Working-Class Women on the Move in British Novels from the 1850S to the 1890S

REREADING ―MISERY‖: WORKING-CLASS WOMEN ON THE MOVE IN BRITISH NOVELS FROM THE 1850S TO THE 1890S

Sun Jai Kim

A DISSERTATION

Submitted to Michigan State University in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of

English—Doctor of Philosophy

2019

ABSTRACT

REREADING ―MISERY‖: WORKING-CLASS WOMEN ON THE MOVE IN BRITISH NOVELS FROM THE 1850S TO THE 1890S

Sun Jai Kim

This dissertation rethinks a set of Victorian novels by close reading the loaded term

―misery.‖ I argue that the middle-class novelists under consideration here were self-conscious of their appropriation of the voice of working-class women and tried to give more space and individual voice to the working-class female characters by often shifting in narrative perspectives, i.e., handing over the narrative agency to them. This dissertation closely reads how the novels grapple with the working-class characters‘ desperate situations by introducing the term ―misery,‖ which is a euphemistic expression of the characters‘ scandalous situations. The study will demonstrate how the uses of the term ―misery‖ provide transformative moments for the working- class female characters to stand above the situations. Reinstating the working-class women‘s agency in the mid-to-late Victorian narratives by staging a series of contexts and places where they achieve perverse power over against what the loaded word ―misery‖ defines, this dissertation has an aspiration to draw an alternative history of women‘s literature built around the middle-class depictions of the Victorian working-class women moving outside the sphere of domesticity, which even led to the fictional representations of the lower-middle-class New

Woman in the fin-de-siècle.

This study‘s perspective reframes the accepted view of considering Victorian female working-class women as an inferior object for the completion of moral virtues of the middle- class domestic women and bourgeois men as Nancy Armstrong famously contended in her works,

Desire and Domestic Fiction (1987) and How Novels Think: The Limits of Individualism from

1719-1900 (2005). In this regard, this study importantly refers to Patricia Johnson‘s groundbreaking reassertion of the importance of the industrial novels, where the complex roles of the working-class women in the reform movements are portrayed, in Hidden Hands: Working-

Class Women and Victorian Social-Problem Fiction (2001). However, this study attempts to overcome Johnson‘s reading of the working-class women in the industrial novels as victims by strategically delving into the narrative techniques used in the four novels for the purpose of giving agency back to the working-class characters. For the theorization of the narrative techniques observed in the novels of my consideration, I refer to Susan Sniader Lanser‘s Fictions of Authority: Women Writers and Narrative Voice (1992) where she explores the ways in which women writers acquire narrative authority.

My dissertation critically revises a line of feminist criticism that defined middle-class female activists and writers‘ exploration in the public space against their antagonism towards the working-class women in the streets as observed in Judith R. Walkowitz‘s City of Dreadful

Delight: Narratives of Sexual Danger in Late Victorian London (1992) and Deborah Epstein

Nord‘s Walking the Victorian Streets: Women, Representation, and the City (1995). Unlike

Walkowitz and Nord who considered the middle-class women as antagonistic or disinterested observers of the life of the working-class women on the streets, my dissertation examines the middle-class authors‘ cultural appropriation of the ideas of working-class women by reading much more complex mixed gestures of sympathetic identification through focalized narration and ironic distance through free indirect discourses.

For my mother who gives me strength to carry on

PREFACE

Elinor could no longer witness this torrent of unresisted grief in silence.

‗Exert yourself, dear Marianne,‘ she cried, ‗if you would not kill yourself and all who love you.

Think of your mother; think of her misery while you suffer; for her sake you must exert yourself.‘

-Jane Austen, from Sense and Sensibility

TABLE OF CONTENTS

1. INTRODUCTION…………………………………………………………………………..1

2. REREADING RUTH‘S FALL IN RUTH………………………………………………....17 Rereading the Fall……………………………………………………………………..17 Questioning the Origin of Fall………………………………………………………....34 Ruth‘s ―Misery‖………………………………………………………………………..44

3. REREADING ―MISERY‖ IN ADAM BEDE…………………………………..………….53 Introduction…………………………………………………………………………....53 Rethinking Hetty Sorrel……….……………………………………………………….60 Rethinking Dinah Morris………………………………………………………………79 Rethinking Infanticide………………………………………………………………....91

4. REREADING ―MISERY‖ AND ―MADNESS‖ IN LADY AUDLEY’S SECRET…………96 Introduction……………………………………………………………………………96 ―Misery‖ and Empowerment………………………………………………………....104 ―Madness‖ and Storytelling………………………………………………………..…122 Conclusion……………………………………………………………………………133

5. TESS‘S ―MISERY‖ AND A MARK OF INDIVIDUALITY IN TESS OF THE D’URBERVILLES…………………………………………………………………….…134 Introduction………………………………………………………………………….134 Tess‘s ―Misery‖……………………………………………………………………....142 Angel‘s ―Misery‖………………………………………………………………….…157 Conclusion……………………………………………………………………………165

6. CODA……………………………………………………………………………………..167

BIBLIOGRAPHY……………………………………………………………………………170

1. INTRODUCTION

This dissertation centers the working-class female characters in Victorian literary history.

By exploring the narrative structures through which the agency of the fictional working-class women is authorized in mid-to-late Victorian novels, this study makes an intervention in the dominant literary history built around the cultural hegemony of the middle-class men and domestic woman. This dissertation examines the ways in which the working-class female characters represented in mid-to-late Victorian novels complicate the Victorian ideology of individualism built around the modern middle class men‘s self-discipline and the domestic women‘s forbearance and self-containment. In particular, my interest lies in thinking about how the middle-class authors in set of canonical works imagine working-class female characters starting to explore their bodies‘ extra capabilities including laboring stamina, mobility, and sexuality when they are deprived of their virginity, which would give them the opportunity to pursue the commonly desirable objects among Victorian bourgeois individuals such as a healthy family and reproduction based on it. They often escape the collapse of or the alienation from their family in pursuit of a new dwelling and economic independence. One might think that the middle-class authors are depicting immoral scenes and the consequences of that immorality.

However, I contend that these novelists are deploying a fantasy of the achievements of working- class female characters to explore the possibility for economic independence, sexual autonomy, and alternative domestic lives. I argue that, while the middle-class Victorian novelists appropriated the voices of the working-class women, they were still self-conscious of their appropriative gestures and tried to give more space and individual voices to the working-class female characters by often backing out of the explicit articulation of particularities or handing over the narrative agency to them.

It is my contention that this narrative transfer happens around the introduction of the term

―misery‖ in the four novels under my consideration: Elizabeth Gaskell‘s Ruth (1853), George

Eliot‘s Adam Bede (1859), Mary Elizabeth Braddon‘s Lady Audley’s Secret (1862), and Thomas

Hardy‘s Tess of the d’Urbervilles: A Pure Woman Faithfully Presented (1892). I explore how the middle-class novelists use the term ―misery‖ to at first present the working-class women as suffering moral consequences for their immoral behaviors and resignifies the term in unconventional ways that the following chapters unpack. I notice how the term ―misery‖ allows the middle-class Victorian novelists to euphemistically articulate indescribable misfortunes that befall the working-class female characters while its use in the narratives often creates a series of transformative moments for the female characters in each of the novels. At the same time, the degree of agency that the female characters have over their misery gradually increases throughout the narrative of my dissertation. I contend that, in the four novels under my consideration, the term ―misery‖ signifies the heroines‘ sexual fall, pregnancy out of marriage, being discarded by men, the difficulties of single motherhood, and the sense of extreme isolation.

The connotations of the term often extend to include their lack of mothering competence and unavoidable mistreatment or desertion of their babies. While the word ―misery‖ has mainly served to create sentimental effects in Jane Austen‘s novels by being associated with the heroines‘ pain of broken heart in an earlier moment of the novels as in Sense and Sensibility (1811) and

Persuasion (1817), the term begins to denote far more serious infelicities yet paradoxically produces perverse empowering effects in the four novels under my consideration. If Jane

Austen‘s narrative use of the term ―misery‖ primarily serves to articulate gentle women‘s agony over their broken heart, the use of the same word in the four novels under my consideration mediates a deeper level of catastrophe and equivalent emotional distress. I notice how the word‘s

connotations become more catastrophic and transformative as it is associated with the working- class women in the four novels. Furthermore, in contrast with the word‘s conventional appearances in Charles Dickens‘s Oliver Twist (1837) and Bleak House (1853) where it mainly denotes the status of destitution in most cases, the ―misery‖ in the four novels under my consideration is used to indicate and qualify the heroines‘ individuality, which shines through a series of misfortunes.

Then, what does it really mean in specific contexts of each novel? While the term

―misery‖ is used in relation to Ruth‘s mental agony rooted in her sexual fall, the same term is more directly connected to Hetty‘s pregnancy out of marriage in Adam Bede. If Hetty needs

Dinah‘s help to unshackle the burden of her misery, Lucy and Tess in the later novels of my consideration have more agency over their misery. For Lucy in Lady Audley’s Secret, the term

―misery‖ signifies an opportunity for her to capitalize on and to commit crimes. For Tess in

Hardy‘s novel, the term ―misery‖ is no longer a burden or a mark of her identity. Tess mentally detaches herself from her misery and takes it as a cogitable object. My exploration of the uses of the word ―misery‖ in each novel is gradually linked to new found agency and will open up an alternative feminist literary history of the working-class female characters. The Oxford English

Dictionary defines the word ―misery‖ as ―a condition of external unhappiness, discomfort, or distress; wretchedness of outward circumstances; distress caused by privation or poverty.‖ That the term is negatively defined in the dictionary is beyond doubt. However, throughout the dissertation, I define the term‘s connotation in more affirmative ways through close reading the transformative scenes where the uses of the term gradually empower the working-class female characters to take extraordinary steps outside their homes.

Significantly, these female characters‘ relations to their homes have never been what the

Victorian domestic ideology defines as normal or ideal1—their homes are absent of an ideal mother, who can give a standard definition to the home, and of a robust father whose economic activity in the public sphere is supposed to provide for the family. Ruth, Hetty, and Dinah are orphans; Ruth lives and works in a sweatshop, Hetty lives with her uncle Poyser‘s family and works for his farm, and Dinah is an itinerant preacher. Meanwhile, Lucy‘s insane mother is sent to a psychiatric asylum when Lucy is still a child and her father is an incompetent alcohol addict.

Tess‘s father is also an alcoholic and Tess is the one who supports her poor family. In this context, moving outside their homes can open up new relationships, and the definition of home is supposed to stay reestablished in the course of these women‘s movements. These working-class female characters of my consideration will end up trying a new form of the nuclear family, which can be single motherhood or a bigamous relationship to escape economic hardship. In this sense, the term ―misery‖ begins to be related to subjectivity formation and to discovering for one‘s body‘s new roles different from what the Victorian domestic ideology narrowly defines around the middle-class domestic women. For instance, Lucy, when her married life with George broke up at its early stage due to George‘s financial incompetence and his flight from his paternal duties to Australia, attempts to create new home surroundings that will meet her economic needs by committing bigamy. Drawing an alternative line of Victorian feminist literary history that ends with Tess of the d’Urbervilles around these characters‘ radical detachment from the domestic ideology, I interpret their escape from their dysfunctional homes and exploration of alternative relationships outside the nuclear family as preparatory steps for the late Victorian

1 The Victorian domestic ideology is based on what John Ruskin defined as the ideal notion of the separate spheres in Sesame and Lilies (1865). Ruskin articulates an ideal domestic sphere managed by an ideal wife as a place free from ―all injury‖ and ―all terror, doubt, and division‖ of the public world (77). Rooted and mentally connected to such a domestic heaven, men are supposed to best perform his public roles.

lower-middle-class New Woman‘s diverse pursuit of sexual autonomy and their diverse physical adventures in the wider world such as bicycling and travelling2.

By exploring narrative cracks and tensions created by the middle-class authors‘ depiction of the working-class characters‘ misfortunes and transformative movements, my dissertation complicates the accepted understanding of Victorian novel as being collusive in maintaining the hegemony of the middle class, bourgeois morality, and cultivation of self-discipline against the invasion of immoderate sensibility. I refute the established idea that the mental growth, personal development, and unique individuality are the monopolized properties of the middle-class characters in Victorian novels. My dissertation reframes the popular view of seeing Victorian female working-class characters as a serving foil for the completion of moral virtues and domestic authority of the middle-class domestic women as Nancy Armstrong contended in her ground breaking work, Desire and Domestic Fiction (1987), which linked the history of British fiction to the empowerment of the middle-classes. My dissertation also questions Armstrong‘s

2 The disintegration of the role endowed to middle-class women as a guardian and nurturer of the safe home culminates in the sociological appearance of the New Woman icon at the fin-de siècle. Sarah Grand, an Irish feminist writer, coined the term ―New Woman‖ in her article titled ―The New Aspect of the Woman Question‖ in the North American Review (1894) to explain the growth of independent career women alongside the industrialization which brought increased educational and job opportunities for women in the late nineteenth century. Grand established herself as a pioneering New Woman writer by publishing The Heavenly Twins (1893) and the Beth Book (1897), which questioned the nature of marriage as one of the mechanisms to oppress women and advocated self- fulfillment over marriage. Henry James contributed to making the term popular by representing the unprecedented New Woman characters in his novels including Daisy Miller (1878) and The Portrait of a Lady (1881). Soon afterwards, burgeoning New Woman novels and journalistic caricatures of the icon as either a bicycling Amazon in men‘s attire or a bespectacled runt formed an essential part of the late Victorian culture and ignited public debates around new forms of femininity. For instance, Grant Allen‘s novel, The Woman Who Did (1895), which depicted a Cambridge-educated Herminia Barton‘s free union and resultant suffering, caused controversy and even offended the New Woman novelists like Grand who were influenced by social purity campaigns against men‘s recklessness and the consumption of pornography. Although there were contestations over the conflicting images of the New Woman in literature and journalism, the cultural stereotype of the New Woman presupposed a class privilege of her as an educated middle and upper-class woman. I, however, attempt a critique of the New Woman‘s class privilege and argue that the origin of the New Woman can trace back to the literary representations of working-class women in the mid-Victorian period. To this end, my study begins with Ruth, one of the less explored social-problem novels, in which a working-class woman‘s struggle against poor living condition gradually empowers her to stand independent.

later formulation in How Novels Think: The Limits of Individualism from 1719-1900 (2005) that

Victorian novels invalidate or repress the other modes of subjectivity such as an excess of sensibility and asocial desires to defend Victorian liberal individualism. I particularly problematize Armstrong‘s dichotomous understanding of Victorian novels when she separates the sensation novel, children‘s novel, detective fiction, and the late-nineteenth-century romance as the mere gothic residues from the mainstream realistic novel. For Armstrong in How Novels

Think, the monstrous female characters including Catherine Earnshaw, Bertha Mason, Edith

Dombey, Tess Durbeyfield, and the protagonists of sensation novels are criminalized and punished in the novels to protect the ideology of individualism (80-81). She writes: ―To maintain the essential difference between our primitive forebears and modern man, fiction developed any number of formal means of transferring the most objectionable masculine features to women, where those features could be sensationally objectified and their potential for violence eliminated‖

(81). In Armstrong‘s ideological reading, the working-class women who belong to either aggressive or monstrous women are doubly marginalized: first of all, they become a container of violence so that men can ―serve as caretaker to his dependents in the factory and the remote outreaches of empire as well as in the home‖ (81). Moreover, these women are degraded to the mere subjugated class for the mainstream Victorian heroines including Jane Eyre who can

―transform individualistic energy into forms of self-management and containment‖ (79) and can become desirable partners for the bourgeois men. Disavowing such ideological reading, my dissertation contends that the middle-class authors do explore the working-class women‘s agency over great suppression and brutal hardship. My analytical emphasis throughout the dissertation lies in excavating the novels‘ narrative techniques of revealing these women‘s agency rather than forging another conclusive reading about the novels‘ conventional endings.

In analyzing the narrative techniques of each of the novels, I importantly refer to Susan

Sniader Lanser‘s theorization of Jane Austen‘s use of the free indirect discourse and of George

Eliot‘s use of the focalized figural narration in Fictions of Authority: Women Writers and

Narrative Voice (1992). Questioning why Armstrong ―reads ‗the rise of the novel‘ as a rise of female authority‖ through Pamela rather than through the writings of eighteenth-century women,

Lanser significantly shifts the ground of exploring narrative structures from man-made narratives to women‘s writing (38). Although my study does not only focus on women writers‘ novels,

Lanser‘s discussions of the means by which women construct their narrative authority within and against the complex social and literary conventions are worthy of note as they are certainly groundbreaking in feminist narrative theory. In analyzing how the character‘s voice is authorized through the narrator‘s ironic distance in Braddon‘s Lady Audley’s Secret and in Hardy‘s Tess of the d’Urbervilles, I particularly refer to Lanser‘s point about the complex relation that the free indirect discourse creates in Austen‘s novels. I am also indebted to Lanser for her detailed examination of Eliot‘s narrative strategies including the adoption of the male narrator in her early novels and the introduction of the epigraph for generalizing authorial commentary in her later novels, which are derived from Eliot‘s sensitivity about the contemporary audience and longing for the public authority. Furthermore, Lanser‘s insight into how focalized figural narration in

Eliot‘s early novels let the narrator‘s text inseparable from the texts of characters helps me theorize about the role of the focalized narration in the middle-class writers‘ appropriation of the working-class women‘s voices in my selection of novels.

My dissertation examines the novels‘ techniques in plotting the specific contexts where the female characters‘ mobility is emphasized. The working-class women‘s manual jobs and their search for them often entail solitary movements in the lonesome wilderness, in desolate

mountain paths, and in quiet backstreets. Ruth encounters Henry, her seducer, by chance in lonesome alleys. Arthur‘s seduction of Hetty is mainly staged in the quiet woodland paths, through which Hetty walks almost every day. Lucy pushes her former husband, George, into the well to protect her against his violent passion in the backyard of the Audley Court. After being rescued from a physical fight with her jealousy colleague in the streets by Alec, Tess becomes asleep in a foggy forest called ―the Chase‖ where Alec rapes her. Their virgin bodies are immediately exposed to a danger of being attacked, seduced, or raped during the outward journey, which is often related to their manual tasks. Their movements outside home inevitably increase the chance of them being drawn into miserable situations, which mainly originate from the sexual dangers. While noticing this unfortunate relationship between misery and movement, I also observe how the working-class women‘s solitary movements in the wilderness generate transformative reinterpretation of misery. This observation is particularly true for Lucy and Tess, the later heroines in my selection of novels. Lucy becomes most energetic when she defines herself as the most miserable woman in the world and decides to walk up the mountain paths at midnight to carry out her plan of an arson attack. Meanwhile, Tess learns to detach her individual subject from misery during her voluntary walking in the desolate mountain paths at night. Tess‘s frame of mind is radically changed when she physically isolates herself from other human beings.

In contrast to the lack of critical interest in exploring the working-class women‘s movement in different spaces, it is not difficult to discover a considerable body of literature on the middle-class women‘s movement in the public space. While classical feminist works such as

Sandra Gilbert and Susan Gubar‘s The Madwoman in the Attic: The Woman Writer and the

Nineteenth-Century Literary Imagination (1979) and Nancy Armstrong‘s Desire and Domestic

Fiction: a Political History of the Novel (1987) have structured their study on femininity around

female characters‘ confinement to domestic space, it is noteworthy that, from the 1990s, feminist critics started to explore the issues of female subjectivity more in relation with middle-class women‘s navigation outside their home to the effect of effacing the spatial dichotomy. For instance, Mary Poovey in Making a Social Body: British Cultural Formation, 1830-1864 (1995) offers a way to understand the construction of Victorian female subjectivity in line with the formation of the other cultural categories such as class and poverty in the period, while emphasizing the existence of fissures in such categories that are produced due to uneven relationship between language and practices in the competing epistemological domains 3 .

Remarkably, adding edge to the critical interests in female subjectivity formation outside of the domestic sphere, scholars such as Judith R. Walkowitz have focused on women‘s active interruptions into the public sphere in the second half of the nineteenth century and noted that women—particularly, middle-class moral reformers—started to participate in the public discussions around sexual dangers due to the strength of their increased access to new public platforms such as media and mixed-gender clubs in late Victorian London in City of Dreadful

Delight: Narratives of Sexual Danger in Late-Victorian London (1992).

However, Walkowitz also argued that middle-class women‘s participation in producing public opinions—which can be called an origin of first-wave feminism—consolidated the idea of women‘s sexual subordination and antagonism against working-class women on the streets. In particular, Walkowitz developed her argument about middle-class women‘s public actions around their responses and the cultural narratives created around the story of Jack the Ripper.

3 Interestingly, Mary Poovey‘s previous work, Uneven Developments (1988), has examined female subjectivity formation within the constraints of home, exploring the ways in which the representations of marginal women such as governesses unsettle the border between classes and gender norms; while a governess occupies a position in a domestic circle, her presence as a working woman troubles cultural ideologies concerning middle-class family home.

Meanwhile, Deborah Epstein Nord (1995) in Walking the Victorian Streets: Women,

Representation, and the City explored complex cultural meanings created around the concept of the ―fallen woman.‖ While acknowledging that the woman of the streets, the figure of the fallen woman, contributed to forming the sexual politics claimed by the male novelist-spectators, Nord noted that the subjectivity of the fallen woman was often erased in the male spectator‘s narratives.

However, casting an important question that guides the entire study in her book, ―What occurs when a narrative tries to evoke the subjectivity of the always objectified female figure? (12),‖

Nord explored the lives of the women in the streets in the 1840s to the 1860s. More precisely, however, Nord examined how middle-class women writers struggled through ―the eroticization of their presence on the streets‖ to create their own vision of the urban Victorian streets (4).

