serves to emphasize her centrality to the couple (Collins 502). Rather than

5 While confidences are often linked to the domestic realm, they also serve to facilitate narrative in a common trope particularly of the early nineteenth-century novel: the prison confession. In novels including Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein (1818), Sir Walter Scott’s The Heart of Midlothian (1818), and George Eliot’s Adam Bede (1859), an imprisoned woman makes a confession to and seeks help from another woman who visits her. This form of narrative especially shows the power of the confidence to move the plot: through the presence of the confidante, we are able both to learn the truth of the imprisoned woman’s crimes and to see the path towards a possible resolution.

privileging the heterosexual romance pairing, this moment emphasizes the confidante relationship while also intertwining it with the married pair; neither exists alone. We see a similar pattern with male confidants in novels including George Eliot’s Daniel Deronda (1876) and Mary Elizabeth Braddon’s Lady Audley’s Secret (1862); in both of these novels, the hero marries the sister of a dear friend who ends up living with the couple and whose presence is emphasized as equally important as the marriage itself.6 Such novels thus show the potential of the confidant(e) to upset and subvert the novel’s ostensible aims. Instead of building to the conclusion of a marriage plot, the novel instead builds towards creating a wider world of intimacies which are not hierarchically arranged; the marriage exists alongside other, equally important relationships in these novels, as well as in Bleak House. Same-sex intimacy is as important as heterosexuality, and the confidante’s presence serves to facilitate this interaction and coexistence of different forms of relationships.

Such coexistence is not always simple, however, as we see in late nineteenth-century novels which feature working confidantes. In New Woman novels, female friendships are frequently situated within the world of work; the heroine confides in her friend about her professional goals and frequently receives practical help from her. These characters struggle, however, to balance professional life with the marriage plot and often must choose between the two. This is a problem not faced by the male heroes of the same period, who are able to continue their work without marriage presenting any interference; witness Dr. Watson, whose marriage falls into the background, allowing him to continue his partnership with Sherlock Holmes just as before.

6 Eve Sedgwick’s theorization of the erotic charge between male rivals (in which she draws on René Girard) also holds true here for male friends (21); in both cases, the woman in the triangle seems to be the least important figure.

Such patterns raise the question of how the role of the confidante is a gendered one. If the purpose of the confidante is to facilitate narrative development and allow the centrality of same- sex intimacy, why should this be a uniquely female job? Although we do see male confidants who take on similar roles, particularly in the marriage triangle novels discussed above, the role of confidante does contain some dimensions that are particularly tied to female characters.

Specifically, her initial marginalization as a figure outside the marriage plot—“out of the game” as Maria says in Deerbrook (46)—is linked to her femininity and to her lack of other viable options. While the male confidant can easily take center stage in some other form of plot—work, travel, solving mysteries—the female figure, especially in the domestic novel, is still linked to marriage as the ultimate fate, and the woman who cannot marry is thus forced into the role of listening to others’ tales of love. Although the conclusions of these novels can trouble marriage’s centrality, and the New Woman novels present pushback against this sole plot, we begin from the premise that the unmarriageable woman must find her purpose in being a friend and that this is at best a consolation prize. This is further exemplified by the unmarried woman’s work in a domestic role. She is in the realm of the home but without a home of her own, and her work is not presented as a vocation but as a necessity.7 As we will see, however, the development of the confidante shows that female intimacy is not second-rate but an option that provides its own meanings to these novels’ heroines and confidantes and allows them to flourish.

Female Intimacy and the Confidante’s Contexts

7 Lucy Snowe, for example, works as a teacher and expresses her dream of having her own school in Villette. However, as she spends much of the novel insulting her students and starts her first class by locking one in a closet (Villette 73), I would argue that teaching is not Lucy’s passion but her idea of the best way to support herself outside marriage.

Particularly since the 1980s, scholars have increasingly focused on female intimacies in the nineteenth century, in the fields of both history and literature; my study follows in this realm through its exploration of what such same-sex intimacy means for the shape of the novel. The role and identity of the female subject have long been a prominent topic in studies of the nineteenth-century novel genre. Nancy Armstrong, in Desire and Domestic Fiction, focuses on the novel as creating “a specific female ideal” and a uniquely female form of subjectivity: she asserts that, as developed through the novel, “the modern individual was first and foremost a woman” (8). Catherine Gallagher also develops this view in “Nobody’s Story,” in which she focuses on the novel’s creation of a subject who lacks “a material referent in the world” and the particular “emotional practice” of female readers in sympathizing with this subject (269, 275).

Mary Poovey’s work in Uneven Developments also plays an important role in this discussion; her work on the governess, whom she defines as a “conduit” and figure trapped between multiple possible class positions, illuminates the pressures facing the female subject and especially the often socially marginal confidante (129).

On the other hand, critics such as Armstrong argue that female experience in these novels is defined by the marriage plot. When discussing the novel’s conclusion in marriage, Armstrong describes it as “focus[ing] on domestic life and the personal experience of women” and emphasizes “the good marriage concluding fiction of this kind, where characters achieve propriety without compromising their domestic virtue” (48). However, the plot of the confidante shows that “the personal experience of women” is not defined only by marriage and heterosexuality but by a wide range of relationships including female intimacy and a connection to the reader.

However, scholars in this field have also emphasized the ways in which women’s intimacies shape the novel and interact with the marriage plot. Janet Todd’s Women’s Friendship in Literature, an early text in the area of women’s intimacies, examines women’s friendship in late eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century novels, arguing for a more central consideration of female friendship and the way it can steal attention from the marriage plot in the texts of this period. Todd largely reads female friendship and marriage as opposing forces; in her readings of

Mansfield Park and Emma, for example, she argues that “With the help of men, Fanny avoids being a female friend; with the help of women, Emma tries to avoid being a wife” (Women’s

Friendship 275). While this is true in some cases, the place of the confidante within the marriage plot in fact makes this more complex. Instead of being opposed, marriage and female intimacy are able to feed off of each other and to coexist, an idea more in line with Marcus’s Between

Women. Marcus argues that relationships between women in Victorian England were neither opposed to heterosexuality nor captured by later conceptions of lesbianism (a central concern in much of this scholarship). Instead, she writes, women’s intimacies co-existed with heterosexuality and with social expectations for women, as part of “the complexity of systems in which constraint was inseparable from liberty, action, and recreation, from a degree of give built into social rules, offering those who lived by them flexibility, if not utter freedom,” a state of things which she terms “the play of the system” (Marcus 26-27). Furthermore, Marcus argues that “the Victorian gender system…provided women latitude through female friendships, giving them room to roam without radically changing the normative rules governing gender difference”

(27). In applying this argument to literature, she argues that “Victorian novels make female friendship the catalyst of the marriage plot” (Marcus 79). These ideas help us to understand the ways in which reading the novel through the confidante plot allows us to see the marriage plot as

potentially decentralized and destabilized as female intimacy becomes more important to our understanding of both the novel’s events and its narrative forms.

Marcus’s approach draws on historical studies that focus closely on women’s bonds, especially three foundational texts: Martha Vicinus’s Intimate Friends, Lillian Faderman’s

Surpassing the Love of Men, and Carroll Smith-Rosenberg’s “The Female World of Love and

Ritual.” These texts examine nineteenth-century attitudes towards female intimacy, generally espousing the idea that, prior to the works of Havelock Ellis and Sigmund Freud, a greater degree of physical and emotional intimacy was tolerated and accepted (IF xx-xxix; Faderman

15-19; Smith-Rosenberg 2, 7-9, 27-29). Such approaches inform my understanding of the confidante and the ways in which she brings female homosocial intimacy to the forefront of the novel, simultaneously acting in conjunction with the marriage plot and raising questions about its supremacy. The presence of the confidante produces such results as queer love triangles, non- traditional family structures, homosocial bonds at least as important as heterosexual romance, and female communities built around shared work rather than marital futures. Through her reception and production of narrative, the confidante thus shapes the novel so that it concludes with a queered version of the traditional marriage plot: perhaps with a non-traditional female- driven family, as in Bleak House, or with a woman turning to a female friend after a failed marriage, as in A Writer of Books. Even in novels whose conclusions do involve heterosexual marriage, the confidante’s place within the marriage triangle troubles our assumptions about what types of relationships are actually central to the nineteenth-century novel.

Other studies in this vein also help to illustrate the vital functions of women’s relationships, particularly as they interact with other social conventions. Jill Rappoport’s Giving

Women, which focuses on women’s use of gift giving and social charity to form alliances and

groups, emphasizes women’s social differences, an important element in understanding the confidante as a marginalized figure. The role of difference is also central to Helena Michie’s

Sororophobia, in which she focuses on the antagonism present in female dyads and pushes back on the notion of the unproblematic “sister” metaphor; she writes, “This place of difference is a troubling one; it is more comforting to imagine that difference can be contained and kept at bay by the construction of a single, powerful identity” (4). Paying attention to the differences inherent in seemingly close and intimate relationships is central to an understanding of the confidante. These tensions are also present in Carolyn W. de la L. Oulton’s Romantic Friendship in Victorian Literature, a text that does not focus solely on women but that engages with the question of categories of intimacy, placing romantic friendship in its own: “romantic friendship had always been dependent for its survival on its capacity for self-regulation, and this is how it was initially able to combat the ‘findings’ of sexologists at the end of the century” (3). Oulton’s reading of Bleak House emphasizes the opposition between Esther and Ada, suggesting that one can only succeed through the other’s fall (Oulton 91-93). While such an opposition might very well describe some of the female pairings in this study—particularly Fanny and Mary—I question its application to Bleak House’s conclusion, which emphasizes an overcoming of differences and an embrace of non-traditional, non-hierarchical relationships. When Esther and

Ada are positioned as Ada’s son’s “two mamas,” their partnership takes on an egalitarian dimension that is also overtly queer; although Esther is married at this point and Ada is widowed, it is clear that their own intimacy is as central as any potential relationships with men

(BH 665).

In this study, I build on this scholarship to explore the unique features of the confidante relationship. In particular, I emphasize the ways in which the confidante queers the marriage plot

and, in turn, what this foregrounding of female homosocial intimacy does to the shape of the novel. It creates a broader conclusion for the novel’s story, ending in a wider network of relationships rather than a single pairing. The formation of the novel’s story is also in large part governed by the confidante herself, with intimacy and narrative linked through her reception of confidences.

The Confidante’s Narrative Space

Through her role in receiving narrative, the confidante is able to occupy multiple spaces in the novel, functioning simultaneously as major and minor character and taking different roles within formal groupings of character relationships. We can understand her position in relation to the “character-space” and the “character-system” (Woloch 14). Woloch defines these terms as

“that particular and charged encounter between an individual human personality and a determined space and position within the narrative as a whole” and “the arrangement of multiple and differentiated character-spaces—differentiated configurations and manipulations of the human figure—into a unified narrative structure,” respectively (14). The confidante often seems to occupy a minor “character-space” within the novel’s plotting, observing rather than taking a central role in acting and participating in its events. This further connects to her social marginalization within the story of the novel. She is frequently a disabled or working-class woman, because of which she is not seen as worthy of consideration or centrality by those around her. As in David T. Mitchell and Sharon L. Snyder’s conception of “narrative prosthesis,” in which disability acts “as an opportunistic metaphorical device,” her disability serves to illustrate her removal from the novel’s central marriage plot (47). However, she occupies a major space in the novel’s form. Without the confidante, the narrative is not able to move ahead, as she

is the vehicle through which the story is conveyed. The confidante’s role thus shifts; she facilitates for the novel’s seeming protagonist while also occupying the space of the protagonist herself. The question of how to resolve this imbalance in the confidante’s position—narratively major while socially minor—also becomes a prominent one, and some novels conclude by collapsing and consolidating, making the confidante major on both fronts.

The confidante’s ambiguous position also reflects René Girard’s theorization of the triangle in Deceit, Desire, and the Novel, which he centers around the idea of the “mediator” who inspires a shared desire (2). The “mediator” thus becomes the central role in the triangle, with the desiring subject more fixated on them than on the ostensible object of that desire (17).

Fanny and Mary’s relationship in Mansfield Park provides a clear example of this formulation: although Fanny and Mary both desire Edmund, their desire also becomes fixated on each other when Fanny plays the role of Edmund as the two rehearse for Lovers’ Vows. However, while the confidante might seem to be participating in this sort of triangle through her central position in the loves and desires of others, her interactions with the novel’s central couple frequently reveals that the “mediator” is not a stable position. Through the confidante’s foregrounding of homosocial bonds, it becomes unclear which party in the triangle is which: who is the heroine, who are the designated couple, who is driving whose desires.

The confidante’s point of view—as listener and sometimes narrator—is central in allowing the novel’s story to occur. In Reading for the Plot, Peter Brooks theorizes narrative as

“a transferential model,” particularly in cases in which one character narrates to another (235). In this formulation, one character serves as a conduit between an in-text narrator and the novel’s reader, which serves as a useful foundation in examining the confidante’s role as recipient and purveyor of narrative. Furthermore, he argues that “narrative itself [is] a form of understanding

and explanation” and one which is heavily governed by “the time it takes, to get from beginning to end” (Brooks 10, 20). This analysis emphasizes the building of intimacy between the confidante and the reader, as well as the way in which the narrative creates this relationship through the confidante’s transmission of information. We see the confidante perform this function in a variety of ways, along a continuum of narrative forms. By serving as a listener for multiple characters, the confidante allows a synthesis of narrative filtered through her perspective: Fanny both listens to and observes those around her, allowing the reader insight into what they are experiencing even as she remains the novel’s main point of view character. Here,

Fanny’s socially minor status serves to facilitate her major role in the narrative; because she is automatically seen as someone who has nothing better to do than listen to others, she is able to learn and convey more of the novel’s plot. Maria, in Deerbrook, conveys her observations of others through long internal monologues, but Esther Summerson takes an even more overt role in conveying Bleak House’s narrative. Not only does she listen to countless other characters sharing their secrets, she directly shares these secrets with the reader through her first-person narrative.

This highlights the complex relationship between narrator and narration, as Esther begins to narrate her own story along with those of others; through her overt address of and engagement with the reader, she makes the reader into her confidante, creating a parallel relationship to that which she shares with Ada. Thus, the confidante’s relation to others as narratee and her relation to the reader as narrator or point of view character are intertwined with and inform each other, particularly through their creation of intimacy.

The confidante’s exchange of stories, gossip, and confidences with others serves to build intimacy, both between her and other characters and between her and the novel’s reader. For this aspect of my argument, I particularly draw on Spacks’s study Gossip. Spacks theorizes the idea

of “serious” gossip that creates intimacy (5). She argues that this form of gossip should not be dismissed as frivolous and that it “exists only as a function of intimacy. It takes place in private, at leisure, in a context of trust, usually among no more than two or three people…It provides a resource for the subordinated…a crucial means of self-expression, a crucial form of solidarity”

(Spacks 5). Such a form of gossip and exchange of information allows the speakers to “reflect about themselves” and thus to reveal their own natures, particularly over the course of time

(Spacks 5). Furthermore, Spacks notes the stakes of gossip within a text (its power to change events) as well as on a metatextual level (its power to shape our understanding of narratives)

(14), as well as the ways in which it facilitates “bonding” and draws the reader into the narrative

(22). We see characters who are already intimate continue their intimacy by sharing confidences, but we also see them using this way of building intimacy. Such attempts can have multiple results—Mary’s confidences both draw and repulse Fanny—and can also bring characters closer to the reader, as when we get to know Esther better through her increasingly candid self- revelations over the course of Bleak House. Casey Finch and Peter Bowen, in “The Tittle-Tattle of Highbury,” also take up the idea of gossip, analyzing free indirect discourse as a narrative form that mirrors “community gossip” and conveys it to the reader (8). Such forms of gossip can exist alongside the more serious confidence and serve to highlight its difference and centrality within the novel. The confidence is simultaneously private (shared between friends) and public

(shared with all the novel’s readers); we are able to become part of the characters’ intimacy by being privy to intimate communications that their other associates do not have our power to overhear. This intimacy formation between reader and confidante further troubles the novel’s hierarchical structure, in line with the confidante’s queering of the marriage plot. The partnership between narrator and reader becomes another relationship that demands acknowledgement,

taking its place in the network of intimacies in which heterosexual romance lacks a unique and privileged status.

Chapters

In this study, I explore these many aspects of the figure of the confidante. I argue that, although marginalized, she is a vital figure in driving and constructing the narrative arc of the nineteenth-century novel. In doing so, she troubles its seeming hierarchy by queering the marriage plot and thus suggesting a different order of primacy for relationships, or perhaps no order at all. Literary confidantes, while possessing some common features, also take on different roles in different novels.

In Chapter One, “The Margin Plot,” I read Jane Austen’s Mansfield Park (1814) and

Harriet Martineau’s Deerbrook (1839) to argue that Fanny Price and Maria Young’s social positions as disabled women of a lower class are connected to their positions as confidantes.

These novels highlight the confidante’s marginalization on various axes (especially disability and class), while at the same time illustrating her narrative primacy. Drawing on Marcus’s examination of the necessity of female intimacy to the marriage plot and on Woloch’s theorization of major and minor characters, I argue that these women, while socially minor, are in fact formally major through their placement within the narrative. While their social roles may seem to make these characters minor, their placement within their respective novels—as characters who receive the confidences of others and to whose points of view the reader has frequent access—serves to make them formally major. Through the lens of disability studies, particularly the work of Rosemarie Garland Thomson, Martha Stoddard Holmes, and David T.

Mitchell and Sharon L. Snyder, I also examine the ways in which these women are socially

rejected and removed from the marriage plot, particularly looking at the ways in which disability serves as a factor used to denote difference. While Fanny’s disability and physical weakness ultimately serves as a positive differentiation factor—she is portrayed as more feminine than other women—and Maria’s is used to keep her separated from the possibility of romantic love, both novels use disability to reinforce the idea of outsider status. This chapter shows the ways in which the confidante figure and the disabled figure both remain more present than we might think, even when the text resists focalizing them. However, despite some gestures towards prioritizing women’s intimacy and queer marriage plots, these novels both conclude by breaking down their central triangles to leave one heterosexual romantic pairing standing alone, although they proceed differently in who they discard.

In Chapter Two, “The Confidante’s Self-Expression in Bleak House,” I read Charles

Dickens’s Bleak House (1853) to argue that Esther Summerson’s position makes central the connection between the confidante’s act of listening and the act of narration. I draw here on the narrative theories of Brooks and Gérard Genette, Caroline Levine’s examination of narrative forms and networks, and Spacks’s theory of gossip. While Esther frequently de-emphasizes her own centrality in the story she is telling, her role as narrator automatically lends her greater importance and places her in a mediating position in the novel. As the confidante, she listens to the stories of many other characters, including Lady Dedlock, Caddy Jellyby, and (principally for this chapter) Ada Clare; as the narrator, she passes these stories onto the reader, revealing her own character in the process. This parallelism serves to emphasize the ways in which the sharing of narrative creates intimacy, as Esther’s intimacy with Ada grows, leading her to come into her own and draw closer to the reader as the novel proceeds; she and Ada share affection with each other, rather than having a one-sided relationship. Ultimately, her sharing of confidences moves

her from the position of supporting character to that of the novel’s heroine. While she begins as a side figure to the romantic pairing between Ada and Richard Carstone, Bleak House eventually connects its many character relationships into a network in which Esther holds a primary position and which does not privilege an individual marriage pairing over other forms of connection.

In Chapter Three, “Confidantes at Work in The Romance of a Shop and A Writer of

Books,” I read Amy Levy’s The Romance of a Shop (1888) and George Paston’s A Writer of

Books (1899) to argue that the confidences in relationships between working women provide the novels’ heroines with the resources they need to express themselves as artists, allowing them a choice that is opposed to heterosexual marriage. Here, I focus on the Lorimer sisters and on

Cosima Chudleigh’s relationships with her fellow working women. I read these novels as New

Woman novels, as they feature confidantes moving beyond the world of home into the world of work and thus attempting to balance the traditional forms of women’s work with work for pay or in the public sphere. In doing so, they trouble traditional gender roles, in tandem with men in fiction of the same time period (notably the Sherlock Holmes stories) and move towards a more ambiguous gender position. Here, I draw on previous scholars of the New Woman and nineteenth-century working women, including Ann Ardis and Martha Vicinus. I also make use of

John Tosh’s examination of nineteenth-century masculinity in order to explore how these novels follow a similar pattern to that of novels of the period that center around men, who are portrayed in intimate work-centered relationships. While the male working friendship frequently expands outside the confines of England, however (even if only through interaction with visitors from abroad), the women’s expansion is restricted to travels from the country to the city; their friendships are also affected by the possibility of potential marriages. While they receive new opportunities and explore new possibilities of centralizing feminine bonds, they are still forced to

choose between the new (exemplified by the world of work and female communities) and the old

(exemplified by marriage), in endings that are perhaps less expansive. These novels therefore continue to emphasize the restrictions placed on women and the close relationship between the confidante pairing and the marriage plot, even in a time of expanding opportunities for women.

In my conclusion, I explore the ways in which the confidante figure continues to be important in literature after the nineteenth century. In doing so, I connect the confidante to the twentieth-century concepts of emotional labor and emotion work, developed by Arlie Russell

Hochschild and defined in her study The Managed Heart as “the management of feeling to create a publicly observable facial and bodily display; emotional labor is sold for a wage” (7).

Hochschild “use[s] the synonymous terms emotion work or emotion management to refer to these same acts done in a private context where they have use value” (7). In other words, these concepts require the worker to present a particular feeling to others in order to earn a reward, monetary or otherwise. While these terms are usually applied to twentieth and twenty-first century contexts, they are in fact useful for understanding the confidante’s social place and the ways in which her economic status defines her role. Furthermore, looking at emotion work in relation to these novels’ portrayal of the confidante can emphasize the ways in which the performance of emotion is not inherently unequal or demeaning.

Through the course of this study, I illustrate the ways in which the confidante’s position is complex and often paradoxical: socially marginal yet vital to the narrative, embedded in the heterosexual marriage plot yet also emphasizing the value of alternative and queer forms of intimacy. Examining the confidante can help us to understand how this female intimacy is embedded in the narrative forms of the nineteenth-century novel; it is not merely a side feature, but essential to every aspect of these texts’ construction. The confidante thus allows us to see

alternative paths and endings for the novel, ones which centralize the intimacy created by narrative exchange.

Chapter One

The Margin Plot: Narrative Positioning and Disability in Mansfield Park and Deerbrook

Discussions of nineteenth-century novels frequently center the marriage plot: the novel’s lovers are its two central figures, and everyone else exists to support them. At first glance, Jane

Austen’s Mansfield Park (1814) and Harriet Martineau’s Deerbrook (1839) might appear to support this conception. The two novels begin their marriage plots with a similar grouping—a heterosexual romantic couple who both confide in an additional, marginalized woman—and conclude with a pairing in which two lovers come together to the exclusion of others. In

Mansfield Park, Fanny Price, the original confidante, ultimately takes the place of Mary

Crawford as she marries Edmund Bertram; in Deerbrook, Maria Young remains on the outside, serving as a witness to the romance between Margaret Ibbotson and Philip Enderby even as she harbors her own love for Philip. The endings of these novels suggest that while the specific identities of the parties involved in the marriage plot may change, such a plot must remain at the center of the novel and occupy space at its conclusion. Other relationships are not equally valuable, and characters, such as the confidante, who do not find a partner must remain on the margins.

The confidante’s marginalization springs from a variety of factors, but here I would like to highlight the intersections of gender, class, and disability. The confidante must perform a particularly female-associated role—that of listening to and providing support and care for others.1 Furthermore, she is often positioned by class in a role that makes caring for others not only desired, but obligatory. Fanny is not formally employed, but as the poor cousin of the

1 This shares features with Arlie Russell Hochschild’s definition of “emotion work” (7), which I will discuss further in my conclusion.

relatives with whom she lives, she is expected to cater to them and is subject to a kind of thoughtless possessiveness, in which her own needs are not considered in comparison to those of others. Maria serves as governess for Deerbrook’s central families, the Rowlands and the Greys, a fate which the novel presents as terrible and as precluding her from participating in the world of love and marriage. While the idea that a governess cannot marry might seem absurd to any later reader of Victorian novels post-Jane Eyre (1847), Maria’s marginalization as a governess is tied to her disability: a bad leg, the result of a carriage accident which also killed her father and thus left her impoverished. Fanny, too, experiences a form of disability, her fatigue and frequent headaches, which is also tied to her work: she often experiences symptoms as the result of carrying out the demands of others. While she expends herself emotionally in caring for others, she also expends herself physically, and she is seen as an inferior woman who does not make enough of an effort to put herself forward. Martha Stoddard Holmes articulates a connection between disability and women’s work in terms of subverting nineteenth-century gender expectations; she writes, “if what distinguishes men from women is that the latter stay home and produce children while the former go to a workplace and make money, the disabled woman’s difference is often imaginatively marked by her working” (94). The disabled woman must go outside the home to support herself, rather than marrying and becoming a mother, something from which she was culturally barred (Holmes 94).2 In addition, both serve as narrative devices to exemplify the confidante’s social marginality: the ways in which she occupies a different social space from the novel’s heroine.

2 Holmes explores what she terms “the connection between emotion and impairment” (3) in order to determined how the Victorians produced twenty-first century notions of disability (4). She particularly emphasizes such points as the Victorian presentation of disability within melodramatic contexts and how this “thematized Victorians’ concerns with identifying what kinds of bodies should marry and what kinds of bodies could work,” especially in relation to gender (Holmes 4).

Marginalization exists, however, both on the level of content and on the level of form, and these two levels do not always mirror each other. While these confidante figures are socially marginalized, the novels often give them a great deal of formal centrality. As with Viktor

Shklovsky’s differentiation between the “images” portrayed in art and the “techniques” used to portray them, these novels portray their confidantes as figures on the outside looking in while also positioning them at the center of the narrative through their use of focalization (1). Austen and Martineau both use free indirect discourse to convey events from Fanny’s and Maria’s perspectives; they also give them important functions in moving the novels’ plots along. Through receiving the confidences of the novels’ pairs of lovers, the confidantes serve to allow the reader access to these characters’ feelings and to move the central marriage plots forward, even in situations in which the lovers will not or cannot make confidences to each other. The ending of

Mansfield Park, in particular, suggests that the confidante’s positions on the levels of content and form are not only contradictory but potentially unstable, as Fanny transforms from marginal figure into heroine. At the same time, however, it attempts to resolve ambiguity by having Fanny and Mary trade places, implying that there can only be one heroine and one central couple. The ending to Deerbrook, while it leaves Maria on the outside of the marriage plot, maintains some of this ambiguity by continuing to emphasize her necessity, incorporating her into the discussions between Margaret and Philip as the marital couple.

I argue, therefore, that Mansfield Park and Deerbrook, through their use of character pairings and triangles, construct the confidante as formally major even if minor within the novel’s social settings. To use Alex Woloch’s term, she occupies conflicting “character- space[s]” on the levels of content and of form, making her a destabilizing textual force who raises questions about which aspects of the novel’s plot are in fact central (14). Furthermore, the

confidante’s disability serves to symbolize her marginality. It does so through the device that

David T. Mitchell and Sharon L. Snyder term “narrative prosthesis” (47). Mitchell and Snyder use this term to describe the frequent phenomenon of disability in literature serving as a

“metaphorical device” to separate characters from “the ‘norm’” and to symbolize larger social problems (47). In these novels, the confidante’s disability serves as a factor that emphasizes her difference—for better or for worse—from other women and that justifies her position as an outsider. Being outside the marriage plot and being physically disabled take on the same value in these texts; the confidante’s role as listener is its own form of marginalization.

The confidantes in these novels thus exist in an uneasy balance. Mitchell and Snyder also note the disabled figure’s fraught place in literature, observing, “Between the social marginality of people with disabilities and their corresponding representational milieus, disability undergoes a different representational fate…Once a reader begins to seek out representations of disability in our literatures, it is difficult to avoid their proliferation in texts with which one believed oneself to be utterly familiar” (52). Through her formal centrality, the disabled confidante likewise remains more present than we might think, even when she plays only a supporting role in events.

Through the pairing of the confidante and the heroine, these novels carry out Sharon Marcus’s idea of the female friendship as necessary for the development of the marriage plot (75).

However, they also go further into prioritizing female intimacy by suggesting that the female pairing might be as important as the heterosexual romance, thus creating a potential queer marriage plot. Nevertheless, I argue that ultimately the novels shy away from the possibilities created by the confidante’s formally central role by breaking down their triangles—one couple and one confidante—to leave the heterosexual couple finally standing alone. Their endings

portray the couple as the ultimate insiders, both socially and formally, with the confidante’s friendship as, at best, an auxiliary to the life formed through marriage.

Mansfield Park and Deerbrook of course have differences in the way they lay out these themes, but a close reading of the two in tandem will prove instructive in the study of early nineteenth-century portrayals of the confidante figure and a potential uneasiness towards the prioritizing of female intimacy.3 Scholars including Deborah Mae Fratz (117) and Deidre David

(77) note Martineau’s attempts to emulate Austen’s style of novel-writing, but these two specific texts are not frequently read together.4 Furthermore, Mansfield Park has not seen much attention from the perspective of disability studies5. This is probably because Fanny is not typically read as a disabled figure (a point to which I shall return), likely because she has an invisible illness and one that does not make marriage a perceived “impossibility” (Holmes 94). Deerbrook, however, is frequently read in this light. Aside from Maria’s more obvious physical disability,

Martineau’s own disabled identity has made her and her work, including her nonfiction dealing with the topic, into a popular subject in scholarship that examines disability and illness in the

Victorian era.6 Scholars comment on the connections between Martineau and Maria; Fratz, for example, notes the ways in which the disabled function to help others both in Deerbrook and in

Martineau’s nonfiction (117), while David also observe further similarities between the two as

“necessarily distanced from the romantic entanglements by virtue of [their] social position and

[their] intelligence” (78). These ties to Martineau’s own biography and her nonfictional and

3 Susan S. Lanser notes a movement away from the portrayal of female same-sex desire in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries (169). 4 Mary Jane Corbett touches on both when examining marriages within the family in chapter three of Family Likeness (57-85). 5 Katherine Mary Skipsey, in her doctoral dissertation Eloquent Bodies, is an exception. Erika Wright also examines the novel in terms of discourses of health and prevention. 6 Holmes examines her in a chapter on autobiographical writings by disabled Victorians (133-190), Maria Frawley, in Invalidism and Identity in Nineteenth-Century Britain, in a chapter on memoirs of the sickroom (200-244), and Rachel Ablow, in Victorian Pain, in a chapter entitled “Harriet Martineau and the Impersonality of Pain” (48-71).

autobiographical writings are undoubtedly important for gaining a larger understanding of nineteenth-century attitudes towards disability. However, focusing on fictional connections and contexts by reading Mansfield Park and Deerbrook alongside each other allows us to examine through lines in novels of the early nineteenth century, from the Georgian period to the early

Victorians. Deerbrook combines features of earlier and later novelists7, while presenting one of the most explicit cases of a confidante being barred from the marriage plot; it is therefore especially instructive for this study. If Martineau serves as a transitional figure8, we are able to observe the ways in which Deerbrook makes Mansfield Park’s themes of disability and female intimacy more explicit, while at the same time echoing its refusal to veer from the heterosexual marriage plot as central to its conclusion.

In theorizing the confidante’s placement within the novel, I will draw on Marcus in order to examine the relationship between female intimacy and heterosexual marriage; I will also engage with Woloch in order to draw out the confidante’s space and role within the novel’s larger structure. In addition, I will use disability studies as a lens to examine the ways in which

Fanny and Maria are or are not defined as disabled, how this connects to the other factors that serve to marginalize them, and how it interacts with their formal roles in their respective novels.

In particular, I will take note of Rosemarie Garland Thomson’s observation that “disabled literary characters usually remain on the margins of fiction as uncomplicated figures or exotic aliens…Indeed, main characters almost never have physical disabilities” to develop an understanding of the confidante’s seemingly contradictory omnipresence and marginalization

7 In her introduction to Deerbrook, Valerie Sanders writes, “For many (including its earliest critics), it is like a Jane Austen novel, only more philosophical; for others it looks ahead to George Eliot…Yet whatever people think of it, Deerbrook undoubtedly stands at a crucial turning-point in literary history…Between the death of Jane Austen in 1817 and…the 1840s onwards, the novel seemed generally to be in abeyance. Novels continued to be published…but these were not the great works by which the nineteenth century would subsequently be known” (xi). 8 Fratz also notes her as a precursor to Charlotte Brontë (135).

(Extraordinary Bodies 9). Drawing on scholars including Holmes, Mitchell and Snyder, and

Garland Thomson, I will look at the symbolic purpose disability serves for the portrayal of the confidantes in these novels and the ways in which it is particularly linked to gender (an area which Holmes and Garland Thomson both investigate).

I will also draw out the dissimilarities between Fanny and Maria as characters with different forms of disabilities. Fanny’s headaches and fatigue, as previously stated, are not always read as a form of disability and certainly prove less prohibitive to her marital future than

Maria’s limp. Drawing on Holmes’s discussion of Victorian fears about disabled women and reproduction—a question that feels particularly relevant to Deerbrook, with its large cast of children and a marriage plot that results in a baby born midway through the text—I argue that

Maria’s visible disability serves to defeminize her and to remove her from the marriage plot, while Fanny’s chronic weakness serves to hyper-feminize her and portray her as a symbolically ideal woman.

After outlining these theoretical approaches, I will apply them to close readings of the two novels, paying particular attention to scenes that highlight the confidantes’ disabilities and their interactions with the novels’ lovers. I will then turn to a comparative reading of the novels’ conclusions in order to examine how they ultimately marginalize or integrate their confidante figures. Finally, I will open out my discussion into a larger literary context, looking at

Martineau’s personal writings in which she documents her own deafness. In doing so, I hope to show the ways in which the confidante figure and the disabled figure both remain more present than we might think, even when the text resists focalizing them, and to show the unique demands with which the confidante must grapple.

The Confidante’s Place

In both Mansfield Park and Deerbrook, the confidante figure is paired with another woman: Fanny with Mary and Maria with Margaret. While these relationships are not entirely one-sided—Mary attempts to facilitate a romance between her brother and Fanny, and Margaret listens to Maria’s account of her past—Fanny and Mary mainly serve to listen to their friends, particularly as they share their feelings surrounding potential marriages. While this listening function may not seem particularly important to furthering the plot—it is not, after all, a form of direct action—it is in fact vital to furthering the novel’s development by providing the characters with an opportunity to work out their feelings and the reader with an occasion to “hear” about and understand them. Such a function is in line with Marcus’s conception of “the plot of female amity” (82). In defining this concept, Marcus argues that “Victorian marriage plots depend on maintaining bonds of friendship between women”9 (75) and that “one friend expresses love for the other by helping her to realize her marriage plot” (82). She cites Deerbrook as a prime example, particularly its concluding moments which “display…the conjugal couple in the light of female friendship” (Marcus 84). Although Marcus’s comment that Maria and Margaret’s

“shared love [for Philip] has brought them closer instead of driving them apart” deserves further interrogation10, her outlining of this form of plot is valuable to an understanding of the confidante’s significant role in the heterosexual marriage plot (84). Even as she is overlooked by those around her, the reader is not able to overlook her; she serves to bring her friend towards marriage by performing the work of listening and counsel. If she is self-effacing, it is a tool to elevate her friend and to allow her to achieve her romantic desires. This is particularly true in

9 Of course, Mansfield Park is not a Victorian novel, and its attitudes towards female friendship are not particularly positive; I will explore the scholarship surrounding this alongside my close reading of the novel. 10 I shall return to it in my close reading of Deerbrook later in this chapter.

these two novels, in which the confidante and her friend share the same love object—one woman must put herself in the background if the other is to gain the man.

The confidante’s relationship to her friend is thus a complicated one, combining mutuality and competition. At times, the novel’s structure centers female intimacy. In both of these texts, the confidante and her friend, in their conversations, share things that they do not share directly with the male lover. Even when he is the subject of the conversation, therefore, the actual act of female intimacy remains more present; the relationship between the two women is what appears on the page. However, that intimacy cannot remain uncomplicatedly central because of the women’s shared desire for the man, which leads to their pairing becoming unbalanced when one of them gains him. Thus, even as the pattern Marcus describes supports the importance of female friendship, it also destabilizes it. This suggests that, within the triangles of these novels, its purpose is ultimately support for a heterosexual union, and at least one of the friends is willing to sacrifice the other.

