House and Home in Late Victorian Women's Poetry
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HOUSE AND HOME IN LATE VICTORIAN WOMEN'S POETRY BEING A THESIS SUBMITTED FOR THE DEGREE OF PH.D IN THE UNIVERSITY OF HULL BY KATHARINE MARGARET MCGOWRAN BA(HONS), MA SEPTEMBER 1999 We flatter ourselves with fancied freedom. We are the slaves of every house that belongs to us. Invisible chains bind us to every chair and table. No sooner have we got rid of them than we begin to long for bonds afresh. (Mary E. Coleridge, Non Sequitur, 1907: 108) Contents Preface 1 1. The Social and Literary Context 4 2. `Echoes... queries... reactions... afterthoughts: Nostalgia and Homesickness 29 3. The Haunted House: Rossetti, Nesbit, Marriott Watson 53 86 4. The House of Poetry: Mary E. Coleridge 5. The House of Art: Mary E. Coleridge 112 6. At the Cross-Roads: Amy Levy 140 7. The Empty House: Charlotte Mew 166 References and bibliography 188 1 Preface Any consideration of the theme of `house and home' leads into discussion on three different levels of discourse. First of all, houseshave biographical and historical significance; they are, after all, real places in which real lives are lived. Secondly, home is an ideologically loaded noun, a bastion of value which is inextricably entwined with the notion of the pure woman. Thirdly, in literature, houses are metaphorical places. This thesis is primarily a study of those metaphorical places. It explores representationsof `house' and `home' in late Victorian women's poetry. However, it also takes account of the biographical, historical and ideological significance of the house, looking at factors which may have helped to shape each poet's representationsof `house and home'. The house occupies an ambiguous position in the poetry of the later Victorian period. It is variously imagined as a haunted house, a ruin, an empty house of echoes, and a prison of isolation and despair. At times, the house is a recognisable domestic place (the private house), at others, it is turned into a place of art or poetry, a new aesthetic `home' for the female imagination. In some poems the house is a focus for nostalgia and homesickness. Yet it is also often a place which must be left behind. What unites the poets I have studied is the fact that the houses they inhabit in their work are never entirely their own and they are rarely entirely at home in them. Home is less roomy as a concept. It tends to carry religious or ideological connotations and is usually represented as a place of duty and responsibility. It also comes to mean the final resting place: the grave. Thus house and home, which are not identical terms, are freighted with different meanings. It is the mismatch of these two terms, the tension between them, which I explore in this thesis. I am not making any claims for an exclusive tradition. Many of these poems contain echoes of other texts or are haunted by the ghosts of other writers. This thesis is a contextualised study of late Victorian women's poetry 2 which traces the connections, as well as exploring the differences, between the women's work and that of their male counterparts. For writers like Pater and Ruskin, the house similarly provides a focus for nostalgia and homesickness. The houses in their work are, like those in the women's poetry, often haunted places. The women poets echo the estrangements experienced by Tennyson's speakers, who return to old homes only to find themselves shut out or their place usurped. However, despite these similarities and continuities, a comparison between the male writers and poets and their female counterparts reveals evidence of a divided literary sensibility about the house, the foundations of which lie in the historical and ideological differences between men and women's relation to it. The social, educational and occupational advances of the 1880s and 1890s gave women the opportunity to extend their horizons beyond the domestic sphere. The movement away from the narrow confines of the private house is echoed in the women's literature of the period, the texts of which recreate the tentative steps outside the home. These poems thus also offer a perspective on the world opening up for women on the other side of the threshold, suggesting new roles and new directions for the female subject. However, the women poets' forays into the `new' imaginative terrain of the city continually highlight the dangers involved in leaving the familiar ground of the house, addressing the difficulty of establishing and sustaining a new social identity. As well as moving beyond the private house, the women's poetry of the period also trespasses into male houses of art. In literary terms, the latter decadesof the nineteenth century were dominated by the aesthetic movement and its decadent aftermath. Despite their resistance to these movements, the women poets I have studied display a fascination with the exclusive realms of art imaged in a number of aestheticand decadenttexts. However, the ambiguous relationship of women to decadenceand aestheticism means that it is hard to fit any of the poets I have studied into traditional perceptions of those movements. 