Namely, Nord‘s argumentative focus mainly lies in separating out the middle-class women writers‘ authentic struggle on the streets from the pervasive sexual prejudices against the fallen women.

If the studies of Walkowitz and Nord have been helpful in illuminating how Victorian female subjectivity was also actively constructed on the streets by being detached from domesticity, they still developed their arguments only around the middle-class women reformers and writers while sympathizing with their views of putting the working-class women, poor women, and fallen women into the position of passive victim. In other words, they keep a safe distance between the middle-class women‘s privileged participation in the public sphere and the working-class women‘s life in the streets—which are oftentimes the targets of the women writers‘ observation—in their studies. To Nord, her interest in the middle-class women writers leads to her investigation of the late Victorian New Woman writers and of the relation between them.

Nord relates the efforts of those female middle-class writers in the 1840s to the 1860s to the New

Women‘s navigation of London city in the last two decades of the nineteenth century. According to Nord, if middle-class female writers such as Elizabeth Gaskell had to fight against ―the taint of exposure that was traditionally and powerfully associated with woman‘s public role‖ (137), in the 1880s and the 1890s, ―new opportunities for education and for work fostered networks of independent women; and living outside of conventional domestic arrangements altered women‘s perspectives about marriage, sexuality, work, and social relations generally‖ (14). Nord explores the lives of the new women such as Amy Levy, Beatrice Webb, and Margaret Harkness while analyzing how ―their poems, novels, and social investigations represented or expressed in a variety of ways the marginality they experienced‖ in ―new spaces for life and work‖ (184). I share many lines of ideas with Nord, particularly in terms of her observation of the sense of marginality that the New Women experienced in London city (184). However, unlike Nord, my study gestures towards a revision of the working-class female characters‘ marginal yet unconventional experiences in the Victorian society, which can be regarded as an insightful source for the New Women‘s marginal lives represented by New Women writers in late Victorian period. If the unmarried, self-determining female characters in the late nineteenth century‘s novels started to see the city of London as a work place (rather than as a dwelling place) to experiment with their socially active ideals, such as philanthropic social works and networking between unmarried women, their attempts are based on the working-class female characters represented in four Victorian novels of my study, who pioneered to define their female subjectivity silhouetted against the works and dynamic movements they perform across the public spaces.

In this dissertation, with priority given to the working class female characters, I attempt to reestablish the critical understanding on how even Victorian middle-class female subjectivity

is constructed in collision and interaction with external forces outside the domestic sphere and how it can be even connected to the New Women‘s bid for emancipation at the fin-de-siècle.

Literary critics like Raymond Williams and Catherine Gallagher have drawn their attention to the importance of understanding the Victorian social problem fictions, defined as the industrial novel, in sketching the big picture of the Victorian fiction in Culture and Society, 1780-1950 and in The

Industrial Reformation of English Fiction: Social Discourse and Narrative From, 1832-1867.

Sharing the same interest with these critics yet questioning why the important role of working- class women, who were represented by the figure of the female factory worker, has been silenced in such discussion, Patricia Johnson reframes the reading of the industrial novels by investigating the complex role of the working-class women in social and political reform movements in

Hidden Hands: Working-Class Women and Victorian Social-Problem Fiction (2001). Johnson observes that the working class women disappeared from the political discourses due to ―the triumph of domestic ideology‖ that insisted working-class women‘s return to the domestic sphere by the 1850s (11). The discourses surrounding working class issues and social reform movements excluded feminist concerns from them. Problematizing such an omission of working class women, Johnson‘s study rediscovered the importance of women‘s labor in enabling British industrialism and constructing the basis of the domestic ideology itself. If Johnson‘s study is valuable in rereading Victorian social problem fictions through their representations of working class women and in rediscovering the practical and symbolic importance of the characters, for this end, her study still focuses on delving into working class women‘s image as victims of enforced domesticity, domestic violence, and sexual harassment at the workplace, which is an extension of domestic brutality. Inheriting Johnson‘s critical insight in pointing out the hidden force of working-class women yet shifting the point of emphasis, I attempt to trace back a spirit

of sexual autonomy and physical liberation to the wider world in the pursuit of economic independence of the Victorian working class women outside their familiar domestic grounds. I make an intervention into the critical narratives that have interpreted the status of working-class women according to the logic of domestic ideology and reclaim these women‘s influence on the formation of Victorian middle-class female subjectivity.

With this intention, in chapters 1, 2, and 4, my study examines Ruth, Hetty, and Tess‘s walking or wandering in the wilderness, unsettled and uncultivated regions remote from residential areas, which offer them good chances to imagine an abandonment of the assigned roles in family or a radical separation from the dysfunctional social relations. Their mobility allows them room to doubt or forget their socially imposed roles at home and even triggers the commission of crimes in case of Hetty, Lucy, and Tess. Their crimes can be seen as an attempt to escape either from the dysfunctional homes and relationships where their assigned roles do not empower them, or from the routine of invalid domestic labors so they may come into a new, more meaningful relationship with themselves, others, and the society. The sense of mobility, observed in these working-class female characters, empowers them to overcome social limits that their domestic surroundings have drawn around them. Culminating my exploration of the working-class female characters‘ mobility with my reading of Tess‘s agency, I will demonstrate how Tess‘s alternative sense of liberal individualism expressed through her mental liberty, which is developed along the expansion of the geographical grounds, is a real highlight of my study‘s excavation of the working-class women‘s gradual achievement of agency over their misery.

In Chapter 1, in order to open readers‘ eyes to the possibility of working-class women‘s active engagement in British social issues, I consider Gaskell as one of the most important female authors in the nineteenth century who explores the location and potential roles of women

in the society and represents the question of female virtues as more sophisticatedly entangled with political and social problems. In Ruth, Gaskell contextualizes the fall of women and indicates that the suffering and economic hardship of Ruth can paradoxically be a springboard to engagement in the social reformation. Considering that women were still excluded from the franchise that the three reform acts in 1832, 1867, and 1884 gradually extended to middle-class men, to working-class men, and finally to most farmers, Gaskell‘s artistic endeavor to give the working-class women a more critical role in the Victorian society is ahead of her time. Most radically, in Ruth, Gaskell explores a possibility of a working-class woman‘s active participation in the edification of society through a young girl, Ruth, who is ignorant, innocent, isolated, and thus more vulnerable to sexual temptation. In this chapter, after looking at ways in which the novel engages with contemporary Victorian gender ideology and complicates the origin of Ruth‘s sexual fall by focalizing the narrative around Ruth, I will argue that Ruth overcomes her past misery and stands firm as a single mother with an independent career and professional ethics as a volunteer nurse in the local community.

In Chapter 2, I will examine the novel‘s critical engagement with the Victorian social convention surrounding women‘s sexuality, focusing a criminal character Hetty‘s wandering movements in close connection with the mobile agency of Dinah, a female Methodist preacher in

Adam Bede. This chapter will examine the subjectivity formation of Hetty and Dinah in the public spaces. With the aim of examining the influence of internalizing society‘s views on sexuality, I will closely trace the variegated uses of the term ―misery,‖ the first meaningful word that appears as a signifier of the outcome of Hetty‘s sexual fall. Through a close reading of the significance of this word in the text, I will draw an important distinction between the male narrator‘s perspective and the larger feminist perspective of the novel. In particular, I will zoom

in how the term forms its variations and augments its signified meanings throughout the narrative, particularly during Hetty‘s wandering journey in British wilderness. I will then demonstrate that the larger feminist perspective of the novel sounded throughout Hetty‘s journey is related to what

Dinah explores and embodies. Paying attention to how the novel represents the prison scene where Hetty and Dinah‘s separate wandering journeys finally merge into one, I will argue that

Eliot lets the readers see beyond what the male narrator describes about Hetty with his objectifying and sexualizing male gaze.

In Chapter 3, I examine how Mary Elizabeth Braddon‘s Lady Audley’s Secret (1862) questions Victorian stereotypical femininity by featuring a female criminal, Lucy Graham (Lady

Audley). While mastering and exploiting the stereotype of Victorian femininity, crystalized in

Coventry Patmore‘s poem, the Angel in the House (1862), to exercise her incredible mobility,

Lucy commits bigamy and attempts a murder of her former husband. Analyzing how the novel constructs Lucy‘s criminality based on her surprising mobility, this chapter will pay attention to how Lucy reconceptualizes and capitalizes on the terms ―misery‖ and ―miserable,‖ the meaning of which are melodramatically understood by the male characters in the novel. This chapter will then contend that Lucy‘s application of the term ―madness‖ to denounce lack of agency in Robert and the narrative technique of free indirect speech mobilized to look into Lucy‘s cleverness show the way the novel empowers Lucy beyond the middle-class professional men. Appropriating both the melodramatic term and the medically charged term to achieve her criminal goals, Lucy breaks away from the position of a female victim, whose sexual attractiveness caused an infelicitous marriage.

Chapter Four pays attention to that, among all deviant female characters considered here,

Tess demonstrates the highest degree of capability in protecting her against misery. Tess actually

murders her seducer, Alec. Exploring the significance of the murder, I contend that Tess‘ crime is the culmination of her growing agency over her misery, which threatens both her and Angel in different ways. Tess‘s mental power to take a critical distance from what the term ―misery‖ stands for in society grows throughout the narrative in the same vein with the expansion of the geographical horizon that she moves around. Exploring her body‘s capability, Tess, at the same time, cultivates a mental power to reframe the story of shameful sex scandal which has been forcefully inscribed on her body by the male characters and amplified by the townspeople.

According to my reading, what lies behind Tess‘s murder is her desire to prove her liberal agency to terminate her own story. I will argue that Tess‘s frequent walking accelerates her development of liberal individual ideas including her new definition of virginity. In the wilderness, Tess starts to reframe the rumors surrounding her sex scandal with Alec. The narrator‘s deliberate movements in and out of the internal focalization surrounding Tess‘s meditation on female subjectivity constructs Tess as a thinker who revises the notion of Victorian liberal individualism in a radically different way.

2. REREADING RUTH‘S FALL IN RUTH

Rereading the Fall

As a first step in my project to argue that the mid-to-late Victorian middle-class canonical authors appropriated their fantasy of working-class women‘s alternative domestic life to imagine their own and created a significant feminist undertone in the conventional texts, I read Elizabeth

Gaskell‘s Ruth as a surprisingly feminist-oriented text, in which foundational ideas of feminism including women‘s sexuality and economic freedom are addressed in depth. In this chapter, I contend that Gaskell appropriates the voice of a working-class single mother, Ruth Hilton, to explore her radical ideas about women‘s lives of economic freedom and sexual autonomy while foregrounding the virtues of Ruth, on the other hand, which conform to the Victorian moral compass. I will discuss how Gaskell complicates the idea of a woman‘s sexual fall through Ruth, who gradually awakens to the social reverberation of her sexual activity outside of marriage, achieves a critical distance to reflect on her sexual activity, and finally becomes a public health worker while remaining a single mother. Closely reading the tone of the narrator, I explore how

Gaskell presents the line separating the virtuous woman and the fallen woman as a precarious one and how the domestic ideology of the period is challenged by Ruth.

The fallen woman in British fiction challenged prescribed gender roles by disrupting the order of Victorian society with their sexual activities outside of marriage. The fallen woman is one of the typical figures in nineteenth century British fiction alongside sex workers and spinsters, who are believed to be the opposite of ―the Angel in the House‖ as presented by

Coventry Patmore in his poem by the same title in 1854. The problem of women‘s sex explored through the fallen woman characters in Victorian fiction challenged a eugenically unified notion

of the nation. To demonstrate how Gaskell suggests a transgressive femininity through a fallen woman character, I begin to unveil the idea of women‘s fall through Ruth and reread a typical fallen woman as a morally sophisticated figure who struggles to stand up on her own feet. Ruth is about an orphan girl, who demeans herself by taking refuge in London and then in Wales with

Henry Bellingham, an aristocratic libertine she happens to meet, right after she is dismissed by

Mrs. Mason, the owner of a sweatshop Ruth works for, as Mrs. Mason spots Ruth‘s secret relationship with Mr. Bellingham. In Wales, just after Mr. Bellingham, persuaded by his mother, abandons Ruth, she attempts suicide. However, Ruth is dramatically saved by the intervention of

Mr. Benson, a Dissenting minister, who urges Ruth to stay with him even after he detects her pregnancy. Mr. Benson and his sister Faith Benson induces Ruth to disguise herself as a young widow with a baby, under the protection of a false name, Mrs. Denbigh, and Ruth starts to work as a governess for Jemima and two young girls at Mr. Bradshaw‘s. Later in the novel, when Ruth goes away with the Bradshaw family to the seaside to take care of Mr. Bradshaw‘s children who are convalescing, she confronts Mr. Donne and recognizes him to be Mr. Bellingham whom Mr.

Bradshaw sponsors to be a MP. Ruth refuses Mr. Donne‘s untimely marriage proposal; yet, she dies of fever due to her nursing of feverish Mr. Donne in the end. Gaskell relates the problem of

Ruth‘s sexual ignorance to her social and economic situation and questions what determines a woman as fallen or virtuous, while compounding these issues and questions in the episodes happening around Ruth. I pay close attention to the scenes in which the narrator induces a nuanced interpretation of Ruth‘s behavior.

Concerning the novel‘s redefinition of Ruth‘s fall and the figure of fallen woman, it is important to note Gaskell‘s treatment of the theme of wandering, which is deeply linked to

Ruth‘s fall as its key driver. Henry seduces Ruth by proposing to go to her old house and wander

around together on Sunday. The scene below illustrates how the narrator introduces different perspectives that observe Ruth‘s wandering and complicates the circumstances of her fall:

Mr. Bellingham looked graver than he had done while witnessing Ruth‘s passionate

emotion in her mother‘s room. But he lost his sense of indignity in admiration of his

companion as she wandered among the flowers, seeking for favourite bushes or plants, to

which some history or remembrance was attached. She wound in and out in natural,

graceful, wavy lines between the luxuriant and overgrown shrubs, which were fragrant

with a leafy smell of spring growth; she went on, careless of watching eyes, indeed

unconscious, for the time, of their existence. Once she stopped to take hold of a spray of

jessamine, and softly kiss it; it had been her mother‘s favourite flower. (49)

The narrator describes the occasion of Ruth and Mr. Bellingham‘s visit to Ruth‘s old house, where she used to live with her mother. The narrator first delineates Ruth‘s wandering through

Mr. Bellingham‘s gaze and also traces a change of his mind: Mr. Bellingham feels indignity first and then swiftly loses the feeling in admiration of Ruth‘s movement. Above all, the term ―his sense of indignity‖ stands out. Why does he suffer an indignity? By using the word to describe the mental status of Mr. Bellingham, the narrator shows that Ruth and Mr. Bellingham visit the house with different purposes. In general, indignity is a feeling that one experiences when humiliated or offended by someone. That Mr. Bellingham feels indignity in relationship to Ruth indicates his offended status. The narrator points out that his look becomes graver while he observes Ruth‘s ―passionate emotion in her mother‘s room.‖ Mr. Bellingham feels jealousy towards Ruth‘s passion and immersion in her past memories, from which he is excluded. He wants Ruth‘s exclusive interest to be directed towards him. Namely, Ruth is not so much fascinated by Mr. Bellingham‘s presence. In contrast, Mr. Bellingham has a yearning for her

attention. Just a moment later, he loses the feeling by being captivated by Ruth‘s ―natural‖ and

―graceful‖ movement. The narration emphasizes that Ruth is not at all interested in luring Mr.

Bellingham‘s attention. She wanders ―careless of watching eyes‖ and ―unconscious‖ of ―their existence‖ for a while. While Mr. Bellingham regards the visit as a date with Ruth, Ruth‘s main concern for the visit was to seek remembrances of her mother. The narration indicates the difference in the couple‘s experiences and feelings. The narrator does not explicitly represent the occasion that causes Ruth‘s sexual fall as an intentional moment from Ruth‘s perspective.

In the above scene, the narrator‘s sympathetic perspective towards Ruth is reflected in

Old Thomas‘s gaze, and the gaze embodies an alternative perspective that the novel introduces regarding Ruth‘s fall. Old Thomas is a keeper of the old house and he is another ―observer of‖ all the movements of Ruth: ―Old Thomas was standing by the horse-mount, and was also an observer of all her goings on. But, while Mr Bellingham‘s feeling was that of passionate admiration mingled with a selfish kind of love, the old man gazed with tender anxiety, and his lips moved in words of blessing‖ (50). The narrator differentiates Old Thomas‘s ―tender anxiety‖ from Mr. Bellingham‘s ―selfish kind of love‖ revealed in Bellingham‘s grave facial expression in front of Ruth‘s blind concentration on her mother‘s memories. Old Thomas‘s anxiety reflects his awareness of the danger Ruth is exposed to at the moment, and the nuance of the narration shows more sympathy towards Old Thomas‘ stance. The narrator‘s observation of Old Thomas‘s mute words of blessing at this moment lays out the pathos of the scene. Furthermore, the novel later treats the problem of Ruth‘s unconsciousness of Mr. Bellingham and Old Thomas‘s two different gazes, the recognition of which might have saved Ruth from her fall. The novel shows that

Ruth‘s gradual awakening to the gazes of others serves as an indicator of her mental growth. The novel maps out the idea of transgressive femininity onto Ruth‘s mental development.

Gaskell explores her radical standard of Victorian female virtue through a working-class single mother character, Ruth. In this regard, I see an urgent need to move forward from the binary framework of dividing between the ―industrial‖ Gaskell and domestic Gaskell4. Regarding this binary tendency of literary critics in reading Gaskell‘s works, Patsy Stoneman aptly observes:

Of all the enormous output of feminist literary criticism during the last fifteen years, none

has been concerned to any major extent with Elizabeth Gaskell. Perceived as belonging

either to the (masculine) preserve of the ‗industrial‘ novel or the cosy world of the ‗lady

novelist‘, her work offered nothing as promising as the Brontë novels or George Eliot (5).

It is surprising to notice that, although critics have noticed the ―masculine‖ or unfeminine aspect of Gaskell‘s fictional world in terms of her interest in industrialism and the suffering of the lower class, they still disregarded her as a minor figure when it came to determining a line of feminist novelists. It was considered as a difficult task to clarify Gaskell‘s standpoint in terms of feminism. As Stoneman analyzes, critics have had a hard time reconciling the ―industrial‖

Gaskell, an author of Mary Barton (1848), with ladylike Gaskell who wrote Cranford (1851), an episodic sketch of an entirely feminine world. Gaskell‘s less known short stories are filled with histories of England, mysteries, and horrible scenes that have caused another problem for critics‘ attempt to seamlessly understand her authorial identity. Moreover, Ruth does not clearly fit into any such frame. Actually, the novel has incurred much resentment from critics and her friends

4 For instance, Tim Dolin opens his ―Introduction‖ to a 2011 new edition of Ruth in Oxford World‘s Classics with the following remarks that encapsulate this binary understanding of the author:

Elizabeth Gaskell is best known to readers and television audiences as the author of two very different kinds of fiction: social problem novels set in the English industrial north; and prose idylls of small-town and village life set in sedate rural parishes dotted around the south-western fringes of the Manchester manufacturing districts, and safely remote from the smoke and fug of their factories and slums. (ⅶ)

Dolin attributes the unpopularity of Ruth among readers to its equivocal position that ―sits awkwardly between the two dominant categories of Gaskell‘s fiction‖ (ⅶ).

due to its provocative and sensational content that presents an innocent female victim who sexually falls through seduction and dies while nursing the very same seducer in the end.

Although such inhospitable judgments on Ruth remain, a few recent critics have significantly paid attention to feminist elements in the novel. Audrey Jaffe‘s criticism analyzes

Ruth as a feminist text. Jaffe couples Ruth with Cranford on the basis of both texts‘ suggestion of the exchange of a male-dominated society for ―a culture dominated by women and/or an alternative, feminine sensibility.‖ Jaffe focuses on ―the detachment‖ of each novel‘s female characters from ―dominant cultural narratives‖ in which female characters are supposed to play subservient roles, ―economically and socially‖ dependent on men (47). Pointing out that Ruth belongs to the category of Gaskell‘s works that deal with social problems, Jaffe meaningfully argues that Gaskell accuses the society of ―the double standard‖ that only blames the seduced woman ―while exonerating the man.‖ Jaffe‘s analysis discovers a particular feminist edge in the novel‘s questioning of the shallowness of ―the eyes of society‖ by suggesting the seemingly fallen woman Ruth ―may in fact be virtuous,‖ rising above society (54). As Jaffe‘s reading indicates, Gaskell questions the false standard of judging women in the period by encapsulating both Victorian women‘s virtues—caring motherhood and domestic earnestness—and sexual boldness in Ruth. Furthermore, the standard of a virtuous woman suggested by Gaskell is more sophisticated than the one followed by the feminists who relied on religious ideologies, particularly the Evangelist movement, to assert the moral superiority of women.

I propose that Amanda Anderson is another significant critic who discovers a pivotal feminist message in Ruth. Anderson, in a similar vein with Jaffe, contends that Gaskell charges the society, which too easily reproduces deterministic discourse on fallen women, with a far more serious sense of responsibility than she charges the fallen woman Ruth with it. In Tainted

Souls and Painted Faces: The Rhetoric of Fallenness in Victorian Culture (1993), Anderson extends her argument on Gaskell‘s criticism of society to her critical view towards the utilitarian emphasis on calculation and instrumentality represented by other characters such as Mr.