The issue of female friendship’s place within the marriage plot further raises the issue of the confidante’s place within the novel’s structure, something we might profitably look at through Woloch’s theorization of major and minor characters. With his ideas of “character- space” and “character-system,” Woloch argues that a novel’s characters, from the most major to the most minor, come together to form “a unified narrative structure” (14). Particularly in his reading of Pride and Prejudice, he emphasizes the role of minor characters in serving both the text’s protagonists and its central thrust, writing, “To be a character in Austen is to get continually contrasted, juxtaposed, related to others, and, as such, to help build the thematic architecture…it is minor characters, in particular, who bear the heaviest portion: unequal partners in a dialectic that could not take place if attention were limited to the protagonist herself”

(Woloch 43). Rather than serving separate functions, the novel’s major and minor characters work together towards creating “a unified whole” (Woloch 50). This idea of novel building by

“juxtapos[ition]” highlights the complementary roles of the heroine and the confidante: each is to some extent defined by the fact that she is not the other (Woloch 43). While Fanny is able to change from confidante to heroine, this requires that the novel change the way in which she is offset by those around her; initially cast as the lowest and most overlooked member of the household, she is eventually portrayed as superior to the novel’s other women, as Janet Todd observes (Women’s Friendship 248). Deerbrook’s pairing of Maria, who can never marry, with

Margaret, who can and will, further exhibits this use of “contrast” in characters in order to build the structure of the novel (Woloch 43). We might thus read the confidante as occupying a minor

“character-space” relative to the novel’s heroine in order to better illuminate the themes surrounding the marriage plot (Woloch 14).

However, we must note one important fact: the novel’s content and form do not necessarily make the same characters minor. A character may be pushed aside socially while simultaneously playing a major formal role in the text, particularly when it is her task to receive or to recount information. Fanny and Maria help to convey the stories of their respective novels through the reception of their friends’ confidences, and their perspectives are vital to the novels’ structures. Much of Mansfield Park is seen through Fanny’s perspective through the use of free indirect discourse.11 While Maria’s perspective is not as dominant in Deerbrook, it still occupies it share of formal space, particularly through a long soliloquy as Maria observes the actions of the lovers. The movement of characters between the roles of confidante and heroine thus serves

11 D.A Miller emphasizes the unique distance of Austen’s narrative voice and its lack of authorial asides (31), creating a division between “(godlike) narration and (all-too-human) character” (42). Through free indirect discourse we receive what seems to be Fanny’s perspective, rather than that of an outside individual.

as an attempt to stabilize and clarify the characters’ status; if the confidante is socially unimportant but central to the structure of the novel, this creates an uncomfortable disconnect.

Fanny’s transformation into Mansfield Park’s heroine thus resolves this difficulty by making the same character major in both form and content: not only is she central to how the story is told, she is central to what it is telling.

The contrast in Fanny’s and Maria’s fates also emphasizes the differences in the concerns of these two novels, even as they both deal with the confidante’s unstable role and her social marginality. Mansfield Park emphasizes Fanny’s individual development and unique nature, with the other characters ultimately revealed to be in service of this end. George E. Haggerty notes the way in which Fanny must hide her true self and her desire for Edmund (178) but eventually is able to express her feelings and be loved by all around her (187). Todd also notes

Fanny’s individuality when she describes the mechanism of Fanny’s elevation through the

“rejection” of the novel’s other women (Women’s Friendship 248). Fanny’s difference from others is present throughout the novel; the ending merely turns this around by allowing this difference to make her celebrated rather than put-upon.

Deerbrook, on the other hand, is more concerned with examining Maria’s place within her social system. David describes Martineau’s sense of a moral need to represent the middle class (something that she contrasts with Austen’s portrayal of a slightly higher milieu) and the ways in which Maria’s situation as a governess is specifically class-based (David 80-82). She argues that Maria “represents some of the conflict experienced by Harriet Martineau and other women intellectuals in the nineteenth century” and takes the view that “the only way Martineau seems able to introduce an intelligent, ambitious woman into her novel is to have her lame, solitary, alienated, and obsessed with unrequited love” (David 84, 86). Fratz further explores the

idea of femaleness as an “economic disability,” especially for disabled women, and writes the

Maria’s “lameness becomes a visible sign of the ways that social perceptions of gender and disability restrict her opportunities” (11). In other words, Martineau is more concerned with exploring Maria’s experience as a disabled working woman within the confines of the plot of a novel, more interested in social comment than in transformative endings.

By elevating Fanny and leaving Maria in her side position, these novels, through different mechanisms, illustrate a separation between the couple and the solitary individual. The novels’ conclusions use similarly strong language in their portrayal of the ways in which one of the female friends is cut off from the triangle. When telling Fanny that he has broken off with Mary,

Edmund describes her as “spoilt, spoilt!” and speaks of her “corrupted, vitiated mind,” an assessment with which Fanny concurs (“MP” 676). Margaret, soon before her marriage, worries about Maria’s social isolation, which she describes as “painful, —very painful,” and Maria’s response that her state was determined by God does not seem much of a consolation (Deerbrook

598). These moments emphasize the ways in which women are differentiated throughout the novels. While individuals may move from “character-space” to “character-space,” there must always be someone occupying the space of the woman who does not belong (Woloch 14). In

Deerbrook, Maria must remain there; in Mansfield Park, Fanny is allowed to exit when Mary replaces her.

Despite some differences in their concerns and conclusions, Mansfield Park and

Deerbrook still both grapple with the confidante’s unstable presence. Her major/minor form/content conflict defines her place in the text and thus casts her as an inherently unstable force, one who is potentially able to break down the plot’s priorities. Through her presence within the development of the marriage plot, she pushes forward the centrality of female

intimacy, calling into question which pairing (the heterosexual lovers or the female friends) is in fact actually the most important. Notably, this takes place even as the confidante emphasizes her own marginal status. While Fanny withdraws from the social world around her and insists that she should not be considered, the text pushes her forward as its ultimate heroine; while Maria describes herself as an outsider, she remains present alongside the lovers until Deerbrook’s final sentence. The confidante’s destabilization of the marriage plot is thus not purposeful but inherent in her role, which helps to explain the cutting off of one party from each of the novel’s central triangles at their conclusions. These conclusions are attempts at stabilizing the confidante, at making her two places in the novel match up. Rather than allowing female intimacy to occupy the central space, the novels strive to create a heroine who is defined against everyone else, both in what happens to her and in the space that she takes up in the text.

Marginality and Disability

We have now established that the confidante is a contradictory figure, centrally placed within the novel’s form while marginally placed within its content and thus acting as an unstable force within the novel. Such contradictions find their mirror within the field of disability studies.

In examining representations of disabled figures in literary texts, scholars often focus on these figures’ ubiquity: Mitchell and Snyder emphasize “their perpetual circulation throughout print history” (52). At the same time, however, they note the ways in which these figures are marginalized within the texts in which they appear and are placed in stereotyped roles: Holmes, for example, observes the juxtaposition between the figures of the saintly disabled child and the shiftless disabled man in Dickens (94-102). The disabled confidantes of Mansfield Park and

Deerbrook act as such figures, both present and pushed aside because of their potential to challenge ideas of social norms.

The scholars on whom I will draw all emphasize the idea that disability, in literature, takes on a symbolic meaning beyond its bare facts, an idea that is central to Mitchell and

Snyder’s work and is defined by their concept of “narrative prosthesis” (47). The two lay out a series of primary approaches to disability studies in literature and the humanities, all of which contribute to their understanding of “the prosthetic relation of disability and characterization as a contrivance” (Mitchell and Snyder 15). Exploring “the pervasive and the hypersymbolic nature of disability” in literature, they argue that “disability pervades literary narrative, first, as a stock feature of characterization and, second, as an opportunistic metaphorical device. We term this perpetual discursive dependency upon disability narrative prosthesis” (Mitchell and Snyder 16,

47). In this reading, disability serves to separate characters from “the ‘norm,’” as well as to symbolize larger problems “of social and individual collapse” (Mitchell and Snyder 47). By using this concept as a theoretical framework, we can better understand the reasons that the confidante is frequently a disabled figure and in turn how she fits into the novel’s plot. Her identity as a disabled woman is especially relevant, and scholars have focused on the particular ways that literature portrays disability with respect to gender.

In Fictions of Affliction, her study of disability in Victorian literature, Holmes examines the disabled body, especially that of the disabled woman, as a site of melodrama. She describes melodrama as “a universe of unthinking, expressively feeling bodies,” one that denies the social aspects of bodily experience (Holmes 17). By creating catharsis through a shared emotional experience between character and audience, melodrama’s act of “constructing physical disability as primarily a feeling state can minimize the importance of the material circumstances that

surround all disabilities, and maximize the importance of personal agency while minimizing the need for social change” (Holmes 28-29). Holmes further notes the particular ways in which this melodramatic conception of disability affects women. Specifically, she analyzes “the recurrent melodramatic trope of a young disabled woman involved in a marriage plot to which she is denied access,” discussing multiple texts that explore the marital and reproductive futures of disabled female figures through an emotional lens (Holmes 35). Her emphasis on these texts’

“use of a ‘twin structure’ that pairs a disabled woman with a nondisabled one and gives them distinctly different physical, emotional, and marital futures” is particularly relevant to the examination of these novels, as such a pairing is also vital to defining the role of the confidante

(Holmes 38). Disability serves as one factor that defines the contrast between the confidante and the novel’s heroine, particularly in their relationships to romance and marriage. Holmes’s analysis suggests that the novel frequently does not know quite what to do with disabled women and struggles to combine marriage and passion in their presentations (56). Disability and female intimacy both have the potential to destabilize conceptions of the centrality and purpose of heterosexual marriage, leading to the fraught place of the disabled female figure as the confidante.

Garland Thomson further emphasizes gendered representations of the disabled figure, focusing on the disabled woman’s complicated positioning. She argues that “seen as the opposite of the masculine figure, but also imagined as the antithesis of the normal woman, the figure of the disabled female is thus ambiguously positioned both inside and outside the category of woman…the disabled woman figure functions as a symbol of otherness, either positive or negative” (Extraordinary Bodies 29). In analyzing mid-nineteenth century American sentimental novels, Garland Thomson argues that the disabled woman serves as a figure of contrast with the

abled woman, writing that “while the various maternal benefactresses [in these pairings] radiate a transcendent virtue, agency, and power, the disabled women become increasingly subjugated, despairing, and impotent” (Extraordinary Bodies 82). Her analysis, particularly of the disabled woman as a figure who symbolizes “otherness” as a whole, provides a framework with which to better understand the relationship between the disabled confidante and the friend with whom she is paired (and, to some extent, the novel’s female figures as a whole) (Extraordinary Bodies 29).

Within a narrative form in which only one woman can marry any given man (at a time, anyway), the novel must present a reason for any rivals to be put aside. In order to remove the confidante from her position in the triangle, the novel therefore constructs her as a disabled woman, seen as naturally “other” and therefore not able to participate in the marriage plot, without requiring further explanation.

Notably, Garland Thomson refers to “otherness, either positive or negative,” suggesting that the disabled woman figure might also be seen as greater, rather than lesser, than those around her (Extraordinary Bodies 29). Helena Michie explores a similar idea in her analysis of

Bleak House and Our Mutual Friend, in which she examines Dickens’s representations of heroines who experience “female pain” (“Who Is This” 200). Michie argues that “the female self, like Dickens’ female characters, comes into being through illness, scarring, and deformity” and that it is only Dickens’s disabled heroines who experience “substantiality” and bodily existence (“Who Is This” 199). Furthermore, she argues, “Jenny and Esther turn their ailments into specifically narrative power” (“Who Is This” 200). While Michie does not specifically describe these characters as disabled and we might debate Esther’s inclusion in that category12, she does suggest that these physical differences not only grant Esther and Jenny identity and

12 Esther does exhibit the “bodily otherness” and “peculiarity” that Garland Thomson links to conceptions of disability in her discussion of freak shows (17).

power but differentiate them from the women around them. She specifically cites Esther’s transformation, through her smallpox and subsequent scarring, into someone who no longer resembles her mother and therefore “can wrench herself free from her mother’s fate” (“Who Is

This” 207).13 Indeed, these scholars all read literary representations of disabled women as portraying them as definitively separated from those around them, in possession of a unique fate.14 This framework can help us to read the disabled confidantes of Mansfield Park and

Deerbrook; while Fanny winds up socially above and Maria socially below the women around them, in both cases their disabilities serve to help define their difference and the reasons for their fates.

The use of disability studies as a critical perspective through which to understand

Mansfield Park and Deerbrook also raises important questions about the differences between these two texts. First among them is who should be read as disabled. Maria, who has what

Garland Thomson terms “a visible physical disability,” seems a fairly straightforward case;

Fanny, however, with her frequent fatigue and headaches, is less clear (82). Holmes includes an appendix entitled “Physically Disabled Characters in Nineteenth-Century British Literature” in

Fictions of Affliction (197-199); while Fanny might seem to fit into the “Chronic Illness or

Unspecified Disabilities” category (199), she is entirely absent from the list, on which Maria is present. Fanny is also not rejected from the world of love and marriage as Maria is: she ultimately transforms from an outsider to an insider and is able to marry.

13 I will return to Esther’s narrative and her identity in Chapter Two. 14 Maria Frawley also examines the two-sided nature of the particularity of disability (specifically chronic illness), arguing, “that so many British invalid authors used their narratives to proclaim the intellectual and creative power conferred by sickness or debility complicates the association of the term with lack and powerlessness,” although she applies this to both men and women (23).

Nevertheless, I will read Fanny as an example of the disabled confidante figure, one who is able to become the novel’s heroine. Firstly, many scholars agree that disability is a broad and porous category. Lennard J. Davis emphasizes the historical “group[ing] together [of] all allegedly ‘undesirable’ traits” (“Introduction” 6), while Garland Thomson notes that “needs and situations are so diverse…Only the shared experience of stigmatization creates commonality”

(Extraordinary Bodies 15). Susan Wendell, in particular, focuses on the need for individuals with chronic illnesses to be included within the disability community, despite historical deemphasis of this connection in order to avoid the language of “cure” (162). Fanny’s physical weakness, which affects her quality of life and her ability to participate fully in the activities of others, can therefore be read as a disability.

Furthermore, Fanny’s illness serves a symbolic function similar to those that scholars describe. Davis, in discussing the general marginality of disabled figures, argues that “the very structures on which the novel rests tend to be normative, ideologically emphasizing the universal quality of the central character whose normativity encourages us to identify with him or her;” however, Fanny’s disability serves to emphasize her more than “universal quality”

(“Introduction” 9). Rather than being like the reader or like those around them, she is better than them. Her disability, like those of the saintly children Holmes discusses (94-102), serves to emphasize her essential goodness and particularly her femininity: her symptoms often flare up in response to her constant willingness to do favors for her demanding aunts, and she is not able to spend all day on horseback like the bolder Mary. In relation to Garland Thomson’s idea of

“otherness, either positive or negative,” Fanny is ultimately on the “positive” end (Extraordinary

Bodies 29). She further illustrates the idea of “peculiarity as eminence…a mark of empowering distinction,” which Garland Thomson brings up in her discussion of freak shows; although Fanny

does not exhibit this particular kind of bodily “peculiarity,” her physical problems do serve to mark her as special and ultimately more virtuous than those around her (Extraordinary Bodies

17). Fanny’s characterization is also tied to the portrayal of the disabled woman and her marriage as lacking in sexuality, as discussed by both Garland Thomson (“Integrating Disability” 345) and

Holmes (56); her marriage with Edmund is largely based in their shared sense of sexual probity, which distinguishes her from Mary and from her cousins Maria and Julia Bertram.

This portrayal of Fanny’s disability as tied to her femininity also helps to address another major question: why disability bars only Maria from the realm of marriage. While Fanny’s disability serves as a more extreme version of what is demanded of the feminine woman, Maria’s serves as a form of interference with that role, particularly as it is tied to her status as a working- class woman. As the accident which leads to Maria’s limp also leads to her father’s death and thus her need to work, her disability stands in for her removal from marriage and specifically from a relationship with Philip. We learn that “it was not till long after it had been made known that Mr Young had died insolvent, —not till after Maria had recovered, as far as recovery was possible, —not till she had fallen into the habit of earning her bread, that Philip re-appeared, and shook hands with her, and told her with how much concern he had heard of her sufferings”

(Deerbrook 48). For Maria, disability occurs as an event, one which firmly divides the past from the present in terms of her prospects of marriage. As such, it separates her experience from

Fanny’s: she no longer sees herself as eligible for the role of heroine.

Gender Roles and the Triangle in Mansfield Park

In Mansfield Park, we see a clear representation of how disability sets the confidante apart. Fanny’s sickliness, although introduced early on, largely serves as a tool to contrast her

with Mary once the latter appears on the scene. The comparison not only illustrates the difference between the two but sets up their ultimate conflict, particularly as it relates to their respective interactions with Edmund. Fanny regularly rides horseback in order to maintain her health, but Edmund offers the horse she uses to Mary. The contrast between the two women is quickly established through the emphasis on Mary’s physical fitness: she is described as “active and fearless, and though rather small, strongly made…formed for a horse woman…very much surpassing her sex in general by her early progress” (“MP” 461). While Fanny needs the horse in order to deal with her delicate health, Mary uses it to exhibit her own good health; she is further constructed as more masculine than Fanny, due to her power. This is further emphasized when

Maria and Julia comment on her riding abilities, noting that “her figure is as neat as her brother’s…her spirits are as good…she has the same energy of character” (“MP” 462). Here, the

Bertram sisters explicitly compare Mary to a man—and, notably, to a man who is at least the attempted lover of most of the young women in the novel, including Fanny. This moment first establishes the potential queering of the triangle of Fanny, Mary, and Edmund, as Mary exhibits the potential to take the expected male position and to become Fanny’s lover; the trading of gender roles between the women will later become even more explicit. Mary also vaunts her own abilities and, in the process, emphasizes the difference between herself and Fanny, declaring, “I am very strong. Nothing ever fatigues me, but doing what I do not like” (“MP” 462). Not only does Mary have physical abilities that Fanny lacks, her abilities are connected to a form of mental strength as she makes her own choices about what to do; Fanny, on the other hand, always takes on tasks that she does not wish to do.

In this moment, the contrast between Mary and Fanny is in an interesting relationship to

Garland Thomson’s analysis of the disabled woman as “the opposite of the masculine

figure…both inside and outside the category of woman” (Extraordinary Bodies 29). Mary is somehow both masculinized and the better woman because of her riding abilities, while Fanny fades into the background; she is not admired as a woman despite the ways in which she is seemingly more feminine than Mary. As is typical of their pairing, Fanny and Mary occupy ambiguous positions relative to each other: here, Fanny is simultaneously more feminine and less of an ideal woman than Mary, but these definitions will later shift as the two take turns playing more traditionally masculine and feminine roles. Their contrast also falls under Mitchell and

Snyder’s concept of “narrative prosthesis,” serving to symbolize something beyond the bare fact that Fanny struggles with her health while Mary is a successful rider (47). Instead, it emphasizes

Mary’s desirability and social success compared to Fanny’s lack, particularly when it comes to

Edmund’s perceptions of the two women.

Edmund’s response to Mary’s riding and his behavior’s effects on Fanny serve to establish the outlines of their triangle, particularly Fanny’s initial status as a minor character in

Edmund and Mary’s romance. After Edmund encourages Mary to use the horse as much as she likes, Fanny becomes ill from doing errands on foot. Edmund’s response highlights his feelings towards both women, as he “very seriously resolve[s], however unwilling he must be to check a pleasure of Miss Crawford’s, that it should never happen again” (“MP” 465). Even as Edmund considers Fanny’s health, Mary remains in his mind. Furthermore, Fanny’s illness is tied to

Edmund’s initial thoughtlessness: the narration here reads, “The pain of [Fanny’s] mind had been much beyond that in her head” (465). Here, illness serves as a symbol for sorrow and mental turmoil. Although Fanny is physically ill because of her chronic weakness and a reaction to working hard in the heat, this moment implies that she is really ill because Edmund has ignored her in favor of Mary. She has been made into a minor party in their triangle, and yet Austen

continues to focalize events through her, keeping her ever-present in the novel’s formal construction. While Fanny does not resist her minor place through her actions within the plot, this formal presence serves to call attention to the ways in which she is pushed aside and in which she and Mary are opposed as figures.

Fanny’s placement between Mary and Edmund serves to bring the pair’s feelings forward, as both confide in her rather than in each other and thus make her a party to their romance. Edmund begins a conversation by asking, “Well Fanny, and how do you like Miss

Crawford now?”, to which Fanny responds, “Very well—very much. I like to hear her talk. She entertains me; and she is so extremely pretty, that I have great pleasure in looking at her” (“MP”

458). Through this conversation, the reader gains a sense of Mary’s role not through her direct presence on the page but through Fanny and Edmund’s interactions. By being present to receive

Edmund’s thoughts about Mary’s looks and character, Fanny allows the reader to access them.

By bringing up Mary’s physical attractions and the “pleasure” they bring her, Fanny might be seen as speaking for Edmund and encouraging him to express his own interest; he immediately agrees with her. At the same time, however, this moment foregrounds a potential attraction or tie between Fanny and Mary as equally important: while later in the conversation Fanny responds to

Edmund’s remarks and opinions, here she speaks first and without any prompting beyond his question. The narration emphasizes a potential heterosexual marriage plot between Edmund and

Mary as the most likely possibility here, stating, “He was in a line of admiration of Miss

Crawford, which might lead him where Fanny could not follow” (“MP” 459). Nevertheless, this interaction serves to highlight how confidences can further the potential eroticism of female homosocial intimacy, even if the intimacy, as in this case, is tinged with rivalry.

Such rivalry is not atypical in Austen’s novels, which frequently foreclose the possibility of female friendship in favor of the marital tie and of relationships within the family. As Susan S.

Lanser notes, “the closest bonds of female intimacy in Austen’s novels end up being those between sisters or sisters-in-law rather than unrelated friends, in a pattern that dovetails with the valorization of female intimacy as familial intimacy” (191)15. Mansfield Park contains a sisterly friendship “ghost plot” (Beer 239), as Fanny and Mary contemplate the possibility of becoming sisters through a potential marriage between Fanny and Mary’s brother Henry; Fanny’s rejection of the marriage and her rejection of Mary are thus bound up together. Indeed, Mary’s advocacy of this marriage against Fanny’s wishes also presents another instance of the privileging of official, legally defined bonds of family or marriage over the more nebulous bonds of friendship.

Rather than bearing out Marcus’s idea of the female friend as essential to the marriage plot,

Austen’s novels suggest that the friend is a sort of spare part, perhaps helpful in moving things forward but ready to be pushed aside when something better comes along. Woloch terms one type of minor character “the worker…the flat character who is reduced to a single functional use within the narrative” (25). While the female friend cannot be “reduced” this far and plays an important role in our understanding of these novels, she also must do so within the “use” of helping the heroine forward. Woloch further notes “that narrative progress always entails a series of choices: each moment magnifies some characters while turning away from—and thus diminishing or even stinting—others,” and Austen’s novels frequently “magnif[y]” their protagonists at the expense of these friends (Woloch 12).

Scholars further argue that Austen’s novels focus on heterosexuality at the expense of female homosocial bonds. Lanser reads the flaws in these female friendships as a turning away

15 Witness Pride and Prejudice (1813), in which Elizabeth’s disenchantment with Charlotte only leads her to cling more closely to Jane and in which even the thoughtless Lydia is kept within the family fold.

from what she terms “the sapphic plot” of earlier novels (192), and Todd particularly emphasizes this breakdown in Mansfield Park, of which she writes that Fanny’s marriage “has cost her female friendship, a strangely threatening potential in this novel of family love” and that “with the help of men, Fanny avoids being a female friend” (Women’s Friendship 246, 275). Indeed, while female friendship plays an important role in Mansfield Park as a whole, it plays almost no role in its conclusion. Fanny and Edmund must both reject Mary in order for their marriage to take place; instead of playing the role of friend to Mary, Fanny parallels Edmund by playing the role of spurning lover. By playing this masculine role opposite Mary, however, Fanny further adds to the queer dimension of their pairing, one which is present even if the novel suggests that it should be rejected. Scholars have not paid much previous attention to the potential queerness of this relationship. Haggerty’s reading of Mansfield Park centers on Fanny’s love for her cousin as provoking “queer isolation” (184), and Todd reads it as eliminating the “androgynous suggestions” of Austen’s previous novels in order to emphasize Fanny’s femininity and argues that Fanny “must remain static within the sexual dichotomy” (“Female Friendship” 38, 43)16.

Despite the novel’s ending and its “supreme rejection” of Mary, however, the queer eroticism of the interactions between Fanny and Mary serves to illustrate an important point: the ways in which the relationship between the confidante and her friend can become more central than the heterosexual pairing, even when such a pairing is ostensibly the subject of their interactions

(Women’s Friendship 248).

16 Vincent Quinn, in his article on Austen and queer theory, mentions a potential queer attraction between Fanny and Mary in Patricia Rozema’s film adaptation of Mansfield Park (Quinn 60) and Rozema’s own comments on this interpretation (Quinn 72) but does not focus on the original text. Quinn also makes reference to Eve Sedgwick’s “Jane Austen and the Masturbating Girl” (Quinn 62), which is relevant here for its focus on scenes between two women which have a man as their ostensible subject (“Masturbating Girl” 823).

Fanny and Mary’s interactions over Edmund emphasize the gender ambiguity of their roles, calling into question the relative importance of each relationship in such a way. When

Mary asks Fanny to help her rehearse her part in Lovers Vows, a play in which Mary and

Edmund are to play lovers, Fanny must take on Edmund’s role. Mary both confides her feelings for Edmund and emphasizes the eroticism of the situation in her request: “I came here to-day intending to rehearse it with Edmund—by ourselves—against the evening, but he is not in the way; and if he were, I do not think I could go through it with him, till I have hardened myself a little, for really there is a speech or two” (“MP” 517). Because of her feelings for him, the performance of a romantic or erotic encounter with Edmund himself is too much for Mary at this point; she must put them into action with another woman, acting the role of a man, instead. At this moment, Fanny and Mary swap their earlier roles. Previously, Mary was the masculine woman, explicitly compared to her brother; now, Fanny takes that position and Mary compares her to Edmund: “How am I ever to look him in the face and say such things? Could you do it?

But then he is your cousin, which makes all the difference. You must rehearse it with me, that I may fancy you him, and get on by degrees. You have a look of his sometimes” (“MP” 517).

Here, Fanny’s position is ambiguous in yet another way, simultaneously sexualized and desexualized. Because Edmund is her cousin, she is thought not to have erotic feelings towards him, and she is seen as a safe, non-threatening scene partner. However, she is placed in an erotic position by playing the role of Mary’s potential lover, with Mary ready to “fancy you him.”

Fanny is thus positioned between gender and sexual categories, which are constantly in flux within this triangle. If, as Judith Butler argues, “gender is always a doing” and formed through performance rather than vice versa, Fanny becomes the male lover and Mary the female lover by playing these roles, just as Mary previously became the masculine figure through her daring on

horseback (33). Their shifting roles in this scene also reflect the “contingency” of gender that

Butler describes in her analysis of drag: Fanny becomes a man when she is placed in the position of being one (175).

Fanny and Mary’s reading of the scene further emphasizes the gender play inherent in the triangle. We learn that “Fanny joined in with all the modest feeling which the idea of representing Edmund was so strongly calculated to inspire; but with looks and voice so truly feminine as to be no very good picture of a man” (“MP” 518). Here, Fanny’s role contains both performance and aspects of an essential self: the text implies that she cannot really be Edmund, or any man, because she is “so truly feminine.” While Mary’s strength and riding ability might be seen as innate aspects of her person that create her gender ambiguity, Fanny’s seems to be situational. However, this moment also illustrates the unfixed nature of the gender and sexual roles that Fanny, Mary, and Edmund play in the triangle by having Fanny’s “feeling” arise not from interacting with Edmund himself but from “representing” him opposite Mary. Rather than taking a socially minor role—the confidante who is on the outside looking in—Fanny takes the major role of the male lover, perhaps the most key figure as he is the unique one. Her act thus queers the “character-space” that the male lover occupies (Woloch 14). Since Edmund is the only man, in playing him Fanny makes herself the main point of the triangle and the object of all desires. While René Girard’s theory of the triangle posits that there is one “mediator” who drives desire for the other parties, here it is unclear who is mediating for whom (2). By playing the role of Edmund, Fanny becomes the object of Mary’s desire while simultaneously desiring herself.

The interactions between the three also reflect Fanny’s simultaneous roles as a key player in the novel’s form and a marginal player in its social scheme, as both Edmund and Mary use her as a tool to drive their romance. As Edmund arrives on the scene, the use of Fanny as a

“functional” figure becomes apparent (Woloch 25), but so does a curious blend of feelings between the three: “Surprise, consciousness, and pleasure appeared in each of the three on this unexpected meeting; and as Edmund was come on the very same business that had brought Miss

Crawford…great was the joy and animation of being thus thrown together—of comparing schemes—and sympathising in praise of Fanny’s kind offices” (“MP” 518). Here, Fanny, Mary, and Edmund all react in the same way to a situation which brings the three of them into closer contact. The placement of “surprise, consciousness, and pleasure” at the beginning of the sentence allows the feelings to take the prime position and to dominate the moment; we know what everyone is feeling, and who exactly is feeling what becomes less important. While Fanny is vital to facilitating this interaction and the others explicitly mention her “kind offices,” her centrality then fades in the second part of this passage, which emphasizes only what Mary and

Edmund share. The narration goes on to state that Fanny “could not equal them in their warmth.

Her spirits sank under the glow of theirs, and she felt herself becoming too nearly nothing to both, to have any comfort in being sought by either. They must now rehearse together…Fanny was wanted only to prompt and observe them” (“MP” 518). Upon the appearance of the real male lover, Fanny must shed her role as the man, at which point she assesses herself as “nearly nothing.”

Just as Fanny the lone “man” becomes central, Fanny as one of two competing women against becomes marginal, especially in her own estimation. The presence of both lovers also reduces the necessity of her role as confidante: Mary and Edmund can now directly interact and express their feelings to each other, rather than using Fanny as a stand-in and expressing them to her. Fanny’s marginalization, however, is not complete here; while she may move into a more minor “character-space” as regards her social place in this scene, her formal “character-space”

remains major (Woloch 14). The continued rehearsal is told from her perspective, and the reader thus becomes aware of her feelings, which are not apparent to Mary or Edmund. Although the reader knows that Fanny fails to prompt the others because she is “agitated by the increasing spirit of Edmund’s manner,” Mary and Edmund blame this on “weariness” (“MP” 518). Here,

Mary and Edmund confuse an emotional response with a physical one, echoing the earlier moment in which the narration links Fanny’s headache to her distress (“MP” 465). While this is another way of minimizing and forgetting Fanny on the part of Mary and Edmund, as they transfer their erotic charges from her to each other, her formal centrality remains key.

The queering of the triangle in this scene is but one example of the characterization of these relationships throughout the novel, which calls into question the relative importance of the three characters. Because of Fanny’s almost constant presence in the narrative, even when the plot seems to be sidelining her, the eroticism that might naturally be directed between Edmund and Mary is instead directed at her. The gender and sexual roles performed by each character shift, and Mary in particular plays out her feelings through Fanny. When Fanny goes to visit

Mary and gets caught in the rain, the scene strongly emphasizes the bodily interaction between them, as Mary is “among the most active in being useful to Fanny, in detecting her to be wetter than she would at first allow, and providing her with dry clothes” and Fanny is “obliged to submit to all this attention, and to being assisted and waited on by mistresses and maids” (“MP”

537). Mary is again physically active and Fanny physically passive; the two are opposed as they are close to each other. Mary follows up this interaction by making Fanny a substitute Edmund again, playing the harp and telling her “I want to play something more to you—a very pretty piece—and your cousin Edmund’s prime favourite. You must stay and hear your cousin’s favourite” (“MP” 537-538). While Mary elsewhere confides her hopes to Fanny, here she skips

the step of telling Fanny about her feelings for her lover and instead makes Fanny into her lover directly.

These moments between Mary and Fanny emphasize the potential homoeroticism of the confidante role. Fanny’s perspective is vital here: because so much of the novel is filtered through her consciousness, we do not get to see much of such private moments between Mary and Edmund. Instead, Fanny as the confidante must play the stand-in; it is through Mary’s interactions with her that we come to understand the erotic potential inherent in romance as it also plays out in friendship. Such a potential is notably absent from either woman’s direct interactions with Edmund, even though the romance and marriage plot between Fanny and

Edmund ostensibly forms the correct and happy ending of the novel. Instead, it is tied to the interactions between the two women and particularly to the more dangerous, potentially transgressive Mary. While Mary tends to lead the pair’s interactions, however, Fanny plays an essential role. Through her receptiveness to Mary’s words and actions, she creates a situation in which an alternate form of intimacy can flourish. And indeed, the roles Mary and Fanny play continue to emphasize ambiguity and a lack of fixity: Mary takes the lead by making Fanny take the unique place of the male lover. Their interactions therefore suggest that, within the novel, female intimacy is as essential a relationship as heterosexual romance. Or perhaps more essential, due to a question that the novel does not ask explicitly—if Fanny is able to play her own lover, is Edmund necessary at all? If Marcus argues that “marriage and friendship are inseparable” and thus implies that readers cannot privilege marriage over friendship, these interactions suggest that readers can instead privilege friendship over marriage, or at the very least over courtship (82). Granted, Fanny and Mary’s relationship does not fit easily into

Marcus’s category of friendship: while it has its aspects of moral support, it also involves

Fanny’s at times intense disapproval of Mary and their rivalry over a man and generally lacks the mutual uplift on which Marcus focuses.17

We might read the negative aspects of this pairing through the lens of Sarah Stickney

Ellis’s The Daughters of England (1842), in which she condemns the damaging effects of flirtation on friendship. Notably, Ellis shares Austen’s seeming preference for familial friendships, writing, “It is a subject of surprise to many, that the young so seldom enter into close and intimate friendship with the members of their own family. Were this more frequently the case, how much more candour and simplicity of heart would mingle with the intercourse of friends!” (Ellis 192). She goes on to emphasize that friends should give moral uplift and that

“woman should be true to woman” (Ellis 199). Ellis further connects this to a problem of flirtation: that women “take more pains to please” men than other women (214). In Ellis’s conception, the proper woman focuses on her female friends and on those within her family, rather than on potentially pleasing men.

We see moments of a friendship that goes against Ellis’s strictures in the relationship between Fanny and Mary, particularly in the characterization of Mary. Firstly, Mary fails to “be true to” Fanny, especially when attempting to advance the marriage between Fanny and Henry

(Ellis 199). She tricks Fanny into accepting a necklace from Henry, leading Fanny to reflect that

Mary, “complaisant as a sister, was careless as a woman and a friend” (“MP” 568). While Mary, like many Austen characters, prioritizes family, here she prioritizes a male family member over a female friend, an action which Fanny’s response suggests is not only incompatible with true

17 Marcus notes that “female rivalry over men was discouraged because it implied that women fought for and won their husbands, but women were allowed the agency of competing for one another’s favor” (59). We might also ask whether “friendship” is too desexualized a term in discussing Fanny and Mary’s interactions, but Marcus’s work in Between Women constructs female friendship and the erotic gaze as parts of Victorian social mores neither opposed to heterosexuality nor fitting into contemporary conceptions of lesbianism.

friendship but even with proper femininity. Mary’s focus on her relationship with Edmund and her ignorance of Fanny’s feelings also suggests that she “take[s] more pains” with heterosexual romance than with female intimacy (Ellis 214).

While Ellis’s ideas of proper womanly behavior include the valorization of female intimacy, she fails to make space for the continuum of desires that Mansfield Park portrays.

