RETHINKING FALLENNESS IN VICTORIAN WOMEN'S POETRY By SCOTT THOMPSON ROGERS Bachelor of Arts · University of Southern Mississippi Hattiesburg, Mississippi 1994 .Master of Arts Oklahoma State University Stillwater, Oklahoma 1997 Submitted to the Faculty of the Graduate College of the Oklahoma State University - in partial fulfillment of · the requirements for - the Degree of · DOCTOR OF PHILOSOPHY - August, 2003 COPYRIGHT By Scott Thompson Rogers August, 2003 RETHINKING F ALLENNESS IN VICTORIAN WOMEN'S POETRY Thesis Approved: --- Dean of the Graduate College 11 ACKNOWLEDGMENTS No one writes in isolation, and I have been blessed with friends, colleagues, and family who were kind enough to listen patiently as I rambled about my topic to them­ sometimes, I can only think, against their wishes. Dr. Linda Austin has been a kind and patient reader of this work, and it is to her attention that much of the shape of the argument is indebted. She has been willing to sort through chapters and bits of argument that should never have seen the light of day, and her comments were always extraordinarily helpful to my thinking on this subject. Dr. Robert Mayer's close readings of draft versions of this dissertation have be,en enormously helpful in sharpening my arguments and forcing me to break from bad habits both in my writing and in my thinking on the subject. Additionally, his counsel on matters of the profession have been much valued over the years, and I am indebted to him for nominating me for university fellowships and awards, all of ~hich have eased somewhat the financial burden of ,.J·' graduate school during the writing of this study. Similarly, Dr. Martin Wallen's rigorous attention to my close readings have been tremendously helpfqJ in focusing my arguments. His collection of Frank Zappa music has also served as a fine diversion from time to time. Dr. Margaret Ewing's comments on draft versions have also helped push my thinking beyond the Victorian period and out into the rest of the world. This study required a great deal of archival research, and I am deeply indebted to the interlibrary services department of the Edmon Low Library, which was extremely patient with me as I requested highly specific editions of very old texts. My work on the Magdalen's Friend and some of the documents associated with the Magdalen Hospital and Highgate 111 Pententiary required travel to London, where the staff of the British Library, the Guildhall Library and the Public Records Office were all helpful and patient. My stay in London during my research trip was made possible by the University of Southern Mississippi's British Studies Program, which was kind enough so allow me to stay with them for a reasonable price in central London. In addition to the cheap lodgings, however, my stay there allowed me a chance to reminisce with professors from my undergraduate education. Gregory McDonald has been foolish enough to ask to read portions of this study during the writing process, and his comments have been, as always, insightful. My conversations with Jason Landrum, who has proven willing hear me talk through troublesome sections of the dissertation, have been helpful and were most appreciated. It is to my wife, however, that I am most indebted. She has proven unbelievably patient over the past two years as the writing has taken place, and as I sit here amidst piles of library books and photocopies, I run happy to inform her that it is all over. For now. lV TABLE OF CONTENTS ·. Chapter Page I. INTRODUCTION 1 II. "BEYOND THE TINSEL SENTIMENT": NAVIGATING THE RHETORIC OF FALLENNESS IN DORA GREENWELL'S "CHRISTINA" 46 III. ''AWAKENED ONCE, SHOW COULD NOT SLEEP AGAIN": ADELAIDE ANNE PROCTER'S·"A LEGEND OF PROVENCE" 96 IV. RE-READING SISTERHOOD IN CHRISTINA ROSETTI'S "NOBLE SISTERS" AND "SISTER MAUDE" 138 V. "MYOWN CUR.SE AT ONCE AND TOOL": AUGUSTA . WEBSTER'S "A.CASTAWAY" ANDTHEREJECTION OFFALLENNESS · 163 VI. CONCLUSION 220 VII. WORKS CITED 229 V CHAPTER ONE INTRODUCTION I When contemporary critics of Victorian literature discuss the fallen woman, they generally admit that for nineteenth-century commentators the term covered a broad range of women's illicit sexual behaviors. In its most limited sense, the term "fallen woman" described middle-class Victorian women who engaged in sexual activity outside marriage, and thus whose fall was at once moral and social in nature. In its broadest sense, the term included the prostitute; and even, as Deborah Logan has recently argued, all women engaged in devianfsexual behaviors, serving as a catch-all for a wide range of women's departures from the expectations of middle-class ideology regarding sexuality. It has been the aim of recent critical attention to tease out a more complete sense of the role of the fallen woman in Victorian culture. This study seeks to expand our understanding of the