Bradshaw in the novel. According to Anderson‘s reading, Gaskell is anxious that all forms of reason and judgment encouraged by materialist and utilitarian perspectives might be no more than selfish instrumentalism. Although Anderson offers a good feminist reading of Ruth by interpreting Ruth‘s sympathetic attitude as an alternative to an autonomous yet selfish individualism cultivated in patriarchal society, Anderson still regresses to the Victorian model of motherhood when she elaborates on Ruth‘s sympathetic gesture. In common with Jaffe who defines Ruth‘s moral superiority above society in terms of maternal affection, Anderson confines the virtue of Ruth to the Victorian framework of maternity while trying to defend Ruth‘s sexual vulnerability derived from sympathetic susceptibility. My reading of Ruth departs both Jaffe‘s and Anderson‘s readings in that I separate Ruth‘s maternal concerns from conventional Victorian motherhood and redefine her maternal identity in terms of her independent spirit. I argue that

Gaskell explores her idea of single motherhood through Ruth. I examine how Ruth expands the bounds of her maternal interest to the wider community as a working mother and a community volunteer worker.

Viewed in the context of the nineteenth century‘s definition of the fallen woman,

Gaskell‘s interest in liberating Ruth from the idea of degradation5 and complicating the notion of

5 Concerning the aura of Ruth, it is significant that Ruth‘s job is a seamstress. Dressmakers and their apprentices in the Victorian period were culturally important female workers. They were supposed to be easily exposed to sexual temptation. Mrs. Mason, the dressmaker, urged Ruth to go to the party hosted by her patron, and there she met the seducer, Mr. Bellingham. Mary‘s job in Mary Barton is also an apprentice of a dressmaker, and she falls prey to Harry Carson‘s flirtation on her way home late at night. Dolin notes: ―a seamstress is an iconic figure for the mid- Victorians of the female proximity of the female industrial workforce and the sex workforce‖ (ⅹ). Despite of Ruth and Mary‘s connection in their career, though, Ruth‘s contextual counterpart in Mary Barton is Esther, a prostitute. Mary does not commit a sexual sin with Harry. She only imagines that Harry could save her from her poor domestic

women‘s virtue by endowing Ruth with social influence is radically feminist. Dolin praises

Gaskell‘s attempt in Ruth as an emboldened one, comparing it to the author‘s depiction of another fallen woman, Esther6, in her first novel Mary Barton (1848). Wandering the streets after her sexual lapse and going in and out of the prison, Esther, despite her tremendous role in helping her niece Mary to discover the clue to the murder case of Harry Carson, finally dies a solitary death. Ruth‘s sexual fall also ends in her death, seemingly conforming to Victorian fictional tradition regarding the fallen woman that punishes women‘s sexual sins with their untimely deaths. However, Gaskell depicts Ruth‘s death as a salvation of the community and a victory of Ruth‘s altruistic virtue, forming a contradiction to the reading public‘s expectations.

Before death, Ruth saw ―the Light,‖ a symbol of heavenly salvation in the Christian tradition, coming to her on her death bed while awing the surrounding people looking down at her peaceful countenance. Ruth‘s death bed scene is similar to that of a woman saint in the Evangelical tradition. The narrator represents the silent drama of Ruth‘s death as filtered through the lenses of the spectators:

They stood around her bedside, not speaking, or sighing, or moaning; they were too much

awed by the exquisite peacefulness of her look for that. Suddenly she opened wide her

eyes, and gazed intently forwards, as if she saw some happy vision, which called out a

lovely, rapturous, breathless smile. They held their very breaths. (448)

The scene develops in intense silence that highlights Ruth‘s visionary mode and her vivid visual

environment.

6 Despite of her important role in the development of the narrative and her iconic influence, Esther is still isolated on the edge of the society. Even her last name is unknown in the text. She does not belong to the world composed of family units. Compared to Esther, Ruth is given a false name as an assumed widower, which leads to the tragic discovery in the end and yet would certainly endow her with a power to establish a new life as a respectable governess and an opportunity to prove her moral virtues.

reflection of such mode. By building up a sense of suspense among the spectators and depicting the awed looks of them, the narrator gradually forges Ruth‘s sainthood at the moment. There is not a word, sigh, a tear, or a moan among the hushed crowd. Every expression explaining Ruth‘s state—―the exquisite peacefulness of her look,‖ ―some happy vision,‖ and ―a lovely, rapturous, breathless smile‖—indicates the spectators‘ admiring gazes and proves her saintly calm in her last moments. In place of moral judgment, condemnation, indignation, or sympathetic distance,

Ruth provokes a sense of wonder among the circle watching her death. Ruth‘s mastery of death overpowers the spectators in the scene. I contend that Gaskell endorses Ruth‘s leverage by such a reverse design of the conventionally melodramatic stage. The death bed, which first appears as a climactic tool for a melodramatic tragic ending, works as a transformative stage where Ruth disrupts conventional expectations and sympathetic responses. Blocking the tears of the spectators, Ruth leaves them awe-struck.

Contrary to my reading of the novel, many first reviewers of Ruth, a large number of them are Gaskell‘s acquaintances, misunderstood the novel as a simple domestic melodrama and have disapproved of the novel‘s examination of a dissolute life. Particularly, Charlotte Brontë questioned why spiritually innocent Ruth should have died in the end. Remaining faithful to the melodramatic convention which interprets the fallen woman‘s death as a punishment and a tragic climax, she resented Ruth‘s fate. On the contrary, I argue that Ruth‘s victorious attitude to death provides an inspirational mode of behavior for the New Woman, who would act regardless of social conventions and boldly engage in social reforms. Admiration and wonder characterizing

Ruth‘s death subverts the Victorian idea of the fallen woman, whose pitiable image has been widely circulated and consumed among middle-class readers. Regarding the gaze of admiration,

Nina Auerbach points out that the attitude of ―admiration‖ mingles with ―condemnation‖ in

―Victorian treatments of the fallen woman‖ in her work which considers the pervasive image of the fallen woman in Victorian literature (29). According to Auerbach, the sense of ―admiration‖ that Victorian readers felt towards the fallen woman always accompanied the attitude of

―condemnation,‖ and the double gaze mythologized the fallen woman. The feeling of admiration was an expression of perverse longing for a state that cannot be reached. The unbridgeable distance between them constructed the inviolable aura of the fallen woman. However, Auerbach differentiates Ruth, arguing that ―Ruth is too sublimely innocent to understand the fact of her own fall: through seduction and betrayal, unwed pregnancy and motherhood, she remains the victim of her destitution, her unprotected orphan state, her sexual ignorance‖ (40). However, focusing more on Ruth‘s development of self-reflection, I suggest, contrary to Auerbach, that

Ruth is empowered with the power to throw off her ―infantine purity‖ and to stand as an independent single mother and as a feminist forerunner.

The forgery of Ruth‘s identity7, which is devised by Miss Benson and painfully consented to by Thurston Benson, is a stratagem introduced by the novel to reveal Ruth‘s power and to make it felt by other characters while also debunking the idea of the virtuous woman circulating around Mr. Bradshaw‘s house. Jemima Bradshaw, a daughter of Mr. Bradshaw, learning from

Ruth at home, is the character who most transparently reflects the moral influence Ruth has among the people around her. On the morning of the baptism of little Leonard, Ruth‘s son,

Jemima calls on Mr. Benson‘s to pay her growing admiration to Ruth. The narrator observes the

7 Many critics have interpreted the forgery of Ruth‘s identity has a negative connotation. For instance, Anderson suggests ―the real fall‖ in Ruth ―occurs when the Bensons lie about Ruth‘s status, passing her off as a widow rather than as an unwed mother‖ (133). Regarding the Bensons‘ lie as a kind of intentional calculation, Anderson points out Gaskell‘s fear and warning of the tendency of deliberation that habitually enforces ―the social and religious discourse on fallenness‖ (134). Though I concur with Anderson‘s insight to read Gaskell‘s anxiety of any kind of calculation, I do read a radical attempt of Gaskell to cast the fallen woman in the role of an unconsciously graceful lady and to complicate the dynamics of visibility through the forgery of Ruth‘s identity.

cause of Jemima‘s physical reactions and her motivation:

Miss Bradshaw was rosy and breathless with eagerness. She had been struck with Mrs.

Denbigh‘s grace and beauty at the very first sight, when she had accompanied her mother

to call upon the Bensons on their return from Wales; and had kept up an enthusiastic

interest in the widow only a little older than herself, whose very reserve and retirement

but added to her unconscious power of enchantment. (179)

Terms such as ―eagerness‖ and ―an enthusiastic interest‖ denote the extent of Jemima‘s crush on

Ruth, and the phrase ―only a little‖ age gap between Ruth and Jemima seems only to add to the power of influence Ruth has on Jemima. Jemima appears to read Ruth‘s unconsciousness of her own charm, or more likely, assign the virtue of unconsciousness to Ruth, and that fact heightens

Jemima‘s admiration of Ruth. That Jemima thinks highly of Ruth‘s unselfconsciousness is in fact the fruit of Mr. Bradshaw‘s repressive home discipline. Disciplined in the patriarchal system of

Mr. Bradshaw‘s household, Jemima habitually gives high added value to self-denial and restraint of women. The ―reserve and retirement‖ of Ruth‘s bearing heighten her attractiveness as a young female in Mr. Bradshaw‘s house. Notice how Jemima acknowledges Ruth‘s ―unconscious‖ and

―unspeakable‖ beauty as a rightly appealing one to her own repressed yet incisive sensitivity nurtured within the patriarchal home:

Her admiration for beauty was keen, and little indulged at home; and Ruth was very

beautiful in her quiet mournfulness; her mean and homely dress left her herself only the

more open to admiration, for she gave it a charm by her unconscious wearing of it that

made it seem like the drapery of an old Greek statue—subordinate to the figure it covered,

yet imbued by it with an unspeakable grace. (183)

Jemima‘s reading of Ruth transparently reflects Mr. Bradshaw‘s home education that forbids an

indulgence of impressionability. Mr. Bradshaw‘s discipline, encapsulated in the phrase explaining that Jemima‘s ―keen‖ ―admiration for beauty‖ was ―little‖ encouraged at her father‘s space of rule, preordains Jemima‘s uncritical adoration of Ruth. It is almost impossible to distinguish whether Jemima admires the ―homely dress‖ that Ruth wears or Ruth herself: as Ruth gave the dress ―a charm,‖ the dress looks like ―the drapery of an old Greek statue,‖ and the dress and the grace of ―the figure‖ (Ruth) becomes an inseparable one in the last sentence of the passage written in Jemima‘s perspective, linked by the (intentionally disorienting) use of the same pronoun ―it‖.

That Jemima confuses the beauty of Ruth with the material item she is wearing overlaps with her father‘s indiscretion in the later scene where Mr. Bradshaw buys Ruth ―a handsome silk gown‖ to reward her for drawing Jemima out of her gloomy attitude towards Mr. Farquhar, whom Mr. Bradshaw wants her daughter to marry. However, unlike her father who believes that he could regulate every action in his house, Jemima, quite unconsciously, invests ―power‖ within

Ruth—an outsider—, a power to enchant and, more importantly, to expose the cultural mechanism in Mr. Bradshaw‘s home that generates the notion of submissive women and the misguided eruption of adoration.

Jemima unselfconsciously reveals the influence of her father‘s patriarchal training by valuing Ruth‘s lack of self-consciousness. Betraying Jemima‘s fancy and forewarning of Ruth‘s tragic secret hidden under a cloak of a widow‘s dress, though, Gaskell points out Ruth‘s ―self- consciousness‖ provoked by no one else but Jemima in the following passage. Mr. Benson is another person admiring Ruth‘s unconsciousness, particularly of her own academic prowess, while he teaches her at home. If Ruth has been only conscious of how she might educate her boy during the lesson with Mr. Benson, at Mr. Bradshaw‘s, she becomes acutely conscious, to the

degree of annoyance, of Jemima‘s admiration and is indeed flattered:

Her delight in what was strong and beautiful called out her master‘s sympathy; but, most

of all, he [Mr. Benson] admired the complete unconsciousness of uncommon power, or

unusual progress. It was less of a wonder than he considered it to be, it is true, for she

never thought of comparing what she was now with her former self, much less with

another. Indeed, she [Ruth] did not think of herself at all, but of her boy, and what she

must learn in order to teach him to be and to do as suited her hope and her prayer. If

anyone‘s devotion could have flattered her into self-consciousness, it was Jemima‘s. Mr.

Bradshaw never dreamed that his daughter could feel herself inferior to the minister‘s

protégée, but so it was; and no knight-errant of old could consider himself more honoured

by his ladye‘s commands than did Jemima, if Ruth allowed her to do anything for her or

for her boy. Ruth loved her heartily, even while she was rather annoyed at the open

expressions Jemima used of admiration. (187, my emphasis)

Markedly, the passage is written in the variation of the narration technique of internal focalization by covering several different perspectives. The full paragraph that this passage belongs to starts with Mr. Benson‘s point of view observing Ruth, then moves to Ruth‘s, Mr.

Bradshaw‘s, to Jemima‘s, and finally goes back to Ruth‘s. Synthesizing different points of view, it seems as though the narrator assembles the pieces of a puzzle to construct the picture of Ruth.

The fluctuation of the narration between Mr. Bradshaw‘s view and Jemima‘s position is finally subsumed under Ruth‘s perspective. The narrator implies that Mr. Benson‘s admiration of ―the quick perception and ready adaptation of truths and first principles‖ and the ―immediate sense of the fitness of things‖ of Ruth and of her unconscious of them well coincides with her real concern for Leonard (187). In contrast, Jemima‘s admiration of Ruth‘s unselfconscious beauty is

inconsistent with the fact that Ruth gradually awakens to the realization of her attractiveness.

Intriguingly, Jemima‘s misconception dovetails with Mr. Bradshaw‘s lack of understanding of his daughter‘s sense of honor felt by just being allowed to do errands for Ruth. The narrator‘s tone describing Jemima‘s adoration of Ruth is mocking, which is also demonstrated in its use of the old-fashioned form of expressions such as ―his ladye‘s commands.‖ Jemima conceptualizes

Ruth‘s feminine virtue according to the tradition of the old-fashioned romance. The real merit of

Ruth‘s moral influence lies in her unimposing power to surmount the pervasive misunderstanding of her in Mr. Bradshaw‘s home, while becoming aware of how this misunderstanding predetermines the boundaries within which she could work.

Different from Mr. Bradshaw‘s belief and Jemima‘s delusion, Ruth‘s moral influence is unfettered by Mr. Bradshaw‘s domineering management system and progressively undermines the false authority on which it stands. In addition to its detrimental impact on Jemima‘s mistaken ideas, Mr. Bradshaw‘s system of management has violent effects on Mrs. Bradshaw whose voice becomes ―sharp and nervous‖ with ―a sort of constant terror of displeasing‖ her husband ―when he was there‖ (231) and on his son Richard who ends up committing a forgery in the later part of the story. Mr. Bradshaw‘s following remark to her daughter when he assures her that Mr.

Farquhar would want to marry her according to the report of Mrs. Bradshaw reveals the particulars of his domestic management: ―‗I have no doubt he did,‘ replied her father, gravely.

‗Your mother is in the habit of repeating accurately to me what takes place in my absence; besides which, the whole speech is not one of hers; she has not altered a word in the repetition, I am convinced.‘‖(222). In the same vein, Mr. Bradshaw attempts to induce Ruth to exercise her influence over Jemima, thinking of indirectly exhorting her daughter to act obediently in front of

Mr. Farquhar. However, Ruth‘s determination to accept his request despite her repugnance for his

suggestion does not take root in the same calculating reason as Bradshaw‘s, but in her unselfish love of Jemima. Ruth‘s motivation to act is to inspirit Jemima: ―On her way home she resolved, if she could, to find out what were Jemima‘s secret feelings; and if (as from some previous knowledge she suspected) they were morbid and exaggerated in any way, to try and help her right with all the wisdom which true love gives‖ (228). Ruth‘s resolution spontaneously discloses the lack of attention and caring based on ―true love‖ at Mr. Bradshaw‘s home. As contrasted with

Mr. Bradshaw‘s patronizing impulse to fix Jemima‘s action, Ruth‘s wish lies in letting Jemima find peace of mind at home. She even changes Jemima‘s excessive self-consciousness arising from the habit of judging herself on grounds of Ruth‘s opinions. She redirects Jemima‘s morbid self-pity towards an interest in others:

Jemima was ashamed of herself before Ruth, in a way which she had never been before

anyone else. She valued Ruth‘s good opinion so highly, that she dreaded lest her friend

should perceive her faults. She put a check upon herself—a check at first; but after a little

time she had forgotten something of her trouble, and listened to Ruth, and questioned her

about Leonard, and smiled at his little witticism; and only the sighs, that would come up

from the very force of habit, brought back the consciousness of her unhappiness. (234)

Instead of imposing herself upon Jemima, Ruth restores Jemima‘s aplomb and excites her curiosity. With the sweet ―fragrance‖ the presence of Ruth left around her after the dinner,

―Jemima was her best self during the next half hour‖ (236). The way Ruth ―insensibly‖ changes

Jemima‘s mood is beyond Mr. Bradshaw‘s scope of knowledge (234). Mr. Bradshaw fails to understand the domestic circumstances happening under his very nose and falsely responds to

Ruth‘s thoughtful act, deciding to reward for her voluntary action:

He never doubted but that Ruth had given her some sort of private exhortation to behave

better. He could not have understood the pretty art with which, by simply banishing

unpleasant subjects, and throwing a wholesome natural sunlit tone over others, Ruth had

insensibly drawn Jemima of her gloom. He resolved to buy Mrs Denbigh a handsome silk

gown the very next day. (234)

In the same way as he had no doubt of what his wife reported to him, Mr. Bradshaw has a firm belief that Ruth gave Jemima ―some sort of private exhortation‖ in submission to his command.

However, disobeying his command of exhortation yet creating a better result, Ruth reveals the deficiency of Mr. Bradshaw‘s management system.

Jemima‘s responses to domestic events attest to the negative influence of Mr. Bradshaw‘s patriarchal education. As Jemima‘s misguided adoration of Ruth is a mirror of the gender ideology circulated in Mr. Bradshaw‘s household, Jemima‘s exceeding anger at Ruth after she discovers her seeming complicity in Mr. Bradshaw‘s management, and Ruth‘s shameful past and disguise, reveals the shallowness of Jemima‘s sensibility, which is yet to be developed, nurtured in Mr. Bradshaw‘s home. Like her father, Jemima fails to read the depth of Ruth‘s thoughts leading to her sympathetic action. Upon Mrs. Bradshaw mistakenly disclosing Ruth‘s involvement with Mr. Bradshaw‘s scheme, Jemima, without patience, sums up the situation in a superficial version as follows: ―papa is going to give Mrs Denbigh a gown because I was civil to

Mr Farquhar last night‖ (238). Jemima hastily renders Ruth‘s voluntary behavior into a part of her father‘s system of management: ―Jemima remembered, with smouldered anger, Ruth‘s pleading way of wiling her from her sullenness the night before. Management everywhere! But in this case it was peculiarly revolting; so much so, that she could hardly bear to believe that the seemingly-transparent Ruth had lent herself to it‖ (238). Jemima‘s use of the expression, ―the seemingly-transparent Ruth,‖ alludes to her false belief that she could transparently read others‘

character through outward manner and patterns of behavior. According to this superficial value system, Ruth‘s conduct easily falls under the same context as her father‘s constant management at home. In the following deliberation of Jemima, it is significant to notice how Jemima refers to

Ruth as ―a stranger,‖ contradicting herself, just because her father exploits her:

She could not say that Mrs Denbigh‘s conduct was positively wrong—it might even be

quite right; but it was inexpressibly repugnant to her to think of her father consulting with

a stranger (a week ago she almost considered Ruth as a sister) how to manage his

daughter, so as to obtain the end he wished for; yes, even if that end was for her own

good. (239)

Besides her power to debunk the myth of the virtuous woman, Ruth‘s engagement in domestic affairs discloses the logic of classification at Mr. Bradshaw‘s house. According to this logic of classification, Jemima and Mr. Bradshaw turn down Ruth in good order: Jemima, in the above scene and Mr. Bradshaw after he learns about Ruth‘s disguise as Mrs. Denbigh. Referring to such a classification, in ―Illicit Inscriptions: Reframing Forgery in Elizabeth Gaskell‘s Ruth‖ (2005),

Sara Malton aptly writes: ―Ruth dramatizes the performative function of such classifications, which threaten to permanently inscribe the fallen woman and her child as degenerate and render it impossible for them to ever move beyond the bounds of that classification‖ (189). In the above scene, it is clear that Jemima unconsciously embodies the pervasive mechanism of this classification and Ruth contributes to revealing such embodied habit of Jemima.

Ruth does not demonstrate any symptom of female vanity, one of the common signs of women‘s fall, and her real frailty lies in her aspiration for connections and sympathy, which are often exploited by male characters including Mr. Bradshaw and Mr. Bellingham, her seducer. Mr.

Bradshaw uses Ruth‘s sympathetic attitude to Jemima as bait to domesticate his daughter and Mr.

Bellingham approaches Ruth on Sunday, the day Ruth is the weakest in aspiration for connections. Instead of accusing Ruth of a fall, Gaskell determines the root of the classifying mechanism that prescribes the fallen. Malton observes: ―the classification of the fallen‖ is itself

―responsible for their permanent degradation‖ (189). More importantly, Malton points out that the way in which the disguise of Ruth ―ultimately reveals the flaws of cultural confidence in detection, in observation as a means to classification and control‖ is much more interesting than

―the pervasive surveillance in the novel‖ (195). Indeed, Ruth‘s success as a disguised widow,

―however temporary,‖ undermines Mr. Bradshaw‘s self-congratulatory sense that he can exercise absolute control over ―his domestic police state‖ as Malton sees through (195). Building upon

Malton‘s insight, my reading concerns more fundamental questions of the novel about how precarious the classification of the virtuous and the fallen is and how the authority of the patriarch who supports the distinction is ill-defined.

