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University Microfilms International 300 N. Zeeb Road Ann Arbor, Ml 48106

8510574

Friedman, Betty McClanahan

THE PRINCESS IN EXILE: THE ALIENATION OF THE FEMALE ARTIST IN CHARLOTTE BRONTE, GEORGE ELIOT, AND VIRGINIA WOOLF

The Ohio State University PH.D. 1985

University Microfilms I nter n ati 0 nal 300 N. Zeeb Road, Ann Arbor, Ml 48106

Copyright 1985 by Friedman, Betty McClanahan All Rights Reserved

THE PRINCESS IN EXILE: THE ALIENATION OF THE

FEMALE ARTIST IN CHARLOTTE BRONTE,

GEORGE ELIOT, AND VIRGINIA WOOLF

DISSERTATION

Presented in Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements for

the Degree Doctor of Philosophy in the Graduate

School of The Ohio State University

By

Betty McClanahan Friedman

*****

The Ohio State University

1985

Reading Committee: Approved By:

Morris Beja

Barbara Rigney

Arnold Shapiro Adviser^ Department of English Copyright by Betty McClanahan Friedman 1985 ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

Any extended work, such as this, relies not only of the persistence and belief of the author but on the support and love of family and friends as well. I must acknowledge those who shared in the completion of this project; in many ways, it is as much their work as mine: my brothers, C. Edward McClanahan and David F.

Gavino, and their families were continuous sources of interest and support during the often disruptive and dispassionate times of this work; Lillian Kelly McClanahan, who voluntarily read many of the books discussed in this dissertation, maintained a belief in myself and in this project which was often stronger and more profound than my own belief.

Two individuals have had an extraordinary influence on my intellectual and emotional lives: without them, my life and my work would certainly have been radically different: Mrs. Johnson, my seventh and eighth grade "English" teacher, defied the convention of indifferent or negligent teaching in ghetto schools and fired her students1 imaginations with poetry and hope; Harvey Friedman, who pursues his life and his research without consideration for the conventional or the impossible, has taught and continues to teach me how to live an authentic life and how to work with passion.

ii VITA

November 23, 1949 Born—Davis, Oklahoma

1976 B.A., S.U.N.Y. at Buffalo Buffalo, New York

1977-1982 Teaching Associate The Ohio State University Columbus, Ohio

1980 . . . , M.A., The Ohio State University Columbus, Ohio

FIELDS OF STUDY

Major Field: The Novel, Professor Morris Beja

Literature By and About Women, Professor Barbara Rigney

Nineteenth Century Literature, Professor Arnold Shapiro

Twentieth Century Literature, Professor Anthony Libby

iii TABLE OF CONTENTS

Page

ACKNOWLEDMENTS ii

VITA Mi

INTRODUCTION. The Female Artist: Towards An Articulation of "Difference" 1

CHAPTER I. "Nobody's Daughter": Villette and the Reification of Feminine Alienation 60

CHAPTER II. Something of an Outlaw: The Rebel as Artist in The Mill on the Floss 128

CHAPTER 111. "No-Man's Land": Originating Inheritance in To the Lighthouse 190

CODA 234

BIBLIOGRAPHY OF WORKS CONSULTED 246

iv INTRODUCTION. The Female Artist: Towards an Articulation of "Difference"

Woman and artist—either incomplete. Both credulous of completion.

Elizabeth Barrett Browning

Nor would I be a Poet— It's f.nei—own the Eai— Enamored—impotent—content The License to revere, A privilege so awful What would the Dower be, Had I the Art to stun myself With Bolts of Melody!

Emily Dickinson

The truth is that when we write of a woman, everything is out of place—culminations and perorations; the accent never falls where it does with a man.

Virginia Woolf

I was an artist, an escape artist.

Margaret Atwood

-1- 2

In her essay on George Eliot, Virginia Woolf praises Eliot's refusal to "renounce her own inheritance—the difference of view, the difference of standard." With these few words, Woolf not only retrieves Eliot from masculine literary tradition but authors a feminist approach for the recovery and reconstruction of women's literature as well. The metaphor of female historical and aesthetic difference, reproduced in the metaphors of disenfranchisement in A Room of

One's Own and of otherness in Simone de Beauvoir's The Second

Sex, is the metaphor most energetically employed in contemporary feminist criticism's attempts to construct, on the scaffolding of Woolfs 2 female difference, a "re-vision" of women's literature. This

"re-vision" of literature by and about women is not only the recovery of "a chapter in cultural history" or an "act of survival" for women readers but an important interpretative method for deciphering the recalcitrant and palimpsestic texts of women; for instance, a rereading of Eliot's Quixotic princesses yields an image of women's internal and external alienation: unconscious of the famine that consumes her, oblivious to the postlapsarian and non-heroic world that surrounds her, projecting desire onto an unobliging reality, and asserting the primacy of self and imagination, the "princess in exile," the female artist, refuses to be intimidated by reality or contained within circumstance:

Always she was the princess in, exile, who in time of famine was to have her breakfast-roll made of the finest-boited flour from the seven thin ears of wheat, and in a general decampment , was to have her silver fork kept out of the baggage. 3

The female artist, more dramatically than her male counterpart, is conceived and defined in opposition to reality and desire.

In A Room of One's Own, Virginia Woolf attempts to answer the question so poignantly raised in the epigraph by Emily Dickinson: what would the "dower1 be for a woman possessed of poetic talent and voice and a fateful refusal to recognize those impediments which work against the articulation of her talent and voice? It is a question and a challenge which produces trembling in Dickinson's inquisitive persona, yet it is a question and a challenge unblinkingly undertaken and documented in the life and work of Emily Dickinson. As with

Dickinson and her persona, Woolf's imagined response to this formidable challenge is a much abbreviated and meager version of her own struggles and realization as a female artist: Virginia Woolf, consummate female artist, creates, in her seminal inquisition into the economics of the female artist, the emblem of the historical betrayal and abandon­ ment of the female artist, Judith Shakespeare:

Let me imagine, since facts are so hard to come by, what would have happened had Shakespeare had a wonderfully gifted sister, called Judith,... She was as adventurous, as imaginative, as agog to see the world as he was. But she was not sent to school. She had no chance of learning grammar and logic, let alone of reading Horace and Virgil. She picked up a book now and then, one of her brother's perhaps, and read a few pages. But then her parents came in and told her to mend the stockings or mind the stew and not moon about with books and papers... .Perhaps she scribbled some pages up in an apple loft on the sly, but was careful to hide them or set fire to them. Soon, however, before she was out of her teens, she was betrothed to the son of a neighboring wool- stapler. She cried out that marriage was hateful to her and for that she was seriously beaten by 4

her father... .How could she disobey him? How could she break his heart? The force of her own gift alone drove her to it. She made a small parcel of her belongings, let herself down by a rope one summer's night and took the road to London. She was not seventeen She had the quickest fancy, a gift like her brother's, for the tune of words. Like him, she had a taste for the theatre. She stood at the stage door; she wanted to act, she said. Men laughed in her face. The managei— a fat, loose-iipped man—guffawed. He bellowed something about poodles dancing and women acting— no woman, he said could possibly be an actress. He hinted—you can imagine what. She could get no training in her craft. ...Yet her genius was for fiction and lusted to feed abundantly upon the lives of men and women and the study of their ways. At last. ..at last Nick Greene the actor-manager took pity on her; she found herself with child by that gentleman and so—who shall measure the heat and violence of the poet's heart when caught and tangled in a woman's body?—killed herself one winter's night and lies buried at some cross-roads where the omnibuses now stop outside the Elephant and Castle.4

Woolfs reinvention of the conditions which argue against the nurturance and the articulation of the female artist are sufficient to produce trembling and paralysis in women with creative ambitions; however, women writers, who have refused to intimidated by circumstance and who have overcome impediments, consistently fail to reproduce models of their own strength and success; reproducing, instead, those models which confirm the frustration and alienation of the female artist. The female artist, who is most visible in the absence of Judith Shakespeare, is not fashioned out of the extraordinary resilience and talent of her creators but from the ordinary and unpropitious material of female circumstance.

A Room of One's Own depicts, through the consciousness of the first modern feminist literary critic, Mary Beton, the historical 5 circumstances which have designedly frustrated and silenced women

in their desire for self-definition and self-expression. Refuting

the popular myth of the artist as a disembodied creature, removed

from the boredom of ordinary life and the crudeness of dependence

on material things, Woolf argues for a perception of the artist, especially the female artist, as historically and materially determined:

What were the conditions in which women lived, I asked myself; for fiction, imaginative work that it is, is not dropped like a pebble upon the ground, as science may be; fiction is like a spider's web, attached ever so lightly perhaps, but still attached to life at all four corners... .when the web is pulled askew, hooked up at the edge, torn in the middle, one remembers that these webs are not spun in midair by incorporeal creatures, but are the work of suffering human beings. ^

Within this "spider's web" exists the potential for the identifying

differences and aberrations of female art from the dominant tradition and, "attached to life at all four corners," the possibility of a common

female voice and experience. Indeed, for Woolf, a common female

voice and experience are more than a possibility; they exist in

the buried life and silent art of every woman and are obtainable from

the past through our mothers, visible in the present in the energy

of women and their hunger for a self-defining experience, and will

be reproduced in the future by daughters who are presently being

conceived. This female continuum is articulated in Woolf's creation

of the conflationary woman who is an inextricable mixture of

"women and what they are like;.. .women and the fiction that they

write;.. .women and the fiction that is written about them." Perhaps

Woolf's greatest contribution to feminist literary criticism is her 6 emphasis on the female artist as a conflationary or composite being as woman, artist, and character.

in the center of A Room of One's Own Woolf erects a monument, in the form of a condensed historical novel', to the singular ambition and tragedy of the female artist. The short, tragic life of Judith

Shakespeare is envisioned as an emblem of the cumulative despair and promise of female artists: her once silenced voice now articulates centuries of female silence and inactivity prescribed by lack of education, opportunity, and tradition; her repressed creativity now directs women to a recovery of their own voices and creations.

At the end of her text Woolf casts off the disguise and fictional distance of Mary Beton to exhort women to work, to prepare, to write in anticipation of Shakespeare's sister's return:

For my belief is that if we live another century or so...and have five hundred a year each of us and rooms of our own, if we have the habit of freedom and the courage to write exactly what we think; if we escape a little from the common sitting-room and see human beings not always in their relation to each other but in relation to reality... .then the opportunity will come and the dead poet who was Shakespeare's sister will put on the body which she has so often laid down.?

The promise contained within the rebirth of Judith Shakespeare is belied by the many conditionals, conditionals which must become realities, attending her return. The extent of Woolf's own disbelief in the existence of uninhibited and unimpeded female art can be detected in the number of provisions dictated by her imagination.

Not only does Woolf's final exhortation to the female artist conceive of female art as inseparable from impediments, but it also contradicts 7 prior intentions of the text: the recovery of female experience, the reconstruction of a lost female tradition, and the accommodation of language and plots to a female aesthetic. Her progressive movement, throughout the text, from charges to think and write as a woman to her espousal of androgyny finds its final expression in her injunction to "see human beings not always in their relation to each other but in relation to reality"—a reality which earlier she would have insisted by categorically defined as masculine or feminine.

In contrast to Charlotte Bronte and George Eliot's desire to be known and judged as simply writers, Woolf possessed a heightened and informed consciousness about women's historical and literary dispossession and about the extent to which that dispossession has plundered female experience and influence:

Nothing remains of it all. All has vanished. No biography or history has a word to say about it. And the novels, without meaning to, inevitably lie.8

Yet Woolf shares with Bronte and Eliot an ambivalence, symptomatic of most women writers, about her position as a woman writer and a conflicting desire, straddled between the aesthetic and the social, to rebel and to conform. In her espousal of androgyny Woolf discovered a resolution: the great artist, she argues, possesses a

"resonant and porous," and "incandescent and undivided" androgynous mind; great art depends on the formation of "the unity of the mind," the avoidance of the separation of the mind "into different chambers" g where "not a sound carried from one to the other." The appeal of the harmony and integration within the concept of androgyny for an artist cannot be dismissed, especially for an artist whose work 8

was dedicated to a recovery of continuities; however, and perhaps

more importantly for Woolf, androgyny offered the removal of creative impediments. In her case, androgyny removed the issue of

sex. Within the concept of androgyny, even a woman could share

Shakespeare's name, even a woman could be a great artist.

Elaine Showalter, one of the first feminist literary critics

to strongly criticize Woolfs espousal of androgyny, locates in the

"flight into androgyny" a retreat from womanhood which not only

betrays past and future Judith Shakespeares and Virginia Woolfs but

is exercised as a form of self-subjugation, as self-imposed silence

as well:

How could any woman writer pretend to be androgynous—indifferent, undivided—in the grip of such inhibition? At some level, Woolf is aware that androgyny is another form of repression or, at best, self-discipline.10

What Showalter perceives as the "psychological equivalent of lobotomy,

Woolf embraces as creative freedom from gender and its consequences

in her life and work. In addition to the inhibitions generated by

history and literary tradition, Woolf argues that it is "fatal for any

one who writes to think of their sex....fatal to be a man or woman

pure and simple... .fatal for a woman... in any way to speak conscious

as a woman." The use and repetition of "fatal" to describe the

articulation of the female experience not only echo her injunction

to kill "The Angel in the House" and contradict her persistent

advocacy for the creation of a female art but italicize her own evasion

of sex, history, and transgression. 9

Paradoxically, Woolfs retreat into androgyny and the loss of

"sex-consciousness" is depicted in a treatise detailing and advocating 13 the need for sex-consciousness in the creation of a female art.

Indeed, the most insistent element in Woolfs fiction and criticism is sex: she is the champion of the female artist's "own inheritance— the difference of view, the difference of standard," a difference which has become defined as "a traversal of the boundaries inscribed in Virginia Woolfs terms"; her reviews and miniature portraits of other female artists have served as a springboard for much of the recent scholarship engaged in a re-vision and re-construction of the female artist; and long before the French feminists seized on the separation of female experience and language, she argued for a totality of difference within fiction written by women:

No one will admit that he can possibly mistake a novel written by a man for a novel written by a woman. There is the obvious and enormous difference of experience in the first place.... And finally.. .there rises for consideration the very difficult question of the difference between the man's and the woman's view of what constitutes the importance of any subject. From this spring not only marked differences of plot and incident, but infinite differences in selection, method and style.14

As an antidote to the fate of Judith Shakespeare and to her romance of the androgynous mind, Woolf creates a contemporary female novelist who will learn how to articulate her own voice and her absence from history and literature. The charge to Mary Carmichael is to create a literature strategically rebellious and sex-conscious; this reclamation of sexual history and habits will be effected through the breaking of fictional maxims, the disruption of the reader's expectations and 10 the fictional sequences, the redesigning of the sentence so that it is more reflexive of women's relation to language and experience, the refashioning of "the forms of literature" to reflect women's experience, the italicization of the ordinary and the impersonal, and, most importantly, the recapturing and reinvention of "these infinitely 1 5 obscure lives" of women. Mary Carmichaei, as her creator imagines her, will chart the female consciousness and lead us into novels of female experience:

For if Chloe likes Olivia and Mary Carmichaei knows how to express it she will light a torch in that vast chamber where nobody has yet been. It is all half lights and profound shadows like those serpentine caves where one goes with a candle peering up and down, not knowing where one is stepping.^

Clearly, Mary Carmichaei's charge is to be very much like her creator,

Virginia Woolf; however, Woolf's alternative to the defeat of Judith

Shakespeare is ephemeral, sacrificed to her vision of the fatality of a woman writing as a woman and to the promise of androgynous incandescence. In her depiction and abandonment of a potential female artist, Woolf, and other women writers, vacillate between an impulse to assert and to repudiate herself and her art; for the woman writer, and the woman reader as well, the heroine-as-artist is too often an exercise in self-denial.

The female artist, who is debilitated by a conflicting impulse between self-assertion and self-denial, originates in the inherent contradictions of her position. These contradictions, which shape the artist and her art, derive their intensity from the coupling of oxymorons particularly hostile to the development and representation 11 of the female self: fiction and reality, society and self, art and life, silence and speech. The dispossession and disinheritance of women from history and literature has necessitated a critical ambience in which contradictions and paradoxes are employed to articulate and illuminate the presence/absence of the female artist and art: Jacques

Derrida and Jacques Lacan argue that woman is best understood as a "lack," as a castrated artist unable to appropriate the phallus pen, as disinherited from language, exiled from phallogocentricism; feminist literary critics actively attempt to generate, within this "lack," the stories of women encoded in the anti-stories of absences, blanks, and silences; and even Virginia Woolfs famous predication that women writers "think back through [their] mothers" was conceived within the paradox of having "no tradition behind them, or one so short 17 and partial that it was of little help." Yet these discussions which center on decentering or validate assertion through negation have produced provocative insights into the subculture—its marginality and its strategies—of women's literature; like other literary subcultures, women's literature is best articulated through its deflection of, rather than conformity to, the dominant tradition.

Within these contradictions and absences, the reproduction of herself as her own protagonist is more problematical for the woman writer than it is for the male writer, whose linguistic and creative energies are not taxed by inhibiting, even formidable, cultural and literary paradigms. The extent to which self-reproduction is problematical for the woman writer is evident in the juxtaposition of

David Copperfield and Jane Eyre or of Stephen Dedalus and Clarissa 12

Dalloway. Women have not inherited nor have they created their own David Copperfields and Stephen Dedaluses; the female translation of the "fabulous artificer" is a reading in circumlocutory and 1 8 schizophrenic art. In the novels to be discussed, Villette, The

Mill on the Floss, and To the Lighthouse, the protagonists, with the singular exception of Lily Briscoe who finaily translates her vision into art, possess artistic impulses which cannot be expressed except through concealment and subterfuge and which fragment, rather than unify, their lives. In addition to their circumscribed social positions, the protagonists share with their creators a limiting and limited vision of the potential for the articulation of their artistic ambitions: Maggie

Tulliver and Mrs. Ramsay direct their artistic ambitions and talents into familial and social spheres; Lucy Snowe, like her literary daughter,

Anna Wulf, in The Golden Notebook, writes the book that we read, but her buried letters and fragmented and fragmenting consciousness are indicative of how a reality which is conceived and defined by women evades a unified articulation in art; even with the exceptional Lily

Briscoe, the desire for artistic articulation is checked for many years by a debilitating paralysis which prevents her from making the leap from woman to artist, from the past of Mrs. Ramsay into the future of Virginia Woolf. The surrender of these protagonists to conventional feminine life and creative alternatives signifies their creator's own apprenticeship to and ambivalence towards these roles and their collective "failure of the imagination," but it also signifies the absence of literary plausibilities and plots and the difficulties which confront a female artist who wishes to gain articulation through masculine 13

fantasies:

The attack on female plots and plausibilities assumes that women writers cannot or will not obey the rules of fiction.... It does not see, nor does it want to, that the fictions of desire behind the desiderata of fiction are masculine and not universal constructs. It does not see that the maxims that pass for the truth of human experience, and the encoding of that experience in literature, are organizations, when they are not fantasies, of the dominant culture. 19

This essential literariness, which frames and frustrates all attempts at self-generation, serves to reinforce those social and creative

restraints that women have attempted to subvert through writing or reading.

Within the few studies dedicated to the explication of the artist- as-hero, the female artist has yet to receive minimal consideration:

Maurice Seebe, in his "definitive" study on the artist, is relentlessly masculine in his choice of prototypes and in the self-defining activities that he assigns to them; his limited and peculiar selection of female artists are sketched into, without accommodation for their differences, his masculine prototypes, but their real absence is evident in his obliviousness to their omission:

Just as every artist is a man, every man is to some extent an artist, a maker of things, and the alienation of the artist is not unlike that of many men in a world where the center does not hold and where even the crowd is a lonely one. To try to create something out of chaos, if only by cultivating our gardens, is to heed the lesson of the artist.20

Beebe fails—and his failure is exceedingly evident in his repetitious equation of man with artist—to consider, as have other discussions 14 of the artist-as-hero, that the "chaos" which women may have to seize and articulate is significantly different from that which reigns over the creations of their male counterparts.

The concerns of the novel have been feminocentric from its inception: written largely for a female audience, it served as entertainment to the literate and the leisured and as instructional for the inexperienced and well-protected woman. It manifested, in response to its audience, a "certain collective obsessing" with the 21 feminine. The novel was inspired and shaped by the images of women writing; especially by those mistresses of "romantic invention," 22 Pamela Andrews and Moll Flanders. Their women readers learned and appropriated the duplicitious value of the pen and for a time in the eighteenth-century, there were more female writers than male writers. Clearly, their creators, Samuel Richardson and Daniel Defoe, succeeded, where their counterparts have not, in creating active and tempting paradigms of the female artist. In their attempt to imitate and fashion female experience, Richardson and Defoe did not, as women writers have historically done, attempt to suppress or redirect their characters' desire for self-definition but granted them a consciousness of the transformative power of the imagination and of language. Pamela and Moll are capable of authoring their own identities and destinies because they were authored by men for whom self- articulation and literary authority was assumed and never challenged.

Ironically, it is female artists reproduced by male writers that are literary prototypes of female duplicity, self-fictionalizatioh, and absolute engagement with the literary potential of one's own life: 15

"Never," Moll complains, "poor vain Creature was so wrapt up with 23 every part of the Story, as I was." Like their descendents Jane

Eyre, Lucy Snowe, and Anna Wulf, Pamela and Moll discover, or rather create, in fiction the exalted ideals that they attempted to find in reality; are alert to the possibilities within the manipulation of reality and within self-fictionaiization; and perceive the act of writing as defensive, as a method of subversion, and as a means of rescripting their destinies. The act of writing for these paradigms of female art is the act of individuation: the reshaping of conventional plots to fit their own ambitions for autonomy, prosperity, and self-definition:

Pamela transforms her vulnerable situation into one of moral and social triumph, and Moll's depiction of her wicked life belies her

"sincere penitence" or the necessity of it; for "helpless, hopeless"

Pamela, writing/words have the dual responsibility of celebrating her helplessness and of granting her power, and for Moll writing is a means of (re)presenting herself as a fated character in a plot conceived 24 before her birth and propelled by forces other than her own.

After the active models of Pamela Andrews and Moll Flanders, it would seem unnecessary to attempt to establish the presence of the female artist in literature; however, since the eighteenth-century, female protagonists have regressed from the playful fictional assertions of Pamela and Moll into an imitation and subversion of such assertions; since Pamela and Moll, the circumstances, social and fictional, "of sustained creation have been almost impossible" for women; and since

Pamela and Moll, women writers, unable to reproduce Richardson's and Defoe's assertive imitations of women in possession of the pen. 16 have inverted the female "flight from repression toward expression" 25 into a retreat from expression. Pamela Andrews and Moll Flanders are exceptions to the general rule of female literary absence and silence, but they are also representative of women's social and literary marginality: neither Pamela or Moll conceive of the pen as a vocation; for both, the pen is an instrument for an opportune and temporary revision of social realities and sexual alternatives. Women's literature has not reproduced the assertive and articulate literary presences of Pamela and Moll, yet the female literary tradition of revision was conceived within those primary images of women writing.

Within his seminal studies of poetic revision and tradition, Harold

Bloom provides the most evocative model for a discussion of female literary revision and tradition. Within Bloom's theory, a psycho- historical interpretation of those "revisionary swerves" comprising the architecture of poetic history, the marginality and alienation of the female artist is manifest as is the need for a revision of artistic and social dictates and models which argue against a poetics of her 2fi experiences or her needs as an artist. Bloom takes as his theoretical model the Oedipal model which lends a historical intensity to his concept of literary creation as an anxious and revisionary struggle between a young poet and his precursor(s): the poet (the ephebe) continually conspires to displace and replace his precursor, yet is fated to repeat him even while engaged in the acts of displacing and replacing him; the poet's anxiety, expressed in his desire for originality and in his fear of being simply derivative of his precursor, propels his creativity while threatening to silence or diminish him; and in an attempt to 17 repress his anxiety of debt and inferiority, the poet swerves from his precursor through a "misreading" or "creative correction" of his work and literary influence:

Every poem is a misinterpretation of a parent poem. A poem is not an overcoming of anxiety, but it that anxiety.^7

Bloom's poetics of anxiety and misreading is a remarkable collection of insights into the interdependence and psychodynamics of poetic creation which have changed our perceptions about and interpretations of literary history and have earned for Bloom a status approaching 28 the mythical. Yet his theory, much like Beebe's study of the artist- as-hero, is unconscious of the special anxieties and circumstances— the first of which is constant omission from literary discussions—of the female artist. Indeed, his theory, articulating a male model based on a male model which has itself been based on a male model, is oblivious of the existence of female poets or literary influence: woman is identified in this Oedipal drama between poet and precursor as the object of their struggle or as inspiring muse; the possibility that literary revision for women, who cannot identify with precursor or tradition, might be more problematical or necessitate a more drastic swerve from influence is not entertained or that anxiety for the woman writer would not be illustrated in looking over her shoulder 29 while writing but in the fact of writing, or authorship, itself.

With the same dualistic logic that characterizes much that has been written and can be said about women, Virginia Woolf argues for a view of women writers as "inheritor(s)" as well as 30 "originator(s)." Women have inherited positions as subjects or 18 as muses of the imagination; as such, they possess no place within 31 the "genealogy of the imagination" of literary tradition. Of

necessity, they have had to become experimenters, to exist between

tradition and self-definition and to write in the hope of self-discovery and self-definition. The inundation of the literary past that Bloom advocates would be a disastrous prescription for the woman writer:

"The precursors flood us, and our imaginations can die by drowning in them, but no imaginative life is possible if such inundation is 32 wholly evaded." Instead of stimulating the imagination to new competitive heights, this recommended inundation would only confirm her difference, propelling the woman writer into paralysis and silence, and unable to free herself or her work from historical or literary context, her creative life would be dependent on the binary of reinventing what she has inherited, of clearing an imaginative space large enough to accommodate dependence and rebellion. Bloom's poetic paradigm equates literary influence with literary history; however, for the woman writer and the heroine-as-artist, literary

influence cannot be literary history.

Unlike the openly combative model in Bloom's psychosexual system, revision for women is a covert activity that takes place between the lines of rebellion and conformity or when, as it does in

Shirley, no one else is listening and where it is necessary under the watchful sexual and aesthetic difference of Milton or Wordsworth, 33 "to clear imaginative space for themselves." In what is considered her least successful novel, Shirley, Charlotte Bronte initially attempted to subordinate sex to history, to create a world, similar 19 to the ambitions of Thackeray, larger than her experience, but instead created a book that yearns for a female Utopia in which mothers, daughters, and sisters are rediscovered and are liberated from literary and social deprivations and restraints. In a self-reversal the novel turns from its early and lengthy engagement with historical issues and the struggles of Robert Moore to a revision of female possibilities, but her revisionary zeal is especially cogent in Shirley

Keeldar's reconstruction of the myth of Milton and his Eve:

Milton was great; but was he good?.. .Milton tried to see the first woman; but,...he saw her not.... It was his cook that he saw.3**

Shirley reimagines Eve as the mother of Titans who possessed a

"daring which could contend with Omnipotence: the strength which could bear a thousand years of bondage" and wears "the consort- 35 crown of creation." Her corrective creation, as Bloom would argue, of Milton's Eve reclaims, for Caroline Helstone and ourselves, the great mother, lost in a surfeit of patriarchal poetics and omissions.

This revision expands our vision of Eve through mythical enlargement while contracting our image of Milton by assessing his humanity and reducing his art to its human subjects. Shirley is a novel which could serve as the pre-Oedipal model for the other motherless books written by women, and the revision of Eve is not only a pivotal moment within the novel but representative of the woman writer's attempt to reclaim her own history and tradition and to repudiate the male vision of that history and tradition as insufficient. Bronte's strategy for the reclamation of Eve is not simply swerving from Milton but to ask new questions, to direct the reader's attention to an idea which 20 previously has always been conceded, to appropriate literary spaces distorted or left blank by previous writers, and to disentrench a tradition which has denied her access to the pen. Literary revision, for women, entails the forging of a new tradition and access to the means of self-definition. Unlike Bloom's anxious and hostile ephebe, the female artist does not fear annihilation from her female precursors but seeks self-confirmation in them.

During the last decade feminist literary critics have addressed the problem of female literary influence by concentrating their efforts on the rediscovery of a literary materfamilias: a rediscovery, similar to any definition attempting to recover a subculture, which relies on the absence as well as the presence of women writers and their fictional representations, on paiimpsestic as well as emphatic texts, and on the subterranean as well as acknowledged interaction between women writers and their texts. In her pioneering study.

Literary Women, Ellen Moers defines, like many vanguard feminist literary critics, women's literature in opposition to what was perceived to be the impulses guiding male literature; therefore, Moers argues for a view of women's literature as fluid, versatile, ineluctable, and collective. The tyranny of tradition, male or female, is seen to be less compelling than the determination of the individual writer:

There is no single female tradition in literature; ...there is no such thing as the female genius, or the female sensibility,.. .All that is required to create a productive tradition for women... is one great woman writer to show what can be done.3°

Ironically, the value of Moer's work exists in its insistence on a 21 tradition manifested in the interdependence of women writers and their texts: that women writers have always primarily sought mentors in other women writers and that the intertextuality of women's literature is evident in its collective obsessing about claustrophobia, isolation, 37 and enclosure. Through their letters and works, Moers sketches an impressive subterranean system of influence: Emily Dickinson discovering images for her poetry and sustenance for her endeavor from the life and works of Elizabeth Barrett Browning; Charlotte

Bronte and George Eliot adopting or reacting to the romantic excesses of George Sand; the red room that seems to begin before Jane Eyre reproducing itself in any number of hideaway attics and finally metamorphosing into A Room of One's Own. In addition to establishing a tradition of influence between women writers, Moers, like Elaine

Showalter, provides an irrefutable presence to women's literature.

Through a reclamation of many earlier and lesser known women writers, Showalter's A Literature of Their Own constructs an impressive history of female literary activity; however, within the context of her book, tradition and influence are asserted in the antecedent silence and disconnection of women writers. Showalter develops corresponding historical evolutions of the female consciousness and aesthetic: evolutions which establish the historical presence of the woman writer by italicizing her evolvement as a social and literary presence and the literary phases which accentuate and correspond to her development:

• First, there is a prolonged phase of imitation of the prevailing modes of the dominant tradition, and internalization of its standards of art and its 22

views on social roles. Second, there is a phase of protest against these standards and values, and advocacy of minority rights and values, including a demand for autonomy. Finally, there is a phase of self-discovery, a turning inward freed from some of the dependency of opposition, a search for identity.38

Showalter, alert to the duplicity and myopia within opposition and narcissism, ends her construction of female literary activity anticipating the development of a self-defining women's literature freed from reaction or self-absorption. Ironically, A Literature of

Their Own concludes with the repetition of Showalter's initial question and quest, suggesting that women's literature has been and is a literature of imitation and antagonism.

More recent feminist literary criticism, as exemplified in the works of Nancy Miller, Sandra Gilbert and Susan Gubar, have turned the lens on women's literary imitation and antagonism and discovered a tradition of subversion and deconstruction of societal and literary maxims;

To build a narrative around a character whose behavior is deliberately idiopathic, however, is not merely to create a puzzling fiction but to fly in the face of a certain ideology (of the text and its context), to violate a grammar of motives that describes while prescribing.... If we were to uncover a feminine "tradition"— diachronic recurrences—of such ungrammaticalities, would we have the basis for a poetics of women's fiction. 39

It is certainly within these ungrammaticalities or breaks with convention that the female artist is conceived and nurtured. The ungrammati­ calities are present in the twists of plot and character away from the conventional, the affirmation of rebellious literary and social 23 paradigms, and in those strategies that women writers deploy to liberate themselves and their literature from perfidious influences; it is in these devious and repetitive breaks from convention that we have learned to read, or to decode, the encoded peculiarities and their significance in women's writing. Virginia Woolf, in her literary essays on women writers, was one of the first critics to recognize and discuss the burdens of social and literary restraints and their necessary translation into social, textual, and personal duplicity: "whatever she had written would have been twisted and 40 deformed, issuing from a strained and morbid imagination."

It is the possibilities within the emergence and the utterance of Showalter's unrealized fourth phase, a women's literature uncon- taminated by male tradition or influence, that has seized the imagination of the more unorthodox critics, particularly the French feminists.

Their essays celebrate the death of male logic and language and herald the recovery of the buried life and language of women: a life and language present within uninhibited impulses and instincts and definable by gender. Espousing stylistic difference, these critics argue, oblivious to the historical irony and circularity of the argument, that women's literature is identifiable not by content but by style. Unfortunately, the attempt to describe, in a non- male language, the specifics of a tradition of female stylistic difference is often too vague to effect a useful model of female style. In her classic statement on the woman writer, "The Laugh of the Medusa," Helene Cixous incorporates the indescribability of women's writing as a basic definition: 24

It is impossible to define a feminine practice of writing, and this is an imposssibility that will remain, for this practice can never be theorized, enclosed, coded—which doesn't mean that it doesn't exist. But it will always surpass the discourse that regulates the phallocentric system: it does and will take place in areas other than those subordinated to philosophical-theoretical domination. It will be conceived of only by subjects who are breakers of automatisms, by peripheral figures that no authority can even subjugate.41

This espousal of "ecriture feminine" is frequently, in the hands of

Cixous and Luce Iriguary, a literary romance rather than a consideration of female literary tradition and activity: it perceives women as existing closer to some unorganized sense of truth, as divorced from the intellectual and linguistic world, as having a more genuine grasp of the world through their intuitions and feelings than through a structured philosophy; it advocates the inscription of the female body, and the social and literary displacement of women from male context. It is, like most repressive Victorian fiction, a glorification of the feminine and a disenfranchisement of women from social or intellectual history. Cixous1 injunction that "women must write through their bodies" is an injunction to relocate feminine tradition and influence within erroneous and harmful mythologies about the superiority and indecipherability of women's lives and is indicative of a dangerous estrangement from social and literary history. Cixous' own estrangement and redundancy is evident in her vision of women writers who write from their bodies, freed of male influence and language:

they must invent the impregnable language that will break partitions, classes, and rhetorics. 25

regulations and codes, they must submerge, cut through, get beyond the ultimate reserve-discourse, including the one that laughs at the very idea of pronouncing the word "silence," the one that, aiming for the impossible, stops short before the word "impossible" and writes it as "the end."42

Most nineteenth-century women writers, in their subversion of

literary and social maxims, were the equal of Cixous' visionary

Judith Shakespeares. However elusive Cixous1 concept of female

literary tradition may be, she and Iriquary, in their opposition to

Lacan's equation of the pen with the phallus, have been a major

inspiration to feminist literary critics.

Yet the theorists who locate a female tradition within language,

have raised important questions: in what ways is women's writing

demonstrably different from men's? Is there a genderlect? Given

the manifestations of a masculine bias in language and literature,

how great is woman's linguistic disadvantage? In what ways have women compensated for their disinheritance from language? If women are absent from language, as they are from history, then an examination of women's writing should produce a history of stylistic differences from male writing. Shoshana Felman argues that the primary obstacle to a woman being understood is her displacement from language, a displacement that can only be rectified by reinvention of language:

the challenge facing the woman today is nothing less than to "reinvent" language,.. .to speak not only against, but outside of the secular phallogo- centric structure, to establish a discourse the status of which would no longer be defined by the phallacy of masculine meaning.43

The reluctance and the refusal of the woman writer to grant the 26 female artist the use of the pen suggests an ambivalence towards the approved modes of feminine expression and occupation and a consciousness of women's linguistic disinheritance and literary disadvantage. Austen, whose heroines daydream, read, but do not write, perhaps voiced for other women writers the reasons why so few of them reproduce themselves in their fictions:

men have had every advantage of us in telling their story. Education has been theirs in so much higher a degree; the pen has been in their hands.^

Whether it be from an ambivalence towards convention or from a recognition that women historically have been denied access to self- expression or self-creation, women writers have assisted in the perpetuation of women's absence from language and literature. Even within the twentieth-century, women writers have written under the difficulties of sexual inversion rather than confront their ambivalence: few, very few, of Willa Cather's works are narrated in a feminine voice; most of Cather's works adopt the viewpoint of a motherless young male adolescent and his enchantment with a highly mythologized and maternal woman; Cather's narratives depend on the progressive social and intellectual discrimination of the adolescent, yet she rarely imagines a heroine who is not simply the object or referent of another's interest.

Virginia Woolf and Dorothy Richardson argued that the masculine bias of language and structured thought and the existing forms within literature alienated the woman writer from self-discovery and from the pursuit of her craft. In her criticism and fiction, Woolf 27 sought the means through which a woman writer could uninhibitedly relate her own experience and demanded nothing less than the trans­ formation of the experiential and stylistic structures of fiction to fit the sequences and sentences within a woman's life:

the very form of the sentence does not fit her. it is a sentence made by men; it is too loose, too heavy, too pompous for a woman's use....And this a woman must make for herself, altering and adapting the current sentence until she writes one that takes the natural shape of her thought without crushing or distorting it. ^

In her tribute to the woman writer and female difference. Pilgrimage,

Richardson anticipated Woolf's work and extended the concerns of a female aesthetic: the accentuation of the internal life over external events, the process of thought over action, and the adoption of the female view over a male view. The motivating plot of this experi­ mental and autobiographical novel is Miriam's discovery of sexual difference and its consequences, her increasing consciousness of that difference, and finally her myopic espousal of that difference.

Instead of creating an alternative to the literary possibilities of the female artist, Richardson further distances the woman writer by celebrating her alienation from society, language, and literature: men and women may inhabit the same space, yet their differences are so profound that they cannot even be thought or expressed:

In speech with a man, a woman is at a disadvantage—because they speak different languages. She may understand his. Hers he will never speak or understand. In pity, or from some other motives, she must therefore, stammeringly, speak his. He listens and is flattered and thinks he has her mental measure 28

when he has not touched even the fringe of her consciousness.*^

Several books later, it is asserted that women's partial access to masculine meaning has been replaced with mutual unintelligibility:

by every word they use men and women mean different things.47

Richardson is praised and studied for her experiments with narration

and female style and experience, yet few women writers or readers

turn to Richardson for an alternative representation of the female

experience. The thirteen books, or approximately 2500 pages, that comprise Pilgrimage isolate and separate Miriam, and the reader,

within a narcissistic artifice of sexual difference. The narcissistic

female aesthetic of Woolf and Richardson began with the quest for

another way of knowing and speaking, for the discovery of a female

voice and perception, and ended in "a self-defeating rejection

of all male culture, an end in itself, a journey to nowhere."48

Finally, there are those theorists who perceive any gender

discussion of writers, their tradition, and their representation in

fiction as a reinforcement of highly mythologized divisions. Joyce

Carol Oates asserts that the distinctiveness of her writing (or

anyone's writing) is attributable to style and not to sex, and

Cynthia Ozick, author of a pioneering essay on the liabilities of

women writing, "Women and Creativity: The Demise of the Dancing

Dog," in a recent essay argues for the desexing of literature and

the imagination. In an argument that enacts Woolf's fears of

creative impediments and her espousal of androgyny, Ozick insists 29 on the liberation of art from gender and declares that:

Outside its political uses, "woman writer" has no meaning—not intellectually, not morally, not historically. A writer is a writer.^

Within this statement exists the reasons for the surge of male pseudonyms in the nineteenth century: the desire to be judged as a writer and not as a woman writer; the disassociation of the serious woman writer from those "silly women novelists"; and an avoidance of confinement to feminine literary subjects. It is opposition turned inward; it is almost gratuitous to be concerned with the representation of women writers when their creators insist on the genderless designation of writer and call themselves Currer Bell and George

Eliot. Ozick argues that the imagination is free from the inhibitions existing within the lives of women:

But when I write, what do Society and its protocol mean to me. When I write, I am in command of a grand As If. I write As If I were truly free. And this As If is not a myth. As soon as I proclaim it, as soon as my conduct as a writer expresses it, it comes into being.50

This "grand As If" argues against Ozick's separation of life and art: few male writers would describe themselves as existing within a conditional, as temporarily liberated from social and literary inhibitions. "As If" is emblematic of the schizophrenic negotiation of the female artist between imaginative freedom and societal imprisonment.