Fanny and Mary’s relationship incorporates its own elements of flirtation, which are not solely confined to relationships with men, and Mary’s failures to put Fanny first do not diminish the valuable place their pairing holds in the novel. Even when Mary focuses on Edmund, the fact that she does so by making Fanny play his role serves to centralize the relationship between

Fanny and Mary, despite its tensions. If Fanny is able both to love and to be Edmund, and if

Mary is able to love Edmund through loving Fanny, Edmund himself seems to be more or less superfluous to the triangle, despite being the only man. It is only the idea of him that is important, foregrounding the women’s queer, shifting desires. Elsewhere in the novel, Fanny’s aunt demands her services by saying, “I cannot do without her:” in the context of the triangle, these words take on a new meaning (“MP” 467). Mary and Edmund “cannot do without” Fanny, as the confidante, even when Fanny and Mary can “do without” Edmund; they need her presence to allow them to express the romantic or erotic feelings that the text does not allow them to express directly to each other. While Fanny may seem to be a minor part of the novel’s marriage plot before she becomes one of the lovers, she is in fact the most vital part of its formal construction and is necessary for the presentation of romantic interaction.

Deerbrook, Disability, and Self-Marginalization

In Deerbrook, Maria’s outsider role is even more pronounced than Fanny’s; furthermore, it is largely self-defined, as Maria emphasizes her position in her internal monologues. Maria’s disability serves as a key factor in defining her status. In line with Holmes’s analysis of the

Victorian novel’s unwillingness to portray disabled women experiencing marital sexuality (56),

Maria sees herself as unfit for marriage. Particularly relevant to her place within the structure of

Deerbrook is Holmes’s reading of the disabled woman’s “implicit exclusion from biological motherhood” and of these novels’ uneasy attitude towards the idea of disabled women reproducing (62). Deerbrook centralizes reproduction more than most novels of the period: both of its central families include multiple prominent child characters, and Hester, one of the heroines, gives birth to a child after her marriage partway through the novel. Maria’s position outside of the realm of family and reproduction is therefore especially notable here, in a novel that devotes exploration to the aspects of family life that take place after the marriage plot’s typical conclusion. While characters such as Hester develop and go through different life stages,

Maria’s social role does not alter over the course of the novel; she may serve to effect change within the world around her, but she herself does not change.

Maria’s static position is particularly notable because Deerbrook makes the roadblocks to her finding love and marriage conspicuous by their lack of explanation. While Maria herself declares from the start that she can never marry, the novel never provides an explicit reason for this. We are left to make our own assumptions, and the presence of Maria’s physical disability, a trait she does not share with the women around her, serves to differentiate her and provide the implied reason. As in the texts that Garland Thomson (Extraordinary Bodies 81-102) and Michie describe, her disability serves to portray her as opposite to the women around her, destined for a

unique and in this case socially inferior fate: she remains stagnant in life while others move forward.

Multiple scholars have explored Maria’s identity and its connection to Deerbrook’s ideas about the proper roles for disabled women or for women more broadly. Clayton Carlyle Tarr explores the novel as one of several in which disabled women “act as surrogate narrators” and serve to “paradoxically uphold…the normalized reproductive networks from which they have been excluded” (646, 651). He argues that Maria observes and narrates other characters’ stories and serves to authorize Margaret and Philip’s marriage at the novel’s conclusion (Tarr 652-653).

Drawing on Martineau’s sociological writings, Fratz also focuses on Maria as a disabled figure who helps others (117), describing her as a “channel for sympathy” for Margaret (119). Darby

Jean Walters cites Maria’s scholarship as an alternative to marriage, even as she acknowledges that “her story still participates in the ontological project to separate and assign hierarchical value to nondisabled and disabled bodies,” implying that Maria’s fate is not valorized by the novel to the extent that marriage is (180). David makes a similar assessment, critiquing the novel for not fully representing the feminist views that Martineau expresses in her nonfiction writings (85-86).

Indeed, while Deerbrook grapples with allowing women possible alternatives to the marriage plot, it leaves the real viability of such alternatives as something of an open question or phantom opportunity.

When Margaret considers her future, confiding in Maria about wondering if she could earn her own living, Maria warns her against such a possibility, despite her own life as a working woman. She tells Margaret “for an educated woman…for such a woman there is in all England no chance of subsistence but by teaching” or dressmaking, and when Margaret presses her to suggest a way of earning money, responds, “I believe I should not if I could. Why? Because I

think you have quite enough to do already, and will soon have too much” (Deerbrook 515, 516).

Maria’s “too much” suggests marriage and perhaps children; the woman who will conclude the novel with the prospect of a happy marriage is barred from working. Nevertheless, this conversation suggests an anxiety about the range of women’s opportunities. While the construction of Maria’s disability as a marriage barrier that forces her to work may be tied to

Holmes’s idea of work symbolizing the disabled woman’s difference from the norm (94), it may also symbolize a larger question: what should a woman’s fate be?

Maria’s exchange with Margaret suggests that she does not perceive work as possessing the same value as marriage but instead as a last resort, something necessary for women who are not fit or ready for marriage. Because Maria, as a disabled woman, works but discourages others from doing the same, her disability serves to create a seemingly fixed block between the classes of working women and marriageable women. Unlike other, able-bodied governess figures (Jane

Eyre being the most prominent example), Maria is not able to cross the boundary between these categories. Mary Poovey, in her examination of the governess, discusses the Victorian concern that such women might trouble the distinctions between the middle and working classes and suggest that there is no essential difference between governesses and wives (126-163). She particularly notes the “crucial assumption…that women would work only out of necessity” and the ways in which increasing numbers of working women complicated this: “These assumptions produced as part of the representation of woman the illusion of one kind of likeness (moral nature, which followed from maternal instinct)…The problem was, of course, that as more working-class women entered paid labor, the possibility that domesticity could ever be their

‘natural’ state seemed increasingly remote” (Poovey 158, 160). This analysis points up the complications in the role of the governess or other working woman, revealing the Victorians’

difficulties in understanding the choice to work as an alternative to marriage and therefore helping to explain Maria’s isolation.

Poovey also discusses the ways in which “the governess was repeatedly linked” to “the lunatic,” another disabled figure (129). While she particularly connects this to the similarities between Jane and Bertha in Jane Eyre, that novel also casts Jane as the physically able caregiver for the blinded Rochester. Although Jane does experience bodily privation and is perceived by

Diana as too “weak” for the life of a missionary in India (JE 418), she still takes the role of the protagonist with “universal quality…whose normativity encourages us to identify with him or her” (Davis “Introduction” 9). Jane thus excites the concerns Poovey describes by her ability to pass outside the governess role through her lack of physical difference from the “natural” woman: the wife who remains in the domestic space (Poovey 160). Maria lacks the ability to excite such concerns because the novel reminds us at every turn of how firmly positioned she is within her role. Walters argues that Deerbrook, along with other nineteenth-century texts,

“reflects the limited success of a cultural desire to partition bodies into constructed categories” and does not make clear distinctions between its disabled and non-disabled figures (174), but when it comes to work and love, Maria herself defines the categories: she cannot become a married woman, and Margaret cannot become a working woman.

Even as Maria constructs herself as a figure who must stand outside the novel’s main plot, however, she remains an important formal figure as we receive her own account of her perceptions. When her young pupils go away to pick flowers, Maria reflects on the occasion and observes those around her, in a passage that shifts from free indirect discourse to a quoted internal monologue and back. In this extended scene, as Maria focuses on what is around her, the reader focuses on Maria through the intense use of her perspective.

The passage begins by describing Maria’s experience of leisure, mingling her own point of view with larger reflections of the value of leisure as a whole. We learn that “such a holiday as this was one of Miss Young’s few pleasures…Let none pretend to understand the value of such whose lives are all leisure…Such have their own enjoyments: but they know nothing of the paroxysm of pleasure of a really hard-working person on hearing the door shut which excludes the business of life, and leaves the delight of free thoughts and hands” (Deerbrook 43-44).

Through Maria’s own “pleasure,” we shift to a larger idea: the value of leisure as a contrast to work. The moment therefore emphasizes Maria’s role as a working woman, setting her apart from the novel’s other women: she is the only one who is able to understand “the delight of free thoughts and hands” because of her circumstances. The novel both makes Maria symbolic and centralizes her as an individual; while Martineau uses her to prove a point about leisure, she also makes her the focus of the scene and goes on to explore her inner reflections in greater detail.

The next part of the scene is told as a direct internal monologue from Maria, one which goes on for three pages. Maria begins with philosophical reflections on the value of the imagination, a trait which she particularly appreciates due to her disability. She thinks, “It is a luxury…for one who cannot move about to sit here and look abroad…But how well I can remember what the pleasure is! The jumping stiles—the feel of the turf underfoot, —the running after every flower, —the going wherever one has a fancy to go, —how well I remember it all!”

(Deerbrook 44-45). Maria emphasizes her own mental experience rather than her current physical experience: she is able to engage in sensory recollections of her pre-disabled past and to focus on seemingly small enjoyments such as “going wherever one has a fancy to go.”

She also focuses on the ways in which her disability makes her different from others, particularly because it allows her to appreciate what they take for granted: “And yet it gives me a

sort of surprise to see the activity of these children, and how little they are aware of what their privilege is. I fancy, however, the pleasure is more in the recollection of all such natural enjoyments than at the moment…The imagination is a better medium than the eye” (Deerbrook

45). Through Maria’s focus on mental experience, she is able both to differentiate herself from those around her and to find commonalities. While she lacks the children’s unthinking

“privilege,” she has similar experiences through her “recollection” and “imagination”—or even possibly superior experiences. Such reflections are in line with Fratz’s reading of Maria as the sociological observer (115) and Tarr’s reading of the disabled woman figure as able “to observe with extraordinary authority” (646). Maria, as is frequent with the confidante, occupies an ambiguous position here: she is both the central character of the scene as the subject of individual focus and a higher voice pronouncing philosophically. Her paradoxical situation is not only apparent to the reader; it also forms her own thoughts. While Maria describes her imagination as something that makes her “equalized” with those who are able to have direct physical experiences of the world, she then compares herself and other “lame people” to

“prisoners suffering cacere duro,” suggesting that her social isolation still holds sway even with the possibility of vivid mental experience (Deerbrook 45-46). Martineau’s construction of

Maria’s identity requires that she be different and set apart by her disability; even as it gives her the possible advantages of imagination and the observational “authority” that Tarr describes, it must keep her out of the social world (646). In this way, her mental faculties are not additions to what another woman might experience, but substitutes.

Maria’s isolation continues as she observes the other young women and differentiates herself from them as one who is to observe love affairs rather than participate in them. She thinks, “I am out of the game, and why should I not look upon its chances? I am quite alone, and

why should I not watch for others?...What is it to be alone…? It is to be put into a post of observation on others” (Deerbrook 46-47). What is most notable here is that Maria defines herself as “out of the game” and “quite alone” without ever providing an explanation as to why: this is the premise from which she draws her reflections and conclusions. While the passage’s earlier emphasis on her social status and her disability provides potential reasons, Maria does not make the connection directly; we are left to assume that these factors are such obvious bars to her entering into “the game” of love that they do not need to be explained. Maria also specifically contrasts herself with other women, thinking of “women who have what I am not to have,—a home, an intimate, a perpetual call out of themselves” and of “I, with the blessing of a peremptory vocation, which is to stand in stead of sympathy, ties, and spontaneous action”

(Deerbrook 47). This moment prefigures Maria’s later discussion with Margaret about women’s work, suggesting that work is only for women who cannot occupy their time with marriage (who may be, as in Holmes’s reading, disabled women (64)). In both passages, it is Maria herself who makes this distinction, and we learn of Maria’s difference through her own perspective. Even if her idea of her role comes from “social perceptions of gender and disability” (Fratz 11), within these textual moments, rather than being dismissed by others, she is dismissed by herself.

The long passage, which at this point moves back into free indirect discourse, then connects Maria’s perception of herself with her poverty and disability by describing how they came to be. We learn of the accident in which her father “was taken up dead, and Maria was lamed for life”—a wording which denies the possibility of any alternate futurity or fate for

Maria—and we see this moment tied to her romantic feelings for Philip (Deerbrook 48). As the two had known each other prior to the accident, Maria “had, indeed, hoped—even supposed— that in Philip’s mind the affair had at least been entertained…She could never settle to her own

satisfaction whether she had been weak and mistaken, or whether she had really been in any degree wronged” (Deerbrook 48). This moment casts ambiguity on Philip’s past feelings for

Maria, as we only learn about them from her perspective. Particularly intriguing is the possibility that he might have “wronged” her by abandoning a potential romantic relationship. While Maria reads her own poverty and disability as now barring her from marriage, this wording suggests that, had Philip previously loved her, he should not have allowed these factors to change his feelings. Maria’s disability serves as a condition that, with the event of the accident, divides her past opportunities from her present status, but this moment calls the rightness of this division into question, even as Maria continues to define herself as separated from other women.

Because we receive this account of Maria’s marginalization from her own point of view, the text implies that Maria is at the very least complicit in it. She herself tells the reader that she is “out of the game;” we thus have only her word for this, and it suggests that it may be her own choice not to seek romantic prospects (Deerbrook 46). While Maria’s division from others is doubtless informed by the “social perceptions” that Fratz describes, the form of the novel implies that it is also formed by her own internalization of these “perceptions” as so natural that they need not be discussed and thus by her views of herself (11). Although her marginalization arises from these particular social roles, it also interacts with her position as the novel’s confidante figure. In both of these novels, we see the confidantes defining their own positions. Fanny decentralizes herself by her responses to Mary and Edmund, helping to facilitate their romance despite her own love for Edmund. Maria, too, helps to facilitate the romance of others, and her disability thus serves as a “narrative prosthesis” for her character type and plot function (Mitchell and Snyder 47). While allowing the reader to have a reason for Maria’s removal from the love plot—albeit a reason that is never explicitly expressed—it also provides the novel with its

confidante by giving us a character who seems suited by her status to listen to others.18 Maria’s description of herself as “put into a post of observation on others” shows that both she and the novel differentiate among those who may participate in romance and those who may only watch, narrate, and advise about it (Deerbrook 47).

Of course, the confidante’s self-decentralization is fraught because of the way the novel presents and narrates it. We learn that Maria is marginalized and sees herself as such in the very moment that we hear from Maria. As such, this moment is a prime example of these novels’ conflict between form and content: how a character can play a major role in the text’s form while still playing a minor one in the plot. This scene provides us with an extensive and deep look into

Maria’s psyche, occupying a large section of the text, even though this digression is not really necessary to move Deerbrook’s story along. It is very difficult, in this moment, to ignore Maria’s presence in the novel or to shunt her off to the side, much less to determine whether she is occupying a major or minor “character-space” (Woloch 14); the focus on her makes it hard to dismiss her as merely serving a function to help other characters. While Maria does fulfill, in this scene, many of the roles that scholars criticize as the only ones allotted to disabled figures in fiction—Holmes’s description of the “young disabled woman involved in a marriage plot to which she is denied access” (35) and Davis’s analysis of the disabled figure’s marginal presence against the novel’s “normative” construction (“Introduction” 9) particularly come to mind—this use of tropes is complicated by the way Maria’s own perspective is absolutely vital. Maria is not just marginally present here, as disabled characters often are, but centrally present; instead of being on the sidelines and observed by the novel’s other characters, she takes charge of the story in order to share her own past.

18 This is in line with both Tarr’s (646) and Fratz’s (117) analyses of the disabled figure as an observer character.

The use of Maria’s perspective in this scene is particularly notable since the text does not previously focalize her. Unlike Fanny, Maria is not the main perspectival character in her novel, and Martineau could easily continue to leave her out. Yet she is brought forward here to share her thoughts. Although she does not share her love for Philip with others—she continues to keep herself out of the marriage plot on the level of its action—she does make it known to the reader, thus giving the reader a deeper sense of her importance than that possessed by those around her.

The purpose of this moment is simply getting to know Maria, contradicting the way she marginalizes herself in its content.

In addition to sharing her own thoughts with the reader, Maria serves to further the plot of the novel by playing the role of confidante to Margaret as she discovers her love for Philip.

Like Fanny, Maria occupies a position between two lovers and allows them to share their feelings with her; while Fanny often seems troubled by this position, however, Maria actively promotes such confidences. Maria’s status as more explicitly divided from those around her— she is a paid worker rather than a dependent member of the family, and her disability is more obvious—may serve to explain this difference. While Fanny has some possibility of marrying, which will eventually pay off for her, Maria’s lack of such a possibility makes it her role to focus on facilitating the romances of others. Tarr argues that one of the disabled woman’s roles in the

Victorian novel is that of “promoting appropriate romantic pairings” (647); this implies, of course, that in Deerbrook a pairing between the able-bodied Margaret and Philip is “appropriate” in a way that a pairing between Maria and Philip could not be. Since both women do love Philip, this suggests that the marriage plot is more a matter of upholding the physically “normative”

(Davis “Introduction” 9) than of fulfilling romantic feelings, particularly if we consider the implication that Philip might have loved Maria prior to her accident. In line with Holmes’s

reading of the “disabled woman’s implicit exclusion from biological motherhood” (62), Maria is prevented from marriage and the possibility of disabled offspring.19

Instead, Maria allows Margaret to share her feelings for Philip, which she initially implies without naming him. When Margaret wonders about the possibility of feeling love,

Maria responds, “If there was any one!...My dear Margaret, do you mean to say there is no one?”

(Deerbrook 185). By implying that Margaret may already feel love, she provokes Margaret to talk further, and Margaret goes on a small tirade about the suspicion others feel towards innocent friendships. To this, Maria says, “I did not throw out a single hint about any friend of yours,” a statement which Margaret concedes while “blushing” (Deerbrook 185). Because Margaret’s expressions of her feelings take place in dialogue rather than in free indirect discourse or internal monologue, the reader must look to the subtext to determine her feelings; even with her confidante, she is not yet ready to tell the whole truth. It is Maria’s interventions, however, that force Margaret to say even as much as she does and that also prime the reader to the need to investigate Margaret’s feelings.

This interaction thus shows Maria’s vital formal function in furthering the novel’s marriage plot, a function that she explicitly defines as that of a friend. After giving Margaret several pages of wise advice, Maria herself confesses that she speaks “from [her] own experience,” although she refuses to be more explicit (Deerbrook 193). She tells Margaret, “I have sometimes grievously wanted a friend to love and speak with, —and if I could, to serve.

Now I have a friend” (Deerbrook 193). The purpose of a friend, according to this passage, is to listen to others and to share thoughts and feelings; the confidante brings the love plot to the fore

19 Maria’s limp, since caused by an accident, is presumably not something that could be passed on, but Holmes’s discussion of “the theory of maternal impressions or frights,” in which a pregnant woman might see a disabled person (or in one case, a ferret) and have her child turn out similarly, suggests a Victorian lack of understanding of heredity that would allow us to read this as a possible concern (65).

by being such a friend. This is in line with Marcus’s argument that “female friendship is thus best described as what I will call a ‘narrative matrix,’ a relationship that generates plot but is not its primary agent, subject, or object…The narrative distinctiveness of friendship lies in its ability to make stability a springboard for the adventures that traditionally constitute our notion of the narratable” (79). Rather than being a source of conflict, Maria and Margaret’s friendship itself

“serve[s]” the novel’s marriage plot by providing a “stable” grounding that allows Margaret to develop her understanding of her own feelings through her exchanges with Maria (Deerbrook

193, Marcus 79). This pairing is not a one-sided one, as Maria shares some of her own experience and feelings with Margaret; at times, they trade the confidante role. However,

Margaret does not draw out Maria’s hints as Maria does with her, and Maria is left to share her true feelings only with the reader.

While Maria allows Margaret to bring out her feelings for Philip, Margaret seems unaware of any special connection between the other two. As they discuss Philip’s possible return to town and whether it might be due to an attraction to Margaret, Margaret attempts to dismiss Maria’s opinions by focusing on her own insight, saying, “I know Mr Enderby so much better than you do” (Deerbrook 195). Although Maria’s friendship and relationship with Philip precede Margaret’s, Margaret does not know of the depth of Maria’s feelings and makes a move to centralize her own relationship with Philip instead. Even though Margaret emphasizes the high value she places on Maria as a friend, at this point in the conversation she further marginalizes her by failing to have insight into her feelings or to consider the possibility of her having a better understanding. This moment further exemplifies the ambiguous position of the confidante: although Maria is vital to the form of this conversation and to bringing out new plot developments, she is still considered a marginal figure and not a viable love object, even by her

closest friend. In contrast to the earlier scene which focalizes her perspective, this scene returns

Maria to the present-but-dismissed position typical of the disabled figure and perpetuates it.

Margaret does not consider Maria to be an individual with her own understanding, and Maria plays into this perception by not correcting her or openly expressing her own feelings.

The Confidante’s Fate

The conclusions of Mansfield Park, in which Fanny is united with Edmund and becomes the marriage plot’s heroine, and of Deerbrook, in which Maria remains present but outside of the

Margaret-Philip engagement, present two alternate fates for the confidante figure. Yet they both speak to an important aspect of marginalization—the way in which it depends on differentiating characters—and both illustrate how the same differentiation can be reversed to make a character prominent. While Fanny’s ultimate difference comes from her elevation and Maria’s from her submersion, both conclusions emphasize the way in which the delineation of a novel’s major and minor characters comes from setting them off against others, both through the formal

“juxtapos[ition]” Woloch discusses (43) and through their social differences in class, gender, and disability status. We know that Fanny is worthy to be Mansfield Park’s heroine because she is more virtuous than the other women around her; we know that Maria cannot become

Deerbrook’s because she is physically different from other women. Being unique can serve either as a reason for bringing a character to the forefront or an excuse to move her into the shadows, but the confidante must, at the end of the novel, experience only one of these fates.

In the final chapters of Mansfield Park, the romance between Mary and Edmund comes to an end following the extramarital affair between their respective siblings, an event which

Edmund sees as a moral affront and Mary sees as minor foolishness. Edmund details their

discussion to Fanny, deploring the fact that Mary displays “no reluctance, no horror, no feminine—shall I say? no modest loathings” (“MP” 675). Mary’s seemingly unfeminine characteristics have previously differentiated her from Fanny in a positive manner; here they return as failings.20 Fanny’s response to Edmund’s confidences notably highlights the contrast between the two women. As Edmund criticizes the way in which Mary expresses herself, Fanny does not express much at all; rather than contradicting Edmund, she agrees with him and in fact takes his ideas to the extreme. Edmund gives long descriptions of his interactions with Mary, and

Fanny is largely confined to such short responses as “And what…what could you say?” and “Did you?” (“MP” 676). Her longest comment, describing Mary is, “Cruel!...quite cruel. At such a moment to give way to gaiety and to speak with lightness, and to you!—Absolute cruelty! (“MP”

676). Even Edmund denies Fanny’s assessment here, but it serves to illustrate Fanny’s unique level of morality, which makes her the novel’s most outstanding woman. The tying together of morality and femininity also lends a new significance to her physical weakness, formerly compared negatively to Mary’s strength. If Mary’s strength is seen as making her less feminine and this is tied to her lack of morality, Fanny’s sickliness can be read as representing virtuous femininity, rather than as a defect, and as standing in for her nature as a suitable heroine.

Fanny’s virtue, however, does not require her to remain loyal to the discarded Mary.

While previous scenes of the novel’s love plot centralize the two women, their direct interactions, and the erotic charge between them, Fanny now puts that aside and centralizes her own interactions with Edmund. After Edmund explains his parting with Mary, “Fanny, now at liberty to speak openly, felt more than justified in adding to his knowledge of her real character”

(“MP” 678). By breaking one of Mary’s confidences and revealing that Mary had hoped for

20 Todd also discusses this moment, writing, “In femininity Mary is Fanny’s antithesis” (Women’s Friendship 269); however, Fanny and Mary’s shifting roles prevent this opposition from being so simple.

Edmund to inherit upon the possible death of his elder brother, Fanny further degrades Mary’s virtue and by contrast exhibits her own. The conclusion of the romance between Edmund and

Fanny in the following chapter (the novel’s last) comes as no great surprise, as it is largely founded on characterizations that the novel has previously established. We learn that “scarcely had he done regretting Mary Crawford…before it began to strike him whether a very different woman might not do just as well—or a great deal better…With such a regard for [Fanny], indeed, as his had long been, a regard founded on the most endearing claims of innocence and helplessness…what could be more natural than the change?” (“MP” 684). Fanny’s “innocence and helplessness,” begun when Edmund meets her as a child and continued through her disabled state, prove to be positives rather than negatives for Edmund. They are central to who Fanny is and make her “a very different woman” from the independent Mary. All of Fanny’s traits, both physical and mental, work together here to symbolize what she is in the novel’s world: the ideal woman to be a heroine and to achieve a happy marriage.

As if this is not sufficient, the novel’s conclusion participates in what Todd terms

Fanny’s “rejection” of Mary and of the other women around her, emphasizing how Fanny’s unique character produces her unique fate (Women’s Friendship 248). Summing up what becomes of everyone in the final chapter, the novel provides Fanny with a better future than those of the other three young women, Maria, Julia, and Mary. Maria, who has run away from her husband with Henry, is described as “unfortunate” and condemned to go with her aunt Mrs.

Norris to “an establishment…formed for them in another country—remote and private” (“MP”

681). Julia “escape[s] better” but is still described as having committed “folly” through her own elopement (“MP” 682). Mary remains discontented, torn between her worldly desires for a rich marriage and her inability to find “any one who could satisfy the better taste she had acquired at

Mansfield…or put Edmund Bertram sufficiently out of her head” (“MP” 684). These unhappy fates precede the description of Fanny’s marriage to Edmund and further serve to emphasize her happiness. Plainly, in a novel centering around a marriage plot, only one woman can achieve the best marriage, and she is the only one who is allowed to be major at the novel’s end. We know that Fanny is now a major character on the levels both of form and of content because of the ways in which she is “continually…juxtaposed” with the women around her (Woloch 43): to put it in common parlance, she is not like other girls.

This resolution to the marriage plot and to the misalignment between Fanny’s formal and plot-based roles also removes the homosocial intimacy between her and Mary in favor of heterosexual romance with Edmund. Previously, Fanny’s centrality to the marriage plot comes about through her playing the role of Edmund with Mary; the novel’s conclusion, however, removes these queer overtones in favor of Fanny moving back into a feminine role and Edmund playing the male role himself. Instead of aligning Fanny’s roles by concentrating on her relationship with Mary—whatever form that might take—the conclusion aligns them by having

Fanny take Mary’s place with Edmund, moving Fanny into the conventional role of marriage plot heroine. Rather than fully acknowledging the centrality of the confidante and the story of female intimacy, therefore, the ending of Mansfield Park implies that the novel’s most important plotline is always the story of marriage.

Fanny’s transformation from confidante to heroine also raises an interesting question: why does Fanny get to transform, and how does this relate to the redefinition of her disability?

The conclusion of Mansfield Park addresses the symbolic rather than the practical aspects of disability; as Holmes says, novels of disability aim to provide catharsis rather than answer questions like “what Tiny Tim will do for a job when he grows up” (18). Even in the novel’s

later sections, Austen continues to mention Fanny’s “delicate and nervous” physical state; therefore, we cannot say that Fanny’s health improves, only that it ceases to be the most important thing about her once she finds love (“MP” 641). Fanny’s movement between character positions, therefore, is not due to any actual change in her traits or character: instead, her change in positions affects how we view these traits. If we have read Fanny as suffering or pitiable because of her physical weakness, we are now expected to read her as happy and triumphant because she has found love with Edmund, even though she may well continue to experience health problems during her marriage. The novel simply redefines Fanny’s disability as a positive rather than a negative distinction, changing her circumstances rather than her innate self.

Maria’s circumstances, on the other hand, remain decidedly the same. The final scene of

Deerbrook consists of a last conversation between Margaret and Maria, which takes place three days before Margaret’s marriage to Philip. Margaret expresses her concern about leaving Maria, whom she describes as “infirm and suffering in body, poor, solitary, living by toil, without love, without prospect” (Deerbrook 598). Margaret clearly defines Maria as an outsider here, and

Maria responds to her none too cheerful comment by saying, “Of all these evils, there is but one which is very hard to bear. I am solitary; and the suffering from the sense of this is great”

(Deerbrook 598). Maria’s many other “evils,” therefore, all contribute to her main struggle: the fact that she is “solitary.” Her disability and poverty serve to emphasize her “suffering” and to draw her apart from the novel’s other characters, providing reasons why she is different and thus cannot experience the fate of marriage which the novel’s other young women—Margaret, Hester, and the young Sophia Grey—all tend towards. Furthermore, Maria is about to lose her position as the confidante, as Margaret concludes her marriage plot and prepares to share her life with her husband instead of with her female friend. Margaret emphasizes Maria’s goodness here, wishing

that she could experience her perspective and thus “be the holier forever after,” but this goodness does not help Maria towards anything except patience with her lot in life (Deerbrook 599).

Unlike Fanny, Maria cannot use her virtue to transcend her social position and physical state; instead, it stands for a consequence of her suffering.

Although Maria withdraws herself from the social world and the world of love, she remains present in the novel’s final moments, even after Philip appears to join Margaret. When

Philip approaches, Margaret asks Maria, “Would you like to be with me on Tuesday morning or not?” and Maria responds, “I will come, to be sure,” referring to Margaret’s approaching wedding (Deerbrook 600). Maria must be present to tie up the novel’s plot, as she has helped to illuminate it, but she cannot be present as one of the lovers; she quickly turns the conversation in order to emphasize Margaret’s tie to Philip, saying, “Go and give Mr Enderby the walk in the shrubbery that he galloped home for” (Deerbrook 600). The novel’s final sentence contains both the Margaret-Philip and the Margaret-Maria pairings: “Margaret kept Philip waiting while she lighted her friend’s lamp; and its gleam shone from the window of the summerhouse for long, while, talking of Maria, the lovers paced the shrubbery, and let the twilight go” (Deerbrook 600).

While the last moment in the novel takes place between Margaret and Philip, they spend it discussing Maria, and she is the last character to be mentioned by name. Marcus analyzes the structure of this sentence to note the way it emphasizes Maria; she writes, “That second clause bends over backward to give the participial phrase ‘talking of Maria’ priority over the clause’s grammatical subject, ‘the lovers,’ but what the sentence loses in fluency it gains in meaning, since that reversal embodies how Maria presides over Margaret’s union with Philip” (85). While

Maria remains minor on the level of content—she has not changed her status or entered into the marriage plot—she continues to maintain a vital presence on the level of form and structure. The

conclusion of the novel, which might seem to be given to the union of the lovers, is also given to her, and she even manages to sneak into the final sentence. As Mary and Edmund initially use

Fanny to maintain their love, here Margaret and Philip make Maria the subject of their talk: she remains a major part of the novel’s ending.

And yet even this last sentence plaintively reveals Maria’s marginality with its reference to her lamp shining “for long” (Deerbrook 600): Maria remains alone while the lovers are together, and her representation is not uncomplicated. Instead, she reflects what Davis describes as the way in which novels fail to “centrally represent” disability (“Introduction” 9), even as disabled figures are in “perpetual circulation” (Mitchell and Snyder 52). Maria and her disability cannot be removed from the novel, but they can be removed from any possibility of taking the leading role. While Marcus argues that the two women’s “shared love has brought them closer instead of driving them apart,” the novel’s final scene spends just as much time emphasizing the differences between Maria and Margaret as it does their enduring friendship (84). Notably, it is

Margaret, the more privileged of the pair, who most emphasizes these differences. She details

Maria’s “suffering,” saying, “Though all this may not be too much for your faith, Maria, I own it is at times for mine” (Deerbrook 598). Though Maria is the one who has problems, Margaret speaks of their sobering effect on her own “faith” and makes herself into the central figure in this scene. She firmly places Maria in relation to herself, as a marginal figure who must offer comfort and advice and attend Margaret’s wedding. This relationship, in which Maria cannot fully share her feelings or receive the same kind of help that she gives Margaret, cannot be described as fully equal or mutual. While her continued textual presence keeps the reader from forgetting her, it is easy for those around her to fail to focus on her experience: as Maria herself says in this

scene, Margaret cannot see from her perspective (Deerbrook 599). It is only through the novel’s focalization, not through its action, that we can begin to understand Maria’s experience.

Like Mansfield Park, Deerbrook concludes by privileging the marital relationship over female intimacy, veering away from the subversive potential of its earlier scenes. Once the confidante has served to facilitate the marriage plot, she is no longer necessary, and she loses her role in relation to her friend; here, Margaret moves on to marriage and leaves Maria alone. While

Mansfield Park elevates Fanny from confidante to heroine, pushing Mary out, and Deerbrook leaves Maria in the same marginalized position, both endings ultimately take a similar form: they portray the disabled confidante as different from other women, in a way that is “either positive or negative” (Extraordinary Bodies 29). Through this mechanism of difference, these novels’ conclusions separate women rather than bringing them together, portraying them in relation to each other only to bring them into relation with men.

The Confidante, Disability, and Literary Forms

While Mansfield Park and Deerbrook are works of fiction, they reflect cultural perceptions of the disabled woman’s role. Indeed, fiction and such perceptions may be mutually influential and also affect the representation of disability in other genres: Holmes writes of autobiography, “As nineteenth-century disabled people represented their lives, those narratives of self were inevitably fashioned with reference to the melodramatic conventions that permeated cultural constructions of disability” (133). In Martineau’s Autobiography, for example, she addresses questions that she also addresses in Deerbrook, such as “the question of work…constructed in relation to the other vocational and social roles [she] did not or could not play, those of wife and mother” (Holmes 187-188). She also brings the portrayal of the disabled

figure in relation to other, able-bodied people into her description of her life. She first discusses a childhood friend, referred to as E., who lost her leg and her own reactions to this event. She particularly emphasizes E.’s positive influence on her: “she and her misfortune were among the most favorable influences I had the benefit of after taking myself in hand for self-government. I have much pleasure in adding that nothing could be finer than her temper in after life, when she had taken her own case in hand, and put an end, as far as it lay with her to do so, to the silence about her infirmity” (Autobiography 36). While Martineau takes a favorable view of E.’s ability to speak for herself, she mostly looks to E. as a positive role model. Much as Margaret centralizes herself in her discussion of Maria’s struggles and her response to them, Martineau uses E. in order to discuss her own development.

In this case, however, the pairing is not between a disabled and a nondisabled woman, since Martineau herself was disabled; she discusses this aspect of her life later on in the

Autobiography. In her reflections on deafness, she emphasizes the idea of disabled life as a world apart: “the sufferers rarely receive the comfort of adequate, or even intelligent sympathy: but there is no saying that an elaborate account of the woe would create the sympathy, for practical purposes” (Autobiography 55). Martineau suggests that narrative is an inadequate tool to convey the experience of disability, which is something that must be understood firsthand. Her further discussion, however, crafts the experience of the deaf as a relational one. She describes it as

“irksome and absurd” to constantly ask people to repeat things and avows “that it is impossible for the deaf to divine what is worth asking for and what is not; and that one’s friends may always be trusted, if left unmolested, to tell one whatever is essential, or really worth hearing”

(Autobiography 56). Although her later statement that “those who hear should not insist on managing the case of the deaf for them” seems to contradict this somewhat, Martineau’s

discussion does illustrate the sidelining of the deaf in a world that is centered around the hearing

(Autobiography 57). Her focus here is on difference: the ways in which the disabled and the abled do not experience the world in the same way. As such, the disabled may often see themselves or be seen by others as marginal, existing in relation to an abled-centric world.

Holmes further analyzes Martineau’s own conception of deafness in her “Letter to the

Deaf,” emphasizing moments in which she discusses the need to self-define. She writes,

“Martineau advocates hastening the loss [of specific experiences] as a way of gaining a sense of mastery” and “In order to continue to derive power from her triumph over the cataclysm of deafness, she must keep alive the (past) reality of deafness as suffering, but detach that suffering from a disempowering interpersonal dynamic of sympathy suggestive of the charitable transaction” (Holmes 153, 154). She also discusses Martineau’s avoidance of the role of the

“unpleasant deaf ‘type’” who asks for frequent repetitions of what others have said (Holmes

153). These moments from Martineau’s life writing suggest her resistance to understandings of deafness as something to be pitied or an inconvenience; instead, the deaf person must accept and thus take charge of her own difference and the challenges it poses for life in the hearing world.