Questioning the Origin of Fall

In line with its interest in rereading the fall of Ruth, I argue that the novel complicates the notion of guilt around Ruth. The first time the word ―guilty‖ appears in Ruth to openly point out a fall by Ruth from other peoples‘ perspective is when the narrator describes Ruth‘s confrontation of Mrs. Mason, the dressmaker to whom Ruth is an apprentice. Mrs. Mason witnesses how inappropriately Ruth stood with ―a lover‖ ―far away from home‖ (54). At the moment, the narrator‘s use of the term, ―guilty,‖ chiefly reflects Mrs. Mason‘s perspective of

Ruth. Noticeably, the narrator deliberately accompanies the word with another modifier,

―trembling,‖ to describe Ruth‘s feeble state of mind. The word ―trembling,‖ showing that the

narrator is more concerned with Ruth‘s response to the accusation, precedes the accusing word

(―guilty‖):

―Come here directly, Miss Hilton,‖ she exclaimed, sharply. Then, dropping her voice to

low, bitter tones of concentrated wrath, she said to the trembling, guilty Ruth:

―Don‘t attempt to show your face at my house again after this conduct. I saw you, and

your spark too. I‘ll have no slurs on the character of my apprentices. Don‘t say a word. I

saw enough. I shall write and tell your guardian to-morrow.‖ (54-55)

The narrator‘s description of the scene justifies Ruth‘s physical response: Mrs. Mason exclaims to Ruth, commands, slights her, and reveals ―concentrated wrath‖ even in a lower tone. At the same time as the narrator applies the term ―guilty‖ to describe Ruth, Ruth clearly starts to recognize herself as guilty for the first time in the novel when she listens to Mrs. Mason‘s condemning speech. Mrs. Mason accuses Ruth of the ―conduct,‖ getting around with a man who looks like her lover, and of the ―spark‖ in her eyes. With her remark, ―I saw enough,‖ by which the narrator ironically implies Mrs. Mason did not see enough to make a judgment of Ruth, Mrs.

Mason rashly constructs the guiltiness of Ruth, which is irrevocable enough to determine Ruth‘s fate. Whether Mrs. Mason‘s accusation is justifiable or not, at this moment, Ruth finally comes to see herself as a sinner, publicly blamed by Mrs. Mason. Mrs. Mason‘s harsh response awakens

Ruth to the social meaning of her conduct:

It seed to the poor child as if Mrs Mason‘s words were irrevocable, and that, being so, she

was shut out from every house. She saw how much she had done that was deserving of

blame, now when it was too late to undo it. She knew with what severity and taunts Mrs

Mason had often treated her for involuntary failings, of which she had been quite

unconscious; and now she had really done wrong, and shrank with terror from the

consequences. (55)

More importantly, though, the narrator keeps a sympathetic tone, using such expressions as ―the poor child‖ and ―involuntary failings,‖ even at this moment when Ruth‘s conduct is clearly denounced. The narrator puts more emphasis on Mrs. Mason‘s severe treatment of Ruth on previous occasions than on Ruth‘s unconscious misbehaviors and sympathizes with Ruth‘s feeling of terror. Considering the tone of the narrator, it seems as though the narrator employs the word ―guilty‖ to designate the common judgmental perspective that Mrs. Mason represents regarding Ruth‘s misconduct, which might still be equivalent to her other less significant

―involuntary failings‖ according to Ruth‘s perspective.

To simply denounce Ruth as guilty of a fall becomes more difficult, considering how deliberately the narrator has developed the sympathetic tone towards Ruth even before she is publicly condemned as a sinner by Mrs. Mason in the above scene. The narrator‘s sympathetic tone towards Ruth is obvious throughout the novel, and the narrator makes particularly elaborate efforts to articulate Ruth‘s unnamable feelings, lack of basic knowledge of sex, and a vague understanding of the social implications of her act while she becomes entangled in an affair with

Mr. Bellingham. The narrator addresses readers and asks them to remember Ruth‘s lack of caution caused by her motherless growth, while at the same time revealing that Ruth is not wholly closed to a sense of guiltiness, though hard to identify, before she is publicly criticized by

Mrs. Mason. Ruth‘s self-questioning scenes in which she ponders her ―strange undefined feeling‖ when she walks besides Mr. Bellingham prove Ruth‘s sensitive conscience and her self-reflective capability. In particular, the act of rambling in the suburbs provokes Ruth to think about the impact of different social relations on her behavior. For instance, Ruth reflects on her behavior in the evening after her ramble with Mr. Bellingham: ―If I had gone this walk with Jenny, I wonder

whether I should have felt as I do now. There must be something wrong in me, myself, to feel so guilty when I have done nothing which is not right‖ (41). To identify the uncomfortable feeling,

Ruth regards herself as wrong instead of accusing Mr. Bellingham of it. If Ruth is ―feeling guilty,‖ however, the guilty feeling is yet one of the numerous feelings—an immense sense of liberty, joy, and wonder—Ruth first experiences while she walks outside alongside Mr. Bellingham.

Although Ruth experiences the uncomfortable guilty feeling, she cannot push the feeling onward to a more productive self-examination as a set of new feelings and sensations overwhelms Ruth during the walk with Mr. Bellingham. The narration delineates Ruth‘s wandering in a framework of her stepping forward to a wider world rather than depicting it as a mere excursion of the couple. Just after the above contemplation, Ruth continues to feel satisfaction: ―I can thank God for the happiness I have had in this charming spring walk, which dear mamma used to say was a sign when pleasures were innocent and good for us‖ (41). The wandering is reframed as Ruth‘s pleasurable encounter with a world outside her small workplace. In fact, while she indulges in her own sense of joy, Ruth ―almost forgot the presence of Mr. Bellingham‖ (39). The act of rambling first faintly awakens Ruth to different social relations with others and then again encourages her to forget the social significance of the relationship she forms at the very moment.

Most of all, Ruth‘s wandering is a rediscovery of her own sensations. Tracing back to the moment of Ruth‘s sexual fall, there is a sensation coming from the unconstrained ramble before any sensuous pleasure in a romantic relationship8.

8 The novel points out Ruth‘s aspiration to freely walk outside of the sweatshop from the very early stage of the narration. Right after the novel introduces the work place, it focalizes on Ruth looking out the window with a longing desire for moving her body out of labor:

Ruth pressed her hot forehead against the cold glass, and strained her aching eyes in gazing out on the lovely sky of a winter‘s night. The impulse was strong upon her to snatch up a shawl, and wrapping it round her head, to sally forth and enjoy the glory; and time was when that impulse would have been instantly followed; but now, Ruth‘s eyes filled with tears, and she stood quite still, dreaming of the days that were gone. (5)

To disclose poor management and lack of domestic security at Mrs. Mason‘s shop, the narrator dramatically contrasts the joy that Ruth experiences outdoors with her previous feeling of loneliness on monotonous, housebound Sundays, the day when Ruth survives merely on ―a bun or biscuit‖ in ―the deserted workroom‖ (34). Ruth used to spend every Sunday alone at Mrs.

Mason‘s shop without proper meals and heating, while her colleagues all went to friends‘ houses or home, before she came to know Mr. Bellingham and spent the day with him. Ironically, Mrs.

Mason, the first accuser of Ruth‘s fall in the novel, is the very creator of Ruth‘s lonely Sundays.

As the narrator also mentions Mrs. Mason‘s struggle as a widow whose ―six or seven children left dependent on her exertions‖ before pointing out the circumstances of her shop management on Sundays, the novel still leaves room to excuse Mrs. Mason‘s parsimony (33). However, the narrator‘s tone explaining the rationale behind ―the pinching economy‖ that governs Mrs.

Mason‘s domestic affairs is not so far from accusing:

On Sundays she [Mrs. Mason] chose to conclude that all her apprentices had friends who

would be glad to see them to dinner, and give them a welcome reception for the

remainder of the day; while she, and those of her children who were not at school, went

to spend the day at her father‘s house, several miles out of the town. Accordingly, no

dinner was cooked on Sundays for the young workwomen; no fires were lighted in any

rooms to which they had access. On this morning they breakfasted in Mrs Mason‘s own

parlor, after which the room was closed against them through the day by some understood,

though unspoken prohibition. (34)

With the phrase ―she chose to conclude,‖ the narrator implies that Mrs. Mason deliberately made a decision to overlook any apprentices who might have no friend to welcome them on Sundays.

What Ruth longs for is ―one run‖ and ―one blow of the fresh air‖ that are not allowed in the present condition of labor (5).

That the closure of Mrs. Mason‘s parlor after breakfast is an ―unspoken‖ rule signifies a sense of unjust treatment behind the ―prohibition.‖ After offering the rationale of the domestic management at Mrs. Mason‘s, the narrator almost retorts one: ―What become of such as Ruth, who had no home and no friends in the large populous desolate town?‖ (34). In place of the judgment on Ruth‘s misconduct committed on one of these Sundays, the narrator redirects readers‘ concern and asks back how Ruth might escape a helpless desolate life without a stranger‘s helping hand. Gaskell elaborates the concrete circumstances before Ruth‘s fall and points out how Mrs. Mason contributed to Ruth‘s fall in a broader context of the plot9, while providing an excusable private situation behind Mrs. Mason‘s regulation. Gaskell alludes to the structural problems of a society that generates a slanted view of the fallen woman and closes its eyes to the circumstances under which she stands and struggles.

Gaskell questions the Victorian moral sense that has been formed around middle-class domestic ideology and thus cannot comprehend the reality of the working class, or the people left out of the safe home where the iconic ―Angel in the House10‖ should preside. An orphan girl like

Ruth finds rambling after rambling with a stranger, who shortly turns out to be an irresponsible seducer, to be a more sympathetic experience than any of her domestic experiences at Mrs.

Mason‘s. Through this, Gaskell exposes the gap between domestic ideology, which has assigned the family home as the particular space for women where they can function as the moral center,

9 At the very outset of Ruth‘s romance with Mr. Bellingham, Mrs. Mason provided fundamental cause for their first encounter. The narrator meaningfully points out one of ―foibles‖ Mrs. Mason has: ―to pay an extreme regard to appearances‖ (8). According to such a tendency of favoring those who does credit to her shop, Mrs. Mason selected Ruth as one of the four girls to send to ―the ante-chamber of the assembly-room‖ to wait on the ladies. At the ball, Ruth first attracted Mr. Bellingham‘s eyes when his dance partner came to Ruth to ask her to repair her dress.

10 I refer to the most familiar phrase from Coventry Patmore‘s well-known poem titled ―The Angel‖ to emphasize the poem‘s role as a cultural archive of the Victorian ideal of the womanhood, while dealing with how Gaskell deconstructs the notion of ideal womanhood people has arbitrarily extracted from the poem through Ruth. For an insightful new approach to Patmore‘s poem, please see Natasha Moore‘s article, ―The Realism of The Angel in the House: Coventry Patmore‘s Poem Reconsidered,‖ in Victorian Literature and Culture 43.1 (2015).

and the reality derived from the absence of such ideal homes, particularly among the working class. Early in the novel, Gaskell reconsiders the mythmaking function of the cult of domesticity by letting Ruth‘s nostalgia for her childhood home where she lived with her mother become a dangerous one in which to indulge. Ruth‘s childish wish to ―see mamma‘s room again‖ (43) traps her into a perilous journey with Mr. Bellingham. Right after Ruth and Mr. Bellingham arranged their walk to Milham Grange, the narrator alludes to the coming danger by sympathetically mentioning—appealing to readers—Ruth‘s lack of proper sexual knowledge which might have protected her from the fall: ―She was too young when her mother died to have received any cautious or words of advice respecting the subject of a woman‘s life‖ (44). According to the narrator‘s remark, it is clear that Ruth‘s childhood home, which her mother did preside over yet could not complete the role of an ideal mother, breaks away from the home supported by domestic ideology. The narrator describes what deceptive form Ruth‘s childish nostalgia could take:

Sorrow had filled up her days, to the exclusion of all lighter thoughts than the

consideration of present duties, and the remembrance of the happy time which had been.

But the interval of blank, after the loss of her mother and during her father‘s life-in-death,

had made her all the more ready to value and cling to sympathy—first from Jenny, and

now from Mr Bellingham. To see her home again, and to see it with him; to show him

(secure of his interest) the haunts of former times, each with its little tale of the past—of

dead and gone events!—No coming shadow threw its gloom over this week‘s dream of

happiness—a dream which was too bright to be spoken about, to common and indifferent

ears. (44)

Keeping in mind that the narrator has already warned the readers of the impending sexual fall of

Ruth and later repeatedly emphasized it through the inner voice of old Thomas, it becomes clear that Ruth‘s ―dream of happiness,‖ a one day tour of her childhood house with Mr. Bellingham, is a complete illusion that will eventually endanger her. Still holding fast to the sympathetic tone towards Ruth, and explaining the reason why she is prone to depend on the sympathy of strangers, the narrator disavows the notion of a sacred home free from threats. In the context of the premonition of Ruth‘s fall, Ruth‘s romanticizing of the past can be particularly harmful.

During their visit to Milham Grange, Ruth completely loses sense of reality, recollecting the former days of her family. Ruth‘s blindness to the present runs parallel to her ignorance of the sexual danger threatening her. The picture of Ruth‘s reminiscence resembles the typical picture of the middle-class ideal of domesticity:

She saw a vision of former days—an evening in the days of her childhood; her father

sitting in the ―master‘s corner‖ near the fire, sedately smoking his pipe, while he dreamily

watched his wife and child; her mother reading to her, as she sat on a little stool at her

feet. It was gone—all gone into the land of shadows; but for the moment it seemed so

present in the old room, that Ruth believed her actual life to be the dream. (48)

In Ruth‘s imagination, her father is depicted as a typical patriarch satisfactorily viewing his wife and child who seem to incarnate the ideal scene that the cult of domesticity spreads: the symbolic phrase ―her mother reading to her, as she sat on a little stool at her feet‖ faithfully gives body to the idea that a mother should morally educate her child at home. Condensing the gist of Victorian domestic ideology into Ruth‘s nostalgic recollection that Ruth indulges in while she gets entangled in Mr. Bellingham‘s plan of seduction, Gaskell exposes the deceptiveness of domestic ideology: Ruth becomes a fallen woman in the middle of her journey to pay homage to her memories of the childhood home. In this regard, Natalka Freeland points out that the novel‘s real

intention to redirect readers‘ attention to the social problems lying behind the plot: ―Ruth (1853) proposes an analogy between the ideologies of sanitation and domestic morality (as embodied in female sexual purity), revealing that projects aiming to clean up both dirty streets and dirty women distract attention from the social problems they ostensibly address‖ (800). Gaskell warns how deceptive the dream of a sacred home can be11.

The novel delves into the superficiality of accusing Ruth of sexual fall. Ironically, even though Ruth is a sinner who commits adultery, according to a Christian perspective, she is guiltier of ignorance of social norms than of her sexual fall. When they condemn Ruth based on her violation of the Victorian ideal womanhood, the public is ignorant of the fact that Ruth has never acquired the appropriate social education designed for women to learn. As a significant number of critics have pointed out, in Ruth, it is hard to pinpoint an actual love scene between

Ruth and Mr. Bellingham, and only Ruth‘s pregnancy afterwards lets readers be certain of the sexual intercourse between them. The omission of any direct allusion to the sex at a level of narration reflects the emotional proximity of the narrator to Ruth in terms of her ignorance. The narrator is not so much concerned with describing the actual sex scene than telling the synthetic circumstances leading to Ruth‘s fall. While shielding their sex scene, Gaskell unpacks the mechanism of stigmatization that swiftly defines Ruth as a sinner. Expelled from Mrs. Mason‘s place, Ruth follows Mr. Bellingham to an inn in a small village of North Wales. In the village,

Ruth begins to attract the public‘s curious yet critical gaze in earnest yet is unconscious of it:

―Ruth was quite unconscious of being the object of remark, and in her light rapid passings to and from, had never looked at the doors and windows, where many watchers stood observing her,

11 For a more recent discussion on how Gaskell exposes the other side of domestic ideology, please refer to Adela Pinch‘s reading of Gaskell‘s novella Cousin Phillis (1864) in ―Reality Sensing in Elizabeth Gaskell: Or, Half- Mended Stockings‖ (2016).

and commenting upon her situation or her appearance‖ (70). Only after a boy named Harry openly affronts her does she start to recognize her degraded social situation. Still, Ruth‘s inability to articulate what she starts ―to entertain of the estimation in which she was henceforward to be held‖ (73) by the public dramatically contrast with their too easy condemnation of her. The boy‘s offensive action nails down Ruth‘s falleness in public. Out of pure admiration, Ruth comes up to a baby she sees on her walk:

The baby sat in placid dignity in her nurse‘s arms, with a face of queenly calm. Her fresh,

soft, peachy complexion was really tempting; and Ruth, who was always fond of children,

went up to coo and to smile at the little thing, and, after some ―peep-boing,‖ she was

about to snatch a kiss, when Harry, whose face had been reddening ever since the play

began, lifted up his sturdy little right arm and hit Ruth a great blow on the face. (71)

The episode demonstrates on a micro level that Ruth‘s behavior, which is true to her sympathetic desire to express love and be loved, comes to be defined in the context of sexual fall by the standard of social norms and public acknowledgement. That Harry blushes at Ruth‘s unaffected behavior and strikes her without a slight sense of guilt hints at the stark reality of Ruth‘s situation.

Ruth‘s fall starts with people‘s articulation of it.

The sympathetic tone of the narrator sketching the story of Ruth‘s fall throughout the novel speaks for Gaskell‘s position as a female middle-class author of social problem novels interested in exploring the life of the working class, poor children, and single mothers: Gaskell questions the society that enforces severe stigmatization, without pondering the context, of an orphan girl and a single mother like Ruth. Freeland sharply observes: ―long before Ruth‘s fall resulted in her social problems it resulted from them, since she succumbed to her seducer only because she was already jobless, friendless, and broke‖ (81). Taking such a structural

contradiction into account, Ruth reveals how arbitrary the construction of Victorian categorization of female fall and virtue are.

Ruth‘s ―Misery‖

The term ―misery‖ is intricately connected with Ruth‘s sense of agony attributable to her sexual fall. Overcoming the misery and declaring a separation from the traces of it are central to

Ruth‘s growth into a self-reliant single mother. Introducing a set of scenes where Ruth is struck by the return of her old misery, Gaskell highlights to what extent Ruth‘s sexual fall threatens to determine her fate but shows how hard she struggles against the threat. The novel‘s first articulation of the term ―misery‖ adds tension to the dramatic scene where Mr. Bellingham, who reappears as Mr. Donne—as a strong candidate for a position in Parliament, realizes the existence of Ruth‘s illegitimate son. Eavesdropping Mr. Bradshaw‘s casual question to Ruth,

―Any message for Leonard beyond love, which is a matter of course?‖, Mr. Donne feels a sudden pang of jealousy ―called out by the idea that Leonard was a grown-up man‖:

―Who is Leonard?‖ said he, to the little girl standing by him; he did not know which she

was. ―Mrs Denbigh‘s little boy,‖ answered Mary. Under some pretence or other, he drew

near to Ruth; and in that low voice, which she had learnt to loathe, he said, ―Our child!‖

By the white misery that turned her face to stone—by the wild terror in her imploring

eyes—by the gasping breath, which came out as the carriage drove away—he knew that

he had seized the spell to make her listen at last. (290, my emphasis)

Mr. Donne‘s sudden detection of the existence of his illegitimate child immediately strikes fear into Ruth‘s heart. The term ―misery‖ dramatically captures the mood of Ruth at the moment. It

has agency to turn Ruth‘s face to absolute paleness and to make her body shiver with fear. In contrast, for Mr. Donne, the ―misery‖ that appears on Ruth‘s face seems to be a welcome clue to resume their old relationship. However, from the moment that she is struck by ―the white misery‖, which becomes equal to her fear of losing Leonard, Ruth fights for her claim over

Leonard. Ruth is haunted by one thought day and night that Mr. Donne would take Leonard away from her: ―It seemed to her that her doom was certain. Leonard would be taken from her! She had a firm conviction—not the less firm because she knew not on what it was based—that a child, whether legitimate or not, belonged of legal right to the father‖ (290). Confronting her son‘s legal father elicits extraordinary mental strength from Ruth. Ruth stands up to Mr. Donne‘s pretentious appeal to their old happy days in Wales with a cordially realistic comment: ―Oh! what is happiness or misery that we should talk about them now?‖ (298, my emphasis). Ruth rises from the ashes of ―the white misery‖ and counterattacks against Mr. Donne‘s stock remark.

In this section, I will demonstrate that Ruth establishes foundational thoughts for single motherhood while fighting against her old misery and Mr. Donne‘s claim to Leonard.

Although conceding that Ruth proves her intrepidity and a sense of independence when she rejects the marriage proposal of Mr. Donne, Stoneman does not see Ruth‘s brave decision as an achievement. Stoneman concludes: ―She is left desolate and confused, still implicated in their joint ‗sin‘‖ (72). Stoneman‘s reading represents the opinions of the majority of critics who still categorize Ruth as a fallen woman while they discover a certain radical aspect in the characterization of Ruth. However, considering Gaskell‘s reconsidering of the categories dividing women and analysis of the social and economic context of Ruth‘s fall, it is not appropriate to rely on the problematic criterion of the fallen to interpret Ruth‘s final declaration to remain single as an extension of her past behaviors. I contend that Ruth‘s refusal of Mr.