A review of female literary tradition and activity suggests that women writers have developed a "special language" to depict their experience and desires and that feminine art and the female artist 30 have been concealed "between the lines, in the missed possibilities 51 of the text." Those missed possibilities italicize the deflected and sublimated activity of an art which has been fatigued by conventions, maxims, and self-subjugation. The artist-as-hero emerged as an attractive and heroic force in nineteenth-century literature, but it was not until the publication of The Golden Notebook that the woman writer reproduced in her heroine her own access, a troubled and fragmenting access, to the pen. Maurice Beebe, in his study of the artist-as-hero, suggests that "the main characteristics of the artist" are "unchanged from the first of the artist-novels to those of our 52 own time." It would seem, when considering the progress between

Emma Wodehouse's delusionary and manipulative art and Anna Wulf's notebooks, that novels about the female artist could be delineated by their evolutionary nature; however, such a view would be too optimistic and would ignore the inhibitions and ambivalences that

Anna Wulf and Doris Lessing encounter in the act of writing and in the act of creating a heroine who writes. The cry which begins with

Bronte and echoes through contemporary female literature that women

"need exercise for their faculties and a field for their efforts as much as their brothers do" is a cry that has been heard, but not 53 accommodated, in literature. Women writers have been so preoccupied with their own artistic survival that the translation of their own experience is conceived in anxiety and rarely articulated.

Carolyn Heilbrun perceives women writers' inability to translate their experience into the lives of their protagonists as a failure of the imagination: 31

Women writers.. .have failed to imagine autonomous women characters... .have been unable to imagine for other women, fictional or real, the self they have in fact achieved.5i*

So severe is this failure to reproduce their own creative and intellectual

autonomy in their heroines that women writers will often project

their more independent and articulate characteristics on a male

character:

men writers have created women characters with autonomy, with a self that is not ancillary, not described by a relationship Women writers, however, when they wished to create an individual filling more than a symbiotic role, projected their ideal of autonomy onto a male character.5^

An example of this sexual inversion is evident in Charlotte Bronte's

William Crimsworth, who is a projection and revision of Bronte and

her experiences in Brussels and who is later translated and revised

into Lucy Snowe. The circumstances and consequences of Bronte's

unhappy Brussels episode signify differently when expressed from

the advantage of a man or from the disadvantage of a woman. An

example of women writers' inability to conceive of women characters

at the center of their novels is evident in the masculine-christened,

but women dominated, novels of George Eliot: Silas Marner, Adam

Bede, Felix Holt, the Radical, and Daniel Deronda. And the examples of Rochester and Heathcliff suggest that women writers are less equivocal about the depiction of energy and passion in their strongest male characters, whereas the imagination which attends the creation of their female characters, while perhaps not failing, is at least ambivalent; an ambivalence which is born of their own precarious negotiation between female and male literature, their own imagination 32 and the dominant imagination, and female experience and prevailing experience; and women writers, strained by such negotiations, create female protagonists who are reminiscent of "a person striking a match that will not light."

D. H. Lawrence asserted that woman is "the unutterable which man must forever continue to try to utter." This assertion removes responsibility for woman's utterance from women to men: men are the artistic originators of what women feel and think and interpret and surround woman's alleged mystery and silence with their own speech. It is in woman's attempt to recover language and to escape the traditional spheres of feminine influence and feeling that Lawrence isolates the catalyst of a psychosexual historical regression:

She faced outward to where men moved dominant and creative, having turned their back on the pulsing heat of creation, and with this behind them, were set out to discover what was beyond, to enlarge their scope and range and freedom.... Looking out, as she must, from the front of her house towards the activity of man in the world at large...she strained her eyes to see what man had done in fighting outwards to knowledge, she strained to hear how he uttered himself in his conquest, her deepest desire hung on the battle that she heard, far off, being waged on the edge of the unknown. She also wanted to know, and to be of the fighting host.58

In this image of woman caught between action and retreat, between the appropriation of a male frontier and the founding of an as yet unimaginable space, Lawrence depicts an emblem of the female artist as she has been uttered by men and inherited by women. Women writers have been unable or reluctant to alter this image of marginali 33

to take their female protagonists into a literary unknown, or to

reimagine their shadowy and vicarious existences which too frequently

and too fruitlessly seek expression in the passive reading or misreading

of other failed female artists. Thomas Hardy's resilient women of

Wessex, whose irrespressible spirits create possibilities in the revision

of days of the week or in the rearrangement of the Bible, are

practically unknown in women's literature; Lawrence's candor

and treatment of women's sexual and spiritual independence broke

with all literary predecessors, male or female. However, for all

the potential differences of these women, they do not write nor do

they paint. Like Hester Prynne's emblematic embroiery of her

letter A, their difference and their desire for self-articulation

signify the act of transgression for which they must compensate:

they are condemned to death, fall into a partial insanity, or are

saved by a late espousal of marriage and convention. Thus far,

it has primarily fallen to male writers to utter woman and her

possible transformations. Within those transformations, however energetic and engaging, the woman writer finds "something that

negates everything she is about":

She finds a terror and a dream, she finds a beautiful pale face, she finds La Belle Dame Sans Merci, she finds Juliet or Tess or Salome, but precisely what she does not find is that absorbed, drudging, puzzled, sometimes inspired creature, herself, who sits at a desk trying to put words together. 59

Looking outwards, to appropriate and extend Lawrence's metaphor of marginality and self-division, from her feminine and rebellious

self to the world of men and activity, the female artist adapts her 34 talent to its potential expression within the world: an expression which is shaped into a cultural and literary mutation of what it might have been. Understandably, her utmost desire is for experience—direct experience, both physical and imaginative, unhindered by cultural restraints or personal inadequacies. Confined to reading, daydreaming, domestic chores, the heroine possesses a passion for adventure, for a larger vision, and for a more complete knowledge of the world. It is this passion, perhaps, which produces so much ceaseless activity in women's literature and which is responsible for the construction of a heroine's life and its consequences on a grand scale: the specter of Catherine Earnshaw Linton presiding over the netherwold of Wuthering Heights; Jane Eyre following, and helping to construct, her own verison of Pilgrim's

Progress; and the panorama of Middlemarch which supports and aggrandizes Dorothea Brooke. Denied experience and knowledge of the world, however, the heroine cultivated a frontier within the imagination which provided modes of being and expression otherwise unavailable to her. The imagination was embraced as a means of transcendence over social realities:

I long for power of vision which might overpass that limit; which might reach the busy world, towns, regions full of life I had heard of but never seen... .best, of all, to open my inward ear to a tale that was never ended—a tale my imagination created, and narrated continuously; quickened with all of incident, life, fire, feeling, that I desired and had not in my actual existence. 6°

However, as Jane Eyre acknowledges prior to this reverie—"anybody may blame me who likes"—such vision and transcendence are 35 fil hindered by guilt and condemned as transgression. Not surprisingly, it is during this reverie on the expansion of her vision and life that Jane Eyre "not unfrequently heard Grace 62 Poole's laugh." The laugh ridicules Jane Eyre's ambitions and desires and omniously echoes the failed ambitions of "a lost novelist, a suppressed poet, of some mute and inglorious Jane Austen, some Emily Bronte who dashed her brains out on the moor or mopped and mowed about the highways crazed with the torture 63 that her gift had put her to." It emphasizes the disjunction, the inherent schizophrenia, of the female artist's existence and the conditions necessary to her realization of her art. And since it is thought to be the laugh of the jailer of Bertha Mason Rochester, it voices the self-division and madness of women writers who imprison their female characters in plots of restraint and who pursue the craft of self-betrayal. It carries the small hysterical laugh of Charlotte Bronte which mocks her own, and her heroines', desperate ambitions and efforts.

Some fifteen years after the mocking laughter of Grace Poole,

Lewis Carroll published a parable on a young girl's metaphysical and linguistic alienation. In Alice in Wonderland Alice quickly perceives the expected duality and poverty of her position: "it's no use now,...to pretend to be two people! Why, there's hardly 61 enough of me left to make one respectable person." For the female artist the meager remains of this "one respectable person" are too often expressed in the division of opposing selves which serve simultaneously to articulate and cancel the other. In fictions 36

about the potential female artist, the self-division complained of

by Alice is delineated in an opposition between the heroine and

her doppelganger; however, the heroine and doppelganger serve as

manifestations of the author's own repression and self-denial.

Just as Bertha expresses Jane's fears of sexuality and aggression,

both Bertha and Jane manifest Bronte's repressed anger and

sexuality and her self-censure. As an expression and negation

of fears or desires, the doppelganger in women's literature is

representative of an authorial schizophrenia:

the madwoman in literature by women is not merely...an antagonist or foil to the heroine. Rather, she is usually in some sense the author's double, an image of her own anxiety and rage. Indeed, much of the poetry and fiction written by women conjures up this mad creature so that female authors can come to terms with their own uniquely female feelings of fragmentation, their own keen sense of the discrepancies between what they are and what they are supposed to be.65

This unique female experience of fragmentation is refracted, not only in the doppelganger but in existential confusion and crisis as well, in much of women's literature. The woman writer's obsession with fragmentation is a product of her own divided existence between inclusion and exclusion in history or literature and the conflict between self-assertion and self-denial.

The doppelganger is an especially common theme in works about artists, and indeed it is a suggestive way of thinking about the divided existence of all artists: the conflict between the artist's alienation from and commitment to life and between the opposing ideals of art and existence. Beebe's works on the artist is founded on 37

the premise of self-division (Ivory Towers vs. Sacred Founts), but

he does not entertain the possibility that this fundamental division

might be more acute with female artists, for whom the disjunction

between inner imperatives and outer realities, between imaginative

possibilities and social impossibilities, signifies their own personal

and professional Scylla and Charybdis. More so than for their

male counterparts, the survival of female artists depends on their

demanding negotiations between text and world, between private and

public voices.

Self-division is an inherited condition of all women: the

dichotomization of male and female options is more strongly felt

by women who are often isolated within their own imaginations and

frustrated by self-cancelling attempts at self-articulation. The female doppeiganger is an eloquent emblem of the female artist's attempt at self-articulation and of her inability to undisguisedly express her own, or her heroine's, anger or desire. The doppeiganger signifies the female artist's need to rise above the literal in the forging of a symbol of her sex's division and fragmentation; she is the mask that the female artist assumes to maintain the necessary distance between the activities of creativity and the social dictates that forbid the expression of female creativity outside the domestic sphere.

In the novels discussed here, she is reconceived by Bronte to articulate the many conflicting selves and desires of Lucy Snowe's fragmented consciousness; by Eliot, she is delineated in the opposition of the dark and passionate Maggie to the blond and frail

Lucy, but her most powerful and subterranean expression is evident 38 in the contrasting talents and ambitions of Maggie and Tom (and, indeed, mirrored in George Eliot's own conflicting sexual identification which conceived the two personalities of George Eliot and Marian

Evans); by Woolf, she is italicized in the opposing artistic alter­ natives and impulses which contain and delineate the lives of Mrs.

Ramsay and Lily Briscoe. In the contemporary works of Doris

Lessing and Margaret Atwood, the female doppelganger continues to represent the strategic articulation of an essentially divided and fragmented experience: in The Golden Notebook, the task of the female artist is to recover the totality of experience and art through a recognition and recreation of their fundamental division and fragmentation, and the many selves and texts of Anna Wulf reflect the debilitating fragmentation of female experience as well as providing Anna with separate and conflicting texts which can be coalesced into a unified life and text; in Lady Oracle, Joan Foster's— foster child of experience and art—uncontrollable fragmentation is a response to cultural and literary plots which simultaneously fascinate and threaten to entrap her and her disaffection with reality:

hadn't my life always been double? There was always that shadowy twin, thin when ! was fat, fat when I was thin, myself in silvery negative, with dark teeth and shining white pupils glowing in the black sunlight of that other world. While I watched, locked in the actual flesh, the uninteresting dust and never-emptied ashtrays of daily life. It was never-never land she wanted, that reckless twin. But not twin even, for I was more than double. I was triple, multiple, and now I could see that there was more than one life to come, there were many.67 39

Dissatisfied with reality, every heroine of even modest

proportions discovers in literature her own suppressed ambitions

and desires and attempts to gain self-articulation through the

fictional. Perhaps the strongest motif in literature about women is

their unhappy attempts to transpose a fictional reality onto ordinary

existence. Of course, such heroines, because of their novel-written

consciousnesses, have little understanding of the division between

fictional and ordinary possibilities. Jane Austen mocks this literate

heroine in Catherine Morland who "from fifteen to seventeen.. .was 68 in training [reading] for a heroine." In her verse simulation of

Jane Eyre, Elizabeth Barrett Browning traces the development of

one female artist, Aurora Leigh, who depends on books to augment and displace experience and who succinctly equates her emotional

life with available plots: "But, after I had read for memory, I read

for hope," or, as Joan Foster, "fairy godmother" to her audience of female readers, rephrased this interdependence of female life and text: "The truth was that I dealt in hope, I offered a vision of a 69 better world, however preposterous." Dorothy Richardson, who

is an originator of the female narrative, anticipated the currently much discussed literariness of female protagonists and their

reliance on books to read (or misread} experience: "Books.

Almost everything can be got from books. Plus imagination.

I believe it's true of lots of women...that homoeopathic doses of

life are enough"; however, these "homoeopathic doses of life" are compromised by their fictional mediation. For the romantic heroine, for every heroine who possesses an educated imagination and who 40 is infatuated with the text and "hooked on plots," the act of reading reinforces and widens the split between society and her imagination, between the ordinary and the extraordinary. The ordinary will always be perceived as insupportable when experienced outside a fictional context. Indeed, the heroine, like women in general, becomes dependent on novels for any expression of her ambitions or desires:

Girls, enjoined from thinking about becoming generals and emperors, tend to live more in novels than boys do, and to live longer in them. It is not megalomaniacal to want to be significant; it is only human. And to suspect that one can be significant only in fantasy or fiction, to look for significance in a concentrated essence of character, in an image of oneself, rather than in action or achievements, is, historically, only feminine. Or mostly.72

Ironically, women do not find in the act of reading the desired articulation of role alternatives or an expansion of their limited experience; instead, they discover other heroines in the act of reading. Reading, rather than writing, signifies that "profound alliance between womanhood and fiction, which properly conjoined are infinite and infinitely resilient," and it is the mutual receptivity of woman and fiction that allows women to "feed on apparent fictions 73 about themselves that provide resilience to nourish life and art."

This resilience between women and fiction can be used to describe all dreamers or latent artists, who read as an alternative to an unsatisfactory world. Male artists, like potential female artists, learn "through reading and imaginative reverie...to move from the

1 74 real world of pain and loneliness into a private 'great good place ."

They discover, like the heroines who sublimate their need for 41

expression in reading, that "their exalted ideals unfit them for 75 reality." This consciousness of the disjunction between reality

and fiction motivates all artists; however, male artists find in

fiction and in art models for self-articulation, whereas female

artists must invent their own models. The models that female

protagonists do locate in fiction are models of sublimated or frustrated

art, and the act of reading, often the means or symptom of a heroine's

sublimation and frustration, as experienced and reflected in literature only reinforces debilitated and debilitating models of female creativity. The female artist can become so dependent on reading

for the exercise of her imagination and the articulation of her

potential that her revision of Stephen Dedalus1 aesthetic ambition 7fi "to recreate life out of life" would read "to recreate life out of art."

The compulsion to fashion life after art frequently yields disastrous results: slowly the thwarted and plot-haunted imaginations of female protagonists find articulation in the distortion of reality; eventually their attempts at realizing self-articulation within a fictional framework of reality is revealed to be just as meager and self-limiting as their own prescribed lives; and finally the fictions which shaped their lives fail as viable alternatives. The most notorious paradigm of the gradual substitution of fiction for reality is found in Flaubert's merciless portrait of a female Quixote, Emma

Bovary. Flaubert, whose work is minutely concerned with the disjunction between the imagination and reality and the inter­ dependence of life and literature, depicts Emma's espousal of a fictional life as inspired and shaped by surreptitiously borrowed 42 novels at the convent:

They were all about love, lovers, sweethearts, persecuted ladies fainting in lonely pavilions, postilions kilted at every relay, horses ridden to death on every page, sombre forests, heart-aches, vows, sobs, tears, and kisses, little boatrides by moonlight, nightingales in shady groves, gentlemen brave as lions, gentle as Iambs, virtuous as no one ever was, always well dressed and weeping like fountains. ?7

The plots contained within these representative fictions signify the estrangement of women from adventure and the limitations imposed upon women by such plots, but also omniously contained within these fictions are the plots that are more often associated with

Emma Bovary, feminine self-deception and self-destruction. The sensibility that existed prior to Emma's "immersion into literature" is forfeited "in the critical act of becoming a heroine" in which 78 "she perfects herself into art, out of life." The tragedy of her foolish, misspent life does little to discourage women from the reading and enactment of novels; indeed, she is frequently regarded as the prototype of female passion and heroic activity. On her deathbed, Emma's last "atrocious, frantic, desperate laugh" gives the lie to her passion and heroism and poignantly argues for the 79 failure of art to provide viable models for female creativity.

For the reading heroine, art must inevitably fail to compensate for what life has denied: the intensity of her emotional attachment to ideals thought to be expressed in fiction cannot hope to be sustained, and her obsession with finding reflections of a possible self results in a narcissistic and self-limiting misreading of the possibilities contained within art. No novel can bear the responsibility 43 placed on it by a heroine looking for self-refiection and self-direction.

The self-expansion that female protagonists search for in fiction is undermined by the narcissistic nature of their endeavor. Ironically, the heroine, who goes to fiction to locate self-articulation, discovers the limiting fictional plausibilities which reify the schizophrenia of female experience in the divided lives of Edna Ponteiller, Emma

Bovary, and Maggie Tulliver between "that outward existence 80 which conforms" and "the inward life which questions."

The futility of attempting to locate female identity in male texts is evident in the frustration and defeat experienced by female readers; since these texts can only be incarnations of cultural biases, women readers suffer a greater alienation from the text than do male readers and must be more active transformers of fiction than their male counterparts. However, much of the recent work in reader response theories has italicized the alienated and resisting reader: Harold Bloom's notorious premise that all readings are anxious misreadings, Paul DeMan's argument that reading vacillates between patterns of insight and blindness, or, especially, Wolfgang

Iser's theory of the energizing constructive blank or absence in reading are particularly relevant to the activity governing the inter­ action of women and fiction. For women, the act of reading is political and revisionary; with that "elasticity of being induced" by reading, women have always filled Iser's blank, but it is only recently that women have adopted this blank or absence as a 81 signification and correction of their historical silence and alienation. The reading of male literature, or literature written but not 44 originated by women, reinforces previous female absence, silence, and alienation and demands that the female reader identify against herself and with a cultural perception of herself. The identification with male texts and plots does not heal the schizophrenic condition of the female reader but increases her sense of self-estrangement and of self-division. Judith Fetterley, in her revisionary The

Resisting Reader, radicalizes the theories of reader response applicable to women readers by advocating a corrective to the divided and assenting female reader and offers a peculiarly feminine definition of the self-dispossession which occurs during the act of reading:

To be excluded from a literature that claims to define one's identity is to experience a peculiar form of powerlessness—not simply the powerless- ness which derives from not seeing one's experience articulated, clarified, and legitimized in art, but more significantly the powerlessness which results from the endless division of self against self.82

This pursuit of self-articulation within the "endless division" of male articulated literature is intensified by the ambiguous and fictional nature of feminine self-definition. Since their primary definition as women is a social and fictional construct—"'woman' has been a socially produced concept, role metaphor, fantasy"— women have easily manipulated and incorporated fictional role go alternatives. As a social fiction, the act of a woman reading for self-articulation becomes an absurdly problematical and narcissistic engagement of infinite reconstructions and repetitions: For a woman to read as woman is not to repeat an identity or an experience that is given but to play a role she constructs with reference to her 45

identity as a woman, which is also a construct, so that the series can continue: a woman reading as a woman reading as a woman.84

To a greater degree than her male counterpart, the female reader

is motivated in her pursuit of self-articulation by oppositions and contradictions that are not resolved but italicized in the act of

reading. For the heroine who looks to fiction to provide possibilities denied by society, she must resign herself to the possibility that the act of reading for women is frequently little more than "an act of

living in contradiction without shame." Barthes1 shameless contradiction is especially applicable to the experience of the woman reader: woman, as she discovers herself in literature and art, is the object or the referent of creative activity; she discovers, especially in Victorian literature or art, that she is not simply the muse of art but the equivalent of art. The female reader who seeks self-articulation must translate herself out of male fantasies and projections and into a self-defining creative activity; however, her historical representation as muse or as the object of masculine internalization has impeded the development of a subjectivity sufficient for independent and self-defining creative activity:

the masculine self dominates and internalizes otherness, that other is frequently identified as feminine, whether she is nature, the representation of a human woman, or some phantom of desire.... To be for so long the other and the object made it difficult for nineteenth-century women to have their own subjectivity. 86

Without subjectivity, "women are incapable of self-representation, the fundamental of masculine subjectivity," and cannot imagine alternative translations to their subordination in art as its muses. 46 referents, or "lamp-holder(s)" who enact a "voluntary submission to a guide."

In the inscriptions of masculine literary tradition, the female artist is trapped in the nightmare of being "killed into a 'perfect' image of herself" and of identifying her own creative impulses as

DO subordinate and silent- The cross-identification that the female artist experiences as a reader increases her anxiety of authorship, amplifies the pressure to capitulate to a societal consensus of viable alternative female roles, and insures an internalization of male standards. If, on the other hand, the female artist is able to escape identification within male literature or art, she may be frustrated by an imitation of the male creative process in which she performs an imaginative sexual inversion of the male muse which is certain to "inadvertently reincarnate the inhibitions of patriarchal tradition"; this subterfuge of reinventing the Muse as male reincarnates the oppressiveness and silencing of patriarchy and necessitates a creation plagued by "the terror from one's own 89 muse." In To the Lighthouse, the female artist confronts an alternative to her historical representation as Muse or her strategic reinvention of the Muse as male: Lily Briscoe transcends her artistic frustration when she sees Mrs. Ramsay, not only Lily's but Woolf's muse, sitting on the steps. Mrs. Ramsay's elusive and intriguing presence throughout the novel effects a liberation of Woolf, Lily, and the female reader from a literature that has defined women as referents to be articulated by men; indeed, Mr. Ramsay, who is blocked at Q and will never reach R, is the novel's frustrated and 47 inarticulate presence. Lily's, and Woolf's, ability to articulate a vision through the female initiates a female-inscribed literature which echoes with Lily's "But this is what I see; this is what I 90 see." It is in this joyous dedication of the female artist as other and as different and in her repudiation of her referent or subordinate status in art that the female artist will help Mary Carmichael to break the sequences of male dominated fiction and, as Bloom worrisomely anticipates, to disable and dislodge the male inscribed text:

Nor are there Muses, nymphs who know, stili available to tell us the secrets of continuity, for the nymphs are now departing. I prophesy though that the first true break with literary continuity will be brought about in generations to come, if the burgeoning religion of Liberated Woman spreads from its clusters of enthusiasts to dominate the West. Homer will cease to be the inevitable precursor, and the rhetoric and forms of our literature then may break at last from tradition.91

The end of the female muse precipitates the beginning of female artistic assertion and articulation in which the female artist will reinvent her art and regain a literary inheritance absent from

Bloom's continuum of a male literary tradition.

In his study on the artist, Beebe concludes that the "artist- go as-hero is usually., .the artist-as-exile." Literary history is abundant with examples of male artists who felt that they must escape the nightmare of their own personal and cultural histories in order to create, whereas female artists do not need to invent themselves as exiles from a collective past. Women have been historically alienated from patriarchal culture and art; the extent 48 of their alienation is evident in their estrangement from a plot which

dictates the development and exile of the artist:

he has sloughed off the domestic, social, and religious demands imposed upon him by his environment. Narrative development in the typical artist-novel requires that the hero test and reject the claims of love and life, of Cod, home, and country, until nothing is left but his true self and his consecration as artist.93

For the female reader and artist, art does not signify a retreat from

life but is, rather, the means of gaining experience. In each of the novels discussed in this study, the female artist uses art and literature to combat her alienation and silence: the orphan

Lucy Snowe, like Charlotte Bronte, writes out of a hope for communion and connection; Maggie Tulliver's creative reading deteriorates into a literal reading which cannot compensate for inexperience or supplement a uncompromising reality; and Lily's art, like Virginia Woolfs, is an attempt to reintegrate a fragmented world. From Bronte to Woolf, each of these novels depict the estrangement of female art and community: in Viliette, the victorious female voice pursues her narrative in independent exile from the community; in The Mill on the Floss, the female imagination is sacrificed for the maintenance of that larger web of life, the community; and in To the Lighthouse, the final stroke of Lily's vision transcends both self and community and exists as a moment of unmediated art. In addition to her estrangement from the community, the fictional construct of femininity intensifies the female artist's alienation from an authentic female voice and 49 experience and condemns her to an inarticulate exile from reality and a heavily mediated "status of literature-in-life":

The literary imagination became the final available vehicle of transcendence. Attached only marginally to the daily business of her society, torn between the poles of victim and queen, woman was so powerful an imaginative abstraction that she assumed the status of literature-in-life, leading humanity beyond the limits of morality to the transfigured freedom of the literary character... .women's lives were exalted to the status of fictions, fiction bestowed in return motive power to many, lives. In its flowering, womanhood was a literary idea in perpetual incarnation, unifying a society at war with itself by spanning the gulf between its fictions and its acts.9**

Alienated from her artistic impulses and ambitions, condemned to an inarticulated existence, and conceived of as "a literary idea in perpetual incarnation," the female artist's flight from country and religion would be only a redundant act. The woman writer does not reproduce her writing or artistic self in her heroines, and her relationship with female protagonists who aspire to self^articulation is often ambivalent, sometimes even sadistic and vindictive; however, in the works discussed here by Bronte, Eliot, and Woolf, the woman writer never loses her consciousness of her own special and non-representative position among women: their works do not, as some of Margaret Drabble's do, glance away from female disinheritance or alienation but attempt to realistically delineate the opportunities for and oppositions to the articulation of female creativity; the fictions of Bronte, Eliot, and Woolf—unlike the facile fictions of Drabble—do not attempt to escape a "consciousness of place and time," to effortlessly fill absences, to alter differences. 50 or to provide the female reader with incredible models, but insist that the frustrated and inarticulate female artist enacts and is comprehended as a metaphor for the historical alienation and 95 silence of women.

In the poem "Heroines," Adrienne Rich celebrates the rebellious, "outlaw" nineteenth-century heroines whose attempts at self-articulation are voiced "in the shattered language, of a partial vision" and challenges the fates and legacies of fictional women:

how can I give you all your due take courage from your courage honoring your exact legacy as it is recognizing as well g6 that it is not enough?

Rich vacillates between realistic representation and a poetic misrepresentation, between a realistic and ideological delineation, of these "exceptional even deviant" heroines; the ambiguity of the final line challenges both society and the woman writer in 97 their inscription of women and fiction. This study shares

Rich's ambivalence towards realism and ideology; it challenges primarily society's but also the woman writer's inscription of the failed and frustrated female artist; it asks, in its articulation of the progressive aliention of Lucy Snowe, the inevitable destruction of Maggie Tulliver, and the incandescent moment of Lily Briscoe, if it was "enough"; and it is a tribute to the great and silenced 51 heroines, and their remarkable authors, whose "shattered language" has helped generations of women to speak. NOTES

Introduction

Epigraphs: Elizabeth Barrett Browning, Aurora Leigh in The Poetical Works of Elizabeth Barrett Browning (Boston: Houghton Mifflin Co., 1974), p. 270; Emily Dickinson, The Complete Poems of Emily Dickinson, ed. Thomas H. Johnson (Boston: Little, Brown and Company, 1960), p. 577; Virginia Wooif, Orlando (New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1956), p. 312; Margaret Atwood, Lady Oracle (New York: Avon Books, 1976), p. 367.

Virginia Woolf, "George Eliot," in Women and Writing, ed. Michele Barrett (New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1979), p. 160.

2 Adrienne Rich, "When We Dead Awaken: Writing as Re­ vision," in On Lies, Secrets, and Silence: Selected Prose, 1966-1978 (New York: W. W. Norton and Company, 1979), p. 35.

3 Rich, "When We Dead Awaken: Writing as Re-Vision," p. 35; George Eliot, Daniel Deronda {New York: Penguin Books, 1977), p. 71.

Virginia Woolf, A Room of One's Own (New York: Harcourt, Brace S World, 1957), pp. 48-50.

5Woolf, A Room of One's Own, pp. 43-44.

c

Woolf, A Room of One's Own, p. 3.

Woolf, A Room of One's Own, pp. 117-118. -52- 53

g Woolf, A Room of One's Own, p. 93.

9Woolf, A Room of One's Own, pp. 101, 102.

Elaine Showalter, A Literature of Their Own (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1977), p. 288.

Showalter, A Literature of Their Own, p. 287.

12Woolf, A Room of One's Own, p. 108.

13Woolf, A Room of One's Own, p. 103.

14 Woolf, "George Eliot," p. 160; Mary Jacobus, "The Difference of View," in Women Writing and Writing About Women, ed. Mary

Jacobus (New York: Barnes and Noble Books, 1979), p. 20.

15Wooif, A Room of One's Own, p. 93.

16Woolf, A Room of One's Own, p. 87.

Woolf, A Room of One's Own, p. 79. 1 8 James Joyce, A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man (New York: The Viking Press, 1968), p. 169. 1 9 Carolyn Heilbrun, Reinventing Womanhood (New York: W. W. Norton and Company, 1979), p. 71; Nancy K. Miller, "Emphasis Added: Plots and Plausibilities in Women's Fiction," PMLA, Vol. 96, No. 1 (1981), p. 46.

20 Maurice Beebe, Ivory Towers and Sacred Founts: The Artist as Hero in Fiction from Goethe to Joyce (New York: New York University Press, 1964), p. 313. 54

21 Nancy K. Miller, The Heroine's Text: Readings in the French and English Novel, 1722-1782 (New York: Columbia University Press, 1980), p. ix.

22 Samuel Richardson, Pamela or Virtue Rewarded (New York: W. W. Norton and Company, 1958), p. 92.

23 Daniel Defoe, Moll Flanders, ed. James Sutherland (Boston: Houghton Mifflin Company, 1959), p. 25.

24 Defoe, p. 297; Richardson, p. 89.

25 Catharine R. Stimpson, "Ad/d Feminam: Women, Literature, and Society," in Literature and Society: Selected Papers from the English Institute, 1978, ed. Edward W. Said (Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins Press, 1980), p. 189.

2fi Harold Bloom, The Anxiety of Influence: A Theroy of Poetry (London: Oxford University Press, 1973), p. 44.

27 Bloom, The Anxiety of Influence, p. 94.

28 See Cynthia Ozick, "Literature as Idol: Harold Bloom," in Art and Ardor (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1983).

29 For an extended discussion of female creative anxiety, see Sandra M. Gilbert and Susan Cubar, The Madwoman in the Attic: The Woman Writer and the Nineteenth-Century Literary Imagination (New Haven: Yale University, 1979) and Margaret Homans, Women Writers and Poetic Identity: Dorothy Wordsworth, Emily Bronte, and Emily Dickinson (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1980).

Woolf, A Room of One's Own, p. 113.

31 Bloom, The Anxiety of Influence, p. 117.

32 Bloom, The Anxiety of Influence , p. 154. 55

33 Bloom, The Anxiety of Influence, p. 5.

•3J4 Charlotte Bronte, Shirley (New York: Penguin Books, 1974), pp. 314-315.

35 Bronte, Shirley, p. 315.

Ellen Moers, Literary Women: The Great Writers (Garden City: Anchor Books, 1977), p. xvi.

37 For an extended discussion of the dominant motifs in women's literature, see Gilbert and Gubar, The Madwoman in the Attic and Moers, Literary Women.

•Dp Showalter, A Literature of Their Own, p. 13.

39 Miller, "Emphasis Added: Plots and Plausibilities in Women's Fiction," p. 36.

no Woolf, A Room of One's Own, p. 51.

41 Helene Cixous, "The Laugh of the Medusa," trans, by Keith Cohen and Paula Cohen, Signs, Vol. 1, no. 4 (1976), p. 883.

42 Cixous, p. 886.

43 Shoshana Felman, "Women and Madness: The Critical Phallacy," Diacritics, Vol. 5, No. 1 (1975), p. 10.

44 Jane Austen, Persuasion in The Complete Novels of Jane Austen (New York: Vintage Books, 1976), p. 616.

45 Virginia Woolf, "Women and Fiction" in Women and Writing, ed. Michele Barrett (New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1979), p. 48. 56

46 Dorothy Richardson, The Tunnel, in Pilgrimage (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1967), p. 210.

47 Dorothy Richardson, Oberland, in Pilgrimage (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1967), p. 93.

48 Showalter, A Literature of Their Own, p. 258.

4Q Ozick, "Justice to Feminism," p. 285.

Ozick, "Justice to Feminism," p. 286.

Elaine Showalter, "Towards a Feminist Poetics" in Women Writing and Writing About Women, ed. Mary Jacobus (New York: Barnes and Nobie Books, 1979), pp. 25, 35.

52 Beebe, p. 65.

53 Charlotte Bronte, Jane Eyre (New York: W. W. Norton and Company, Inc., 1971), p. 96.

5£,Heiiburn, pp. 71-72.

55 Heilbrun, p. 73.

56Woolf, A Room of One's Own, p. 84.

57 D. H. Lawrence, "The Study of Thomas Hardy" in Phoenix: The Posthumous Papers of D. H. Lawrence, ed. E. D. Macdonald (London: The Viking Press, 1967), p. 496.

58 D. H. Lawrence, The Rainbow (New York: The Viking Press, 1961), p. 3.

59Rich, "When We Dead Awaken: Writing as Re-Vision," p. 39. 57

Bronte, Jane Eyre, pp. 95-96.

Bronte, Jane Eyre, p. 95.

Bronte, Jane Eyre, p. 96.

Woolf, A Room of One's Own, pp. 50-51.

64 Lewis Carroll, Alice in Wonderland {New York: W. W. Norton and Company, 1971), p. 12.

65Gilbert and Gubar, p. 78.

66 In addition to Gilbert and Gubar's The Madwoman in the Attic, see Barbara Rigney, Madness and Sexual Politics in the Feminist Novel (Madison: The University of Wisconsin Press, 1978).

67 Atwood, Lady Oracle, p. 274.

CO Jane Austen, Northanger Abbey in The Complete Novels of Jane Austen (New York: Vintage Books, 1976), p. 369.

69 Browning, Aurora Leigh, p. 264; Atwood, Lady Oracle, p. 35.

Dorothy Richardson, Dawn's Left Hand in Pilgrimage (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1967), p. 238.

Atwood, Lady Oracle, p. 367.

72 Rachel M. Brownstein, Becoming a Heroine: Reading About Women in Novels (New York: The Viking Press, 1982), p. xv.

73 Nina Auerbach, Woman and the Demon: The Life of a Victorian Myth (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1982), p. 225. 58

74

Beebe, p. 92.

75Beebe, p. 71.

Joyce, p. 172. Custave Flaubert, Madame Bovary, ed. and trans, by Paul de Man (New York: W.W. Norton and Company, 1965), p. 26.

78 Leo Bersani, A Future for Astyanax: Character and Desire in Literature (Boston: Little, Brown and Company, 1969), p.194; Brownstein, p. xxii.

79 Flaubert, p. 238.

80 Kate Chopin, "The Awakening," in The Awakening and Other Stories (New York: Holt, Rinehart and Winston, Inc., 1970), p. 14.

81 Bersani, p. 194.

82 Judith Fetteriey, The Resisting Reader: A Feminist Approach to American Fiction (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1978), p. xiii.

83 Stimpson, p. 190.

84 Jonathan Culler, On Deconstruction: Theory and Criticism After Structuralism (ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1982), p. 64.

85Culier, p. 32.

Homans, p. 12.

87 Homans, p. 17; George Eliot, Middlemarch (Boston: Houghton Mifflin Company, 1968), pp. 13, 21. 59

Gilbert and Gubar, p. 15.

89 Heilbrun, p. 169.

90 Virginia Woolf, To the Lighthouse (New York: Harcourt, Brace & World, Inc., 1955), p. 32.

91 Harold Bloom, A Map of Misreading (New York: Oxford University Press, 1975), p. 33.

92 Beebe, p. 6.

93 Beebe, p. 6.

94 Auerbach, p. 62.

95 Browning, Aurora Leigh, p. 366.

96 Adrienne Rich, "Heroines," in A Wild Patience Has Taken Me This Far: Poems 1978-1981 (New York: W. W. Norton and Company, 1981), pp. 35-36.

Rich, "Heroines," p. 33. CHAPTER I. "Nobody's Daughter": Villette and the Reification of Feminine Alienation

Ambition, literary ambition especially, is not a feeling to be cherished in the mind of a woman... .even in celibacy it would be better for her to retain the character and habits of a respectable decorous female.

The Professor

Exhausted by emotion, my language was more subdued than it generally was when it developed that sad theme; and mindful of Helen's warnings against the indulgence of resentment, I infused into the narrative far less of gall and wormwood than ordinary. Thus restrained and simplified, it sounded more credible.

Jane Eyre

If men could see us as we really are, they would be a little amazed; but the cleverest, the acutest men are often under an illusion about women: they do not read them in a true light: they misapprehend them, both for good and evil: their good woman is a queer thing, half doll and half angel; their bad woman almost always a fiend. Then to hear them fall into ecstasies with each other's creations, worshipping the heroine of such a poem—novel—drama, thinking it fine—divine! Fine and divine it may be, but often quite artificial—false as the rose in my best bonnet there. If I spoke all I think on this point; if I gave my real opinion of some first-rate female characters in first-rate works, where should I be? Dead under a cairn of avenging stones in half an hour.

Shirley

-60- 61

Nature had given me a voice that could make itself heard, if lifted in excitement or deepened by emotion.

Villette

It was inevitable that a century characterized by schizophrenia should produce female artists distinguished by the violence of their personal and aesthetic conflicts. The self-division of the nineteenth- century woman writer, who wrote under patriarchal approval and within patriarchal limits, is witnessed in the rare translation of her life into art or the conversion of her beliefs into practice: following in the steps of their Queen, the creative forces responsible for Ruth Hilton, Aurora Leigh, Dorothea Brooke, and Jane Eyre publicly opposed or evaded the enfranchisement of women; the aesthetic confidence and powers of Elizabeth Caskell, Elizabeth

Barrett Browning, George Eliot, and Charlotte Bronte found conservative expression in meager and conventionalized representations of the gifted and ambitious woman. As discussed earlier, women writers, especially nineteenth-century women writers, do not reproduce themselves as male writers do; instead they envision narrow and_ambivalent representations of the female artist. In their distortions and ambivalence, these representations are powerful utterances of the woman writer's self and societal estrangement which frequently vacillate, especially in texts of feminine aesthetic sublimation like Middlemarch and Aurora Leigh, between self- representation and self-denial. Of the nineteenth-century women 62 writers, Charlotte Bronte most obviously embodied this division between life and art, between public and private lives; however, unlike many of her female contemporaries who paid for their insubordination with acquiescing art, Bronte envisioned and effected within her art all that she was unable to imagine or express in her domestic life. Isolated within silent and obedient domesticity,

Bronte relied on her art to articulate her sense of frustration and dispossession as a woman and as an artist. This division between the domestic and the aesthetic is confirmed in the separate concerns of her correspondence and fiction: a consideration of the circumstances inhibiting or encouraging feminine creative activity and the subter­ fuges of feminine self-expression are practially absent from her domestic-centered correspondence but urgently present in her fiction. Her trance-produced art is an art which is unconscious of its own subversion and anger and which articulates her feminine and aesthetic estrangement within the context of "powerful images

•j of nineteenth-century female feeling."