These ideas of the disabled person’s role are also reflected in Deerbrook, in which Maria defines herself as unmistakably different and actively removes herself from love. Her difference is implied to have created her virtuous and philosophical way of coping with the world; she responds to her disability by developing a new worldview.

Whether for better, as in Mansfield Park, or for worse, as in Deerbrook, the disabled confidante’s difference remains central to these novels and serves to separate her from other women. As such, while women’s intimacy is a major part of their structures, their conclusions attempt to do away with this focus. Their endings declare in favor of heterosexual romance,

rather than a continuum of different intimacies, including the queerness of female-female pairings. Through their use of disability as “narrative prosthesis” (Mitchell and Snyder 47), these novels move the confidante between “character-space[s]” (Woloch 14). Disability, class, and gender—the factors that might seem to keep the confidante in a subordinate position—therefore do not stand for just one role here. Instead, they are mobile in their meanings, raising the confidante to major status or moving her out of the main plot, bringing female intimacy into a central place. This mobility, however, is somewhat at odds with the fixed structure of the marriage plot, which serves to explain these novels’ endings’ focus on one woman at the expense of others: the strict pairing of the heterosexual marriage removes the space of female intimacy.

Nevertheless, as the confidante narrative develops, the conclusion need not center on such a declaration; instead, the confidante, despite her difference, can maintain intimacies with other women and live within a non-traditional structure. Charles Dickens’s Bleak House, which I will address in the next chapter, is such a novel, carrying over elements from Mansfield Park and

Deerbrook—a confidante who is physically different and socially minor but even more vital to the narrative—while introducing the possibility of an alternate fate.

Chapter Two

The Confidante’s Self-Expression in Bleak House

In describing her own struggles as one of the narrators of Charles Dickens’s Bleak House

(1853), Esther Summerson aptly illustrates the confidante’s ambiguous position. She tells the reader,

I don’t know how it is, I seem to be always writing about myself. I mean all the time to write about other people, and I try to think about myself as little as possible, and I am sure, when I find myself coming into the story again, I am really vexed and say, “Dear, dear, you tiresome little creature, I wish you wouldn’t!” but it is all of no use. I hope any one who may read what I write, will understand that if these pages contain a great deal about me, I can only suppose it must be because I have really something to do with them, and can’t be kept out. (BH 85)

Esther’s musings highlight the ways in which, as narrator, she is vital to the text even when she believes her presence should be marginal. She divides the roles of Esther the narrator, an active agent who “mean[s]…to write about other people” and “tr[ies] to think about [her]self as little as possible,” and Esther the character, the “tiresome little creature” who foils the narrator’s plans by

“coming into the story” and who “can’t be kept out.” While Esther the narrator attempts to craft the story to her own specifications, the undeniable presence of Esther the character makes her goal of focusing solely on “other people” an almost impossible one. Her process of narration, therefore, raises the question of whether it is possible to tell a story without involving oneself: whether the story that Esther the narrator tells will not always end up being the story of Esther the character.

Esther’s roles as narrator and character, therefore, create an additional form of the major/minor conflict we have seen with Fanny and Maria. As a figure in Bleak House’s story, she, like her predecessors, is socially marginal and unimportant: a young unmarried woman with

no family of origin, serving as companion and housekeeper in the Bleak House ménage. She can potentially be read as a disabled or disabled-adjacent figure once she contracts smallpox and is subsequently left with scars. As the novel’s narrator, however, her presence is essential to the text: the story literally cannot go forward without Esther’s telling, and she is particularly important as a recipient of other characters’ confidences, which she passes on to the reader.1 It is

Esther’s role to pass on the confidences she receives to the reader, and her role as confidante and her role as narrator thus have a direct linear connection which allows the reader of Bleak House to receive information and thus understand the novel’s story. The confidences that Esther receives are central to many of the novel’s plotlines—such as Ada Clare and Richard Carstone’s love story and Lady Dedlock’s identity as Esther’s mother—and it is through Esther’s narration of how she came to acquire this information that the reader acquires it as well. Unlike the novel’s omniscient third person narrator, Esther allows the reader to see where she got her information: from others telling it to her.

Thus, Esther serves to illustrate an important function of the confidante: passing stories on. The confidante allows the reader access to the confidences she receives, paralleling her own relationship to the confider.2 These relationships have another parallel in their creation of intimacy. Esther’s interactions with other characters, particularly Ada, as confidante find their mirror in her interactions with the novel’s reader. In both cases, she serves as a partner in an emotionally charged narrative exchange. Ada and Richard intimately adopt Esther into the world of their emotions and give her the central position in their love affair: both confide in her about

1 Of course, Esther does not tell the entire story of Bleak House; I will touch more on the issue of the two narrators later in this discussion. In particular, scholars including John P. Frazee, Richard T. Gaughan, Ralph W. Rader, Matthew Rubery, and Ellen Serlen have discussed Bleak House’s use of two narrators and how these narrators either create a split in the novel or ultimately come together for a larger effect. 2 This is in line with Peter Brooks’s description of narration as “a transferential model” in which an in-text narratee turns narrator and shares someone else’s story with the reader (235).

it, and at one point she literally sits “between them” as they share their secrets with her (BH 135).

Ada’s confidences, in particular, are couched in the passionate language of affection: her relationship with Esther is not just a chance for her to air her own thoughts but a deep bond that incorporates both young women. The openness and intimacy of this bond allows Esther to participate in emotional exchange, which ultimately becomes apparent in her relationship with the novel’s reader.

Although Esther initially resists making herself central to the story, her close bond with

Ada allows her to come into her own. When Esther directly addresses the reader early on in the novel, she is apologetic, emphasizing her own perception of herself as unimportant. In the passage cited above, Esther pleads with “any one who may read what I write” to understand her own foibles in inserting herself into the text (BH 85). Her relationship with the reader thus takes on an emotional valence: she strives to please, and the reader must strive to sympathize and pardon. As Ada shares her feelings with Esther and builds their relationship, however, Esther becomes able to share her own feelings with the reader and to move beyond her fear of acknowledging herself. By the end of the novel, Esther centers her narrative around her own development and fate: while she begins by portraying herself as a minor figure in others’ stories, she concludes by portraying her loved ones as figures in her own. Esther thus simultaneously builds intimacy with Ada and with the reader; over the course of the novel’s significant length, she allows the reader to become closer to her, motivated by her growing sense of herself as important to her friend.

Female intimacy in Bleak House, therefore, is more egalitarian than in Mansfield Park or

Deerbrook. While scholars including Carolyn W. de la L. Oulton argue that the novel’s conclusion serves to elevate Esther over those around her, particularly Ada, by highlighting

Esther’s marriage (91-93), I read the ending of Bleak House as decidedly less hierarchical.

Rather than privileging her marriage, Esther’s narration in the final chapter gives equal weight to a range of characters and relationships, and her language in describing her continued intimacy with Ada lends a queer valence to the relationship between the pair. This suggests the “flexible make-up and permeable boundaries” of the family, in which “friends could be an intimate part of family life” and serve as members of the household, that Leonore Davidoff and Catherine Hall discuss (31, 321). In Bleak House’s ending, the characters build on and add to the nuclear family through bonds of personal attraction. While the earlier novels I have discussed dismiss the confidante and female intimacy once marriage comes along, Bleak House concludes with a network of equally significant relationships. Although Esther may hold the primary position in the final chapter, her primacy is based on her connections with others—often connections built through confidences. And these connections, Esther’s narration implies, are all major ones: marriage and biological family are not the only desirable intimate relationships, but two among many. Esther can share an emotional bond with her husband and her children, but she can also share one with her female friends, her guardian, Ada’s son, and even the reader—someone she does not really “know” at all.

Esther’s relationship with Ada, in which she plays the role of confidante, helps develop her relationship with the reader, in which she is the one to confide; these parallel intimacies ultimately lead to the network of relationships at the novel’s conclusion. In order to explore the role of narrative and confidence in bringing Esther to this point, I will draw on narrative theory, as well as examine the novel’s formal features. In particular, I will make use of narrative theorists including Peter Brooks and Gérard Genette to illuminate the ways in which the formal features of Esther’s narrative both reflect her closeness with Ada and bring the reader closer to

her. I will also draw on Caroline Levine’s work on forms, particularly networks, in order to show how Bleak House’s narrative brings characters together. Furthermore, I will examine the confidences Esther receives in the light of theoretical explorations of gossip, particularly Patricia

Meyer Spacks’s notion of “serious” gossip that serves to build intimacy and the ways in which gossip can “create story” (5, 13). Finally, I will engage previous critics of Bleak House in order to look at two important questions about Esther’s narrative, which must be grappled with before proceeding: what is the relationship between Esther’s narrative and the third-person narrative, and why is Esther so unpopular with critics and readers?3

After laying out the theoretical underpinnings of this discussion and addressing these questions, I will explore Esther’s development over the course of the novel, focusing on her growing relationship with Ada and how it parallels her growing relationship with the reader. In the process, I will also touch on some of Esther’s other confidante relationships and how they serve as contrasts with the Esther and Ada pairing, particularly looking at the secret Esther receives from Lady Dedlock and at her relationship with Caddy Jellyby. I will then pay particular attention to the novel’s conclusion and how it serves to create an egalitarian network of intimacies based on confidences, permitting female intimacy to flourish alongside heterosexual marriage rather than be supplanted by it. Finally, I will look at Bleak House in the context of some other novels of the period, particularly others by Dickens, in order to highlight both the unique features of its ending and the ways in which it fits into larger literary patterns. In doing so, I will show how the intimacy that Esther and Ada share helps to shape Esther’s ultimate

3 Frazee cites contemporary negative commentary on Esther, including Charlotte Brontë’s description of her as “weak and twaddling” and Margaret Oliphant’s comment that Esther was “a failure…[as] a heroine” (227). Rubery’s commentary on the serial reading process and thus the reader’s long association with Esther (116), as well as Sarah Winter’s analysis of the “democratically inclusive” experience of “shared” serial reading, using “memory as the medium where reading intersects with everyday life” (8, 8, 14), are also useful for understanding the contemporary reader’s experience with reading the novel or Dickens’s serialized works more generally.

narrative focus both on others and on herself. Their relationship illustrates the confidante’s vital place in conveying the nineteenth-century novel’s narrative, even as she shakes up its central concerns. The confidante’s perspective brings forward not only the marriage plot but the possibility of female intimacy as a viable through line for the novel, one which can provide the heroine with its own happy ending.

Confidence and Narrative

Esther’s narrative is particularly formally interesting because of its two levels: Esther receives narratives from others in the form of confidences and then conveys those narratives to the reader. This serves to heighten the notion of narrative as a form of communication. When we read about other characters directly communicating with Esther, we become more aware of the way in which she is communicating with us, particularly since the novel’s other narrator is not so personified. Brooks’s conception of narrative in Reading for the Plot is helpful for understanding this aspect of Esther’s narrative. He writes, “Narrative itself [is] a form of understanding and explanation” (Brooks 10). Through her narrative, Esther is able to build a relationship of

“understanding” with the reader: ultimately, to make herself understood. Genette similarly emphasizes the communication aspect in one of his several definitions of narrative: “the event that consists of someone recounting” (26). These definitions serve to emphasize the ways in which being the narrator of a novel shares similarities with being a person talking to others: it is ultimately a form of sharing a story. We might also look at the layers of narrative and storytelling in Bleak House through what Brooks describes as a “transferential model” of narrative: a narrative in which the narrator conveys a story she has received through someone else (235). He argues that narration provokes “the listener’s complicity” and writes that “the reader’s situation

in regard to the narrator mirrors the narrator’s situation in regard to” the original teller of the story (Brooks 217, 220). This formulation, particularly the use of “complicity,” emphasizes the act of narration as an intimate one: the narrator’s words serve to shape the listener, her understanding of herself, and the words she uses in turn.4

Brooks’s examination of narrative’s unfolding in time is also particularly useful in coming to grips with a lengthy novel such as Bleak House. In discussing Genette, Brooks argues that although a narrative is often technically a physical “object” (“a book”), “its realization depends on its being gone through in sequence and succession” and that “the time it takes, to get from beginning to end—particularly in those instances of narrative that most define our sense of the mode, nineteenth-century novels—is very much part of our sense of the narrative”(Brooks

20). This development of the narrative in time is essential to the building of the intimacy between the reader and Esther. Matthew Rubery, in his examination of the effects of Bleak

House’s original serial publication, writes, “Some of the most significant relationships in my life have lasted for a shorter period of time than that of the serial reader’s relationship with Esther

Summerson” and states that the serial reader would likely feel “a profound sense of loss upon

[the novel’s] completion” (116, 117)5. While the extended publication process of the original serial version would surely increase the amount of time between the reader’s first and last encounters with Esther, this sense of extended time is still present when reading the novel as a single volume. The reader only leaves Esther when she chooses to end her story and thus receives a sense of repeatedly interacting with her. This allows the reader to grow to take an

4 Dorrit Cohn’s examination of fictional narration emphasizes the ways in which we come to know the characters whose minds we have access to “in ways we could never know people in real life” (5); however, I will emphasize the way in which this understanding of the individual character (in this case, Esther) is formed not only through her internal reflections but through her relationships to others and how they shape her own self. 5 Debra Gettelman also examines the specific experience of the Victorian reader, arguing that “authors and readers valued novels not only for their narrative content, but also for the introspective digressions they elicit”—in other words, that the reading experience was largely based on the reader’s personal sensations (200).

interest in the repeated elements of her stories and thus to become continually more invested in the budding relationship. The novel’s development in time thus suggests that intimacy is a process built through the sharing of confidences, rather than something immediate. The difference between Esther’s first introduction of herself and her final address to the reader is striking in this regard. Esther begins her narration, “I have a great deal of difficulty in beginning to write my portion of these pages, for I know I am not clever,” and further deprecates herself as

“not charming” and “timid and retiring” (BH 11, 11, 12). This suggests a lack of confidence in her ability to reach the reader, especially when describing her lonely childhood. By the end of the novel, however, Esther is much more confident when she describes her place in the life she has made with Ada and her other intimates, expressing her hope of receiving “dear remembrance” from the reader (BH 663) and even acknowledging the possibility of her own beauty (BH 665).

Particularly noteworthy in this light is the fact that Esther narrates the final chapter of

Bleak House in the present tense (all of her previous narration of events is in the past tense, although she sometimes uses the present for discussions of her writing experience), thus seemingly leaving the reader with her as she is now. Genette describes a narrative shift from past to present tense as an “effect…of final convergence;” he argues that such a shift is expected in a first-person narrative and thus has “no dramatic effect…unless the final situation should itself be a violent denouement” (221). However, this argument fails to acknowledge the emotional impact of this shift as a narrative strategy. Because of the bond created between the reader and Esther through the novel’s length, the reader comes to want to know her present fate. We want the acknowledgement that Esther, as she is “now,” has reached the end result of her process of development and a happy ending to her troubles. Even if we experience the “profound sense of

loss” that Rubery describes, we want to be able to leave Esther safely and not to worry about what the future still holds for her (117).

Caroline Levine also notes the importance of Bleak House’s length in shaping its story. In both her book Forms and her shorter article “Narrative Networks: Bleak House and the

Affordances of Form,” she explores the idea of the novel as a network of interconnected relationships. She describes the “affordances” or possibilities offered by “narrative length,” arguing that Bleak House’s length allows it to represent a network as shorter texts cannot, offering Dickens’s Hard Times as a contrasting example (“Affordances” 517). Furthermore, she emphasizes the way in which the novel’s mysterious plot requires the reader to “spend hours and hours in the experience of uncertainty,” again calling attention to the way in which the reader is fully brought into the world of the novel through temporal experience (Forms 129). Rather than separating the experience of the reader and the experience of the characters, Dickens brings them closer together through his formal choices, creating connections that stretch across the divide between the text and the outside world.

In this sense, we might look at Bleak House’s reader as part of the large network of individuals that Levine describes in her reading of the novel. She describes it as a text “that casts social relations as a complex heaping of networks that not only stretch across space but also unfold over time” (Forms 115). Furthermore, she emphasizes the diffuse nature of this structure, writing that “almost all of the characters act as nodes in more than one different distributed network at a time” and that the novel’s length leads to “multiple principles of interconnection” in which there is no clear cause and effect (Forms 125, 115). These formulations, along with

Levine’s assertion that being connected to many other characters does not necessarily correspond to being powerful, are useful for understanding Bleak House’s ultimate portrayal of Esther as

participant in a large range of intimate bonds, both within the novel and with the reader (Forms

126-127).

Levine’s conception of network, while it may contain elements of other forms which she discusses, such as hierarchies (Forms 113), is not itself a hierarchical one: different relationships interact with each other without a clear indication of which are more significant, and social status is not necessarily linked to centrality. Another particularly suggestive aspect of Levine’s reading is her assertion that Bleak House portrays family as a network, rather than “a singular unit”

(Forms 128). Such a conception of family also suggests that it is malleable, particularly as

Levine’s notion of network involves the possibility of changing and adding characters as “nodes”

(Forms 125). The non-traditional family structure at the end of Bleak House, in which Esther’s

“family” involves many people who are not related to her by blood or marriage—Ada, Ada’s son

Richard, and John Jarndyce—shows a network that is expandable, that depends more on the connections forged between individuals by intimacy rather than on strict notions of who counts as a relative. In line with both Levine’s reading of Bleak House as a series of networks and

Davidoff and Hall’s reading of the family as able to incorporate different individuals (321), I argue that Esther’s place as confidante in Bleak House allows for the building of relationships based on personal interactions and affection between character pairings. It is upon these pairings that the larger familial network of the novel is built, as characters like Esther and Ada are specifically drawn together by shared confidences and love rather than biological or legal factors.

Thus, while it is important to examine Esther’s narrative as part of a large, complicated novel with distinctive formal features, it is equally important to examine it as part of what it represents: a world built on interpersonal exchanges and on the sharing of information, secrets, and confidences. For this aspect of the text, it is useful to turn to Spacks’s theory of “serious”

gossip (5). Spacks describes “serious” gossip as “exist[ing] only as a function of intimacy. It takes place in private, at leisure, in a context of trust, usually among no more than two or three people…It provides a resource for the subordinated…a crucial means of self-expression, a crucial form of solidarity” (5). While she specifically connects her “serious” gossip to more traditional definitions of the term, noting that it involves “talk about others,” she argues for its vital function, for the need not to dismiss it as frivolous (Spacks 5). She further adds that “its participants use talk about others to reflect about themselves, to express wonder and uncertainty and locate certainties, to enlarge their knowledge of one another” (Spacks 5).

This model, I argue, can serve to illuminate Esther’s relationship with Ada, built as it is around the sharing of information. While Ada usually tells Esther about herself rather than about others (and Esther not infrequently fails to tell Ada anything, a point to which I shall return), we still see the pair using their conversations for “self-expression,” “solidarity,” and “to express wonder,” particularly when Ada first tells Esther about her love for Richard (Spacks 5). Esther’s narration, however, more closely fits Spacks’s model, as she shares information about or gleaned from third parties. It is particularly tied to Spacks’s argument that gossip consists of “narrative, interpretation, judgment…[which] create story” (13). Through bringing together others’ confidences and her own thoughts on them, Esther follows this pattern to tell both the “story” of those around her—and, at the same time, of herself. As I have discussed, Esther’s lament that she

“can’t be kept out” of the story calls into question the distinction between telling a story about oneself and about other people; it suggests that Esther’s narrative can never be only about others

(BH 85). We might begin to question whether sharing gossip or stories about third parties is really different from sharing stories about oneself: in other words, whether it is useful to define gossip as something that can only be about other people.

Particularly notable here is the idea that individuals can “reflect about themselves” through telling the stories of others; this brings us back to Esther’s questions about her own place in the narrative (Spacks 5). While Esther worries about “coming into the story,” as the narrator she is always already in it (BH 85). Even when she plays a marginal role in her stories about other people, these stories involve her by virtue of her telling them: Esther’s gossip, therefore, is essentially about herself. This double-sided aspect to Esther’s narration particularly reflects her role as a sort of general confidante. While she may see and present herself as a marginal figure whose function is only to listen to others, the fact remains that the confidante function is essential to bringing the story forward, and Esther’s narrative, as opposed to that of the third- person narrator, makes us aware of individuals’ choices in sharing information. Through listening to Ada’s and Richard’s confidences about their love, for example, Esther is able to forward their romance by bringing this information to Jarndyce—as well as to forward the narrative’s progress by bringing it to the reader.

Through Esther’s narrative, the novel thus makes the argument that the self and other people are not easily separable entities. Individuals are intertwined, often in unexpected ways, and even when conveying information about others, Esther is giving the reader a portrait of herself. This accounts for the blurring of categories between the confidence—generally classed as personal and dealing with one’s own situation—and gossip—generally classed as dealing with other people—that we see in her narrative. Rather than being frivolous, Esther’s gossip and information sharing is indeed “serious” as it serves to give emotional significance to the relationship between her and the reader (Spacks 5).

Spacks further argues that “subject, in the case of gossip, can penetrate method…

Novelistic narrators often arouse in readers the kind of intense interest in personal detail that

gossip generates, and they may attempt to establish with their readers a kind of relationship approximating that of gossip” (10). Esther’s narration makes this apparent, particularly when she addresses the reader in such ways as her apology for putting herself into the story (BH 85): she seems to be questioning whether she should be doing such a thing or whether she should focus on gossip about others. Spacks adds that while “the reader has no such freedom [to ask questions of the speaker]…the reader’s fascination approximates that of hearing an extended and absorbing piece of gossip: interest not only in the persons spoken of but in the speaker’s sensibility” (10).

The “interest…in the speaker’s sensibility” that Spacks describes is vital to our understanding of

Esther’s roles relative to both Ada and the reader. Much as Esther engages with Ada’s secrets because of her love for and interest in her friend, the reader comes to engage with the narrative through such an interest in Esther: through a growing curiosity about how she will tell the story, not just about what will happen next.

The relationship between Esther and the reader thus mirrors that between Ada and Esther:

Ada shares herself with Esther by making confidences, and Esther in turn shares herself with the reader by passing them on. These confidences, however, play somewhat different roles. Ada’s confidences to Esther immediately affect the plot, as when Ada tells Esther and Esther in turn tells Jarndyce of the love between Ada and Richard, leading to their engagement (BH 134-137).

Esther’s confidences to the reader, however, affect our understanding of her nature, whether she is self-effacing as at the beginning or, as later on, more open.6 The confidences Esther receives, and the way she acts on them, bring about changes in her circumstances: the engagement

6 We might look at these two levels of confidences in light of Spacks’s distinction between fiction as a form of gossip and gossip in the real world. She notes that the two are similar because of their narrative elements, but she argues that fiction acts as gossip “made safe…Far less dangerous than its oral equivalent, gossip converted to fiction keeps its place on the page—not in the air between two speakers, not subject to incalculable elaboration or speculation” (Spacks 14).

between Ada and Richard, for example, has the potential to reorder the stable household at Bleak

House, and Lady Dedlock’s secret changes Esther’s conception of her own identity. The very fact that the other characters view Esther as someone to confide in is noteworthy: it implies that she is worthy of trust and affection, prompting the reader to care for her as she ultimately comes to care for herself. This helps to expand our understanding of the alternative intimacies that the confidante creates. Not only does she shape intimacies outside of heterosexual marriage through her reception of narrative, she makes the very form of the narrative into one of these intimacies: the relationship between confidante and reader takes a place alongside the novel’s other bonds.

Narrative Questions

As we have seen, Esther’s narration serves to highlight the theme of intimacy, something that we cannot easily achieve with the novel’s other narrator: an anonymous, omniscient third- person voice. Although several other nineteenth-century novels employ a multiplicity of first- person narratives (Wilkie Collins’s The Woman in White (1860) and Bram Stoker’s Dracula

(1897) are prominent examples), Bleak House is unusual in making Esther the sole first-person narrator opposite an anonymized speaker. The contrast between Esther and the third-person narrator serves to foreground the socially integrated nature of Esther’s narrative. This narrative is based in Esther’s communications with those around her, as well as her individual role in understanding events. Her narrative is thus personal, serving to show the perspective of one person within a social world rather than an outside observer or larger social conscience.

In the third-person narration, Dickens uses free indirect discourse, a form which Casey

Finch and Peter Bowen describe as having its own relationship to gossip. They write, “And if

Emma is a novel that identifies gossip as the way communities narrate their authority, it is also

emphatically a novel that gossips…the novel’s deployment of free indirect style…has the effect of naturalizing narrative authority by disseminating it among the characters” (Finch and Bowen

3). In this reading, it is not merely the novel’s content but its form that conveys the idea of gossip; through seemingly peering into the characters’ minds and recounting what they are thinking, an author brings forward a variety of voices, each sharing different secrets about the intimacies of their lives. As Finch and Bowen argue, “The very force of free indirect style is the force of gossip. Both function as forms par excellence of surveillance” (3). They go on to observe the way in which the third-person narrator in a novel that is told through free indirect discourse “acts…as a mediator of privileged communal opinions” (Finch and Bowen 6-7). The narrator’s gossiping role is thus to share the “communal” point of view and to convey to the reader what the mythical everyone thinks. While first-person gossip creates intimacy with the gossiper—Esther shares secrets with the reader and incorporates herself into what she tells— third-person gossip is less personal and more prying; the narrator tells all about everyone but shares nothing about their self or how they came to know this information.

We see this sort of “communal opinion” narration, which does not express the views of any specific character, from Bleak House’s third-person narrator, who serves to convey the social beliefs that govern the world of the novel. This narrator begins the novel and quickly introduces the central court case: “no crumb of amusement ever falls from JARNDYCE AND JARNDYCE

(the cause in hand) … Jarndyce and Jarndyce drones on. This scarecrow of a suit has, in course of time, become so complicated, that no man alive knows what it means” (BH 2-3). Here, the narrator plunges the reader into the “communal opinions” that Finch and Bowen describe, explaining how people view and understand the case without naming any specific individual (7).

Even when individuals are introduced, the source of information about them remains obscure: we

learn, for example, that “Mr. Tangle knows more of Jarndyce and Jarndyce than anybody. He is famous for it—supposed never to have read anything else since he left school” (BH 4). Mr.

Tangle, an extremely minor character, is only shown to the reader through what others “suppose” about him; we do not receive his personal point of view but instead the point of view of an anonymous public entity that gathers information about him through unknown sources. The third-person narrator also provides the reader with social judgments, as in the famous comment on Jo’s death: “Dead, your Majesty…Dead, men and women, born with Heavenly compassion in your hearts. And dying thus around us every day” (BH 492). Such moments do not facilitate personal connection with this narrator, who if anything seems to be above the reader, the arbiter of what people should think.

Bleak House’s two narrators thus form a marked contrast to each other. In examining the reasons for the novel’s two narrators, scholars have often commented on the difference between

Esther’s more personal story and the broader story of the third-person narrative. Richard T.

Gaughan argues that Esther “is the missing center of the third-person narrator’s story” and that

“the real mystery in the novel is the life the systems of order must ignore and Esther is the expression of that life” (80). He notes the ways in which Esther’s social outsider position— which, I argue, makes her a good fit for the role of confidante—“gives her the rare opportunity to improvise rather than merely accept her identity and, more importantly, to improvise a narrative suitable to this identity” (Gaughan 87). The word “improvise” is particularly significant here, suggesting the ways in which Esther’s narrative shifts and develops, reflecting her own discovery of herself. Ellen Serlen also reads Esther’s narrative as “a highly personal and nostalgic vision of a past, recreated and artificially ordered by Esther herself” arguing that the third-person narrator

represents the “familiar” and Esther the “romantic” (two words which Dickens uses to describe the novel in his forward) (Serlen 552, 551, 551).

While Serlen believes that Esther’s narrative provides Dickens with an opportunity to critique her romanticism as “morally invalid,” I would argue instead that Esther’s narrative is not merely fanciful and self-determined but instead highly social (Serlen 552). Although Esther may indeed “order” her own story, she bases it on what she has learned from others, and the sources of this learning are much more clearly outlined than those in the third-person narrative. While the third-person narrative is communal and impersonal, conveying information to the reader without any description of its origins, Esther, on the other hand, foregrounds the process of narration as socially grounded, showing the reader how she passes on information that she has gained from her interactions with others. This helps to make Esther’s narrative a personal one, something that is made more acute through her contrast with the third-person narrator. Therefore, the two narratives of Bleak House serve to highlight Esther’s storytelling as an interpersonal process—to bring forward the idea of “the event that consists of someone recounting”—by placing her alongside another narrator who pointedly cannot interact with others as she does (Genette 26).

One clear example of this difference is Esther’s first exposure to Jarndyce and Jarndyce.

While the third-person narrator quickly launches into a discussion of the case and already seems to know all about it (or at least to know that such knowledge is impossible), Esther is exposed to it within the text and narrates this process of discovery. When Kenge arrives at Esther’s house after her aunt’s death, he says, “Our young friend has no doubt heard of…Jarndyce and

Jarndyce,” and, upon receiving a negative answer, adds, “Is it possible…that our young friend…never heard of Jarndyce and Jarndyce!” (BH 15). Esther narrates, “I shook my head, wondering even what it was,” and then goes on to explain how she learned about John Jarndyce,

who becomes her guardian (BH 15). Esther’s knowledge comes from others and affects her own self: this facilitates the process of getting to know Esther for the reader, by pointing out how knowable she indeed is compared to the other narrator.

There is another critical problem with Esther as a narrator, however: once they do know her, many readers do not seem to like her very much. John P. Frazee begins his study of Esther by citing negative opinions of her from contemporary readers including Charlotte Brontë (227) and himself writes that “she could hardly be seen as anything but vapid and twaddling” (233) even as he argues that there are narrative reasons for this (232-233). Ralph W. Rader describes her as “static and vapid” (54), Serlen argues that she “is the unconscious butt of authorial irony”

(553) and compares her to the evasive Harold Skimpole (555-557), and even Gaughan, who reads her less critically than others, writes that she is “coy” (89). How, then, can we recuperate

Esther? Why should we come to feel a connection with her through her narration? While these scholars all attempt to provide various formal reasons that we may not care for Esther,7 none of them suggest that we might, in fact, care for her after all.

We might, however, develop a more positive understanding of Esther by reading her development and particularly the conclusion of the novel in a new light: one that emphasizes her story as relational rather than merely personal. Scholars tend to read Esther’s narrative as self- involved: Serlen writes of the novel’s ending, for example, that Esther’s “people exist in happy nonentity, devoid of proper names and modified only by Esther’s possessive ‘my’” (564). While

I will return later to a detailed reading of the novel’s final chapter, I would argue that such readings are based in a hierarchical notion of roles and relationships that Bleak House in fact

7 Serlen emphasizes the contrast between realism and romanticism (552); Rader argues that her plot is not fully developed (53-54), Gaughan says that she needs to avoid fitting into social roles (89); Frazee argues that her story is present to provide “an emotional equivalent” for the social critique on which Dickens really wants to focus (230).

breaks down. Rather than seeing Esther as self-aggrandizing because she describes others in relation to herself, the novel’s ending encourages us to see her as socially integrated; rather than seeing Esther’s marriage as the only conclusion of her plot, the novel’s ending encourages us to take note of her intimacy with others, including Ada. These elements of the novel are not newly introduced at the ending, either: Esther’s entire narrative is the story of her development as narrator and individual through her role as listener and confidante. Thus, we might come to have a more positive view of Esther if we focus on this building of relationships over time—both between Esther and other characters and between Esther and ourselves. We can read her narrative in the light of what Spacks terms “the importance of relationship as an issue of literary interpretation…Fictional characters relate to one another…and readers relate to characters, to narrators” (12). Esther’s place in the novel serves to show the confidante’s centrality and the way her participation in relationships, whether of others’ marriages, of friendship for its own sake, or of sharing a story with the reader, facilitates their success.8

The Joys of Confidence

While Esther serves as a confidante, at one time or another, for almost everyone she meets, her closest intimacy is with Ada. This intimacy is notable for the mutual support it provides. Unlike in Mansfield Park or Deerbrook, confidante and heroine are not two hierarchical roles; instead, each woman is able to take on aspects of both. Esther receives love and trust in return for her receipt of Ada’s confidences, allowing her to develop her own sense of self and in turn affecting her narration.

8 Marcus argues that “Victorian novels make female friendship the catalyst of the marriage plot” (79)—here, Esther’s friendship with Ada brings about not just Ada’s marriage but the two women’s shared future.

Before meeting Ada, Esther has little experience with such mutual support in the giving and receiving of confidences. While the first anecdote in her narrative involves the confiding of secrets, these secrets pass from Esther to her childhood doll, who is naturally very unresponsive.

Esther tells the reader, “I was such a shy little thing that I seldom dared to open my lips, and never dared to open my heart, to anybody else… [I would] tell her all I had noticed since we parted. I had always rather a noticing way” (BH 11). This confidante relationship is obviously one-sided; the doll cannot answer Esther or provide her with any support. Instead, the moment serves to emphasize Esther’s own initial repression and unwillingness to “open her heart” in any situation in which she might risk something: she is not yet ready or able to form intimate connections with other people. If in Brooks’s “transferential model” the narrator takes on the characteristics of the person from whom they receive the story, here Esther is not fully able to tell her story because she does not receive anything (235). The process of narration cannot properly exist in this one-sided world, as Esther lacks significant material to shape her narrative and herself.

Yet Esther does introduce her own role as narrator here, describing what might be her main qualification for the position: her “noticing way” (BH 11). Esther quickly undercuts this by a disclaimer, however, saying that she has “not a quick way, O no!...I have not by any means a quick understanding” (BH 11). This suggests that her narration will be more observational than analytical. On the one hand, this prefigures the emphasis on the transmission of confidences, stories, and information that will be a major feature of Esther’s narrative: if she is only to

“notice” and not to “understand,” it is essential that other people tell her things in order to form her narration (BH 11).9 However, it also calls into question how personal her narrative will be;

9 We will see later that Esther in fact has a good understanding of Ada, at least, and she herself says of her understanding, “When I love a person very tenderly indeed, it seems to brighten” (BH 11).

after all, the third-person narrator may “notice” things too. The resistance to the personal touch serves to highlight Esther’s early recalcitrance and lack of sympathetic relationships with others.

Despite her desire for emotional connections, she does not possess any, lamenting, “I was to no one upon earth what Dolly was to me” (BH 13).10

Esther’s new position at Bleak House as housekeeper and companion, however, allows her to participate in relationships of mutual sympathy. Because Esther takes on the companion role as a necessity, however,11 we might at first question whether the sympathy Esther provides

Ada with is genuine or something that is demanded of her, much as Fanny is required to cater to her troublesome aunts. Lauren N. Hoffer comments on the Victorian companion’s need to perform sympathy, writing, “The companion could fulfill needs for attention, emotional connection, and control that these women [their employers] were not able to obtain from their families or social circles. Employing a companion could permit a Victorian lady with enough disposable income the opportunity to receive sympathy, without the necessity of reciprocation”

(193). Hoffer particularly focuses on Rosa Dartle in David Copperfield, whom she argues

“manipulates the sympathy she is expected to provide her mistress” and thus provides insight into the novel’s other characters whom she observes (191). One might read Esther as fulfilling a similar function as she relates the stories of those around her and makes use of her “noticing way” (BH 11). Her sympathy might thus seem to arise only out of duty or gratitude: her agreement to marry Jarndyce could certainly be an indication of this, and her frequent remarks that she does not understand why others praise her, which contribute to the perception of her as

“coy,” suggest a show of false modesty (Gaughan 89). However, the language of mutual

10 Esther’s confidences to her doll thus cannot fit into Brooks’s description of “narrative…[as] a form of understanding and explanation” (10), since the doll cannot respond and engage in this process. 11 It is not a paid position, but Jarndyce presumably provides for her as she performs work.

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affection between Esther and Ada, as well as their physical closeness, suggests that each experiences the same feelings for the other: rather than Esther being forced to perform sympathy while Ada remains aloof, the two feed off each other to build their affection.