Donne‘s marriage proposal is a signal of her independent spirit. Far from being ―confused‖ and still ―implicated‖ in the sexual sin, Ruth exercises a calm influence over Mr. Donne who starts to enquire, asking intentionally designed questions to discover her current status. Surprising

Jemima‘s two younger sisters by her subversive appropriation of ―quiet authority,‖ Ruth responds to Mr. Donne‘s brutal question of if she has never been in Wales, in the following calm tone that reflects her controlled manner and thoughts: ―‗I was there many years ago. Events took place there, which contribute to make the recollection of that time most miserable to me. I shall be obliged to you, sir, if you will make no further reference to it‖ (281, my emphasis). Indeed,

Ruth, quietly but powerfully, commands him not to implicate her in the past scandal. The present

Ruth is no longer miserable to be dependent on Mr. Donne‘s mercy. The narrator deliberately contrasts Ruth‘s mature handling of Mr. Donne‘s discourtesy with his reaction that reveals he is still short in understanding of the moral implications of his past act and of Ruth‘s mental detachment from the miserable experience:

Mr Donne did not dislike the answer, and he positively admired the dignity with which

she spoke. His leaving her as he did, must have made her very miserable; and he liked the

pride that made her retain her indignation, until he could speak to her in private, and

explain away a good deal of what she might complain of with some justice. (281, my

emphasis)

Mr. Donne only superficially reads the dignity Ruth cultivated; he confuses her dignity with a sense of pride, impetuously concluding that Ruth still uses the adjective ―miserable‖ with an intention to appeal her emotions to him. The narrator intentionally uses the phrase ―with some justice‖ in a tricky way: First, it can modify ―what she might complain of‖ and can signify that

Mr. Donne perceives the justness in case Ruth would remonstrate about his behavior, but the

phrase ―complain of‖ exposes Mr. Donne‘s ignorance of the seriousness of his fault. Second,

―with some justice‖ can also modify ―explain away a good deal of‖ and can mean that Mr. Donne attempts to invest his past act with a sense of justice. In either case, the narrator alludes to Mr.

Donne‘s confused state of mind caused by Ruth‘s authoritative tone of command and his shallow contrivance. Contrary to the interpretation of Stoneman, the close reading reveals the tumult of

Mr. Donne. Their different perspectives of seeing the past misery separates Ruth and Mr. Donne.

Ruth is practically a single working mother above and beyond her significant maternal affection that many critics have applauded. Ruth brings home an income as a governess and, when denied that income after her past is disclosed, resolves to be a tireless and fearless charitable worker. A close look at the scene in question where Ruth refuses the marriage proposal of Mr. Donne exposes Ruth‘s will to live conscientiously as a self-reliant single mother with her son. Ruth fiercely reacts to Mr. Donne‘s suggestion to take charge of Leonard. His suggestion sounds tempting enough to win Ruth; he says: ―I will take care the highest paths are open to him!‖

(302). However, Ruth flatly dismisses Mr. Donne‘s custody of Leonard and completely denies his assertion of fathership:

―If there was one thing needed to confirm me, you have named it. You shall have nothing

to do with my boy, by my consent, much less by my agency. I would rather see him

working on the roadside than leading such a life—being such a one as you are. You have

heard my mind now, Mr Bellingham. You have humbled me—you have baited me; and if

at last I have spoken out too harshly, and too much in a spirit of judgment, the fault is

yours. If there were no other reason to prevent our marriage but the one fact that it would

bring Leonard into contact with you, that would be enough.‖ (303)

Ruth aspires to disentangle her son and herself from any kind of leverage he might want to

exercise. Her repetitive use of the possessive ―my‖ puts emphasis on her spirit of independence, her ―agency.‖ Ruth‘s refusal of Mr. Donne‘s marriage proposal also denotes her radical redefinition of fathership. Being connected by blood relationship does not automatically qualify

Mr. Donne to be Leonard‘s father. Ruth concludes that sticking to her single motherhood is a far better choice than submitting to him and being protected under the marriage institution that the society blindly approves without proper regard to each individual‘s situation. Considering the prevailing Victorian attitudes towards women as ―property‖ and the fact that ―for a woman to control her own body—to dispose of it or authorize its use as she saw fit—interfered with the property rights of her husband or father‖ (Mitchell ⅹⅰ), Ruth declares a separation from the patriarchal relations and refuses to be a property of a man by her dismissal of Mr. Donne‘s claim to marry her and to be Leonard‘s father. To consider her own sense of judgment and independence first, despite all her economic hardships and the social benefits Mr. Donne might give her12 and Leonard, Ruth is an inspirational model for the later female heroines under my consideration who aggressively come into conflict with Victorian ideology of marriage and question its mechanism of suppression of working-class single mothers. That Ruth achieves her right to take care of Leonard as a single mother elevates her as a model for the later feminist struggles.

I suggest that, through Thurston Benson, Gaskell proposes a new principle of manhood, which is compatible with the radical perspectives that Ruth starts to harbor. If Mr. Donne is unqualified as a father according to Ruth‘s definition, Mr. Benson is a father figure who gives

Ruth and her son social, economic, and mental support, however small it might be from the

12 As Mr. Bellingham changes his name to Mr. Donne, he could still help Ruth with the social position and wealth he has free from the past scandal.

perspective of the world, respecting Ruth‘s sense of independence at the same time. Mr. Benson, a disabled dissenting minister, has compassion for Ruth at the moment of her wandering after Mr.

Bellingham (Mr. Donne) discards her13. Mr. Benson‘s decision to accept Ruth at his house, knowing that she is ―more guilty than she seemed‖ (117) and is about to give birth to her fatherless child, is radical enough to cause blame on him and he even provokes his sister‘s indignation. However, Mr. Benson appeals to his sister Faith when she blames his moral sensitivity, saying, ―I think, you, Thurstan, are the first person I ever heard rejoicing over the birth of an illegitimate child‖ (119). Mr. Benson replies: ―Oh, Faith! Once and for all, do not accuse me of questionable morality, when I am trying more than ever I did in my life to act as my blessed Lord would have done‖ (120). Indeed, Mr. Benson‘s sense of morality goes beyond the general social norm that divides the legitimacy and the illegitimacy of a being and enables him to overcome his own limitations to embrace Ruth‘s disgrace as his own. Ruth‘s sinfulness provokes the strongest kind of sympathy in Mr. Benson. I suggest Mr. Benson‘s acceptance of

13 Indeed, Mr. Benson‘s enormous capability of having genuine pity for Ruth is the heart of his characterization as a single father figure in the novel. Proposing an alternative model of father through Mr. Benson, Gaskell reconsiders the prevailing gender ideology of the time. Mr. Benson listens to and responds to Ruth with all he has instead of giving commands or judging her situation. In front of Ruth who just cries out helplessly that Mr. Bellingham has left her, Mr. Benson is lost for words:

Before he could speak a word to comfort her, she had burst into the wildest, dreariest crying ever mortal cried. The settled form of the event, when put into words, went sharp to her heart; her moans and sobs wrung his soul; but as no speech of his could be heard, if he had been able to decide what best to say, he stood by her in apparent calmness, while she, wretched, wailed and uttered her woe. But when she lay worn out, and stupefied into silence, she heard him say to himself, in a low voice:

―Oh, my God! For Christ‘s sake, pity her!‖ (96)

Breaking the gender ideology that has assigned anything related with emotional care to women in the domestic and has defined men in the public in terms of their ability of logical thinking and business, Mr. Benson becomes a father figure for Ruth and her child due to his sympathetic power. From a larger perspective, the radically different manhood embodied in Mr. Benson can be explained alongside Gaskell‘s interest in sympathy as an alternative means to cure the industrialized England. Anderson points out: ―In appealing to a language of feeling, Gaskell‘s novel does not significantly depart from the industrial novels of her time, which shared the belief that rationalized reform was continuous with the utilitarian and dehumanizing spirit of industrialism itself‖ (109).

lying, Faith‘s idea of representing Ruth as a widow to their neighbors, should be considered as a radical decision to shoulder the responsibility that might be requested in consequence of the lying. Mr. Benson clearly penetrates the unconscious work of such a temptation in his own mind:

Ah, tempter! Unconscious tempter! Here was a way of evading the trials for the poor

little unborn child, of which Mr Benson had never thought. It was the decision—the pivot,

on which the fate of years moved; and he turned it the wrong way. But it was not for his

own sake. For himself, he was brave enough to tell the truth; for the little helpless baby,

about to enter a cruel, biting world, he was tempted to evade the difficulty. He forgot

what he had just said, of the discipline and penance to the mother consisting in

strengthening her child to meet, trustfully and bravely, the consequences of her own

weakness. (122)

His first consideration is ―the little helpless baby‖ Leonard. ―For himself,‖ Mr. Benson was

―brave enough to tell the truth‖ of Ruth, but he decides to be even more brave to protect Leonard and help self-reliance of Ruth as a single mother. I differ in opinion with Anderson who sees that

―the real fall‖ in Ruth ―occurs when the Bensons lie about Ruth‘s status, passing her off as a widow rather than an unwed mother‖ (133) and thus thinks Gaskell instrumentally uses Mr.

Benson‘s lie as a tool to criticize ―the imagination‖ as well as ―calculation‖ (135). I contend that

Anderson‘s interpretation of Mr. Benson‘s lie is not very different from following the binary division between the illegal and legal or the judgment based on the religious precepts in that she rather easily counts Mr. Benson‘s lie as a fault. Although it seems as though it belongs to the category of fall, Mr. Benson‘s lie should be understood in the extension of his radical revision of morality that allows one to surpass the common ability to sympathize in the boundary of the socially allowable. In the above quotation, ―the discipline and penance to the mother‖ that Mr.

Benson forgot belong to the realm of legalism. As in the case of the representation of Ruth‘s sexual fall, Gaskell questions the ethical standard behind an easy judgment of others‘ actions.

Before interrogating the falsehood itself, Gaskell explores the system that necessarily instigates one to choose the falsehood.

The seemingly tragic ending of the novel should not obstruct my argument that Ruth is a feminist text that celebrates a single mother‘s spirit of independence, which allows her to overpass gender ideology the society approves as legal. After losing her employment as a governess in Mr. Bradshaw‘s house, Ruth could not find another job to earn her and Leonard‘s living. The following passage demonstrates Ruth‘s deep sense of disappointment over the impossibility of proving her capabilities and supporting Leonard:

Ruth‘s only point of hope was Leonard. She was weary of looking for work and

employment, which everywhere seemed held above her reach. She was not impatient of

this, but she was very, very, very sorry. She felt within her such capability, and all ignored

her, and passed her by on the other side. But she saw some progress in Leonard. (383)

Contrary to a number of critics‘ lamentation over Ruth‘s passivity, Ruth attempts to prove her capability in a career with passion. The problem is that the society is not ready to give a single mother like Ruth a fair opportunity to prove her value. The comment that Ruth was still patient yet was ―sorry‖ for the situation implies Ruth‘s mature understanding to see through the limits of the society. In the same respect of Ruth‘s discernment in blind points of law, the ―progress‖ she hopefully observed in Leonard is ―the determination evident in him to be a ‗law unto himself,‘ and the serious thought which he gave to the formation of this law‖ (383). Ruth‘s philosophy of education lies in encouraging Leonard‘s critical discernment and sense of agency. Her strong philosophy of independence gives her power to devote her time to the job ―as a sick nurse‖ she

finally gets thanks to Mr. Wynne, the parish surgeon: ―As she had foretold, she found a use for all her powers‖ in the employment (390). The narrator writes how Ruth‘s ―harmony and refinement of manner, voice, and gesture‖ arising from the fact that they are ―the true expression of a kind, modest, and humble spirit‖ morally influences the poor patients. Ruth‘s last decision to commit herself to her duty as a nurse taking charge of the fever-ward and to take care of fever- stricken Mr. Donne should be read as Ruth‘s professionalism, the spirit of which even enables her to leave Leonard. Ruth‘s spirit of independence, a brave decision to lead single motherhood, and professionalism attests to her qualification to be a feminist forerunner for the other female working-class women of my consideration.

3. REREADING ―MISERY‖ IN ADAM BEDE

Introduction

In the previous chapter, I looked at how Ruth blurs the line between the fallen and the virtuous women by complicating the background circumstances surrounding the sexual fall of

Ruth. I also foregrounded Ruth‘s idea of single motherhood and self-reliant lifestyle. In this chapter, I turn to George Eliot‘s Adam Bede to argue that the novel empowers its two working- class female characters, Hetty and Dinah, as the agents for a feminist narrative that underruns the story told by the male narrator with the novel‘s multi-layered use of the term ―misery.‖ I will demonstrate how the varied connotations of the term ―misery‖ help readers to acknowledge the discrepancy in perception of the fictional reality between the male narrator, Hetty, and Dinah.

Through my close reading of the term, I will contend that the novel disavows its allegiance to the male narrator‘s perspective. Namely, I will make distinction between the male narrator, whose perspective represents the attitude of contemporary middle-class men towards a sexual fall and a woman‘s crime, and the larger perspective of the novel, which distances itself both from a judgmental gaze and from institutional approaches towards infanticide. I assume that the larger perspective of the novel represents Eliot‘s project of exploring the working class women‘s lives and reaching out to a broader readership in the future generation beyond the narrow circle of contemporary middle-class. I will also show that the larger perspective of the novel is embodied by Dinah‘s disinterested yet sympathetic attitude towards Hetty, particularly after her crime. The middle-class author Eliot celebrates the joint achievement of Hetty and Dinah.

I will demonstrate that the novel first creates a counter narrative as a challenge to the

male narrator‘s perspective by featuring the wandering movement of Hetty and representing corresponding changes in her consciousness. Initially, Hetty‘s wandering movement is her attempt to shake herself free from the burden of unintended pregnancy and impending disgrace among her relatives and neighbors. During the journey, Hetty‘s self-consciousness of her body grows, and at the same time, the connotations of the term ―misery‖ are extended from a description of her bodily status of pregnancy to a descriptive term for her ontological alienation from the whole community. By stacking up connotations of the word ―misery‖ throughout the narrative, the novel revokes the credibility of the male narrator‘s didactic perspective, which only relies upon a narrow fixed understanding of the word. Meanwhile, by featuring the itinerant preaching activity of Dinah, which culminates in her philanthropic visit to the prison where

Hetty is confined, the novel supports Hetty‘s legitimate sense of self-pity channeled through the term ―misery‖ and reinforces the counter narrative developed alongside Hetty‘s wandering. Two female characters‘ wanderings meet at the symbolic space for the nineteenth century‘s discipline, such as a prison, and their affective union, dramatized by Hetty‘s candid confession and Dinah‘s tolerance and sympathetic understanding, finally defeats the male narrator‘s didactic narrative perspective. By close reading the relevant passages, I will show how the novel countenances

Dinah‘s autonomous decision to accompany Hetty in the prison and her unconventional treatment of Hetty‘s crime and dreadful status while critiquing the male narrator‘s effortless simulation of sympathy towards Hetty. I argue that the novel eventually undermines the perspective of the male narrator, the gender identity of which was believed to be intentionally assumed by Eliot to appeal to middle-class readers, while gradually empowering the feminist narrative created by the movements of the two working-class female characters. Simultaneously,

I contend that Dinah‘s autonomous decisions to preach in the public and to accompany Hetty in

the prison can become a feminist gesture of a working-class woman, through which Eliot explores the idea of women‘s liberty in the public space beyond the bounds of class and gender.

My contention around the novel‘s critical distance from the male narrator complicates a view towards Eliot‘s mimetic realism and opens up the possibility of reading Eliot‘s fantasy about the working-class women. Among the recent critics who paid attention to gender and narration in Eliot‘s works, Rae Greiner and J. Hillis Miller are most relevant to my study as they have focused on how our understanding of Eliot‘s realist narratives can be complicated by critically scrutinizing the omniscient male narrator‘s ability. In ―Sympathy Time: Adam Smith,

George Eliot, and the Realist Novel‖ (2009), Greiner revisits the notion of sympathetic identification by distinguishing its cognitive features from the emotions that sympathetic identification is believed to engender, and then she proposes an alternative model of sympathy based on her rereading of Adam Smith‘s sympathy as a speculation in an inter-subjective narrative temporality. Greiner also focuses on how nineteenth-century realist novels can

―instantiate Smithian sympathy at the level of form‖ (299). Greiner argues that Eliot is the novelist who is most often associated with Victorian sympathy. However, complicating common assumptions about the mechanism of sympathy in Eliot‘s novels, Greiner argues that Eliot critically self-scrutinizes her narratives‘ ability to bring up sympathy in readers, focusing in particular on Eliot‘s examination of the relationship between sympathy and omniscience: ―In bringing to life characters in whom realism‘s signature technique is brought to life, Eliot questions the extent to which omniscience might forestall rather than encourage fellow-feeling‖

(300-301). According to Greiner, Eliot questions the assumption that identification based on omniscience is a prerequisite for sympathy. In a similar vein, in Reading for Our Time: Adam

Bede and Middlemarch Revisited (2012), Miller argues that Eliot challenges the paradigm of

realism and scientific generalizations held by the omniscient male narrator by deliberately including passages that contradict the assumptions of mimetic realism in her work. Miller distinguishes between the male narrator of Adam Bede who Eliot self-consciously introduces to write from a more broadly appealing man‘s perspective, and the real female author of the novel,

Marian Evans (Eliot‘s real given name). Based on this distinction, Miller explores how Eliot‘s disbelief in an all-knowing and all-seeing eye betrays itself in the scientific comments relying on generalization of the events made by the male narrator. In his analysis, Miller pays his close attention to the types of language to which the referential theory of language is not adequately applied. Reading the passages abundant with this metaphorical language, Miller ultimately reveals how Eliot‘s novel has room for ―a power of sympathy that transcends‖ the rationalistic vision supported by nineteenth-century mimetic realism (28). Both Greiner and Miller argue that

Eliot undermines the male narrator by questioning the constraints of the vision of mimetic realism. I will add to these critical conversations surrounding the male narrator and realism by examining Eliot‘s fantasy about the life of working-class women explored through the narrative focalized around Hetty and Dinah‘s unconventional movements.

Reading the middle-class author‘s sympathetic identification with the working-class female characters, my argument critically reconsiders the previous feminist arguments made concerning Hetty by Nancy Anne Marck and Deanna Kreisel. I argue against their reading of

Hetty‘s disruptive narrative as a challenge/threat to the author‘s intention. In ―Narrative

Transference and Female Narcissism: the Social Message of Adam Bede‖ (2003), Marck contends that readers‘ understanding of the male narrator‘s prejudiced interpretation of Hetty‘s deviancy and crime ultimately undermines ―Eliot‘s alleged reverence for male-centered community at the novel‘s close‖ (449). Building her argument upon both Gillian Beer‘s reading

of Hetty as a disruptive power and Nina Auerbach‘s reading of Hetty as a more challenging character than the novel intended, Marck points out the textual instability derived from the suppression of Hetty‘s narrative in the novel. Although I agree with Marck‘s sharp reading of a textual tension created between the male narrator‘s social message and the influential counter narrative of Hetty, my interpretation diverges from Marck‘s in arguing that the narrative is constructed in order to be more sympathetic with Hetty rather than with the patriarchal narrative of the male narrator. If Marck interprets the novel from a psychoanalytic perspective that looks at a textual gap, I rather dig into the embedded fantasy of the middle-class author about the middle- class women‘s liberty by closely reading the author‘s multi-dimensional use of a particular word,

―misery.‖

Similar to Marck‘s reading, Kreisel interprets Hetty to be threatening to the author‘s ethical project of realizing a society based on Victorian bourgeois morality in ―Incognito,

Intervention, and Dismemberment in Adam Bede‖ (2003). Kreisel acutely perceives that Eliot‘s

―masculine incognito‖ is a reflection of the author‘s anxiety about the problem of gendered authorship and narrative intervention (543). However, although Kreisel senses that Hetty‘s subversive power might form an alternative narrative to the primary realist narration, she finally concludes that ―Hetty embodies Eliot‘s nightmare possibility of female authorship‖ (570). Both

Marck and Kreisel ultimately reduce a subversive narrative of Hetty to a threatening by-product, which is inconsistent with Eliot‘s intentional pursuit of ideal realism relying on the male narrator.

Contrary to both Marck‘s and Kreisel‘s interpretations, I consider how Eliot deliberately interrupts the male narrator‘s moralistic vision by focusing on Hetty‘s thoughts about her

―misery‖ provoked during her wandering movements, which is finally integrated into a feminist breakthrough performed by Dinah in the prison.

With emphasis on Eliot‘s critical distance to the judgmental male narrator who represents the view of middle-class readers, my reading makes a critical intervention into the debate about gendered narration and targeted readership in Eliot‘s work. I contend that Eliot explores her idea of working-class women‘s life, represented by Hetty and Dinah, rather than siding with the middle-class, represented by the male narrator. I will relate my critical insight into Eliot‘s fantasy about the working-class women to the way Eliot treats the theme of infanticide. Eliot takes a critical distance from the contemporary middle-class stance on how to deal with social evils like infanticide: unlike her contemporary fellow authors interested in social reform movements,

Eliot‘s solution for increased infanticide does not rely on an institutional intervention or on an encouragement of social responsibility for the crime. I contend that Eliot finds distortions in the institutional approach at the state level to working-class women‘s problem, and she instead sees hope in prompting gradual changes in an individual‘s consciousness despite the individual‘s marginality in terms of class and gender. My argument about Eliot‘s idea of reform proceeds from Laura Berry‘s critical insight into Eliot‘s disbelief in indiscriminate state intervention into social issues stated in her book, The Child, The State, and the Victorian Novel (1999). In the chapter on Eliot, ―Civilization and Confession in Midcentury Representations of Infanticide and in Adam Bede‖, Berry writes about the importance of understanding distinct characteristics of working-class life first and foremost before applying standard institutionalizing methods to their social problems. She writes: ―During a time of massive legislative activity and bureaucracy building in English society, Eliot returns to the parish and to the past, in order to suggest a dismantling of a state not yet fully formed, urging instead a careful observation and understanding of the lower classes‖ (146). While agreeing with Berry‘s careful reading of Eliot‘s assertion of individual approach to working-class women‘s criminal issues like infanticide,

unlike Berry, I do not consider Eliot‘s view as an anachronistic one. On the contrary, I interpret

Eliot‘s interest in ―dismantling of a state‖ and representing Hetty and Dinah‘s movements in local landscapes as constituent of her feminist exploration of alternative domestic lives through lenses of the working-class single mother and the preacher, which is in line with the other middle-class authors‘ pioneering investigation into sexuality and mobility.