In her novels, Bronte does not reproduce her productive creative self; both Jane Eyre and Lucy Snowe's artistic ambitions are satiated in single autobiographical efforts; however, she does detail the obstacles to the realization of the feminine creative self.

The primary obstacle to the female artist exists in woman's historical alienation from society and her internalization of that alienation. Her fiction resides within communities of women which are aiso communities of exiles: orphans, nuns, distressed 63 gentlewomen, abused wives, insane wives, spinsters, and other women, in whom the self-alienating psychological and sociological construct of femininity manifests itself in divided and emaciated lives. Increasingly fearful of self-abnegation in love and friend­ ship, her heroines progressively embrace the alternative of exile as an affirmation and protection of self. From the fantastic abundance of The Professor to the nameless, homeless, storyless heroine in her final fragment, Emma, her heroines reflect Bronte's progressive despair and isolation and her fear of and attraction to immersion into self-referential and self-protective worlds.

In her last novel, Villette, Bronte articulates a peculiarly feminine sense of dispossession in the displaced and diffused sensibility of Lucy Snowe. The isolated and self-alienated consciousness of Lucy partially reflects the repression of the nineteenth century as well as more contemporary problems of self- expression and being; indeed, Lucy is a prototype for many modern and contemporary displaced and dispossessed heroines such as

Clarissa Dalloway and the nameless narrator of Surfacing. In attempting to explain her isolation and compulsory self-reliance,

Lucy designates herself as a "placeless person"; this baptism of dislocation embraces Lucy's experience of familial and societal placelessness and psycholgoical displacement and is descriptive of her shadowy and voyeuristic activities as narrator (46). Her placelessness is a metaphor not only for the alienation within her life but for the societal and psychological estrangement of women and of the literary and historical disconnection of the female artist. 64

As "nobody's daughter," the non-existence of Lucy Snowe is an emblem of feminine alienation (170). All of Bronte's heroines are disinherited daughters, attempting through self-mastery and self- denial to regain admission to a prelapsarian world and to reclaim absent fathers and mothers; however, Lucy's unqualified disinheritance, which admits only glimpses of qualified and ultimately inaccessible happiness, incorporates an alienation from the desires and ambitions necessary for self-reclamation and even from self- recognition.

Feminine experience as detailed by Bronte is as experience of the Other. This experience is intensified and reinforced in the presentation of Lucy's story as not only the story of woman as

Other but as the story of a woman who perceives and creates herself as Other and who remains Other. In her text on feminine alienation. The Second Sex, Simone de Beauvoir describes the basic impulse of identification within alienation, and its manifestation in feminine frustration and self-detachment:

it is to prefer a foreign image to the spontaneous manifestation of one's own existence, it is to play at being. Woman is shown to us as enticed by two modes of alienation. Evidently to play at being a man will be for her a source of frustration; but to play at being a woman is also a delusion: to be a woman would mean to be the object, the Other.2

Bronte's preference for existence in a "foreign image" and the capacity of her sympathetic imagination to "play at being" is evidenced in her life and work. Once, the Bronte legend begins, Patrick Bronte asked his children to don masks so that 65 they would be able to uninhibitedly answer his questions; the effectiveness of her father's demonstration is manifested in her continued reliance on this strategy of self-concealment t& effect self-expression.

She began her creative career by imitating gentlemen's magazines of the 1830s, by following and embellishing the exploits of her lifelong hero, the Duke of Wellington, and by fostering the imaginary life of the wooden soldier that generated the kingdoms of Angria and Condal. With Emily and Anne's retreat into the feminine realm of Gondal, Branwell became her creative conspirator, but not her partner, in the sublimated construction of the romantic and fantastic Angria which was dominated by the Duke of Zamorna, a swashbuckling adventurer and seducer of multitudes of women, who was a combined representation of the Duke of Wellington and Byron and who would find muted and tamed expressions in the male heroes of her adult fiction. The male identification which incited her early creative activities was translated into the male impersonation of

Currer Bell, an impersonation, like that of George Eliot, which created a lifelong schism between Bronte's creative and domestic lives, and her unsuccessful adoption of the male voice in her first narrator, William Crimsworth. In her last two novels, Shirley and

Villette, Bronte repudiates the possibility of self-expression in masculine dress: Shirley Keeldar, Esquire possesses a man's name and position yet vacillates between feminine restraint and masculine freedom and is finally brought to her knees by her master/teacher/ father/husband and the sexual politics of marriage; Lucy Snowe, 66 as a symptom of her disintegration, is called by many, often masculine, names and is assigned the part of lover to her own heroine , Ginevra Fanshawe, a part which Lucy insists on playing in feminine dress with a few masculine props and in which she discovers her own voice and attraction of self-disguise: "1 had accepted a part to please another: ere long, warming, becoming interested, taking courage, I acted to please myself" (165). Lucy's insistence on remaining within her feminine apparel while performing as a male acts as a metaphor for the feminine subjectivity and voice of Currer Bell, a metaphor which distinguishes Bronte's work from that other male impersonator, George Eliot. In contradistinction to her increasingly alienated heroines, and to Eliot, Bronte's creativity progresses from alienation of self and voice to the discovery of a voice and, to a large extent, self-articulation.

In her life and work, the fallacy of feminine expression through male identification is a subterranean theme which dominates her fiction: the self-alienation within the psychological and societal construct of femininity, a construct dependent on the repression of desires and ambitions and resulting in the unexpressed, incomplete, and divided lives of women; the self-devastating effects of a construct founded on repression and role playing is depicted in Bronte's representation of the irrepressible and, therefore, divided feminine consciousness, and its manifestation in the many complementary psyches within her fiction: Jane Eyre and Bertha Mason Rochester, Shirley Keeldar and Caroline Helstone, Polly Home and Ginerva Fanshawe, and

Louisa Graham and Madame Beck. Like a hall of repeating and 67

self-distorting mirrors, the disintegrated consciousness of Viilette

subdivides and multiplies this division to reflect the many self-

representations of its narrator, Lucy Snowe. Her capacity for losing

herself in the identity of another woman, of playing at being

feminine, emanates from an almost borderless ego which is barely

able to distinguish between the Lucys and the not-Lucys; her

extreme ego flexibility, itself a manifestation of the feminine construct,

aliows her to try on, to inhabit, the feminine life strategies of

spinster, angel, flirt, and subversive while concealing her own

strategy of secrecy. From these lives, albeit incomplete and

stifled, Lucy discovers relief from the anxiety of living in a world

inherently opposed and hostile to the solitary self and receives

self-affirmation: "There are human tempers, bland, glowing, and

genial, within whose influence it is as good for the poor in spirit to live, as it is for the feeble in frame to bask in the glow of

noon"(231). Her dependence on others for self-articulation is arguably the cause of her nervous breakdown during "The Long

Vacation," the only extended period of isolation in her life. The absence of others who nurture and inhabit her frail psyche forces her to confront the "headlong.. .abyss" of her vacant life; however, instead of gazing into that abyss as she gazes into and judges the lives of others, she loses consciousness (192). Her retreat into illness, a favorite strategy of Bronte, Jane Eyre, and Caroline

Helstone, dramatizes the years of repressed feeling and action and self-avoidance. Her alienation is echoed in an impregnable silence 68 and repetitious blankness, in the "wordless silence, a long blank oblivion," that envelopes the narrative and threatens her existence and sanity and which is deferred by her compartmentalized self- representation, her varied and vicarious inhabitation of life (348).

The maxim that artists should be conservative in their lives so that they may be radical in their work italicizes the self-division, between life and art, of every artist; however, it especially articulates the inherent conflicts of the female artist who too often, as in the case of Charlotte Bronte, has to choose between self-expression in life or in art. The fissures which threaten Lucy's psyche and her narrative are eminently visible in her creator's schizophrenic existence. Bronte was an orthodox Christian Tory in her politics and religion, insecure and formal in her few friendships, and submissive and resigned in her filial duties; her fictional world, however, contained not only a new type of heroine with a distinctly dissatisfied voice and a feminist agenda but the essentials of a new literature of consciousness and psychology as well: she is credited with making the novel the "vehicle of personal revelation. She is our first subjective novelist, the ancestor of Proust and Mr. James

Joyce and all the rest of the historians of the private consciousness"; she is the primary architect of female narrative consciousness and as an original explorer of the repetition, repression, and minutiae within a woman's world, she is the recognized creative mother of

Dorothy Richardson, Virginia Woolf, Doris Lessing, and Muriel

Spark; and her novels, in the extent and depth of their uncanny insights into the defenses and psychology of the self, are often cited 69 3 as the first instances of the modern psychological novel. However radical her art, however much its coarseness and anger ignored and opposed Victorian conventions and however much its narrative strategies shaped the modern novel, it was not an art distanced from her emotional life but an unmediated art which sprang from an intensely personal vision, a vision fostered entirely by her imagination repeatedly acting upon extremely limited experience and disappointed and repressed desires, and a vision that developed into and then repudiated the art of revision, a rearrangement of disagreeable particulars and the imaginative recovery of a life that life had failed to provide. Unlike earlier heroines who are translated into beloved and redeeming wives, Lucy Snowe inherits the solitary fate of her creator.

Mrs. Gaskell, in her incomparable but schizophrenic biography of Bronte, reports that Bronte possessed the overwhelming "desire

(almost amounting to illness) of expressing herself in some way."

Arrived at from observations and conversations at the end of

Bronte's life, this is an instance of Gaskell's penetrating intelligence into her compulsion, forever insatiable and repetitive, to create and recreate her life. It was a compulsion born in early adolescence and nurtured in isolation and self-reliance. Perched on top of a hill in the remote Yorkshire moors, the motherless, and essentially orphaned, siblings possessed the solitude and the liberty to read, to fantasize, and to write their miniature books and magazines.

Similar to the literary ambience and precocity of the Woolf household 70 and siblings, the Bronte children had inherited from their parents, especially from their father who had published some poetry and sermons and continued to entertain literary pretensions, a love of reading and a desire to write. The specter of fame and fortune was as present to Charlotte as it was absent to Emily. From a very early age, the siblings pursued their familial infatuation with fiction: living within the frame of fiction, their communications with each other mainly consisted of fictional collaboration on the dashing inhabitants of their kingdoms; within this frame of fiction, reality was displaced and books mediated between the siblings: "it was the habit in the Bronte family...to approach reality through the mediating agency of books, to read one's relatives, and to feel 5 related to one's reading." The imaginary worlds of Angria and

Condal were adolescent reproductions of the passions and adventures encountered in their extensive and uncensored reading of Shakespeare's comedies, Byron, and other texts forbidden to Victorian women and children. The exaggerated and highly coded heroism and eroticism of their adolescent productions (texts which Bronte produced until her mid-twenties and which Emily and Anne never repudiated) attempted to compensate for the realities of poverty, illness, death, and isolation; however, the exercise of their imaginations did not simply supplement the lonely life in Haworth, it superseded that life and its realities. They imitated and incorporated fantastic romantic modes of being, sometimes unable to distinguish between life and art; they retreated into solipsistic worlds, outside of which they barely thrived; and they grew increasingly dependent not only 71 on each other but on their imaginative activities. In an auto­ biographical fragment written at Roe Head shortly before her precipitous and therapeutic return home, Bronte details the self- division that threatened her mental health and became emblematic of her conflicted psyche and fiction:

All this day I have been in a dream, half miserable, half ecstatic,—miserable because I could not follow it out uninterruptedly, ecstatic because it showed almost in the vivid light of reality the ongoings of the infernal world. I had been toiling for nearly an hour with Miss Lister, Miss Marriott, and Ellen Cook, striving to teach them the distinction between an article and a substantive. The parsing lesson was completed; a dead silence had succeeded in the schoolroom, and I sat sinking from irritation and weariness into a kind of lethargy. The thought came over me: Am I forced to spend all the best part of my life in this wretched bondage, forcibly suppressing my rage at the idleness, the apathy, and the hyperbolical and most asinine stupidity of these fat-headed oafs, and of compulsion assuming an air of kindness, patience, and assiduity? Must I from day to day sit chained to this chair, prisoned within these four bare walls, while these glorious summer suns are burning in heaven and the year is revolving in its richest glow, and declaring, at the close of every summer day, the time I am losing will never come again? Stung to the heart with this reflection, I started up and mechanically walked to the window. A sweet August morning was smiling without....! listened—the sound sailed full and liquid down the descent: it was the bells of Huddersfield Parish Church. I shut the window and went back to my seat. Then came on me, rushing impetuously, all the mighty phantasm that this had conjured from nothing,—from nothing to a system strange as some religious creed. I felt I could have written gloriously. The spirit of all Verdopolis—of all the mountainous North—of all the woodland West—of all the river-watered East, came crowding into my mind. If I had had time to indulge it I felt that the vague suggestions of that moment would have settled down into some narrative better at least than anything I ever produced before. But just then a dolt came up with a lesson. I thought I should have vomited.6 72

In this miniaturized self-portrait exists the dominant motifs of her

fiction: self-expression and self-restraint, the demands of duty

and the enticements of the imagination, claustrophobia, poverty,

and illness; and in her assumption of moral and intellectual

superiority, in her distress and anxiety over social displacement,

and in her conviction of self-importance are the early delineations

of her heroines. As a sketch of the female artist, it is a depiction

of the circumstances, inevitably confronted and often detailed

in the lives of female artists, in which creation by women, even

self-acknowledged geniuses, has been almost impossible. A century

after Bronte's entreaty of "am I forced to spend all the best part

of my life in this bondage, forcibly suppressing my rage, " Virginia

Woolf echoed the same irresolvable frustration and restraint:

"who shall measure the heat and violence of the poet's heart when

caught and tangled in a woman's body?" Clearly, Bronte and

Woolf, although without resolutions, were not only victims but

poets of that violence.

Bronte's creative conflict was manifested in a Calvinistic

guilt about her indolent and erotic daydreams and in a terror of

her attraction to and increasing self-immersion into those daydreams.

The delicate balance between ordinary existence and imaginary worlds,

a balance acknowledged by Bronte herself, is described by her

latest biographer, Margot Peters, as "precariously skirting chasms,

the solid ground of reality crumbling away, always in peril of

losing her footing and plunging headlong into the dangerous realm o of fantasy." The danger of falling out of reality and into a 73 madness of solipsism is always a subterranean possibility in her fiction and was realized in one of the last scenes she created:

Lucy Snowe's unchecked, drug-induced solipsistic reveries in the park. In a text that could act as a casebook on the destructive effects of repression, the novel's final support of some form of societal and self repression, a support emanating from the judgmental errors committed by Lucy's unrestrained imagination, is not only surprising but almost a repudiation of its earlier arguments.

Albert Camus observed that "art is the activity that exalts g and denies simultaneously." It is this impulse of self-cancellation, assertion met with repudiation, that governs Bronte's relationship with her feared yet sovereign creative self. In her last books, this relationship is especially evident in her obvious pleasure and comfort in the imagination and in her frequent denials of it:

Shirley begins with the promise of "something real, cold, and solid something unromantic as Monday morning" and ends with the death of the fairies, yet it simultaneously promotes the solace and affirmation found within the imagination and endorses literary revision as a creative activity; in Viilette the narrator denies while practicing her clandestine art:

I, Lucy Snowe, plead guiltless of that curse, an overheated and discursive imagination; but whenever, opening a room-door, I found her seated in a corner alone, her head in her pigmy hand, that room seemed to me not inhabited but haunted.10

To possess an active imagination was to be guilty of self-indulgence. 74 of subversion of truth and reality, of difference, and of participation in a "secret and sworn allegiance" to "our sweet Help, our divine

Hope" (271). Bronte's creative, and sexual, guilt was discharged in self-flagellation, repentance, and increased attempts at conformity.

In a letter to her conservative friend, Ellen Nussey, she confesses to her sin of difference: "but I am not like you, if you knew my thoughts; the dreams that absorb me; and the fiery imagination that at times eats me up...you would pity and I dare say despise me."11

The sins and the dangers of passionate thoughts and of difference were confirmed in Robert Southey's response to her inquiry about pursuing a literary career:

The day dreams in which you habitually indulge are likely to induce a distempered state of mind; and, in proportion as all the ordinary uses of the world seem to you flat and unprofitable, you will be unfitted for them without becoming fitted for anything else. Literature cannot be the business of a woman's life, and it ought not to be. The more she is engaged in her proper duties, the less leisure will she have for it, even as an accomplishment and a recreation.12

To the poet laureate's prediction of her eventual unfitness for the world, Bronte quickly assured him of feminine interests and occupations:

I find enough to occupy my thoughts all day long.. .without having a moment's time for one dream of the imagination. In the evenings, I confess, I do think, but I never trouble any one else with my thoughts. I carefully avoid any appearance of preoccupation and eccentricity, which might lead those I live amongst to suspect the nature of my pursuits.13

From the beginning of her creative life, she had evinced a preference 75 for secret plays but as her response to Southey indicates, she had revised the secret plotting of tales into the secret plotting of her literary talents and ambitions. Greatly affected by the poet's advice, that "Literature cannot be the business of a woman's life," Bronte determined that she would abandon her "habit of

'making out"1 and confine herself to accepted and non-threatening feminine activities; only after her life was threatened by this supposedly remedial confinement did she once again allow herself to inhabit worlds beyond "the rude Real." A few years later, she bid a formal, and written, farewell to Angria and the fantastic fiction of her adolescence. To ease her creative guilt and fear of the creative principle, she began her adult fiction with an espousal of fiction which "restrained imagination, eschewed romance, repressed excitement":

i said to myself that my hero should work his way through life as I had seen real living men work theirs—that he should never get a shilling he had not earned—that no sudden turns should lift him in a moment to wealth and high station; ...that he should not even marry the beautiful girl or a lady of rank. As Adam's son he should share Adam's doom.^5

In answer to Caskell's questions about her realistic fiction, Bronte more accurately defined her practice of realistic art: "We only 1 fi suffer reality to suggest, never to dictate." Her commitment to realism is evident in her invention of the unattractive and displaced heroine; however, even within the spare and dis-romantic world of Villette, the fantastic from her adolescent fiction surfaces to advance plot, to connect all characters and events to the narrow 76 concerns of her novels, and to resolve in fiction what is irresolvable in reality.

Bronte divided her existence between the two separate and conflicting states of being located in the imagination and reality.

She felt that "the marvelous" did not "exist save in the world of the imagination and that one must learn to prefer the plain and homely," and her espousal of realism was "based on a conviction 17 of the necessity of self-abnegation." Frances Henri, the first heroine of her adult fiction, articulates the emotional politics of her vacillation between imagination and reality: "I must cultivate fortitude and cling to poetry; one is to be my support and the 1 g other my solace through life." The measure of her last heroine's alienation is her self-immersion in and her voyeuristic apprehension of reality and self, a voyeurism which embraces her indirect accumulation of experience, through her many and varied literary maxims, and her failure to seek comfort or self-affirmation in the real world: if there was a hope of comfort for any moment, the heart or head of no human being in this house could yield it; only under the lid of my desk could it harbour, nestling between the leaves of some book, gilding a pencil-point, the nib of a pen, or tinging the black fluid in that ink-glass (494), Lucy Snowe's choice of companions (paternalistic and inappropriate literary maxims, pen, pencil, books, and ink) reflect her disengage­ ment from the human race and its ordinary realities and the precarious state of her mind. 77

In their clandestine and compartmentalized aesthetics, the

Bronte sisters commuted from the obligations and selflessness of a

spacious reality to the indulgences and seif-creation of a closeted

imagination. In her poem, "To Imagination," Emily Bronte not only

voiced her sisters1 increasing disconnection from reality but also

her own fearless retreat of self-survival into the imagination:

So hopeless is the world without. The world within I doubly prize; Thy world where guile and hate and doubt And cold suspicion never rise; Where thou and I and Liberty Have undisputed sovereignty.^

The poem expresses a belief in the imagination's ability to effect self-determination, to manipulate reality into possibilities and power; a belief, as argued by Patricia Meyer Spacks, most frequently confined to the powerless female and too often interpreted as the only or dominant artistic activity of women. For the Brontes, their faith in the potential of the imagination emanated from a desire for active revision of their daily lives; however, unlike Emily's disabling self-immersion or unlike women writers who did not attempt to translate their creative and sexual conflicts into their fiction, Charlotte's escape into creative activities did not further estrange her from her life but confirmed the insupportability of the lives that she and other women were forced to sustain without protest.

This protest, so absent within her own life, was irrepressible in her fiction and won this tiny, somber woman the reputation of being an unchristian rebel, of writing as "a woman.. .unsexed": 78

We want a woman at our hearth her impersonations are without the feminine element, infringers of modest restraints, despisers of bashful tears, self- reliant, contemptuous of prescriptive decorum; their own unaided reason, their individual opinion of right and wrong, discreet or imprudent, sole guides of conduct and rules of manners,—the whole hedge of immemorial scruple and habit broken down and trampled upon... .outrages on decorum, the moral perversity, the toleration of, nay, indifference to vice which must leave a permanent distrust of the author on all thoughtful and scrupulous minds.20

In this condemnation, excepting the rather far-flung accusations

of "moral perversity" and "indifference to vice," exists the materials

for our contemporary heroines. Within the context of her work,

she refused to attempt the expected feminine accommodation between

speech and self-censorship; instead, in the transcription of her anger

and disappointments, she was able to transcend the "special language"

of "verbal inhibitions" consisting within "the verbal range permitted

to English gentlewomen." A significant part of her protest

responded, as witnessed in her initial adoption of the male voice and

in her continuing male impersonation, to the linguistic and creative

limitations imposed on her gender:

Come what will, 1 cannot, when I write, think always of myself and of what is elegant and charming in femininity; it is not on those terms, or with such ideas, I ever took pen in hand: and if it is only on such terms my writing will be tolerated, I shall pass away from the public and trouble it no more.22

This espousal of an asexual and ahistorical art, an embrace of conformity rather than rebellion, was sometimes undermined by glimpses into her own silences and debilitation. In a letter to

Caskell, Bronte discusses the difficulty of translating "the severe 79

Truth as you know it in your own secret and clearseeing soul" into art, and the difficulty of the woman writer to be "quite your own woman, uninfluenced, unswayed by the consciousness of how your work may affect other minds; what blame, what sympathy it may call forth."23

The emotional force of her fiction coupled with her lack of sufficient self-censorship and suppression drew from contemporary and modern critics responses which vacillated between admiration and apprehension. For Matthew Arnold, who celebrated her as an artist who "leaves half her laurels unwon," Bronte's fiction transparently conveyed her preoccupations with absence and anger:

"the writer's mind contains nothing but hunger, rebellion and rage, and therefore that is all she can, in fact put into her book. No fine writing can hide this thoroughly, and it will be fatal to her 24 in the long run." Within this judgment, Arnold is advocating feminine silence and submission, for discontent and rebellion are rarely perceived to be creative handicaps. Virginia Woolfs admiration was qualified by objections to her immersion in the personal and by the self-distorting intensity of her anger:

one sees that she will never get her genius expressed whole and entire. Her books will be deformed and twisted. She will write in a rage where she should write calmly. She will write foolishly where she should write wisely. She will write of herself where she should write of her characters. She is at war with her lot. How could she help but die young, cramped and thwarted?25

Interestingly, Woolfs visions of Bronte's "cramped and thwarted" life and art originate not in the existence or expression of anger 80 but in the imperative subversion, the attempted suppression and displacement, of that anger. For Woolf, she possessed "more genius.. .than Jane Austen," but it was a genius, like the geniuses of all defeated Judith Shakespeares, mired in poverty and isolation and vulnerable to and unforgiving of the circumstances which worked to effect her disinheritance and silence. The apprehensions of Arnold and Woolf are echoed in George Henry Lewes' review of

Villette: "Contempt of conventions in all things, in style, in thought, even in the art of story-telling, here visibly springs from 27 the independent originality of a strong mind nurtured in silence."

Lewes is addressing the creativity of Bronte, but he could just as easily be addressing the novel's narrator, Lucy Snowe. In her last novel, the anger subsides and resignation into silence and separation is born; promoting the value of isolation for women, the novel eschews feigned reintegration into society and concludes with its heroine strategic internalization of feminine disinheritance.

Of "the little cage of 'Currer Bell1," as Emily Dickinson immortalized her life, we have inherited many glimpses: of her nose pressed to the page in her nearsighted engagement of a book; of her trance-induced states of creativity in which her minute scrawl, unguided by consciousness, bounded off the page or into previous lines; of her spare 4'9" figure deposited at the elbow of Thackeray's gigantic 6'6" person; of her great ambition for fame and society and, when she was lionized by literary London, of her physical incapacity to tolerate the slightest attention; of her customary somber black dress self-consciously brightened by a pink bonnet; 81 of her great desire to attend the Royal Literary Fund Society dinner, during which she would be placed in the ladies gallery from which she would be asked to witness the dining and speeches of

Dickens, Thackeray, and other male literati; of her incomprehensible fortitude during too much illness and death; and of her receipt, from her beloved George Smith, of five hundreds pounds for the purchase of Villette, about one-eighth of Thackeray's standard 28 price. The glimpse we have not inherited is one of the professiona artist refining and nurturing her craft. Like the glimpse of Jane

Austen writing at the parlour table, vulnerable to interruptions and always prepared to conceal her art from the intruder, the glimpses we have inherited of Charlotte Bronte are ones of interruptions and attempted concealment. Amid the many partial representations of

Charlotte Bronte exists the fixed image of a female genius engaged in the act of re-creation, an act founded on a recognition of essential dispossession and unequivocal faith in the power of her gifts.

Inhabiting a claustrophobic world of orphans and exiles, of emotional starvation and intellectual pretensions, of psychological conflicts and instability, of isolation within and without, Bronte's characters are usually defined by absence rather than presence and by alienation rather than communion. The experience of absence and alienation that threatens to overwhelm her earlier novels is allowed unrestrained expression in her least conventional novel,

Villette. It is a dis-romantic rewriting of her first novel. The

Professor, and an instructive revision of her most popular novel,

Jane Eyre. With less than seven years between them. The Professor 82 and Villette, in their movement from wish-fulfilling fantasy to profound disillusionment, suggest a comprehensive change in an aesthetic and emotional sensibility. William Crimsworth, the narrator

°f The Professor, begins his adult life without nurturing family or friends, prospects or money, and—as his brother's slave—with very little self-esteem; by the end of the novel, he and his lace- mending-poet-bride have created a family, discovered friends, possessed of a bounty of highly compensating prospects, returned to his homeland, and had his self-esteem revived in the respectful saluation, employed by his wife as well, of "professor." In contrast to the bleakness and deprivation of Lucy Snowe's narrative, the world of The Professor is a just and plenteous world:

Behold us now at the close of ten years, and we have realized an independency. The rapidity with which we attained this end had its origin in three reasons: Firstly, we worked so hard for it; secondly, we had no incumbrances to delay success; thirdly, as soon as we had capital to invest, two well-skilled counsellors, one in Belguim, one in England,.. .gave us each a word of advice as to the sort of investment to be chosen... .Accounts being wound up, and our professional connection disposed of, we both agreed that, as Mammon was not our master, nor his service that in which we desired to spend our lives; as our desires were temperate, and our habits unostentatious, we had now abundance to live on—abundance to leave our boy.29

The intervening years between The Professor and Villette claimed the lives of Branwell, Emily, and Anne and witnessed major personal disappointments which were sufficient to transform this vision of

"abundance" into that of the shipwrecked Lucy Snowe; however, the motif of alienation from self and world is the diacritical characteristic of Bronte's world, a characteristic which becomes 83 progressively more pronounced in character and plot: Crimsworth's bounty is translated into the castrated union of Jane and Rochester;

Jane's matrimonial Eden is adjusted to reflect the matrimonial subordination and prostration of Caroline and Shirley; and Shirley's reluctant and crazed acceptance of her master is transformed into

Lucy's final disconnection from love and world.

The increasing alienation of her characters is conveyed in their destinies and within pivotal and emblematic representations of a character's alienation which contain much of the novel's emotional force and attempt to articulate desires and states of being of which the creator and character seem barely conscious. In The Professor the reclamation of the self is coincident with the reclamation of the absent mother: the absence of Crimsworth's mother, an absence reified in his estrangement from her picture, signifies his social disinheritance and his emotional deprivation; Frances Henri's alienation from her mother's language is significant not only of Frances' personal estrangement but of the linguistic and social disinheritance of the female artist, a disinheritance reified in Lucy Snowe's estrangement from her native language and from the Labassecourian tongue. Frances' alienation from the maternal tongue, however, does not frustrate her attempts at its reclamation nor her unwavering faith in and commitment to her creative gifts. To Crimsworth's attempts to evaluate her creativity, Frances responds:

I am glad you have been forced to discover so much of my nature; you need not so carefully moderate your language. Do you think I am 84

myself a stranger to myself? What you tell me in terms so qualified, I have known fully from a child.30

In The Professor Bronte's sympathies, usually confined to her

heroines, are divided between the effeminate and displaced Crimsworth

and the creative and distressed Frances. As the only heroine who

actively and candidly pursues the craft of writing and who shares

that writing with the reader, Frances is representative of the

necessary self-sufficiency, as witnessed in her rebuke to Crimsworth's

artistic judgment of her, of the female artist and the potential for

its ultimate expression in solipsism:

For me the universe is dumb, Stone-deaf, and blank, and wholly blind; Life I must bound, existence sum In the strait limits of one mind;

That mind my own. Oh! narrow cell; Dark—imageless—a living tomb! There must I sleep, there wake and dwell Content,—with palsy, pain, and gloom.31

Disinherited from history and society, the female artist exists in

a world which cannot echo her own voice nor reflect her existence

and which forces her into her own mind for self-affirmation.

Crimsworth rescues Frances from the solipsism she fears and articulates; for the solitary Lucy Snowe, however, the promise of communion with realities outside her own existence, of her

voice repeated within the voice of another, drowns with Paul

Emanuel.

The symptoms of Jane Eyre's self-alienation are visible in her counter-selves: the mad and bestial Bertha, restrained in

her attic (that room of her own) but escaping now and again to 85 articulate Jane's repressed desires and anger; and the burdensome and life-threatening child, the psychological counterpart of Bertha, who occurs in Jane's dream and who recurs throughout Bronte's work and life:

During all my first sleep, I was following the windings of an unknown road; total obscurity environed me; rain pelted me; I was burdened with the charge of a little child: a very small creature, too young and feeble to walk, and which shivered in my cold arms, and wailed piteously in my ear. I thought, sir, that you were on the road a long way before me; and I strained every nerve to overtake you, and made effort on effort to utter your name and entreat you to stop—but my movements were fettered; and my voice still died away inarticulate; while you, I felt, withdrew farther and farther every moment. 32

Both Bertha and the child are abstractions which are projections of

Jane's subjectivity rather than characters independent of her desires or fears. Bertha signifies Jane's subterranean emotional activity, whereas the child is significant of Jane's emotional deprivation and immaturity, of her existential displacement, and of her silence.

This fettering and "inarticulate" child is the self that was never allowed expression, that was never integrated into the narrative of

Jane Eyre; wailing, because it is unable to speak, it is "inhabited by a cry" and threatens to unbalance, to silence, and to strangle

Jane with its own fear:

Wrapped up in a shawl, I still carried the unknown little child: I might not lay it down anywhere, however tired were my arms—however much its weight impeded my progress, 1 must retain it. ...the child clung round my neck in terror, and almost strangled me.... I was shaken; the child rolled from my knee, I lost my balance, fell, and woke.33 86

In his work on the artist, Freud argues for an understanding of the parallel and continuous activities of the child and of the artist: the child's play world, and the artist's work, originates in a desire to resolve conflict; the artist, however, inherits the unresolved conflicts of the child. With Bronte, the play world activities, the "habit of making out," of Charlotte were identical to 3*1 the activities of Currer Bell. The repetition of this child in her fiction, and in her dreams, suggests an art denied resolution and the continuation of the silenced and silencing child of the secretive

Charlotte into the artist, Currer Bell. In a wail that does not relieve but intensifies the anguish, this piteously wailing child is repeated in Caroline Helstone's cry, "I ought not to have been born; they should have smothered me at the first cry," and in the diminutive Polly Home's declaration that "in this way I cannot— 35 cannot live!" In an uncanny coincidence, this abandoned and threatening child is repeated in Bronte's death from an hysterical form of morning sickness. In a novel in which the narrator is the creator of pictures depicting decapitated and mutilated women. Bertha and the unknown child are only manifestations of a more profound and subterranean fragmentation, a fragmentation indicated in Jane's initial self-description as a "discord... .a heterogeneous thing."

In her most ambitious and most disrupted texts, Shirley, Bronte locates the novel's centers of alienation within the social context and life alternatives of women. Torn between providing an ambitious panoramic social commentary and evoking the minute and repetitive particulars in the days of women, Shirley is often alienated from its 87 own intent; vacillating between a historical depiction of the Luddite riots in 1811 and 1812 and the topical and immediate consideration of "the woman question," between a self-effacing impersonal narration and an intrusive personal commentary, the novel often seems to be a text in search of itself. These primary tensions between the historical and the personal are italicized in an ending of conflicting intent: at the end of the novel, imagination succumbs to reality and industry, and the fairies are banished from the hollow; the last view of Shirley Keeldar, Esq., Bronte's most wish-fulfilling and most revisionary heroine, is one of her matrimonial reduction to the 37 "queer and crazed" state of that abstraction. Bertha. The generating impulse to write a historical text was transformed into an impulse to create and establish a female Utopia, a land in which female power and friendships are not exercises of the imagination but realities; the subterranean text traces a female dis-utopia, the alienation and self-alienation of women from society and from their own desires, desires which are never directly translatable but must be sublimated into conventional modes of expression.

By the nature of her dependent and unpromising situation,

Caroline Helstone, a self-envisioned "bystander at the banquet," is forced to consider her life's expression within the alternatives available to unmarried women of her acquaintance: the frenzied domesticity of Hortense Moore, the domestic seclusion of Margaret

Hall, the self-denying selflessness of Miss Ainley, or the self- 38 forsaken uncommunicativeness of Miss Mann. Ail these alternatives require a depletion of self, a self already existing outside the 88 sanction of society, history, and art and defeated by "the reproach 39 of [its] dependence." In her uncompromising delineations of their non-lives, Bronte, like Caroline, is engaged in the envisioning of realistic life alternatives and pursuing a specter which haunts her work: the woman alone. In The Professor Bronte parodies society's rejection of a creature it has denied essential humanness and place:

Look at the rigid and formal race of old maids— the race whom all despise; they have fed themselves, from youth upwards, on maxims of resignation and endurance. Many of them get ossified with the dry diet; self-control is so continually their thought, so perpetually their object, that at last it absorbs the softer and more agreeable qualities of their nature; and they die mere models of austerity, fashioned out of a little parchment and much bone. Anatomists will tell you that there is a heart in the withered old maid's carcase—the same as in that of any cherished wife or proud mother in the land. Can this be so? 1 really don't know; but feel inclined to doubt it.1*0

Old maids are depicted as self-cannibalistic and as substituting spontaneity and youth for "maxims of resignation and endurance."

The hesitant and disclaimed assertion that these "mere models of austerity" are able to feel and love emanates from an internalization of society's repudiation of the emotional life of the unmarried woman. As realized in Lucy Snowe, the old maid, existing in alienation from self and society, is nurtured by abstractions which reinforce her alienation from desire and communion.

In her re-evaluation of women within Victorian culture and art.

Woman and the Demon, Nina Auerbach establishes the representation of the old maid as one of the three "central, interdependent paradigms of victim and queen" which she charts as existing outside of the 89 anticipated

Victorian pieties about womanliness: women were exhorted to live in and through patriarchal family roles and exalted above all as mothers, but the three paradigms that animate the fictional imagination are outcasts from domesticity, self- creating rather than seiflessly nurturing, regal but never maternal. Solitaries by nature and essence, they transcend the culture that creates them.41

in her argument that the feminine paradigms of the nineteenth century were models of alienation, Auerbach questions critical commonplaces about the force of the impression of the feminine ideal on the Victorian mind. The suggestive phrases in her argument are "self-creating rather than seiflessly nurturing" and

"they transcend the culture that creates them"; these phrases, arguing for an existential libertion through alienation, aptly articulate the attempted self-creation and transcendence of Jane

Eyre and Lucy Snowe; however, Bronte's fiction also investigates the alienation within those paradigms denied the freedoms of exile: the exile and self-alienation of the old maid was repeated in the more conventional feminine paradigms of wife and mother. These paradigms of the feminine ideal are not represented as viable alternatives to the solitary lives of her exiled heroines but as alternatives of self-sacrifice and exile; the wife and mother are not emblems of fulfillment and nurturance but are effete models of subjugation and absence.

There are no successful marriages in Bronte's novels; the marriages which endure do so out of the sheer will of fantasy or a democratic debilitation of the husband. Marriage, as the 90

text and ending of Shirley illustrate, requires not only self-abnegation

to a male master but is the author of psychological and physical

trauma as well: the disinheritance and death of Crimsworth's

mother, the restraint and death of Bertha Mason Rochester, the

mental and physical abuse of Mrs. Pryor by her husband, and the

death of Mrs. Home, attributed to her husband's neglect. At the center of Shirely exists the silent and absent example of Mary Cave,

the former wife of the Rev, Helstone and a personification of the

feminine ideal. Worshipped as "a girl with the face of a Madonna; a girl of living marble; stillness personified," Mary Cave's suitors 42 are drawn to her death-in-life existence. Soon after her marriage to Helstone, she declines, without her husband's notice, into death in which she is a "still beautiful-featured mould of clay left, cold 43 and white." A lifeless piece of matter from which self and desire have long since been extracted, the fact of death alters little in her existence and elicits little from all except a frustrated romantic suitor who acknowledges that his love would have been tempered by her continued life. Her perfected stillness is considered by

Helstone, who believes that women should be silent and invisible, the perfect deportment of women. Mary Cave—the Freudian possibilities of her name are endless—is an abstraction of the feminine ideal and a representation of how that abstraction is conceived in hate and fear of women, embraced by neurotic and self- destructive women, and active only through the mediation of distance and literature. As an abstraction of a patriarchal ideal, she is representative of the cultural restraints and self-suppression 91 attached to that construct of "woman." Though Shirley was written many years before John Ruskin published his famous "Of Queen's

Gardens," Bronte refutes the vision of woman as an elastic and receptive depository of male inadequacies and desires:

Thus, then, you have first to mold her physical frame, and then, as the strength she gains will permit you, to fill and temper her mind with all knowledge and thoughts which tend to confirm its natural instincts of justice, and refine its natural tact of love.... It is of no moment, as a matter of pride or perfectness in herself, whether she knows many languages or one; but it is of the utmost, that she should be able to show kindness to a stranger, and to understand the sweetness of a stranger's tongue.^

Ruskin's perfectly constructed woman is one who is shaped by others yet primarily exists for the moral edification of her architects and is one who may be alienated from her own language yet possesses access to even the "stranger's tongue." As represented in the fate of Mary Cave, this feminine construct is a schizophrenic model of the victim as queen and the queen as victim. The answering vision to patriarchal creation and the devastation of Mary Cave exists in the masculine freedoms and presumptions of Shirley Keeidar,

Esquire; however, as the novel's ending suggests, the queen is soon translated into victim.