fallen woman by attending to the history of her representation in a small selection of fallen-woman poetry written by women who were directly involved in work among fallen women. Women's writing (and particularly that of middle-class women) offers a unique insight into Victorian attitudes toward fallenness and reclamation, for it was at them that much·ofthe rhetoric of the reclamation movement was directed, either in terms of attempting to convince fallen women to enter an institution of reclamation or in terms of soliciting women to engage in volunteer work in such an institution. My analysis reveals that even among those directly involved in the reclamation movement there was often confusion about the class, 1 appearance, and temperament of the fallen women they were seeking to reclaim. This confusion on the part of the reformers is instructive, for it indicates that the conventional Victorian understanding of the fallen woman sometimes bore little resemblance to the actual women they were seeking to reclaim, and thus that the narratives describing them were in need of correction. It is in the fallen woman poetry written by women who were directly involved in work among the fallen that we can see these corrections taking place. Only recently, with the publication of a handful of anthologies of Victorian women's poetry, have critics begun to tum their attention to some women poets who, while popular in the nineteenth century, have received little or no critical attention since then. 1 Of the poets I engage in this study, Christina Rossetti is by far the most widely­ read today (and this almost exclusively because of feminist attention to "Goblin Market" since the 1970s) but the others-Dora Greenwell, Adelaide Anne Procter, and Augusta Webster-have received little or no critical attention.2 It is one of the objects of this study to rectify this situation, in part simply by granting these poets the attention they deserve, but also by attending to the ways they represented the fallen woman in their poetry. My analysis reveals that these women often represented the fallen woman in ways that opposed conventional treatments of the figure, and thus their revisions allow us to trace shifts in Victorian thought about the fallen woman over the course of the figure's popularity. There have been to date only a few book-length studies of the fallen woman in the nineteenth century. 3 Deborah Logan, in F allenness in Victorian Women's Writing ( 1998), raises an important point about most of these recent studies ( and many which precede them): almost all of them treat the fallen woman in novels written by men, and thus 2 women's writing on the subject has, until recently, been neglected. While it is not the task of the present essay to compile a bibliography of modem critical attention to the fallen woman, it is important to note this critical omission in late twentieth-century studies of the figure, since it indicates the degree to which contemporary scholarship has virtually ignored the record of thought about the subject by many women who were directly involved in work among fallen women. Correcting this lack of attention to women's representations of the fallen woman is, in fact, part of Logan's explicit purpose for her book. As she explains in her introductory chapter, one of her aims "is to explore a representative sampling of women's writing about fallen-woman issues" (16). Logan rightly points out that to ignore women's treatments of the fallen woman is to ignore the ways that women writers challenged evangelicals and moralists whose assumptions were promoted by the male medical establishment as scientific "fact" [by demonstrating that fallen women are not] genetically class specific, though they are produced by class stratification·and power imbalances in society and as such are amenable to change. This shift in focus away from class-based character defects to the significance of environmental influences participates in the discourse of socioiogical disciplines developed during the Victorian period. (17) Logan explains that by privileging the sociological over the moral the fallen woman became a vehicle for attention to issues which would eventually be combined under the rubric of "The Woman Question" and which would enjoy heightened political attention as the campaign to repeal the Contagious Diseases Acts transformed public concern over 3 prostitution into a national political issue at the heart of which was a political debate about Victorian attitudes toward women.4 Indeed, during its period of popularity, the fallen woman served as a rallying point for women wishing to engage issues relating to the condition of women. 5 Such attention to the fallen woman is not surprising; the representation of the fallen woman cut across economic, social, moral, political, medical, spiritual, and philosophical boundaries.