In my argument about the alternative feminist narrative created through Hetty and

Dinah‘s movements, Dinah‘s attempt at networking with Hetty through her brave break into bureaucracy, symbolized by the prison in the novel, provides a new mode of behavior, available to working-class women. I argue that Dinah completes the transgression that Hetty‘s body has started by disturbing the public order in the prison, where she joins Hetty. Among the critics who have recently paid attention to the issue of the mobility of Victorian women, Charlotte Mathieson explores how the travelling bodies of Dinah and Hetty impinge against the gendered politics of mobility and the orders of the nation-space in Mobility in the Victorian Novel: Placing the

Nation (2015), in which she discusses how the nation is contested and reproduced in conjunction with continental and global networks formed through various travel practices of different bodies on the move. Noticeably, the majority of the characters whose mobility Mathieson explores in the book belong to the working-class. Mathieson points out how walking practice was closely connected to working-class life. In particular, positing Adam‘s invincible physicality in Adam

Bede as an example, Mathieson observes how ―the use-value of the laborer‘s ability to walk‖ was important in defining working-class masculinity (22). According to Mathieson, however, working-class women‘s mobility was still confined within the bounds of their daily chores and restricted by the problematic connotation of it, a threat to the social mores. In this context, in her chapter on Adam Bede, Mathieson takes special note of Dinah‘s exceptional mobility enabled by

Methodist preaching. However, Mathieson gives more thoughts on how ―the pain of Hetty‘s walk and the successive wearing-down of her body‖ open up a narrative space to discuss the mapping- out of the nation (38). The vast unknowable world beyond Loamshire became a comprehensible and navigable space along the line of Hetty‘s walking journey. Then, by excavating the meaning of Hetty‘s painful walking journey as a reprimand for her fall, Mathieson reads the local landscape as a hostile repository of national pain such as Hetty‘s: ―the landscape remains as a reminder of the pain and suffering that has been forged through that space‖ (41). I find it significant that Mathieson refuted previous critics, who regarded Hetty‘s expulsion to Australia in the end as Eliot‘s gesture toward rebuilding a morally ideal England, by suggesting how

Hetty‘s walk offers another version of nation-building. However, while I build on Mathieson‘s insight on Hetty‘s movements, I intend to connect Dinah‘s intrusion into the prison closer to the end with Hetty‘s walking journey to see the complete picture of Eliot‘s exploration. With such intention in mind, I choose to structure my argument in two parts: first, an examination through my close reading of the term ―misery,‖ through the various uses of which the novel empowers

Hetty‘s journey, while criticizing the male narrator‘s perspective which represents the contemporary middle-class readers. Then, I will look at how the novel frames Dinah‘s performance and movements alongside its critical view of the male narrator to let the two female characters‘ achievement meet in the end in the prison scene.

Rethinking Hetty Sorrel

Eliot plotted Adam Bede based on a story told to her by her aunt Elizabeth Evans, who was a female Methodist preacher and the original model for Dinah, about a girl‘s confession of

child-murder (Hertz 88). The performance of a real female preacher ordains the main event of the plot. The fictional space of the novel is the pastoral community called Hayslope, where four main characters‘ romances unfold. Adam Bede, a renowned carpenter, is in fervent love with

Hetty, who knows his feelings, but falls in love with Arthur, the local squire‘s grandson and heir.

Adam witnesses a tryst between Arthur and Hetty and fights with Arthur. Adam severely rebukes

Arthur for the falseness of seducing a girl who is inferior in class to him, and Arthur leaves Hetty to go back to his militia. Then, Hetty, in despair, agrees to marry Adam but discovers her pregnancy right after the promise. In despair, Hetty leaves the community in search of Arthur, dreading the expected misery and shame. During her wandering journey, Hetty delivers her baby, yet abandons it in a field. When Hetty goes back to the place, it is too late to save the life of her baby. Upon Hetty being sentenced to death for child murder, Dinah visits the prison, stays with

Hetty, and draws out Hetty‘s confession of sin. Arthur, visiting the community for his grandfather‘s funeral, appeals to the court and changes the sentence to a permanent transportation.

Although Eliot plotted the novel upon the story told by her aunt and the novel features

Dinah‘s preaching as one of the main events, the male narrator‘s omniscient perspective guides readers into the narrative. While keeping his omniscient perspective, the male narrator inserts domineering or insulting remarks about women. For instance, when the narrator describes the scene in which Adam squabbles with his mother over having supper while being on the go, he notes: ―But one of the lessons a woman most rarely learns is never to talk to an angry or a drunken man‖ (38). Then, he even adds a fine edge of misogynistic cynicism at the end of his description of the quarrel when Adam acknowledges how his angry mode perplexes his dog, Gyp:

―Adam noticed Gyp‘s mental conflict, and though his anger had made him less tender than usual

to his mother, it did not prevent him from caring as much as usual for his dog. We are apt to be kinder to the brutes that love us than to the women that love us. Is it because the brutes are dumb?‖ (39). He even goes so far as to deviate from the story and denounce a so-called vixen:

―if Solomon was as wise as he is reputed to be, I feel sure that when he compared a contentious woman to a continual dropping on a very rainy day, he had not a vixen in his eye—a fury with long nails, acrid and selfish‖ (39). I argue that the male narrator‘s disregard for women insinuated through his misogynistic comments is undermined by the novel‘s narrative formations around the movements of Hetty and Dinah.

The novel often contradicts the male narrator‘s perspective through significant moments of focalized narratives on Hetty‘s consciousness and imaginative power as it grows throughout her wandering journey. Oftentimes, Hetty‘s physicality refuses to be contained in the male narrator‘s words. Wandering in the wilderness after leaving the Hayslope community to hide the fact of her extramarital pregnancy, Hetty wildly imagines drowning herself in a pool. Hetty‘s initial hope of finding and resorting to Arthur Donnithorne, the aristocratic seducer who abandoned the dairy maid Hetty, has been frustrated as she hears that his troops have left the country. Left alone, with the sense of surrounding coldness and darkness, her wild imagination starts to exert a real influence over her body. Hetty‘s imaginative power breaks out of the narrative frame formed by the male narrator. The narrative is close to free indirect speech at that moment, describing Hetty‘s feelings in the following manner:

The horror of this cold, and darkness, and solitude—out of all human reach—became

greater every long minute: it was almost as if she were dead already, and knew that she

was dead, and longed to get back to life again. But no: she was alive still; she had not

taken the dreadful leap. She felt a strange contradictory wretchedness and exultation:

wretchedness, that she did not dare to face death; exultation, that she was still in life –

that she might yet know light and warmth again. (419-420)

It seems as though Hetty has already met her body‘s death and longs to ―get back to life again‖ from the world after death. However, she feels an acute sense of physical aliveness at the same time. Her body simultaneously experiences death, with her power of imagination, and life, with her body‘s sensitiveness. The narrative voice at this moment is not true to ontological reality.

Rather, the reality of Hetty‘s body lies in its imaginary existence in both life and death and, just a moment later, in its feeling of ―a strange contradictory wretchedness and exultation.‖ The narrative voice is focalized to Hetty‘s imagination and physical consciousness and simultaneously attests to the fluidity of Hetty‘s body. Detaching herself from ―all human reach,‖ wandering alone in the paths through a wood, Hetty discovers her imaginative capability to defeat limits of bodily existence. Remarkably, the experience of Hetty‘s body is conveyed beyond the scope of the male narrator‘s perspectives. As such an exemplary passage illustrates, the narrative often deviates from the male narrator‘s perspective to explore the weird moments of

Hetty‘s conflicted consciousness derived from her bodily experiences.

Hetty‘s body constantly expands its ambit throughout the novel, particularly during its wandering journey after its pregnancy. Hetty‘s body is first presented as a token of exchange in androcentric society, but, through its extramarital pregnancy, her body transgresses the code of exchange and then, through its journey of wandering which eventually results in an infanticide, transgresses the code of motherhood. I claim that a counter narrative to the male narrator‘s perspective is created through wandering of Hetty in the wilderness that shows Eliot‘s interest in exploring women‘s mobility and helps readers rethink Hetty and her criminality. To argue this, I particularly trace the multifarious uses of the term ―misery‖ and the dynamics of the narrative

created surrounding the application of the term in Adam Bede. ―Misery‖ is the first word that appears as a signifier of the condition of Hetty‘s pregnancy in the text and then continuously expands its denotations14, while escaping the narrow scope presented by the male narrator.

The word ―misery,‖ initially meaning a great despair embedded in Hetty‘s pregnancy out of marriage as a result of her flirtation with Arthur who is her social superior, starts to operate as a misery in real sense, which practically threatens Hetty‘s welfare, in the novel‘s conventional setting: namely, Hetty‘s pregnancy can only be recognized as a misery in her neighborhood. Her relatives and friends acknowledge her pregnancy as a miserable incident that will inflict great hardship upon Hetty‘s daily life and her close relatives‘ lives. In other words, the existence of a public gaze and conventional framework renders the unmarried mother‘s pregnancy truly miserable. Hetty‘s recognition of her pregnancy and single motherhood as a misfortune finally leads to her crime, an infanticide. The perspectives of Hetty‘s neighbors towards Hetty are

14 For a great example of interpreting a novel by focusing a small detail, please refer to Douglas Kneale‘s article. I should admit my interpretive focus on the term ―misery‖ is indebted to Kneale‘s critical methodology of deducing important generalization on Eliot‘s narrative frame from the small detail like hanky. In his article titled ―Hetty‘s Hanky,‖ Kneale digs up the complex ethical implication engraved in Hetty‘s ―little pink silk handkerchief (125),‖ the slight object which is briefly mentioned three times in Adam Bede, and densely examines the web of responsibility in Hetty‘s crime that, according to Kneale, Eliot wants to represent as a subtly entangled one. Kneale especially points out the importance of the forensic framework through which Eliot allows us to see the happenings in the novel—a novel of ―sympathetic realism‖ and a mystery of murder at the same time (125), because the framework could control the readers‘ judgment and sympathies towards Hetty. In this context, Kneale explains how Eliot‘s deliberate representation of the three scenes where Arthur searches for the handkerchief implies the author‘s intention to complicate the framework itself. After close readings of the scenes, Kneale concludes as thus:

Up to this point I‘ve been focusing on the handkerchief as if it implicated Arthur in a crime. But Arthur hasn‘t committed any crime; he is guilty of a moral wrong that later results in the commission of a felony of infanticide, and it is precisely this problem—―the problem how far a man is to be held responsible for the unforeseen consequences of his own deed‖ (468)—that Adam Bede as a whole forces the reader to consider. (140)

According to Kneale, Eliot opens up the possibilities for readers to contemplate how far a person‘s responsibility extends in an unexpected result of their actions by deliberately featuring Arthur‘s discovering, discarding, and recovering of Hetty‘s handkerchief. Excavating the forensic perspective embedded in the novel, Kneale emphasizes Eliot‘s ―desire to present a sympathetic treatment‖ of Hetty (141). However, although Kneale shows a sharp insight in reading Eliot‘s sympathy towards Hetty revealed through the framework of the novel, his reading still minimizes Hetty‘s role in the development of the narrative. Therefore, while I build on his critical methodology of drawing an important insight from a small detail, I focus more on the representation of Hetty‘s action and its significance.

assimilated into the male narrator‘s point of view. The male narrator seems to implicitly urge readers to take the same judgmental perspective towards Hetty. However, my reading elucidates the novel‘s deliberate work of inducing readers to have an insight into the bias of the male narrator by suggesting a different dimension of what the ―misery‖ could imply and signify other than just the despair caused by Hetty‘s pregnancy. In my reading, the connotations and nuances of the novel‘s clever use of ―misery‖ far exceed the dictionary definitions. The first definition of

―misery‖ from Oxford English Dictionary is ―a condition of external unhappiness, discomfort, or distress; wretchedness of outward circumstances; distress caused by privation or poverty.‖ The dictionary shows how the word used to be related to the state of extreme poverty, a condition for outward unhappiness. Then, the dictionary defines the word‘s extended meaning as ―great sorrow or mental distress; a miserable or wretched state of mind; a condition characterized by a feeling of extreme unhappiness.‖ The Oxford English Dictionary‘s definition of ―misery‖ comprises two levels of implications: external discomfort and mental distress. Building on these initial definitions of the word which the novel also touches upon while making a flexible application of them, my reading reveals how the novel amplifies the implications of this term by relating the word to different aspects of Hetty‘s physical walking journey.

Distinguishing the bias of the male narrator from the larger perspective that the novel presents will further unearths how Eliot is critical of contemporary discourses of law and criminology surrounding the working-class women. Periodicals were one of the sources in which the contemporary discourse of criminology was distributed. Contributing to the discourse of female crimes, the Bastardy Clause in the 1834 New Poor Law placed the blame of infanticide solely on unmarried mothers. And influential newspapers such as the Times, which represented the concerns and the opinions of the middle classes, tended to communicate the need to regulate

sexual behavior (Goc). In this respect, it is significant that the nineteenth century‘s ideas about infanticides are reflected in the male narrator‘s voice, which problematizes Hetty‘s carelessness, vanity, and lack of objective view about difference in social class while being generous towards

Arthur. The male narrator‘s emphasis on Hetty‘s previous ignorance and his superficial display of sympathy towards Hetty has an indication of the greater historical context in the nineteenth century. The legally sympathetic gesture towards working-class mother who killed her children was actually established by the introduction of a new law in the nineteenth century, the

Infanticide Act, which regarded the killing of an infant by its mother during the early months of life, particularly due to puerperal insanity, as a less severe crime than a murder and allowed the accommodation of such woman in asylum according to the ―Second Reading‖ in Infanticide Act

(House of Lords Hansard, 1938). Noticeably, however, the novel shows how Hetty reacts negatively to the idea of institutional provision for public care, such as a parish. The insertion of

Hetty‘s aversive feelings towards the idea of being put under the public care questions the system that makes poor women subject to scientific investigation of madness and assigns them potential criminal types before understanding their individual circumstances and hardships of life. By demonstrating how Hetty‘s aversion to being sent to a parish reinforces her sense of misery and gives a new momentum to her escaping journey, the novel disavows institutional treatments of the working-class women‘s crimes, which are endorsed by the male narrator.

By unpacking the different uses of the term, ―misery,‖ I contend that the novel is critical of the attitude of the male narrator and ultimately sides with Hetty, who represents the life of working-class single mothers. The novel legitimizes Hetty‘s self-pity by imposing multifarious meanings to the word ―misery‖ and applies the word to define Hetty‘s physical condition and subsequent life. This deliberate rupture between the male narrator‘s first introduction of the word

―misery‖ with its conventional meaning—―external discomfort‖ according to OED—and the interpretive possibility of the word ―misery‖ further introduced by the novel is a narrative device that helps the reader to sympathize more with Hetty than with the male narrator. If ―misery‖ signifies a notion of tragedy prescribed by the cultural recognition of the situation for the male narrator, the novel introduces another dimension: the word ―misery‖ becomes a practical physical burden for Hetty throughout her wandering journey. The novel uses the word ―misery‖ while relating it to Hetty‘s moment of awakening to how people might perceive her secret love affair and its consequence. That Hetty has been ignorant of what her sexual involvement with

Arthur would bring to her life is obvious in the following passage where the male narrator elaborates on Hetty‘s emotional response to Arthur‘s goodbye letter. Particularly, Hetty‘s emotional shock is channeled through her previous sense of ignorance of the notion of misery:

She felt nothing but that Arthur was cruel—cruel to write so, cruel not to marry her.

Reasons why he could not marry her had no existence for her mind; how could she

believe in any misery that could come to her from the fulfillment of all she had been

longing for and dreaming of? She had not the ideas that could make up the notion of that

misery. (363, my emphasis)

Hetty‘s sex with Arthur was performed without an acknowledgment of social class difference.

The last sentence, ―she had not the ideas that could make up the notion of that misery,‖ shows

Hetty‘s previous unawareness of the eyes of the world towards women‘s sexual fall. Although the male narrator applies the term ―misery‖ in the present situation, the conceptual distance of

Hetty from the sense of the term is obvious: Hetty is unable to ―make up the notion of‖ the term with the ideas she had been nurtured. However, what the two repetitive uses of the word ―misery‖ signify in the above passages is quite ambiguous. Grammatically speaking, the first ―misery‖ is

modified by the adjective ―any,‖ which is usually used to indicate a thing that is not specific in kind or quantity. The male narrator depicts the state of Hetty after having an uneasy sleep using the word as follows:

There was a feeble dawn in the room when Hetty awoke, a little after four o‘clock, with a

sense of dull misery, the cause of which broke upon her gradually, as she began to discern

the objects around her in the dim light. And then came the frightening thought that she

had to conceal her misery, as well as to bear it, in this dreary daylight that was coming.

(363-364, my emphasis)

The first use of the word in this passage appears in an expression, ―a sense of dull misery,‖ and it seems to signify Hetty‘s mournful feeling after being abandoned by Arthur. But when the word appears again in the later phrase, ―she had to conceal her misery,‖ it becomes clear to the reader that her misery means a physical state of pregnancy. ―Misery‖ means pregnancy in the passage.

It is a shameful thing she must hide from others. The use of the word ―misery‖ to allude to pregnancy is a vestige of the middle-class novelist‘s great pains over how to express the immediate physical change in Hetty‘s body. Considering that concrete description of an unmarried woman‘s physical changes due to pregnancy in a novel that targets middle-class readers should be avoided, the choice of the term ―misery,‖ which signifies an outward condition of unhappiness according to OED, is an excellent choice. At the same time, the diction provokes sensitive readers‘ curiosity and lets them be more sensitive about the repetitive use of the term.

Also, the previous statement that Hetty had not had any ideas to get a sense of the misery seems to echo beyond the male narrator‘s observation of Hetty‘s reaction: the social connotation of the word ―misery‖ begins to press upon her and the pressure is inscribed in her body. The flow of the narrative that gradually reveals the connotations of the word ―misery‖ reflects Hetty‘s steady

awakening to the tragic result her sexual ignorance has brought to her life.

In the chapters titled the ―Hidden Dread‖ and ―The Journey in Hope,‖ in which Hetty decides to escape from her home and wanders in the vicinity of Stoniton, the word ―misery‖ extends its connotations by being aligned with the words that signify Hetty‘s fear of being branded with a shameful sin. Accordingly, the word ―misery‖ begins to be interpreted against a social context as signifying her fear of negative social evaluation rather than as a reflection of

Hetty‘s sentiment and her private condition. Hetty‘s fear is rooted in her gradual awakening to the fact that her sex and pregnancy outside of marriage seriously offends the social code. Her growing fear will eventually lead her to attempt infanticide. Furthermore, that Hetty has accepted

Adam‘s proposal of marriage while concealing the pregnancy deepens her sense of social fear.

As Hetty‘s body becomes heavier with child, she is more fearful of getting found out:

After the first on-coming of her great dread, some weeks after her betrothal to Adam, she

had waited and waited, in the blind vague hope that something would happen to set her

free from her terror; but she could wait no longer. All the force of her nature had been

concentrated on the one effort of concealment, and she had shrunk with irresistible dread

from every course that could tend towards a betrayal of her miserable secret. (396, my

emphasis)

In the passage, Hetty‘s pregnancy equals ―her miserable secret‖—a thing that must be concealed as far as possible. However, it is also doomed to disclosure. The secret necessarily accompanies

―irresistible dread‖ of its fated ―betrayal.‖ Hetty‘s ―blind vague hope‖ is futile. Through her prolonged waiting and dread, Hetty becomes estranged from her fiancé, Adam. With such a miserable secret, Hetty becomes more isolated from her kindred and the neighborhood, even from Adam who considers himself as a sole consoler and lover of Hetty.

I contend that the novel contradicts the male narrator‘s cynicism on Hetty‘s selfishness.

Importantly, the added significance of Hetty‘s social fear resulting from her physical condition starts to shed new light on the problem of Hetty‘s lack of sympathy towards others that the male narrator has pointed out as her innate fault earlier. According to the development of the situation, the novel, different from the male narrator, is inclined to acknowledge Hetty‘s right to self-pity, and the problem of the absence of sympathy appears to be a thing that other characters share. For instance, Adam is no exception to the problem. Afraid of being discovered by her friends and relatives, Hetty decides to run away from them under the guise of visiting Dinah in Snowfield and to go instead to Arthur in Windsor, and Hetty shows her tears when she says her parting words to Adam in the following scene. Adam‘s reaction to her tears seems to isolate Hetty further:

‗God bless her for loving me,‘ said Adam, as he went on his way to work again, with Gyp

at his heels.

But Hetty‘s tears were not for Adam – not for the anguish that would come upon him

when he found she was gone from him for ever. They were for the misery of her own lot,

which took her away from this brave tender man who offered up his whole life to her, and

threw her, a poor helpless suppliant, on the man who would think it a misfortune that she

was obliged to cling to him. (398, my emphasis)

First, the novel makes readers witness Adam‘s self-centered misreading of Hetty‘s tears as her expression of affectionate regard for him, and then, the novel transposes the lack of sympathy from Hetty‘s individual flaw to Adam‘s selfish misconception, to an ordinary problem of lovers.