Furthermore, the affection between Esther and Ada centralizes female intimacy, which exists in the novel alongside heterosexual romance. Their friendship plays an important role in the development of the romance between Ada and Richard; in fact, Esther takes center stage even as Ada and Richard might seem to be the primary parties involved. This is most notable when Ada and Richard first confess their love to Esther. This scene, although ostensibly centered around the love between Ada and Richard, seems most focused on the love between Ada and

Esther, expressed both physically and verbally. Ada begins her confidence with “My darling

Esther! ... I have a great secret to tell you!” to which Esther responds mentally with, “A mighty secret, my pretty one, no doubt!” (BH 134). Not only do these endearments establish the closeness between the two women, Esther’s response suggests her level of knowledge of Ada: she already knows what Ada is going to tell her. Furthermore, Esther seems to derive pleasure both from her sense of Ada’s pleasure and from their physical closeness. When Ada tells her that the secret is about Richard, Esther responds by “kissing her bright hair” and narrates, “It was so pretty to have her clinging to me in that way, hiding her face; and to know that she was not crying in sorrow, but in a little glow of joy, and pride, and hope; that I would not help her just yet” (BH 134). Indeed, she perhaps does not perform the role of the confidante as well as she might; rather than “help” Ada to reveal her secret, she draws out and prolongs the moment to serve her own needs and extend their intimacy.

When Ada eventually does confess to her love for Richard, the words and gestures that might be associated with the heterosexual romance in fact take place between the two women.

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Esther addresses Ada as “my pet of pets,” “my darling,” and “my love,” while Ada calls her

“Esther dear;” these words are accompanied by Ada “hold[ing Esther] round the neck,” “kissing” her, and “laying down her face again upon [Esther’s] breast” (BH 135). Notably, as Esther has already hinted, the function of this moment is not actually the transmission of information from

Ada to Esther. When Ada tells Esther that Richard loves her, Esther says, “I could have told you that weeks and weeks ago!” and when Ada confesses her own love, Esther tells her that “I had known that, too, just as well as I had known the other!” (BH 135). The confidence, then, functions not as a way for Esther to learn about the romance but as a way to increase intimacy between Ada and Esther: to introduce the topic of love and thus to allow them to express their love for each other. In the vein of Spacks’s description of the functions of gossip—that

“participants use talk about others to reflect about themselves, to express wonder and uncertainty and locate certainties, to enlarge their knowledge of one another”—this moment allows Ada and

Esther to use a second relationship to advance their own, and their pleasure comes from the knowledge of the truth they share (5). This moment also presents an interesting twist on Sharon

Marcus’s argument that “one friend expresses love for the other by helping her to realize her marriage plot” (82). While Esther does help to bring Ada towards marriage here, the marriage plot also helps Ada and Esther to realize and affirm their love for each other. Esther describes

Ada as speaking “with a bashful simplicity that would have won my heart, if she had not won it long before:” the language of love accompanies female intimacy rather than the heterosexual pairing that is ostensibly at the center of this scene, thus bringing Esther into a more prominent role on the levels of both form and content (BH 135).

This intimacy then expands as Ada and Esther bring Richard and Jarndyce into the scene, establishing the idea of love as part of a network of relationships rather than a single pairing.

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Levine’s conception of family as a network rather than a unit in Bleak House is particularly relevant here: we see the heterosexual couple, often considered the prototypical closed-off unit, as part of a larger circle of intimacy in which they do not even play the central role (Forms 128).

In fact, that role literally goes to Esther as Ada and Richard ask her for her advice and her assistance in telling Jarndyce about their love; she narrates, “They brought a chair on either side of me, and put me between them, and really seemed to have fallen in love with me, instead of one another; they were so confiding, and so trustful, and so fond of me. They went on in their own wild way for a little while—I never stopped them; I enjoyed it too much myself” (BH 135).

Esther does not simply facilitate marriage for the couple here; she is the vessel for their shared love. Instead of using the marriage plot to marginalize the confidante, Bleak House uses it to bring her to the fore. Esther is essential to the conveying of narrative in more ways than one here: much as the reader needs her to relate the story of Ada and Richard’s love, Ada and

Richard themselves need her to allow them to express it.

Esther conveys the couple’s love not only to the reader but to Jarndyce as well. After discussing their plans for the future with Ada and Richard, she tells Jarndyce, “Ada and Richard have fallen in love. And have told each other so…and to tell you the truth, Guardian, I rather expected it” (BH 136). Here the act of speech—of “tell[ing]”—is the most important part of love.

Ada and Richard’s love does not become worthy of reporting until they have “told each other so,” even though Esther suspected it before, and the matter cannot be settled until they have in turn told Esther and she has told Jarndyce. Love almost takes the form of a speech act, or

“act…performed when words are uttered” (“Speech Acts”), and this moment serves to cast narration as a vital action that shapes the unfolding of a story. As Esther’s sections of the novel are constructed as a story told by one person, she can only convey what she herself observes or is

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told. She cannot bring forward what is concealed: her own ability to present events openly is based on the openness of others.

Despite Esther’s central position in the unfolding of the Ada and Richard love plot, her socially marginal status still poses a problem. When Ada asks if it was wrong to confess

Richard’s love for her, Esther narrates, “She might have coaxed me to say No, if I had been the hardest-hearted Duenna in the world. Not being that yet, I said No, very freely” (BH 135). Esther emphasizes her own status as “Duenna” and also implies, through the use of the word “yet,” that she is to remain in this role, rather than marrying as Ada will. Ada also calls attention to this through her address of Esther as “dear Dame Durden,” the others’ nickname for her as housekeeper (BH 135). However, her use of the word “dear” implies that although Esther plays the role of unmarried housekeeper, this does not mean that she is not loved and cherished. While the role could be seen as demeaning, Ada’s use of “dear Dame Durden” as one of her terms of affection for Esther suggests that she is not lesser. It also implies that being a single housekeeper is not incompatible with the queer intimacy between Esther and Ada, even if it is seemingly incompatible with being a bride.

Esther is thus simultaneously centralized and decentralized, beloved and secondary. Her position at the moment reflects the confidante’s double place within the nineteenth-century novel: occupying both a marginal social role (as a single, working woman) and a central role in conveying the narrative. She is certainly a member of the group—Jarndyce, in responding to the announcement of Ada and Richard’s desired engagement, references “these relations between us four which have so brightened my life,” placing each person on an equal footing—but her status, unlike that of Ada and Richard, is stagnant (BH 136). Ada and Richard’s expansive visions of their marital future further the simultaneously central and marginal nature of Esther’s place. The

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pair include her in their future plans, but they include her just as she is, declaring that “I was to be Ada’s bridesmaid when they were married; I was to live with them afterwards; I was to keep all the keys of their house; I was to be made happy for ever and a day” (BH 138). While Ada and

Richard give Esther a central position, it is a central position in their lives rather than in her own, and none of the three yet envision new possibilities for Esther. Esther still sees herself solely in relation to others; her own idea of being “happy for ever and a day” is the same as that of Ada and Richard, as she joyously recounts their plans for her and is pleased to be bound up with them.12

While Esther, Ada, and Richard perceive Esther’s future as unchanging, Jarndyce has a different attitude towards her role. After Ada and Richard become engaged, he praises Esther as

Ada’s “friend and counsellor” but then adds, “But we must take care, too, that our little woman’s life is not all consumed in care for others…some one may find out, what Esther never will, — that the little woman is to be held in remembrance above all other people!” (BH 138). While

Jarndyce upholds the notion of hierarchy by placing Esther “above all other people,” his statement reveals the possibility that this hierarchy can change. The role of “friend and counsellor” need not keep Esther from achieving her own happiness; she, too, can play a central

12 Scholars including Davidoff and Hall, Nancy Armstrong, and Mary Poovey have discussed the connections between new definitions of femininity and bourgeois class position in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, emphasizing the ways in which female subjectivity and class understanding shape each other. Davidoff and Hall write that “gender and class always operate together…consciousness of class always takes a gendered form” and that “the organization of sexual difference is central to the social world” (13, 29). Armstrong makes a similar point in discussing Pamela, writing that “competing class interests are…represented as a struggle between the sexes that can be completely resolved in terms of the sexual contract” (49). Esther’s role here, as both a female worker in the particularly gendered roles of housekeeper and companion and a member of a middle-class household, is therefore ambiguous: where does she stand in the world of bourgeois femininity? Particularly useful here is Poovey’s argument that, while Victorians believed women would create a “domestic character” for both themselves and men, “as more working-class women entered paid labor, the possibility that domesticity could ever be their ‘natural’ state seemed increasingly remote” (160). Esther’s role crosses multiple boundaries here; she is a worker but lives in the home, the arbiter of the domestic but in an unconventional place in the family as a potential third to Ada and Richard. Davidoff and Hall’s commentary on women’s role in the home “as work” (33) suggests these porous boundaries to be more common than we might think: Esther’s double role as confidante is also mirrored by her ambiguous social role.

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role. Notably, Jarndyce’s language suggests that the two roles—“friend” in Ada’s marriage plot and heroine in her own—could coexist, as he says that Esther’s life should not be “all consumed.” Such wording suggests that “care for others” is an admirable and valuable aspect of life, one which can help Esther to develop even as it should not solely define her fate. Esther’s involvement in Ada and Richard’s love story, with Jarndyce’s suggestion that she may someday have one of her own, therefore highlights an egalitarian dimension to intimacy. Individuals can take turns holding the central role in the story, and rather than being placed on different levels, alternate forms of intimacy can coexist and intertwine.

Esther continues to facilitate the relationship between Ada and Richard through her later interactions with Richard, in which she attempts to shape him into a better lover.13 When Esther tries to steer Richard away from his investment in Jarndyce and Jarndyce, he makes her his messenger to Ada even as he rejects her advice. Addressing her as “best of confidantes,” Richard seeks to have her convey her impressions of him: “I wish to represent myself to her through you…I know you will soften the course I take, even though you disapprove of it…I—I don’t like to represent myself in this litigious, contentious, doubting character, to a confiding girl like Ada”

(BH 400). Here, Richard explicitly describes Esther as a “confidante” and Ada as “confiding,” using the terms to suggest the essential honesty of the interactions between the two women.

Knowing he is on the wrong path, he wants to channel his own relationship with Ada through that between Esther and Ada in order to improve and strengthen it: he depends on Esther’s narration to “represent” him positively. He wants her to perform what Brooks describes as

“narrative shaping,” in which a narrator emphasizes what they consider of “significance” (34): in

Richard’s own mind, his good intentions and love for Ada are more important than the mistakes

13 This is another form of the friend who helps the heroine “to choose a husband wisely” (Marcus 85); here, Ada has already chosen, but Esther attempts to improve the husband’s character.

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he makes, and he thus wants Esther to transmit them and put them foremost in her narrative. At the same time, however, by telling Esther that he wants “to represent myself through you,” he again casts her as the primary player in the romance with Ada (BH 400, emphasis mine). Here,

Esther, who gives good advice and is trusted to communicate honestly with Ada, plays the role of the lover that Richard should be. This leads to a subversive proposition which disturbs traditional relationship hierarchies: that the intimacy between the two women is a more morally suitable romance than the heterosexual engagement.

Richard and Esther again play the roles of parallel lovers in a later visit from Richard, in which the two join in praise of and love for Ada. Esther tells Richard, “I know your welfare to be the dearest wish of her heart…And O, my dear Richard, Ada’s is a noble heart,” to which he responds, “I am sure it is,” further referring to Ada as “the dear girl” (BH 471). Here, the two use similar language to describe Ada, and Esther brings Richard closer to what she herself is, using her own love for Ada to remind Richard of what he should be feeling. While Esther is generally more intimate with Ada herself, she also becomes intimate with Richard because of their shared adoration for Ada. Esther further makes use of these intertwined relationships by facilitating a friendship between Richard and Alan Woodcourt, her own beloved. When Woodcourt agrees to spend time with Richard, Esther responds, “God bless you! ... Ada loves him—we all love him, but Ada loves him as we cannot” (BH 474). This comment does suggest multiple kinds of love, with Ada’s romantic love for Richard being particularly noteworthy. However, Esther’s definition of love is still expansive, incorporating “all” of Richard’s associates. Furthermore, by drawing Woodcourt closer into this circle, she continues to intertwine romance and other forms of intimacy. While she believes at this point that she can never marry Woodcourt, she still wishes to incorporate him into the group relationship between herself, Ada, and Richard. By playing

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him in the role of friend to Richard and supporter of the romance between Ada and Richard—a role parallel to her own—Esther suggests that there are many ways of expressing love. In addition, this moment serves to illustrate the “multiple principles of interconnection” without clear cause and effect that Levine reads as governing Bleak House (Forms 115). Esther’s love and concern for Ada and Richard and her secret love for Woodcourt are bound up together here; we cannot say that she is motivated by her relationship to a single individual. Here we see how the confidante plot in the Victorian novel, rather than elevating marriage at the expense of female intimacy, incorporates both. These relationships may serve to facilitate each other, but it is not a one-way street; heterosexual and same-sex intimacies build on each other, with the confidante helping to direct both through her conveyance of information between parties.

We see this develop when, in turn, Woodcourt’s incorporation into Esther’s relationship with Ada and Richard further spurs on her love for him. When he tells her that he has been spending time with Richard and that Richard seems happier, she narrates, “His friendly and familiar way of speaking of them, his unaffected devotion to them, the grateful confidence with which I knew he had inspired my darling, and the comfort he was to her; could I separate all this from his promise to me?” (BH 608). Here, Esther’s love for Woodcourt is inextricably tied to his friendship with Ada and Richard, a friendship that she herself has instigated. Woodcourt’s friendship with Richard grows out of his love for and “promise to” Esther; her wish for them to be friends grows out of her love for each of them. Even while focusing on and praising

Woodcourt in this passage, Esther continues to express her love for Ada as well, referring to her as “my darling.” Ada is bound to Esther by this tie of love, and in turn Woodcourt is doubly bound to her by the way he comforts her beloved Ada. Neither romantic love nor friendship is prioritized in this passage; instead, each feeds on the other. Rather than isolating Esther in the

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role of listener, her intimacy with Ada, based in confidences, provides her with the impetus to extend her social world.

In a more minor vein, Esther experiences a similar social integration in her relationship with Caddy and Caddy’s beloved, Prince Turveydrop. As with Ada and Richard, Esther’s presence is inextricable from the progress of this romance: like other confidantes, she may seem to fill a supporting “character-space,” but the way she interacts with the couple suggests that they in fact need her to function successfully (Woloch 14). Instead of holding stable positions, the three constantly shift, and their roles are so intertwined that it becomes difficult to identify the primary connections: does Esther enter into the relationship between Caddy and Prince, or does Prince enter into the relationship between Esther and Caddy? This ambiguity comes to the fore when Esther and Caddy discuss a conversation Caddy had with Prince. Esther questions

Caddy as to whether she referred to her as “Miss Summerson” in this conversation, to which

Caddy replies that she used the more familiar “Esther;” Caddy also reveals that she “generally call[s] Prince my darling child,” upon which Esther “insist[s]” that she use the term in their conversation and quickly adopts it herself (BH 248). Rather than being two people who happen to be close to Caddy, Esther and Prince themselves are brought together through this use of language. Esther is “Esther” to Prince, as her friend calls her; Prince is “my darling child” to

Esther, as his beloved calls him. Their respective roles are thus collapsed, and even though

Esther and Prince are not physically together, Caddy’s confidence serves to insert her into their relationship and to make her, as it were, one of them. Esther further builds on this by participating in all the major milestones of Caddy and Prince’s courtship. She helps them break the news of their engagement to their respective families and prepares Caddy for the wedding, and their daughter is her namesake, perpetuating her presence in their lives even into the

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unknown future, as Caddy speculates on “her own old age, as the grandmother of little Esther’s little Esthers” (BH 515).

These networks continue to emphasize the shifting place of the confidante and how the intimacy developed through confidences serves to bring her forward. Moving away from the idea of isolated individuals or singular pairings such as the couple, they instead suggest the “unified narrative structure” of Woloch’s “character-system” (14). However, what is particularly notable about the confidante is how she moves from place to place within this “structure,” even within individual relationships. Esther might originally play the role of “mediator” for Caddy’s desires, as Caddy expresses her wish to be like Esther and imitate her housewifely ways (Girard 2).

Later, however, Caddy becomes the “mediator” between Prince and Esther and drives them to care for each other because she cares for them both, telling Esther, “You have no idea what an opinion he has of you! ... it only makes me joyful, for you are the first friend I ever had, and the best friend I ever can have, and nobody can respect and love you too much to please me” (BH

247). As with her relationship to Ada and Richard, her relationship to Caddy and Prince allows

Esther to become central and beloved, even if it is within what seems to be primarily someone else’s story. However, her place within these stories and the primacy of the confidence-based relationships between Esther and the other women queer these marriage plots and disrupt conventional ideas of what relationships are most important. Indeed, they suggest that the novel’s primary love stories may involve Esther after all.

The Pitfalls of Confidence

Esther’s confidante relationship with Ada is particularly notable when we consider it in the light of the other primary secret she receives: that Lady Dedlock is her mother. At first

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glance, Ada’s secret and Lady Dedlock’s secret, although undoubtedly very different in their content, may not seem all that different in their effects on the form of Esther’s narrative. In both cases, someone tells Esther something and she recounts this to the reader: the passing along of stories is still foregrounded. However, closer examination reveals significant differences in the way these moments shape Esther’s character and thus her ability to communicate with the reader.

While Ada’s confidences give Esther pleasure and allow both women to express themselves, serving as “a crucial form of solidarity,” Lady Dedlock’s secret forces Esther to conceal and efface herself, both within the text and in her interactions with the reader (Spacks 5).

In examining Esther’s meeting with Lady Dedlock, many scholars have commented on the effect of Esther’s smallpox scars, particularly on Esther’s statement, “I felt…a burst of gratitude…that I was so changed as that I never could disgrace her by any trace of likeness; as that nobody could ever now look at me, and look at her, and remotely think of any near tie between us” (BH 386). Helena Michie argues that the scars thus allow Esther to differentiate herself from Lady Dedlock and that she “turn[s her] ailment…into specifically narrative power” by becoming her own person with a bodily self (“Who is This” 200). Rachel Carroll takes a nearly opposite view, arguing that Esther’s scars serve as a mark “signifying” her illegitimate origins and that “her illness can be read as traumatic re-enactment of the social death of her birth” (2, 9); Fuson Wang also reads Bleak House’s attitude towards Esther’s illness negatively, writing that the novel “takes the non-normative as defective, a blemish that stands in the way of perfect happiness and perfect integration into society” that Esther must overcome by the end of the novel (478). These views all, however, emphasize the idea that Esther’s scars set her apart and make her socially different; I argue that they play a similar role to Fanny and Maria’s disabilities in representing Esther’s social marginality and the reasons for her placement in the

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confidante role. In a novel that works towards Esther’s integration, her moment of “gratitude” for being unlike her mother—for her own isolation—serves to highlight the factors holding her back

(BH 386). Esther’s encounter with Lady Dedlock shows Esther increasing her own pain and isolation; it is not a confidence that allows her to grow.

The isolation that Esther experiences within the novel thus extends to her relationship with the reader. Not only is Esther unable to help Lady Dedlock, who insists that “no affection could come near her, and no human creature could render her any aid,” she cannot help herself

(BH 387). Esther suggests asking Jarndyce for advice, but Lady Dedlock refuses; Esther thus feels unable to share the secret within the world of the novel. This inability to confide in turn affects her narrative, in which she minimizes and apologizes for her own feelings, rather than expressing herself expansively as she does when talking of Ada. She tells the reader, “I hope it may not appear very unnatural or bad in me, that I then became heavily sorrowful to think I had ever been reared” (BH 389). Concerned about how she will “appear,” Esther downplays her own distress at Lady Dedlock’s story to the reader. She struggles with how to express her narrative even as she tells it, and this moment seems to defy “the difference in function and…the difference in information” between narrator and protagonist that Genette reads as a feature of the retrospective first-person narrative (194). Here, Esther, telling her narrative later, appears to experience the same confusion that she experienced immediately upon learning the secret from

Lady Dedlock and to still be confined by her mother’s confidence. We thus see how others’ willingness to be intimate with Esther affects her willingness to be intimate with the reader: because Lady Dedlock expresses her secret as something shameful and isolating that necessitates that she and Esther remain apart, Esther experiences the same shame in narrating. She “mirrors”

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Lady Dedlock through her narrative strategies of concealment, if no longer through her face

(Brooks 220).

Like Esther’s childhood doll, the reader is unable to participate in reciprocal intimacy, and Esther cannot find relief or comfort in disclosing the secret through her narration. Instead, she assuages her feelings through her intimacy with Ada. When Esther is reunited with Ada following her meeting with Lady Dedlock, she can again occupy the place of the beloved, something she cannot do with her mother. Of her first moment with Ada, Esther narrates, “O how happy I was, down upon the floor, with my sweet beautiful girl down upon the floor too, holding my scarred face to her lovely cheek, bathing it with tears and kisses, rocking me to and fro like a child, calling me by every tender name she could think of, and pressing me to her faithful heart” (BH 392). This moment emphasizes the essential equality that defines Esther and

Ada’s intimacy, as both are “down upon the floor.” Furthermore, both are able to express care for each other; Ada’s use of “tender name[s]” for Esther mirrors Esther’s own speech in response to her confession of love for Richard and is in turn mirrored in Esther’s description of her here as

“my sweet beautiful girl.” Their intimacy also takes on multiple dimensions, as they play different roles simultaneously. Their physical closeness and “kisses” bring out the queer aspect of their relationship, which is linked to its egalitarianism: Esther and Ada are able to love each other in a way that does not involve the social gaps experienced by Esther and Lady Dedlock or even Ada and Richard. Even the difference of Esther’s face does not matter in this relationship, as her “scarred face” is placed alongside Ada’s “lovely cheek.” At the same time, however, this scene allows Esther to experience some of the maternal love she does not get from Lady

Dedlock, as Ada “rock[s her] to and fro like a child.” Scholars including Serlen (561) and Frazee

(231) have emphasized the ways in which this reunion carries more of an emotional charge than

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the meeting between Esther and Lady Dedlock, attributing it respectively to Esther’s self- centeredness and the novel’s lack of thematic connection between Esther and Lady Dedlock. I would argue, however, that this emotional intensity serves to suggest that Esther and Ada’s relationship can stand in for the family relationship that Esther lacks: that Ada can perhaps be

Esther’s family.

Nevertheless, Lady Dedlock’s secret still shapes Esther after this reunion, as she finds herself unable to confide in Ada. She narrates,

If the secret I had to keep had been mine, I must have confided it to Ada before we had been long together. But it was not mine; and I did not feel that I had a right to tell it…It was a weight to bear alone; still my present duty appeared to be plain…Though often, when she was asleep, and all was quiet, the remembrance of my mother kept me waking…I did not yield to it at another time; and Ada found me what I used to be. (BH 392)

Esther recognizes that confidences have the power to relive her feelings and lighten the “weight” she must “bear”. However, the secret Esther keeps is different from that Ada shared; it is, as she says, “not mine,” and she cannot even pass it along to Ada as she passed Ada’s love for Richard along to Jarndyce. Notably, Esther’s language here is uncertain. She says that she “did not feel that” she could tell the secret and that it “appeared to be” her duty to keep it; at this moment,

Esther lacks confidence in her own understanding. While she successfully remains “what [she] used to be” in her interactions with Ada, she still describes herself as different “in that particular of which I have said enough, and which I have no intention of mentioning any more, just now, if

I can help it,” presumably referring to her facial scars (BH 392, 393). Although Esther cannot conceal her face, she can continue to avoid full confidence by not explicitly naming what she is talking about.

Even though Esther cannot entirely “help” bringing up her scars, it is notable that she mentions them here in her narration rather than to Ada or another character. Ada might be able to

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offer her some comfort, as she does in the previous scene, but narration does not provide that solace. What Esther can share with Ada and what Esther can share with her unknown reader14 are different because of social constraints and Esther’s perceptions of her own responsibilities towards others; sharing Lady Dedlock’s secret with Ada could have consequences within the world of the novel, while the reader is a safe recipient. Addressing the reader, who does not technically exist in the same world as Esther, moves her confidences into the realm of storytelling: they become the gossip transformed into fiction and thus robbed of its “danger” that

Spacks describes (14).

The other major matter which Esther holds back from Ada and from the reader is her love for Woodcourt, although her secret-keeping is fairly transparent. Indeed, whether Esther confides in Ada is somewhat ambiguous. After dining with Woodcourt, Esther narrates, “I have forgotten to mention—at least I have not mentioned—that Mr. Woodcourt was the same dark young surgeon whom we had met at Mr. Badger’s…Or, that when they were all gone, and I said to Ada,

‘Now, my darling, let us have a little talk about Richard!’ Ada laughed and said—But, I don’t think it matters what my darling said. She was always merry” (BH 154). We can presume that

Ada comments on Esther’s apparent romantic feelings for Woodcourt in conjunction with

Esther’s comment on her own romance, and this is clearly an affectionate moment, with Esther twice referring to Ada as “my darling.” Although Esther does not confess her love for

Woodcourt in her narration, it is possible that she confides it in response to Ada’s unknown remark and simply draws a curtain over the scene: the reverse of her behavior with regard to

Lady Dedlock’s secret. A later moment, in which Woodcourt leaves flowers behind and Caddy speculates that he purposely left them for Esther, lends credence to this idea, as Ada comments,

14 Esther’s narration makes it clear that she is writing for some reader, although an unspecified one, whom she describes as “the unknown friend” (BH 663. See also BH 11, 85.)

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“Do they look like that sort of thing? ... O, yes, indeed they do, Dame Durden! They look very, very like that sort of thing!” (BH 183). Esther’s friends’ willingness to publicly tease her about

Woodcourt suggests that her romantic feelings are not a secret from them. At the very least, Ada and Caddy must know about these feelings, even if she does not express them in words, and she certainly does not deny them. Here, Esther builds intimacy with Ada and Caddy and confides in them in a way that she avoids confiding in her reader, and notably this is a happy secret: Esther can share joy with her friends even when she conceals sorrow from them.

When discussing Woodcourt in her narration, Esther remains circumspect, still resistant to placing herself at the center of the story. As Woodcourt’s mother attempts to deter Esther from romance with her son, Esther narrates, “And after all, what did it matter to me, and why did it matter to me? …why should I harp afterwards, with actual distress and pain, on every word she said…These were perplexities and contradictions that I could not account for. At least, if I could—but I shall come to all that by-and-by, and it is mere idleness to go on about it now” (BH

315). While Esther’s feelings are fairly transparent here, she does not speak of them directly and instead foregrounds the difference between her past self—unable to fully “account for” her feelings—and her current narrating self, who will “come to all that by-and-by.” This is a moment in which Esther the narrator clearly “‘knows’ more than [herself as] the hero,” and yet she tells her story as if she cannot understand what she was experiencing (Genette 194). Esther only expresses her feelings for Woodcourt at a point in the story when she considers them hopeless because of her scars: “And now I must part with the little secret I have thus far tried to keep. I had thought, sometimes, that Mr. Woodcourt loved me…I should have been glad of it [if he had told her]. But how much better it was now, that this had never happened!” (BH 380). Esther

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confesses her hopes once she sees them as foreclosed: she continues to use her narrative to separate herself from the possibility of becoming a heroine.

Although Esther is able to build her narrative around others’ confidences and to express her pleasure in them—particularly those from Ada—the novel still presents these moments in which she is diffident about her own place in the narrative, and these moments are particularly linked to the factors that marginalize her socially. She does not share Lady Dedlock’s secret with

Ada and minimizes her own feelings to the reader because this is linked to her illegitimate status; she does not speak of her love for Woodcourt until she sees their marriage as impossible because of her scarring. Esther’s failures to confide are thus moments that remove her from others.

Because she is different in ways that society perceives as negative, she is also not able to put herself forward as an individual in a positive manner: as, for example, the potential heroine of her own marriage plot. In contrast, the novel’s moments of successful confidence are built around Esther’s integration with others and her place within networks of relationships such as the found family of Bleak House. The novel’s conclusion blends these two aspects of Esther’s character—her individuality and her place in the community—to show how Esther has learned to care for herself while continuing to care for others, to confide in the reader as Ada confides in her. Esther’s own ability to confide is facilitated by her first-person narration, an aspect of Bleak

House that particularly stands out among the novels under discussion here. Not only does it serve to highlight the narrative function of the confidence, it emphasizes the confidante’s centrality to our perceptions of these texts by allowing her to tell the story in her own voice. Esther’s use of allusions to a reader in her narration—particularly in the final chapter—serves as an emblem of the way in which the confidante figure, even if socially marginal, still demands our attention.

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Esther’s Fate

The final scenes of Bleak House extend and centralize the network of relationships in which Esther, as confidante, plays a vital role. They thus build on the previous networks that

Esther has helped to create and result in an opportunity for her to fully tell her own story. She begins her narration in the last chapter with a direct allusion to the reader: “Full seven happy years I have been the mistress of Bleak House. The few words that I have to add to what I have written, are soon penned; then I, and the unknown friend to whom I write, will part for ever. Not without much dear remembrance on my side. Not without some, I hope, on his or hers” (BH

663). Here, Esther highlights the function of her narrative itself as a confidence: the sort of open, bond-facilitating “serious” gossip that she shares with Ada (Spacks 5). Esther transfers the way in which she has been accustomed to receive confidences to her own recounting of confidences, to the extent that she feels a bond with her reader, whom she does not know and cannot identify.

Nevertheless, Esther affectionately terms the reader a “friend” and avows that she will think of them with “much dear remembrance” (BH 663). Although Esther cannot know the reader’s response, they still have the potential to return her affections (unlike her first confidante, the doll), and she sees this return as her likely due. When she “hope[s]” for “dear remembrance” from the reader, she centralizes herself in her story: rather than insisting, as before, that her focus should have been on others, Esther avows that she has conveyed something of herself (BH 663).

She takes on Ada’s traits and manner of confidence by trusting an unknown someone else with her own story.

In narrating the conclusion of the novel’s events, however, Esther still portrays her individual self as bound up in relationships with others. Of Ada after Richard’s death, she says,

“They gave my darling into my arms, and through many weeks I never left her. The little child

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who was to have done so much, was born before the turf was planted on its father’s grave. It was a boy; and I, my husband, and my guardian, gave him his father’s name” (BH 663). While the relationship between Esther and Ada has always been strongly connected to that between Ada and Richard, here, with Richard gone, it is unquestionably Ada’s most important bond. Esther now has the right to possess Ada, whom some unnamed “they” has given to her. The effect is to center Esther and Ada’s love, firmly establishing this relationship’s centrality before moving on to the other events of Esther’s life. The circle then expands to included Woodcourt and Jarndyce as they name Ada’s baby alongside Esther. Rather than being raised in the traditional family structure of mother and father, the baby is incorporated into the network of non-hierarchical relationships and has a multitude of parents. While this seems in line with Levine’s assertion that the family in Bleak House takes the form of a network, the implications are somewhat different

(Forms 128). Levine argues that the network illustrates the ways in which family members “are not always already fused together, but rather connected by paths that can be interrupted,” as well as the idea that individual family members are replaceable: she cites the examples of Esther’s separation from Lady Dedlock and Mrs. Badger’s multiple husbands (Forms 128). This diffuseness, however, does not define the family network at the end of the novel, which instead serves to highlight the ways in which families can be formed rather than split. Indeed, Esther and

Ada achieve a still closer bond as joint mothers to young Richard.

Esther and Ada’s ultimate roles emphasize the queer dimension of their relationship: the two almost seem to take the place of the novel’s central couple, implying that the fruition of the confidante plot can be as significant as the fruition of the heterosexual marriage plot. Esther’s language in describing Ada is at least as effusive as that she uses in describing Woodcourt, now her husband; Ada is, as ever, “my darling girl,” while Woodcourt is “my love, my pride” (BH

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665). Her description of Woodcourt, however, focuses more on what he does for others in his work as a doctor, while her description of Ada focuses more on their own relationship and their child-rearing—a realm that they are perhaps able to share more than Esther is with Woodcourt.

The confidante relationship, rather than the heterosexual household, defines the space of shared domesticity. Esther expresses her love for Ada by saying, “I think my darling girl is more beautiful than ever…Sometimes, when I raise my eyes and see her, in the black dress that she still wears, teaching my Richard, I feel—it is difficult to express—as if it were so good to know that she remembers her dear Esther in her prayers” (BH 665). The relationship between Esther and Ada is no longer intertwined with the relationship between Ada and Richard (senior), and

Ada’s “black dress” suggests that a future marriage will not interfere with the confidante bond.

Furthermore, Esther’s statement that her feelings for Ada are “difficult to express” implies a significance outside the realm of normative heterosexuality for their relationship. Esther cannot put this relationship or her feelings into easy terms because they are stronger than what is socially prescribed for a pair of women. Yet, even if their relationship is not socially normative, the fact that Ada “remembers her dear Esther in her prayers” suggests that it is spiritually sanctioned. Much the novel earlier casts Esther’s caring for Ada as a potential moral guide for

Richard, here it suggests that this queer pairing is connected to social bastions of morality: faith, the home, and motherhood.

Despite Esther’s existing marriage to Woodcourt, she shares a marriage of sorts with

Ada, one defined by their shared motherhood of young Richard. Esther explains, “I call him my

Richard! But he says that he has two mamas, and I am one” (BH 665). Ada and Esther’s status as

Richard’s “two mamas,” as well as their continued endearments towards each other, creates the queer possibility of co-mothering as a mutual relationship that sustains each of them as they

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work towards joint goals. Esther’s role as Ada’s confidante therefore remains at least as significant as her marriage: it proves to be a long-lasting relationship and one that is vital to her ultimate sense of self. Esther’s intimacy with Ada illustrates the way in which Bleak House allows the confidante to be a figure who participates in multiple relationships: female intimacy, heterosexual marriage, and both biological and adoptive motherhood. Not only does this subvert the “anxiety” that Victorians felt at “imagining disabled women as lovers, wives, and mothers”

(Holmes 35)—indeed, Esther’s marriage and children cure her smallpox scars, if anything—it illustrates a move towards centralizing the confidante figure within a nontraditional structure that earlier novels’ conclusions shied away from. Notably, however, Dickens still locates Esther’s happiness within the domestic realm; we will see in later novels the struggle to maintain female intimacy and heterosexual marriage side by side in the world of work.

While I argue that Esther’s ultimate relationship with Ada is mutually sustaining, Oulton reads Esther’s position at the end of the novel more negatively, suggesting that she subordinates

Ada by her own success. Citing Alexander Welsh, who “identifies a latent hostility to Ada embedded in Esther’s narrative,” she writes, “When [Esther] marries the eligible Woodcourt and

Ada is left as a dependent widow, the final pages of the book firmly reinforce the triumph of this ostensibly marginalized figure by humiliating her potential rival” (Oulton 91, 92-93). Such a reading might be apt for a novel that suggests that only one woman can be major at a time and that all others must be marginal, as we saw in Mansfield Park. However, it fails to account for

Bleak House’s more egalitarian perspective and valuing of the confidante bond: instead, it places marriage on a pedestal that the novel’s final setup does not support. Rather than solely emphasizing Esther’s marriage to Woodcourt and Ada’s placement in Esther’s old role of housekeeper at Bleak House, the conclusion reinforces the idea of the relationship network by

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devoting as much space to Esther’s intimacy with Ada, her continued relationship with Jarndyce, and even the fates of such minor characters as Caddy’s brother Peepy as it does to the marital pairing. Such a conclusion suggests that being unmarried does not necessarily make a character

“marginalized;” instead, other forms of love and intimacy, especially those built by shared confidences, are equally important for self-development and expression, as well as for their own sakes.

Indeed, a wide range of intimacies co-exist at the end of Bleak House. When examining the building of female relationships in the novel, Jill Rappoport writes that Esther’s “close connections to Caddy Jellyby and Ada Clare suggest that, here and elsewhere, giving can establish female community as an alternative or supplement to the patriarchal family…The surrogate children they present to her…shift…the priorities of kinship and storytelling away from heterosexual procreation and toward women’s elective affiliation” (10). While these relationships indeed serve to expand notions of “kinship” and put emphasis on found families rather than biological families, “supplement” is more apt than “alternative” when looking at the novel’s conclusion, as Esther’s relationships incorporate new people and connections into existing structures. Caddy’s bond with Esther, for example, does not supplant her heterosexual romance with Prince but instead adds to it, making female intimacy and marriage almost even in the scale. This also allows Esther to both occupy the place of a conventional heroine—by concluding her marriage plot with the conclusion of the novel—and to continue to shape her own understanding of her place through her other relationships and her confidante role. While Levine argues that “Bleak House painstakingly works out the importance of impersonal (and transpersonal) networks over personal agency,” Esther’s place in this queer network instead serves to give her agency in narrating herself and her fate (“Affordances” 520).