The death of Mary Cave, a potential surrogate mother to

Caroline, reinforces the sense of maternal abandonment and absence within the novel. Contemporary reviewers of Shirley criticized the maternal abandonment of Caroline as improbable in that no mother would abandon her child to a heartless and abusing father; however, modern critics object not to the maternal abandonment but to 92 maternal return, to the fantastic coincidence of Mrs. Pryor unmasking herself as Caroline's long absent mother. As a novel which works against integration, Shirley is primarily a book about emotional truths, those truths which Bronte held as the only requirements for art, and one of the truths within Shirley is the absence and the attempted recovery of the mother. It hardly matters that Mrs. Pryor's role in the novel represents its weakest plotting deficiency; it is the grief over her absence and the emotional impact of her return that affect novel and reader. As is evident in Shirley's revision of Milton's

Eve, a major intent of the novel is the reclamation of women from the male imagination and the re-vision and restoration of the first mother:

"I saw—I now see—a woman-Titan: her robe of blue air spreads to the outskirts of the heath, where yonder flock is grazing; a veil white as an avalanche sweeps from her head to her feet, and arabesques of lightning flame on its borders. Under her breast I see her zone, purple like that horizon: through its blush shines the star of evening. Her steady eyes I cannot picture; they are deal—they are deep as lakes—they are lifted and full of worship—they tremble with the softness of love and the lustre of prayer face to face speaks with Cod. That Eve is Jehovah's daughter, as Adam was his son."45

In answer to Shirley's equalizing visions of maternal magnificence,

Caroline envisions a more immediate and personal, but as powerful, return of a mother who is able to say, "I have a home for you: you shall live with me. All the love you have needed, and not tasted, from infancy, I have saved for you carefully. Come! it 46 shall cherish you now." As a symbol of nurturance withheld, of feelings repressed, of alienation within and from childhood, the 93 absent mother is palpably present in all of Bronte's novels. The yearning of an isolated Persephone for rescue by Demeter is felt throughout her work; however, even when Demeter is granted a much desired return, as in Shirley, she is as alienated from and powerless within society as her daughter. The absent mother does not vanquish her daughter's sense of otherness but confirms it.

In her abandonment of Caroline to her abusive father and in her necessary renunciation of Caroline to marriage (a recapitulation of

Mrs. Pryor's own choice) and fate, her mother can only attempt to effect her own unsuccessful escape.

Caroline discovers, as Bronte's other heroines do, that the attempted restoration of the absent mother cannot provide access to power or speech, nor can she reshape a childhood of emotional deprivation and alienation. Since the absent mother is the internalization of the heroine's unfulfilled needs, she cannot effect an escape that the heroine cannot envision. The desire to reinvent the mother is a desire for self-reinvention, and the desire for maternal nurturance is the desire for "physical nurturance and a legacy of power and humanity from the adults of their own sex." In an act of self-reinvention and nurturance,

Jane Eyre perceives in a dream-vision of a divine mother the confirmation of her own impulses and conscience:

She broke forth as never moon yet burst from cloud: a hand first penetrated the sable form shone in the azure, inclining a glorious brow earthward. It gazed and gazed and gazed on me. it spoke to my spirit: immeasurably distant was the tone, yet so near, it whispered 94

in my heart—"my daughter, flee temptation!"

"Mother, I will."1*8

As evidenced in Shirley, Caroline, and Jane's maternal reinvention,

Bronte's art repetitively attempted to restore the absent mother and to recapture a childhood of spontaneity and feeling. The heroine's ability to restore the absent mother, to regain maternal nurturance, is equivalent to their own ability for seif-nurturance.

As the most dispossessed and self-dispossessed heroine, Lucy Snowe's maternal sensibilities are as accessible as "Greek and Hebrew" (572).

Born from her emotional deprivation, Bronte's repetition of maternal absence and feminine alienation not only articulates but nourishes her disinherited female readers. Adrienne Rich, in her essay on the mothering of the motherless Jane Eyre, voices the attraction of Bronte's fiction for women: "I have never lost the sense that it contains, through and beyond the force of its creator's 49 imagination, some nourishment 1 needed then and still need today."

Written a year after the publication of Matthew Arnold's

"The Buried Life," Villette reifies the mass repression and alienation depicted in that poem:

i knew the mass of men concealed Their thoughts, for fear that if revealed They would by other men be met With blank indifference, or with blame reproved; 1 knew they lived and moved Tricked in the disguises, alien to the rest Of men, and alien to themselves—and yet The same heart beats in every human breast!^

A century of profound social and industrial displacement, the nineteenth century perceived itself as an orphan of history, as 95 witnessed in its abundance of orphan narratives or even in its fascination with the isolated and solitary Charlotte Bronte. Arnold's poem, and Villette, internalize this perception of exile, represent the alienation within conformity, and argue for the oneness of history and the individual. In Villette the ambience of alienation is italicized in its fictional location of Villette, Labassecour, in its frequent reliance on a foreign language, in its emphasis on the activities within Madame Beck's self-enclosed school, and in the gender of its narrator. When the male persona of Arnold's poem is converted into a female narrator, the potential for alienation is amplified.

Reading Villette as a feminine response to Arnold, Gilbert and

Gubar consider the differences within a romanticized male embrace of alienation and historical feminine alienation:

Where the male Romantics glorified the "buried life" to an ontology, Bronte explores the mundane facts of homelessness, poverty, physical unattractive- ness, and sexual discrimination or stereotyping that impose self-burial on women. While male poets... express their desire to experience an inner and more valid self, Bronte describes the pain of women who are restricted to just this private realm. Instead of seeking and celebrating the buried self, these women feel victimized by it; they long, instead, for actualization in the world.51

Alienation, within Bronte's fiction, is not celebrated but is represented as a symptom of societal and individual illness; her heroines struggle for "actualization in the world" only to be returned to their private worlds of restraint and solipsism which can only be overcome outside the context of realism, within the fantastic resolutions of her novels. As if to underscore the differences between Arnold's poem and her feminine applications of it, Bronte 96

locates in the center of her text the legend of the nun who was

buried alive and at whose feet Lucy buries her letters from Graham, emblems of her possible communion and reintegration within society.

Villette, vacillating between solipsism and community, totters on the borders between experience and isolation. Lucy's pilgrimage

(like Jane, she is a seif-designated Christian anticipating and relating her progress) is not a journey from deprivation to abundance, nor from isolation to community, but a journey which ends as it began: alone. She is dispossessed of family and of a past prior to the opening Bretton episode; her pre-Bretton life is either concealed or conveyed in distancing and vague metaphors:

"the ship was lost, the crew perished"; she, like another paradigm of feminine dispossession and vulnerability, Milly Theale, is "a survivor—a survivor of a general wreck" who is "destined never to rid [herself] of a considerable chill"; she is the eternal orphan, an extreme example of the psychological prototype of Bronte's heroines:

Of all things, herself seemed to herself the centre,—a small, forgotten atom of life, a spark of soul, emitted inadvertent from the great creative source, and now burning unmarked to waste in the heart of a black hollow.52

She is a self-acknowledged "cypher," a condition, like Lucy's existence, which has multiple interpretations: "a zero.. .standing by itself, expresses the absence of any quantity, but increases or diminishes the value of other figures, according to its position";

"a person or thing of no value or consequence; a nonenity"; or 97

"a secret or disguised manner of writing meant to be understood only by the persons who have the key to it." As a record of

Lucy's consciousness, the narrative grasps people or events only as they relate or reflect Lucy's experience of alienation and deprivation;

Lucy not only "expresses the absence of any quantity," she is obsessed with her existence as an "individual of no social significance" and the reflections of that existence in other lives (66). In a novel narrated by a woman with an irrepressible imagination and ambitions to write, there are remarkably few images of Lucy Snowe as the artist; indeed, we are allowed only one glimpse of her artistic self in communion with the "Creative Impulse" (425). Lucy's schizophrenic narrative vacillates between information and deception, between her internal and external lives, and between the affirmation and the denial of those lives. As naught, as a nonenity, and as a secretive and subversive writer, Lucy Snowe is "by nature a cypher" (425).

Manifest in her narrative secrecy and deception is the denial of her artistic being. Throughout the novel, Lucy mocks and denies the imagination responsible for the creation of the narrative: "of an artistic temperament I deny that I am" (67); so, her narrative possesses the quality of a narrative which renounces itself while it continues to engage the reader. The conflicting impulses of her narrative signify the "mortal consequences" of a woman's trans­ gression into art and the lack of a historical and literary context 54 which would have provided her with a voice. Unlike her contemporary, David Copperfield, Lucy possesses no predecessors 98 from which to generate her narrative; her voice, necessarily, is experimental, hesitant, and has great difficulty in articulating an integrated "I." If her narrative suffers from "insane inconsistency," it is because she has long been a bystander at her own creation, a creation from which her voice is absent and in which her psychology mimics the desires and needs of her male authors:

The roots of "authority" tell us, after all, that if woman is man's property then he must have authored her, just as surely as they tell us that if he authored her she must be his property. As a creation "penned" or "penned in." As a sort of "sentence" man has spoken, she has herself been "sentenced": fated, jailed, for he has both "indited" her and "indicted" her. As a thought he has "framed," she has been both "framed" (enclosed) in his texts, glyphs, graphics, and "framed up" (found guilty, found wanting) in his cosmologies.55

The inconsistency of Lucy's narrative, and of Jane Eyre's narrative, emanates from her apprehension of the blankness enveloping an existence denied a context and in the conflict between her desire to be "authored," "sentenced," and "framed," and her desire for self-articulation; however, to exist within the protective and consistent context of male authorship is to renounce a different voice and narrative.

Lucy's preparation in her narrative, however, is deceptively presented as minimal. As "a mere looker-on at life," Lucy gathers the material from "a quiet nook, whence unobserved I could observe" (165-166). Variously described as a shadow or a ghost,

Lucy exists on the margins of her own narrative; as a spectator- creator, she resembles Hawthorne's own emblem of the artist: 99

a spiritualized Paul Pry, hovering invisible round man and woman, witnessing their deeds, searching into their hearts, borrowing brightness from felicity and shade from their sorrow, and retaining no emotion peculiar to himself.56

Her resemblance to Hawthorne's artist-heroes is reinforced in her active voyeurism: from her "watchtower" and "through the enchantment of distance," she absorbs the lives of others into her weak and blank narrative (85). As with Hawthorne's Prys and Coverdales, Lucy's voyeurism is inscribed with a desire to penetrate, to know without being known, and to dominate the objects of her observation. One of her freedoms of exile is that she is able to maintain the distance necessary to be a "spectator instead of a spectacle."

Lucy's alienated psyche, her "homeless, anchorless, unsupported mind," echoes the mind of another nineteenth-century schizophrenic,

Poe's William Wilson, whose "countless subdivisions... .several large chambers communicating with each other" signifies a compartmentalized 58 self-expression or, rather, self-diffusion. The effect of Lucy's voyeuristic activities and extreme ego flexibility is her dependence on others for self-affirmation. The female characters in the novel are specters of the absence and alienation as experienced but not incorporated by Lucy; it is from the narratives of these women that Lucy's narrative is created. However, Lucy's narrative pursues the ghost of her life through other feminine lives which she perceives as more real than her own life. Her ontologicai instability is manifest in Ginevra's multiple names for her, in the other characters insistence on addressing her, and only her, by her full name, and 100

in the questions of identity which echo throughout the novel:

"'Who are you. Miss Snowe?"1.. .'"But are you anybody"1 (367-368)?

In Villette the most dramatic emblem of feminine silence and alienation is the nun. In her earlier fiction, the image of the nun

represents a life of restraint and feminine seclusion: in Jane Eyre

Rochester perceives Jane as a diminutive nun, and in Shirley the

seclusion of Nunnwood, an inaccessible dell containing the ruins of a convent, is coveted by Shirley and Caroline. In Bronte's last novel, the nun is a silenced image of restraint: "a figure all black or white; the skirts straight, narrow, black; the head bandaged, veiled, white" (290). The legend of the nun, buried in Madame

Beck's garden and resurrected at critical points in Lucy's narrative, reads that she was "buried alive for some sin against her vow" and continues to haunt the place of her burial (123). This sin, as this novel of self-surveillance corrobates, involved some unchecked expression of feeling. Like Bertha she haunts the attic and isolated places, and like Bertha she appears at moments of emotional crises and articulates, as an emblem of restraint and indulgence, the conflict between expression and repression. This conflict and its presence within the novel are reified in Lucy's perception of

Catholicism as a religion of self-alienation, in the "conventual silence and stagnation" of Madame Beck's school, itself formerly a convent, and in the depiction of Labassecour as a "land of convents and confessionals" (224, 114).

Gothic stock devices in Bronte, as Robert Heilman and Charles

Burkhart have so persuasively argued, are not merely agents of 101

melodrama but signify "the terror of meeting one's self face to face," and the fate of the nun, unlike the fate of Bertha, underscores 59 this distinction. The nun, that specter of "romance and

unreality," is exposed as not the ghost of the buried nun nor the ghost of Paul's beloved Justine Marie but as nothing more than an ardent suitor's convenient disguise for gaining entrance into

Madame Beck's school:

My head reeled, for by the faint night-lamp, I saw stretched in my bed the old phantom—the NUN In a moment, without exclamation, I had rushed on the haunted couch; nothing leaped out, or sprang, or stirred; all the movement was mine, so was all the life, the reality, the substance, the force; as my instinct felt. I tore her up—the incubus! I held her on high —the goblin! I shook her loose—the mystery! And down she fell—down all round me—down in shreds and fragments—and I trode upnn her (564).

With the specter nun laid out on her bed, Lucy is forced to confront the terrors of world-disinheritance and repression and to acknowledge that "all the movement was mine, so was all the life, the reality."

In this highly symbolic moment, Lucy rushes and destroys the specter of her "long-continued mental conflict" and an emblem of female denial and silence (296). The destruction of the nun suggests Lucy's liberation from this specter of denial and silence; however, attached to the head of the disembodied nun is a note which introduces ambiguity into Lucy's emotional liberation:

"The nun of the attic bequeaths to Lucy Snowe her wardrobe" (564).

Auerbach argues that Lucy's inheritance of the nun's habit symbolizes her induction into a world of feminine power and communion in which 102

"she is initiated into a world as well as denied one"; however,

although Villette is a novel about and by women, it is not "in

possession of the Amazons," and Lucy's inheritance of the nun's

habit and its manifestation in her final isolation is not a strategy

of choice but a strategy of survival.

Lucy does not, as the reader does, connect her condemnation

to solitude and her inheritance of the nun's habit but presents her

narrative as an alternative to conventual silence and repression:

"I might just now, instead of writing this heretic narrative, be

counting my beads in the cell of a certain Carmelite convent on the

Boulevard of Crecy in Villette" (191). This "heretic narrative "

vacillates between expression and repression, between self-surveillance and self-indulgence, and between concealment and revelation. Her

narrative is not a simple alternative to conventual silences but an

incorporation of them as well. Like her strategy of isolation, many of the strategies—of deceit, of self-denial, of voyeurism—of the

narrative are strategies of the convent. Just as Lucy consigns her

letters to the tomb of the nun, she consigns her narrative to a burial within these conventual strategies. In a sympathetic confrontation with the muffled stare of the nun, Lucy repeats the questions of identity directed to her throughout her narrative and describes her own featureless and blank stare: '"Who are you? and why do you come to me?1 She stood mute. She had no face—no features: all below her brow was marked with a white cloth; but she had eyes, and they viewed me" (354). The nun, as inhabited by the slick Alfred de Hamal, is a parody of Gothic melodrama, but 103

it is as a projection of Lucy Snowe's repressed psyche, as symbolized

in this mirroring of her own watchful and silenced anonymity, that

she is best apprehended.

There is general bewilderment and criticism about the opening chapters of Villette; many critics complain that these Bretton

reminiscences have little to do with the major portion of the narrative and that they mislead the reader into believing that the emphasis of the book is Poliy Home instead of Lucy Snowe; however, the opening Bretton chapters of communion and exile frame, as the word "home" frames Lucy's narrative, and reify the exclusion of Lucy alerting the reader to the narrator's own marginality within her narrative and her reliance on others to create her story. The novel begins with the last biannual visit of the orphan Lucy Snowe, whose permanent residence is just as undefined as the kinsfolk she shares it with, to her godmother's house in Bretton, a town so long connected with that family that it bears their name. In distinct contrast to Lucy's nurtureless and homeless existence, the Bretton home is enlivened by good spirits and thrives on mutual affection and devotion of mother and son. Into this house, comes the motherless Polly Home, who is temporarily deposited with the

Brettons during her father's absence. Although a tiny child, Polly has long assumed the responsibilities of her dead mother for her father and herself; at a time when she should be playing with dolls,

Polly has learned to mimic, in ways that the adolescent Lucy has not, and has internalized the proper psychology and activities of the young woman: 104

When I say child I use an inappropriate and undescriptive term—a term suggesting any picture rather than that of the demure little person in a mourning frock and white chemisette, that might just have fitted a good-sized doll— perched now on a high chair beside a stand, whereon was her toy work-box of white varnished wood, and holding in her hands a shred of a handkerchief, which she was professing to hem, and at which she bored perseveringly with a needle, that in her fingers seemed almost a skewer, pricking herself ever and anon, marking the cambric with a track of minute red dots; occasionally starting when the perverse weapon—swerving from her control—inflicted a deeper stab than usual; but still silent, diligent, absorbed, womanly [13).

Like Lucy, Polly is a child who has been dispossessed of childhood.

As a perverse and miniaturized image of the feminine ideal, Polly represents woman as an infantile doll; her adaptation of womanly self-governance and activity italicizes the conditioning of the female child and the similar expectations of the female child and woman. In her eagerness to please her father, Polly has comprehended and internalized the female habits of silence, even within pain or violence, and self-denial. At the age of six, she already understands that she must adapt herself to the interests of the men in her life and that her portion of sweets should be given to Graham or her father.

Ten years later, when she re-enters Lucy's life again, Lucy affectionately compares her to a lap dog in the seat of a male master and decides that she had "demeaned herself with distinction" (514).

Polly, absorbed in her grief over her father's absence and her love for Graham, has little energy to spare for the neglected Lucy.

It is only after Polly's reappearance, with z new name and new title, 105 that they recognize their early mutual dependence. In the opening chapters, Polly's familial alienation parallels Lucy's, yet Polly is able to dramatize and to indulge her loss whereas Lucy can only retreat from emotion and the world. It is within Polly's talents for self-dramatization that Lucy, and the reader, looks for the articulation of Lucy's feelings. Upon her father's departure, Lucy projects into Polly's pronounced despair the cry of eternal abandon­ ment: "'Why has thou forsaken me?' "(21). It is a cry that runs throughout the narrative. Just as Polly utters Lucy's sense of betrayal, she is fearless, as fearless as Lucy is fearful, in her pursuit of Lucy's own love, Graham: "One would have thought the child had no mind or life of her own, but must necessarily live, move, and have her being in another: now that her father was taken from her, she nestled to Graham, and seemed to feel by his feelings: to exist in his existence" (24-25). At moments when Polly represses her feelings, it is Lucy who experiences the tension of unexpressed emotions and who seeks relief: "I wished that she would utter some hysterical cry, so that I might get relief and be at ease" (11). Polly is as active as Lucy is still, as involved as

Lucy is detached, yet it is their conditions of dependence and abandonment rather than their differences which cement their mutual understanding. When Polly declares that '"in this way I cannot— cannot live,'" it is a direct declaration of the "'dreadful miz-er-y1" that inhabits the heart of Lucy Snowe as well (33).

The end of the Bretton chapters signifies the end of communion and Lucy's re-engagement with the harsh and worsening reality of 106 her life. It is at the end of the Bretton experience that Lucy, in a gesture of self-embrace, allows herself to embrace and comfort Polly.

This embrace acts as a formal closure of the brighter chapters in

Lucy's past. After Bretton, Lucy drifts into eight years of silence, disengagement, and personal devastation. It is only after

Bretton that the reader understands Lucy's apprehensions about

Polly's future to be apprehensions about her own: '"How will she get through this world, or battle with this life? How will she bear the shocks and repulses, the humiliations and desolations, which books, and my own reason tell me prepared for all flesh'"(35)? The extent of Lucy's alienation is evident in her reliance on her mind and on literature but not on experience to formulate an understanding of the world. When she is reunited with the untried and still beautiful child, Lucy realizes that such apprehensions should have been directed at her own future:

"As a child I feared for you; nothing that has life was ever more susceptible than your nature in infancy: under harshness, or neglect, neither your outward nor your inward self would have ripened to what they now are. Much pain, much fear, much struggle would have troubled the very lines of your features, broken their regularity, would have harassed your nerves into a fever of habitual irritation: you would have lost in health and cheerfulness, in grace and sweetness" (449).

Lucy is aware of the physical and mental effects of the unfavorable circumstances of her life; however, as she initially perceived herself in the abandoned Polly, she generalizes the particulars of her life to embrace any life of deprivation. She can only understand her life or the lives of others through the act of 107

comparison and frequently perceives her life and the lives of others

as paradigms rather than as an expression of an individual existence.

Finally, Polly, in her marriage to Graham, expresses not what Lucy

is but what Lucy is not: "M think it is deemed good that you two

should live in peace and be happy... .Some lives are thus blessed:

it is the attesting trace and lingering evidence of Eden. Other

lives run from the first another course1" (449). Polly Home is

reduced to the abstraction of Eden, and her life possesses meaning only as it emphasizes Lucy's expulsion from Eden.

The other female touchstones of Lucy's alienation are Miss

Marchmont, Madame Beck, Ginevra Fanshawe, and Vashti. The

life of Miss Marchmont, an elderly spinster employer and surrogate mother, anticipates many of the events in Lucy's life: it is within the confines of Miss Marchmont's narrow celibate existence that Lucy learns to minimize her expectations and to conform to the available space; it is Miss Marchmont's frustration in love, the death of her fiance, which is re-enacted in Lucy's loss of Paul Emanuel; it is her legacy of suffering and isolation that Lucy inherits and enacts; it is her death that gives birth to a self-reliant Lucy and forces her back into the world; and it is Miss Marchmont's final surrender to the poetry of memory that Lucy's narrative impersonates even as it relates it. Like many mothers in history. Miss Marchmont's initial legacy to Lucy is disinheritance which is translated into a legacy of guilt and finally gives Lucy the means to pursue an independence and prosperity simitar to Miss Marchmont's; in

Villette the reclamation of the mother occurs in Lucy's recapitulation 108

of the lives of her surrogate mothers, Miss Marchmont and Madame

Beck.

Like the other characters who appear in the narrative only as

they are summoned by Lucy's consciousness, the stealthy figure of

Madame Beck appears and disappears in response to Lucy's need

for an antagonist, a maternal model of feminine competency, or a

rival. The prosperous and self-contained Madame Beck is a foil to

Lucy's Protestant rigidity and unworldliness; however, the espionage

and voyeuristic activities of Madame Beck do not offset but mirror

the activities of the narrator. Her "watch-words" of "surveillance"

and "espionage" are Lucy's own words, and the description of

Madame gliding "ghost-like through the house watching and spying everywhere, peering through every key-hole, listening behind every door" echoes Lucy's apparitional existence (82). Absent from the novel during most of Lucy's developing relationship with

Paul, Madame, who was earlier thought to be a rival for the attentions of Graham, is invoked as a conspirator against the realization of

Lucy's happiness and a rival for Paul's affections. Madame Beck is an unconvincing conspirator or rival; it is Lucy's own protective self-restraints and habitual repression of feeling that conspire against the possibility of happiness with Paul. In her own school in the postlapsarian solitude of Faubourg Clotilde, Lucy settles into an existence mediated by and rivaling the existence of Madame Beck.

With similarities to Lucy's own unfinished story, Madame Beck is dropped from the narrative, then resurrected and dismissed in a sentence addressing the fates of her fellow conspirators. The fate 109 of Madame Beck, who "prospered all the days of her life," is the fate that Lucy allows her readers to imagine as her own (594).

Bronte critics generally dismiss Cinevra Fanshawe as an

"idiot beauty," yet it is Ginevra who is the most astute interpreter of Lucy's alienation from self and world. Lucy and Ginevra first meet on "The Vivid," an aptly named ship bound from London to

Villette, and it is Ginevra who suggests Madame Beck as a potential employer. On the ship, in the example of a distressed young woman married to a rich old man, Lucy acknowledges a fate opposite to the one of independence and poverty, and Ginevra confronts the fate for which she has been cultivated:

"But I know what it is to be poor: they are poor enough at home—papa and mama, and all of them. Papa is called Captain Fanshawe; he is an officer on half-pay, but well-descended, and some of our connections are great enough; but my uncle and godpapa de Bassompierre, who lives in France, is the only one that helps us: he educates us girls. I have five sisters and three brothers. By-and-by we are to marry—rather elderly gentlemen, I suppose, with cash: papa and mama manage that'1 (61).

Although Ginevra relies on the conventional feminine strategies of beauty and duplicity, she is not less marginal nor less objectified than exiled Lucy within her own life; indeed, even the miserable solitude of Lucy Snowe seems preferable to "earning a living" in the standard manner of the Fanshawe women (61). From her position of alienation, Ginevra is able to comprehend the extent of Lucy's dispossession and in curious exchanges of narrator and creator,

Ginevra often articulates and dramatizes Lucy's alienation. Her designation of Lucy as "nobody's daughter" is descriptive of her 110

own patriarchal absence and her dependence on surrogate fathers.

Similar to the relationship between Polly and Lucy, the

relationship between Ginevra and Lucy is based on a mutual need

for self-affirmation through comparison with another and seemingly different life. For Ginevra, Lucy's plainness and unhappiness are a foil to her beauty and a confirmation of her accommodation to society's expectations of women. In an act of self-affirmation,

Ginevra leads Lucy to a mirror to contemplate, within the two contrasting reflections of femininity, her favored image:

Putting her arm through mine, she drew me to the mirror... .She turned me and herself round; she viewed us both on all sides; she smiled, she waved her curls, she retouched her sash, she spread her dress, and finally, letting go of my arm and curtseying with mock respect, she said: "I would not be you for a kingdom" (169).

Ginevra's dismissal of Lucy reifies Lucy's obsessive self-denial through­ out the novel. This denial extends not only to her denial of feelings but also encompasses her denial of physical needs: to Ginevra's ever present hunger, she offers her own food. For Lucy, Ginevra's feminine duplicity and shallowness reinforce her conceit of moral and intellectual superiority; however, Ginevra is also perceived as a favored object of love and as such as a vehicle for the expression of Lucy's suppressed romantic fantasies:

By True Love was Ginevra followed: never could she be aione I imagined her grateful in secret, loving now with reserve; but purposing one day to show how much she loved: I pictured her faithful hero half conscious of her coy fondness, and comforted by that consciousness: I conceived an electric chord of sympathy between them, a fine chain of mutual understanding, sustaining Ill

union through a separation of a hundred leagues— carrying, across mound and hollow, communication by prayer and wish. Cinevra gradually became with me a sort of heroine (186).

Ginevra is a heroine unlike Jane Eyre or Lucy Snowe; she is

Bronte's comment on the conventional heroine but instead of being simply a repetition of Blanche Ingram, her fate is drawn with compassion and her "life by proxy" is revealed as no more self- abdicating than other feminine alternatives (573). Indeed, her shallowness conceals sufficient depth and strength to engineer an adaptation of her inherited fate: instead of pursuing a marriage of convenience and money, she pursues and elopes with the man she loves. The reality of Ginevra Fanshawe, as with the other characters, exists in the consciousness of her chronicler; her desires and motivations, when separate from Lucy's, are barely articulated within the narrative. As heroine and as the representative of "True Love,"

Ginerva is reduced to a romantic abstraction which emphasizes Lucy

Snowe's emotional deprivation.

Although she seeks self-articulation through the lives of other women, Lucy rejects conventional expectations of women, and she rejects art that reinforces feminine stereotypes: the queenly sensuality of Reuben's "Cleopatra," Lucy denounces as "an enormous piece of claptrap" and the female alternatives of "La vie d'une femme," she declares are "grim and gray as burglars, and cold and vapid as ghosts... .insincere, ill-humoured, bloodless, brainless nonentities"

(236,238). At the literal center of the novel, Lucy locates her own vision of feminine art, not as conceived and perpetuated by 112

male artists but as expressed by and through a woman. In Vashti,

the nameless actress, art and artist merge into a spectacle of

destruction and creation. Vashti, a demon comprised "neither of

woman nor of man," is a portrait of the self-consuming and suffering

female artist "locked in struggle, rigid in resistance" (305-306). The

passions struggling for articulation within this anonymous artist

equally fascinate and appall Lucy:

It was a marvellous sight: a mighty revelation. It was a spectacle low, horrible, immoral (306).

The force of her ambivalence towards Vashti underscores the

intensity of her struggle between expression and repression. Vashti

is perceived as the rebellious "fallen, insurgent, banished" angel with "HELL on her straight, haughty brow"; within this fate of disinheritance is written the "Hate and Murder and Madness" of a female genius unexpressed and the punishment for attempted expression (307,306). In a novel which observes a silence about feminine art and which depicts feminine world-denial and self-contem­ plation, Vashti dramatizes the terror of an artist consigned to self- consumption, of the terror of the self-devouring female artist. As she approaches self-utterance, as she resists "to the latest the rape of every faculty, would see, would hear, would breathe, would live, up to, within," her performance is abruptly terminated by fire within the theater (309). The avenging hand of Thornfield

Hall penetrates Villette to check passion and to smite transgression and to forever silence the self-expression that Bronte envisioned within the female artist. The secret of Vashti, like the secret 113 creative activities of Lucy, is kept from a world which would judge her, as Graham Bretton does, "as a woman, not an artist" (309).

Vashti was fashioned after an actress Bronte had seen in

Brussels, but she is a rather horrifying metaphor for the restraints and anger experienced by Bronte. With her great capacity for hatred and her growing fears about her self-dependent art, it was inevitable that she should create an agent to articulate her anger and fears; however, like other scenes of violence within her fiction, especially the presentation of Jane Eyre's dissected and headless women, Vashti explodes into the book without preparation and vanishes just as quickly; the reader is left to discover within the shadowy and inoffensive Lucy Snowe sufficiently concealed emotion to produce a vision of a woman being devoured by her own repressed desires and thwarted ambitions. Vashti embodies not only Lucy and

Bronte's unconscious anger but the impulse behind their art as well, especially the impulse behind Bronte's exhaustively repetitive art:

I have said that she does not resent her grief. No; the weakness of that word would make it a lie. To her, what hurts becomes immediately embodied: she looks on it as a thing that can be attacked, worried down, torn in shreds (306).

Within the same, short chapter Vashti and Lucy engage in parallel struggles for self-expression. Lucy's struggle between

Reason and Feeling, between society and self, between convention and desire, is articulated in her dual response to Graham's letter.

In love with Graham, although she denies all special feelings for him, responding to his letter presents the possibilities of affectionately 114

addressing him and of impressing him with her mastery of the pen.

Lucy realizes that she cannot betray her heart or her pen to Graham,

and she resolves to write "two answers—one for my own relief, the

other for Graham's perusal":

To begin with: Feeling and 1 turned Reason out of doors, drew against her bar and bolt, then we sat down, spread our paper, dipped in ink an eager pen, and, with deep enjoyment, poured out our sincere heart when, then, I had given expression to a closely-clinging and deeply-honouring attachment— an attachment that wanted to attract to itself and take into its own lot all that was painful in the destiny of its object; that would, if it could, have absorbed and conducted away all storms and lightnings from an existence viewed with a passion of solicitude—then, just at that moment, the doors of my heart would shake, bolt and bar would yield, Reason would leap in vigorous and revengeful, snatch the full sheets, read, sneer, erase, tear up, re-write, fold, seal, direct, and send a terse, curt missive of a page (301).

This struggle for self-expression is not confined to the repetitive contest of Reason and Feeling; it is a struggle to liberate oneself from conventions and self-restraints that inhibit vision and the articulation of that vision, that consigns an artist to sex and a compartmentalized vision. Considering the inhibitions within and the punishments for feminine self-expression, Lucy concludes that Reason, in her eviction of Feeling and expression, "did right" (301). It was a decision Bronte failed to make in her unrestrained letter to Constantin Heger, but one that she advocated in the fairytale resolution of The Professor, in Jane's marriage to Rochester, in the double weddings of Caroline and

Shirley, and in the solitude of Lucy. As manifested in her progressively pessimistic resolutions, the sacrifice of self-expression 115 to the restraints of popular expectations was a sacrifice she was less inclined to advocate; perhaps, if Bronte had lived to complete

Emma, Vashti would have completed her performance.

The experience of identification is denied to the male characters in Villette. In Charlotte Bronte's fiction, there exists no Heathdiff, no male sharer of a feminine existence, nor does there exist a

Catherine, a woman strong enough to locate her identity within masculinity. From Graham Bretton's sturdy, self-contained frame,

Lucy draws strength for her feeble form, but it is a strength of good spirits and fortune which is equally allotted to all of humanity and not supportive of Lucy's special needs. As the indiscriminating and transient benefactor of warmth and solace, Graham acts, without the possibility of involvement or intimacy, as the sun to Lucy's crescent moon. Paul Emanuel is too vain and too self-propelled to play a being or to consider the existence of another as anything other than a potential mirror for his own self-enlargement. Although he is finally translated into the benevolent founder of Lucy's school and the promised sharer of her life, he is a despot among women. His discriminating tyranny over Lucy, his checking of bright colors or emotional expressions, emanates from his recognition of Lucy as "at once mournful and mutinous" (274). His conviction that Lucy needs "much checking, regulating, and keeping down" partially springs from his awareness of her subversive nature but it is primarily evidence of his need to dominate, eternally to be the master, to be the professor of literature to the teacher of English

(433). Self-actuating within the world and self-contained, Bronte's 116 heroes, with the exception of the effeminate Crimsworth, seek only reflections of their existence in the lives of others and do not float, dispossessed of past and allegiance, from one incomplete and compartmentalized self-representation to the next.

Bronte's failure to resolve her fears and conflicts as a woman and as an artist is evident in the intratextuai and intertextual repetition and revision of motifs and characters within her fiction.

Of these repetitions and revisions, Bronte's attempt to resolve her heroines' desire for romantic and self-effacing love and their need for self-containment and chastity dominates her novels. In the most dramatic instances of this attempted resolution, Bronte creates male characters who embody her heroines' self-division.

In Jane Eyre, Jane must choose between the conventional and bloodless St. John Rivers and the sexual and egotistical Rochester.

Her decision to return to Rochester is a triumph of the heart over the head and of lawlessness over convention; however, in her passionate union with the recently blinded and maimed Rochester,

Jane is able to experience passion without the sacrifice of her virginity or reason. This union, as many of Bronte's critics have argued, is her attempt to resolve an unresolvable situation through a symbolic and equalizing castration of the male. In her last novel, Bronte returned to the triangle which mediated Jane Eyre.

Just as Rochester and St. John are emblems of Jane's divided psyche, Graham Bretton and Paul Emanuel are representative of

Lucy's fragmented existence: Graham represents her ambivalent attraction to convention and her desire for containment within 117 family and society, whereas Paul signifies her propensity towards unchecked passion and shares her outcast status. Since Graham is associated with her lost childhood, he becomes identified and loved as someone who provides continguity and as someone who has lived a life opposite from her own shipwrecked existence.

It is Lucy, in the hope of communion, who initiates and embroiders her relationship with Graham. After Lucy learns of his attraction to Ginevra, however, she buries his letters, a burial which signifies her concession to reason, her forfeiture of love and communion, and her self-condemnation to repression and silence. Just as

Graham's difference mediates Lucy's attraction to him, her attraction to Paul is founded on their mutual eccentricity and isolation.

It is in Paul that Lucy finds the male mastery that she yearns for; it is for Paul that she demonstrates the authencity of her writing; it is from Paui that she seeks approval as a writer; and it is in his confession that "nothing now living in this world loves me" that

Lucy locates, as Jane did in Rochester, a sympathetic soul and fellow sufferer (498). Lucy's love for Paul, however, is not contained by passivity or self-abnegation but insists on reproducing in Paul its own creative image:

I felt as if—knowing what I now knew—his countenance would offer a page more lucid, more interesting than ever; I felt a longing to trace in it the imprint of that primitive devotedness, the signs of that half-knightly, half-saintly chivalry which the priest's narrative imputed to his nature. He had become my Christian hero: under that character I wanted to view him [491).

In order to incorporate him into her world of books and imagination. 118 he is elevated from a crude and tyrannical little man to the status of an avenging hero. Her relationship with him is sealed imaginatively and literarily by his departure on the "Paul et Virginie" (564). It is through Paul, monster that he may be, that Lucy is able to imagine and experience love. Her cry, in response to Madame Beck's attempt to separate herself and Paul, of "My heart will break!" is affecting because it is, at last, the cry of a heart released from its closely guarded silence (580). Like Rochester, Paul's presence threatens Lucy's mental and sexual integrity. As in Jane Eyre,

Bronte fails to resolve the debilitation and self-depletion experienced by women in their relationships with men and must, in Villette, repeat the forced resolution of destroying the male.

The incredible fact of Bronte's fiction is its ability to articulate, without resolution, her artistic inhibitions and to generalize those inhibitions into the conflicts of the female artist. In addition to the societal and psychological restraints that foster feminine silence, her heroines exhibit a masochistic desire for male mastery which conflicts with their desire for self-mastery. The dangers of sacrificing self-control to the violent male world are evident in the threatening and fragmenting triangles that inform Jane Eyre and

Villette. Indeed, Bronte's entire canon could be read as an indictment against men for heinous crimes against women. The women in Bronte's world seek resignation to their lives of solitude and silence, whereas the men are volatile and violent: her father was accustomed to destroying fine silk gowns, sawing up chairs, and firing off pistols behind the parsonage; she and her sisters 119

were terrorized for years by Branwell's Byronic seif-dramatization

and dipsomania; and her novels claim the lives and bodies of

abused, imprisoned, and dead women. It is a world in which

male tyranny impedes and cancels not only female speech and

thought but being, in which transgressions of prescribed and

circumscribed behavior are answered with chastisement, and in

which women are buried alive for some undisclosed breach whereas

their male accomplices remain unnamed and unpunished. The dialectic

of master and slave, of teacher and student, is the most insidious

threat to female speech, yet this relationship, the reification of

male power and feminine absence, is the most desired relationship

within her novels. It is so desirable that her heroines live in a

struggle for mastery of their feelings and when such attempted

self-mastery collapses, they must be rescued from their own impulses

of self-abnegation.

Bronte's heroines in their vacillations between independence and

submission, are predecessors of Lawrence's equally ambivalent

women. Her heroines, unconventional on every other point,

become locked into the orbit of a male sun and must be liberated

from their self-abnegating orbit in order to continue their pilgrimage

towards self-creation. In Villette, while determining the method of Lucy's rescue, Bronte has Paul, in anticipation of his destruction, articulate Rochester's fate to Lucy: '"Ah, traitress! traitress! You are resolved to have me quite blind and helpless in your hands'" (389)!

Lucy, too ontologically fragile to serve any existence but her own,

is not redeemed by love or reintegrated into society but is consigned 120

to self-contemplation and exile. It has become critically proper to

acknowledge the ambiguity of Paul's fate; however, Bronte's

conception of the cold, frigid fate of Lucy does not allow for the

return of Paul, and whatever attempts she made to create an

ambiguous ending were concessions to her father, concessions which

were slight and which few but the stubbornly optimistic Victorians

would believe. The ambiguity that critics often assign to the

novel is in fact the ambiguity of Lucy's fate: the exchange of

potential community and love for solitude and speech is an exchange

which may guarantee freedom but which threatens solipsism.

