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Margaret Oliphant's Textual Authority Shannon Landry Brown Louisiana State University and Agricultural and Mechanical College

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Margaret Oliphant's Textual Authority Shannon Landry Brown Louisiana State University and Agricultural and Mechanical College Louisiana State University LSU Digital Commons LSU Doctoral Dissertations Graduate School 2005 "We are no preacher" [electronic resource] : Margaret Oliphant's textual authority Shannon Landry Brown Louisiana State University and Agricultural and Mechanical College Follow this and additional works at: https://digitalcommons.lsu.edu/gradschool_dissertations Part of the English Language and Literature Commons Recommended Citation Brown, Shannon Landry, ""We are no preacher" [electronic resource] : Margaret Oliphant's textual authority" (2005). LSU Doctoral Dissertations. 1800. https://digitalcommons.lsu.edu/gradschool_dissertations/1800 This Dissertation is brought to you for free and open access by the Graduate School at LSU Digital Commons. It has been accepted for inclusion in LSU Doctoral Dissertations by an authorized graduate school editor of LSU Digital Commons. For more information, please [email protected]. “WE ARE NO PREACHER”: MARGARET OLIPHANT’S TEXTUAL AUTHORITY A Dissertation Submitted to the Graduate Faculty of the Louisiana State University and Agricultural and Mechanical College in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy in The Department of English by Shannon Landry Brown B.A., Duke University, 1992 M.A., University of New Orleans, 1998 May 2005 ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS First and foremost, I want to thank my director, Elsie Michie, whose Victorian Literature seminar started it all, without whose guidance, encouragement, and unfailing supply of suggested additional readings I am absolutely certain this work would never have seen the light of day; I also want to thank my committee, James Borck, Sharon Aronofsky Weltman, and my outside reader Frank Anselmo for not forgetting me after what proved to be an extended period of creation, and Daniel Novak for helping me out of a pinch; my father, without whose support (both financial and otherwise) I would have never gotten through my Master’s program; all of my family and friends, for never doubting that I would finish; my daughter, whose timely arrival forced her mother to finally get her act together; and, last but definitely not least, Richard, for giving when he didn’t have to, for biting his tongue when he didn’t want to, and for never letting me quit. ii TABLE OF CONTENTS ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS.................................................................................... ii ABSTRACT........................................................................................................... iv CHAPTER ONE INTRODUCTION .................................................................................1 TWO “I’M NOT JUST A MACHINE FOR DARNING SOCKS!”: WOMEN’S OCCUPATIONS IN OLIPHANT’S NOVELS...............17 THREE BEATING HEARTS AND WALKING DEAD: OLIPHANT’S SUPERNATURAL FICTION.....................................56 FOUR A PRICK OF GENIUS OR GRIST FOR THE MILLS? OLIPHANT’S LITERARY CRITICISM............................................96 FIVE CONCLUSION..................................................................................136 BIBLIOGRAPHY................................................................................................140 VITA....................................................................................................................145 iii ABSTRACT In this dissertation, I examine four of Margaret Oliphant’s novels, her supernatural fiction, and her literary reviews, revealing how she relies on her knowledge of the cultural sign system, domesticity, and women’s value to show how women may successfully navigate middle-class Victorian society. She accomplishes this by identifying the places where women’s strengths lie: the boundaries between work and family, between the spiritual and material, amid the everyday details that she herself realizes reveal the workings of society. She sets herself up as a voice of authority within the system itself, not as a distant, all-knowing sage but as someone who shares the tensions that women in the Victorian period experienced while searching for meaningful occupation and serving as the heart of a household, and ultimately reveals that women are able to exert control over themselves in previously unacknowledged ways. iv CHAPTER ONE INTRODUCTION Margaret Oliphant is an enigma. A very prolific author who wrote in a variety of genres on a plethora of topics, she is seldom read today. Despite the recent reappearance of several of Oliphant’s texts1, she is not acknowledged as part of the Victorian canon, and in her own day never reached the highest ranks of the literary elite. This perceived