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“It's All About Us:” Review of Lisa See's Snow Flower and the Secret

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“It's All About Us:” Review of Lisa See's Snow Flower and the Secret Feminist Awakenings: Review of Essie Fox’s Elijah’s Mermaid and Stevie Davies’ Awakening Marie-Luise Kohlke (Swansea University, Wales, UK) Essie Fox, Elijah’s Mermaid London: Orion Books, 2012 ISBN: 978-1-40912-335-4, £12.99 (PB) Stevie Davies, Awakening Cardigan: Parthian, 2013 ISBN: 978-1-90894-698-0, £15.00 (HB) ***** From the outset, neo-Victorianism has been crucially concerned with gender issues, particularly the role of women and the historical discrimination and abuses perpetrated against them, regardless of whether the neo-Victorian novel’s beginnings are located in the 1960s with Jean Rhys’ Wide Sargasso Sea (1966) and John Fowles’ The French Lieutenant’s Woman (1969) or pushed further back to Michael Sadleir’s Fanny by Gaslight (1940) and Marghanita Laski’s The Victorian Chaise-longue (1953). As such the neo-Victorian novel has been engaged in feminist consciousness-raising, whether directly or indirectly, both of its audience and its often outcast, persecuted, and exploited female characters. Perhaps fittingly – if never conclusively (witness Sadleir and Fowles) – historical fiction itself was once regarded as a peculiarly ‘feminine’ genre, both in terms of its writers and audience, something like the poor spinster cousin of the more ‘literary’ novel. In the last three decades, however, not least through the neo-Victorian efforts of such iconic women writers as A. S. Byatt and Sarah Waters, the genre has gone mainstream and firmly established itself at the heart of the cultural establishment. Not least, today’s historical novels, particularly those re-imagining the long nineteenth Neo-Victorian Studies 6:2 (2013) pp. 207-222 208 Marie-Luise Kohlke _____________________________________________________________ century, repeatedly win the most coveted national and international literary prizes, most recently Eleanor Catton’s The Luminaries (2013), which garnered both the Governor General’s Award (Canada) and the Booker Prize. Not coincidentally, The Luminaries also includes that indispensable element of neo-Victorian gender politics – the fallen woman or prostitute. The same motif recurs in two other recent neo-Victorian fictions by women writers that more specifically focus on feminist awakenings: Essie Fox’s Elijah’s Mermaid (2012) and Stevie Davies’ Awakening (2013). Both novels pursue their feminist agendas through the trope of biological or affinitive sisterhood, which as yet remains a comparatively neglected topic in neo-Victorian criticism. This is all the more curious in view of the importance of sisterhood for the second-wave feminist movement, as well as for feminist and proto-feminist literature of the nineteenth century, such as Elizabeth Barrett Browning’s Aurora Leigh (1856), Christina Rossetti’s Goblin Market (1859, publ. 1862) or, perhaps most famously, Charlotte Brontë’s Jane Eyre (1847) with its depiction of psychological sisterhood and dédoublement between the titular heroine and the first Mrs Rochester, as per Sandra M. Gilbert and Susan Gubar’s The Madwoman in the Attic (1979). Fox’s and Davies’ neo-Victorian novels, however, centralise sisterhood – in its various potential meanings – in such a way that a discussion of their works becomes virtually impossible without it. On one hand, this centralisation of sisterhood could be read as signalling dissatisfaction with post-feminism, constituting a nostalgia for a previous phase or phases of feminism, played out via fictional travel back in time. On the other hand, via the earlier historical setting, the privileging of sisterhood helps focalise the biological inscriptions and potential re-essentialisations of feminism itself – from Woolfean ‘thinking back through our mothers’ to jouissance, écriture feminine, and the in-your-face sexuality/self- sexualisation associated with girl power. Arguably, this latter aspect of neo- Victorian writing tends to be disregarded in favour of concentrating on the genre’s liberative aspects. Fox’s novel explores the sisterhood trope in the contexts of Victorian art, publishing, and the asylum industry, while Davies’ text does so through the context of religion, specifically the Dissenting Baptist community. Each writer pairs her unconventional ‘fallen’ protagonist with a second, more conservative female protagonist and double. However, the latter does not merely perform the role of convenient foil (as Ernestina Neo-Victorian Studies 6:2 (2013) Review of Elijah’s Mermaid and Awakening 209 _____________________________________________________________ Freeman does to Sarah Woodruff in The French Lieutenant’s Woman, for example), but instead plays a crucial part in facilitating – and eventually to a greater or