As articulated by Bronte, the female artist's struggles between

self and world and between love and integrity are not marked by

resolution but by loss. The conflict between imagination and reason emanates from a consciousness that attempts to put aside childish things and to enter the adult world of reality; this entrance exacts an alienation from the past and a commitment to a new narrative:

at eighteen the true narrative of life is yet to be commenced. Before that time, we sit listening to a tale, a marvellous fiction; delightful sometimes, and sad sometimes; almost always unreal. Before that time, our world is heroic; its inhabitants half-divine or semi-demon; its scenes are dream- scenes; darker woods, and stranger hiils; brighter skies, more dangerous waters; sweeter flowers, more tempting fruits; wider plains, drearier deserts, sunnier fields than are found in nature, overspread our enchanted gaze. What a moon we gaze on before that time!...at eighteen, drawing near the confines of illusive, void dreams. Elf-land lies behind us, the shores of Reality rise in front. 62

This description of Caroline Helstone as existing between the thresholds of imagination and reality is representational, with the 121

exception of Lucy Snowe, of the Bronte heroine. This childhood

narrative, to which the heroines struggle to return, is an embellish­

ment and exaggeration of nature which is inscribed with the desire

to envision "happy fiction that can create what life denies."63 The

fairies are dead and childhood a blank absence before Lucy begins

her narrative: her conflict between imagination and reality occurs

in a mind long closeted from and distrustful of her past and the

world; her alienated and wounded imagination is too immersed in her

solipsistic and morbid fiction to regain her repressed and much mourned prelapsarian narrative of hope, communion, and "happy

fiction." From a heroic and ambrosial past, she is forever disinherited and like other women writers, who perceive within their personal alienation the manifestation of their historical and

literary disinheritance, her narrative is a witness of feminine dispossession:

A loss of something ever felt I— The first that I could reflect Bereft I was—of what I knew not Too young that any should suspect

A Mourner walked among the children I notwithstanding went about As one bemoaning a Dominion Itself the only Prince cast out—64

Bronte's work, like Emily Dickinson's, is dominated by this pervasive sense of difference and loss—a loss predating consciousness—by her expulsion—as realized in the frigid isolation of Lucy Snowe—from the "Dominion" of "illusive, void dreams," and by her continuing and finally aborted attempt to retrieve the narrative of childhood. NOTES

Chapter I

Epigraphs: Charlotte Bronte, The Professor and Emma, A Fragment (London: J. M. Dent & Sons Ltd., 1975), p. 133; Charlotte Bronte, Jane Eyre (London: Oxford University Press, 1975), pp. 82-83; Charlotte Bronte, Shirley (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1979), pp. 395-396; Charlotte Bronte, Villette (New York: AMS Press, 1982), p. 90. (All further page references to the novels of Charlotte Bronte will correspond to the above editions.)

Elizabeth Hardwick, Seduction and Betrayal: Women and Literature (New York: Random House, Inc., 1975), p. 22.

Simone de Beauvoir, The Second Sex (New York: Bantam Books, Inc., 1970), p. 46.

David Cecil, "Charlotte Bronte as a 'Freak Genius,1" in Charlotte Bronte: Jane Eyre and Villette, A Casebook, ed. Miriam Allott (London: The Macmillan Press Ltd., 1973), p. 167.

Elizabeth Gaskell, The Life of Charlotte Bronte (Baltimore: Penguin Books inc., 1975), p. 507.

Sandra M. Gilbert and Susan Gubar, The Madwoman in the Attic: The Woman Writer and the Nineteenth-Century Literary Imagination (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1979), p. 250.

Thomas J. Wise and J. Alexander Symington, ed., Miscellaneous: The Miscellaneous and Unpublished Writings of Charlotte and Patrick Bronte (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1936), II, 255-256.

-122- 123

7 Virginia Woolf, A Room of One's Own (New York: Harcourt, Brace & World, Inc., 1957), p. 50.

o Margot Peters, Unquiet Soul: A Biography of Charlotte Bronte (Garden City, New York: Doubleday & Company Inc., 1975), p. 27.

g Albert Camus, The Rebel: An Essay on Man in Revolt (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1956), p. 253.

10Shirley, p. 7; Villette, p. 9.

Thomas J. Wise and J. Alexander Symington, eds., The Brontes: Their Lives, Friendships and Correspondence (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1933), I, 139.

1 2 Wise and Symington, The Brontes, I, 155.

13 Wise and Symington, The Brontes, I, 157-158.

14Gaskell, p. 210; Villette, p. 127.

1 5 Wise and Symington, The. Brontes, I, 152; The Professor, p. xi.

16Gaskell, p. 388.

17 Carol T. Christ, "Imaginative Constraint, Feminine Duty, and the Form of Charlotte Bronte's Fiction," Women's Studies, 6 (1979), p. 290.

1 8 The Professor, p. 192.

1 9 Emily Bronte, The Complete Poems of Emily Jane Bronte (New York: Columbia University Press, 1941), pp. 205-206. 124

20 Elizabeth Rigby, "From an unsigned review, Quarterly Review," in The Brontes: The Critical Heritage, ed. Miriam Allott (London and Boston: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1974), p. 116; Anne Mozley, "From an unsigned review. Christian Remembrancer," in The Brontes: The Critical Heritage, p. 207.

21 Elaine Showalter, A Literature of Their Own: British Women Novelists from Bronte to Lessing (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1977), p. 25.

22 Wise and Symington, The Brontes, Ml, 31.

23 Wise and Symington, The Brontes, IV, 76-77.

24 Matthew Arnold, "Haworth Churchyard," in The Poems of Matthew Arnold (London: Longman's Group Ltd., 1979), p. 427; Allott, The Brontes, p. 201.

25Woolf, p. 72.

25Woolf, p. 72.

27Allott, Charlotte Bronte, p. 104.

28 Emily Dickinson, The Complete Poems of Emily Dickinson (Boston: Little,Brown and Company, 1960), p. 70. 29 The Professor, p. 227.

30 The Professor, pp. 119-120.

31 Charlotte Bronte, "Frances," in The Complete Poems of Charlotte Bronte, ed. Clement Shorter (St. Clair Shores, Michigan: Scholarly Press, 1978), p. 22.

32 Jane Eyre, p. 355. 125

33 Sylvia Plath, "Elm," in Ariel (New York: Harper and Row,

1965), p. 16; Jane Eyre, p. 357.

Gaskell, p. 210.

35Shirley, p. 264; Villette, p. 33. 36

Jane Eyre, p. 13.

37Shirley, p. 731.

38Shirley, p. 282. 39 Jane Eyre, p. 10. 40 The Professor, pp. 192-193. 41 Nina Auerbach, Woman and the Demon: The Life of a Victorian Myth (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1982), pp. 61-62.

^Shirley, p. 60.

43 Shirley, p. 62.

44 John Ruskin, Sesame and Lilies (New York: American Book

Company, 1916), p. 96.

Shirley, pp. 360-361.

Shirley, p. 362. ' 47 Phyllis Chesier, Women and Madness (New York: Avon Books, 1972), p. 18. 48 Jane Eyre, p. 407. 126

49 Adrienne Rich, On Lies, Secrets, and Silence: Selected Prose 1966-1978 (New York: W. W. Norton and Company, 1979), p. 89.

50Arnold, p. 287.

51Cilbert and Gubar, p. 402.

52 Henry James, The Wings of the Dove (Baltimore: Penguin Books inc., 1965), pp. 158, 156; Shirley, p. 550.

53 Webster's New Twentieth Century Dictionary (New York: Collins World Publishing Company, 1978), p. 327.

54 Mary Jacobus, "The Difference of View," in Women Writing and Writing About Women, ed. Mary Jacobus (New York: Barnes

and Noble Books, 1979), p. 11.

55Villette, p. 460; Gilbert and Gubar, p. 13.

and Sketches (New York: Holt, Rinehart and Winston, 1970), Nathaniel Hawthorne, Nathaniel Hawthorne: Selected Tales p. 404.

Dianne F. Sadoff, Monsters of Affection: Dickens, Eliot , and Bronte on Fatherhood (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1982), p. 129.

58Villette, p. 56; Edgar Allan Poe, Selected Writings of Edgar Allan Poe (Boston: Houghton Mifflin Company, 1956), p. 121.

59 Charles Burkhart, Charlotte Bronte: A Psychosexual Study of Her Novels (London: Victor Gollancz Ltd., 1973), p. 114.

fin Nina Auerbach, Communities of Women: An Idea in Fiction (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1978), pp. 110, 113. 127

61Kate Miliett, Sexual Politics (New York: Avon Books, 1970), p. 194.

62Shirley, p. 109.

63Peters, p. 139.

64 Dickinson, pp. 448-449. CHAPTER II. Something of an Outlaw: The (In)Articulation of the Rebel as Artist in The Mill on the Floss

For there is no creature whose inward being is so strong that it is not greatly determined by what lies outside it. A new Theresa will hardly have the opportunity of reforming a conventual life, any more than a new Antigone will spend her heroic piety in daring all for the sake of a brother's burial: the medium in which their ardent deeds took shape is for ever gone. But we insignificant people with our daily words and acts are preparing the lives of many Dorotheas, some of which may present far sadder sacrifice than that of the Dorothea whose story we know.

Middiemarch

You may try—but you can never imagine what it is to have a man's force of genius in you, and yet suffer the slavery of being a girl.

Daniel Deronda

The world of the imagination.. .becomes a more complete, more totalized reality than that of everyday existence, a three-dimensional reality that would add a factor of depth to the flat surface with which we are usually confronted. Art would be the expression of a completed reality.

Paul De Man

Sympathy is but a living again through our own past in a new form.

"Janet's Repentence"

-128- 129

George Eliot's second and most autobiographical novel. The

Mill on the Floss, is heavily mediated by the texts of two

influential male authors: John Bunyan and William Wordsworth.

In such a novel, a spiritual and emotional pilgrimage from doubt

to faith, from alienation to affirmation, from despiar to redemption

would be expected; however, in this repetitive and circular narrative

of a woman's dispossession of imagination and future, the tale is

inverted: there is no celestial city for Maggie Tulliver at the end

of her circular journey, nor is there an imaginative articulation of

the past, only a repetitive and destructive spiritual statis, childhood

fixation, and death. The novel is a dialogue between narrative and

plot, between Eliot and Maggie, and the imaginative and literal

reclamation of the past. With schizophrenic simultaneity, the novel

is motivated by a compulsion to arrest "the dire years whose awful

name is Change" yet condemns a mind so equally fixated in the past that it believes "the end of our lives will have nothing in

it like the beginning." This simultaneous attraction to and

renunciation of the past creates a self-conflict within the novel which, necessarily unresolved, overwhelms narrative and plot, creator and character in its rush towards a fictitious integrity.

Like her heroines who share a penchant for the misreading of social and literary texts, Eliot constructs The Mill on the Floss from her unconscious and deliberate misreading of Bunyan and Wordsworth; however, unlike her Promethean bound heroines, Eliot is able to translate her misreadings into female reconstructions of male texts of spiritual progress and self-articulation which italicize the 130 female experience of dispossession and dis-evolution, of progressive alienation from self and community, of the static and regressive emotional development of the nineteenth-century woman, and of the disjunction between imaginative imperatives and their articulation in reality. In their "wide hopeless yearning for that something, whatever it was, that was greatest and best on this earth," Eliot measures the distance between the extraordinary women of ordinary opportunities and their (in)articulation of that "genteel romance... 2 full of vague power, originality, and general rebellion."

Charlotte Bronte had been dead for two years when George

Eliot published her first work of fiction. The fact evokes juxtaposing images of Bronte's precocious and self-consuming commitment to art with Eliot's latent self-discovery and creative arousal; it also elicits an appreciation of the comparative difficulties with which these two nineteenth-century female Titans gained access to and articulation of their creative powers and impulses: Bronte, although she was thirty at publication, had progressed from a secretive and self-condemnatory writer of adolescent fantasies to a self-articulating, albeit self-conflicted, fiction; whereas Eliot's distrust of the imagination and of a self unmediated by humiliation and denial prohibited, even when she had become a respected writer and translator and one of the intellectual forces of London's literati, her desire to write fiction. Eliot's liberation into fiction corresponded with her increasing alienation from the social and familial restraints which silenced the young Mary Ann Evans.

For both Bronte and Eliot, their progressive alienation from 131 such restraints nurtured and facilitated creative expression: Bronte, existing in an ambience of absence and eccentricity, found strength and art in her distance and dissimilarity from the world; Eliot, after the death of her father, her estrangement from her brother, and her elopement with George Henry Lewes, cultivated in the familial and societal exclusions the freedoms of, as she inscribes

Maggie, "an outlawed soul" (413).

Existing as an outlaw in the provinces of Eliot's fiction, however, possesses a different signification than it does in Bronte's claustrophobic world: for the latter's heroines, the prototypical recorders of woman's disinheritance, exile is social as well as psychological, and their art, an art that simultaneously eradicates and celebrates their otherness, emanates from and is validated in their alienation; for Eliot's heroines, exile is italicized in the novels' omniscient and masculine narration—a narration which further distances her heroines and herself from the articulation of a female voice—in their covetous pursuit of, much like their creator's, and exclusion from the masculine world and its systems of knowledge, and in their capitulation to Sameness, to the conventions of the community. Bronte's outlaws attempt to subvert personal and social history and manipulate their confined environments from their metaphorical corners, whereas Eliot's ambivalent rebels are overwhelmed and consumed by their division and by an unwieldy and uncomprehending (and uncomprehensible) environment.

The imaginations of Maggie Tulliver and Dorothea Brooke do not experience the romantic and fantastic flights of self-creation of 132

Jane Eyre and Lucy Snowe but are moored firmly in the postlapsarian and non-heroic realities of mediocrity and sexism. Eliot's refusal to grant her heroines the voice and anger of Bronte's heroines, to imagine destinies incongruent with nineteenth-century conventions, has provoked much criticism of her self-hating and masculine vision and an insistence on the ideological, as opposed to the realistic, responsibilities of art:

the objection is not that Dorothea should have married Will, but that she should have married anybody at all, that she should ultimately be denied the opportunity given Will to find her own paths and forge her energies into some new mold. ...We could have had this vision if the author held the mirror to....that world she forced into existence when she stopped being Mary Ann Evans and became George Eliot instead.^

The operative cliche in Eliot criticism attempts to locate her fiction of female frustration in her unconventional life: if she had been able to marry Lewes, then she would have felt less compelled to reinscribe conventional, and self-condemnatory, expectations within her fiction; however, although such criticism possesses a psychological truth about Eliot's displacement of her crimes and punishment onto her heroines, it ignores the absence of self-reproduction in works by women writers, and it omits Eliot's pioneering and resolute commit­ ment to an aesthetic doctrine of the commonplace:

the existence of insignificant people has very important consequences in the world. It can be shown to affect the price of bread and the rate of wages, to call forth many evil tempers from the selfish, and many heroisms from the sympathetic, and, in other ways, to play no small part in the tragedy of life.^ 133

This epousal of "insignificant people" is accompanied by a conflicting

nostalgia for the past and for its heroic expressions. Eliot's middle-

class heroines, Maggie Tulliver and Dorothea Brooke, are dominated

by this nostalgia and by their desires to evade commonplace destinies;

in the end, however, they are overwhelmed by their creator's aesthetic

doctrine, by their insignificance, an insignificance which Eliot

endorses as the subject of art and as the form of contemporary

heroism. In its attraction to the heroic and in its celebration of the ordinary, her fiction creates a schizophrenic tension, not unlike

that which exists between the imaginative and the literal recovery of the past, in which it can neither renounce the egotistical and

the noble, nor can it celebrate the altruistic and the conventional:

There are few prophets in the world; few sublimely beautiful women; few heroes. I can't afford to give all my love and reverence to such rarities; I want a great deal of those feelings for my everyday fellow-men.5

Eliot's appetite, like her heroines', for the heroic is satisifed by transposing the heroic onto the commonplace; however, unlike their creator, Maggie Tulliver and Dorothea Brooke's heroic ambitions can never be self-articulated but must be voiced through a

redefinition of heroism which necessitates their capitulation to the restraints and literality mediating ordinary nineteenth century female existence. Eliot, aware of her unlikely emergence from such restraints and literality, confessed that "few women, I fear, have had such reason as I have to think the long, sad years were worth living for the sake of middle age." By middle age, her 134

heroines' romantic and heroic aspirations have been deflated: Hetty

Sorrel and Maggie Tulliver are dead, Gwendolen Harleth is widowed

and hysterically propelling herself into life, and Dorothea Brooke

is "absorbed into the life another.. .only known in a certain circle 7 as a wife and mother."

Regardless of the inevitable tragedies awaiting their capitulation

to convention and community, the most distinctive trait of Eliot's

heroines is their heroic and unceasing attempts to author, within

the confines of patriarchy, their own destinies: adopting a

conventional feminine model, her heroines reconstruct that model

to satisfy their desires and ambitions; however, their adoption of

and enclosure within that model proves fatal: Hetty is seduced

and betrayed by her feminine vanity, Maggie finds in self-renunciation

the means for self-creation and self-destruction, Gwendolen and

Dorothea are subordinated in marriages that promised to grant them

a vicarious expression of their ambitions. In her most popular fiction,

Eliot's female artists direct their creative energies and vague yearnings

toward the creation of more self-expressive lives within the inhibitions of history and community, within the constraints of alienating and

feeble literature:

She rejoiced to feel herself exceptional; but her horizon was that of the genteel romance where the heroine's soul poured out in her journal full of vague power, originality, and general rebellion, while her life moves strictly in the sphere of fashion.8

This juxtaposition of imagination and reality, of rebellion and

fashion, inscribes the subjugation of power, originality, and rebellion

to a narrow and limiting world. This literary model, which mediates 135 the formation of her heroines' desires, writes not in the public inscriptions of the artist but in a private catharsis of art and not in self-articulation but in a reinforcement of feminine literature and of the obscurities and generalities which mystify the feminine and inhibit female self-comprehension. In their misreading of literature as life, of compliance as rebellion, and of passion as self-articulation, Eliot's heroines insist on a schizophrenic reliance on convention for rebellion, a reliance that earned Eliot the reputation of "a deluded woman who held phantom sway over subjects g even more deluded than herself."

Her female artists assert that art is initimately bound to existence and is articulated, not in public, stylistic, or theoretical contexts, but in the personal and the remedial; they anticipate

Virginia Woolf's domestic creators/connectors in their reigning desire to "make life beautiful—I mean everybody's life." The few women in Eliot's fiction who are allowed to translate their creative impulses into a public art have subjugated life to art:

I wanted to live out the life that was in me, and not be hampered with other lives.... I did not want a child....! did not want to marry.... I had a right to seek my freedom from a bondage that I hated.11

Princess Halm-Eberstein, who abandoned Daniel Deronda as a child to pursue her singing career, had to place herself outside of the conventional roles of wife and mother in order to create a life that would best allow the articulation of her gift. Ironically, this self-creation, this Promethean assertion of the self, which closely parallels Eliot's emergence as a writer, is depicted as a 136 narcissistic retreat from the natural feelings of wife and mother and from the cultural imperatives of feminine duty and responsibility.

The final price of female artistic self-assertion is alienation from emotions and instinct and imprisonment within a self-referential world constructed solely for the unhampered articulation of art; however, Eliot invests the Princess with not a little sympathy and with many of the social and emotional truths of her own unnatural life:

Every woman is supposed to have the same set of motives, or else to be a monster. I am not a monster, but I have not felt exactly what other women feel—or say they feel, for fear of being thought unlike others.12

This denial of monstrosity possesses a particular poignancy in the context of a childless, unmarried woman writer articulating in one of her closest self-reproductive characters an argument against a standard of conformity and for a reassessment of society's generalized motives. When the Princess finally appears in Daniel

Deronda, it is within an ambience of great sacrifice, not of conventional female self-sacrifice but of great personal sacrifice, in which Eliot recreates the absence of alternatives, conventional or rebellious, for women. The Princess1 feminist consciousness articulates the tragedy of women forced into conflict with themselves:

You are not a woman. You may try—but you can never imagine what it is to have a man's force of genius in you, and yet to suffer the slavery of being a girl.''3

This is the cry which resonates through George Eliot's life, through the divided consciousness of her more conventional heroines, and 137 which found articulation in the monstrosity—for, in her confusion of words for action, of acting for spontaneity, of self-dramatization for self-articulation, she is certainly a monstei—of a woman who dedicates her life to art. Eliot's ambivalence towards the female artist is evident in her vacillations between assertion and denial of her freakishness, vacillations borne out of a primary association of the female artist with deformity. In the beginning of her creative career, Eliot attempted to avoid the freakishness of her situation by adopting a male persona and by submerging her female subjectivity into ambitious and omniscient masculine narratives; however, the failure of this strategy to resolve her creative anxieties is manifested in the repetitive association of female artists and deformity and in the "resurgence of the same fear of freakishness or monstrosity that necessitated male mimicry in 14 the first place" in her last creative work.

Kate Millett attempted to encapsulate Eliot's personal and aesthetic histories when she wrote that "George Eliot lived the 15 revolution.. .but she did not write of it." In fact, as the primness and formality of her reticent letters italicize, her socially objectionable life as writer and adulteress was balanced by her adherence to the most insignificant propriety and by their, Eliot and Lewes', adoption of the conventional model for their relationship.

Mtllett's objection is perhaps best understood in her, and other feminist critics', embrace of Charlotte Bronte. Unlike Princess

Halm-Eberstein, who is not seen in the dizzying practice of her art but who is introduced after she was lost her voice, after she 138 has been betrayed by art, Bronte's heroines revel in a Byronic self-creation and unhesitatingly assert, at least to the reader, their moral, emotional, and literary independence:

All change, and for ever, I take from thy vision, darkness: I loosen from thy faculties, fetters! I level in thy path, obstacles: I, with my presence, fill vacancy: I claim as mine the lost atom of life: I take to myself the spark of soul-burning, heretofore, forgotten!1 ^

In such assertions, Bronte's heroines create a mythos of primordial female power and establish their claims to it, which cannot be contained or articulated in ordinary nineteenth-century female life.

As self-envisioned Titans, they not only level centuries of obstacles and seize the vision purloined by patriarchy, but also inhabit the absences, fill the vacancies, created by woman's social and literary disinheritance; as active literary revisionists, they most often locate and renovate female absences in patriarchal literature:

If I could read the original Greek, I should find that many of the words have been wrongly translated, perhaps misapprehended altogether. It would be possible, I doubt not, with a little ingenuity, to give the passage quite a contrary turn; to make it say, "Let the woman speak out whenever she sees fit to make an objection;—it is permitted to a woman to teach and to exercise authority as much as may be. Man, meantime, cannot do better than hold his peace," and so on.1?

Caroline Helstone's reinterpretation of St. Paul's injunctions on female silence reclaims the female voice by converting women's linguistic disinheritance into inheritance and by exercising the interpretative power of the reader to translate an absence into literary authority, an authority which is so arbitrary that it can be gained by a turn of the passage. Caroline's desire to rewrite history and 139

literature to correspond to personal wishes and truths is a characteristic emphasis in the highly personal narratives of Bronte's heroines; Eliot's fiction, on the other hand, would locate the metaphor of woman's past and present disinheritance in her inability to read, or to read properly, the language and its literature which has excluded and oppressed her for centuries. The literary disinherit­ ance of Eliot's heroines is evident in their inadquate educations and in their propensity for misreading, for investing their rebellious inclinations in conventional female fictions of masochism, subordination, and renunciation. In her last creative work, Eliot repeated the elemental estrangement of literature and life: "It has long been understood that the properties of literature are not those of practical 18 life." Unlike the romantic and self-referential world of Bronte's heroines, it is within this context of "practical life" that Maggie

Tulliver, Dorothea Brooke, and Gwendolen Harleth's destinies are determined, but it is within the context of the imagination and its work that their ambitious and emotional yearnings seek articulation.

Although they are more victimized than liberated by their acts of misreading, Eiiot is careful to illustrate, in the case of Hetty

Sorrel, that female illiteracy is far more devastating:

She only saw something that was possible: Mr. Arthur Donnithorne coming to meet her again along the Fir-tree Grove. That was the fore­ ground of Hetty's picture; behind it lay a bright hazy something—days that were not to be as the other days of her life had been. Hetty had never read a novel; if she had ever seen one, I think the words would have been too hard for her: how then could she find a shape for her expectations? They were as formless as the sweet languid odours of the garden at the Chase.19 140

Eliot's insistence on the separation of literature and life in

Daniel Deronda is not present in her first novel; in the construction

of one of her first heroines, Hetty Sorrel, she argues for the

mediative value, as the primary informational and experiential

source for women, of literature on life: Hetty's literary ignorance,

equated with social and sexual innocence, prevents her from

imagining or anticipating the possibilities contained in Arthur's attentions or in her response to him and condemns her to enact

her tragedy within her vain self-referential world. In contrast to

Hetty's tragic ignorance, Maggie Tulliver's life is too mediated, too articulated by a literature that does not comprehend her

rebellion. Eliot's heroines are not literary revisionists but Hteralists who depend on conventional literary models to shape their imaginations and to articulate their desires, and her reliance on omniscient masculine narration suggests an authorial compliance with such plots and models as well. Unlike the immediate and urgently female voice of Bronte, Eliot constructed an impersonal, invisible, and plural presence in her work, encumbered her psyche with a

"metaphorical transvestism," and suppressed her discordant female voice in the conciliating "editorial 'we'" of Aurora Leigh:

I learnt the use Of the editorial "we" in a review As courtly ladies the fine trick of trains. And swept it grandly through the open doors As if one could not pass through doors at all Save so encumbered.20 141

The camouflaging of the authorial voice within a seemingly conciliating communal voice originates, not in feminine compliance, but in the history of feminine deception and subversion. Contrary to the objections of Eliot's critics, the fates of her heroines are not dissimilar from those conceived by Bronte: each sacrifices their heroines to marriages and to conventional lives; the differences, significant differences, occur in their dissimilar employment of narration to inscribe compliance or rebellion, to espouse reality or imagination, to suggest self-diminishment or self-assertion, and to articulate male and female voices. Had Eliot been more blatantly and conventionally feministic in her work, had she reverted to the identity of Mary Ann Evans, had she espoused the intimacy of the first person narration and invited the identification of female readers, had she been careful to suggest that the lives of her heroines, especially the life of Maggie Tulliver, were fragments of her own life, then her heroines would serve as emblems of societal, rather than authorial, betrayal and few women writers would feel compelled 21 to denounce her writing because she wrote "like a man." These qualifications govern the female reading experience and seriously compromise the effectiveness of Eliot's work as a feminist model; however, the feminist content of her fiction is evident in its uncompromising delineation of the conflict between women and their destinies, and in her faithful representation of the consequences of female literality and its dependency on patriarchal literature, on a text outside and against the self, for self-articulation. Nancy

Miller, in her influential article on female plots and plausibilities. 142

argues that the subversion of patriarchal conventions in female

fictions resides not in the text's attention to life but in its self-

referential deflection, a deflection that motivates Eliot's deceptively

acquiescent fiction, of conventional plots and expectations:

The point is...that the plots of women's literature are not about "life" and solutions in any therapeutic sense, nor should they be. They are about the plots of literature itself, about the constraints the maxim places on rendering female life in fiction.22

Eight years before she began to write fiction, Eliot, or more

appropriately Mary Ann Evans, confessed her need for self-articulation: 23 "It is necessary to me, not simply to be, but to utter." Her

compulsion for utterance is manifested in her lengthy and ambitious

novels, in her dozens of essays, and in the volumes of her existant correspondence, yet little is known about the ambitious and frustrated young woman who confessed her need to write and to speak or about

the lionized and worshipped mature author who is best described by

Virginia Woolfs admission that "to read George Eliot attentively is

to become aware of how little one knows about her." George

Eliot was not born until Mary Ann Evans' thirty-seventh year

but when she was born, fully conceived with creativity intact, she

was but one, albeit the dominant one, of many self-baptisms which

were suggestive of self-invention but signified the compartmentalization of personal and emotional histories: Mary Ann Evans, as the center of Eliot's family romance, was the dutiful daughter and sister;

Marian Evans, the "wife" of Lewes and the feminine compliment to

Eliot; Polly, Lewes' public pet name for Eliot and suggestive of a

more spontaneous and less formidable nature; George Eliot, the 143 writer who aggressively pursued her price in publication and who received disciples with wisdom and benevolence; and Mrs. John

W. Cross, Eliot's short-lived capitulation to respectability and convention. Her convincing inhabitation of each created self often frustrates attempts to reconcile her fiction and personal past, to duplicate the continuity contained within her work:

George Eliot literally never had a childhood, so that to speak of her as having been too tomboyish to please her mother is as unconvincing as it is to refer to Mary Ann Evans (or Marian Lewes or Mrs. John Cross) as the author of the George Eliot novels.2^

The dichotomization of Eliot's life between the past and the present, the domestic and the creative, and the feminine and the masculine is reiterated in the incongruities between her compartmentalized personal histories and her fictional endorsements:

an agnostic setting out to write about the virtues of clerical life, a "fallen" woman praising the wife's service, a childless writer celebrating motherhood, an intellectual writing what she called "experiments in life."26

These multiple contradictions between practice and belief, between life and art are a tribute to her great creative sympathy which effortlessly comprehended and delineated differences, yet they also contribute to the mythos of Eliot's essential schizophrenia and to her general evasion of definition and creative intention, a divison and evasion which was translated into the lives and creative impulses of her heroines. These impediments to a comprehension of Eliot and her heroines have frustrated not only her critics but Eliot as well: her failure to produce an autobiography. 144 even at the insistent promptings of her beloved Lewes, signifies a failure to integrate and reconcile her fragmented life and its many contradictions:

How in autobiographical form could she have explained the difference between Marian Evans and George Eliot, as well as the strange necessity which linked the two? Had she not been the often egotistic, uncontrolled, and suffering Marian Evans, she could not have written the particular novels she did; it is also probable that had George Eliot not come into existence, she would have written no novels.27

In her psychoanalytic biography of Eliot, Ruby Redinger locates

Eliot's creative emergence in the incarnate division of a pre­ existing dual consciousness. Eliot was troubled by this dual consciousness, by the simultaneous experiences of involvement and detachment, yet a consciousness that is capable of both sympathy and objectivity is of great value to the artist, who must exist simultaneously inside and outside her work, and it exists within the sympathetic detachment of Eliot's narratives. Unlike Bronte, whose masculine and feminine names corresponded to conventional masculine and feminine divisions between personal and professional, private and public worlds, Eliot's creativity seemed to be dependent on her inhabitation of a male persona. This male impersonation provided women writers with a sense of literary license, context, and community; however, her insistence on the pseudonym, even after her identity was well-known, suggests that her psychological dependence on the liberties and privileges bestowed by George

Eliot was particularly intense: 145

this pen name represents a transformation of gender which granted the author male authority and placed her in a patriarchal tradition of storytelling George Eliot's pen name provided her the power of the penis, the power to engender in writing, and so the power of the phallogos, the authority of the male world.28

Eliot's belief in the magical properties of names is evident in her multiple self-baptisms which accompanied her many transformative self-creations. The commentary on her adoption of a masculine creative identity emphasizes the freedoms and privileges contained in that act; however, as a woman, especially a woman who for her first three decades was restrained by father and brother, such an identification may also suggest an identification against herself, a reinforcement of earlier masculine restraint, as well as providing the means for creative self-engendering. Like the ambiguous texts which govern her heroines' lives, Eliot's creative works articulate a dialogue between restraint and freedom, between rebellion and convention: in her omnisicent narratives and her heroines' commitment to masochism and self-renunciation and their immersion in the masculine world, Eliot reiterates the oppression and creative restraints of Mary Ann Evans; Eliot's adoption of a paternal discourse for her fiction allowed her represent and italicize its feminine oppression and creative restraints from within its own context while existing outside of that context. Nina Auerbach locates Eliot's birth as an artist in the beginning of her unconventional relationship with Lewes and in the subsequent refinement of her dual consciousness of existing inside and outside convention, of her profound appreciation and manipulation of the liberties within her 146 stereotypically fallen state:

The role of fallen women was so pivotal in Eliot's life, functioned so powerfully as the crucible in which unpromising beginnings were forged into unprecedented triumphs, that it is tempting to read her life as a mythic work of Victorian fiction.... her birth as an artist may have resulted from the power of her faith in the unstated implications of her own fall and its potential, not for redemption, but for renewal. When we look at her biography in this broader context, George Eliot's salvation as an artist seems to spring from her own awesomely intelligent appreciation of the conventional role she assumed.^9

In her possible elopement with Stephen Guest, Maggie Tulliver is Eliot's only heroine to come close to duplicating her creator's liberating alienation from societal expectations and judgments; however, in her return to the statis of the past and childhood and to the scrutiny and condemnation of the community, Maggie bears a punishment that Eliot circumvented.

The latency of her creative articulation and her dependence on the male persona for that articulation italicizes the conflicts and obstacles which impeded the emergence of female artists in the nineteenth century. This century's infamous disenfranchisement of women is reified in the suffering of the young Mary Ann Evans, who outwardly conceded to the renunciatory and subordinating feminine ideal so ardently commemorated by John Ruskin and

Coventry Patmore. In tribute to Eliot's early years of self-repression and hardship, Virginia Woolf expresses a general regret about her long pilgrimage to art: "we cannot read the story without a strong desire that the stages of her pilgrimage might have been made, if not more easy, at least more beautiful." The birth of George Eliot 147

was not spontaneous nor was it beautiful; it was, however, a

magnificent transcendence of the debilitating feminine ideal as well

as the courageous silencing of self-censure and the egotistical

assertion of one's own imagination and beliefs experienced by every

artist but more acutely by female artists:

the private audience in imagination is a large part of the source of the unique kind of courage needed to convince the artist, in whatever medium, that he can breathe life into a seemingly arbitrary array of inanimate material. Thus a chasm separates the would-be but frustrated artist from the productive one—perhaps an even greater chasm than that between the non-artist and the artist: a rich fantasy life, talent, and even the conscious desire to execute may be meaningless without the inner sanction liberated by the private audience. The yet-untested writer might sit forever before blank paper, unconvinced that to put down marks on that paper might not merely despoil it. Or if he should make an attempt, he discovers that what he had most needed is suddenly gone, just as the dreamer's censor at times most annoyingly switches off all the lights and sound effects at the very moment of denouement in the ego drama. ...George Eliot sat so poised for many years.31

In an effort to explain Eliot's latent but undiminished creativity

and unresolved conflicts, Redinger's psychoanalytic reading of

her birth as an artist necessarily emphasizes her early inability

to bridge the chasm from life to art or to liberate the "inner

sanction" which would translate her out of the past and into a

self awaiting creation. Interestingly, once this inner sanction

was liberated, the creative paralysis of Eliot's early life did not

recur until shortly before her death, and Redinger's offers a correlation between her death and "the cessation of her creativity."

Her dependency on a vibrant and metamorphizing imagination is 148 reproduced in her heronies1 sacrifical and self-depleting journeys from inhabitation of the imagination to a reluctant residence within the community; however, as "would-be but frustrated" artists, they never bridge the chasm between life and art but, like the dancers on Keats's urn, sit eternally poised for self-articulation.

Unlike most women writers,George Eliot enjoys a distinguished reputation among male critics and possesses an undebatable position within the history of literature; her years of social and creative alienation and her conciliating male impersonation have been rewarded with her incorporation into a literary tradition indifferent to, or ignorant about, the difference of sex. In

The Great Tradition, F. R. Leavis devotes one-third of his highly selective study to propagandizing Eliot's fiction but contains the creative accomplishments of Charlotte and Emily Bronte, who represent a historical feminine voice, in a two paragraph "Note: 'The 33 Brontes'." As Leavis' critical bias indicates, Eliot's inclusion and perpetuation in the male literary canon has been so uncompromising that female readers and writers are forced into the position of having to reclaim her work and of having to reconstruct the feminist content within that work. Female readers and writers are discovering within the seemingly male inscribed pages of Eliot the reasons for her inclusion in a strong female tradition.'

her self-conscious relatedness to other women writers, her critique of male literary conventions, her interest in clairvoyance and telepathy, her imagery of confinement, her schizophrenic sense of fragmentation, her self-hatred, and what Emily Dickinson might have called her "Covered Vision."34 149

Such feministic themes and images are present in Eliot's fiction because of her incontrovertible experience as a woman struggling for creative and personal expression in the nineteenth century and because, shortly before she began to write fiction, she performed her own parallel journey to establish, recover, and comprehend the traditions in women's literature.

In her few, and often self-contradictory, essays on women writers, Eliot argues for a complementary masculine and feminine view of reality, experience, and literature and suggests that the existing distortions within female texts arise from their limited access to reality and experience. Eliot reproduces these distorted, self-limiting spheres of female experience and male experience in her fictional dialogue between the complementary active and passive realities of men and women: Adam Bede and Dinah Morris,

Maggie and Tom Tulliver, Dorothea Brooke and Tertius Lydgate,

Gwendolen Harleth and Daniel Deronda. As a woman writer on the verge of disguising her work within the fictional cloak of masculinity, Eliot's advocacy of a female presence in art, of specific female contributions to art, is surprising:

Science has no sex: the mere knowing and reasoning faculties, if they act correctly, must go through the same process, and arrive at the same result. But in art and literature, which imply the action of the entire being, in which every fibre of the nature is engaged, in which every peculiar modification of the individual makes itself felt, woman has some­ thing specific to contribute. ^5

In "Woman in France: Madame De Sable," there is a yearning to participate in this specific contribution of female artists and to 150 produce the unencumbered art of French women writers who "wrote under circumstances which left the feminine character of their minds 36 uncramped by timidity and unstrained by mistaken effort." The absence of these circumstances which are conducive to uninhibited female art in France condemns English women writers to the reproduction of mindless, derivative fiction:

With a few remarkable exceptions, our own feminine literature is made up of books which could have been better written by men; books which have the same relation to literature in general, as academic prize poems have to poetry: when not a feeble imitation, they are usually an absurd exaggeration of the masculine style, iike the swaggering gait of a bad actress in male attire.37

It is with some irony that Eliot's summation of the woman writer's alienation from gender, voice, and art within masculine fictions is read; however, her analysis of female literary alienation correctly comprehends only those female fictions that remain unconscious of their enclosure in and imitation of masculine fictions. In her definition of a female writing tradition, Eliot demands difference from the masculine tradition and an italicization of that difference, of women's exclusion from literary and historical narratives. Her criticism of silly women novelists locates her attack not in a woman writer's defensive adoption of masculine affectations but in her retreat into the exaggerated and unconscious female fictions of the "mind-and-miilinery species" which is defined as "the frothy, the prosy, the pious, or the pedantic... .a composite order of 38 feminine fatuity." These fictions are unconsciously derivative and imitative of the dominant literature and cultural models. 151 and encourage a prejudicial categorization of women writers as inferior and imitative- Eliot's criticisms reflect the fashioning of her own aesthetic manifesto, a manifesto conscious of its essential difference and alienation and a deliberate revision of the repetitious, conventionalized feminine novel and heroine.

Victorian culture and literature were dominated by the feminine ideal of literal selflessness, purity, and receptivity; daughters were fashioned into and eulogized as the spiritual and moral caretakers of private and public sanctuaries and were encouraged in self-renunciatory, rather than self-developmental, talents. Eliot's heroines, like their creator in her earlier life, possess a special talent for the former without, however, sacrificing the latter; even during their most intense periods of evangelical self-abnegation, her heroines have only sublimated their profound desire for a more beautiful and noble life. Indeed, their immersion into self-abnegation and their sublimation of all passions but self- denial represent a creative and religious ideal which articulates their essential religiosity:

They cannot live without religion, and they start out on the search for one when they are little girls. Each has the deep feminine passion for goodness, which makes the place where she stands in aspiration and agony the heart of the book— still and cloistered like a place of worship, but that she no longer knows to whom to pray. In learning they seek their goal; in the ordinary tasks of womanhood; in the wider services of their kind. They do not find what they seek, and we cannot wonder. The ancient consciousness of woman, charged with suffering and sensibility, and for so many ages dumb, seems in them to have brimmed and overflowed and uttered a demand for something— they scarcely know what—for something that is 152

perhaps incompatible with the facts of human existence. George Eliot had far too strong an intelligence to tamper with those facts.39

Virginia Woolf perceptively locates the intense religiosity of Maggie

Tulliver and Dorothea Brooke in their simultaneous alienation from and internalization of conventions which declare "we don't ask what a woman does—we ask whom she belongs to" (372). Dissatified with the "ordinary tasks of womanhood," their conventional imaginations seek something, which they can not name and thus can not attain, outside of their own consciousness for self-articuiation.

