THE ART OF POPULAR FICTION GENDER, AUTHORSHIP AND AESTHETICS IN THE WRITING OF OUIDA A thesis submitted in fulfilment of the requirements for the Degree of Doctor of Philosophy in English in the University of Canterbury by Carla Molloy University of Canterbury 2008 Table of Contents Acknowledgments............................................................................................3 Abstract ............................................................................................................4 Introduction ......................................................................................................6 i. Introducing Ouida.................................................................................7 ii. Ouida: A Critical Survey ...................................................................15 iii. Ouida and Women's Authorship in the Nineteenth Century..............40 iv. Outline of Thesis...............................................................................46 Chapter 1: Beginnings. Strathmore, Gender and Authorship..........................52 Chapter 2: Tricotrin, Professionalism and High Art .....................................101 Chapter 3: Women, Realism and Friendship ................................................157 Chapter 4: Aestheticism and Consumer Culture in Princess Napraxine .....................................................................................................228 Afterword .....................................................................................................284 Notes ............................................................................................................290 Works Cited (Primary) .................................................................................322 Works Cited (Secondary) .............................................................................332 List of Figures Figure 1: Punch’s Fancy Portraits,—No. 45 ................................................142 Figure 2: The Six-Mark Tea-Pot...................................................................235 3 Acknowledgments First of all, of course, I must thank my supervisors: Helen Debenham, who started me off both on this thesis and on Victorian women’s writing; Jed Mayer, who ably stepped in as chief supervisor after Helen’s retirement; and last but not least, Gareth Cordery. I have learned a lot from all of you and I deeply appreciate it. Thank you to everyone at the Australasian Victorian Studies Association (AVSA) for your support, both financial and moral, and to the University of Canterbury and the New Zealand Federation of Graduate Women for your financial support. Thank you also to the perennially helpful staff at the University of Canterbury Library. Finally, a special thank you to my husband, Surujhdeo Seunarine: suddenly all the words I can think of to express my gratitude for your love and support seem inadequate. A heartfelt thank you also to my parents, Sherryl and Michael Molloy, for your love and support throughout the duration of my studies. 4 Abstract This thesis examines the popular Victorian novelist Ouida (Maria Louisa Ramé) in the context of women’s authorship in the second half of the nineteenth century. The first of its two intentions is to recuperate some of the historical and literary significance of this critically neglected writer by considering on her own terms her desire to be recognised as a serious artist. More broadly, it begins to fill in the gap that exists in scholarship on women’s authorship as it pertains to those writers who come between George Eliot, the last of the ‘great’ mid-Victorian women novelists, and the New Woman novelists of the fin de siècle . Four of Ouida’s novels have been chosen for critical analysis, each of which was written at an important moment in the history of the nineteenth century novel. Her early novel Strathmore (1865) is shaped by the rebelliousness towards gendered models of authorship characteristic of women writers who began their careers in the 1860s. In this novel, Ouida undermines the binary oppositions of gender that were in large part constructed and maintained by the domestic novel and which controlled the representation and reception of women’s authorship in the mid-nineteenth century. Tricotrin (1869) was written at the end of the sensation fiction craze, a phenomenon that resulted in the incipient splitting of the high art novel from the popular novel. In Tricotrin , Ouida responds to 5 the gendered ideology of occupational professionalism that was being deployed to distinguish between masculinised serious and feminised popular fiction, an ideology that rendered her particularly vulnerable as a popular writer. Ouida’s autobiographical novel Friendship (1878) is also written at an critical period in the novel’s ascent to high art. Registering the way in which the morally weighted realism favoured by novelists and critics at the mid-century was being overtaken by a desire for more formally oriented, serious fiction, Ouida takes the opportunity both to defend her novels against the realist critique of her fiction and to attempt to shape the new literary aesthetic in a way that positively incorporated femininity and the feminine. Finally, Princess Napraxine (1884) is arguably the first British novel seriously to incorporate the imagery and theories of aestheticism. In this novel, Ouida resists male aesthetes’ exploitative attempts to obscure their relationship to the developing consumer culture while confidently finding a place for the woman artist within British aestheticism and signalling a new acceptance of her own involvement in the marketplace. Together, these novels track Ouida’s self-conscious response to a changing literary marketplace that consistently marginalised women writers at the same time that they enable us to begin to uncover the complexity of female authorship in the second half of the nineteenth century. 6 Introduction The year 2008 marks the centenary of the death of Ouida (Maria Louisa Ramé). Despite her prominence as a popular novelist and polemical thinker during the second half of the nineteenth century, however, her cultural and literary significance is only just beginning to be understood. Largely familiar to us today as the best-selling but now obscure author of racy high-society novels, she was also a political campaigner who took an intense interest in the lives of the Italian peasants, an ardent animal rights activist, an environmental campaigner, an outspoken atheist and, perhaps surprisingly, the author of two essays stridently opposing female suffrage. Most importantly for this study, she was, in addition, intensely serious about her role as an artist and extraordinarily sensitive and responsive to changes in the contemporary literary climate. By taking this fascinating and illuminating writer as my subject, I have two broad intentions. The first of these is, in the face of the current critical neglect of Ouida, to present her to the reader as a subject deserving of critical attention and, building on the small but significant work that has been carried out on her, to add to those ways in which her cultural and literary importance are beginning to be recognised. More broadly, I use Ouida and her fiction to expand our current understanding of women’s authorship in the 7 second half of the nineteenth century, particularly in the context of the much- neglected generation of writers who come between the ‘great’ mid-century women writers and the New Woman writers at the end of the century. This introduction is composed of four parts that correspond to these aims. I start by introducing Ouida to the reader and giving a brief overview of her life and writing. I then take the opportunity to present, for the first time, a comprehensive review of contemporary scholarship about her. After this, I set up the main body of my thesis by placing Ouida in the context of current scholarship about women’s authorship, before, in the last section of the introduction, outlining the arguments in the chapters that follow. I. INTRODUCING OUIDA As a writer who is likely to be familiar to few, Ouida, and her changing relationship to various literary and aesthetic discourses throughout her writing career, first require some introduction. 1 Before metamorphosing into Marie Louise de la Ramée, the name that is usually assigned to her, she was born Maria Louisa Ramé in 1839 in Bury St. Edmunds, Suffolk, to an English mother and a French father. Her father, who is rumoured to have been an agent for Louis Napoleon, was absent for much of her childhood and finally disappeared around 1857. 8 After moving to London at about the time of her father’s disappearance, Ouida began writing in order to support her mother and grandmother. She was discovered by W. Harrison Ainsworth, the editor of Bentley’s Miscellany , who published her first short stories in 1859 under the pen name Ouida, a childhood mispronunciation of “Louisa.” Her first novel, Granville de Vigne: A Tale of the Day , was serialised in the New Monthly Magazine from 1861 to 1863; the novel was then published by Tinsley in three volumes under the title Held in Bondage and was an “enormous success” (Bigland 30). Held in Bondage and the early short stories that were later published under the title Cecil Castlemaine’s Gage (1867) are strongly influenced by the hyper-masculine novelist George Alfred Lawrence and successfully capitalised on what Anthony Powell describes as the “cult” following that Lawrence commanded amongst