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Esther’s final statement, the last sentence of the novel, reflects the way in which her strong relationships with those around her lead her to find confidence in their own role.

Responding to Woodcourt’s comment on her prettiness, Esther writes, “But I know that my dearest little pets are very pretty, and that my darling is very beautiful, and that my husband is very handsome, and that my guardian has the brightest and most benevolent face that ever was seen; and that they can very well do without much beauty in me—even supposing—” (BH 665).

Esther’s words combine her love for others with her newfound foregrounding of the self. All those around her are named in relation to her by her use of the word “my”: this centralizes Esther within her own story, making the others into supporting characters. Nevertheless, their relationships remain important. Esther praises her children (and perhaps young Richard, as she does not specify exactly who the “dearest little pets” are), Ada (notably the only character here who is bound to her solely by affection rather than by a legal relationship: she is simply “my darling”), Woodcourt, and Jarndyce, suggesting that their attractive looks may be enough, allowing the group to “very well do without much beauty in me.” Such a moment suggests a communal sharing; much as the group can share the duties of family and friendship, they can potentially share the resource of “beauty.” However, Esther’s final words, “even supposing—,” imply a newfound self-confidence, one which lets her believe that she shares in the beauty.

Rather than being the ugly duckling in a group of swans, Esther, much as she receives affection and confidences, has received a sense of her own beauty here, transmitted through the network in which she takes part. She is thus able, in the novel’s final moment, both to affirm her love and admiration for those around her and to centralize herself.

“You Are the Centre”

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The otherwise irritating Harold Skimpole, Jarndyce’s ostensible friend, makes an apt comment on the construction of Bleak House and Esther’s place in it. He tells Esther, “When I see you, my dear Miss Summerson, intent upon the perfect working of the whole little orderly system of which you are the centre, I feel inclined to say to myself—in fact I do say to myself, very often—that’s responsibility!” (BH 403). These two terms—“system” and “centre”—are vital to defining the character interactions of the novel, as well as Esther’s own role.15 Bleak

House ultimately makes the case for a network or “system” of intertwined relationships, one which does not elevate marriage or biological family. While Esther lacks a family of birth and remains unmarried for the majority of the novel, her own deep friendships, built around confidences, and their interactions with other forms of relationship, such as Ada and Richard’s love story, prove to be just as vital. In fact, her connections with her biological family—the aunt who raised her and her brief meeting with Lady Dedlock—prove damaging and abortive.

Alongside the valorizing of the queer bond between Esther and Ada, this serves to suggest that relationships are not necessarily better just because they are conventional and that a family of choice may be better than a family of blood.

While Esther’s relationships do make up a “system,” it is a system that works to place her at its own “centre,” a process that develops in Esther’s mind and through her narration over the course of the novel. Such a development is facilitated by Esther’s changing relationship to confidence and intimacy, which is turn reflected in the tone of her own confidences through narration. Esther begins with only an unresponsive doll as her intimate, but she later achieves closer intimacy with Caddy and particularly with Ada; as the other women confide in her, she

15 Serlen reads this statement as showing Esther’s negative influence and describes it as an “echo” of earlier descriptions of Chancery (557). However, the “system” Esther helps to form serves to provide benefits for its participants in a way that Chancery does not, and I would argue that the novel makes a distinction between the system born out of personal affinities and the bureaucratic system.

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comes to understand the receiving of confidences as a process that, as Spacks argues of gossip, serves to increase interpersonal bonds (5). By foregrounding narrative in this way—by showing how much of what Esther knows is something that others tell her, and by portraying this as taking place in circumstances that reflect and build interpersonal intimacy—the novel allows us to understand Esther’s narrative as a confidence of its own, as something that she tells the reader, whom she envisions as a friend, in order to help them understand and appreciate her. Over the course of the narrative’s extended and unfolding time, Esther transmits more, increasingly personal confidences that increase her closeness to the reader; rather than playing the role of a distant narrator who only tells us about others, Esther allows her narration to reveal her own self.

Although the novel contains destructive secrets, most prominently Lady Dedlock’s, it ultimately portrays the confidence as a privileged form of secret, constructive rather than destructive.

Receiving the confidences of others allows Esther to make confidences about herself to the reader; rather than claiming, as she does early on, that she is not important enough to be central, she comes to portray herself as a vital link in a world of interpersonal connections.

While other Dickensian women participate in confidences and female intimacies,

Esther’s story most fully realizes this dimension of the confidante’s role because its conclusion allows the female bond to exist on a continuum with others. As a companion, Esther might be placed alongside Mrs. General from Little Dorrit (1857), whom Hoffer describes as one of several figures who “exploit their positions…to achieve their own goals” (194). While Mrs.

General weaponizes the sympathy expected of her in the companion role and uses it in an attempt to elevate her own status and bend others to her will, Esther’s rise is a byproduct of her sympathetic relationships with others rather than the purpose of it. Instead, we might read Esther as closer to David Copperfield’s (1850) Agnes Wickfield or The Mystery of Edwin Drood’s

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(1870) Helena Landless, figures who devote themselves to the happiness of others out of genuine caring. Agnes, like Esther, plays the role of a third party in a heterosexual relationship: the marriage between David and Dora, in which she serves as a friend to both. And both women form a pairing with one of the marital partners after the other dies, as Agnes marries David and

Esther shares Ada’s child. While both novels suggest that this new grouping is better than the conventional heterosexual couple, Agnes’s fate falls into the pattern of novels in which only one woman can be the heroine, as she is only able to marry David once Dora is gone. As Marcus notes, the women’s bond is centered around David; she writes, “Just as Agnes helped give Dora to David, Dora’s last act is to repay the favor by giving her husband back to her friend” (90).

Rather than leaving the relationship between the two women as the one that remains—or even concluding with marriage and female intimacy existing alongside each other, as in Bleak

House—David Copperfield ultimately clears the stage of Dora and leaves the reader with the marriage between Agnes and David.

The Mystery of Edwin Drood more strongly prioritizes female intimacy, although we of course cannot know how its story would have ended up. Helena and Rosa Bud’s declarations of friendship are followed by physical affirmations, with Helena kissing Rosa (Drood 53) and Rosa demanding of Helena, “Hold me! Stay with me! I am too frightened to be left by myself” (Drood

54). Such outpourings of affection closely mirror those of Esther and Ada, with a notable difference that pushes the centralization of female intimacy further: while Esther receives Ada’s confidences about a desired heterosexual romantic relationship, Helena receives Rosa’s about the attentions of a man she would like to escape. Helena’s queerness is also initially more blatant than Esther’s, as she is masculinized (in the past she has “dressed as a boy, and showed the daring of a man”) and serves as Rosa’s physical protector (“With one swift turn of her lithe

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figure, Helena laid the little beauty on a sofa, as if she had never caught her up”) (Drood 49, 51).

The pairing of Helena and Rosa suggests female intimacy not only as a possibility for women that exists alongside heterosexual pairings but as a way to potentially protect themselves from men, a purpose that it does not serve in Bleak House’s transformation of Esther into the marriage plot heroine.

In a reverse of Bleak House’s conclusion, Charlotte Brontë’s Villette, published in the same year (1853), illustrates what happens to a confidante-narrator who lacks good material: without experiencing intimacy and receiving fully open confidences from others, she cannot tell a clear story of herself. Lucy Snowe, its heroine, like Esther, conveys her own story to the reader, although she does so in a very different way: replete with obfuscation. While Esther worries that she says too much about herself, Lucy manages to say very little, revealing the details of her past to neither the reader nor anyone within the novel. However, Villette also illustrates the ways in which Lucy’s own experiences of intimacy (or non-intimacy) and the way others conceal things from her shapes her own concealments. Ginevra Fanshawe, who confides in Lucy, keeps important information like the identity of her lover from Lucy, and the language that the two use to address each other is a far cry from Esther and Ada’s laundry list of pet names. Lucy calls

Ginevra “preposterously vain” and “a poor creature,” adding, “In my heart you have not the outline of a place,” while Ginevra addresses Lucy as “caustic creature” (Villette 134) and is described as “cruelly exultant” when boasting of her own lover (Villette 136). Marcus argues that the novel is “resistant…to female friendship” and that its “failure to end in marriage has less to do…with the heroine’s desire for women than with her idiosyncratic rejection of female friendship” (105, 102). I would argue that Lucy’s failure to be open with the reader also arises from the novel’s problems with female friendship, specifically the lack of confidences; if Lucy

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never experiences trust or openness from others, she cannot confide in anyone, even someone outside her story. Villette’s relationship between confidence and narrative thus forms a dark mirror to that in Bleak House, even to its ending. Lucy, too, discusses other people in her final paragraph, but she does so in order to emphasize how their lives are full while hers is abortive; her direct address to the reader takes the impersonal form of the novel’s final sentence,

“Farewell” (Villette 464). While Esther emphasizes her full world of connections even as she is married, there is nothing remaining in Lucy’s life once her potential love story fails. Neglected and decentralized by others, she neglects and decentralizes herself.

Thus, while sharing some elements with these other novels, Bleak House stands out for its portrayal of a heroine who ultimately successfully integrates and connects the many relationships in her life: her position as wife, her role as confidante to other women, and her place as narrator and intimate of the reader. The novel structures Esther’s home life around both traditional heterosexual marriage and her queer intimacy with another woman. Instead of elevating one woman at the expense of others, as in Mansfield Park and Deerbrook, Bleak House presents an egalitarian ending in which Esther and everyone in her world are equally important.

While this expands our understanding of relationships in the domestic realm, the novel does not present female intimacy as an alternative to domestic life— instead it is something that can enrich it—and although Esther technically works, her work is unpaid labor and also part of the domestic sphere. Later novels, centering around the New Woman, use female intimacy to help shape the uneasy tensions between the world of home and the world of work, positing women’s friendships as something that can govern their entry into public space. In the meantime, however,

Esther’s world of Bleak House and Bleak House provides her with the raw material for the personal work of narration and self-discovery.

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Chapter Three

Confidantes at Work in The Romance of a Shop and A Writer of Books

In her Essays on the Pursuits of Women (1863), Frances Power Cobbe affirms the value of women’s intimacy. In the essay “Celibacy v. Marriage,” she writes of the unmarried woman,

If she have no sister, she has yet inherited the blessed power of a woman to make true and tender friendships, such as not one man’s heart in a hundred can even imagine; and while he smiles scornfully at the idea of friendship meaning anything beyond acquaintance at a club, or the intimacy of a barrack, she enjoys one of the purest of pleasures and the most unselfish of all affections. Nor does the “old maid” contemplate a solitary age as the bachelor must usually do. It will go hard but she will find a woman ready to share it. And more! — (but it is a theme we may not treat of here). (Cobbe 52)

Not only does Cobbe valorize the power of women’s intimacy—which she sees as existing on a continuum encompassing sisterhood, friendship, and marriage-like queer bonds1—she sees this form of closeness as uniquely female. While men “can[not] even imagine” such intimacy, it is natural to women and a vital part of their lives. Women, even if unmarried, are unlikely to be alone, Cobbe implies, because of their power to create and invest in alternate forms of intimacy.

Nevertheless, Cobbe does not privilege this intimacy over heterosexual marriage. In another essay in the same collection, “What Shall We Do with Our Old Maids?”, she affirms marriage as desirable, even as she argues that women should have more opportunities to pursue careers. She writes, “Marriage is, indeed, the happiest and best condition for mankind” (Cobbe

62) and goes on to argue that careers for women are desirable so that they will only marry for love rather than economic necessity, thus improving the quality of marriages as a whole (Cobbe

62-63)2. As Martha Vicinus notes, “Cobbe was one of the best-known promulgators of a freely

1 See Sharon Marcus’s discussion of the idea of the “lesbian continuum” in the Victorian era (29). 2 Perhaps the use of the term “mankind” might imply that marriage benefits men more than women, but Cobbe’s overall argument suggests that it is a generally desirable state.

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chosen celibacy…But part of her success was surely due to her willingness to work within the traditional definitions of women’s duties” (IW 16). In Cobbe’s essays, women’s work is intertwined with the possibilities of women’s marriages and women’s friendships. While marriage is still presented as the “best” ultimate fate, work and friendship are themselves valorized as desirable, rather than tragic or unfitting, alternatives.3 Her essays both present new options for women’s independence and affirm the central social place of marriage.

This duality is present in late nineteenth-century novels centering around the figure of the

New Woman.4 New Woman novels attempt (and sometimes struggle) to balance the novel’s traditional marriage plot with the presentation of a heroine who plays non-traditional roles. And the New Woman herself is not necessarily a clearly defined category. Ann Ardis argues that leaving the world of the home for the world of work was not enough to make a New Woman as this also required “challeng[ing] the naturalness of sex, gender, and class distinctions” (17); Talia

Schaffer attempts to distinguish female aesthetes from New Women while noting that “the fundamental question of how to define the New Woman remains unsolved” (10). For the purposes of this chapter, while I will engage with scholarship on the figure of the New Woman that uses different features to define her character, I will mainly focus on late nineteenth-century novels that address women’s working lives. Although many definitions of the New Woman focus on her increased sexual freedom and interactions with public life, these aspects of her character cannot be held distinct from her entrance into the working world, which serves to complicate her relationship to the traditional domestic plot and its marital conclusion.

3 This is in line with Marcus’s assertation that “Victorian society, in which marriage between men and women was a supreme value, did not suppress bonds between women but actively promoted them” (26). 4 Elizabeth Miller studies the increasing effect of independent radical presses on literature published at this time, including its affirmation of sexual freedom and critiques of marriage (257-277). Simon Eliot also observes that the many changes in culture and technology from the 1880s to 1890s led to a new print culture and a “time of rapid expansion” for the possibilities of becoming a writer (14). We see these factors reflected in the novels under discussion.

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Furthermore, the New Woman’s place in the working world allows her to form intimacies with other women that serve as confidante pairings with a difference. Confidences in these novels frequently center around professional ambitions rather than potential lovers, allowing women’s intimacies to replace the marriage plot’s centrality, even if often uneasily. Yet women’s confidante relationships also involve the intimacy, possible rivalry, and mutual aid that we see in earlier novels, now moved from the sphere of work in the home to work in the wider world. The novels in previous chapters portray confidantes who work (whether they are paid or not) in domestic positions—as companions, governesses, and housekeepers. Their ultimate fates, even if they are expansive as Esther’s is, also keep them within the home. The heroines and confidantes of the novels I will discuss here engage in professional and artistic work, and while their confidences share some of the features of those in earlier novels, they also shift accordingly to focus more on this new sphere.

Amy Levy’s The Romance of a Shop (1888) and George Paston’s (Emily Symonds) A

Writer of Books (1899) share a general structure—a young woman or women come to London5 in order to pursue a new form of work, following the deaths of their fathers (in both cases, their mothers have already died). The traditional patriarchal move from the home of the father to the home of the husband is therefore replaced in these novels with a move from the home of the deceased father to the world of work and women’s communities. We see here the alternative options valorized by Cobbe (62-63): rather than being forced to marry in order to survive economically, the heroines of these two novels are able to support themselves. The Romance of a

Shop begins with its female intimacies already established, as its heroines are four sisters, the

Lorimers, who decide to open a photography studio; Cosima Chudleigh, the heroine of A Writer

5 The Lorimer sisters of The Romance of a Shop already live on the outskirts of London but move to a more central area.

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of Books, befriends other working women at the boarding house where she lives while on her quest to become a writer. Both novels present women seeking new opportunities in new places and using their intimacies with other women in order to achieve their goals.

These novels therefore both introduce new elements into the lives of their heroines and confidantes and continue patterns from earlier novels. Particularly notable is the way in which they treat the question of the confidante’s place in the novel’s structure. In Mansfield Park and

Bleak House, the confidante begins the novel as a marginal figure, but the novel’s plot and her relations with other character move her towards the center, particularly in her formal functions.

In The Romance of a Shop and A Writer of Books, however, the divisions between the roles of heroine and confidante are often more clearly defined. While the novels’ heroines are part of communities of working women, they also stand alone as central figures; it is clear from the start who holds the position of protagonist in these novels, and that does not change over the course of the text. Such a feature might be explained by these heroines’ relationships to narrative: both

Gertrude Lorimer (the principal sister) and Cosima are writers. Their respective novels therefore give them more freedom to tell their own stories, rather than focalizing their adventures through others; they pursue their individual talents instead of trying to fit into fixed positions in a marriage plot.

Nevertheless, these novels display a similar duality to that in Cobbe’s essays: their heroines are not allowed to fully escape the world of the marriage plot or to go on unchanged once they have come into contact with it. Even as they work as photographers, many of the

Lorimers’ confidences center around their romances with various men, and the novel concludes with three of the four married (the youngest, Phyllis, has died of tuberculosis, related to her status as a fallen woman) and the photography studio closed. While two of the sisters do

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continue to work, they do so alongside their husbands rather than each other. Cosima’s friendships with her fellow working women, which explicitly center around helping each other with their careers, disappear from the novel once she enters into an unhappy marriage which negatively affects her writing. She does interact again with a female friend in the novel’s final scene, in which she has left her husband and begins writing again.

These novels of working women and their confidences do bring them outside the home and the domestic or romance plot, but there is also a move to bring them back there. This move suggests that Sharon Marcus’s argument that female intimacy and heterosexual marriage were compatible and even encouraged to co-exist in the Victorian era becomes more complicated when work is also brought into play (26). Female intimacy within the working world serves to allow women the chance to express themselves as autonomous individuals. This often takes the form of practical aid: the Lorimers are able to be photographers in part because Gertrude’s friend

Constance helps them find a studio, and Cosima begins her career with advice given by her fellow writer Miss Nevill. Confidences about heterosexual romance are unnecessary for this type of development and at times even disturb it. If, as Marcus argues, “Victorians accepted friendship between women because they believed it cultivated the feminine virtues…that made women into good helpmates,” these friendships that instead “cultivate” female independence might be rather more threatening (26). While Bleak House presents a world in which female intimacy is able to exist alongside heterosexual marriage as part of a larger network of bonds, these New Woman novels present intimacies that take women outside the world of marriage entirely or at least force them to make a choice between the worlds of paid labor and female bonds and of heterosexuality.

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As women’s roles and intimacies within the world of work changed during this period, however, so did men’s. Scholars note the ways in which the emergence of the New Woman brought about fears of shifts in gender roles: Patricia Marks describes worries about “a reversal of sex roles” and “a completely new order” (3). However, like women’s changing roles, those of men were not necessarily straightforward. John Tosh’s analysis of the Victorian man’s relationship to domesticity argues that it was “central to masculinity. For most of the nineteenth century home was widely held to be a man’s place…as the place where his deepest needs were met” (1). While this might seem to indicate that men’s roles were already less separate from women’s than the popular imagination gives them credit for, Tosh also notes a shift away from this in the late nineteenth century—the same time as the emergence of the New Woman—which he describes as “the flight from domesticity” (172). He characterizes this shift as involving a greater interest in empire and adventure, both in life and in fiction, as well a greater involvement in homosocial spaces such as the club or sporting group (174-178, 186-189).

These new relationships are reflected in Cobbe’s description of male friendship as

“acquaintance at a club, or the intimacy of a barrack,” and they also appear in many novels of the late century which focus on pairs or groups of men working together (52). Such male groups as the writers of George Gissing’s New Grub Street (1891), the vampire hunters of Bram Stoker’s

Dracula (1897), and the traders of Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness (1899) form relationships based around their common goals. While heterosexuality is not absent from their lives, it often fades into the background. In Dracula, for example, the men come together because of their shared love for one woman, Lucy, going so far as to all give blood to her (Stoker 138-168). Once she has died, however, they continue to plan the fight against Dracula as “a sort of board or committee” (Stoker 264). It is easy for these men to focus on the task at hand and even to use

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heterosexual romance as an inciting force; unlike the women in these novels of work, they do not need to break away from expectations to create a homosocial space outside the home.

This also suggests that the ease with which Cobbe dismisses these friendships as not as powerful or true as those between women deserves questioning, as the male pairings in these novels reveal an intimacy and tenderness that we have previously seen in such strong confidante relationships as that between Esther and Ada (Cobbe 52). This is most prominent in Sir Arthur

Conan Doyle’s Sherlock Holmes novels and stories, which place the bond between Holmes and

Watson far above any outside relationships, including heterosexual romance. Their pairing does center around the work they do while solving mysteries, but in the course of that work they also display kindness and support for each other. Their interactions are further built on layers of confidence, with clients confiding in them, Holmes confiding in Watson, and Watson confiding everything to the reader. This use of layers of narrative (also apparent in Dracula and Heart of

Darkness) serves to reinforce the centrality of confidences in creating intimacy, much as it does earlier with female confidantes in Bleak House. Through the exchange of confidences, these men are able to tell their stories.

We must consider these novels in light of earlier scholarship on such male pairings.

Scholars have previously explored masculinity and gender roles in male bonds in nineteenth- century novels, but many of these studies tend to focus on earlier texts or non-British texts, presenting similar themes in a different context. In his exploration of Frankenstein, in which he engages with Eve Sedgwick’s scholarship, Eric Daffron argues that in the early nineteenth century, “people also began to scrutinize more closely a whole spectrum of relations that men had with other men;” he focuses on the range of sympathetic relationships between men, citing

Sedgwick’s notion of a “continuum” (416). Ellen Brinks looks at English and German gothic

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texts as playing out concerns about “male effeminacy” (12) and the “close bonds or friendships between men” that were part of “the ‘cult of sensibility’” (17). And of course, we also see male pairings in many of the period’s other canonical texts, prominently including several of

Dickens’s novels (Pip and Herbert in Great Expectations (1861), Mortimer and Eugene in Our

Mutual Friend (1865)) and George Eliot’s Daniel Deronda (1876). What is particularly interesting about these late century novels, however, is their embedment in the world of work and in traditionally masculine, even hypermasculine, contexts such as adventure stories; they emphasize male closeness without linking it to elements of fantasy (as in Frankenstein and the gothic texts), to a domestic space (as in Great Expectations and the conclusion of Daniel

Deronda), or to an ultimate marriage plot that will replace the life of male co-existence (as in

Our Mutual Friend).6 Instead, they allow male bonds to take the central place, largely unaffected by the appearance of female characters.7

The men of these novels are also able to avoid the marriage plot having any effect on their work or on their homosocial bonds. While Watson meets his wife in the second Holmes novel, The Sign of Four (1890), his marriage never merits anything more than brief mentions in future stories, nor does it ever prevent him from going to solve mysteries alongside Holmes. The marriage plots in The Romance of a Shop and A Writer of Books, however, force the professional plots out of the text and fundamentally shape and change the women’s relationships with each other. I argue, therefore, that these texts reveal a relationship between gender, work, and

6 While Leslie A. Fiedler also explores male homoeroticism in nineteenth-century working and adventure novels, his study focuses on American texts, which he explicitly casts as opposed to the tradition of the British and European novel (see, for example, 31, 368). 7 Lauren Goodlad emphasizes “the trend…in which Britain’s best-educated middle-class men were drawn away from ‘ordinary industry,’ and toward genteel professionalism” (104), and Jennifer Ruth also discusses the new role of the professional as between classes and “at once outside the market and within it” (33). The development of the professional class created a new space for men to interact, and these novels illustrate aspects of professionalization in such trades as writing and detective work. At the same time, however, they often escape the “genteel” space that Goodlad describes to send characters on unconventional, world-spanning adventures (104).

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confidence that is more porous than in earlier texts but still far from equal for men and woman.

While both are able to combine the world of work and the world of confidence and homosocial intimacy, this process is fraught and often futile for women once they marry, while men are able to balance the two. Cosima finds “her once fertile brain…dull and barren” after her marriage and her departure from the boarding house occupied by her female friends (Paston 142); the married

Watson, on the other hand, inevitably responds with a remark such as, “I should be glad to come” whenever Holmes seeks his help on a case (Doyle 562). These novels therefore illustrate both an expansion of the avenues for the confidante relationship, including the ways in which it provides support for women outside the realm of marriage, and the ways in which the marriage plot still serves to influence intimacies between women.

The novels of this period, therefore, reveal a shifting and blurring of gender roles for both women and men. Women move outside the realm of the home to working life in the city, and they have friendships and make confidences that center around these lives, rather than solely around romance. Men also come together in the world of work, but this allows them to heighten their intimacy and to confide in each other; in some cases, as with the Holmes stories, the character pairing becomes as much of a draw as the plot. The confidant(e) role is thus available to both men and women and becomes entwined with aspects of the role that have nothing to do with the marriage plot. At the same time, even as gender roles change, horizons for male characters remain broader than those for female characters. Some of these horizons are quite literal: the heroines and female confidantes of these novels usually move from the private sphere of the home to the public sphere of the city, but the heroes and male confidants often move outside England altogether. These texts reflect Tosh’s description of the “new genre of bestselling adventure fiction” in which “men set off into the unknown, to fulfill their destiny

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unencumbered by feminine constraint or by emotional ties with home” (174). While this phrasing somewhat oversimplifies the role of women in these adventure stories, it does illustrate the way in which they allow men a broader scope than women, who do not engage in such extensive work travel. Women in the world of work experience both an expansion of their lives’ boundaries and continued aspects of confinement that men need not grapple with.

In this chapter, I will begin by examining scholarship on gender shifts and women’s communities in the late nineteenth century. Drawing on scholars including Ardis, Marks, and

Vicinus, I will look at the figure of the New Woman and the expansion of women’s working communities during this period and will build on this scholarship to show how these novels tie women’s intimacies specifically to the world of work. I will also place these working women’s confidences within a larger context by looking at changes in masculinity in the fictions of this period, using Holmes and Watson as a case study. Through a brief close reading of their interactions, I will show how these texts tie male intimacy to a male-dominated world of work while also presenting characterizations that resist hypermasculinity. I will then close read The

Romance of a Shop and A Writer of Books, focusing particularly on their beginnings and their endings. I will show how these novels begin by bringing their female protagonists into the world of work, where they build relationships with other women and find fodder for their confidences;

I will then show how the novel’s marriage plots resist these changes and how the novels’ endings either affirm or revert from them. In doing so, I hope to show how these novels involving the public sphere continue an earlier tradition of women’s intimacies and confidences as a possible alternative to the marriage plot’s centrality. What is most notable, however, is that these novels do not allow heterosexual romance and the homosocial world of work to coexist: unlike the

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heroes of male adventure novels or earlier domestic confidantes, their heroines must choose between them.

Gender Shifts and Women’s Communities

The New Woman became a figure of much debate in the late nineteenth century. As

Ardis describes, “A tremendous amount of polemic was wielded against [the New Woman] for choosing not to pursue the conventional bourgeois woman’s career of marriage and motherhood.

Indeed, for her transgressions against the sex, gender, and class distinctions of Victorian

England, she was accused of instigating the second fall of man” (1). She further argues that the creation of the term “New Woman” was used to make the New Woman into a literary figure rather than a social one and thus to make her less threatening, noting that “the expanding controversy focused more and more narrowly on the representation of the New Woman in fiction” (12). Marks’s study of the New Woman furthers this idea through its emphasis on portrayals of and commentary on the figure in the periodical press, citing numerous pieces that mock her. While Marks argues that British periodicals were more likely to present the New

Women as “threatening,” while American periodicals presented her as “provocative or humorous,” the British periodicals she cites do use parodic poems and cartoons to comment on the New Woman, diminishing her through these mocking literary forms (19).

Literary texts therefore both illustrate how women were increasingly taking on what were perceived as masculine roles and attempts to put them back in their traditional places. The fear of the New Woman as a threat to social order might then explain the tendency of these texts to control her by limiting her ability to escape the marriage plot—a form of control that could not be so neatly or so easily exercised on real women. Although these texts move towards

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introducing new options for women, they do not fully embrace these options. Elizabeth Miller comments, for example, on how novels dealing with unconventional sexual relationships, such as

Grant Allen’s The Woman Who Did and Thomas Hardy’s Jude the Obscure, frequently had unhappy endings, even as contemporary writers such as Edith Nesbit connected the possibility of free love to women’s financial independence (257-276). Even when dealing with seemingly less daring matters such as women’s mutually supportive communities, these novels are still bounded by expectations of what a novel about a woman ought to be. They are still bound by “the claims of domesticity,” and romance finds its place even in stories that initially focus on other aspects of women’s lives (Tosh 174).

Marks’s account of the New Woman also emphasizes her creation of her own identity, an especially important factor for understanding these heroines’ relationships to narrative. Marks writes, “The overt repudiation of femina domestica that cultural history has mythologized as the women’s movement can therefore be seen as an attempt on the part of women to write their own history…The new self that women created was quickly co-opted into a new mythology” (10).

The heroines of both The Romance of a Shop and A Writer of Books are creative artists—both are writers, and the Lorimers are also photographers. Their attempts to define themselves through work are thus also attempts to tell their own stories; they create their own images of their thoughts and of the world they observe. While their self-narration takes the form of confidences to their friends, as it does with previous heroines, their self-defining characters also account for the seemingly more “practical” nature of the confidante relationships in these novels. Esther and

Ada’s confidences emphasize their sympathy and help them to bond; when Gertrude and Cosima confide in their friends, they frequently receive practical help with such matters as finding a studio or gathering material for writing. Rather than asking their confidantes to narrate their lives

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for them, they ask them to help them to a place where they can narrate themselves. However, the larger structure of these novels also reflecting the “co-opt[ing]” that Marks describes. The heroines of these novels do not define all that happens to them (notably, neither is told as a first- person narrative, despite focalizing a writer figure) and instead are fitted into pre-defined plots of marriage that do not always provide an easy space for work and artistic creation.

These novels also allow their heroines to develop as individuals through their membership in women’s communities, strongly bound to the world of work. Vicinus emphasizes the growing need and desire for single women to work in the mid to late century and how these women “led in the creation of an active women’s movement, seeking not only political change and education, but also jobs and ultimately…a whole new way of structuring their lives” (IW 6).8

In creating this new structure, these women themselves constructed the single working life and the world of love and marriage as incompatible: “By necessity and choice single women strengthened their friendships with each other and minimized their heterosexuality…Unmarried women often portrayed themselves as either as asexual saints…or as strong women whose sexuality was sublimated into a wider sphere of action” (IW 17).

Vicinus observes further that “both sides of the debate kept within carefully defined parameters, with neither admitting that women might have much to lose in a marriage or that marriage might interfere with ambition” (IW 18). While these novels portray an incompatibility between heterosexual marriage and women’s communities, they take different attitudes towards it: in The Romance of a Shop, marriage provides happy endings for the Lorimers even as it takes them out of their community, while A Writer of Books portrays Cosima’s marriage as the source of her unhappiness. These disturbances to the female community reflect Vicinus’s assertion that

8 Vicinus explores a range of communities, including the suffragist movement, church groups, and nursing communities. Jill Richards also ties women’s communities to their entry into the “public sphere” (535).

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“the very idea of an effective female community was frightening. It implied that women could be self-sufficient and that men were disposable” (IW 31). As with more general fears about the changing gender roles embodied by the New Woman, these concerns influence our understanding of the plots of these novels, which do not portray women’s communities as stable and lasting or entirely separate from the world of men. However, their differing attitudes towards heterosexual marriage—as a welcome conclusion or as a state to escape—also imply that the idea of self-sustaining women’s communities was not necessarily “frightening” to all writers or observers of the New Woman. Instead, they affirm the idea of female intimacy as a possibly desirable alternative to their marriage plot: while the two may not be able to co-exist in these novels, marriage is not always the first or best choice.

It was not just New Woman fiction that reflected shifts in and concerns about gender roles during this period. Critics also comment on the ways in which the aesthetic movement showed shifting perceptions of the roles of men and women. Talia Schaffer analyzes the ways in which the simultaneous rise of the aesthetic and of the New Woman led to a perception that men and women were crossing into each other’s realms: “While New Women were accused of excessive unwomanliness, New Men were condemned for excessive effeminacy; contemporary critics coupled them as the twin extremes of ordinary gender identity” (19). Kathy Alexis

Psomiades also takes up this issue in her examination of how the aesthetic movement used tropes of the feminine to portray desirable men in art: “these masculine figures are constructed as desirable precisely through…the structures… associated with the representation of femininity.

Because of its private sexual connotations, femininity marks these figures as private objects of desire rather than public agents…aestheticist art makes masculine and feminine bodies promise the fulfillment of desire in similar ways” (7). These two analyses suggest not only a shift in but a

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blurring of masculine and feminine identities. Rather than simply swapping roles, men and women each took on aspects of what the other was expected to be. Such a shift can help account for the similarities we see in late century texts revolving around women and those revolving around men; the working plot becomes more prominent in both, and both feature same-sex intimacies formed through work or travel. The marriage plot, however, still remains more prominent in those texts which center women rather than men, emphasizing that this blurring was far from all-encompassing and still subject to the controversy that Schaffer describes.

Furthermore, while the language Psomiades uses to describe the aesthetic male figure reflects

Brinks’s description of the earlier figure of the “effeminate” man of the gothic, the adventure novels do not portray men as objects of desire but rather as active agents who both play traditionally masculine roles and share close homosocial intimacies (Brinks 16).

While this scholarship helps us to understand the perceptions of women as taking on more traditionally masculine roles, their increasing entrance into the public sphere, and work as a space for women’s intimacies, we can better understand the representation of these changes in novels by studying their relationship to confidence and narrative. Women’s work, I argue, serves as an extension of the space and form of confidence in these novels. In this new sphere, confidence comes to serve not only as a way of sharing one’s feelings with a friend (and by extension the reader) but as a way of seeking practical help (and by extension moving the plot forward). By confiding her ambitions to other women, the working heroine receives help and tools for advancement in her career. And since this career is a creative one, by expressing herself to her confidante, she receives the help that allows her to express herself publicly through her art.9 The world of work is thus strongly entwined with women’s intimacy and confidences; by

9 Edith Johnstone’s A Sunless Heart (1894) is another example of this; the heroine Gasparine and her mentor Lotus exchange both professional aid and the stories of their pasts.

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allowing them to maintain themselves (as Cobbe sees as a primary goal) and thus separate themselves from the world of men and marriage, it facilitates their bonds with each other and their ability to express their thoughts.

As members of women’s communities, the Lorimers and Cosima build new lives in female-dominated spaces (their studio and a boarding house, respectively). Their movement from their fathers’ homes to these spaces, rather than to husbands’ homes, allows them to fashion a new way of using confidences and in turn increasing their independence. While confidences in previous novels helped women to new homes with husbands (even if, as in the case of Esther, that new home also included other intimates), these confidences help women to new types of homes altogether. With the help gained by such confidences, they can develop narratives of the self, ones which do not necessarily foreground marriage but instead the working world that they occupy along with men. However, unlike with men, marriage continues to exert its spell on them and pull them from the homosocial community. In these novels, narratives of female intimacy and narratives of marriage exist as alternatives, rather than two stories that can co-exist.

Masculine Freedoms: Holmes and Watson as a Case Study

To understand both the ways that the world of work facilitates same-sex intimacy and the freedoms that women still lack within it, it is useful to turn to male adventure novels as a counterexample. The Sherlock Holmes stories fit particularly well here, as their narrative structure is similar to that of texts such as Bleak House: the confidences Watson receives enable him to narrate the stories. However, there is an important difference: these confidences revolve around work rather than love. For men as well as women, the world of work takes a central position in novels of this period, facilitating a space of male intimacy that often marginalizes or

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excludes women. The male communities they create contain elements of both the feminine and the hypermasculine. While Schaffer and Psomiades analyze aesthetes as taking on more traditionally feminine roles, playing the roles of “objects of desire” (Psomiades 7), and forming their communities around this subversion (Schaffer 30), Tosh’s analysis of male communities during the same period emphasizes a resistance to domesticity and a desire to focus on the active realms of physical achievement, including adventure, empire, and sports (174-188). Such activities specifically excluded women. Tosh notes that, in adventure novels, “support and companionship are provided by the silent bonds of male friendship” (174). He argues that this literary trope mirrored real life, in which “celibacy and a preference for the homosocial life were more than the inevitable accompaniment to the young man’s life overseas. They also provided motivation” and sport was seen as “an alternative way of life to the feminized home” which could take men away from their wives (Tosh 176, 188).