The extent of their escape from the historical burden of female silence is brief Quixotic transformations of reality which proceed from disastrous misreadings of others and a refusal to be determined by calling "everything by the same name that all the people about an me did." This imposition of the imagination on reality and their dissatisfaction with looking "at things from the proper feminine angle" does not create viable alternatives of utterance and action, nor does it significantly alter their destinies but leads to paralysis and capitulation. In her observation that the stories of Eliot's heroines are "the incomplete version of the story of George Eliot herself," Woolf is alluding to the strong autobiographical components in her fiction, to her desire to transcend female debilitations , and to her inability, or her refusal, to "renounce her own inheritance" of womanhood for the rewards of art:

For her, too, the burden and the complexity of womanhood were not enough; she must reach beyond the sanctuary and pluck for herself the strange bright fruits of art and knowledge. 153

Clasping them as few women have ever clasped them, she would not renounce her own inheritance— the difference of view, the difference of standard— nor accept an inappropriate reward.2*2 it was precisely this "difference of view.. .difference of standard" that Eliot declared absent from conventional female writing and towards which she was evolving in her criticisms of those fictions.

The Mill on the Floss, the second of Eliot's novels and the first to focus on the psychological and social development of a heroine, is the most autobiographical and most "incomplete version" of her life within her fiction. As such, the novel produced the strongest cathartic and catalytic effect on her creative processes. In her psychoanalytic study of Eliot's creative conflict, Laura Comer

Emery argues that Eliot's creative liberation began with her confrontation of herself in Maggie, a confrontation which endured ten years of depressions, psychosomatic illnesses, and creative inhibitions and inertia but culminated in the birth of the author of Middlemarch:

the expression of self and of despair accomplished in the creation and destruction of Maggie—is a painful confrontation with which the earnest, truth- seeking creative woman struggles until she comes to a new knowledge and acceptance of herself—a new vision which ultimately gives her creative imagination greater vitality than ever before, so that the painful process of growth and adjustment culminates in the writing of Middlemarch. *"

Maggie's death by inundation is suggestive of the extent to which

Eliot was overwhelmed by unresolved conflicts and by her inability to confront those conflicts. Ironically, the novel that initiates 154

George Eliot's liberation from the past and into art condemns her heroine to a destructive repetition of the past and imprisons her within the desires and asexuality of childhood. At a pivotal moment in the novel, Maggie throws off the bonds and expectations of approaching womanhood, cuts her hair, and gains "a sense of clearness and freedom, as if she had emerged from a wood into the open plain" (58). Eliot regained the clarity and freedom of childhood through her mature creative activities; for Maggie, however, continued existence on the "open plain" of childhood results only in stagnation of the imagination and death. The novel is more than an attempted self-vindicating reconcilation of past and present, authorial creative emancipation, or a juxtapositioning of a young girl's scholarly and creative ambitions and the psychological and social injunctions against their realization; like watching an individual on a station platform recede as the train pulls away, this is novel about Maggie Tutliver's disappearance into the community, a disappearance which entails a progressive death of the imagination and an increasingly somnambulistic inhabitation of mind and body.

In an ambience of diffusion and restraint, the unraveling of female creativity is staged; the same dream-like vagueness that permeates the novel shapes Maggie's character. Of Eliot's heroines,

Maggie's psychology and ambitions are the most ill-defined and diffuse. As the only heroine to possess a recorded childhood, since the other heroines are joined "in medias res," Maggie would promise to provide a more delineated model of the Victorian woman and of the development of female creativity; however, it is precisely 155 the lack of conventional models for the creation of Maggie that works against an unambiguous representation.W When Maggie espouses the philosophy of Thomas a Kempis, she attempts to comprehend herself and the world through a series of negations; similarly, the novel most succientiy defines Maggie through negation: the contrast with her pretty and fair cousin, Lucy, "who always did what she was desired to do," italicizes the distance between Maggie and the conventional and the feminine:

And Maggie always looked twice as dark as usual when she was by the side of Lucy.... It was like the contrast between a rough, dark, overgrown puppy and a white kitten. Lucy put up the neatest little rosebud mouth to be kissed: every­ thing about her was neat.415

The vagueness of Maggie's character is not entirely explained by her lack of a female model, in the Victorian world or in the novel;

Eliot seems to be unable to unambiguously articulate the creative impulses or rebellion of a young woman, or at least of a young woman who shares most of Eliot's past. By her own admission, the only flaw in the novel is its disproportionate emphasis of

Maggie's childhood which suggests that Eliot was more comfortable in attributing much of her rebellious life to a child than to a woman.

Perhaps, Eliot's own discomfort with adult life results in the progressive vagueness of Maggie's character and in Maggie's return to childhood, a return necessitated, perhaps, by her own psychic health rather than Maggie's allegiance to the past. Maggie's increasing evasiveness parallels the destruction of her creative impulses which are evident in the first two-thirds of the book: she begins by imposing her 156 own narratives on books and the world, and she enters adulthood with undisciplined emotions and unsatisfied yearnings but with a far more passive and uncreative imagination. In her articulation of

Maggie through negation, Eliot relies on silence and absence to represent Maggie's diminished creativity and diminishing self; more than her other heroines; Maggie exists as a metaphor, rather than as a fully-realized creation, of a desire larger than circumstances or, as Woolf expressed it, of "something that is perhaps incompatible 46 with the facts of human existence."

In The Portrait of a Lady, a novel heavily mediated by Eliot's fiction, Henrietta Stackpole responds to the absence of opportunities for women by embracing the vagueness that so permeates the lives of Eliot's heroines: "You think I ought to do something, and so 47 do I, as long as you leave it vague." Lacking the definite purposes and ambitions of men, the imprecise yearnings and ambitions which inhabit her heroines' lives are the products of "the yearning activity of faculties which, deprived of their proper material, 48 waste themselves in weaving fabrics out of cobwebs." This

"something" which contributes to the "indefiniteness" and "formless­ ness" of "later-born Theresas" prevents the precise delineation of desires and ambitions of Hetty Sorrel, Dorothea Brooke, Gwendolen

Harleth as well as Maggie: in Maggie's endurance of "this wide hopeless yearning for that something, whatever it was, that was greatest and best on this earth" is a continuation of that "bright hazy something" which manipulates Hetty towards her fate and is echoed in Dorothea's ambitions for "something beyond the 157

shallows of ladies'-school literature" and in self-preoccupied 49 Gwendolen's "always thinking of being something extraordinary."

Much like her creator's flight from womanhood, Maggie and her

spiritual sisters' pursuit of that "something" which will provide

definition and determinacy follows the traditional paths of masculine

knowledge and freedom; like Theresa, Maggie and Eliot's other

Theresas are discouraged in their pursuit of knowledge and self-

articulation by the "domestic reality... in the shape of uncles" and are condemned to a mute and static existence consecrated to their desires and ambitions for that something which will liberate • • 50 them from a fatal ambiguity.

The condensed narrative of Saint Theresa acts as a metaphor

for female heroism and self-articulation; however, within her fully

realized ambition is contained woman's historical absence from the heroic and from self-articulation; in her religious reforms, she is simultaneously an emblem of woman's assertion and sublimation, of her conservation and revision of tradition, of experience and inexperience, of purpose and desire: Theresa's passionate, ideal nature demanded an epic life: what were many-volumed romances to chivalry and the social conquests of a brilliant girl to her? Her flame quickly burned up that light fuel; and, fed from within, soared after some illimitable satisfaction, some object which would never justify weariness, which would reconcile self-despair with the rapturous consciousness of life beyond self.... Many Theresas have been born who found for themselves no epic life wherein there was a constant unfolding of far-resonant action; perhaps only a life of mistakes.51

Eliot's other Theresas also consider themselves superior to the 158

"many-volumed romances of chivalry and the social conquests of a brilliant girl" and share Theresa's strong will and passionate imagination for a different literature, for a literature that will create a new life in which their vague desires can experience incarnation in "some object" other than the conventions of love and marriage or within the feminine ideal of selflessness and subordination. Eliot's many "foundress(es) of nothing" are in the pursuit of a new text which would serve as a corrective to the feminine compulsion to 52 "learn her life-lessons in very trivial language."

The "something" which especially inhabits the lives of Maggie

Tulliver and Dorothea Brooke is the consequence of the disjunction between their characters and their opportunities, the "offspring of a certain spiritual grandeur ill-matched with the meanness of 53 opportunity." At the beginning of her most famous "something" novel, Middlemarch, Eliot asks the question that italicizes this disjunction:

What could she do,—what ought she to do?—she, hardly more than a budding woman, but yet with an active conscience and a great mental need, not to be satisfied by a girlish instruction comparable to the nibblings and judgments of a discursive mouse.5i*

The question conflates ability and duty—"What could she do... ought she to do?"—which forces the heroine and the reader away from an internal and independent definition of that "something" and back into the familial and social context for an answer. The answer which further frustrates feminine desire and impedes the articulation of that "something" is that a woman's attempt at 159

self-articulaton must occur within the conventional feminine roles

of sister, daughter, wife; indeed, even the formidable Gwendolen

Harleth is reduced to recognizing the social and economic necessity

of marriage. The "very trivial language" mediating female desire

and ambition condemns women to a reiteration of the elemental and

feminine language of love, dependence, and need. Frustrated by

ambiguity and convention, the "something" which permeates Eliot's

novels simultaneously signifies the vague promise and the inevitable

capitulation of her heroines; it is definitive only of an absence, a

yearning for the inutterable and inconceivable within the feminine

plausibilities of the nineteenth century; and it is significant of Eliot's

failure to imagine or inscribe, perhaps because there was no

alternative to realistically imagine or inscribe, an unconventional

answer to her divided question. In assessing Dorothea Brooke's

fate, Eliot acquits Dorothea and condemns society but is curiously

silent about and detached from her responsibilities as the architect of that fate:

Many who know [Dorothea], thought it a pity that so substantive and rare a creature should have been absorbed into the life of another, and be only known in a certain circle as a wife and mother. But no one stated exactly what else that was in her power she ought rather to have done. 55

As artists, Eliot's heroines manipulate, with equal exertions of ego and imagination, that malleable "something," which seems to thrive in that space of possibilities in which self and society do not conflict, and to evade reality by refashioning it. In a succinct and representative delineation of the imposition of the imagination on 160

reality, Mirah Lapidoth confesses to a schizophrenia shared by Eliot's

other heroines:

I made a life in my own thoughts quite different from everything about ma: I chose what seemed to me beautiful out of the plays and everything, and made my world out of it: and it was like a sharp knife always grazing me that we had two sorts of life which jarred so with each other.56

These "two sorts of life," consisting of the imaginative and the

literary inopposition on reality and fact, is in evidence in Maggie's passionate commitment to "the triple world of Reality, Books, and

Waking Dreams" (241). As Mirah's confession reveals, this peculiarly feminine imposition of the imagination on reality elevates and camouflages circumstances, but it also increases an individual's alienation from society, reality, and an integral self; however, it does not significantly alter reality. Their precarious imaginative rearrangement of reality precludes a confrontation and comprehension of reality, as must happen in the creation of art; Maggie and

Dorothea's Quixotic visions, as signals of their retreat into egotism and evasion, are adumbrations of their tragedies. In The Mill on the Floss, it is Maggie's desire to reconstruct reality to coincide with her primary experience in literature:

everybody in the world seemed so hard and unkind to Maggie: there was no indulgence, no fondness, such as she imagined when she fashioned the world afresh in her own thoughts. In books there were people who were always agreeable or tender, and delighted to do things that made one happy, and who did not show their kindness by finding fault. The world outside books was not a happy one (207-208).

In contrast to her narcissistic imaginative interaction with literature, the world responds inadequately to Maggie's emotions. Ignored 161 or mistreated by the world, Eliot's heroines seek an articulation of their emotional being and vague desires in an imaginative exchange with literature, an exchange which reinforces their disillusionment with and detachment from reality and which is necessarily repetitive and unsatisfying. When society fails them, this imaginative exchange between self and world is the only antidote they possess to feminine silence and passivity and, like the construct of femininity, it further alienates them from their goal of self-articulation. Maggie, who continually vacillates between subordination and assertion, silence and speech, passivity and action, avoids comprehending and confronting Tom and the cruelty within his acts by projecting onto the context of her life the desires of her subterranean life:

Well! there was no hope for it: he was gone now, and Maggie could think of no comfort but to sit down by the holly, or wander by the hedgerow, and fancy it was all different, refashioning her little world into just what she should like it to be. Maggie's was a troublous life, and this was the form in which she took her opium (43-44).

Maggie's art is an art of avoidance and signifies an attempt to construct an immediate resolution to an irresolvably feminine "conflict between the inward impulses and outward fact" (241). This conflict and its imaginative resolution of avoidance is, as Patricia Meyer

Spacks has documented, a major motif in nineteenth-century women's literature; the conflict and its attempted resolution intensified as middle-class women increasingly gained access to books and to leisure and became cognizant of the discrepancies between the articulate and romantic lives within books and their own inarticulate 162 and prosaic existences. In a letter to Maria Lewis, Eliot confesses her early attempts to imaginatively reconcile internal and external facts:

When I was quite a little child I could not be satisfied with the things around me; i was constantly living in a world of my own creation and was quite contented to have no companions that I might be left to my own musings and imagine scenes in which I was chief actress.^

In this description of her formative creative activities, Eliot ignores the value of such activities in order to italicize the alienation and avoidance contained in imaginative and passive reconstructions of an inadequate reality.

Maggie's "starved life" and reconstructive imagination, however, do not manifest themselves in an articulation of the self and world parallel to that of her creator; clearly, Eliot is the only artist and only being capable of re-creation in The Mill on the Floss (362).

Indeed, even the words art and artist are withheld from the text.

The fates of Maggie Tulliver, Dorothea Brooke, and Gwendolen

Harleth indicate that the transformative power in Eliot's fiction is not deflected into the lives of her heroines but confined to and absorbed in her own metamorphizing personality. Maggie and

Dorothea share their creator's early imposition of the heroic onto the commonplace; however, for Eliot, whose life followed a parallel transformation from the commonplace to the heroic, this imposition provided the cornerstone in her aesthetic manifesto:

My imagination is an enemy that must be cast down ere I can enjoy peace or exhibit "uniformity of character. I know not which of its caprices I have most to dread—that which incites it to spread 163

sackcloth "above, below, around," or that which makes it "cheat my eye with blear illusion, and beget strange dreams" of excellence and beauty in beings and things of only "working day" price.58

Written long before she began to write fiction, this letter demonstrates an uncanny preoccupation with the schizophrenia of creative life and anticipates not only her commitment to a realistic depiction of the commonplace but an evangelical consciousness about the imagination that her heroines inherit. In those incomplete versions of herself, especially in Maggie and Dorothea, Eliot seems to withhold any consciousness or achievement which could not have been experienced by Mary Ann Evans. If Eliot had been able to define and articulate that something in her early life, then her heroines would probably have possessed greater and less diffuse access to their desires and creative impulses; under such improved and more articulate circumstances, however, her fiction would be less representative of the nineteenth-century female artist, who was more frequently alienated from art, frustrated by inarticulation, and sacrificed to narratives created by and for others than redeemed by her imagination.

Maggie, the embryo of Dorothea, does not find redemption in the imagination but discovers in the world and in books a validation of her outlaw status and a reification of her alienation from the conventions that restrain her. Throughout the novel, she is seen and sees by negation: she is represented as the antithesis of Lucy; she is excluded from Tom's and the world's masculine activities; she is not good and must be punished; she is a 164

"small mistake of nature," who is responsible for that "topsy-turvy" world in which daughters are clever and sons are slow; she is not a fair-skinned, conventional, restrained Dodson but a "rude and brown" Tulliver, who is unable to mold her behavior to the feminine or to subdue passions which are indicative of an excessive nature and imagination that is "never satisfied with a little of anything"; and she espouses Thomas a Kempis to reaffirm her experience of negation through a desireless and needless stupor (13, 18, 86, 287).

In its beginning, the novel articulates Maggie's alienation in her readings of and identification with the devil and the witch in

Daniel Defoe's The History of the Devil. She learns in her reading of the witch that guilt or innocence is irrelevant to the fate of society's outlaws:

"That old woman in the water's a witch—they've put her in to find out whether she's a witch or no, and if she swims she's a witch, and if she's drowned—and killed, you know—she's innocent, and not a witch, but only a poor silly woman. But what good would it do her then, you know, when she was drowned (16-17)?"

Maggie's drowning is the consequence of her attempts to prove that she is not an outlaw and to gain Tom's absolution for her unconventional behavior. Repeatedly, Maggie attempts to articulate her sense of alienation in a creative identification and sympathy with other outcasts: as simultaneous punishment for her deviancy and liberation from her overwhelming sense of difference, Maggie runs away to the gypsies, whom she has frequently been compared to and who exist in similar disenfranchisement; the cloistered and evangelical philosophy of Kempis allows her to re-create and enact 165 a dispossession generated by society and family; and in the deformity and loneliness of Philip Wakem, she finds signification of her own sense of monstrosity and an object for the love and sympathy that she is so anxious to give. Maggie's initial answer to "the painful riddle of the world" is a creative misreading of and resistance to her life's context; however, as she matures, the answer, no longer mollifed by imagination and resistance, is self-denial and suicide (315).

As self-punishment for pushing "with a fierce thrust of her small arm poor little pink-and-white Lucy into the cow-trodden mud," Maggie runs away to join the gypsies (90-91). Self-orphaned and in a dream-like state that coincides with the novel's, she arrives at the gypsies' camp with a script for her rebirth as a gypsy, as an authentic outlaw:

It was just like a story: Maggie like to be called pretty lady and treated in this way... "I'm come from home because I'm unhappy, and I mean to be a gypsy. I'll live with you if you like, and I can teach you a great many things" (97).

Within this group of exiles, Maggie represents civilization and asserts the superiority of her knowledge, becoming, for the first time, the teacher, the authority grounded firmly in history and culture. Their social and linguistic inferiority liberates Maggie into an articulation of the extent of her desires: "If I was a queen, I'd be a very good queen, and kind to everybody" (98).

Unanticipated in her script, however, is the fact that, although the gypsies are exiles within British culture, they possess their own language and conventions to which she is subject in the same way 166 that she was subjected to long hair, subdued conduct, and domestic activities. The gypsies, she discovers, are not waiting to be re-created from the narratives of books that she has consumed:

"Maggie felt that it was impossible she should ever be queen of these people, or even communicate to them amusing and useful knowledge"(99). Maggie returns to St. Ogg's because she is frightened of the gypsies, fatigued by their poverty, and, most importantly, disappointed in her ambitions and disillusioned about the romantic and imaginative possibilities present in their lives.

The gypsies are perceived as an antidote to the unheroic and unromantic world of St. Ogg's, yet they fail to assist Maggie in her attempt at self-creation and in her effort to transcend alienation and achieve community with others. Still, Maggie leaves the gypsies with her imagination unviolated; it is possible, after this confrontation of reality and imagination, to insist on the continued impositon of fairy tales on reality:

If her father would but come by in the gig and take her up! Or even if Jack the Ciantkiller, or Mr. Greatheart, or St. George who slew the dragon on the halfpennies, would happen to pass that way! But Maggie thought with a sinking heart that these heroes were never seen in the neighbourhood of St. Ogg's—nothing very wonderful ever came there (100).

Maggie does not question the reality of books and her imaginative reconstruction of them; she questions instead the reality and validity of St. Ogg's. Her fairy tale heroes and the books that contain them are more than compensations for an unfulfilling life; they are manifestations of all possible reality and experience. 167

In an attempt to include her own possible heroism within the masculine fictions shared by Tom and Philip, Maggie defers to literature for inclusion: "She wanted to know if Philoctetes had a sister, and why she didn't go with him on the desert island and take care of him" (163). Her passive and feminine dependence on books for information and experience italicizes her alienation from genera! experience, an alienation that is more likely to distort vision, profoundly to confuse reality and imagination, than to refine one's sense of reality. Like her creator, Maggie is victimized and debilitated by her indiscriminate consumption and embrace of the fictional; in her twentieth year, Eliot wrote to Maria Lewis to confide that she had been irreparably damaged by the reading of novels:

I am I confess not an impartial member of a jury in this case for I owe the culprits a grudge for injuries inflicted on myself. I shall carry to my grave the mental diseases with which they have contaminated me.... I was early supplied with them by those who made use of the materials they supplied for building my castles in the air. But it may be said "No one ever dreamed of recommending children to read them " I answer that men and women are but children of a larger growth; they are still imitative beings....We are active beings too. We are each one of the Dramatis personae in some play on the stage of life—hence our actions have their share in the effects of our reading.5^

Eliot insists, long before the advent of reader response, on the active interaction of text and self and on the interpretation of the text by the reader. Like Emma Bovary, Maggie and Dorothea possess and enact a textual history; unlike Flaubert, however,

Eliot disrupts the textual interaction between her heroines, their 168

lives, and their books in a confrontation of reality and imagination

in which her heroines capitulate the texts of their desires and vague

ambitions and surrender to the community's texts of femininity and

conformity.

Maggie's consumption and incorporation of Thomas a Kempis'

philosophy of solitude and renunciation are expressive of her

desire to elevate the oppressive limitations of life through a spiritual

purification of desire, of her irrepressible impulse towards self-

creation, and of her reification of feminine restraint and self-denial.

Kempis' philosophy of self-restraint is a prominent script in the

lives of Dorothea, Maggie, and Eliot; for all three, it is a

reification of the restraints within the community and family and

an internalization of those "external bond(s) of discipline which

would save [them] from the threatening forces within."60 Eliot

manifested a lifelong dependency on masculine restraint—brother,

father, and Lewes—to check passion and intemperate behavior;

on the day after her father's death, Eliot expressed this

dependence in her fears of sensuality and impurity: "I had a

horrid vision of myself last night becoming earthly sensual and

devilish for want of that purifying restraining influence."61 These

fears are evident in her fiction, which struggles between an articulation of passion and its excesses and the restoration of

restraint and reality.

Maggie's abject espousal of renunciation is borne out of crisis and a general sense of helplessness. As an antidote to her feminine

helplessness, Maggie seeks, as her creator did, for "some unlearned 169 secret of our existence" in the masculine system of knowledge:

Sometimes Maggie thought she could have been contented with absorbing fancies; if she could have had all Scott's novels and all Byron's poems!—then, perhaps, she might have found happiness enough to dull her sensibility to her actual daily life. And yet ...they were hardly what she wanted. She could make dream-worlds of her own—but no dream-world would satisfy her now. She wanted some explanation of this hard, real life she wanted some key that would enable her to understand, and in understanding, endure, the heavy weight that had fallen on her young heart... .Latin, Euclid, and Logic would surely be a considerable step in masculine wisdom— in that knowledge which made men contented, and even glad to live (241, 250-251).

In this time of intense need, fiction and the imagination are relegated to the feminine world of indulgence and inaction, and the unlikely systems of "Latin, Euclid, and Logic" are embraced in an attempt to understand "this hard, real life." Both Maggie and Dorothea are fascinated by and envious of the masculine possession of a

"key" to knowledge which signifies the power of self-articulation, comprehension of the world, and the absence of frustration and suffering; however, for both Maggie and Dorothea, this gilded key is simply a projection of their own emotional and intellectual needs and ambitions. Maggie, who is untrained for any employment, emotionally debilitated by conflicting feelings of rebellion and guilt, and is confined to the house while Tom redeems the family, locates in Kempis' The Imitation of Christ not the key to knowledge but a reiteration of conventional feminine masochism and renunciation.

As if to italicize the redundancy of her quest, Eliot places

Maggie in the position of a redundant reader, of discovering a supposed articulation of her suffering in the underlined passages 170

of the previous reader:

If a man should give all his substance, yet it is as nothing. And if he should do great penances, yet they are but little. And if he should attain to all knowledge, he is yet far off. ...That having left all, he leave himself, and go wholly out of himself, and retain nothing of self-love 1 have often said unto thee, and now again I say the same. Forsake thyself, resign thyself, and thou shalt enjoy much inward peace... .Then shall all vain imaginations, evil perturbations, and superfluous cares fly away; then shall immoderate fear leave thee, and inordinate love shall die (251).

In this mortification of the ego, Maggie perceives the possibility of

a heroic alternative to the narrowness and ugliness of an existence

mediated by ego and desire and perceives the opportunity once

again to grasp authority over her life, to gain access to self-

articulation through a deliberate renunciation of it:

Here, then, was a secret life that would enable her to renounce all other secrets—here was a sublime height to be reached without the help of outward things—here was insight, and strength, and conquest, to be won by means entirely within her own soul, where a supreme Teacher was waiting to be heard (254).

In contrast to her previously creative and interactive acts of

reading, Maggie's redundant reading of Kempis is literal and

repetitive; it is so literal and repetitive that she perceives this ambitious secret, which would "renounce all other secrets," as the secret of existence and not as a paradigm of self-destruction and death; she does not understand the irony within her flight from womanhood to Kempis, she is unconscious of the egotism and desire that mediates this doctrine of self-renunciation; and she is unaware of the need for self-dramatization that attracts her to Kempis: 171

"her own life was still a drama for her, in which she demanded of herself that her part be played with intensity" (256).

Margaret Homans argues that Maggie's repression from a creative and self-articulating reader to a literal and articulated one is an especially feminine and self-destructive act: "To learn how to read as a repeater of other's words is feminine, and it is also fatal." Homans suggests that Maggie's death can be anticipated in her increasingly literal relationship with the world and its texts:

The reading acts do not themselves cause her death, but they identify the thematics of return with rhetorical repetition and the thematics of death with the lack of one's own world. And as specially feminine reading acts, they identify learned feminine behavior with return, literal repetition, death, and silence.63

It is this "lack of one's own world" that The Mill on the Floss attempts to plot through Maggie's gradual dispossession of imaginary and self-articulated possibilities and progressive immersion into and enclosure within absences articulated by the alien voice of patriarchal culture. Maggie's condemnation to "literal repetition, death, and silence" is manifested in the novel's systematic frustration of all creative expression which is not a reification of the feminine texts of abnegation and masochism. These texts of feminine abnegation and masochism prepare the reader for Maggie's violent death which is acutely anticipated in the violent imagery of a self barely restrained by society or by "a like unlike, a self that self restrains" and of passion in collison with reality: 172

Maggie.. .looking from the bed where her father lay, to the dull walls of this sad chamber which was the centre of her world, was a creature full of eager, passionate longings for all that was beautiful and glad; thirsty for all knowledge; with an ear straining after dreamy music that died away and would not come near to her; with a blind, unconscious yearning for something that would link together the wonderful impressions of this mysterious life, and give her soul a sense of home in it. No wonder, when there is this contrast between the outward and the inward, that painful collisons come of it.54

In the original manuscript, Eliot further emphasized the inevitable violence of a desire continually frustrated:

A girl of no startling appearance, and who will never be a Sappho, or a Madame Roland or anything else that the world takes note of, may still hold forces within her as the living plant- seed does, which will make a way for them­ selves, often in a shattering, violent manner (208).

Eliot argues for the irrepressibility of female creativity which will discover and force a means for its expression; however, she does not suggest that female creativity shares the linearity and directness attributed to masculine creativity but argues, rather, that it is subterranean, abrupt, and fragmentary. In her fiction this frustrated but irrepressible desire for creative expression is most often voiced through conventional feminine activities but, with Maggie Tulliver, such sublimated expression is acutely unsatisfying, and the long repressed and starved desire for self-articulation erupts with a violence sufficient to destroy not only Maggie and Tom but much of the community as well.

To emphasize the differences between masculine and feminine creative evolution, Eliot juxtaposes the creative promise and evolution 173 of Philip Wakem with the statis and dis-evolution of Maggie. It is

Philip who reactivates Maggie's interest in novels, who perceives in

Maggie's surrender to the words of Kempis a desire for negation and for self-stupification, and who articulates Maggie's "long suicide" in his equation of Kempis with Maggie's passion for self- destruction (288). Philip's observations create another dimension to the provincial Maggie, a dimension of difference and of her alienation from a possible, less prosaic self:

What was it, he wondered, that made Maggie's dark eyes remind him of the stories about princesses being turned into animals?.... I think it was that her eyes were full of unsatisfied intelligence, and unsatisifed, beseeching affection (158).

Philip's interpretation of Maggie's difference and dissatisfaction is a reflection of his own deformed and alienated existence, yet it is also a favorite and powerful image—the image of the dispossessed princess—which Eliot employs to represent the extent of her heroines' alienation from their innate selves.

In contrast to Maggie's debilitating difference, Philip responds to his deformity, to his exclusion from society, wtih the creation of an alternative world. His feminizing deformity excludes him from the active, masculine world and thrusts him into an exile similar to Maggie's; however, because he is male and wealthy, he possesses choices denied to Maggie and which help him to gain artistic self- expression. Philip evolves into an artist, after exercising the masculine privileges of education, travel, and self-sufficiency; earlier in the novel, however, he is identified with women and his seemingly dilletante pursuit of art possesses a feminine diffusion and 174 incompetence:

I care for painting and music; I care for classic literature, and mediaeval literature, and modern literature: I flutter all ways, and fly in none (286).

Maggie and Philip are brought together by their shared exile and their mutual emotional deprivation. Philip, motherless and living with a cold father, is attracted to the "wealth of love" in Maggie and by the fact that "there was one to claim it all" (269). He perceives in Maggie's generous and compassionate nature a readiness to pity and an eagerness to love, even—if not especially—him, and preys on her emotional deprivation and on her "tenderness for deformed things" (158). It is through Philip's enchantment and experience with Maggie that the reader best gains an appreciation of Maggie's passionate stature and of her enormous capacity for sympathy. The power of Maggie's sympathetic imagination is evident in her transforming legacy to Philip:

In knowing you, in loving you, I have had, and still have, what reconciles me to life.... I think nothing but such complete and intense love could have initiated me into that enlarged life of others; for before, I was always dragged back from it by ever-present painful self-consciousness. I even think sometimes that this gift of transferred life which has come to me in loving you, may be a new power to me (440).

This legacy of "transferred life" is the gift of sympathy, of negative capability, without which art is impossible. Philip's

"new power" allows him to feel and articulate lives outside of his

"painful self-consciousness"; for Maggie, however, sympathy does not bear a "new power" through which she could attempt to articulate the world but assists in her general disintegration and victimization: 175 her sympathetic reading of the world confuses fact and fantasy which finally reinforces her self-destructive commitment to literality and to repetition, and her receptivity to and compassion for the feelings of others—especially Tom, Philip, and Stephen—aid in her victimization. Like her literary heirs, Clarissa Dailoway and

Mrs. Ramsay, Maggie's sympathy is too diffuse to be organized into artistic expression and too ignorant of its own value to insist on its discriminate use.

In one of the books, Madame de Stael's Corinne, which Philip uses to entice Maggie away from the self-stupification of Kempis,

Maggie discovers the text which will succeed the script of Thomas a Kempis. Angered by the unjust but predictable treatment of her prototype in female fictions, she declares:

I'm determined to read no more books where the blond-haired women carry away all the happiness. I should begin to have a prejudice against them. If you could give me some story, now, where the dark woman triumphs, it would restore the balance. I want to avenge Rebecca and Flora Maclvor, and Minna and all the rest of the dark unhappy ones (290-291).

Since Maggie previously incorporated literature without regard to its inclusion or exclusion of her, this is a startling declaration and signifies an unsuspected consciousness about the dependence and interaction of life and literature. Her strategy to "restore the balance," to become not only the blond-haired heroine's equal in literature and society but to establish herself as their preferred prototype, is not to reimagine or to rewrite society through art but to avenge her defeat and absence in society and literature by 176 incorporating the values of this societal text, by inscribing this revenge text, into her own life: Maggie does not produce or locate corrective scripts but literally enacts her revenge on literature and society through her inversion of the hated text through her betrayal of Lucy and elopement with Stephen. The content, or the "repressed content" as Nancy Miller would argue, of Maggie's inverted script does not emanate from wounded vanity or from

"erotic impulses" but from an "impulse to power: a fantasy of power that disdains a sexual exchange in which women can participate 65 only as objects of circulation." Her bid for power, for preference and self-determination, in literature and society follows her earlier concessions to their conventional plots. In her desire to reproduce herself in the "pink and white" being of Lucy, Maggie—in ways very similar to those of her creator—practices an art which has been "subverted into self-hatred":

Maggie always looked at Lucy with delight. She was fond of fancying a world where the people never got any larger than children of their own age, and she made the queen of it just like Lucy, with a little crown on her head, and a little sceptre in her hand.,..only the queen was Maggie herself in Lucy's form.66

This pre-adolescent fantasy of power articulates Maggie's desire to remain fixed within childhood, to enter the eternal statis of

Peter Pan in which children refuse to grow up, and a preternatural consciousness of her exclusion from the conventional feminine scripts of power and beauty. 177

Eliot locates in the plot of Corinne, as she locates in the narratives detailing her heroines' defeats, the cultural prejudices which prohibit the articulation of unconventional sentiments and ambitions. In juxtaposition to the dream-like ambience of the novel,

Eliot depicts, with more precision than in her other novels, those constructs which condemn Maggie to an inarticulate life and an early death. The novel is conceived as a contrast between the opportunities and frustrations experienced by boy and girl, man and woman; this contrast focuses on the differing talents and life scripts possessed by Tom and Maggie. The Mill on the Floss opens on a scene in which Mr. and Mrs. Tulliver are discussing alternative educations for Tom; in juxtaposition to this discussion Eliot places the Tullivers' denouncement of Maggie's unusual cleverness as '"Too 'cute for a woman, I'm afraid,... It's not mischief much while she's a little un, but an over-'cute woman's no better nor a long-tailed sheep— she's fetch none the bigger price for that"1 (12). As a result of their father's social ambitions, Tom is educated beyond his abilities and social position; however, Maggie is briefly instructed in the unspectacular and finite expectations of women within the Victorian culture.

The disjunction between the male and female texts of education and ignorance, of experiene and inexperience, is emphasized early in the novel:

He knew all about worms, and fish, and those things, and what birds were mischievous, and how padlocks opened, and which way the handles of the gates were to be lifted. Maggie thought 178

this sort of knowledge was very wonderful—much more difficult than remembering what was in the books; and she was rather in awe of Tom's superiority, for he was the only person who called her knowledge "stuff," and did not feel surprised at her cleverness. Tom, indeed, was of opinion that Maggie was a silly little thing; all girls were silly—they couldn't throw a stone so as to hit anything, couldn't do anything with a pocket- knife, and were frightened at frogs. Still, he was very fond of his sister, and meant always to take care of her, make her his housekeeper, and punish her when she did wrong (36).

Within this division of experience, girls are denied access to nature, the possession of all survival skills, and moral self-regulation.

Tom's evaluatoin of Maggie's skills as "stuff" reiterates the value that society has historically placed on female activities and accomplish­ ments and is repeated in the novel's depiction of the negative value of Maggie's cleverness and her attachment to books; Tom's subordination of his sister to the role of housekeeper and his assumption of moral authority and prosecution do not remain the whimsical daydream of a boy but are enacted, as they are in society, by an adult Tom and Maggie. During a visit with Tom at the

Stellings', Maggie discovers that her exclusion from masculine knowledge, whether it be frogs or mathematics, is not personal but historical:

"But I shall be a clever woman," said Maggie, with a toss. "O, I daresay, and a nasty conceited thing. Every­ body1 II hate you."

...She began to read with full confidence in her own powers, but presently, becoming quite bewildered, her face flushed with irritation. It was unavoidable—she must confess her incompetency, and she was not fond of humiliation. "It's nonsense!" she said, "and very ugly stuff— 179

nobody need want to make it out." "Ah, there now. Miss Maggie!" said Tom, drawing the book away, and wagging his head at her, "you see you're not so clever as you thought you were." "O," said Maggie, pouting, "I daresay I could make it out, if I'd learned what goes before, as you have" (130-131).

In this exchange, an unvanquished and still potentially self-articulating

Maggie confidently relies on her mental prowess to gain the inaccessible and to assert the power of her talents over Tom's masculine skills and privileges; however, she learns that not only are clever women detested but that masculine knowledge is a closed system which requires initiation and guidance. Her educational history of random feminine reading and domesticity did not prepare her for the decoding of a mathematical theorem, nor did it attempt to satisfy her need for a substantial and continuous intellectual exchange: "Even at school she had often wished for books with more in them: everything she learned there seemed like the ends of long threads that snapped immediately" (250). Maggie is alienated from the conventional feminine scripts represented by

Corinne and embodied in Lucy, from the masculine knowledge and activity of Philip and Tom, and finally from her own inteliectual talents and ambitions.

Guided only by the omniscient and patriarchal voice of the narrator, Maggie's life progresses towards feminine passivity, silence, and death. The novel offers no active female models to validate her early rebellion against femininity or to articulate her ambitions in an accessible, female sphere. The women in her life, especially her mother and Lucy, are either ineffectual and obedient or are. 180 as the Dodsons are, metaphors for a society that punishes spontaniety and rewards a treadmill existence:

There were particular ways of doing everything in that family: particularly ways of bleaching the linen, of making the cowslip wine, curing the hams, and keeping the bottled gooseberries;... in short, there was in this family a peculiar tradition as to what was the right thing in household management and social demeanour, and the only bitter circumstance attending this superiority was a painful inability to approve the condiments or the conduct of families ungoverned by the Dodson tradition (39-40).

The rigorous conformity of "the Dodson tradition" is, ironically, dictated by sisters who are as equally disenfranchised from society as Maggie. In such an oppressively rigorous and unconscious community of women, Maggie is indeed an outlaw; however, in the delineation of Maggie as an outlaw, her exclusion from the

Dodson tradition and her nonconformity to its expectations precipitate but does not sustain a consciousness of women's literary and historical disinheritance which is manifested in:

no other part of her inherited share in the hard-won treasure of thought, which generations of painful toil have laid up for the race of men, than shreds and patches of feeble literature and false history (252).

Within this non-context of obedient and imitative women and of "feeble literature and false history," Maggie's narrative of attempted self- articulation unravels towards negation and death.

As an exercise in authorial wish-fulfillment, as a meditation on the efficacy of daydreams to alter past and present reality.

The Mill on the Floss is especially cruel in its denial of its heroine's desires. The narrative records "the strongest need" in Maggie's 181

nature as "the need of being loved"; it is this need which compels

her to reject the "wayward choice of her own passion" and return

to a civilization which has essentially disenfranchised her, and to

suffer Tom's condemnation (34, 413). In conflict wtih this need

are her noble and beautiful ambitions to transcend the female

sphere of the personal and the emotional and to locate herself within

the happier and more self-protective realms of the abstract and

the intellect. To Philip, she confesses a fear of entrapment within

the feminine and a desire to escape its debilitating imperatives of

nurturance: "I don't know what may be in years to come. But

I begin to think there can never come much happiness to me from

loving: I have always had so much pain mingled with it. I wish

I could make myself a world outside, as men do" (361). The novel

denies Maggie this separate and seif-sufficient world; it condemns

her to the enactment of a peculiarly feminine tragedy:

We women are always in danger of living too exclusively in the affections; and though our affections are perhaps the best gifts we have, we ought also to have our share of the more independent life—some joy in things for their own sake. It is piteous to see the helplessness of some sweet women... .They have never contemplated an independent delight in ideas as an experience which they could confess without being laughed at. Yet surely women need this sort of defense against passionate affliction even more than men.67

The novel does grant Maggie, in an ironic conclusion to her victimization by memory and love, a repetitive and sterile return to a childhood dependent on the whims and judgments of Tom and Tom's absolution, at the moment of death, of transgressions defined by

himself. With one word, "Magsie," she is once again nine years old 182

and at the beginning of her journey; the word absolves her of

the rebellious history intervening between the opening and closing

of the novel (455). As the novel's most ardent "man of maxims,"

Tom's absolution relieves Maggie of her crimes against convention

and reabsorbs her into the community; however, although her

enormous sense of guilt demands Tom's and the community's

forgiveness, Eliot mocks their ability to understand and to absolve

Maggie:

And the man of maxims is the popular representative of the minds that are guided in their moral judgment solely by general rules, thinking that these will lead them to justice by a ready-made patent method, without the trouble of exerting patience, discrimination, impartiality—without any care to assure themselves whether they have the insight that comes from a hardly-earned estimate of temptation, or from a life vivid and intense enough to have created a wide fellow-feeling with all that is human (435).