lesser extent participating in – the awakening of her more transgressive ‘sister’. Though strikingly different in narrative mode, with Fox opting for a Gothic as compared to Davies’ realist approach,1 both novels also contain resonant echoes of Victorian writings and, in the case of Davies’ novel, Victorian women writers’ lives. Elijah’s Mermaid opens with the report of the suicide of a young woman and mother. Fished from the Thames, her ‘found’ infant is brought to Mrs Hibbert’s House of Mermaids, an up-market brothel on Cheyne Walk, London, where she grows up under the name of ‘Pearl’ – ironically referencing both the “gleaming and white and innocent” colour of her namesake (p. 94) and the title of a Victorian pornographic magazine. The choice of the brothel’s location is itself overtly self-conscious, evoking that most famous of Pre-Raphaelite painters, Dante Gabriel Rossetti, a resident of the same street. However, Osborne Black, the patron who eventually purchases the adolescent Pearl at Mrs Hibbert’s auction of her maidenhead, is an artist more in the John William Waterhouse mode, obsessed with the painting of pale mermaids. (Fittingly, Pearl suffers from a genetic mutation, having webbed feet.) At the age of fourteen, the nineteenth-century age of consent for marriage, Pearl is coerced to sign a blank “entitlement” deed giving herself into the “care and protection of” whichever man signs what is, in effect, her purchase agreement (p. 89, original italics). Pearl’s subsequent life as Black’s muse and artist’s model, posing first as his daughter and later his wife, thus proves little more than a continuation of her former objectification and exploitation, when Hibbert temptingly paraded her before her clients as “the Wondrous Water Child, the Living Jewel from the Oyster Beds”, her “petite nymphe” (p. 19), crowned with shells. Interspersed with Pearl’s narrative is that of the putative orphans Elijah and his twin sister Lily, who are adopted from the Foundling Hospital at a young age by Augustus Lamb, a middle-class writer of popular children’s books and fairytales, including one of a mermaid (calling to mind Hans Christian Anderson’s work). Lamb’s intervention in the children’s lives follows a letter from his friend and London publisher Frederick Hall, informing the writer of Hall’s suspicions regarding the likelihood of the infants being the illegitimate children of Augustus’ dead son, Gabriel, and a young Italian woman once employed at Frederick’s offices, where Gabriel worked. Yet in spite of the brother-sister twinning and the novel’s title, Neo-Victorian Studies 6:2 (2013) 210 Marie-Luise Kohlke _____________________________________________________________ Elijah’s Mermaid actually focuses much more on female than male experience. Apart from actual and invented nineteenth-century epigraphs, and interpolated occasional letters, stories, Elijah’s short diary, and newspaper reports, the narrative is told exclusively from Pearl’s and Lily’s perspectives. It is the implicit doubling of Lily and Pearl – as each girl’s fate could easily have been the other’s – that drives the plot, while their very names embody the poles of the Victorian feminine binary (or sisterhood) of purity and corruption. Indeed, in Fox’s Gothic sensation fiction, respectability and ‘fallenness’, virtue and vice go hand in hand, with the one risking at any moment to tip over into its correlative. Not least, the twins’ beloved ‘Uncle’ Freddie assumes increasingly sinister overtones, as he becomes implicated in both the pornography trade and in procuring young Magdalenes from “the Dockside Nightbird Mission” (p. 22, original italics) as household servants expected to service their master’s private needs also. As much is gradually revealed when the twins reach maturity, and Elijah, on account of his artistic talents as an illustrator and photographer, moves to London to work for Osborne Black upon Freddie’s recommendation. When Elijah mysteriously disappears some ten weeks later, the ingénue Lily leaves the ailing Lamb in search of her brother – assuming the more traditional role of the fairytale male quester and rescuer. The early parts of the novel, preceding her investigations, revolve around the two girls’ memories of their childhoods, which uncannily mirror one another. Just as Pearl is sequestered in the brothel, Lily is “cocooned” (p. 32) from the outside world at Kingsland House, the Lambs’ idyllic country residence, like some sort of fairytale sleeping beauty in her adoptive father’s tales, published by Hall, who also issues the sensationalist weekly magazine As Every Day Goes By. The magazine is both the twins’ favourite reading material and that of Pearl, old copies of which are passed on to her by the brothel’s cook without the madam’s knowledge. Mrs Hibbert, Pearl reflects, would disapprove, because she prefers me to read
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