However, Tosh also notes the ambivalence of this all-male world and how its homosocial nature related to homosexuality. He writes, “Any code which is so resolutely homosocial and so indifferent towards women must, we suppose, be founded on a culture of same-sex desire…But that code gave no quarter to homosexuality…But the code of manliness in its public renderings was no more a reliable guide to men’s behavior than it had been in the early Victorian period”

(Tosh 189). Such analysis suggests a greater connection between the more explicitly queer, gender-bending world of the aesthetes and the hypermasculine world of empire and sports than might be apparent at first glance. Indeed, the male bonds we see in texts of the late nineteenth century occupy a space between the feminine and the hypermasculine, heavily emphasizing the powerful support provided by male intimacy and pair bonds while also portraying feats of adventure and bravery. While the texts I will look at here are not explicitly homosexual, they

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privilege male bonds over heterosexuality, sometimes to the extent of cutting out major female characters entirely. They also allow these bonds to become a space of confidence and closeness in which their male protagonists build intimacy through the sharing of stories, much as we have seen in earlier novels of female confidantes.

Eve Sedgwick’s theorization of male homosocial desire in Between Men is helpful for understanding the relationships between the male confidants in these texts, particularly as it fits into the larger curve of fiction over the course of the century. Drawing on René Girard,

Sedgwick focuses on the idea of the erotic triangle, observing that “Girard seems to see the bond between rivals in an erotic triangle as being even stronger…than anything in the bond between either of the lovers and the beloved…the triangles Girard traces are most often those in which two males are rivals for a female; it is the bond between males that he most assiduously uncovers” (BM 21). She emphasizes the “themes associated with male homophobia and homosexuality” in Victorian texts including Our Mutual Friend, in which the romantic rivalry between Bradley Headstone and Eugene Wrayburn emphasizes the erotic charge and hostile sexuality between the two men (BM 163). We see a similar form in the erotic triangles of novels including Daniel Deronda and Mary Elizabeth Braddon’s Lady Audley’s Secret (1862), in which a male homosocial and homoerotic bond is resolved by a marriage between one of the men and the other’s sister, bringing the male romance to a stable conclusion without bringing it into the open. The emphasis in these novels is on male bonds, but they use the form of the heterosexual marriage plot to achieve their resolutions. They therefore share traits with the New Woman novels that interrupt the female homosocial world with heterosexual marriage—they do not allow same-sex intimacy to stand undisturbed—while at the same time prefiguring male

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adventure novels by allowing the male bond to continue even after the entrance of women and indeed intensifying its depth through the marriage triangle.

These adventure and work novels frequently emphasize the bonds of men who work alongside each other by sidelining or removing the female characters. In Dracula, three of the vampire hunters share a love for the same woman, Lucy, but this brings them closer as they try to save her from Dracula; when this fails and they have to stake her, they continue their friendship and joint endeavors, suggesting that the bond between the men is more important to the novel’s progress than Lucy herself, its ostensible source. Heart of Darkness features no female characters for the majority of the text, bringing connections between men to the fore. Notably, both of these texts play with narrative: Dracula is told through the form of various characters’ written narratives, which they share with the reader and each other, while Heart of Darkness employs layers of characters relating their stories. As in earlier confidante texts, the foregrounding of the characters’ sharing of their stories with each other emphasizes confidence as narrative; it allows the reader to participate in the exchange of confidences by reading what the characters have ostensibly written or seemingly eavesdropping on their conversations.

The Sherlock Holmes stories are perhaps the most prominent portrayal of male intimacy during this period. These stories privilege male intimacy by making the relationship between

Holmes and Watson central to their narrative structure. Not only is Watson a helper for Holmes in his work, his role as confidant allows Holmes to share his deductions, which Watson in turn shares with the reader through his first-person narratives. Through their portrayal of Holmes and

Watson’s care and support for each other, as well as their initially shared domestic space, the stories suggest a traditionally feminine aspect to their characters; through their portrayal of the pair’s boldness in solving dangerous mysteries, they suggest a traditionally masculine aspect.

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Doyle thus provides the reader with a form of male character who exists between traditional gender categories and whose central relationships are homosocial ones. Furthermore, their exchanges of confidences allow them to build intimacy with each other and also convey their stories to the reader, drawing the reader in to an extended bond with the pair over the course of their many adventures.

The men of these adventure novels experience greater freedom than the New Woman even on a purely geographical level, frequently traveling outside England (Tosh 174). Holmes and Watson take part in this: although they rarely leave England themselves, many of their cases bring them into contact with mysteries that originated on other continents. Their first adventure,

A Study in Scarlet (1887), is probably the most prominent example of this; its backstory, set among Mormons in the American west, explicitly brings in the outside world through its contrasting third-person narration (Doyle 55-84). The short stories “The Five Orange Pips”

(1891) and “The Yellow Face” (1893) also center around problems which originated in the

United State, and The Sign of Four’s mystery originates in India. Furthermore, Doyle uses these cases from abroad to introduce elements of history and local color into the stories, emphasizing the potential exoticism of foreign locations. This global element to the Holmes stories, along with active elements such as chase scenes, helps to construct Holmes and Watson as brave men of the world who have a wide scope available to them for their adventures.

These adventures exist alongside Holmes and Watson’s relationship, which is the central one in the stories. In The Sign of Four, Watson falls in love with Mary, the woman who brought the case to Holmes, and the two become engaged. Holmes, however, disapproves of the whole enterprise, saying to Watson, “I really cannot congratulate you…love is an emotional thing, and whatever is emotional is opposed to that true cold reason which I place above all things,” and

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adding that he fears marriage could interfere with his ability to solve cases (Doyle 183). Despite

Holmes’s qualms and Watson’s passionate professions of love (Doyle 166), however, marriage in the Holmes stories proves not to interfere with anything at all. Although some of the later stories are set prior to Watson’s marriage and others are set afterwards, this makes no difference to the progress of the plots; even after marriage, Watson is always ready to set off on a case whenever Holmes asks him. The intimacy between Holmes and Watson is therefore not only stronger than heterosexual romance and marriage but completely unchanged by its presence. The

Holmes stories do not suggest that working male intimacy and marriage are incompatible; they simply suggest that marriage is a permissible option but completely unimportant in the grand scheme of things. Mary only merits some brief mentions in future stories, while the bond between Holmes and Watson is always central. While heterosexual romance and marriage might be expected parts of the nineteenth-century fictional tradition, Doyle only pays lip service to them here, introducing a marriage which he then proceeds mostly to ignore.

The depth of the intimacy between Holmes and Watson appears most clearly in “The

Final Problem,” originally intended to be the last story. When Holmes arrives at Watson’s house, their understanding of each other is immediately apparent, as Watson sees that Holmes is

“looking even paler and thinner than usual” and narrates that Holmes says, “‘Yes, I have been using myself up rather too freely,’…in answer to my look rather than to my words” (Doyle 557).

Holmes then confides in Watson about his enemy, Moriarty, and the two flee England together so that Holmes may escape him. It is clear that Holmes desires Watson’s companionship more than any specific help he might provide, as he says, “It would be a great pleasure to me…if you could come on to the continent with me” (Doyle 562). Watson, in turn, responds without any consideration of his marriage, only of his work and his connection with Holmes: “The practice is

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quiet…and I have an accommodating neighbour. I should be glad to come” (Doyle 562). Their exchange emphasizes Holmes’s confidence, which is in the tradition of those in novels including

Bleak House: it serves to further the intimacy between the speaker and the confidant, rather than to bring about immediate practical change in one’s circumstances. It is thus in line with Spacks’s notion of “serious” gossip that builds closeness; through their exchange, Holmes and Watson are brought closer together for their final adventure (5).

The two remain together on their travels through Europe until Holmes’s (later reversed) death, and the story concludes with the two expressing their feelings of affection for each other,

Holmes in a letter he has left for Watson and Watson in his narration. Despite previously dismissing emotion, Holmes shows that he cares for Watson here, writing of his own death, “I fear that [defeating Moriarty] is at a cost which will give pain to my friends, and especially, my dear Watson, to you” (Doyle 569). While he also asks Watson to “give [his] greetings” to Mary, it is clear that Watson does not prioritize her here (Doyle 569). Instead, he focuses on Holmes, concluding his narration by describing him as “him whom I shall ever regard as the best and the wisest man whom I have ever known” (Doyle 570). While “The Final Problem,” like all of the

Holmes stories, involves an adventure, it emphasizes the relationship between Holmes and

Watson especially strongly as it does not feature a question to be resolved. Instead, it focuses on

Watson supporting and ultimately eulogizing Holmes and suggests that their companionship is the most important part of their work together.

Doyle also builds “The Final Problem,” like other Holmes stories, around a multi-layered structure of narratives and confidences. As characters tell each other about themselves, Watson passes this knowledge on to the reader; here, for example, Holmes tells Watson the entire story of his previous hunt for Moriarty. While these narratives, complete with extensive word-for-

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word dialogue, often feel rather artificial, they also call attention to the important of stories in creating understanding between people. Without the narratives of those involved, Holmes cannot get the information that he needs to solve his cases; without Holmes’s narratives, Watson cannot understand what he is thinking. The way in which Watson then passes these narratives on to the reader creates a structure like Esther’s narrative in Bleak House: confidences about confidences.

As Holmes and Watson build their intimacy through shared narratives, Watson builds intimacy with the reader through sharing his narratives as well, bringing the reader into his bond with

Holmes. Indeed, in “The Final Problem,” Watson states multiple times that he is telling the story in order to help the reader understand Holmes so that they can, he implies, share his admiration for him (Doyle 557, 570). Furthermore, he calls attention to his own emotion in telling it by saying that sharing Holmes’s good character is his only purpose; otherwise, he would not tell this particular story as he is too upset by his loss (Doyle 557, 570).

Doyle’s stories therefore mirror, through their structure, older confidante stories in creating intimacy between the reader and the characters. Even in the context of male confidants and the world of work, they continue to emphasize the homosocial confidant relationship as a viable alternative to heterosexual romance. They also make use of confidences both for practical purposes—Holmes’s clients need to tell him about their problems so that he can solve them— and for the purposes of creating intimacy between individuals; confidences also allow the confider the opportunity to have someone else tell their story. The bond between men created by these confidences always occupies the central position in the stories, never supplanted or interfered with by other types of relationships, specifically heterosexual romance.10 Keeping

10 One might say that Moriarty interferes with the bond between Holmes and Watson by (temporarily) killing Holmes. This interference proves somewhat futile, however, as Doyle ultimately returned to Holmes and Watson stories, first by writing The Hound of the Baskervilles (1901-1902), set prior to Holmes’s death, and then by

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same-sex intimacy and working bonds central, however, is a much more fraught matter for female characters in texts of the same period. In this sense, the Holmes stories are more in the vein of Bleak House: they prioritize alternate intimacies that can exist alongside marriage

(although marriage is much more minor here). The novels of working women’s confidences, however, portray different forms of intimacy as disruptive to each other. Marriage interferes with the female bond, a phenomenon which, although occurring in a new setting, has commonalities with the conclusions of Mansfield Park and Deerbrook. However, while those novels portrayed their heroines as choosing marriage over friendship, these New Woman novels are more ambivalent, suggesting that marriage is perhaps not the best or most desirable fate.

Female Community in The Romance of a Shop

The Romance of a Shop begins with female intimacy already established. As its four heroines, Fanny, Gertrude, Lucy, and Phyllis, are sisters, their intimacy is based on their bond of blood and drives their desire to stay together in the face of their father’s death. Levy quickly introduces the Lorimers’ need to support themselves as a major problem, telling of “their unforeseen calamity…a sudden loss of fortune, immediately followed by the sudden death of the father, crushed by the cruel blow which had fallen on him” (10). This provides an opportunity for the four to go to work, which, as Vicinus notes, was often motivated by a need for middle-class women without husbands or fathers to support themselves: “Many of the most publicly visible single women had fathers who lived by their professional skills…These daughters could expect little in the way of an income after the death of their fathers, and so had the most to gain from the new educational and job opportunities” (IW 6-7). Notably, the Lorimers already have the means

resurrecting him altogether. This also highlights the bond created between Holmes, Watson, and readers, as Holmes was brought back due to his popularity.

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of working even before they decide to make their own livings: the opening scene of the four making plans takes place in their at-home photography studio.

As they begin their discussion of their future, Levy frames their closeness through the metaphor of the photographic grouping. The sisters gather together: “Phyllis cast her long, supple frame into the lounge which was regarded as her special property, and Fanny sat down on a chair…Gertrude put her hands behind her and leaned her head against the wall…‘Now that we are all grouped,’ [Phyllis] said, ‘there is nothing left but for Lucy to focus us’” (Levy 11). In this moment, the sisters are both creative workers—Lucy is to take the photograph—and the objects of a creative work. We are invited to see the Lorimers within Levy’s work as through their own cameras, and this moment also sets up the tensions that will work on the sisters throughout the novel. Although their grouping, which highlights their intimacy, is linked to the work that they themselves perform, the scene also foreshadows that they may be removed from the position of workers and be placed in the more decorative domestic role.

Gertrude’s proposal—that the sisters should jointly open a photography business— furthers their intimacy by bringing them together in a joint professional endeavor; not only are they a family by blood, they are a group of co-working artists by choice. Gertrude tells her sisters, “There is one thing, at least, that we can all do…we can make photographs!...Why not turn to account the only thing we can do, and start as professional photographers? We should all keep together” (Levy 13). Gertrude’s wording here emphasizes both the importance of the sisters’ bond and the fact that their working is a serious endeavor. The repeated use of the word

“all” and the phrase “keep together” show Gertrude’s desire to form a female community with her sisters. The word “professional” shows that work, specifically non-household work, will be central to this community; it is not merely another version of domesticity. Becoming

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photographers will allow the sisters to form a female community of workers, allowing them to move away from the home and the patriarchal space. Gertrude specifically mentions and rejects the possibilities of some of them going to India with their uncle or living in another family’s home; instead, their new workplace will be the center of an alternative community (Levy 12).

While the Lorimers are already Londoners and do not move to a new city to pursue their trade, they do move from its domestic to its commercial realm, using work to shift the terms under which they live.

Mavis Chia-Chieh Tseng also highlights the ways in which the particular choice of photography plays a significant role in the novel’s construction of the Lorimers as independent women. She writes that through photography, “the author shows us a possibility for the marginal figure to assert herself confidently,” and that it gives the sisters the ability to create their own visions of the world around them: “what Gertrude is seeing is readily framed like a picture”

(Tseng 69, 70). She particularly emphasizes photography’s dual role as both an art form and a new trade, writing that Levy “has an insightful awareness that to break free from the restraints imposed by the male-dominated society, women must see with their own eyes and see beyond their domestic spheres” and that work as professional photographers is “a passport to a more promising and progressive world” (Tseng 72-73). The photography studio both provides the

Lorimers with an opportunity to maintain themselves outside of the patriarchal home and heterosexual marriage and allows them to express their own ways of seeing things through their photographs. This combination of practical maintenance and self-expression also comes through in the use the Lorimers make of confidences.

The world of work dominates the early part of the novel and forms the content for the sisters’ first confidences. As they make their plans, Gertrude shares them with her friend

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Constance, emphasizing the extent to which she values a female community with independence from others. When Constance suggests that they should not start their own studio but begin as assistants elsewhere, Gertrude replies, “If I said that one was life and the other death…you would perhaps consider the remark unworthy a woman of business. And yet I am not sure that it does not state my case as well as any other. We want a home and an occupation, Conny, a real, living occupation” (Levy 29). Gertrude’s description of work as “life” and “a real, living occupation” shows its centrality to the future she envisions for herself and her sisters: one in which they find themselves fulfilled outside of traditional expectations of feminine roles. She also focuses her conversation with Constance around her professional ambitions; marriage is not her goal and central topic, nor is work merely a second choice necessary to support oneself.

While Fanny Price, Maria, and Esther all perform work (with or without pay), their work is located within the home and serves more to define their identity vis-à-vis an existing family rather than to create a radical new structure. While the conclusion of Bleak House does portray

Esther as part of a wider network of found familial relationships, her work is still centered around caring for her loved ones in the domestic space; both Esther and Gertrude see their work as intertwined with others, but Gertrude envisions the photography itself, not only the relationships, as a new source of vitality.

Through confiding in Constance, Gertrude also expands the potential of women’s community and brings Constance into her world of work, if only tangentially. The plans for the photography studio help Constance to shift away from traditionally feminine roles: “Like many girls of her class, she had good faculties, abundant vitality, and no interests but social ones…Her friendship with the Lorimers, with Gertrude especially, may be said to have represented the one serious element in Constance Devonshire’s life. And now she threw herself with immense zeal

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and devotion into the absorbing business of house-hunting” (Levy 35). Through helping the

Lorimers find a space for their studio, Constance helps to exemplify the value of work for women: it allows them to find new avenues for their “faculties” that are not available in traditional roles. Notably, Constance’s change in interests is facilitated by the confidences she receives from Gertrude on the subject of work; rather than furthering each other’s marriage plots, the women of The Romance of a Shop begin by furthering each other’s independence plots. They also use confidences to create opportunities for practical help, as Constance becomes involved in finding a location for the studio. Confidences here are thus mutually beneficial opportunities for self-development. Constance is able to cultivate her own “serious element” through helping

Gertrude and the other Lorimers, and her help in turn allows them to find a place in which to practice their art.

Soon after the sisters open their shop, however, the novel begins to introduce heterosexual romance plots for them, which come to occupy a major part of the text. At first, romance is intertwined with work; Lucy’s future husband, the artist Frank Jermyn, first appears when he asks the sisters to take photographs in his studio. While this might seem in line with

Marcus’s analysis of the coexistence of heterosexual marriage and female intimacy in the marriage plot (75), Gertrude’s anxious response suggests otherwise and in fact hearkens back to

Vicinus’s description of working women explicitly defining themselves as separated from the world of men (IW 17). She asks Lucy, “Do you realize that this latest development of our business is likely to excite remark? ...It [visiting a man’s studio alone] is unconventional, you know” (Levy 62). While the sisters’ whole business and living situation is “unconventional”—

“Of course it is; and so are we,” Lucy responds (Levy 62)—it is the potential presence of heterosexual romance that leads to Gertrude’s concern. Specifically, she seems worried about the

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encroachment of the outside world in the form of judgment or “remark:” the mere entrance of a man raises fears of sexual licentiousness (Levy 62). With the presence of men, the sisters can no longer keep their undisturbed female community, and the potential comment of the outside world is a dangerous force, unlike the supportive confidences shared between friends. As Gertrude’s vision of the photography studio is that of an alternate form of home, it is notable that she links the entrance of a man to public opinion, which, as previously discussed, feared the rise of the

New Woman. While Bleak House concludes with the confidante participating in the establishment of an alternative family structure that combines heterosexual marriage and queer intimacies within the domestic setting, The Romance of a Shop portrays potential heterosexuality as a threat to any non-conventional home.

The sisters’ community is further disturbed by the presence of Sidney Darrell, later

Phyllis’s seducer, who hires Gertrude to photograph a painting he owns. When she returns from the job, she says of him, “He is this sort of man; —if a woman were talking to him of—of the motions of the heavenly bodies, he would be thinking all the time of the shape of her ankles”

(Levy 76). Here, Gertrude’s distress implies a permanent divide between the realms of women’s achievements and of heterosexuality, suggesting that men bring the latter even into spaces in which women wish to emphasize the former. Dialogue about men is already coming to dominate the sisters’ conversations and confidences, even those which are ostensibly about work. Instead of sympathizing with Gertrude’s feelings, her sisters tease her about distaste leading to love:

Lucy says, “We all know…it is best to begin with a little aversion!” and Phyllis quotes, “Friends meet to part, but foes once joined—” (Levy 76). Their words confirm Gertrude’s fears of heterosexuality replacing a community of independent women; the sisters now think of the potential futures they might have with men rather than their business as a source of shared life.

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Lucy and Phyllis’s teasing suggests a blockage to open confidences, as they do not take Gertrude seriously; instead of helping her to express herself, as Constance does earlier in looking for a studio, they cut her off.

The eleventh chapter of the novel, which is actually entitled “A Confidence,” illustrates the shift in the focus of the sisters’ lives as men invade their world of work. The confidence in question, made by Constance to Gertrude, concerns her unrequited love for Frank. She tells

Gertrude, “I can’t bear it any longer. I must tell someone or it will kill me…He is so different from them all…Who could help it? Frank—” (Levy 99-100). While Constance has listened to

Gertrude’s earlier confidences, Gertrude does not want to return the favor. Instead, she is disturbed by Constance’s words: “She disapproved, generally speaking, of confidences of this kind, considering them bad for both giver and receiver; but this particular confidence she felt to be simply intolerable” (Levy 100). The “of this kind” suggests that Gertrude is thinking about romantic confidences, and here such confidences are portrayed as destructive rather than moving the confider towards a hopeful future. Gertrude’s distaste for this particular revelation is likely due to her knowledge of the potential romance between Frank and Lucy, but the reason she considers romantic confidences “bad for both giver and receiver” is more obscure.

An earlier scene, in which Gertrude regrets the possibility of her sisters marrying, may shed some light on this. Here Gertrude displays a deep ambivalence towards the idea of such romances: “One day, she had always told herself, they would go away…She did not wish it otherwise. She had a feminine belief in love as the crown and flower of life; yet, as the shadow of the coming separation fell upon her, her spirit grew desolate and afraid; and, lying there in the chill grey morning, she wept very bitterly” (Levy 94). While Gertrude is not entirely resistant to the idea of love and even sees it as valuable, she also sees it as inextricably linked to a “coming

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separation” between herself and her sisters. The women’s community of work and the heterosexual couple are incompatible in Gertrude’s mind; love will inevitably separate the community and change the nature of their relationships. Female intimacy cannot continue unchanged through marriage, and perhaps that is because the Lorimers are sisters and share a home. While they do not live in a traditional patriarchal family, their household is still based upon their blood relationship, and a marriage would still necessitate a move from the family of origin to the marital family. The fact that this possibility makes Gertrude feel “desolate and afraid” may contribute to her aversion to romantic confidences: she is not sure how to feel about love.

Indeed, love does not provide the women of The Romance of a Shop with the same opportunities for ambitious futurity that work does, and their confidences about love function differently from their confidences about work. Confidences about work allow the women to provide each other with practical help, which in turn allows them the opportunity for further self- expression; when Constance helps Gertrude find a studio, Gertrude can become a photographer.

When Constance confides her love for Frank, even as she proclaims her need to express her feelings, that expression does not bring her resolution; she cries and asks, “How can I bear my life? How can I bear it?” (Levy 100). In response, Gertrude can only offer, “There are other things which make happiness besides…Our own self-respect, and the integrity of people we care for,” to which Constance replies “without enthusiasm, ‘but I should like a little of the more obvious sorts of happiness as well’” (Levy 100). These confidences about love cannot be solved by women’s industry and only allow them to give each other vague platitudes, which both

Constance and Gertrude know will not lead anywhere. Especially in this scene, in which

Gertrude and the reader both already know that Frank is destined for Lucy rather than Constance,

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heterosexual love is a dead-end path which does not provide opportunities for the future or for productive confidences. Entering the world of work outside the home means that women have to balance their new pursuits with the marriage plot: they exist within two different narratives.

Thus, confidences about the two co-exist uneasily. They pull female characters in different narrative directions, rather than, as in earlier novels that are focused solely on marriage, helping them towards a single plot’s conclusion.

As the sisters’ various romances and their consequences—Fanny’s marriage to a former love, Lucy’s engagement to Frank, and Phyllis’s seduction by Darrell and subsequent death of tuberculosis11—come to play a more prominent role in the story, they take precedence over the world of work and female community. At one point, after Phyllis’s death, Gertrude thinks, “How strange it seemed, after all that had happened, to be sitting here quietly, talking about over- exposed negatives, premiums, and apprentices” (Levy 158). Once heterosexual romance has become a presence in the sisters’ lives, work cannot hold the preeminence it once did; it becomes the way the sisters maintain themselves before marriage, rather than an end in itself. Although

Gertrude plans to remain at work at the studio, this falls by the wayside once she becomes engaged herself, and the final section of the novel details the surviving sisters’ individual paths.

While both Gertrude and Lucy continue to work—Gertrude finds success with her writing and

Lucy remains a photographer—they no longer work together, and each is paired with her husband instead. We learn of Lucy that “the photography, however, has not been crowded out by domestic duties; and no infant with pretensions to fashion omits to present itself before Mrs.

11 Phyllis’s illness might be read as another example of “narrative prosthesis” (Mitchell and Snyder 47). It comes on once her elopement is foiled and serves to facilitate her removal from the plot once her moral character is damaged, despite the lack of an actual biological connection between elopement and tuberculosis. Phyllis herself says, on her deathbed, “Don’t be sorry. I have never been a nice person” (Levy 152). We again see a construction of disability/illness and marriage as incompatible and a link between that illness and qualities of personal character.

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Jermyn’s lens…Her husband is no less successful in his own line” and of Gertrude that she

“wonders if [her son] will prove to have inherited his father’s scientific tastes, or the literary tendencies of his mother” (Levy 172). Rather than being the basis for a female community, the sisters’ individual talents and vocations now co-exist with more traditionally domestic pursuits, lending a duality to their fates. Lucy now focuses specifically on photographs of children, and

Gertrude’s talents are mentioned in relation to what she might or might not pass on to her son.

While the women work, their work is feminized and made traditional, rather than constructed as the new way for women to “see beyond their domestic spheres” that Tseng describes (73).

Yet marriage also does not damage the women’s relationships as much as Gertrude feared. Constance is also mentioned as having married, and we learn that “her old affection for

Gertrude continues, in spite of the fact that their respective husbands are quite unable (as she says) to hit it off” (Levy 173). We receive no information about the cause of the conflict between the husbands, but we do see that the women’s marriages shape but do not fully determine the nature of their new relations to each other. Indeed, after the potential challenge to the women’s friendships from Constance and Lucy sharing the same love object, the resolution of each woman’s individual marriage plot renews their intimacy. As the three surviving Lorimers and

Constance are all happily settled, there is no longer any possibility of rivalry or jealousy that might interfere with their friendships.

The sisters’ photography studio, however, does not so happily survive the conclusion of the novel. While this “shop,” with its position in the title, is central to the sisters’ journey, they leave it upon their marriages, and the final two sentences of the novel are elegiac, focusing on the fate of their former workplace and home: “The Photographic studio is let to an enterprising young photographer, who has enlarged and beautified it beyond recognition. As for the rooms

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above the umbrella-maker’s: the sitting-room facing the street; the three-cornered kitchen behind; the three little bed-rooms beyond; —when last I passed the house they were to let unfurnished, with great fly-blown bills in the blank casements” (Levy 173). These sentences emphasize the extent to which the sisters’ former domain is no longer the same place. The studio has changed “beyond recognition,” and the sisters’ rooms are now “blank” and the bills to advertise them are “fly-blown,” suggesting a long period of decay. While the changes are not necessarily all negative—the studio has been “enlarged and beautified”—taken together they show a great shift from the situation the sisters established at the beginning of the book, and they strongly imply that they can never go back on these changes.12 Change in this novel is not always bad: the sisters are happy in their new homes and still maintain their connections with each other and with Constance. However, it cannot be denied that change is present and due to the sisters’ marriages, which have led them to abandon the studio. While marriage does not remove them from the world of work, it does remove them from their female community in favor of more traditional marital pairings, thus changing the way they relate to each other.

This novel’s relationship to marriage is therefore much more ambivalent than that of the

Holmes stories, in which marriage does not interfere with same-sex work and intimacy and which allow their heroes an unbounded world of adventure as a result. While the Lorimers’ adventures take them out of the realm of traditional femininity for a time, they do not give them such horizons; even in the physical realm, they are more constrained. They travel around London in the course of their business, but they are not connected to the world outside of England as male adventurers typically are. Indeed, international travel in The Romance of a Shop is tied to masculinity and portrayed as threatening to domesticity. Fanny’s eventual husband, whom she

12 The “enterprising young photographer”’s gender is not specified; perhaps the ending of the novel suggests a new female artist pursuing her career, albeit alone.

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loved in the past, is only able to marry her after returning from India; Frank goes to Africa on an illustration assignment and is believed dead. When Phyllis plans to elope with Darrell, she leaves

Gertrude a note saying, “This is to tell you I am not coming home tonight—am not coming home again at all, in fact. I am going to marry Mr. Darrell, who will take me to Italy” (Levy 140). The international world is the world of men and damages women’s marriage prospects; when the men are abroad, they are unavailable as partners. The possibility of going abroad with Darrell also threatens Phyllis’s reputation as a proper feminine woman, suggesting that even if women can leave the patriarchal home, they should not leave the sphere of home altogether. This aspect of the text shows a flip side to the adventure stories that Tosh describes as portraying men

“unencumbered by feminine constraint or by emotional ties with home;” it suggests that there is a cost to the absence of men and that such an absence interferes with the prospect of domestic futurity (174). While in the Holmes stories, domesticity and adventure run on parallel tracks—

Watson’s marriage doesn’t interfere with his ability to adventure, but neither do his adventures cause problems in his marriage13—here they are contending forces. Going abroad has the potential to interfere not only with traditional domesticity but with female community. When

Phyllis says that she is “not coming home again at all,” she refers to the space that she shares with her sisters (Levy 140). In this sense, her departure is another version of the other sisters’ marriages: a way of disturbing the status quo and privileging other factors over the sisters’ relationships to each other.

The fact that the end of the novel does not entirely break down their community is due to the fact that it is based not only on their shared work but on their familial relationship. While women’s creative work is an important topic in the novel, it is not what creates the Lorimers’

13 Admittedly, Watson’s marriage is so rarely discussed that we cannot form much of an impression of it one way or the other.

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bond, which already exists at the beginning. Unlike Bleak House, which focuses on a family created out of bonds of sympathy rather than bonds of blood, The Romance of a Shop bases its intimacies in more socially codified relationships, first between sisters and later between spouses. (It is perhaps notable here that Fanny, who is the others’ half-sister, is the least close to them and the least significant in the novel.) Anne Thackeray Ritchie discusses the prominence of such relationships in her essay “In Friendship,” found in her 1874 collection Toilers and

Spinsters. She writes, “To be in love is a recognized state; relationship without friendship is perhaps too much recognized in civilized communities; but friendship, that best blessing of life, seems to have less space in its scheme than almost any other feeling of equal importance”

(Thackeray Ritchie 291-292). The Lorimer sisters’ relationship combines the “recognized” and the emotional—theirs is not “relationship without friendship,” but a mixture of the two, implying that their sisterly bond is particularly strong. The fact that their intimacy originates from belonging to the same family—that it has an understood “space in [life’s] scheme”— accounts for the fact that it is able to continue once their working community has broken up.

While the novel suggests that women’s communities cannot exist unchanged once heterosexual romance has entered the scene, it leaves intact the possibility of close intimacy between sisters and these family bonds keeping women attached to each other. The powerful social forces of romance and family that Thackeray Ritchie describes remain present at the end of The Romance of a Shop, when some of the Lorimers’ more socially defiant choices and opportunities for self-expression have been watered down. The family thus creates a space for female intimacy, and we return to the domestic settings and connections that appear in previous novels. The sisters’ familial relationship allows their intimacies to remain in place after marriage

(unlike in Mansfield Park, where the possibility of Fanny and Mary becoming part of the same

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family and thus lifelong friends is foreclosed when Fanny does not marry Henry), but their family does not expand outside the traditional boundaries of biological and marital relationships.

Their confidences initially succeed in forming a new narrative for their lives, but their later confidences gesture towards the status quo of heterosexual marriage to which they return.

The Working Woman’s World in A Writer of Books

The conclusion of The Romance of a Shop, like Cobbe’s essays, reflects an ambivalent social world, in which women can pursue opportunities to work but still view marriage as a desirable end goal. While the Lorimers are not as easily able to balance work and same-sex intimacy with marriage as male heroes are and their marriages thus entail some sacrifices, they still maintain both in their lives. A Writer of Books, however, suggests a stronger division between the homosocial world of the single working woman and that of the married woman.

While Cosima does not initially resist heterosexuality like the women Vicinus describes (IW 17), she finds her female friendships and her work both damaged by her marriage, rather than working in harmony with it; ultimately, she must reject her marriage in order to return to her writing and to female community.

Cosima’s first female friends are names we are likely to recognize. We learn that at parties, “Cosima, shy, awkward, and self-conscious, stood about among the giggling groups, and wished herself back in the old library with Elizabeth Bennett [sic], and Maggie Tulliver, and

Rhoda Fleming, and a few other girls who had brains and spirit and far more vitality than these puppets of flesh and blood” (Paston 9-10). Cosima’s contrasting of these literary heroines as women with “brains and spirit and…vitality” and her female peers as “puppets of flesh and blood” reveals what she values in a friend, as well as the ways in which the confidantes she seeks

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out will be women who play untraditional social roles and can help her to do the same. Cosima’s resistance to social expectations is thus clearly connected to her interest in literature. We further learn that “the young men were afraid of her, because of her reputation for learning. A girl who cannot play tennis, cannot dance, and has no facility in either chaff or flirtation, scarcely shows to advantage in provincial society” (Paston 9). Her “learning” is opposed to traditional femininity and places her within the realm of the New Woman; not only does she not conform to expectations, she does not care to try. She chooses literature as the realm in which she can be herself: “She quickly discovered that she was not fitted to shine in Yarminster society, and went back to her friends in leathern jackets. At twenty, after a voluntary apprenticeship of several years, she formally adopted literature as a profession, and began to write a novel” (Paston 10).

The use of the words “apprenticeship” and “profession” shows that Cosima views her writing as a career; it is not a pastime before marriage but an alternative pathway that shapes her relationships and values.

Like the Lorimers, Cosima takes this existing occupation and enters into the world of work by necessity upon the death of her father. While her community expects her to work because of her lack of money, her choice of career is unusual. Community members suggest that she teach, a choice that would group her with the heroines of governess novels, women whose work serves as an extension of what is already expected of them in the home. Indeed, many of the early working women Vicinus discusses worked in such roles, arguing that thus they “could make a maternal contribution to ‘all social institutions’” and making use of “an ideology based upon woman’s innate nature” (IW 15)14. Cosima, however, resists this channel. She declares, “I

14 This also has tied to the “maternalist” social movements described by Seth Koven and Sonya Michel, in which women entered into social activism based on their traditional roles: “maternalist women not only concerned themselves with the welfare and rights of women and children, but also generated searching critiques of state and society” (2).

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shall go to London…and try my fortune in literature. I have finished one novel, and while it goes the round of the publishers I shall live on my capital, and write another…if in that time I haven’t succeeded…I don’t think I should do for a governess, but I might be a clerk or a shop girl”

(Paston 11). Cosima casts her career plans in traditionally masculine terms. Her journey to

London is an adventure in which she will “try [her] fortune,” and she depends upon her independent possession of her inheritance, which she specifically refers to as “my capital,” to launch herself into success. Furthermore, she is resistant to traditionally feminine work even as a last resort, rejecting becoming a “governess” in favor of being a “clerk,” a position with decidedly masculine connotations.15 Her plan to go to London also allows her to expand her knowledge of the world; A Writer of Books makes use of the urban setting to create a space of adventure for Cosima, analogous to the male hero’s travels outside of England.

Upon arriving in London, Cosima seizes upon two fellow working women who live in her boarding house as potential friends and allies who can help her develop her writerly voice.

She first meets Miss Phelps, a doctor, and thinks that “her conversation should be full of instruction to the novelist” (Paston 17). Cosima decides to ask Miss Phelps if she can observe an operation in order to write about it; Miss Phelps is at first dubious, but when Cosima explains her goals finally says, “I’ll tell you what I’ll do for you…I’ll take you to the hospital, and introduce you to some of my patients. They’ll be charmed to talk to you…If you listen sympathetically, you’ll be giving them pleasure, and gaining material at the same time” (Paston 34-35). Although this businesslike exchange might seem a far cry from Esther’s and Ada’s confidences, replete with physical affection and numerous pet names, it also provides Cosima with the opportunity to

15 Leah Price and Pamela Thurschwell examine the ways in which secretarial work began as a male-dominated field before transitioning to its association with women (“Introduction” 4-7); Ivan Kreilkamp’s essay in their collection of works on secretaries particularly focuses on male shorthand writers (13-31). Cosima would thus be part of the beginnings of a new wave of women taking these positions.