These intrusive men of maxims, with their unoriginal and repetitive

philosophies, are representative of the cultural forces that abort

female speech, assert that "a woman's no business wi' being so

clever," and crush those who seek to articulate that something

which can only be grasped through its difference from their "general

rules" (16). In her comedic representation of the Dodsons's

meticulous conformity, Eliot criticizes the community's obsessions

with the conventions of being and doing, of membership and exile;

in her condemnation of the men of maxims, however, she accuses

the community of the most unpardonable crime of morality and judgment untempered or unmotivated by sympathy and makes her

most complete break with it. It is in this condemnation that the 183 web of life which so governs Eliot's novels is briefly interrupted to assert the significance and solitude of individual life.

In a complaint that could well be attributed to Eliot's failure to bring The Mill on the Floss to a satisfactory close, Maggie complains to Philip about a novel by Scott: '"I went on with it in my own head, and I made several endings; but they were all unhappy.

I could never make a happy ending out of that beginning"' (267).

The beginning of Eliot's tale, a tale kept within the limits of social determinism and mediated by the plots of other tales about female ambition exceeding opportunity, is not propitious for a happy ending.

The ending that Eliot's "revived consciousness" imagined was a literal regression to childhood and a recapitulation to feminine social alternatives from which Maggie is rescued by death, by the flood of her own repressed and frustrated passions (38). The novel does not attempt to discover social or literary plots through which the promise contained in the young Maggie Tulliver can develop into the self-articulation of a female artist; indeed, the promise contained within the child Maggie recedes until the reader can barely perceive it and then explodes in a death-wish; however, it is within this realistic and socially determined depiction of Maggie's tragedy and in her distence from her creator that the significance of her early promise can be fully grasped. As a delineation of the female artist, the novel is more successful in liberating Eliot's voice and memory than it is in freeing Maggie from circumstance and gender, from the fragility of woman's hopes which are "woven of sunbeams" and annihilated by "a shadow"; it is a tale which is clearly subordinated 184

CO to the needs of the teller.

With Tom and Maggie's tomb inscription, "in their death they were not divided," the hovel attempts to foster a culminative sense of integration and unity; however, this is an illusory integration and unity founded on statis and destruction. The most palpable rupture in this schizophrenic text exists in the disjunction between the fates of the character and the creator: having consigned

Maggie to an eternal childhood and thus liberated her own imagination from the past, Eliot is free to begin the work which will declare herself an artist, Middlemarch; she effects her escape from the prelapsarian world of childhood through Maggie's imprisonment within it without sacrificing memory, "the mother tongue of the imagination," which, although it binds and silences Maggie, remained the most active and mediative presence in Eliot's creative life (38).

The Mill on the Floss chronicles a young girl's sacrifice of self- articulation for love and forgiveness and, within that text of feminine sacrifice and frustration, delineates a tale about a voice and spirit denied. The "sacred poet," who will celebrate the heroics of the insignificant "later-born Theresas," is not absent from Middlemarch,

Daniel Deronda, or The Mill on the Floss but exists in the voice of George Eliot who speaks of inarticulate and silenced quests 69 different from, but not dissimilar to, her own journey. NOTES

Chapter II

Epigraphs: George Eliot, Middlemarch (Boston: Houghton Mifflin Company, 1968), p. 612; George Eliot, Daniel Deronda (New York: Penguin Books, 1977), p. 694); Paul De Man, Blindness and Insight: Essays in the Rhetoric of Contemporary Criticism (New York: Oxford University Press, 1971), p. 34; George Eliot, "Janet's Repentance," in Scenes of Clerical Life (New York: Penguin Books, 1977), p. 358.

George Eliot, The Works of George Eliot: The Legend of Jubal and Other Poems, Old and New (Edinburgh: William Blackwood and Sons, 1925), p. 207; George Eliot, The Mill on the Floss (Boston: Houghton Mifflin Co., 1961), p. 212. (All further page references to The Mill on the Floss will correspond to this edition.)

2 Eliot, Daniel Deronda, p. 83. 3 Lee R. Edwards, "Women, Energy, and Middlemarch," in Middlemarch, ed. Bert G. Horback (New York: W. W. Norton and Company, 1977), p. 690. H George Eliot, Adam Bede (Boston: Houghton Mifflin Co., 1968), p. 58.

5Eliot, Adam Bede, p. 153.

George Eliot, The George Eliot Letters, Vol. I, ed. Gordon S. Haight (New Haven: Yale University, 1954), p.354-6.

George Eliot, Middlemarch, p. 611. g George Eliot, Daniel Deronda, p. 83.

-185- 186

Virginia Woolf, "George Eliot," in Women and Writing, ed. Michele Barrett (New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1979), p. 150.

1 o Eliot, Middlemarch, p. 162.

Eliot, Daniel Deronda, pp. 668-689.

Eliot, Daniel Deronda, p. 691.

13 Eliot, Daniel Deronda, p. 694. 14 Sandra M.Gilbert and Susan Gubar, The Madwoman in the Attic: The Woman Writer and the Nineteenth-Century Literary Imagination (New Haven: Yale University, 1979), p.66.

15Kate Millet, Sexual Politics (New York: Avon Books, 1969), p. 192.

Charlotte Bronte, Shirley (New York: Penguin Books, 1974), p. 459.

Charlotte Bronte, Shirley, p. 323.

Eliot, Daniel Deronda, p. 288.

19Eliot, Adam Bede, p. 116.

20 Elizabeth Barrett Browning, Aurora Leigh in The Poetical Works of Elizabeth Barrett Browning (Boston: Houghton Mifflin Co., 1974), p. 292. 21 Dorothy Richardson, Dawn's Left Hand in Pilgrimage (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1967), p. 240. 22 Nancy K. Miller, "Emphasis Added: Plots and Plausibilities in Women's Fiction," PMLA, Vol. 96, No. 1 (1981), p. 46.

23Eliot, The George Eliot Letters, Vol. I, p. 255. 74 Woolf, "George Eliot," p. 150. 187

25 Ruby V. Redinger, George Eliot: The Emergent Self (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1975), p. 4.

26Gilbert and Gubar, p. 479.

27 Redinger, p. 10. 28 Dianne F. Sadoff, Monsters of Affection: Dickens, Eliot, and Bronte on Fatherhood (Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1982), pp. 104-105. 29 Nina Auerbach, Woman and the Demon: The Life of a Victorian Myth (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1982), pp. 183-184.

30Woolf, "George Eliot," p. 153.

31 Redinger, pp. 90-91. 32 Redinger, p. 463. 33 F. R. Leavis, The Great Tradition (New York: New York University Press, 1964), p. 27. 34 Gilbert and Gubar, p. 476. 35 George Eliot, "Woman in France: Madame De Sable," in Essays of George Eliot, ed. Thomas Pinney (New York: Columbia University Press, 1963), p. 53.

Eliot, "Woman in France: Madame De Sable," p. 54.

37 Eliot, "Woman in France: Madame De Sable," p. 53. 38 Eliot, "Silly Novels by Lady Novelists," in Essays of George Eliot, p. 301.

Woolf, "George Eliot," p. 159.

40 Eliot, Middlemarch, p. 392. 188

41 Eliot, Middlemarch, p. 70.

HZWoolf, "George Eliot," p. 160.

Laura Comer Emery, George Eliot's Creative Conflict: The Other Side of Silence (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1976), p. 7.

Eliot, Daniel Deronda, p. 35. us Eliot, The Mill on the Floss, pp. 83, 55.

46Woolf, "George Eliot," p. 159.

17 Henry James, The Portrait of a Lady (Boston: Houghton Mifflin Company, 1963), p. 187. 48 Eliot, "Woman in France: Madame De Sable," pp.80-81. 49 Eliot, Middlemarch, p. 3; Eliot, The Mill on the Floss, p. 252; Eliot, Adam Bede, p. 116; Eliot, Middlemarch, p. 18; Eliot, Daniel Deronda, p. 97.

Eliot, Middlemarch, p. 3.

51 Ehot, Middlemarch, p. 3. 52 . Ehot, Middlemarch, p. 4; Eliot, The Mill on the Floss, p. 366. 53 Eliot, Middlemarch, p. 3. 54 Eliot, Middlemarch, pp. 20-21. 55 Eliot, Middlemarch, p. 611. 56 Eliot, Daniel Deronda, p. 253.

57Eliot, The George Eliot Letters, Vol. I, p. 22.

CO Eliot, The George Eliot Letters, Vol. i, pp. 65-66. 189

"Eliot, The George Eliot Letters, Vol. I, pp. 21-22.

fifi Redinger, p. 167.

61Eliot, The George Eliot Letters, Vol. I, p. 284.

CO Margaret Homans, "Eliot, Wordsworth, and the Scenes of the Sisters' Instruction," in Writing and Sexual Difference, ed. Elizabeth Abel (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1980), p. 58.

63 Homans, p. 64. fi4 Eliot, The Works of George Eliot, p. 205; Eliot, The Mill on the Floss, p. 208.

65Miller, p. 41.

66Gilbert and Gubar, p. 477; Eliot, The Mill on the Floss, p. 55.

67Eliot, The George Eliot Letters, Vol. V, p. 107.

68George Eliot, Felix Holt: The Radical (New York: W.W. Norton and Company, 1970), p. 26.

69 Eliot, Middlemarch, p. 3. CHAPTER III. "No-Man's Land": Originating Inheritance in To the Lighthouse

Both in life and in art the values of woman are not the values of a man. Thus, when a woman comes to write a novel, she will find that she is perpetually wishing to alter the established values.

"Women and Fiction"

1 cannot make use of what you tell me—about women's bodies for instance—their passions—and so on, because the conventions are still very strong. If I were to overcome the conventions I should need the courage of a hero, and I am not a hero. I doubt that a writer can be a hero. I doubt that a hero can be a writer.

The Pargiters

Of ail that only a few random marks scrawled upon the canvas remained. And it would never be seen; never be hung even, and there was Mr. Tansley whispering in her ear, "Women can't paint, women can't write..."

To the Lighthouse

Woman must write her self: must write about women and bring women to writing, from which they have been driven away as violently as from their bodies— for the same reasons, by the same law, with the same fatal goal. Woman must put herself into the text— as into the world and into history—by her own movement.

Helene Cixous

-190- 191

Virginia Woolf assisted in the modern novel's removal from

"the historical to the personal." Like her contemporaries, James

Joyce and Marcel Proust, she was a great innovator of modern

prose who ran, and still runs, "a long way ahead of. ..[her] critics";

like her male contemporaries, her fictional innovations were motivated by a need to reconstruct the novel so that it would articulate a dissenting experience and reality; and, like those contemporaries,

Woolfs literary ambitions embraced nothing less than the reinvention of literature and language: she, like Clarissa Dalloway and Mrs.

Ramsay, wished to "kindle and illuminate" literature and language until it danced free from its conventional restraints, until she was able to:

make prose move—yes I sweat—as prose has never moved before; from the chuckle, the babble of the rhapsody. Something new goes into my pot every morning—something that's never been got at before.2

To read her work is—as it is with Joyce and Proust—to be continually surprised by how effectively she invented this "something new."

Unlike her contemporaries, however, Woolfs aesthetic innovations were motivated by a desire to politically revise a literature and language that either excluded or denigrated her work and experience.

Her redefinition of experience as subjective, her destruction of the

"gig lamps" of patriarchal plots, and her creative synthesis of prose and poetry to create a feminine lyricism were as much the results of her reinsertion of the feminine in literature as they were attempts 3 a'i self-definition and literary self-creation. Unlike her literary mothers, Charlotte Bronte and George Eliot, Woolf made no 192

pretense of capitulating to or accommodating the male literary traditions of plot, style, and narration but so reconstructed

literature that it had to capitulate to and accommodate the feminine

"creative 'I AM,."i,

In her poignant essay on Christina Rossetti, Woolf brings the essay to an astounding climax by having the excessively shy and self-effacing poet rise to the defense of her work with an assertion g of self: "I am Christina Rossetti." The "indiscretion" that Woolf commits in her "admiration" of Rossetti's unlikely self-assertion is the translation of these four seemingly innocuous words into a female literary revolution assisted by the unmitigated and unapoiogetic assertion of the feminine "I." She understood that a prolonged assertion of the feminine "I" would necessarily precede the resurrection and the creation of female art. As her style matured and she became more confident as a writer, Woolf lost interest in pursuing any subject outside the experience of this important "I":

"I am I ... is the only justification for my writing, living." Her self-absorption in the feminine and the personal has made her vulnerable to accusations of solipsism; however, as her diaries and her essays on the works of other female artists indicate, Wooif perceived the recovery of Judith Shakespeare and the creation of

Mary Carmichael as dependent on a salutary and temporary separation of female experience from the intimidating and subordinating

"facts" of patriarchal culture and the construction of a female art as dependent on the seizure of this uncontaminated and elusive female "1." Woolf's fictional innovations, her insistence on her own 193 experience, and her italicization of the feminine attempted to capture the feminine "I" which remained unwritten and inarticulated

those unrecorded gestures, those unsaid or half- said words, which form themselves, no more palpably than the shadows of moths on the ceiling, when women are alone, unlit by the capricious and colored light of the other sex.8

In her struggle for self-definition and assertion in fiction,

Woolf became obsessed with the conditions of female creativity. Her essays and novels continually question the how and why of female creativity and insist on parallels between the frustrated and exhausted female artist and her articulate and productive male counterpart, in Jacob's Room Woolf creates a particularly tense scene between an aggressively bitter feminist scholar and a passive male reader:

Miss Julia Hedge, the feminist, waited for her books. They did not come. She wetted her pen. She looked about her. Her eye was caught by the final letters in Lord Macaulay's name. And she read them alt round the dome—the names of great men which remind us—"Oh damn," said Julia Hedge, "why didn't they leave room for an Eliot or a Bronte?"

Unfortunate Julia! wetting her pen in bitterness, and leaving her shoe laces untied. When her books came she applied herself to her gigantic labours, but perceived through one of the nerves of her exasperated sensibility how composedly, unconcernedly, and with every consideration the male readers applied themselves to theirs. That young man for example. What had he got to do except copy out poetry?^

The male artist, inheritor and copist of Marlowe and Macaulay, is not "exasperated" by the absence of "an Eliot or a Bronte" from 194 the dome of the British Museum Library or by a history of absence from literature, whereas the female artist, who cannot reproduce herself or, much less, easefully and confidently copy from Marlowe, is debilitated not only by poetry and an intense bitterness but by a certain knowledge of her own inevitable absence from masculine history and tradition. In her most autobiographical novel,

To the Lighthouse, Woolf constructs a contrast of the aesthetic alternatives available to women and attempts to create a creative inheritance for women in Mrs. Ramsay but also emphasizes parallels between the almost gratuitous literary activities of men and the frustration and exhaustion of women in their attempts to create: the supine poet, Augustus Carmichael, lies distanced from the ordinary demands of daily life and searches in his opium stained beard for the words which will eventually make him a highly respected poet; Lily Briscoe must struggle with and reconcile her feminine inheritance with the compulsions of a serious artist before she is able to translate her visions into art; Mr. Ramsay egotistically and unrepentantly usurps all available feminine energies and sympathies to nourish his factual and uncompromising work on "kitchen tables";

Mrs. Ramsay spends and exhausts her life combatting male sterility and disconnection and attempting to counter the disintegration and chaos of life.

The female artist, as envisioned and represented by Woolf, cannot thrive in a context which facilitates a male art and impedes female art. Woolf's obsession with female creativity and with comprehending and resurrecting its history and traditions is 195 evidenced in her prolific attempts to read her female iiterary predecessors as women and to decipher their seemingly conventional works in the contexts of their frustrated and alienated lives. It is exceedingly difficult, she discovered, to read Charlotte Bronte or George Eliot's works as conventional reproductions of the nineteenth-century novel when one is aware of the lives such convention forced on them. Woolf perceived and recorded the psychological and creative strain of the female artist who was forced to create within a context which denigrated and disinherited her.

Most women writers, she argued, were compromised either by their attempts to conform to the traditions and expectations of dominant culture or, like Julia Hedge with her untied shoes and

"gigantic labours," by their own bitterness. Each of her female literary precedessors was "slightly pulled from the straight, and made to alter [their] clear vision in deference to external authority."

Both Bronte and Eliot were compromised by their assimilation and impersonation of masculine fictions and by their imitation of its sentences: "Charlotte Bronte, with all her splendid gift for prose, stumbled and fell with that clumsy weapon in her hands. George

Eliot committed atrocities with it that beggar description." More disastrous, however, for Bronte's genius—or for the talent of any woman who creates out of her grievances—was her inability to transcend her bitterness and anger and to achieve an impersonality in her art:

we are conscious of a woman's presence—of someone resenting the treatment of her sex and pleading for 196

its rights. This brings into women's writing an element which is entirely absent from a man's, unless, indeed, he happens to be a working-man, a negro, or one who for some other reason is conscious of disability. It introduces a distortion and is frequently the cause of weakness. The desire to plead some personal discontent or grievance always has a distressing effect, as if the spot at which the reader's attention is directed were suddenly twofold instead of single.12

Ironically, as evidenced in her portrait of the feminist Julia Hedge,

Wooif's objections to Bronte's inability to transcend the grievances of her sex are applicable to her own failure to "ignore such claims and solicitations" of her feminine self and "hold on [her] way 13 unperturbed by scorn or censure." Indeed, although Woolf prescribes a disinterest and unconsciousness of gender in women's writing, her writing is differentiated from the male model of gender disinterest and unconsciousness by its insistence on and itahcization of sex. Undoubtedly the daughter of Leslie Stephen would flinch at the idea of producing political literature not dissimilar from the

"working-man," the "negro," or other literary subcultures; however, no one can read her fiction without being aware of its "distortion" of conventional experience and of the writer's attempt to reproduce a marginal and subterranean experience.

In contrast to her contemporaries' self-reproductions in

A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man and Remembrance of Things

Past, Woolf never produced a novel in which her birth and tenure as an artist are articulated. The closest she came to reproducing herself in her fiction—or to translating her views about the female artist into her fiction—occurs in the portrait of the amateur/ 197 professional painter, Lily Briscoe. For the most part, however,

Woolf used her mother, Julia Stephen for her model of female creativity; it is from Julia Stephen or Helen Ramsay, Woolf seems to suggest, that the female artist is descended. It is curious that a woman writer who could conceive a female literary revolution and articulate the militancy of A Room of One's Own found it impossible to reproduce her own revolutionary spirit in her fiction.

In "Modern Fiction" and "Mr.Bennett and Mrs. Brown," essays which assert fictional claims and visions over a masculine tradition of materialism or realism, Woolf connects the bondage of the writer to the conventions of fiction: "if a writer were a free man and not a slave, if he could write what he chose not what he must, if he could base his work on his own feelings and not upon 14 conventions...." If the writer were not a slave, then she would not be compelled to repeat the designs of literary authority and tradition, nor would she be bereft of her own vision and voice:

"the writer seems constrained, not by his own free will but by 15 some powerful and unscrupulous tyrant who has him in thrall."

Woolfs attempted remedy of her own thralldom to history and literary tradition is a reorganization of reality and a reinvention of literature.

Although she, early in her career, proclaimed herself "the only woman in England free to write what I like," her diaries and essays betray her self-confidence and are plagued with fears that the essential literariness of language and the conventions of fictions may frustrate her attempts to produce a self-articulating art: 198

i shall here write the first pages of the greatest book in the world. This is what the book would be that was made entirely solely and with integrity of one's thoughts. Suppose one could catch them before they became "works of art"? Catch them hot and sudden as they rise in the mind—walking up Asheham hill for instance. Of course one cannot; for the process of language is slow and deluding. One must stop to find a word. Then, there is the form of the sentence soliciting one to fill it.16

Thus, even imprisoned within her art-facilitating ahistorical and solipsistic world, Woolf cannot reproduce "entirely solely and with integrity" her own impulses or visions in art but is subject to a bondage similar to that which has betrayed and silenced her female literary precedessors.

Like her predecessors, Woolf was challenged by the recapturing and creation of female experience but remained seemingly oblivious to the absence of her own creative consciousness in her fiction.

Perhaps this absence is the result of her capitulation to the reader, who would be unprepared for and unaccepting of any woman artist who did more than "playing at painting," or the result of a blindness inspired by centuries of female silence and absence; whatever the reason, no woman writer has been so prolifically obsessed by the woman artist and her desire to create, her absence from history and tradition, and her frustration within art: in The Voyage Out,

Mrs. Palloway, and To the Lighthouse, she celebrates instinctual feminine creativity, criticizes its conventional expressions, and locates within it woman's creative past; in Orlando, her male/female protagonist carries, from century to century, the manuscript 199 of an epic poem before being able to complete it in the twentieth^ century; and in her last work. Between the Acts, her inexhaustible

interest in female creativity is witnessed in her creation of Miss

La Trobe (224). It is, however, in her magnum opus to women and creativity, A Room of One's Own, that Woolf most candidly confronts and articulates the social and psychological obstacles to female creativity. She depicts the female artist as imprisoned within the restraints of patriarchy and dependency which compromise and frustrate any pursuit, like the fateful adventures of Judith

Shakespeare, of art or self-articulation. If, as represented in the metaphoric tragedy of Shakespeare's sister, she is compelled to create, this compulsion will yield only unsatisfied yearnings and an internalized, inarticulated violence: "Who shall measure the heat and violence of the poet's heart when caught and tangled in a woman's body." In an attempt to "measure" and articulate this tangled and tortured existence, Woolf abstracts from her silenced predecessors a biography which is similar to her own life of alienation, madness, and suicide: "any woman born with a great gift in the sixteenth century would certainly have gone crazed, shot herself, or ended her days in some lonely cottage outside the 18 village, half witch, half wizard, feared and mocked at." The recent publication of Woolf's diaries and correspondence has so impressed her readers with their general bulk and quality that there is a movement to deemphasize her madness and to emphasize her awesome capacity for sustained work; yet, however much the 200

intricate tensions and mosaics of her fiction argue for a superior

sanity and physical stamina, her life and death were mediated by

a context as unrelenting as the one that isolated and debilitated

Judith Shakespeare. Unlike her literary mothers, Woolf fully

comprehended and articulated the power of this patriarchal context

to compromise her life and work. Many of her observations, which

emanated from her own anger and divided experience, about her

predecessors and female creativity are applicable to her own

harassed and guilty creativity. When she writes of Bronte's

debilitation and silenced self-knowledge, the reader comprehends

Woolf's own anguished compromise: "She knew, no one better, how

enormously her genius would have profited if it had not spend itself 19 in solitary visions over distant fields."

The context which mediated Virginia Woolf's life and work was not dissimilar from that which mediated the lives and works of

Charlotte Bronte and George Eliot. She was born only fourteen months after the death of Eliot and was raised a Victorian. At

22 Hyde Park Gate, the Stephen family home, all the conventions and expectations of the late Victorian society were observed and perpetuated: Mr. and Mrs. Leslie Stephen assumed, as do

Mr. and Mrs. Ramsay, the symbolic and conventional roles of husband and wife, of man and woman; the Stephen boys received a formal university education, whereas the Stephen girls, although given access to their father's library, were kept at home and educated in the feminine arts of domesticity and decorum. Woolf's campaign to liberate her mind from the oppressive forces of Hyde Park Gate, to wrestle "illegitimate freedom" from the Victorian patriarchy of her father, and to evade her mother's subordinate life and creative exhaustion was particularly intense and began early in her life. In an autobiographical sketch, Woolf relates an early sense of the oppression in and her alienation from the world of her parents:

Two different ages confronted each other in the drawing room at Hyde Park Gate: the Victorian age; and the Edwardian age. We were not his children, but his grandchildren. When we both felt that he was not only terrifying' but also ridiculous we were looking at him with eyes that saw ahead of us something—something so easily seen now by every boy and girl of sixteen and eighteen that the sight is perfectly familiar. The cruel thing was that while we could see the future, we were completely in the power of the past. That bred a violent struggle. So that while we fought against them as individuals we also fought against them in their public capacity. We were living say in 1910; they were living in I860.21

In this "violent struggle" between past and future, Woolf fought for self-articulation. The half a century which separated Leslie

Stephen from his youngest daughter bred a schizophrenia of compliance and rebellion; even as she and Vanessa appeared to shape their conduct to an expected feminine subordination and receptivity, they were subversively infiltrating the masculine privileges of education and art:

In 22 Hyde Park Gate round about 1900 there was to be found a complete model of Victorian society. If I had the power to lift out a month of life as we lived it about 1900 I could extract a section of Victorian life, like one of those cases with glass covers in which one is shown ants or bees going about their affairs.... From ten to one we escaped the pressure of Victorian society. Vanessa, I 202

suppose.. .painted from the life.... And for the same three hours I could be reading perhaps Plato's Republic, or spelling out a Creek chorus. Our minds would escape to the world which on this November morning of 1940 she inhabits at Charleston and I in my garden room at Monks House... .About 4.30 Victorian society exerted its pressure. 22

Thus, Woolf's first introduction to art and knowledge was mediated by a strategy, which had been experienced and perfected by nineteenth-century female artists, of concealment and duplicity.

The schizophrenia which marks and haunts female art is evident in her construction of a dual identity to accommodate the differing needs of her public and private lives. Her simultaneous existence in predetermined and self-articulating lives produced an "internalized split" between an identification with and glorification of Victorian life and a rejection of Victorian patriarchy that was never resolved 23 in her life or work. Her ambivalence towards the repressive world of her father and mother is most evident in her fictional invention and identification with the domestic creativity of her mother.

The female artist's "inevitable struggle between tradition and the individual talent" was particularly intense and complex for 24 Virginia Woolf. Her father was an architect of Victorian patriarchy and literature, and her mother was a "self-chosen... 25 princess to a patriarch." Since both father and mother were staunch representatives of a tradition which threatened to suppress and strangle her talent, her emergence as an artist required a creative reparenting of herself. The necessary circumvention of 203 her parents extended to her work, in which she, like all female artists, was confronted with the dilemma of exorcizing the influence of the maternal as well as the paternal:

If a man's text,... is fathered, then a woman's text is not only mothered but parented; it confronts both paternal and maternal precursors and must deal with the problems and advantages of both lines of inheritance.26

The worlds of her father and mother provided her with an irresolvable opposition between masculine sterility and intellection and feminine creativity and instinct, but she also inherited from them a history of literary activity, a compulsion for work, and a respect for sympathy and receptivity. However, the most dramatic evidence of Woolf's creative reparenting is witnessed in her artistic catharsis of her father and mother's repressive influence:

I used to think of him and mother daily; but writing the Lighthouse laid them in my mind. And now he comes back sometimes, but differently. {1 believe this to be true—that I was obsessed by them both, unhealthily; and writing of them was a necessary act.) He comes back now more as a contemporary. I must read him someday. 1 wonder if I can feel again, I hear his voice, I know this by heart?27

For the forty-four year old Lily Briscoe as well as for the forty-four year old Virginia Woolf, To the Lighthouse is a cathartic experience. The novel not only reinforced the latent creative voice that Woolf discovered while working on Jacob's Room but exorcized from her the inhibitions that whispered that "women can't paint, women can't write" and that urged her to be kind to men and dishonest about her own experience (75). This exorcism 204 of her parents allowed Woolf to perceive her father, who possessed sufficient authority to declare "There is no Cod," as a contemporary and colleague (308). In this effective de-fusion of her potent father,

Woolf can anticipate reading his work without being intimidated and anticipate the return of feeling which as she demonstrates in the cases of Septimus Warren Smith and Lily Briscoe, is indicative of a creative disorder and its resolution. With her usual uncanny insight, Woolf comprehended the dilemma of self-parenting for the female artist and understood that the continued presence of her father and mother would distort her own voice and visions. In her self- defensive murder of the patriarch and his princess, Woolf struck, as Lily does, "that razor edge of balance" batween tradition and female art which prepared her for the uninhibited and relatively unmediated articulation of her vision in The Waves (287).

Although Woolf purged her mind of the censorship and repressive influences of her parents, she continued to perceive her writing as unmitigated acts of rebellion. As delineated in her autobiographical sketches, writing and reading were imbued with a secrecy and guilt not dissimilar from criminal acts. Inevitably, the daughter of Leslie Stephen would equate writing and reading with the usurpation of her father's powers and would enact her own revolution:

Writing, for Virginia Woolf, was a revolutionary act. Her alienation from British patriarchal culture and its capitalist and imperialist forms and values, was so intense that she was filled with terror and determination as she wrote. A guerrilla fighter in a Victorian skirt, she trembled with fear as she prepared her attacks, her raids on the enemy.... She always feared she would be found out, that the 205

punishment of the fathers for daring to trespass on their territory was "instant dismemberment by wild horses" She felt that writing was a conspiracy against the state, an act of aggression against the powerful, the willful breaking of a treaty of silence the oppressed had made with their masters to ensure survival. Language and culture belonged to them. ...Virginia Woolf's rebellion sought not only the overthrow of male culture but also a return to the oppressed of their rightful heritage and the historical conditions in which to enjoy it.28

In this description of a woman creating in anxiety and sheer terror against accepted values and conventions, Jane Marcus captures the psychic debilitation of the female artist. Woolfs unequivocal feminism often masked the fear, evident in the illnesses preceding and succeeding her creative endeavors, under which she created.

Her extreme creative anxiety and insecurity forced her into a dependence on Leonard Woolf and other literary males for judgments about her books. While writing for Woolf may not have been exactly comparable to "guerrilla" warfare, it was a struggle between the sanctuary of silence and repression and the liability of speech and creative activity. For Woolf, this struggle manifested itself in continually having to combat "a circle of invisible censors" who 29 besieged her with pleas for silence and caution. Even while attempting to circumvent the female history of concealment and suppression and to "write what cannot be written," Woolf perceived that her ambition, or the ambitions of other women artists, to articulate "the to-be-said and the not-said" of female experience would inevitably be obstructed by an internalized male censor:

Men, her reason told her, would be shocked. The consciousness of what men will say of a woman who speaks the truth about her passions 206

had roused her from her artist's state of unconsciousness. She could write no longer. The trance was over. Her imagination work no longer.3°

The female artist, distracted by patriarchal values and conventions, will never experience the creative freedoms of her male counterpart.

Her writing and imagination are sacrificed to a consciousness of sex.

In To the Lighthouse, Lily's creative concentration is challenged by the vulnerability and self-doubt originating from her conflicts as a female artist:

Always (it was in her nature, or in her sex, she did not know which) before she exchanged the fluidity of life for the concentration of painting she had a few moments of nakedness when she seemed like an unborn soul, a soul reft of body, hesitating on some windy pinnacle and exposed without protection to all the blasts of doubt (236-237).

Woolf's retreat into androgyny is an attempt to negotiate the terror of female creation, but it is also an attempt to gain the same creative advantages as her sex-unconscious male counterparts. Paradoxically, if a female artist defeats her internalized censors by achieving an unconsciousness of her sex—if she, in fact, creates "as a woman, but as a woman who has forgotten that she is a woman"—then the truth "about [her] body, about [her] passions" will never be articulated.31

For Woolf's most articulate critic, the paradox within her creative rebellion and her negotiation of the male censor is symptomatic of the general "secession" of the female aesthetic from history, literature, and sex: 207

Women writers responded to the war by turning within; yet they renounced the demands of the individual narrative self. The world seemed dominated by the violence of ego; women writers wanted no part of it. Thus the fiction of this generation seems oddly impersonal and renunciatory at the same time that it is openly and insistently female. The female aesthetic was to become another form of self- annihilation for women writers, rather than a way of self-realization. One detects in this generation clear and disturbing signs of retreat: retreat from the material world, retreat into separate rooms and separate cities. Under the banner of the female aesthetic marched the army of secession.32

In contrast to Marcus1 sketch of a terrified and ambivalent "guerrilla fighter in a Victorian skirt," Elaine Showalter argues for an interpretation of WooIFs work as evasive rather than creative of female experience. Her criticism of Woolf's, and Richardson's, retreat into solipsism is, ironically, a criticism directed by Woolf against the "Leaning Tower" artist who is so alienated from society that he "couldn't describe society: had therefore to describe 33 himself." Woolf, who suffered extreme alienation during her bouts of madness, understood the hazards of solipsism but also sought it out as a sanctuary and as the most conducive state for the creation of uninhibited female art. A more non-negotiable criticism of Woolf's evasion of her responsibilities as a woman writer is her glorification of the Victorian feminine ideal in her portraits of domestic creativity and her failure to produce a model of active and self-contained female creativity. Woolfs celebrations of female art in Clarissa Dalloway and Mrs. Ramsay are not only celebrations of a creative existence that she refused to imitate but depictions of creative diffusion and sympathetic exhaustion: 208

Woolf's female aesthetic is an extension of her view of women's social role: receptivity to the point of self-destruction, creative synthesis to the point of exhaustion and sterility... .The free-flowing empathy of woman seeks its own ecstatic extinction. For Mrs. Ramsay, death is a mode of self-assertion. Refined to its essences, abstracted from its physicality and anger, denied any action, Woolf's vision of womanhood is as deadly as it is disembodied. The ultimate room of one's own is the grave. 34

Lytton Strachey found it difficult to assess the portrait of a hostess who combats war and chaos with her offerings of parties in

Mrs. Dalloway, and the difficulty of assessing Clarissa's creative endeavors remains; however, in Mrs. Ramsay's death Wooif emphasizes the "exhaustion" and "self-destruction" of conventional and indiscriminate feminine sympathy and creativity. For Mrs.

Ramsay, death is not "a mode of self-assertion" nor is it an

"ecstatic extinction," but it is the inevitable result of being denied, as Mr. Ramsay is not, one's own "private door" to slam (42). Like

Bronte and Eliot, Woolf produced no fictional models of an active and successful female artist but vacillated between an assertion and renunciation of female creativity in her depictions of displaced and conventional modes of female creative expression and their results.

Throughout her prolific literary career, Woolf vacillated between traditional and "factual" essays and novels and experimental and visionary novels. She relied on her essays, biographies, and traditional novels to check the creative and existential freedoms experienced in her most experimental works. Although she forced literature and language to capitulate to her vision, she could not 209 sacrifice the world of facts and social reality that she had inherited.

A recent biographer attributes even her madness to a desire for 35 a "new synthesis, a creative recombination of fact and vision."

In her depictions of female creativity, she was never able to synthesize fact with vision, A Room of One's Own with To the

Lighthouse, or Mary Carmichael with Lily Briscoe. This vacillation between fact and vision, between conventional and self-articulating modes of creative expression, is present in her embrace and repulsion of the female artist. Her ambivalence towards female creativity is evident in her desired transcendence of sex and in her portraits of the female artist as either exiled from marriage and love or as a symbol of creative nurturance and receptivity.

In her portraits of Lily Briscoe and Mrs. Ramsay as female artists,

Woolf resurrects not Judith Shakespeare but stereotypes of female creativity as a compensatory or instinctual activity- She denies her creative female protagonists her experience or advantages as an artist: Rachel Vinrace dies before she can articulate her creative yearnings or consummate her love; Liiy Briscoe, who pursues her art while taking care of her father, is condemned to an isolated and periphersi existence; Clarissa Dalloway and Mrs. Ramsay mimic their creator's search for continuity and unity, but their search is 37 conducted as "great amateur(s) of the art of life." However, it is in her portraits of domestic creativity and connection that the conflict between fact and vision is most intense. The portrait of

Clarissa Dalloway as a creative sensibility is de-fused by her vanity, frivolity, and lack of maternal feeling. The portrait of 210

Mrs. Ramsay, however, is the most attractive and enigmatic

representation of conventional female creativity. She is "the

thing itself": the essential creative impulse stripped of language

or easel (174). She is "frightening" and "irresistible" as a model

of female art which contains silence as well as nurturance (152).

As the mother through which all female artists think back, she

entices her aspiring and creative daughters away from their self-

articulated lives and art and into selflessness and receptivity. For

Lily, the translation of her vision into art is impeded by the conflict

between her need for maternal nurturance and her creative ambitions:

She could see it all so clearly, so commandingly, when she looked: it was when she took her brush in hand that the whole thing changed. It was in that moment's flight between the picture and her canvas that the demons set on her who often brought her to the verge of tears and made this passage from conception to work as dreadful as any down a dark passage for a child. Such she often felt herself— struggling against terrific odds to maintain her courage; to say: "But this is what I see; this is what I see," and so to clasp some miserable remnant of her vision to her breast, which a thousand forces did their best to pluck from her. And it was then too, in that chill and windy way, as she began to paint, that there forced themselves upon her other things, her own inadequacy, her insignificance, keeping house for her father off the Brompton Road, and had much ado to control her impulse to fling herself (thank Heaven she had always resisted so far) at Mrs. Ramsay's knee and say to hei—but what could one say to her? "I'm in love with you?" No, that was not true. "I'm in love with this all," waving her hand at the hedge, at the house, at the children. It was absurb, it was impossible (32).

Mrs. Ramsay, placed in the position of Woolf's male censor, disrupts

Lily's creative concentration. In answer to Mrs. Ramsay's maternal 211 abundance and commonplace femininity, Lily must not only assert her creative vision but combat the apparent and comparative sterility, inadequacy, and insignificance of her own existence.

Lily's love for Mrs. Ramsay is mediated by "this all," by the art that surrounds her. This secure, patriarchal nest threatens division and appropriation of Lily's independence and art:

For what happened to her, especially staying with the Ramsays, was to be made to feel violently two opposite things at the same time; that's what you feel, was one; that's what I feel, was the other, and then they fought together in her mind (154). The conflict which intensifies with Mrs. Ramsay's presence is significant of, to feminize Harold Bioom's masculine creative model, the anxiety and division that the female artist experiences when confronted with her creative precursor. To the Lighthouse details the female artist's confrontation with and incorporation of her creative mother and her resolution of femininity and art.

Five years after the completion of To the Lighthouse, Woolf argued that the female artist could survive only through a destruction of her female precursor and her legacy of absence, silence, and obedience:

I turned upon her and caught her by the throat. I did my best to kill her. My excuse, if I were to be had up in a court of law, would be that I acted in self-defence. Had I not killed her she would have killed me. She would have plucked the heart out of my writing It is far harder to kill a phantom than a reality... .But it was a real experience; it was an experience that was found to befall all women writers at that time. Killing the Angel in the House was part of the occupation of the woman writer. 3? 212

In a prescription that resembles Bloom's for the ambitious and anxious ephebe, Woolf advocates the repeated and tireless overthrow of one's creative inheritance. The female artist's "occupation,"

Woolf argues, is a continual self-renewal and articulation. However,

in A Room of One's Own, written a year after the publication of

To the Lighthouse, Woolf argues for a synthesis of women's creative

inheritance and their self-engendrure. The female artist, she 38 contends, must be "an inheritor as well as originator." Since male aesthetic influence is "too distant to be sedulous," she asserts 39 that female artists must "think back through our mothers."

Given the similarity between Woolf's aesthetic principles and the ambitions of her domestically creative mother, her assertion of

"our mothers" legacy is to be read as a personal as well as a historical inheritance. Woolf's obsession with feminine creativity and instinct emanates from the legend of Julia Stephen. Phyllis

Rose argues that Woolf eased her creative guilt by pursuing her mother in many of her female characters and by reinventing herself as "her mother's heir":

there was some connection between the outbreaks of Woolf's illness and her feeling that in being a writer she was doing something her family and society did not fundamentally support.... In To the Lighthouse Woolf dramatizes the working out of a way in which she can see herself as her mother heir's while still rejecting the model of womanhood she presents. She does this by conceptualizing Mrs. Ramsay as an artist, trans­ forming the angel in the house, who had been for the Victorians an ethical ideal, into a portrait of the artist.40

This strategy de-fuses "the angel in the house" by transforming 213 her into a creative co-conspirator. Woolf's profession as a witer emanates from her identification with her literate and industrious father; however, her desire for an identification with her mother is evident in the women she created and in her aesthetics. Ironically, for a woman who later advocated the strangulation of repressive mothers, Woolf's aesthetic doctrines and motivation are articulated in the characters most closely resembling her mother. In Mrs.