failure on her part particularly rankled Oliphant, who judged herself just as worthy of the critical attention that more popular authors received. Laurie Langbauer suggests that context is behind Oliphant’s minor reputation: “considered against the supposed certainties of the Victorian world view and the stated requirements for tightly knit endings of the Victorian three-volume novel, her own narrative experiments in inconclusiveness have been overlooked or misunderstood” (62). What also may have kept Oliphant from success was the method she used to establish authority in her texts: her mastery of the middle-class system. In the following chapters, I show Oliphant relying on her knowledge of the rules of middle-class social behavior, domesticity, and women’s value in both the public and private spheres in order to redefine women’s place in Victorian society. She does this by identifying the places where women’s strengths lie: in the relationship between work and family, between the spiritual and material worlds, amid the everyday details that she herself realizes reveal the workings of the middle class. She sets herself up as a voice of authority within the system itself, not as a distant, all-knowing sage but as someone who experiences the tensions that women in the 1 More specifically, the 2001 appearance the Kirsteen e-text on the “Celebration of Women Writers” website, Elizabeth Langland’s 2002 edition of Phoebe Jr., and the Oxford UP publication of Hester in 2003. 1 Victorian period felt while searching for meaningful occupation and serving as the heart of a household. In doing so, Oliphant ultimately reveals the ways in which women can control their own lives. Traditionally, Victorian sages, such as Ruskin, Carlyle, Arnold, Disraeli, and Eliot, have been said to, “express notions about the world, man’s [sic] situation in it, and how he should live” (Holloway 1), something that, in general, Oliphant’s novels, supernatural fiction, and literature reviews do. As Elizabeth Jay notes, however, “Carlyle’s ‘The Hero as Man of Letters’ defined the Victorian ideal of the writer as prophet, priest, or sage as exclusively male” (244). Additionally, Carol T. Christ talks of sage-writing as a locus of masculine heroism, in that the writing itself was gendered masculine. She points to the distinction drawn between “lady novelists” and “men of letters.” Although Carlyle himself praised some of Oliphant’s work2 as being a venture into “real literature,” it was not enough to raise Oliphant to the status of the “male heroes of literature” (Jay 245) or to the rank of sage. The sage normally writes from a position outside of society, and he or she is able to see the error of society’s actions because of this distance. The “style, tone, and general presentation of the sage derive from the fact that his voice resides at the periphery” rather than at the center of society (Landow 23). Often, sage writing is critical of current views for having abandoned traditional orthodoxy. As part of their detachment, sages frequently put themselves in direct opposition to the audience, almost in the mode of an outright attack. Though she is frequently critical of society, Oliphant does not distance herself from it or place herself outside of it. Oliphant instead examines middle-class ideology from the inside out. 2 Specifically, Oliphant’s biography of Edward Irving 2 Oliphant establishes her authority in her texts through her identification of the power inherent in women’s position in society. Her presentation of women’s domestic, spiritual, and professional roles reveals how they cross boundaries normally thought of as strictly defined. Oliphant’s writing can help us to see not just how she establishes her influence, but where the authority of Victorian women in general is located in her ideological vision. Oliphant shows women where they are powerful—she does not “create” strengths for women, but she does show them ways that they have control over their own lives, places of power that many women may not realize exist. Oliphant’s own experiences color her presentation of women’s position in the middle class, and her use of personal examples emphasizes that she, too, is searching for agency in a system that by nature denies women self-actualization. Her intimate knowledge of the system allows her, in a way, to use it against itself: Oliphant frequently finds perceived weaknesses of women and shows how they are in fact strengths. Women’s connection to the spiritual, frequently viewed as proof of their inability to be logical, is what allows them to connect the spheres of this world and the next, the material and the invisible world of the spirit. The everyday tasks of the domestic realm become a place of hidden power in plain view, knowledge of which grants women mastery not just over the household but over the entire society. In her position, working both inside and outside the home, Oliphant is given insights
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