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express herself to another woman and in turn to develop her own narrative. While Miss Phelps initially fails to understand Cosima’s interest in her patients, the confidence Cosima makes about her goals gets Miss Phelps to provide her with help and potential material for her writing. Here a working confidence again leads to practical aid; Cosima does not want Miss Phelps to tell her story for her but to give her the chance to tell one of her own. She is almost naively open with her desire to observe operations, and we learn that she “made no secret of her intended profession” (Paston 34). Her openness enables her success, and it also further emphasizes the relationship of confidence and narrative. By telling about herself, Cosima gets the opportunity to learn the stories of Miss Phelps’s patients, building their narratives into her own.

Cosima’s relationship with a fellow writer also helps her to develop professionally. Kate

Nevill, another resident of the boarding house, is a journalist, and Cosima tells her about her writing goals, asking her about the British Museum reading room and about how to begin in journalism. At first Miss Nevill is suspicious, replying, “Now I can just earn enough to keep myself in decency, but I don’t tell other people how I do it. We all have to look after ourselves at this game” (Paston 28). Here, Miss Nevill reveals a potentially problematic side to working confidences: in a world with limited work, especially for women, not everyone is able to succeed and sharing resources might do more harm than good. Cosima, however, has a more idealistic view of working women’s community. She replies, “Even if you confided to me all the secrets of your success, I should never dream of taking advantage of them in any way that could do you injury,” at which point Miss Nevill agrees to show her around the reading room (Paston 28).

Cosima’s candor again gains her practical help that will ultimately facilitate her self-expression, as Miss Nevill shares many tips about writing and research with her. As she tells Cosima about her own working process, she says, “Bless me, I’m letting you into all the secrets of the prison-

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house” (Paston 31). Miss Nevill’s help is valuable to Cosima specifically because they are both women working in the same field; she is able to share inside knowledge and small details that

Cosima might not be able to get from another source. Their companionship leads Miss Nevill to

“let…[Cosima] into all the secrets,” even though she was previously suspicious and wary about sharing her knowledge. As fellow working writers, the two also have more social equality than many of the previous confider-confidante pairs we have seen, in which the confidante’s role of listener is partially determined by her lower standing: here, the two strive towards the same goal.

They also trade thoughts on work back and forth, with neither strictly occupying the role of speaker or listener; Cosima shares her writing and her ambitions, while Miss Nevill shares her experience.

Thus, female companionship leads to progress for Cosima, even when Miss Nevill’s advice to her is not fully encouraging. When Cosima attempts an article and shares it with Miss

Nevill, the latter “declare[s] that although it was ‘good stuff,’ she could not think of any editor who would be in the least likely to take it,” advising Cosima to “cultivate the common or chatty style” (Paston 37, 38). The relationship does not give Cosima immediate writing success, but she does get an honest response from a fellow working woman and advice about how she might progress and improve. Although Miss Nevill’s advice here suggests that Cosima’s individual voice is not particularly marketable, it also suggests that she takes Cosima’s ambitions seriously enough to try to help her succeed.

Cosima’s working friendships with other women in her boarding house also illustrate how women’s communities help to create new spaces. While the boarding house is not a deliberate community of women like those Vicinus describes, it still fulfills the role of “a woman-controlled space” (IW 7). It provides a found space in which Cosima can encounter other

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women who are like her: those who are outside the traditional structure of the patriarchal family.

Maria Carla Martino, one of the few scholars who examine A Writer of Books, calls particular attention to this aspect of the novel, noting that the setting presents “a wider range of female types than the ones generally presented in a New Woman novel” (228). These “types” begin with the mother and daughter who run the house; although their occupation is more traditionally feminine than those of Cosima and her friends and she does not find them particularly sympathetic, this does help to construct the boarding house as a woman-dominated space.

Considering women’s work as a response to being left without parents or the support of a family, the boarding house makes sense as a space for working women’s encounters (Vicinus IW 7).

Furthermore, in addition to existing in a shared space, Cosima’s confidantes also help expand her world. Through accompanying them to the places where they work, she is able to see and learn about more of London, which she uses as potential fodder for her own narratives.

Cosima’s confidantes are important to her life as a writer: they drift out of the novel as this life undergoes a change and Cosima marries. Miss Phelps, tied to Cosima’s life at the boarding house, vanishes entirely; Miss Nevill appears in the context of Cosima’s marriage as she enters upon her own engagement to her sickly cousin. Although she plans to continue to work in order to support them, we also see a change in her character: “It rather annoyed

[Cosima] that Kate Nevill, that hard-headed, brusque-mannered young person should seem so foolishly, unreasonably happy in her unsatisfactory love-affair” (Paston 118). While this moment is obviously meant to serve as a contrast to Cosima’s own ambivalence about her marriage, it also illustrates the ways in which romance and the marriage plot bring out a different aspect of a woman’s character than the world of work. Miss Nevill is no longer her “hard-headed” self once she is in love, just as Cosima can no longer focus on her work once she is married. Her unhappy

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marriage damages her creativity: when she attempts to write, “her once fertile brain seemed to have become dull and barren, her imagination absolutely refused to work, and she began to fear that her marriage, so far from exercising a stimulating influence upon her mind, had deadened or destroyed her literary faculty” (Paston 142). Through marriage, Cosima loses her confidantes from her working life (at this point, neither Miss Phelps nor Miss Nevill appears again in the novel) and thus loses her ability to express herself either about or through her writing. Even when she does attempt to write, her husband fails to understand the vocational aspects of her work, seeing it as only a money-making endeavor (Paston 209). Leaving her father’s home brings her into the world of work and female intimacy, which serves an alternative path to marriage; entering her husband’s home forces her to depart from it.

Critics who have written on A Writer of Books have paid particular attention to Cosima’s unhappy marriage and to the novel’s conclusion in which she leaves her husband. Melissa

Michelle Donegan, who looks at it in the context of New Woman novels of abused female writers, particularly notes the spaces Cosima lives in, writing, “Paston solidifies the connections between physical space and emotional freedom and well-being, between marriage and captivity and confinement” (255). She also emphasizes the fact that Cosima does not bear living children, making it easier for her to leave the marital home; instead, she notes, Cosima produces books, and Paston “uses the metaphor of writing as a procreative process” (Donegan 284). Martino also discusses Cosima’s departure from the realm of the home and the novel’s unusual conclusion: “it rejects the conventional happy ending, without at the same time leaving us with a martyr or a frustrated heroine” and instead provides “a happy ending in the public sphere: the success of

Cosima’s novel” (233, 234). These analyses are useful in their differentiation of the domestic sphere and “the public sphere” of work and writing: Cosima is not able to occupy two worlds at

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once. However, what is particularly notable about Cosima’s work is that she is not relating merely to a public full of strangers or existing as a woman in a male world: instead, her work is built by her female intimacies, and her departure from her marriage is facilitated by one of these relationships.16

The last scene of the novel sees Cosima beginning to write as she stays with her friend and neighbor, Mrs. Mackay. Although Mrs. Mackay is not a working woman herself, Cosima associates her with narrative because of her intense knowledge of other people’s lives. When she shares stories with Cosima earlier in the novel, Cosima says, “What a treasure you would be to a sensation novelist…With you for a collaborateur, I believe that even I could write a detective story” (Paston 185). Just as Miss Phelps is a source for medical knowledge and Miss Nevill a source for journalistic knowledge, Mrs. Mackay is a source for gossip as knowledge and narrative substance, illustrating the continuum between personal exchanges and confidences and the fabric of storytelling and creative writing17. She is therefore an apt person for Cosima to be with as she regains her creative powers. Cosima also confides in Mrs. Mackay, telling her, “I’ve come to ask you if you will take me in for to-night. I ought to tell you first, though, that my husband and I have agreed to part” (Paston 255). Mrs. Mackay quickly accepts this, even suggesting that Cosima avoid encountering Mr. Mackay and thus creating a world of female solidarity that excludes men.

16 Cosima’s life as a writer, even though it is seemingly an individualist occupation and one that can be performed anywhere, is thus deeply embedded in her female community. This allows us to read the role of a writer as potentially analogous to the other occupations for women that various scholars describe. Vicinus’s statistics of employed women at the turn of the twentieth century are dominated by “nuns, sisters of charity,” “sick nurses,” and “teachers” (IW 29), and she writes of the “schools, colleges, sisterhoods, [and] settlement houses” in which these women lived (IW 31); Jill Rappoport addresses a similar topic in her analysis of female Salvation Army workers “stationed in the slums” (107). These occupations combine the traditionally domestic care roles of women with life outside the home. Cosima’s work as a writer, on the other hand, seems like it could be performed within a traditional domestic setting and yet requires her to escape her marital home to rejoin other women. 17 This returns to Spacks’s argument that gossip “create[s] story” (13)—here, it even forms a kind of “story” that Cosima believes she alone could not write, illustrating narrative’s collaborative aspects.

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Cosima then comes to the conclusion that the world of heterosexual romance is not necessary for her, reflecting that “in the life of the modern woman…love is no less episodical than in the life of a man…it has been deposed forever from its proud position of ‘lord of all’”

(Paston 257). While marriage and writing are not compatible for a woman in the world of this novel, unlike for male heroes, Cosima sees the world of her work—structured by her relationships with other women—as not a poor substitute for marriage but a state of its own.

Indeed, love, often seen as a woman’s goal, is masculinized here by being described as “lord of all:” work is perhaps the option that better suits a woman. Cosima is immediately inspired to write and receives pen, paper, and ink from Mrs. Mackay; she tells another woman of her ambitions and receives the practical help that will allow her to express herself. Her consideration of her plan to write, in the novel’s final paragraph, also mirrors her initial declaration of her ambition to go to London. Cosima thinks of her paper, pen, and ink as “the materials of war” and her writing as “begin[ning] her campaign;” again, her career goals do not fit into any traditionally feminine paradigm (Paston 259). However, Cosima blends gender presentations here. While she casts herself in the manly role of the soldier, she performs this work in a community composed of women. Her confidantes help her to navigate the world of work rather than of love and to exist outside the male-dominated home, making A Writer of Books a text that values female intimacy and what women can bring to each other even as it creates a heroine who finds traditional feminine roles stifling.

Cosima’s occupation as a writer makes her creation of community particularly significant, as writing is often considered a solitary occupation. Like Esther, however, Cosima forms her narrative from her social interactions; she sees narrative as a part of life. Her perceptions of Mrs. Mackay’s gossip and of the stories of Miss Phelps’s patients as potential

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material for her writing suggest that spoken communication and written communication are not respectively social and solitary but instead interlinked: both are forms of creative work and ways of expressing stories. While Cosima interacts with a few other writers—besides Miss Nevill, there are the Mallorys, a brother and sister pair—she is not part of a large literary community; we get less of a sense of the larger world of writing than we get in a novel such as New Grub Street, which focuses on the multiple perspectives of a variety of mostly male writers trying to succeed in London. Since Cosima does not have many female writers with whom she can interact, she draws on other women in a variety of roles in order to create an expanded sense of narrative to fuel her writing. This implies that women’s writing should not be isolated or esoteric but instead reflective of the world: that the exchange of confidences and varied experiences is necessary in order to express oneself. Returning to the links between “real world” confiding and storytelling and the creation of novelistic narrative, we can see how the confidences Cosima gives and receives help her to construct both her novel and her own life, which in turn makes up A Writer of Books. Confidences in the world of the working woman artist thus “create story” on two levels

(Spacks 13): developing the events of her life for the reader and, within the text, developing her art.

The Confidante’s Forms of Work

The novel of work provides new opportunities for the confidante: it allows her to take on more traditionally masculine roles within a world of female intimacy. Through her confidences to other women, she is able to express herself, receive help, and gain the resources she needs to develop as an artist and an individual. Nevertheless, perhaps in response to fears of the New

Woman’s socially destructive potential, these novels do not seem fully able to incorporate the

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two realms of marriage plot and homosocial working plot, as one leads to the other being cast aside. Marks cites contemporary journalism commenting on alternatives to marriage for those who could not find husbands and were termed “‘redundant’ women,” with the conclusion, “The

Victorians considered…work…to be a poor alternative to marriage” (30). She further cites a range of economic proposals designed to get women into marriages and out of the workforce

(Marks 31) and notes the paired “need for practical accomplishment…[and] need for self- sufficiency” for working women (Marks 57), emphasizing work as a way for women to sustain themselves when lacking other financial support. Her citations from contemporary periodicals highlight perceptions of work as a temporary, less desirable stopgap before marriage. While the novels to some extent bear out this perception by portraying marriage and work as incompatible, they also complicate it by portraying work as a choice and by showing what women might lose by leaving the work world: their female friendships.

Female intimacy is not necessarily entirely supplanted by heterosexual romance, but it is at least changed by it: these heroines cannot have their cake and eat it too. Female intimacies shift to be more defined by discussions of men, and women must choose between their places in the world of female community and the world of marriage; they do not build egalitarian networks that incorporate both forms of relationship. Texts of this period offer men the chance to have the best of all worlds: to engage in adventures, to participate in powerful homosocial intimacy, and to take part in heterosexual romance without having it change the rest of their lives. These worlds are never quite compatible for women, however; while the Lorimers ultimately choose their marriages over their joint business and Cosima chooses her writing over her marriage, both novels end with such a decision. These intimacies that fail to “cultivate…the

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feminine virtues” do not bring women towards marriage or co-exist with it; instead they offer the possibility of an alternative life in a non-domestic setting (Marcus 26).

Indeed, what stands out about The Romance of a Shop and A Writer of Books, compared to the novels discussed in previous chapters, is their portrayals of work in the public sphere rather than in the domestic. These working heroines live in the world of the New Woman. While the previous confidantes worked as companions or governesses, positions associated with feminine-coded domestic tasks and with care work, the tasks of a photographer or writer depend upon producing creative products. Both forms of work involve emotion, but the domestic worker must direct her emotion towards others by displaying care for their feelings18, while the creative artist expresses her own. Although the New Woman heroines’ work is socially integrated into female communities, as I have shown, its results are shown in the products it produces, while the domestic confidantes’ work is based around intangible results such as others’ emotional responses to them.

Thus, the domestic confidante’s work in some sense is to be a confidante, while the public sphere confidante’s task is broader. Because Fanny, Maria, and Esther’s roles involve supporting those around them, they are seen as natural repositories of others’ stories and woes.

While their roles are in some cases malleable—as Fanny transforms from a marginal figure in

Mansfield Park to its heroine—and their relationships with other women involve mutual affection, it is nevertheless easy to determine who fills the role of confidante in each of the novels I have focused on in previous chapters. Fanny, Maria, and Esther usually keep their feelings to themselves in their interactions with Mary, Margaret, and Ada; even when they

18 This is related to Arlie Russell Hochschild’s concept of emotional labor, which I shall discuss in my conclusion.

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express themselves in their thoughts or to the reader, in their outward behavior they focus on dealing with others’ emotions, triumphs, and troubles.

In The Romance of a Shop and A Writer of Books, it is less easy to determine who exactly is the confidante. In both of these novels, we see women exchanging confidences, with two friends frequently trading views back and forth. Their exchanges are also couched less in terms of care work and more in terms of practicality. When Cosima shares her writing and Miss Nevill shares her experiences with journalism, each reveals something of herself, but at the same time the moment is more closely connected to Cosima’s development as a writer than to cementing the bond between the two women. In this aspect, they have much in common with the male confidants of the Holmes stories: while their bonds are clearly important to the story, they are closely connected to their working lives. Holmes and Watson rarely share personal confidences,19 and yet their intimacy is clear. Just as these stories of male confidants suggest that adventurous men need not abandon close emotional connections, the New Woman novels suggest that women can enter the traditionally masculine world of work and still maintain close bonds with other women. They can express themselves through their ambitions in the professional sphere and participate in socially integrated creative work. While the New Woman heroine’s fate is somewhat ambivalent due to the ways in which she is forced to choose between work and domesticity, these novels still allow her a world of working intimacy. She is able to use confidences to build a life of independence and female friendship—but she must choose between this new plot and the marriage plot to find her story’s ending.

19 “The Final Problem” is something of an exception, but even there the confidences are connected to Holmes’s battle with Moriarty.

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Conclusion

Emotional Labor and Later Confidantes

In this study, I have explored the centrality of the confidante in the nineteenth-century novel. Although she initially seems to be a side figure, she in fact plays a vital role in both the novel’s content and its form; she serves to foreground alternate forms of intimacy within the novel’s story and to guide the way the narrative takes shape. She also serves to both illustrate and complicate the ways in which women are expected to help each other work through emotions.1

While this places demands on the confidante and governs the behavior expected of her, it need not be false or one-sided. Instead, it serves bring her closer to those who confide in her and to provide her with additional sources of support in her life, which can help bring her to a happy fate outside the realm of the marriage plot.

The confidante’s relationship to intimacy and narrative is present in all of these novels, but it shifts over the course of the novel’s development. I began my study with a brief look at

Samuel Richardson’s Clarissa (1747-1748), an early example of the ways in which the intimacy and confidences exchanged between women can serve to shape a narrative. The letters between

Clarissa Harlowe and Anna Howe are not only tokens of intimacy; they are the novel’s very story, which is both about their letters and created by their letters. While the pair’s closeness is cut short by Clarissa’s death, the novel ends with what Susan Lanser terms a “sapphic after-plot” in which Anna “suggests that [Clarissa’s death] isn’t all, that the female affiliation that has structured the narration cannot be killed off by the apparent closing of the plot or even by

Clarissa’s death, that there will be a story beyond the story, and one in which she herself is

1 Arlie Russell Hochschild discusses the gendering of emotional labor in The Managed Heart (171-172).

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paramount” (181, 180). Lanser’s analysis is important for considering how the confidante’s role in the novel’s form and in its content interact; even when the conclusion of the novel seems to de-prioritize female intimacy, the confidante’s role in shaping the progress of the plot needs to be taken into account. Clarissa is particularly notable here for the similar language that Anna and

Lovelace use in discussing the dead Clarissa; both state that they have a “right” to possess her body after her family’s rejection of her, language that casts both in a marital role towards

Clarissa (Richardson 1384, 1403). Particularly because Clarissa’s potential heterosexual marriage plot between Clarissa and Lovelace does not end at all happily, the novel shows an early example of a conclusion that calls into question the prioritizing of heterosexual romance over female homosocial intimacy. Neither Lovelace nor Anna wins Clarissa, and therefore neither relationship can easily be said to be more important. Even in Anna’s own marriage, which illustrates Lanser’s notion of the “containment” of female-female desire, she takes on the personality and tasks of Clarissa, somehow keeping their intimacy alive (169).

This eighteenth-century posthumous continuation of the intimacy created by confidences is somewhat more radical than the early nineteenth-century novels I read in this study, which struggle with the challenges of maintaining female intimacy and marriage simultaneously.

Instead, these novels conclude with a marriage plot that incorporates one of the novel’s two women—either the original confidante or her friend—while leaving the other on the outskirts, separated both from the possibility of marriage and from female intimacy. Such a trend suggests more of the “containment” that Lanser describes (169), rather than the intertwining of heterosexual marriage and female intimacy that Marcus theorizes. Instead of allowing for the queer potential of female intimacy as a viable alternative to marriage, or even a relationship that can accompany it, these novels foreclose it, implying that it cannot exist alongside the

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heterosexual pairing. Mansfield Park, as Janet Todd outlines, heavily emphasizes Fanny’s

“rejection” of other women in favor of heterosexual marriage (Women’s Friendship 248), and the text struggles to balance the powerful presence of female intimacy with its ultimate conclusion.

While Fanny serves as the confidante for Mary and Edmund and thus shapes the novel’s progress, her eventual role as an important member of the family is tied to Mary’s disappearance and her own marriage to Edmund: two women cannot be equally important at one time. The novel is thus almost a “confidante’s revenge” story, in which the once marginalized and overlooked Fanny finally gets the chance to be the most admired and successful woman (in terms of her marital fate) while the others are relegated to being side characters. Deerbrook is more ambiguous in its attempts to balance female intimacy and the conclusion of the marriage plot.

While Maria still remains present and close to Margaret and Phillip, the traits that cast her as a marginalized figure suggest that no change in her position is possible. Maria’s role as governess, tied to her poverty and her disability, is implied to be a permanent one. Unlike Fanny, she has no opportunity to get her revenge; unlike Mary, she is not just removed from the marriage plot but never has the chance to enter it at all. Despite her important presence in shaping the novel’s narrative, her absence from the marriage plot and position as confidante appears as another form of disadvantage, alongside her social position and physical disability. Deerbrook’s ending thus moves away from its formal emphasis of the confidante’s vital role, relegating her instead to her initial position as a side figure.

As the century moves on, however, we see a movement from marriage as the novel’s ultimate desired relationship—whether the confidante is admitted into it or excluded from it— towards novels in which a wider network of relationships becomes a viable and fulfilling alternative. Esther’s fate in Bleak House is the most prominent example of this, as Esther finds

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herself living a life in which bonds formed only by feeling—with Ada, their “shared” son, and

Jarndyce—are no less important than her legalized relationships with her husband and children.

Not only that, but these bonds are tied up with the form of the novel and thus with Esther’s relationship with the reader. We take leave of Esther and her network all at once, as she enumerates her loved ones in the novel’s final sentence, addressed to the reader. Much as

Clarissa and Anna earlier built their bond by exchanging writings, Esther bonds with the reader by sharing her writings as well, writings which also serve to show the development of the bond between Esther and Ada. While marriage is presented as an unexpected triumph for Esther— something that lifts her out of the role of the plain friend who facilitates others’ romances—it does not lead her to abandon her other intimacies, nor does it become more important than them.

Esther’s family with Woodcourt, created through heterosexual marriage, and Esther’s family with Ada, created through their queer bond, coexist and are given equal weight. Instead of privileging marriage for its own sake, therefore, Bleak House suggests that it can exist alongside same sex-relationships, that the two can work together as part of a larger family structure, and that both types of relationships involve equally strong love. The confidante plot thus works with

Bleak House’s expansive, multi-thread narrative to bring out the idea that the novelistic ending need not focus narrowly on one pairing. Instead, it can focus on a broadening of life’s possibilities. Esther, who begins the novel solitary, finds her happiness in a nontraditional found family and intensifies her connection to the reader. This illustrates that the novel can take its characters on alternative paths and even combine them, bringing together Esther’s roles of wife, confidante, and narrator.

The wider world formed by the confidante’s female intimacies continues in The Romance of a Shop and A Writer of Books. Gertrude, along with her sisters, and Cosima make their

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entrances into the world outside the home with the help of other women, largely through the other women’s responses to their confidences and the advice they are able to give. Nevertheless, marriage is not absent from these novels, and unlike their predecessors, their heroines struggle to balance it with their other intimacies. Marriage breaks up the Lorimers’ shared home in their photography studio, and it draws Cosima away from her writing and the female friends she has made in that world. Nevertheless, the connected worlds of female intimacy and work do not vanish completely. The Lorimers, as sisters, continue to spend time together and to work separately; Cosima returns to both worlds when she leaves her husband. Nevertheless, the possibility of living in all worlds simultaneously is fraught, and perhaps this can be explained by the particular nature of work in these novels. Although previous confidantes have worked, the women of these novels are different in two ways: they have vocations, and they produce products. Their work is less connected to the kinds of emotional bonds that the other novels’ heroines—Fanny as companion, Maria as governess, and Esther as housekeeper/duenna—must form and maintain.

This is not to suggest that either form of work—the emotion-based or the production- based—is better, merely that each has its advantages and drawbacks in forming the confidante’s journey. The contrast between the two, however, is notable in light of Arlie Russell Hochschild’s study of emotional labor in The Managed Heart. Hochschild begins her study by comparing “the nineteenth-century factory child and the twentieth-century flight attendant,” explicitly casting different forms of labor as belonging to different times (5). She goes on to note one major difference between these two: “in the case of the flight attendant, the emotional style of offering the service is part of the service itself, in a way that loving or hating wallpaper is not part of producing wallpaper” (Hochschild 5-6). However, Hochschild notes some common ground. She

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writes, “Beneath the difference between physical and emotional labor there lies a similarity in the possible cost of doing the work: the worker can become estranged or alienated from an aspect of self—either the body or the margins of the soul—that is used to do the work” (Hochschild 7).

She then defines and outlines the differences between “emotional labor” (“the management of feeling to create a publicly observable facial and bodily display…sold for a wage”) and “emotion work” (“these same acts done in a private context where they have use value”) (Hochschild 7).

Hochschild’s analysis here has interesting implications in studying the confidante. Firstly, her construction of physical labor and emotional labor as typical work forms of different time periods deserves further consideration. Although Hochschild characterizes emotional labor as a twentieth-century work form, the positions occupied by the confidantes in these novels suggest that it has much earlier roots. A certain “emotional style” is part of Maria’s paid work as a governess and Fanny’s and Esther’s unpaid jobs in the home (these latter two fitting into the category of emotion work) (Hochschild 5). This further connects to Mary Poovey’s analysis of the governess’s role as troubling because of her challenge to the division between the middle- class home and the outside world, in which “neither sex nor class ‘stamp[s]’ the governess as different from the lady who employs her” and thus she performs for pay the emotional labor which they might be expected to perform for free (133). She further illustrates the way in which middle-class women “[can]not all be wives” and thus raises doubts about their possible fate

(Poovey 144). Maria is certainly this sort of uncomfortable figure—and she is one of the few young female characters in these novels who does not marry—but the demands of emotion work placed on the other confidantes are still significant. In fact, the unpaid emotion work of characters like Fanny and Esther may be even more fraught; rather than providing a service for money, they must show their gratitude for a home that has been provided to them, whether this

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demand is made explicitly (as by Mrs. Norris) or simply grows out of social expectations (as in

Esther’s upbringing).

Taking this idea to its logical conclusions, I would argue that the role of the confidante itself—in any circumstances—requires the performance of emotion work. After all, it involves demonstrating sympathy to another and taking in their confidences with a friendly disposition.

This can necessitate hiding one’s true feelings (as Fanny must do with Mary) or simply maintaining sympathy towards another who experiences happiness than one does not. While it could be argued that concealment has no place in a true friendship, the confidantes in these novels almost always hold at least something back in order to perform their roles. While one party—the “confider”—is open, the confidante is not perfectly so. Hochschild notes that emotional labor and emotion work are often specifically required of women (171-172), and the women in the confidante role are socially marginalized in other ways as well. Their need for concealment of their feelings thus might lead one to think that the role of confidante is not only one performed by a marginalized figure but one that is in itself marginalizing. The confidante is unable to fully centralize herself with her friend if she cannot say all she thinks.

However, the confidante’s relationship with her friend instead complicates Hochschild’s assertion that “the worker can become estranged or alienated from an aspect of self—either the body or the margins of the soul—that is used to do the work,” which implies that emotional labor is often one-sided, false, and unrewarding (7). Instead, it becomes something that can produce its own rewards beyond the economic by facilitating the formation of intimacy. Rather than showing that the performance of emotion necessarily springs from something that the performer does not feel herself, the emotion work performed by the confidante in fact springs from her genuine feelings for her friend and her desire to maintain and improve their relationship. While

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this may entail some moments of performance or concealment, it does not follow that this means that the entire relationship is unreal. Instead, the use of emotion work here shows that performance may be a valuable tool in creating intimacy and that perfect honesty is not always necessary or desirable. Emotion work serves to create a space for sharing and openness, a space which, if successful, may produce more of the same.

The presentation of emotion also interacts with the novel’s formal features. Maria performs certain emotion work in her direct conversations with Margaret, while she explains more of the reasons for her choices in her internal monologue, presented directly to the reader.

Esther’s narrative also shows her shaping the presentation of her own feelings, as with her apologies for such things as centering herself in the story and feeling upset about Lady

Dedlock’s confession; she clearly tries to perform the role of the proper narrator, which requires a certain level of emotional engagement with the reader. The variety of different narrative forms allows the reader to be privy to different aspects of the confidante’s emotions: her external presentation of them, her private feelings, and the ways that these may or may not match up.

In order to look at the difference between the presentation of emotion work (which has public aspects even within the private or domestic sphere) and the private or internal reflection, I would like to conclude by examining a later novel which shares many of the same concerns as these nineteenth-century texts and which is told in the form of a diary. Doris Lessing’s The Diary of a Good Neighbour (1983, published under the name Jane Somers) follows the adventures of the middle-aged Jane Somers as she befriends the older woman Maudie. Initially, this text seems removed from the concerns of the nineteenth-century novel—the widowed Jane’s marriage plot is firmly in the past—and pushes the boundaries of what it might represent with its frequent detailed descriptions of bodily decay. Rather than portraying two young women sharing secrets

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about potential lovers, The Diary of a Good Neighbour focuses more on the work of daily care and on stories of the distant past. In fact, however, this novel continues the tradition of the confidante and shares many key features with the novels I have been discussing, particularly in its centralizing of the pitfalls and rewards of emotion work.

Here, Jane performs emotion work as she takes on Maudie’s regular care. While Jane is not in a paid position, she performs much of the work of a nurse or household aide, due to

Maudie’s resistance to official bureaucracy. She thus finds herself navigating many of the same pitfalls in her attempts to keep Maudie happy, much as the nineteenth-century confidantes must still cater to others’ feelings even when they are not “officially” employed (Fanny as her aunt’s companion, Esther as a member of the household who is also the housekeeper). The novel thus provides a twentieth-century look at some of the same joys and dilemmas faced by these earlier confidantes, as well as the relationships they prioritize.

First, the novel focuses entirely on female intimacies, especially those that are not socially codified. Most prominent is Jane’s friendship with Maudie, which begins when the two meet by chance in a shop; this later leads to Jane befriending other elderly women to whom she is connected through Maudie and her network of social services professionals (also women).

Jane’s friendship with her magazine co-editor Joyce also plays a key role. The only female intimacy here that is codified by familial bonds is that between Jane and her niece Jill, who comes to live with her, and this notably comes as a surprise to Jane, who does not get along well with her sister (Jill’s mother). As such, the novel prioritizes the unexpected intimacy, one which is based on feeling rather than on social standards. And like Bleak House, it shows how such intimacies can expand one’s world; like Esther, Jane becomes someone she does not expect due to her friendships with those around her.

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Jane’s diary narrative also reflects earlier forms of narration. Jane herself views the narrative form as necessary to her own understanding of the story, beginning the novel with,

“The first part is a summing-up of about four years. I was not keeping a diary. I wish I had. All I know is that I see everything differently now from how I did while I was living through it”

(Lessing 5). Jane’s diary shapes her relation to events just as it shapes her relation to the reader; we receive events filtered through the perspective of her writing. In some ways, this narrative style hearkens back to the early novel, particularly eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century texts that are composed of documents. It also shares similarities with Esther’s narrative, supposedly something she is writing for the novel’s reader. Unlike the meticulously dated letters of Clarissa,

Jane’s diary has a loose style with no dates for entries. It also interpolates other narrative forms, as when Jane writes an entire day from Maudie’s perspective (Lessing 113-122), and frequently reports entire conversations word-for-word in a most un-diary-like style (a frequent trait of nineteenth-century reported narratives, from Esther’s own writing to Nelly’s reported story of the past in Emily Brontë’s Wuthering Heights (1847)).

Jane uses her diary not explicitly to craft intimacy with the reader but to craft intimacy with herself, working through what she has experienced, as well as to craft intimacy with Maudie and other women by imagining their lives in her writings. Narrative becomes a place to explore what might be and to investigate connections between the self and others, much as Clarissa and

Anna’s letters suggest alternate possibilities for Clarissa’s fate. After writing Maudie’s day, Jane writes her own (Lessing 123-127) and comments on what she perceives as the difference in experience between the two in caring for themselves: “[for Jane] it all takes a few minutes…But that is because I am ‘young’, only forty-nine. What makes poor Maudie labour and groan all through her day, the drudge and drag of maintenance” (Lessing 127, ellipsis original). Narrative

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thus serves not only as a tool to build sympathy through finding common ground with others but also through finding differences; two characters need not be alike to understand each other.

Finally, The Diary of a Good Neighbour emphasizes the emotion work inherent in caring for someone else, particularly as relationships grow. Jane’s relationship with Maudie is particularly characterized by its non-official nature; Maudie contrasts her with “the social workers, and Home Helps, and—a Good Neighbour” (women who are assigned to visit the elderly), all of whom she distrusts, and this perhaps places a greater burden on the relationship

(Lessing 17). When Jane first agrees to visit Maudie, she realizes what it may mean: “When I got home that evening I was in a panic. I had committed myself” (Lessing 14). Although the novel frequently emphasizes the physical reality of caring for an elderly person, as Jane helps to clean

Maudie, it also emphasizes the emotional sharing that leads to that form of physical closeness.

Maudie often tells Jane about her childhood and young adulthood, stories which Jane reports in the diary. Because of this building of intimacy, Maudie comes to rely on Jane, preferring her care to that of others; when Maudie resists having a nurse and Jane plans to go away for a trip, she thinks, “I stood there, worried because I was late…And worried about her. And angry. And resentful. And yet she tugged at me, I wanted to take that dirty old bundle into my arms and hug her. I wanted to slap her and shake her” (Lessing 43). Following the intimacy built by Maudie’s confidences and stories, Jane feels unwillingly attached to her; she must perform care and yet knows she cannot fully handle the job.

Over the course of the novel, we see the multiple sides to performing such emotion work, including the way it draws the women together, the way it creates struggles for Jane, and, after

Maudie’s death near the end of the novel, the problem of its absence. Jane, upset by the lack of care shown by Maudie’s family, tells Jill, “I’m so angry I could die of it…If I let myself stop

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being angry, I’m going to howl and scream” (Lessing 253). While emotion work is frequently difficult, its absence with the death of Maudie leads to a loss in Jane’s life, a space for sorrow.

This moment also further emphasizes the role of female intimacy in creating an alternative space for women outside of the traditional family unit. While Maudie’s family does not care for her, her relationship with Jane, based only on their emotional connection, becomes central to both of their lives. Because she is neither a family member nor paid, Jane is not “officially” obligated to care for Maudie but feels she must do so anyway. This illustrates how, in the ambiguous situation of the confidante, required emotion work and self-generated emotion often intertwine and become indistinguishable.2

Ultimately, the building of intimacies by the confidante creates a vital force in her life.

She is tied to those around her by their shared secrets and stories and by the very experience of sharing them; her story is not only her own, but that of other people. Through examining the figure of the confidante, we, as readers, can understand more about the variety of spaces women can occupy, within narrative and within life. Perhaps what is most important is that these spaces are not isolated: we cannot easily define the place of the confidante as separate from the places that are occupied by others. Instead, she creates and drives larger networks, ones that combine a variety of forms of intimacy but prioritize those that are created by choice. And this larger choice—the decision to be intimate with another and to share one’s life with her—is precipitated by what may seem a smaller choice but which is in fact, within the narrative form of the novel, the most important choice of all: the choice to share a story.

Thus, over time, the confidante’s place in the novel both evolves to fit women’s changing situations and remains consistent in its foregrounding of alternatives to heterosexual marriage

2 Viviana Zelizer addresses a similar topic in The Purchase of Intimacy, in which she argues that households are “small economies…[in which] intimate relations and economic relationships coincide” (242).

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and its emphasis on narrative as a vehicle for creating these alternatives. We cannot say that the confidante subverts all traditional ideas of the nineteenth-century novel, as she often becomes involved in heterosexual marriage plots, whether her own or those of others. However, her clear presence forces us to acknowledge her central role, in line with Marcus’s practice of “just reading” what “openly” appears in a text (75). We must pay attention to how she shapes all of a novel’s narratives, not just her own fate. The confidante plot is a central aspect of the nineteenth- century novel, one that builds on older traditions and influences later fiction, one that brings women’s queer intimacies to the fore. It allows the form of these intimacies—the repeated exchange of confidences, secrets, stories, and truths—to shape the novel’s arc.

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