Dalloway, Clarissa's active creation of life, of "making it up, building it round one, tumbling it, creating it every moment afresh," is a rephrasing of Woolf's belief "that the whole world is a work 41 of art; that we are parts of the work of art." Clarissa and

Mrs. Ramsay's ebullient seizures of the moment , their assertion of continuity within a discontinuous experience, of connection and communion within irrefutable isolation and silence, and their emasculation of the authority of change and chaos in the creation of an alternative world of imagination and eternity, are enactments of Woolf's own aesthetic motivation: "I thought.. .something very profound about the synthesis of my being: how only writing 42 composes it: how nothing makes a whole unless I am writing."

The character of Clarissa Dalloway was a creative recombination of Woolf's mother as well as many of her "hostess" friends; she was primarily interested in exploring, through Clarissa, feminine creativity as a social art and in contrasting Clarissa's sane and social art with the incommunicable and diseased art of Septimus

Warren Smith. In the character of Mrs. Ramsay, however, Woolf establishes a tradition of female art and its creative legacy for 214

the self-engendering female artist. By originating and redefining

her creative inheritance from her mother, Woolf is able to

acknowledge and separate their respective creative activities, to

transcend the guiit of being different from her mother, and to kill

the mother that would insist on her daughter's capitulation to

conventions:

Until I was in the forties—I could set the date by seeing when I wrote To the Lighthouse, but am too casual here to bother to do it—the presence of my mother obsessed me. 1 could hear her voice, see her, imagine what she would do or say as I went about my day's doings. She was one of the invisible presences who after all play so important a part in every life.43

Woolf's most autobiographical novel is a meditation on the

divisions of male and female experience, the social and artistic

alternatives of women, and the complex relationship between the

female artist and her creative precursor. It is also a conflation

of past, present, and future realities in which the aforementioned

motifs are enacted. The novel opens on the past, which is then

the present and which is mediated by future expectations, goes on

to the present, which contains the past and is still mediated by

future expectations, and climaxes in the vision of the female artist

liberated into a future free from the inhibitions or anxieties of

the past or present. The novel begins as an elegy to Mrs. Ramsay's creativity and sympathy and ends with the artistic completion of

Lily's vision. Although they represent the oppositions of communion and isolation, of marriage and spinsterhood, of sympathy and self-containment, it is Mrs. Ramsay who mediates—indeed. 215

literally poses foi—Lily's art and who, ten years after her death,

brings Lily to her vision.

Mrs. Ramsay is the apotheosis of the female aesthetic's

glorification of women as "creators, originators, artists, ... all 45 the time." The purple wedge which symbolizes her is significant of her enigmatic and elusive presence: she is a diffuse and

sympathetic sensibility ministering to all; she is a "core of darkness" capable of such extraordinary concentration and negative capability that she is able to become "the thing she looked at";

she is the stereotypical late Victorian wife and mother elevated to myth; she is an artist whose canvas and "antagonist" is life; and she is a menacing, manipulative, and short-sighted presence to younger women who wish to create something outside of family and love (96, 97, 120). She is disinterested in power, yet she spends a substantial portion of the first section reading to her youngest child from a story of subversive female power, which is realized in her being crowned at the end of the novel with "a wreath of white flowers" (269). She is the active creative presence within the novel, yet it is only after her death that her magnificent labours are realized in the "helter skelter" and the "gigantic chaos" that invades her home and consumes two of her children (193, 202).

She is uncontaminated feminine instinct who, like Clarissa Dalloway,

"knew nothing, no language, no history... her only gift was knowing people by instinct," yet she is a spy in the house of women who trustingly reinforces patriarchal values and knowledge: 216

A square root? What was that? Her sons knew. She leant on them; on cubes and square roots; that was what they were talking about now; on Voltaire and Madame de Staei; on the character of Napoleon; on the French system of land tenure; on Lord Rosebery; on Creevey's Memoirs: she let it uphold and sustain her, this admirable fabric of the masculine intelligence, which ran up and down, crossed this way and that, like iron girders spanning the swaying fabric, upholding the world, so that she could trust herself to it utterly, even shut her eyes, or flicker them for a moment, as a child staring up from its pillow winks at the myriad layers of the leaves of a tree (159).

In the world of masculine mathematics and heroics, Mrs. Ramsay is reduced to the position and responsibility of a "child."

Ironically, her utter faith in the fabric and metal of "masculine intelligence" to "uphold and sustain her" is repaid in its demands and in the exhaustion of her receptivity and sympathy. Mrs.

Ramsay, intimidated and impressed by the alien nature of masculine interests, fails to perceive that the "iron girders" of masculinity are dependent on her whispered encouragements and unchecked sympathy.

The novel opens with Mrs. Ramsay sitting in the window with her son, James, at her knee. Throughout the novel, from this first image to her reappearance to Lily at the end of the novel, she is defined and mythologized as a mother. Her creative capacity for empathy and connection emanate from her maternity and femininity. Like a mythical collaborator of fate, like the great Demeter herself, Mrs. Ramsay sits in the window knitting together the diverse threads of a brown stocking and exerting

"with immutable cairn" an influence "over destinies which she 217 completely failed to understand" (78). It is from this position, between the open window and the terrace, between domestic and public worlds, between the external and internal, that Lily attempts to capture her. Within the context of a dialogue between subject and object, between perceiver and perceived, the narrative consciousness of the novel illuminates character by vacillating between the perceiving consciousness of a character and the perception of that character by another character. This device allows the reader to inhabit the character's mind without sacrificing an external and impersonal view of the character. All the major characters are delineated and comprehended by this device; however, it is Mrs. Ramsay's perceptions and the way that she is perceived that dominate the novel. Her consciousness is guided by a creative empathy, by an affective perception, which emanates from a desire to destroy differences and to create connections.

She is an artist of the interpersonal and of the domestic, yet she is also the object of other's perceptions and of another's art.

The narrative consciousness italicizes its, and Lily's, obsession with her as an object of art in its many framings of her: the novel opens with her framed in the window; at one point she is framed "absurdly" within a "gilt frame"; and she is even, as if the reader needed the connection, framed "against a picture of

Queen Victoria wearing the blue ribbon of the Garter" (48, 25).

Thus, when the reader first encounters Mrs. Ramsay sitting in the window, it is not only within the creativity of maternity and 218 femininity that she is comprehended but, as particularly demonstrated in Lily's obsession with capturing her, as the muse and object of the narrative consciousness.

The novel opens with Mrs. Ramsay's reassurance to James that the weather will permit a long-anticipated trip to the lighthouse.

This reassurance evades the fact that the weather will not be fine and is indicative of Mrs. Ramsay's casual and creative rearrangement of facts and realities. In her "transaction" with "her old antagonist" life, she does not hesitate to exaggerate or manipulate its facts in order to create or sustain a happy or eternal moment, whereas

Mr. Ramsay will not compromise nor allow his children to compromise the brutality of facts (120). As a man existing in a patriarchal culture which is founded on the masculine system of language and knowledge, Mr. Ramsay is comfortable with facts; indeed, his legacy is books and the facts that they contain. His insistence on his children's allegiance to the world of facts is an insistence on their acceptance and acknowledgement of his power and privileges:

What he said was true. It was always true. He was incapable of untruth; never tampered with a fact; never altered a disagreeable word to suit the pleasure or convenience of any mortal being, least of all his own children, who, sprung from his loins, should be aware from childhood that life is difficult, facts uncompromising; and the passage to that fabled land where our brightest hopes are extinguished, our frail barks founder in darkness (her Mr. Ramsay would straighten his back and narrow his little blue eyes upon the horizon), one that needs, above all, courage, truth, and the power to endure (10-11).

Mr. Ramsay's inability to tamper "with a fact" suggests a particularly 219 spare and inactive imaginative life. As a corrective to his sterile imagination and "fabled land" of "facts uncompromising," Mrs.

Ramsay makes extraordinary promises and reads fairy tales to her children. Her manipulation of the masculine world of facts is comparable to a subversion of her husband's power, of his legacy to his children, and of masculine intelligence.

Mrs. Ramsay's mollification of facts not only subverts masculine power but creates its dependence on her for truth. However rigidly Mr. Ramsay may insist upon the inflexible and disheartening world of facts, it is not from the barrenness of facts or books that he is stimulated into being or to work:

Mrs. Ramsay, who had been sitting loosely, folding her son in her arms, braced herself, and, half turning, seemed to raise herself with an effort, and at once to pour erect into the air a rain of energy, a column of spray, looking at the same time animated and alive as if all her energies were being fused into force, burning and illuminating (quietly though she sat, taking up her stocking again), and into this delicious fecundity, this fountain and spray of life, the fatal sterility of the male plunged itself, like a beak of brass, barren and bare. He wanted sympathy. He was a failure, he said. Mrs. Ramsay flashed her needles. Mr. Ramsay repeated, never taking his eyes from her face, that he was a failure. ...It was sympathy he wanted, to be assured of his genius, first of all, and then to be taken within the circle of life, warmed and soothed, to have his senses restored to him, his barrenness made fertile, and all the rooms of the house made full of life....

James felt all her strength flaring up to be drunk and quenched by the beak of brass, the arid scimitar of the male, which smote mercilessly, again and again, demanding sympathy (58-59).

To emphasize the opposition of the "fatal sterility" of male selfishness and the "delicious fecundity" of female sympathy, Woolf relies on an 220

imagery of metals, angularities, abruptness, and barrenness for

the male and an imagery of diffusion, openness, illumination, and

wetness for the female. The collapse of his masculine world of facts

and his fear of never reaching "R" lead Mr. Ramsay to compete

with his son for the maternal "circle of life" in which he can remain

oblivious to and protected from ordinary reality (55). His circling

and repeated swooping down on his prey are suggestive of a cannibalistic consumption of his wife's energies and sympathy. This consumption returns Mr. Ramsay to life, but the effort contracts and exhausts Mrs. Ramsay:

Immediately, Mrs. Ramsay seemed to fold herself together, one petal closed in another, and the whole fabric fell in exhaustion upon itself, so that she had only strength enough to move her finger, in exquisite abandonment to exhaustion, across the page of Grimm's fairy story, while there throbbed through her, like the pulse in a spring which has expanded to its full width and now gently ceases to beat, the rapture of successful creation (61).

This "rapture of successful creation" is, in fact, the historical sacrifice of women to men. The creative renewal that Mr. Ramsay demands from Mrs. Ramsay exacts from her the energy and sympathy which could be more creatively articulated. The sympathy which

Mrs. Ramsay, and women historically, so rapturously forfeits

is essential to the creation of art. Mr. Ramsay holds the opinion that "the arts are merely a decoration imposed on the top of human life; they do not express it," and Mrs. Ramsay, in her smiling tolerance of Lily's attempts at a professional and public art, enacts

Mr.Ramsay's separation of serious art from a woman's life (67).

For Mrs. Ramsay, her remarkable capacity for sympathy exists to 221 be exhausted on a maintenance of the personal, whereas, for Lily, it is a precious asset which must be protected and contained within her art- In contrast to Mrs. Ramsay's self-abandonment, Lily's reaction to Mr. Ramsay's demands is to avoid the exhaustion and contamination of those demands which would reduce her art to

"playing at painting":

She set her clean canvas firmly upo i the easel, as a barrier, frail, but she hoped sufficiently substantial to ward off Mr. Ramsay and his exactingness. She did her best to look, when his back was turned, at her picture; that line there, that mass there. But it was out of the question. Let him be fifty feet away, let him not even speak to you, let him not even see you, he permeated, he prevailed, he imposed himself. He changed everything. She could not see the colour; she could not see the lines; even with his back turned to her, she could only think, But he'll be down on me in a moment, demanding— something she felt she could not give him (224, 223).

Between herself and the demands of the male world, Lily places her art. The demands are so relentless and pervasive that it is only

"a barrier, frail" between herself and the destructive male ego. Her refusal to satisfy the cannibalistic needs of Mr. Ramsay does not reflect on the morality of such demands and dominance of space but on the authenticity of Lily's femininity. Lily's subterfuge for the evasion of the male demanding presence is to withdraw further into herself, to "draw her skirts a little closer round her ankles, lest she should get wet," and to redirect those demands away from sympathy to the more neutral subject of his "beautiful boots" (228, 229). 222

Mrs. Ramsay and Lily delineate the oppositions of private and public, of conventional and self-articulating, female art, yet they share the creative ambition to discover within the chaos and fluidity of life an immutable and eternal pattern, a figure in the carpet which will allow them to comprehend and recreate the reality behind appearances. Lily attempts to capture "this other thing, this truth, this reality, which suddenly laid hands on her, emerged stark at the back of appearances" with paint and a brush that is the "one dependable thing in a world of strife, ruin, chaos";

Mrs. Ramsay, however, sorts out from the strife and chaos those moments of personal and collective immortality:

Nothing need be said; nothing could be said. There it was, all round them. It partook, she felt, carefully helping Mr. Bankes to a specially tender piece, of eternity; as she had already felt about something different once before that afternoon; there is a coherence in things, a stability; something, she meant , is immune to change, and shines out (she glanced at the window with its ripple of reflected lights] in the face of the flowing, the fleeting, the spectral, like a ruby; so that again tonight she had the feeling she had had once today, already, of peace, of rest. Of such moments, she thought, the thing is made that endures (236, 224, 158).

At the Ramsays1 dinner party, the flux of the outside world is momentarily defeated by the harmony and communion around the dinner table. To create this moment of being, Mrs. Ramsay has exercised her domestic and sympathetic talents; Lily's participation, however, in this domestic creativity is limited to reluctantly conceding to Mrs. Ramsay's unspoken request that she relinquish the pleasing thoughts of her work and her experiment on "what 223 happens if one is not nice to that young man" in order to be kind and sympathetic to the misogynist, Charles Tansley (139). Mrs.

Ramsay, with some vanity, perceives that the harmony and cohesion of her dinner party will, like her memory of the Mannings, become a living a common memory for her guests:

They would, she thought, however long they lived, come back to this night; this moon; this wind; this house: and to her too. It flattered her, where she was most susceptible of flattery, to think how, wound about in their hearts, however long they iived she would be woven; and this, and this, and this... (169-170).

When her guests return to their isolated and different lives, Mrs.

Ramsay's dinner party will be a memory of how they once came together and fought "their common cause against the fluidity out there" (147).

In the final section of the novel, Lily comes to a latent comprehension of Mrs. Ramsay's power as an artist to penetrate and simplify life into "little daily miracles, illuminations, matches struck unexpectedly in the dark":

But what a power was in the human soul! she thought. That woman sitting there writing under the rock resolved everything into simplicity; made these angers, irritations fall off like old rags; she brought together this and that and then this, and so made out of that miserable silliness and spite ...this moment of friendship and liking—which survived, after all these years complete, so that she dipped into it to re-fashion her memory of him, and there it stayed in the mind affecting one almost like a work of art (239-240).

From Mrs. Ramsay's art, Lily is able to "re-fashion" a moment in her experience and memory. In Mrs. Ramsay's art, she discerns the impulses which motivate her own desire to create: just as Lily 224

penetrates and alters, with color and line, the surfaces of reality,

Mrs. Ramsay is able to refashion human feeling, to combine creatively two disparate temperaments, and to impose meaning and eternity on the prosaic and ordinary. Lily comes to a recognition that an artist is defined by her desire to steal from the violent shortness and inexplicable nature of life some moments which will endure: "'you1 and 'I1 and 'she' pass and vanish; nothing stays; all changes; but not words, not paint" (267). Like the dancers on the Grecian urn,

Mrs. Ramsay's moments exist independently of time and change.

At the end of the novel, however, Lily realizes that it is the impulse, rather than the actuality, to salvage moments of or scenes from life that is important. Regardless of whether women have been historically absent from art, as Charles Tansley needs to believe, or whether her picture will be "hung in the attics" or "destroyed," only the desire to create permanence out of the ephermeral is significant. In her designation of Mrs. Ramsay's harmonious and eternal moments as "almost like a work of art," Lily concedes to the skill of domestic art and to the talents of those who are adept at it without, however, sacrificing the professionalism and difference of her own art. When Lily cries out that "she owed it all" to

Mrs. Ramsay, she is referring to Mrs. Ramsay's recreation of the relationship between Charles and herself and to her revelation that life will not be illuminated by a "great revelation" but rather from a collection of created moments "struck into stability" (241,

240, 241). This debt does not explicitly include her own art; however, it is in her pursuit of Mrs. Ramsay and by the revelations 225 contained in Mrs. Ramsay's "almost art" that Lily is returned to feeling and is able to complete her picture.

After Mrs. Ramsay's death, the disintegration and fluidity that her dinner party defeated invades and takes up an unchallenged residence in the Ramsay's summer home. Through the work of two female servants, who are married and are contemporaries of Mrs.

Ramsay, "the corruption and the rot" of the house are "rescued from the pool of Time" (209). Into this "house full of unrelated passions," the Ramsays and their guests return (221). The whirling and unmanageable "Time Passes" section ends with Lily's startled consciousness, with her "sitting bolt upright in bed. Awake" (214).

From this point on, it is Lily's consciousness and art that fashion and inform the novel. The final section begins with Lily's questioning of her relationship with and feelings for Mrs. Ramsay.

Once again at the Ramsay's breakfast table, Lily is puzzled by her lack of feeling for Mrs. Ramsay: "Nothing, nothing—nothing that she could express at all" (217). In this section, Lily moves from repression to the expression of feelings for Mrs. Ramsay and from the isolation of a self-engendering female artist to the discovery and recreation of a creative inheritance from Mrs. Ramsay.

In order to create a tradition of female art, to originate her own inheritance, Lily must first decipher and penetrate the elusive

Mrs. Ramsay:

she imagined how in the chambers of the mind and heart of the woman who, was, physically, touching her, were stood, like the treasures in the tombs of kings, tablets bearing sacred inscriptions, which if 226

one could spell them out, would teach one everything, but they would never be offered openly, never made public (79).

This early, frustrated attempt to inhabit and capture Mrs. Ramsay is indicative of a desire to incorporate her knowledge and art.

Such incorporation, Lily believes, will liberate her from the guilt and conflicts that undermine her art and will enhance her ability as an artist. Mrs. Ramsay's feminine knowledge and arts and their power to create intimacy and unity are not, like Lily's, public acts but remain sealed within her "core of darkness" (96).

Thus Lily's inheritance, or rather the inheritance of all female artists, must be a private transaction between her imagination and her needs as an artist. In a later and more successful attempt to capture the ordinary and miraculous intelligence of Mrs. Ramsay,

Lily tries, immersing herself in an empathy comparable to Mrs.

Ramsay's, to perceive the world as Mrs. Ramsay perceived it:

One wanted fifty pairs of eyes to see with, she reflected. Fifty pairs of eyes were not enough to get round that one woman with, she thought. Among them, must be one that was stone blind to her beauty. One wanted most some secret sense, fine as air, with which to steal through keyholes and surround her where she sat knitting, talking, sitting silent in the window alone; which took to itself and treasured up like the air which held the smoke of the steamer, her thoughts, her imaginations, her desires. What did the hedge mean to her, what did the garden mean to her, what did it mean to her when a wave broke (294)?

The "secret sense" that Lily lacks is Mrs. Ramsay's instinctual comprehension of people and things. In this attemped identification with Mrs. Ramsay, Liiy not only hopes to come closer to the object 227 of her art but also acknowledges the value of Mrs. Ramsay's way of knowing. The imagery used to describe this attempted identification suggests that—in Lily's desire for instinctual knowledge, for the diffusion of her contained self, and the envelopement of anothei— the identification is at least partially successful.

In the "Lighthouse" section, Woolf vacillates between the stories of Lily Briscoe and Mr. Ramsay. This vacillation and

Mr. Ramsay's literal dominance of space italicizes Lily's struggle for space in which to recreate herself as an artist. The last part of the novel is punctuated with Lily's invocations of Mrs. Ramsay.

Although most of them are met with silence, her final invocation is answered by Mrs. Ramsay's presence on the step:

"Mrs. Ramsay! Mrs. Ramsay!" she cried, feeling the old horror come back—to want and want and not to have. Could she inflict that still? And then, quietly, as if she refrained, that too became part of ordinary experience, was on a level with the chair, with the table. Mrs. Ramsay—it was part of her perfect goodness—sat there quite simply, in the chair, flicked her needles to and fro, knitted her reddish-brown stocking, cast her shadow on the step. There she sat (300).

It is her own maternal, literal and metaphoric, deprivation that

Lily confronts in this image of Mrs. Ramsay. She and Lily's long repressed conflicts and feelings are disarmed and reintegrated into

"ordinary experience." With her needles once again flicking and the "shadow" subduing her, a demythicized Mrs. Ramsay returns as more of a co-conspirator than as a reproach to Lily's independent and childless life. As anticipated by Lily, Mrs. Ramsay's return forces "the space" to "fill" and "those empty flourishes" to 228

"form into shape" [268). Forced into the context of filled spaces and form, Lily experiences the coherence of all things. This revelation of an essential coherence defeats, as it must have defeated

Woolf's, Lily's repressed grief and sense of loss. Mrs. Ramsay's cathartic appearance resolves Lily's schizophrenic attraction to the patriarchal-inspired Mrs. Ramsay and her desire to create an independent and self-articulating art and life. From this experience,

Lily is able to assert "that razor edge of balance between opposite forces; Mr. Ramsay and the picture; which was necessary" (287).

The assertion of this division between patriarchy and her art is not a reinforcement of the conflicts experienced earlier but a containment and separation of her art from the debilitating and silencing effects of patriarchy. In that "line there, in the centre," Lily discovers a "no-man's land" which is demarcated and articulated by the female artist (310, 127).

Lily's pursuit and incorporation of Mrs. Ramsay's creative sensibility, as with Woolf's parallel pursuit of Julia Stephen, liberates her from the guilt and anxiety of the self-engendering artist by immersing her in a non-competitive, albeit threatening, creative past. In her essays on women writers and women's writing, Woolf recorded the absence of a female creative tradition and attempted to recover and create a tradition of female art. In To the Lighthouse, she effectively recreated not only her personal and creative past but the creative past of all women. Mrs. Ramsay possesses the sympathy and desire for unity essential to the impulse and expression of all art, yet she must, like the Angel in the House, be acknowledged 229 and transcended. To insist on her literal legacy, rather than to exist as her metaphorical heir, is to suffer the fate of Prue

Ramsay or of the other daughters whose affection she is accused of stealing. In her maiden voyage into professional art, Woolf created a male character who was obsessed with writing a novel 45 about '"Silence, or the Things People Don't Say'." From this initial vision of repression as articulated by a man to her inquiries into female creativity in Mrs. Dalloway and To the Lighthouse,

Wootfs obsession wtih the artist evolved into a closed and clear articulation of the female vision. In Lily's vision, there is a liberation of female art from frustration and conflict, a reconcilation with and reintegration of its creative past, and the echo of her creator's voice prepared to begin the creation of "my first work n46 in my own style!" NOTES

Chapter IN

Epigraphs: Virginia Woolf, "Women and Fiction," in Women and Writing, ed. Michele Barrett (New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1979), p. 49; Virginia Woolf, The Pargiters (New York: New York Public Library and Readex Books, 1977), p. xxxix; Virginia Woolf, To the Lighthouse (New York: Harcourt, Brace £ World, 1955), p. 75; Helene Cixous, "The Laugh of the Medusa," Signs 1, No. 4 (1976), p. 875. (All intratextual references to To the Lighthouse are taken from the text cited.)

Harvena Richter, Virginia Woolf: The Inward Voyage (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1970), p. 3. 2 Virginia Woolf, A Writer's Diary, ed. Leonard Woolf (New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, Inc., 1953), p. 70; Virginia Woolf, Mrs. Dalloway (New York: Harcourt, Brace £ World Inc., 1953), p. 6; Woolf, A Writer's Diary, p. 161. 3 Virginia Woolf, "Modern Fiction," in The Common Reader (New York: Harcourt, Brace £ World, Inc., 1953), p. 154.

Sandra M. Gilbert and Susan Gubar, The Madwoman in the Attic: The Woman Writer and the Nineteenth-Century Literary Imagination (New Haven: Yaie University, 1979), p. 17.

Virginia Woolf, "I am Christina Rossetti," in Women and Writing, ed. Michele Barrett (New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1979), p. 168.

6Woolf, "I am Christina Rossetti," p. 168.

7Woolf, A Writer's Diary, p. 347.

-230- 231

g Virginia Woolf, A Room of One's Own (New York: Harcourt, Brace £ World, Inc., 1957), p. 88. g Virginia Woolf, Jacob's Room & The Waves (New York:

Harcourt, Brace & World, Inc., 1959), p. 106.

10Woolf, A Room of One's Own, p. 77.

nWoolf, A Room of One's Own, p. 80. 12 Virginia Woolf, "Women and Fiction," in Granite and Rainbow: Essays (New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1958), pp. 79-80.

13Woolf, "Women and Fiction," p. 80.

14Woolf, "Modern Fiction," p. 153.

15WooIf, "Modern Fiction," p. 153.

16Woolf, A Writer's Diary, pp. 81, 93. 17 Woolf, A Room of One's Own, p. 50.

18Woolf, A Room of One's Own, p. 51.

19Woolf, A Room of One's Own, p. 73.

20 Virginia Woolf, "The Mark on the Wall," in A Haunted House and Other Short Stories (New York: Harcourt, Brace & World, Inc. , 1972), p. m.

21 Virginia Woolf, "A Sketch of the Past," in Moments of Being (New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1976), pp. 126-127.

22Woolf, "A Sketch of the Past," pp. 127-128.

23 Mary Jacobus, "The Difference of View," Women Writing and Writing About Women, ed. Mary Jacobus (New York: Barnes and Noble Books, 1979), p. 20. 232

24 Rose, Woman of Letters, p. 94. 25 Jane Marcus, "Introduction," in New Feminists Essays on Virginia Woolf, ed. Jane Marcus (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1981), p. xix.

") fi Elaine Showalter, "Feminist Criticism in the Wilderness," in Writing and Sexual Difference, ed. Elizabeth Abel (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1982), p. 33.

27Woolf, A Writer's Diary, p. 135.

28 Jane Marcus, "Thinking Back Through Our Mothers," in New Feminist Essays on Virginia Woolf, ed. Jane Marcus (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1981), pp. 1-2.

29Woolf, A Writer's Diary, p. 303.

30 Jacobus, "The Difference of View, pp. 12-13; Catharine R. Stimpson, "Ad/d Feminam: Women, Literature, and Society," in Literature and Society: Selected Papers from the English Institute, 1978, ed. Edward W. Said ( Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins Press, 1980), p. 175; Virginia Woolf, "Professions for Women," in Women and Writing, ed. Michele Barrett (New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1979), pp. 61-62. 31 Woolf, A Room of One's Own, p. 96; Woolf, "Professions for Women," p. 61. 32 Elaine Showalter, A Literature of Their Own (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1977), p. 240.

33Woolf, A Writer's Diary, p. 315.

34 Showalter, A Literature of Their Own (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1977), p. 240. 35 Rose, Woman of Letters, p. 138.

36Woolf, A Writer's Diary, p. 346.

37 Wooif, "Professions for Women;" pp. 59-60. 233

Woolf, A Room of One's Own, p. 113.

39Woolf, A Room of One's Own, p. 79.

40 Rose, Woman of Letters, p. 169. in Woolf, Mrs. Dalloway, p. 5; Woolf, "A Sketch of the Past," p. 72. 112 Woolf, A Writer's Diary, p. 201.

^Woolf, "A Sketch of the Past," p. 80.

44 Dorothy Richardson, Revolving Lights, in Pilgrimage {New York: Alfred a. Knopf, 1967), pp. 256-257. 45 Virginia Woolf, The Voyage Out (New York: Harcourt, Brace S World, Inc., 1948), p. 220. 4fi Woolf, A Writer's Diary, p. 172. CODA

If women had been the recorders of things from the beginning it would all have been the other way round.

Dorothy Richardson

If you want to know more about femininity, enquire from your own experiences of life, or turn to the poets.

Sigmund Freud

A century ago, Emily Dickinson declared her self-creation:

"I never had a mother." This maternal deprivation of the female artist is simultaneously literal and metaphoric, referring equally to her lack of biological and literary maternity. The biological mothers of Dickinson, Bronte, Eliot, and Woolf either died when their daughters were young or were indifferent to or absent from their lives; their literary mothers were equally indifferent to or absent from their lives. This absence has been considered beneficial to the female artist, for, lacking maternal models, she was forced into self-creation. Yet, however much this maternal void may have liberated them from a repetition of their mothers' lives, it is largely responsible for their failure, with the exception

-234- 235 of Virginia Woolf, to consistently create nurturing maternal presences and for their failure to nurture their own heroines. Even within that elegy to maternal nurturance and sympathy. To the Lighthouse, the novel is motivated by a desire to recapture a mother who is representative of an obsolete and oppressive world. Recent feminist criticism has translated the female artist's maternal absence into parental absence. Many women writers turned against their indifferent or absent mothers in order to identify with their literate and articulate fathers. Such an identification, as most women writers come to realize, only fostered her sense of inadequacy as a woman and her sense of deviancy as a woman artist. Thus, in order to circumvent the blank of maternal absence or the hostility of masculine history, the female artist has had to be not only self- creating but self-engendering as well.

In addition to struggling with the parenting of her work, the female artist has had to create her own models of female art.

Alice Walker, in an attempt to explain the difficulties of the black woman writer, describes a defeating circularity of self-definition and self-creation which is applicable to the female artist: "She must be her own model as well as the artist attending, creating, learning from, realizing the model, which is to say, herself. Mi

Considering the self-consumption within the self-defining self- creation of female art, it is little wonder that most feministic writers produce work which is highly solipsistic. From Lucy Snowe to Esther Greenwood, the female artist's rage for self-definition— 236 her unrelenting "I am, I am, I am"—is an assertion of the self and a challenge to the centuries of male conceived and interpreted 3 experience. This passion for self-definition, however, has not substantially challenged or redefined the historical definition of the female artist: isolated and unmarried, she enacts a compensatory transaction between the art of others and her unsatisfied, ordinary, and foolish existence. Female artists have, with some strategic alterations, reproduced this historical model of the woman artist.

Their inability to produce female characters who exist in a primary and professional relationship with art reflects their difficulty with envisioning and asserting themselves as artists. Women writers' failure to imagine female protagonists who share their aesthetic motivations and impulses is significant of their reproduction of the historical absence of the female artist rather than their redefinition of women's relationship to art. After confronting her own alienation and silence, Woolf prophesied that the duplication of the woman writer's experience in her work would continue to be impeded by those centuries of misinterpreted experience and silence and her debilitating reaction against them:

she has stili many ghosts to fight, many prejudices to overcome. Indeed, it will be a long time still, I think, before a woman can sit down to write a book without finding a phantom to be slain, a rock to be dashed against. ^

The female artist's failure to reproduce herself in her own art emanates not from "woman contra woman" but from her internalization 5 of patriarchal social and creative prohibitions. In order to 237

transcend these silencing phantoms and prohibitions, the female

artist has to resolve her historical preoccupation with self-definition

and take up residence in the "no-man's land" of self-creation.

In The Bell Jar, Esther Greenwood articulates the woman

writer's strategy of self-concealment: "My heroine would be

myself, only in disguise." Esther, herself derivative of Sylvia

Plath's creative powers, creates a female protagonist who is

derivative of Esther and who creates a female protagonist who

is derivative of herself and who creates.... The infinite recreation

of female protagonists who are less articulate and more creatively

frustrated than their creators serves as an allegory for the seemingly

non-negotiable distance between a female artist and her paradigms

of female art. This distance between creator and female protagonist

intensifies an already extreme alienation. In addition to social and

historical alienation, the woman artist is alienated from an articulation of her creative impulses in her art, an alienation which is reproduced

in her female creations. The female artist, like her male counterpart, equates creative activity and femininity with intense alienation.

To invoke the theories of R. D. Laing, the female artist's alienation and her reproduction of it in her art can be interpreted as an italicization of her own creative and societal negative experience.

Instead of granting her female creations her own hard won self- articulation and creativity, she imposes on them the auihentic feminine experiences of alienation and schizophrenia. This is certainly the case with Charlotte Bronte, who may have failed to 238 translate her actively creative self into her art but who did not fail to emphasize the extreme alienation and division of the female artist in that work. George Eliot's failure to reproduce herself was not mediated as strongly by her sense of alienation as it was by her appreciation of just how exceptional her life was and how close she came to suffering the fates of a Maggie Tulliver or Dorothea

Brooke. Virginia Woolf s failure to take a female protagonist beyond the promise of Lily's vision and into the innovations of her art emanated from her inability to fuse the facts of her essays with the vision of her novels and from her unresolved attraction, perhaps fixation, to the world of her mother. In the works of Bronte, Eliot, and Woolf, this alienation of the female protagonist from art is depicted not only in her separation from and frustration in art but in her reliance on the male world to mediate between themselves and their art: in Villette, Lucy seeks and needs Paul's approval of her writing; in The Mill on the Floss, Maggie regains access to the world of fiction through Philip; and in To the Lighthouse, Lily, in silent communication with Carmichael, seeks reassurance of the endurance of art. The most famous case, however, of male mediation in female self-creation is the male conceived sentence which begins the narrative of Anna Wulf in The Golden Notebook. In order to create a fully realized and self-articulating artist from the feministic consciousnesses but decidedly Victorian experiences of Bronte,

Eliot, and Woolf, it would have been necessary for these Titans of female creativity to confront and deconstruct, as Woolf repeatedly 239 attempted to do, their own ambivalence towards women and the articulation of their creativity.

In more recent attempts to articulate the female artist, there

is reiteration, if not an embrace, of her essential alienation from self, world, and art. Contemporary literature, especially, depicts her alienation as existential evidence of her superior sensitivity and morality. In Doris Lessing's The Golden Notebook, Anna

Wulf believes that she can escape alienating and conflicted allegiances by liberating herself from the inhibitions and repressions of the past:

I want to be able to separate in myself what is old and cyclic, the recurring history, the myth, from what is new, what I feel or think that might be new.8

This desire to escape history and to enter a self-articulated reality is most succinctly stated in her ambition to create a new book and a new order:

a book powered with an intellectual or moral passion strong enough to create order, to create a new way of looking at life.9

The book she creates is, of course. The Golden Notebook. The new order that she founds is created from an existential embrace of alienation and a fragmented and fragmenting reality. This new order perceives the dismantlement of order and the fragmentation of experience to be the prerequisite to a female comprehension and articulation of an alien and destructive reality. Instead, however, of effecting a coherent articulation of female experience, the novel reiterates the nineteenth-century motifs of madness, enclosure. 240 alienation, and division as primary female realities. In other contemporary novels by women, there exists a strong desire to create a cohering vision of the female experience: in some of the works of Margaret Drabble this desire is so strong that it is the sole determinant of her narratives and reality; in Margaret Atwood's fiction and in the wondrous fiction of Alice Munro, as in the poetry of Sylvia Plath, this attempt at self-articulation is achieved through a creative mythology of the self and through a remythologizing of the female experience. In Atwood's The Edible Woman, the female protagonist dispenses with her past through a literal consumption of her historical and oppressed self, and in Lady Oracle, Joan

Foster avoids the articulation of her own life through a suicidal reproduction of cheap gothic romances which quickly and hopelessly entangle her in their vapid plots and oppressing language. As a reason for her contrived suicide, Joan cites literature: "I'd been shoved into the ranks of those other unhappy ladies, scores of them 10 apparently, who'd been killed by a surfeit of words." Apparent in the works of Lessing and Atwood is a self-consciousness about the disinheritance of women and about the absurdity of their attempts to reconcile their experiences with that of the dominant culture; however, the cohesive and independent creative vision of these authors remain absent from their art.

In an attempt to separate masculine and feminine creativity,

Joyce Carol Oates distinguishes between the preoccupations of the writer and of the woman writer: "A writer may be beleaguered by an number of chimeras, but only the (woman ) writer is 241 beleaguered by her own essential identity," This enclosure of the woman in parenthesis is an assertion of sex as a secondary, and perhaps contaminating, characteristic in art. When Oates acknowledges that women writers reconcile gender with art "with difficulty," she undermines her parenthetical assertion of the 12 indifference and transcendence of art over identity or politics.

In fact, gender and class are the primary determinants which affect the artist's creative confidence, conception of character, and selection of topics. As with any sub-culture, women artists have been unavoidably "beleaguered" by their sex and its exclusions from history and literature. Since self-definition precedes self-creation, centuries of women artists have had to redefine or recover their experiences as women in order to facilitate creation by other women. Women artists, because of their history of inexperience in the world, are generally acknowledged to rely more strongly on autobiography than do their male counterparts. Their reliance on the personal for creation forces them into a beleaguered awareness of themselves as women and into a negotiation between their experiences as women and their ability to articulate those experiences in art. To insist that the woman writer be de-parenthesized is only to recognize that to all the plurality of selves that read and write—"the self that judges, the self that reads, the self that writes, and the self that reads itself"—the woman artist and writer brings her own 13 unique and non-negotiable experience. By insisting on the difference that this experience affects within her texts and inter­ pretations, feminist art and criticism has been accused of reducing 242 the world and its reproduction to a political paradigm which is forced on narratives and experience.

In its pursuit of female creativity as articulated or experienced by women, this dissertation has been decidedly beleaguered by gender and reductionist and revisionary in strategy. To capture previously neglected or subterranean themes, it has been necessary to sacrifice holistic readings—if, indeed, such readings can exist— of the primary texts for partial and distorted readings. An example of creative distortion within this study is evident in the unusual space and emphasis given to the lives of women writers. Since the female artist, like Woolfs conflationary female artist, encompasses both writer and her creation, it has been the ambition of this dissertation to delineate the creative ambience in which the woman writer struggled for self-articulation and capitulated to convention as well as the desires and ambience which guide and frustrate her female protagonist. Another distortion within this work can be located in its narcissistic neglect of the male artist. Since this study was inspired—or, rather, provoked—by a work that explored the artist in Charles Dickens but not in Charlotte Bronte, in William

Wordsworth but not in George Eliot, and in James Joyce but not in Virginia Woolf, it was conceived as a corrective to such male- centered vision and criticism. It is through such distortion that the masculine literary tradition has perpetuated itself, and it is through the seizure and employment of this strategy that the female artist will be not only acknowledged as the equal of Dickens, 243

Wordsworth, and Joyce but defined and restored to her own history of subversion and difference. NOTES

Coda

Epigraphs: Dorothy Richardson, The Tunnel in Pilgrimage (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1967), p. 251; Sigmund Freud, The Complete Introductory Lectures in Psychoanalysis (New York: W. W. Norton and Company, 1966), p. 599.

i Quoted in John Cody, After Great Pain: The Inner Life of Emily Dickinson (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1971), p. 40. 2 Alice Walker, In Search of Our Mothers' Gardens: Womanist Prose (San Diego: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1983), p. 8. 3 Sylvia Plath, The Bell Jar (New York: Harper and Row, 1971), p. 199. 4 Virginia Woolf, "Profession for Women," in Women and Writing, ed. Michele Barrett (New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1979), p. 62.

Jacques Derrida, Spurs: Nietzsche's Styles (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1978), p. 93.

Virginia Woolf, To the Lighthouse (New York: Harcourt, Brace and World, 1955), p. 127.

7Plath, The Bell Jar, p. 98.

Doris Lessing, The Golden Notebook (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1962), p. 404. g Lessing, The Golden Notebook, p, 61.

-244- 245

Margaret Atwood, Lady Oracle (New York: Avon Books, 1976), p. 346.

Joyce Carol Oates, "(Woman) Writer" in First Person Singular: Writers on Their Craft (Princeton: Ontario Review Press, 1983), p. 197.

12Oates, "(Woman) Writer," p. 197.

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