Further, in the above passage, misery acquires an extended meaning: now Hetty‘s whole destiny itself can be defined as a misery15. Being isolated in her own lot of misery, Hetty‘s self-image of

15 That the notion of misery now extends its meaning up to the definite explanation of Hetty‘s whole destiny illuminates Hetty‘s little margin for thinking about others. Notice where the following passage puts emphasis on:

herself as ―a poor helpless suppliant,‖ throwing her powerless self to Arthur, attains legitimacy.

The novel distances itself from the male narrator by encouraging the reader to have a sympathetic view towards Hetty‘s circumstances while validating her self-pity through this.

When Hetty‘s wandering journey begins, the accumulated meanings of the term ―misery‖ begin to affect Hetty‘s behaviors for readers to see their power of influence. The novel explores how Hetty‘s misery—now an integrated notion to designate her pregnancy out of wedlock and her whole tragic doom at the same time—prompts her to imagine complete separation from all meaningful social relations. In the following chapter titled ―The Journey in Despair,‖ upon arriving at Windsor, Hetty finds out that the troop Arthur belongs to has gone to Ireland, instantly faints at the moment of hearing this news from the landlord at the Green Man, and begins to agonize over what future course she should take, after being ill in bed for a night at the Green

Man inn. Significantly, Hetty, away from home, is suddenly reminded of the fate of a young woman like her left with a baby: the woman was sent to ―the parish‖—in other words, the workhouse in her own parish (412). Hetty feels that being taken to a parish is close to being imprisoned, and it is not exactly because of Hetty‘s particular temperament, but because of the pervasive ideas of the Hayslope people who have ―little pity for want and rags‖ and rather regard them as ―a mark of idleness and vice‖ as shown in the following extract:

Now for the first time, as she lay down to-night in the strange hard bed, she felt that her home had been a happy one, that her uncle had been very good to her, that her quiet lot at Hayslope among the things and people she knew, with her little pride in her one best gown and bonnet, and nothing to hide from any one, was what she would like to wake up to as a reality, and find that all the feverish life she had known besides was a short nightmare. She thought of all she had left behind with yearning regret for her own sake: her own misery filled her heart: there was no room in it for other people‘s sorrow. (403-404, my emphasis)

While Hetty shows no breadth of mind to care for others‘ sorrow, she also contemplates on her previous lot as a happy one. She feels grateful for the people she knew at Hayslope. Though she is in misery, the misery touches her mind and makes her see newly the people and things that were previously around her. After all, Hetty is not a monster different from others, and her lack of sympathy is a common trait that is also found in other characters like Adam and Arthur—whose lack of sympathy is well illustrated in the goodbye letter to Hetty, a collaboration of the two men.

She thought of a young woman who had been found against the church wall at Hayslope

one Sunday, nearly dead with cold and hunger—a tiny infant in her arms: the woman was

rescued and taken to the parish. ‗The parish!‘ You can perhaps hardly understand the

effect of that word on a mind like Hetty‘s, brought up among people who were somewhat

hard in their feelings even towards poverty, who lived among the fields, and had little

pity for want and rags as a cruel inevitable fate such as they sometimes seem in cities, but

held them a mark of idleness and vice—and it was idleness and vice that brought

burthens on the parish. To Hetty the ‗parish‘ was next to the prison in obloquy; and to ask

anything of strangers—to beg—lay in the same far-off hideous region of intolerable

shame that Hetty had all her life thought it impossible she could ever come near. (412)

The novel, which seems to relate the particularity of the mind like Hetty‘s at first glance, in reality accounts for the absence of social program that Hetty could rely on, and further the lack of sympathy on the part of society.

The novel adds another layer of meaning to the word ―misery‖ by letting others recognize

Hetty as a victim of seduction. Indeed, even the landlord and the landlady of the Green Man exploit Hetty‘s miserable lot by plotting gain out of Hetty‘s locket and earrings, apparently her sole property, which Hetty puts out to get money for her journey. Behind the narrator‘s mocking tone in describing the couple‘s real intention that seeks to downsize the seriousness of it lies

Eliot‘s warning that we might all have a possibility of committing a crime against others. The author directly appeals to the readers: ―He wished Hetty well, doubtless; but pray, how many of your well-wishers would decline to make a little gain out of you‖ (415). The landlady at the inn is actually the first person who detects the real secret of Hetty by just glancing at Hetty‘s figure.

She clandestinely examines the possessions of Hetty and rightly infers the circumstances

surrounding Hetty‘s wandering journey. This time, through the perspective of the landlady observing Hetty, the meaning of the word ―misery‖ enlarges again—Hetty is now seen as a victim of a seduction and her misery is viewed in conjunction with the existence of a male seducer:

It was not the first time the landlady had seen the ornaments, for she had examined the

contents of Hetty‘s pocket yesterday, and she and her husband had discussed the fact of a

country girl having these beautiful things, with a stronger conviction than ever that Hetty

had been miserably deluded by the fine young officer. (415, my emphasis)

The word ―misery‖ which has so far mostly appeared as a descriptive noun referring to Hetty‘s state is above used as an adverb that modifies the passive phrase about Hetty. Through the lens of the couple, Hetty is described as a victim of deception. The adverb adds the sense of melodrama to their conviction. Going through the gossip that the landlady and her husband generate between them, Hetty‘s misery becomes just one of the common sentimental stories in the neighborhood, a story of a poor country girl seduced by a rich young officer. However, circulating through such an exchange of gossip, Hetty gets no substantial help or support, but rather she becomes more isolated from possible social aids and networks.

The more Hetty becomes isolated, the more closely Hetty‘s inner thoughts are narrated in relation with the term ―misery.‖ Losing her little hope of finding Arthur and saying goodbye to the couple at the Green Man inn, Hetty finally decides to completely lock herself in her secret state and die alone. However, via the method of free indirect discourse, the narration gets closer to Hetty‘s thoughts and the ―misery‖ delivers Hetty‘s complicated state of mind in the below passage:

Hetty felt that no one could deliver her from the evils that would make life hateful to her;

and no one, she said to herself, should ever know her misery and humiliation. No; she

would not confess even to Dinah: she would wander out of sight, and drown herself

where her body would never be found, and no one should know what had become of her.

(416-417, my emphasis)

With such thoughts, Hetty wanders back to Stratford-on-Avon. In the passage, the word ―misery‖ still signifies Hetty‘s state of pregnancy and her shame, which means she cannot even think of talking to Dinah at the moment. However, the free indirect discourse betrays Hetty‘s longing to be understood and accepted. Hetty‘s sense of frustration expressed in the first sentence, ―Hetty felt that no one could deliver her from the evils,‖ is intensified in the next sentence, ―no one, she said to herself, should ever know her misery and humiliation,‖ which was ironically meant to manifest her firm resolution. At this instant, the word ―misery‖ also has all the accumulated significances the novel has established in the different passages so far—Hetty‘s pregnancy, her tragic fate itself entailing a feeling of terror, the scandalous aura surrounding Hetty that people cannot fail to notice, and the indicator/marker of the melodramatic scandal. Hetty‘s ―misery‖ is no longer a shame to be concealed, but a revealed shame itself. That Hetty seems to be isolated from the horizon of understanding of such sophistication and still believes no one knows her secret makes readers feel uncomfortable about the male narrator‘s rather intentional use of the word to describe her resolution at the moment. My argument is that the novel cultivates the readers‘ sense of the accumulated significations of the word, while inducing the readers to feel uncomfortable about the male narrator‘s deliberate choice of the word.

Hetty‘s great will to live and move her body explored throughout the narrative is contrasted with the male narrator‘s intention to burden Hetty with loaded allusions to the term

―misery.‖ The male narrator emphasizes and even intends to aggravate Hetty‘s separation from

the community by using the term to explain her state of mind. In the novel, Hetty alone is isolated from and ignorant of the overlapped meanings of the term, yet readers can sense her isolation. Hetty‘s obsessive desire to disappear out of sight, her death instinct, is also an external reflection of her isolation gradually happening at the textual level. However, to Hetty‘s surprise,

Hetty‘s will to survive is too strong to be entirely subdued by her impulsive dramatic resolution of death: ―Yet she took care of her money still; she carried her basket: death seemed still a long way off, and life was so strong in her! She craved food and rest—she hastened towards them at the very moment she was picturing to herself the bank from which she would leap towards death‖

(417). Hetty even experiences a sense of exultation over the fact that she is still alive. The feeling of jubilation Hetty‘s body experiences over her aliveness works as a driving force for her movements. Left alone in the wilderness, Hetty momentarily extricates herself from the heavy burden of her pregnancy and its concealment, the weight of misery upon her. She only focuses on her own body‘s desire, forgetting its social obligation. Ironically though, Hetty, with such a strong will to survive and an exhibition of mobile agency, is only shown or described as a brute or a mad woman by the man who later finds Hetty at a barn and by the male narrator.16 Forced out of civilized community and regarded as a mad woman even before she commits a crime,

Hetty drifts into an immoral course and violates the moral laws by abandoning her child.

The novel questions the male narrator‘s easy mobilization of sympathy towards Hetty.

16 For instance, after meeting the old man at the small barn where Hetty fell asleep, Hetty loses a sense of joy she has experienced in wandering and she gets obsessed with the dread of people‘s look:

The passionate joy in life she had felt in the night, after escaping from the brink of the black cold death in the pool, was gone now. Life now, by the morning light, with the impression of that man‘s hard wondering look at her, was as full of dread as death;-it was worse; it was a dread to which she felt chained, from which she shrank and shrank as she did from the black pool, and yet could find no refuge from it. (422)

Hetty chains herself to the dreadful looks of others and finally embodies the dread of them.

The closing comment of the male narrator in the chapter, ―The Journey in Despair,‖ is a mixture of harsh judgment and a shallow expression of sympathy. He looks down upon Hetty‘s journey and depreciates the meaning of her struggling. By staging his judgmental voice at the end of the chapter where the novel explores the question of Hetty‘s isolation from the social relations, the novel reveals how the gaze of ordinary people represented by the male narrator easily simulates sympathy while indeed employing violence against the state of a helpless girl like Hetty. It is noteworthy that the narrator employs such critical expressions as ―hard unloving despairing soul,‖

―narrow heart and narrow thoughts,‖ and ―hunted wounded brute‖ to depict the state of Hetty in the following passage:

Poor wandering Hetty, with the rounded childish face, and the hard unloving despairing

soul looking out of it—with the narrow heart and narrow thoughts, no room in them for

any sorrows but her own, and tasting that sorrow with the more intense bitterness! My

heart bleeds for her as I see her toiling along on her weary feet, or seated in a cart, with

her eyes fixed vacantly on the road before her, never thinking or caring whither it tends,

till hunger comes and makes her desire that a village may be near.

What will be the end? – the end of her objectless wandering, apart from all love, caring

for human beings only through her pride, clinging to life only as the hunted wounded

brute clings to it?

God preserve you and me from being the beginners of such misery! (423, my emphasis)

The male narrator‘s too emotional exclamation, ―my heart bleeds for her,‖ very swiftly shifts into harsh comments concerning her such as ―caring for human beings only through her pride, clinging to life only as the hunted wounded brute clings to it.‖ Moreover, the male narrator‘s last wish only preserves his emptiness of his heart. He wishes to be liberated from any sense of

responsibility for such misery as Hetty‘s. The term ―misery‖ in this last remark serves to separate the narrator and even his readers from Hetty. The male narrator dreams of an easy escape from being involved in such a fate as Hetty‘s and invites the readers to the same evasive tendency.

However, considering the multi-dimensional perspectives built around the word ―misery,‖ the reader perceives the irony of the male narrator‘s cast of the word in such a simple and slight fabrication as ―such misery.‖ In other words, the novel has already implicated readers in the story of Hetty.

As part of its deviation from the male narrator‘s perspective, after Hetty commits a crime, the novel starts to employ the term ―misery‖ to reveal the male characters‘ feeling of guilt derived from their previous negligence of Hetty and their current helplessness in front of Hetty‘s tragic situation. Hetty‘s misery begins to draw political interest from the community members and function as a framework for the investigation of the Hayslope society. When Adam vents his mental sufferings to him, becoming aware of Hetty‘s disappearance, Mr. Irwine looks back on how Arthur attempted to confess the affair to him:

It was plain enough now what he had wanted to confess. And if their words had taken

another turn … if he himself had been less fastidious about intruding on another man‘s

secrets … it was cruel to think how thin a film had shut out rescue from all this guilt and

misery. He saw the whole history now by that terrible illumination which the present

sheds back upon the past. But every other feeling as it rushed upon him was thrown into

abeyance by pity, deep respectful pity, for the man who sat before him, already so bruised,

going forth with sad blind resignedness to an unreal sorrow, while a real one was close

upon him, too far beyond the range of common trial from him ever to have feared it. (442,

my emphasis)

Mr. Irwine is regretful of having missed a chance to rescue Hetty from the misery and people around her including himself from a severe guilty conscience. From the perspective of Mr.

Irwine, eventually, Hetty‘s misery starts to be regarded as a common difficulty that concerns the whole community. Among the interested parties, Adam is the central figure, who is yet ignorant of Hetty‘s pregnancy and her crime—―a real one〔sorrow〕‖—in the above passage. The fact that the real sorrow coming close upon Adam has been ―too far beyond the range of common trial from him ever to have feared‖ attests to the Hayslope community‘s ineffectualness in processing such a plight as Hetty‘s. From this time forth, the male characters including Adam, Arthur, and

Mr. Irwine accept and even contend for their share of Hetty‘s misery. Learning about Hetty‘s crime and the trial, Adam remonstrates with Mr. Irwine as thus: ―You think it doesn‘t matter as she lies there in shame and misery, and he〔Arthur〕 knows nothing about it—he suffers nothing‖

(459, my emphasis). Adam is anxious that Hetty be isolated in her misery and contends that

Arthur, the inflictor, should share the misery with Hetty. Mr. Irwine gives an answer: ―Adam, he will know—he will suffer, long and bitterly. He has a heart and a conscience: I can‘t be entirely deceived in his character. I am convinced—I am sure he didn‘t fall under temptation without a struggle‖ (459). What Mr. Irwine prognosticates is Arthur would suffer for Hetty‘s misery for his entire life. Hetty‘s misery, ironically, acquires a power to transform others‘ lives.

The novel‘s view towards Hetty is embodied by Dinah‘s voluntary activity in the prison.

The legitimacy of Hetty‘s self-pity about her miserable lot finally gains sympathy from Dinah in the prison where Hetty confesses her crime. Hetty says in front of sympathetic Dinah: ―I put it down there and covered it up, and when I came back it was gone….It was because I was so very miserable, Dinah…I didn‘t know where to go…and I tried to kill myself before, and I couldn‘t‖

(491, my emphasis). Unlike others, Dinah transparently sympathizes with Hetty‘s situation,

which is condensed in the term ―miserable.‖ The term actually functions as a weapon attacking

Hetty at the time of her crime. In the same confession, Hetty repeats the word: ―Oh, it was so dreadful, Dinah…I was so miserable…I wished I‘d never been born into this world. I should never like to go into the green fields again-I hated ‗em so in my misery‖ (491, my emphasis). As her confession testifies, Hetty was still miserable after her delivery—after being liberated from her pregnancy, and the term ―misery‖ signifies the whole existence of Hetty in her confession.

However, finally, Hetty‘s misery is communicated to Dinah and Hetty is relieved of the ponderous burden. Hetty is no longer defined by the sophisticated semantic network built around the word ―misery.‖ Dinah voluntarily becomes Hetty‘s accomplice in liberating her from the prison of the meanings of the word ―misery‖ built by the male narrator. In the following section,

I am going to delve into the itinerant journey of Dinah before she finally comes to unite with

Hetty in the prison.

Rethinking Dinah Morris

I contend that Dinah embodies the novel‘s greater interest in a critical reconsideration of the male narrator‘s omniscient and misogynistic perspective. Unlike previous literary critics‘ treatment of the conventional characteristics of Dinah, my reading takes more note of Dinah‘s deviancy as a working-class female preacher who positions herself as a voluntary outsider and of

Eliot‘s interest in exploring the idea of women‘s liberality outside domesticity through Dinah.

Critics have complained that Eliot‘s heroines are ―conventional‖ and lack audaciousness, the quality which readers might expect from a woman writer whose romantic relationship with

George Lewes, a married man, ―transgressed Victorian convention,‖ as Kate Flint argues (159).

Adding to such views, Margaret Homans argues that Eliot‘s early novels, including her very first novel, Adam Bede, consolidate Victorian middle-class womanhood ―as womanhood itself‖ (156) when they universalize middle-class morality through female heroines. Homans aligns herself with Nancy Armstrong in terms of the rise of middle-class domestic women when she writes:

―For Armstrong it is the domestic, psychologically profound, sexual female self whose construction as natural and universal is the key to middle-class ascendency‖ (157). Although

Homans acknowledges that Hetty belongs to the lower class and remains as a monstrous outsider with her crime and overt sexuality, she concludes that Adam Bede consolidates ―the middle-class ascendency,‖ the domestic epitome of which Dinah signifies. Instead of following this line of complaint and defining Eliot as a pro-bourgeois writer, I propose to read Dinah as an accomplice in the feminist narrative, alternatively written around Hetty‘s wandering. My reading of Dinah as an accomplice in the feminist narrative built by Hetty‘s movement places Eliot on the working- class women‘s side. The two female heroines are both working-class characters who transgress the conventions of the Hayslope community. I also consider the importance of the public influence that Dinah‘s movement generates in relation with the ―miserable‖ scandal that Hetty‘s pregnancy, wandering, and child murder produce. As an itinerant female preacher, Dinah‘s trained disinterestedness in the public gaze eventually empowers her to go beyond the public opinion regarding Hetty that the male narrator represents.

Critics have shown a tendency to separate Hetty from Dinah and either regard Hetty‘s divergence as subsumed under the novel‘s final vision of Dinah‘s nuclear family depicted in the

Epilogue or consider Hetty as an outsider who should be banished to complete the novel‘s bourgeois vision. For instance, Josephine Mcdonagh, a critic who takes into account more comprehensive cultural connotations embedded in the motif of child murder in Adam Bede, still

regards Hetty and Dinah as a contrary characters to each other and interprets Dinah as an ideal mother figure supported by the contemporary conduct books. According to Mcdonagh‘s dichotomous interpretation, while Hetty shows a lack of maternal love in the chapter titled ―The

Two Bed Chambers,‖ Dinah demonstrates her ―motherly spirit‖ by concerning herself with

Hetty‘s vanity and further through her voluntary career as a Methodist preacher. Such a reading that regards Dinah‘s pastoral career as a manifestation of her ―motherly spirit,‖ above all things, does not respect Dinah‘s mental agony. However, Dinah‘s agony over whether she should go back to Snowfield to continue preaching or remain near her uncle‘s family and Adam is seriously dealt with in one of the last chapters, ―In the Cottage.‖ Taking into account such agony, it is not at all easy to conclude that Dinah‘s choice to become a mother is out of her missionary calling, which Mcdonagh regards as a motherly work. Rather, I assert that the novel sustains a feeling of tension and nervousness surrounding Dinah‘s last choice.

I propose that Dinah‘s renunciation of preaching in ―Epilogue,‖ described as a result of being conscious of the possible dangers of falsely inducing untalented women to perform preaching, can be interpreted as a projection of Eliot‘s sense of responsibility as an intellectual who is more concerned with public good than with individual desire. I believe that Eliot projects her idea of public performance onto the working-woman, Dinah, and I regard Dinah‘s abandonment of public preaching as an extension of her public vision. Dinah‘s marriage should not be easily rendered as a renunciation of her independent sense of career. Eliot reflects her sense of artistic responsibility in Dinah‘s agony and her final decision. For Eliot, the self- awareness of her responsibility as an artist serving the public good is the matter of the highest priority. Daniel Cotton discusses Eliot‘s acute self-awareness as a writer in Social Figures:

George Eliot, Social History, and Literary Representation:

Eliot was above all else one whose intellectual identity was of a type inconceivable

before her age and incomprehensible apart from the changes that had been brought to

England over the last hundred years. This status as an intellectual accounts for Eliot‘s

conception of herself as an artist and may even be considered the most compelling

influence in the art she produced. To understand her work, one should understand the

provenance of this identity. (4)

Cotton aptly points out the gravity of Eliot‘s intellectual identity to understand her works. Giving a thought to how this identity has influenced Eliot, it becomes possible to see Dinah‘s professional behavior and resolution as a preacher as related to Eliot‘s self-contemplation of her public responsibility as an artist. Then, without underestimating Dinah‘s performance, we could discover the influence of her public performance, including her dramatic embracement of Hetty in prison, which cuts across the narrative in Adam Bede.

I contend that Eliot imagines the working-class women‘s extra mobility and liberal lifestyles through Dinah and explores a new mode of individuality. My interpretation of Dinah‘s public performance puts her outside of the Hayslope community and, by extension, aligns her with the other working-class female characters, including Hetty, who disregard socially acceptable codes of conduct and move on their own account. I particularly give attention to

Dinah‘s peculiar insensitiveness to what people think of her, a characteristic in drastic contrast to the other community members‘ acute sensitiveness to public opinions and their desire for a sense of privacy, the reverse of their severe sensitiveness to opinions. I argue that Dinah‘s complete disregard for public opinions detaches her from the culture of the general public, which instigates people to aim for public acknowledgement and reputation, and that the novel indicates the falseness and potential brutality of such a culture through Dinah, who ironically acquires a

powerful social influence that comes through in emergencies among the members of Hayslope and Snowfield community. Dinah proves her complete indifference to people‘s opinions about her performance and person in the first encounter with Mr. Irwine, a rector, in the following conversation. Mr. Irwine questions her private awareness of the public gaze and Dinah answers:

“And you never feel any embarrassment from the sense of your youth—that you are a

lovely young woman on whom men‘s eyes are fixed?‖ he said aloud. ―No, I‘ve no room

for such feelings, and I don‘t believe the people ever take notice about that. I think, sir,

when God makes His presence felt through us, we are like the burning bush‖ (101)

Mr. Irwine represents the community‘s general view of a young female preacher. He assumes

Dinah‘s discomfort to be the natural response of a young woman exposed to the public eye.