3 Critics have tended to emphasise the ways in which the movements marginalise and exclude women. For example, Elaine Showalter has described the paradoxical nature of fin-de-siecle culture in which `strongly anti-patriarchal sentiments could... coexist comfortably with misogyny' (1990: 11). Camille Paglia has defined the aesthetic movement as a struggle between male `aesthetic perception' and `female nature' (1990: 485). However, as Leighton has noted, by concentrating on `gendered dualisms', these critics tend to trap themselves `in the very system which is being exposed: man for art, woman for nature'(1997: 2). `Such gendered dualisms', she concludes, `can close like a vice' (1997: 2). I too have attempted to distance myself from those critics by exploring instead the mix of political and aesthetic energies in the women's poetry. Tracing the contradictory impulses of these texts (their political commitments and aesthetic evasions) helps to illuminate the role that gender plays in aestheticism and decadence without reinscribing those `gendered dualisms'. However, although these women poets venture into realms beyond the private house, the homing instincts of their imaginations continue to bring them back to it. Charlotte Mew, who brings this `tradition' to its bleak conclusion, is the most modem of the poets I have studied. She died in 1928, nearly thirty years after the end of Victoria's reign. However, her belated revisitations of the house act as a reminder of the vice-like grip which it retains upon the female poetic imagination. In her poetry, the house has become a ghost of its former self. Yet, as Virginia Woolf remarked in her essay `Professions for Women'(1929), `[i]t is far harder to kill a phantom than a reality' (1984: 60). For these late Victorian women poets, the ghostly, textual presence of the private house proves similarly difficult to destroy. 4 Chapter One The Social and Literary Context. The later Victorian period was marked by a number of advancements in the cause of women's liberation. Legislative reforms like the Married Women's Property Act of 1882 granted wives the same rights as single women over their property and earnings; improvements in education opened up new occupational possibilities. 1869 saw the opening of Girton College, the first residential college for women. The 1880s and 1890s witnessed the emergence of the New Woman and the growth of causes like the Rational Dress Movement, the Anti- Matrimonial League and the Suffrage. The increasing provision of public space for women in the form of clubs, colleges, department stores, cafes and even public lavatories, gave women more freedom of movement, generating `a new urban female style of "being at home" in the city' (Walkowitz 1992:46). Thus, in theory at least, women found themselves faced with a number of new alternatives to the `hothouse and stove cultivation' of domestic life (Mill 1906: 44). Critics have claimed that the social changes of the later period, particularly the provision of public space for women, were `as important in undermining the ideal of social duty and the domination of the home as the growing claims of the Suffrage movement' (Davidoff 1973:67). In an article published in The Woman's World in 1888, the novelist and poet Amy Levy surveys the changing social context of women's lives: In class-room and lecture theatre, office and art-school, college and club- house alike, woman is waking up to a sense of the hundred and one possibilities of social intercourse, possibilities which, save in exceptional circumstances, have hitherto for her been restricted to the narrowest of grooves (1888d: 364). 5 Her evocation of the numerous potential destinations for women outside the realm of hearth and home, `class-room and lecture theatre... office and art- school, college and club-house', suggests the extent to which the boundary between the private house and the public sphere was beginning to open up, allowing women from the `high and dry' regions of residential districts to come down to the `pleasant shores where the great stream of life is dashing and flowing' (1888d: 364). The goal of a life beyond the realm of the private house, `hitherto... felt as a vague longing', has, she states, `assumed the definite shape of a practical demand, now that so many women of all ranks are controllers of their own resources' (1888d: 364). Women, Levy suggests, are beginning to make room for themselves in the public sphere, envisaging new roles for themselves and new contexts for social interaction and participation. Many of the new clubs, colleges, shops and cafes for women were establishedin and around the West End.