However, against Mr. Irwine‘s assumption and his use of ordinary and secular language that describes Dinah as ―a lovely young woman on whom men‘s eyes are fixed,‖ Dinah employs her typically biblical language, ―the burning bush‖ to explain her person in front of the public. Dinah conceives, against the social norms, that her gender and youth recede during her performance and that she personifies the impersonal messenger of God. If even Mr. Irwine, the rector, embodies the popular notion of regarding female preaching as embarrassing, Dinah escapes embarrassment by putting herself beyond the common boundary of language and understanding.

Dinah disavows gender norms of the society by situating herself above the realm where people‘s gazes affect and regulate social behaviors through her imagination, performance, and selection of language. Dinah dares to ignore gender ideology and chooses to perform an unfamiliar role of an ardent female preacher.

Significantly, Dinah‘s performance unearths the absence of ideal public spheres in the sense of Habermas in Hayslope. The culture of the public of Hayslope community that lays

primary stress on people‘s opinions, fame, and social recognition does not perform a favorable function in terms of rightly circulating people‘s thoughts and guiding their conduct. Excessive consciousness of other people‘s gazes and opinions seems to obstruct open critical thinking about and debates on public matters among people. In other words, sound public discussions among community members and their active participation in community issues do not exist in the

Hayslope community. For instance, the following description of the community‘s public gathering in the occasion of Dinah‘s preaching reveals the lack of salutary inter-communication between community members and instead discloses their undue concern for saving faces:

Now and then there was a new arrival; perhaps a slouching labourer, who, having eaten

his supper, came out to look at the unusual scene with a slow bovine gaze, willing to hear

what any one had to say in explanation of it, but by no means excited enough to ask a

question. But all took care not to join the Methodists on the Green, and identify

themselves in that way with the expectant audience, for there was not one of them that

would not have disclaimed the imputation of having come out to hear the ‗preacher-

woman‘, they had only come out to see ‗what war a-goin‘ on, like‘. (23)

What the gathered people only show concern about is how they could gaze at the female

Methodist preacher and satisfy their curiosity while undetected by others, because being discovered for ―having come out to hear‖ the preaching of a female preacher would mean a dishonor for them. This attitude reduces Dinah‘s preaching to a mere spectacle17. Furthermore, their cautious avoidance of joining the Methodists‘ circle surrounding Dinah alienates Dinah and

17 It is noticeable that people‘s mere curiosity towards Dinah does change into more serious responses after Dinah‘s preaching starts. However, the audience‘s attention still does not catch the deeper meanings of her appeals. The narrator writes: ―There was many a responsive sigh and groan from her fellow-Methodists, but the village mind does not easily take fire, and a little smouldering vague anxiety, that might easily die out again, was the utmost effect Dinah‘s preaching had wrought in them at present‖ (33).

a small group of her followers and marks her preaching performance as a socially disgraceful behavior. Ironically, though, such alienation from the general public allows Dinah room to perceive people‘s superficiality and vanity during her preaching and arouses a will to exert her mobility and come close to Lisbeth, Hetty, and other marginalized members at the same time18.

Completely disregarding the public fame her preaching in front of the public might impair, Dinah gradually builds up her charisma and social influence in the whole community, which finally comes to recognize her power in emergency situations—the death of Adam‘s father and Hetty‘s murder trial.

Dinah‘s complete disregard for public fame that empowers her to stay close to Hetty throughout the murder trial and to finally bring about Hetty‘s confession of guilt indicates her mature sense of individuality, which is not easily affected or interrupted. Dinah moves according to her own decisions and individual judgments, regardless of public opinion. Dinah could create a secure privacy even in the middle of a public space such as a prison. Conversely, in a culture in which to secure people‘s opinions in the public is deemed crucial, an unexpected private encounter is more likely to generate a surprisingly powerful sensation that even disturbs rational judgments and actions based on social norms. Eliot perceives that putting too much value on the public eyes produces an unhealthy yearning for liberation, privacy, and violation of social rules in return. The novel investigates how this kind of sensation can be perilous through Arthur‘s flirtatious relationship with Hetty, the main accident that finally leads to Hetty‘s crime in the

18 Dinah‘s attentiveness to others while preaching is contrasted with Arthur‘s ego-centric absorption in his acting. For example, when he acts in front of Adam to beguile him into believing his version of harmless flirtation with Hetty, Arthur can‘t see Adam‘s response: ―Arthur was too much preoccupied with the part he was playing himself to be thoroughly aware of the expression in Adam‘s face‖ (325). And instantly after Arthur surprisingly notices Adam‘s seriousness by his hard voice, Arthur is ―dominated‖ by ―the man whose good opinion he cares for‖ (325-326). Such a fluctuation between vain self-absorption, mindless of others, and an excessive consciousness of others‘ opinions characterizes Arthur.

narrative. The first significant meeting between Arthur and Hetty, distinguished from previous

(mere) exchanges of gazes in the Hall Farm where Hetty works as a dairymaid for her uncle and his wife, happens outside of their immediate neighborhoods. The narrator puts emphasis on the sensation they feel: ―They were alone together for the first time. What an overpowering presence that first privacy is!‖ (142). This private encounter generates an overwhelming sensation, a mixed feeling of liberation from the public eye and excitement of self-indulgence in secrecy.

However, such moments of privacy, unlike Dinah‘s independent management of her actions throughout the domestic and the public spheres, is also easy to be broken up by external threats, even by a slight one. In the following passage, a distinctively private and romantic atmosphere between Arthur and Hetty crumbles away when Hetty‘s basket, an object that signifies her weary daily life of labor and her working class identity, falls on the ground.

But they started asunder with beating hearts: something had fallen on the ground with a

rattling noise; it was Hetty‘s basket; all her little workwoman‘s matters were scattered on

the path, some of them showing a capability of rolling to great lengths. There was much

to be done in picking up, and not a word was spoken; but when Arthur hung the basket

over her arm again, the poor child felt a strange difference in his look and manner. (145)

The sudden fall of Hetty‘s basket in the midst of their private meeting breaks the spell of the privacy that doesn‘t have a power to sustain itself as Dinah‘s sense of independence does. Arthur‘s changed look indicates his sudden awakening to their class difference.

Being self-conscious of his social status, Arthur is unlike Dinah in his sensitiveness to public opinions. Yet this tendency does not protect him from falling into temptation, which results in his public shame. Contrary to Dinah‘s indifference to how people would judge her actions, Arthur minutely envisages the possible scandal that might follow if his relationship with

Hetty will be disclosed to the public. The narrator describes Arthur‘s state of mind right after his private meeting with Hetty in the following passage, using the method of free-indirect discourse:

To flirt with Hetty was a very different affair from flirting with a pretty girl of his own

station: that was understood to be an amusement on both sides; or, if it became serious,

there was no obstacle to marriage. But this little thing would be spoken ill of directly, if

she happened to be seen walking with him; and then those excellent people, the Poysers,

to whom a good name was as precious as if they had the best blood in the land in their

veins – he should hate himself if he made a scandal of that sort, on the estate that was to

be his own some day, and among tenants by whom he liked, above all, to be respected.

He could no more believe that he should so fall in his own esteem than that he should

break both his legs and go on crutches all the rest of his life. He couldn‘t imagine himself

in that position; it was too odious, too unlike him. (151)

Arthur‘s desire to be continuously held in high esteem by Martin Poyser, Hetty‘s uncle and the leaseholder of the Hall Farm, who also seems to regard keeping a good name as a priority, and by other tenants of his grandfather Squire Donnithorne‘s estate competes with his sexual desire for

Hetty. The ecstasy of Arthur in private is too readily interrupted by his consideration of social relations and fame. In other words, Arthur recognizes that it is impossible to keep privacy intact.

Thus, this imaginary scandal exerts a strong influence on Arthur from the outset of his relationship with Hetty. What is ironic is that such an imaginary scandal, which would make

Arthur ―too odious,‖ does not exert real power to stop Arthur‘s risky flirting with Hetty. The imaginary scandal Arthur resorts to in order to control his sexual desire works only on a superficial level and does not meddle with Arthur‘s innermost desires and feelings.

Another male character, Adam, is also not free from self-consciousness of his own social

status as a respected working-class man. Adam understands how to appeal to Arthur‘s susceptibility to public opinions when he persuades Arthur to leave the town after discovering the secret love affair between Hetty and him. However, Adam is definitely more interested in how the possible scandal would affect Hetty, so he first and foremost supposes Hetty and her relations will seriously lose their reputations once the affair would be made public. Adam‘s speech resorts to Arthur‘s thorough knowledge of the code of manners and the social order:

‗You know it couldn‘t be made public as you‘ve behaved to Hetty as y‘have done without

her losing her character, and bringing shame and trouble on her and her relations. What if

you meant nothing by your kissing and your presents? Other folks won‘t believe as

you‘ve meant nothing; and don‘t tell me about her not deceiving herself. I tell you as

you‘ve filled her mind so with the thought of you as it‘ll mayhap poison her life; and

she‘ll never love another man as ‗ud make her a good husband.‘ (326-327)

It is a known fact among Adam and Arthur that Arthur could not marry Hetty and become her faithful husband. Hetty is excluded from this knowledge from the beginning of the affair.

Knowing this, Adam accuses Arthur of willful neglect of the known social rule and of exploiting

Hetty‘s ignorance of the tacit rule to pursue his selfish sexual desire. Arthur‘s ―kissing‖ and

―presents‖ to Hetty signify a gross negligence of the social conduct code. Adam intends to reawaken Arthur‘s sensibility to the social code and opinions. Adam even sharply penetrates

Hetty‘s childish fantasies which Arthur has arisen and encouraged with his inappropriate behaviors. Adam maintains that Arthur should acknowledge how poisonous his expression of love has been for Hetty. Significantly, though, Adam, who is officially recognized as Hetty‘s suitor, overlooks Hetty‘s most intimate feelings and needs—her desperation for attention, protection, and sympathy—so he cannot prevent but rather contributes to Hetty‘s despair by

getting Arthur to leave her with a cruel letter. The possible scandal Adam presupposes, and against which he confronts with Arthur in Hetty‘s shoes, is still derived from his recognition of the bylaws of the male-dominated community, and thus, it ignores Hetty‘s innermost desires.

From the exchange of the male discourse, which is mainly concerned with the gain and loss of social fame, position, and power, Hetty is completely alienated. Besides, Adam‘s appealing speech still alludes to his deeper intention to take Hetty to wife. In such male discourses of Adam and Arthur, Hetty‘s body is a mere object that is too easily desired, discarded, and exchanged according to power relations among men. Dinah remains unaffected by interests in power relations rooted in controlling the social gaze and independently decides where she would go.

Dinah‘s imaginary capability to perceive other people‘s innermost mental needs and her sense of autonomy to move in accordance with their needs regardless of the public gazes is a result of her own independent training program, which does not aim at gaining political power— a highly regarded value cherished among male protagonists including Adam and Arthur as discussed above—but aims to relieve the pain of others and console them. Dinah‘s self-education, targeted to make her a sympathetic female itinerant preacher, clearly goes against the gender ideology of her times: Dinah does not confine herself in a passive position when it comes to self- education and labor. One of the primary concerns of Dinah‘s self-education program is to enhance her physical mobility for the purpose of itinerant preaching and saving souls. Dinah‘s own handwriting inserted in the novel illustrates this point. A letter from Dinah formulates another line of the counter narrative generated from women‘s bodies and opposing the narration of the male narrator. Dinah‘s letter sent to Adam‘s brother Seth, a Methodist friend of hers, which

Adam happens to read, describes how she has sincerely trained her body to walk a long way and speak in public without fatigue: ―In my outward lot, which you ask about, I have all things and

abound. I have had constant work in the mill, though some of the other hands have been turned off for a time; and my body is greatly strengthened, so that I feel little weariness after long walking and speaking‖ (358). It can be inferred Dinah, different from other laborers, is satisfied with the constant labor. Dinah is a skilled manual worker in the mill and her mastery of the labor serves to strengthen her body19. I consider Dinah‘s interest in training her own body for public service crucial in terms of interpreting her as embodying Eliot‘s idea of feminine liberality, because her interest in corporeal power resists male discourses that dichotomously understand female bodies either as an object of male desire or as a performer of a mother‘s duty. In this context, it is noteworthy how Adam responds to the above letter from Dinah. Adam says to his brother Seth as thus: ―I daresay I should ha‘ thought a preaching woman hateful. But she‘s one as makes everything seem right she says and does, and I seemed to see her and hear her speaking when I read the letter. It‘s wonderful how I remember her looks and her voice. She‘d make thee rare and happy, Seth; she‘s just the woman for thee‖ (359). Although Adam senses Dinah‘s special presence in the letter, he still readily relegates Dinah to the role of Seth‘s wife. However,

19 Another scene where Dinah‘s serious interest in invigorating her own body is witnessed is the first conversation between Dinah and Lisbeth, which happens when Dinah visits Lisbeth to console her grief over her husband‘s sudden death. The narration closely follows Lisbeth‘s reaction to Dinah‘s first words of consolation as thus:

Slowly Lisbeth drew down her apron, and timidly she opened her dim dark eyes. She saw nothing at first but a face – a pure, pale face, with loving grey eyes, and it was quite unknown to her. Her wonder increased; perhaps it was an angel. But in the same instant Dinah had laid her hand on Lisbeth‘s again, and the old woman looked down at it. It was a much smaller hand than her own, but it was not white and delicate, for Dinah had never worn a glove in her life, and her hand bore the traces of labour from her childhood upwards. Lisbeth looked earnestly at the hand for a moment, and then, fixing her eyes again on Dinah‘s face, said, with something of restored courage, but in a tone of surprise –

‗Why, ye‘re a workin‘ woman!‘

‗Yes, I am Dinah Morris, and I work in the cotton-mill when I am at home.‘ (120)

Betraying expectations of Lisbeth and readers, the narration introduces Dinah‘s hands which have the marks of years of labor, and Dinah‘s identity is explained in terms of working women. Namely, Dinah has domesticated her body as a working body. Her body is inscribed with her labor.

the novel shows that Adam‘s perspective on ideal wifehood significantly starts to alter when he finally realizes his love for Dinah: Adam becomes respectful of Dinah as a better (or more mature) person than himself and gets to dream of ―strengthening each other in all labor‖ in marriage with Dinah (580)20. Adam‘s marital vision of helping each other in all kinds of labor includes both domestic chores and community service. Dinah continues to give sermons to her close circle of friends and neighbors, and Adam encourages her in doing such services. Dinah cures Adam‘s anxiety about reputation and simultaneously seeks to reorient the community people‘s interest away from self-indulgence in public fame and towards self-education.

Rethinking Infanticide

The middle-class author‘s exploration of the ideas of mobility and autonomy available to the working-class female characters through Hetty and Dinah insinuates that the author dissents from Victorian reformist idea about deviant women based on the state intervention. On a historical level, the way Adam Bede deals with Hetty‘s infanticide seems to be affected by but actually takes a different path from the contemporary Victorian social reformist attitudes—that is

20 Such a change in Adam is significant when we refer to his previous vision of marriage. In the following passage, the narrator describes Adam‘s imaginary picture of his future marriage with Hetty:

How she will dote on her children! She is almost a child herself, and the little pink round things will hang about her like florets round the central flower; and the husband will look on, smiling benignly, able, whenever he chooses, to withdraw into the sanctuary of his wisdom, towards which his sweet wife will look reverently, and never lift the curtain. It is a marriage such as they made in the golden age, when the men were all wise and majestic, and the women all lovely and loving.

It was very much in this way that our friend Adam Bede thought about Hetty; only he put his thoughts into different words. (167)

In the description, the role of wife Adam thinks about is just to give birth to children and look respectfully her husband, while he draws an invisible separate line between them.

to say, the active intervention of the society in solving crimes committed by women—towards women‘s crimes. Although, at first glance, the novel appears to support the reformist idea that the society should burden itself with the responsibility for Hetty‘s crime and its edification, my reading demonstrates that the novel underlines the deconstructive power of Hetty‘s wandering journey by its use of the loaded term ―misery‖: the novel‘s narrative concerning Hetty‘s wandering allows the reader to perceive the shallowness of the reformist idea expressed in the male narrator‘s voice and reveals its incapacity to incorporate individual bodies‘ sexual and suicidal desires. Namely, Eliot in Adam Bede disapproves of the ways the community treats its female working-class criminals.

In this regard, my argument is indebted to Laura Berry. In The Child, The State, and The

Victorian Novel (1999), Berry separates out mid-Victorian writing about infanticide as a

―historically specific discourse‖ from earlier ―punitive‖ attitudes (179) in that the mid-Victorian discourse interpreted the child murder not as essentially rooted in the murdering mother‘s violence but as ―a generalizable social guilt‖ and as a call for the society‘s collective sense of

―responsibility‖ and for suitable ―social intervention‖ (134). While Berry situates the creation of

Adam Bede in such a specific moment of reform in mid-Victorian Britain, she importantly acknowledges that Eliot‘s concern did not lie in addressing the state intervention, which was supported by medical reports and popular press in the period. Berry observes Eliot‘s disbelief in the institutional discipline in the following passage:

If individual guilt required social confession, this social confession requires a social and

institutional intervention. Civilizing means, at least in part, institutionalizing. But in

George Eliot, the mediation of individual guilt through social shame and responsibility is

insufficient; the intervention of the state is actively despised. Eliot embraces her own

version of instinct and civilization in her discussion of infanticide—but she uses it to

resist state intervention by suggesting that change happens over time, happens ―in the

body,‖ and defies both speech and social practice—her theory of a history that is

―incarnate‖. In George Eliot‘s work there is no true child-subject because, unlike most of

her contemporaries discussed thus far, she finds no solution in the social. (136-137)

Berry is right when she points out Eliot‘s disinterest in ―state intervention‖ based on collected data and her interest in individuals‘ steady incarnation of a history, a history as an accumulation of continuous changes in the individual body. As Berry articulates, Eliot proposes the body as a ground where historical changes can happen and illustrates this in the prison scene where Hetty confesses her sin to Dinah, which is ―about the bodily experience of confession itself, one that remains private; it cannot be told because even though it is experienced partly through speech it cannot be spoken of or described, only endured and enacted‖ (155-156). Eliot finds a solution in individual contacts and communications (as exemplified in my above interpretations of mutual understanding between Hetty and Dinah in the prison and between Adam and Bartle Massey in the hotel room) that can channel bodies‘ desires into connection and solidarity and might lead to the cure and transformation of the community that has caused the infanticide.

The reason why Eliot disavows interventions of the massive bureaucratic system that the social reformers believe in becomes clearer when we refer to the historical context and discourses of sanitary reform in the mid-Victorian period. In Victorian Writing about Risk:

Imagining a Safe England in a Dangerous World (2000), Elaine Freedgood comprehensively explores how institutional interventions become a major moralizing force among citizens during the period of industrial and imperial expansion of England. Particularly, in the second chapter,

―The Rhetoric of Visible Hands: Edwin Chadwick, Florence Nightingale and the Popularization

of Sanitary Reform,‖ she critically considers the way Edwin Chadwick‘s Report on the Sanitary

Condition of the Labouring Classes of Britain (1842), one of the most influential documents of the sanitary reform movement, endowed its very author with an unperturbed authority by

―rhetorical thickets overgrown with facts‖ (49), and also provided the Victorian middle classes with ―the transcendent administrative authority‖ (48) to monitor the general condition of national health. In fact, Chadwick‘s report sketches the objects of his observation as ―safely contained,‖ as detached from the readers. In this way, the author established his professional authority. In addition to its rhetorical strategy, Freedgood observes a peculiarity of the text in its style of representation:

Unlike the narratives of the numerous reform novels of the 1840s, in which characters,

however idealized or vilified, move and change, even if to very little effect, Chadwick

and his investigators represent the poor as objects in a tableau, frozen (often almost

literally) in time and mired in refuse. They are objects not so much to be pitied, but to be

bathed and then returned to an atmosphere purified of the disease and dirt that are

immobilizing them –sometimes causing them to stick together in an all too literal fashion.

(51, my emphasis)

As Freedgood notes, Chadwick and his comrades described the poor as helpless objects who could only be saved and be purified by the intervention of the reformers engaging in the sanitary project. Given this fact, just considering the way Adam Bede presents Hetty‘s untamed desire, her desultory wandering movement, and the constant changes of the state of her body, it is obvious that Eliot would be opposed to Chadwick‘s style of representation of the poor ―as objects in a tableau‖ lost in passive desperation. Indeed, in Adam Bede, Eliot is definitely more interested in exploring how the wandering movement of Hetty, who falls into destitution and is

reduced to wandering on the roads after her unwed pregnancy, induces each community member including Mr. Irwine, a rather quiescent rector, and Adam, a treelike man with unwavering sincerity, to move, to react, and afterwards to participate in the community issue, which is

Hetty‘s murder of her child. The power derived from Hetty‘s movement is doubled and supported by Dinah‘s unconventional movement.

4. REREADING ―MISERY‖ AND ―MADNESS‖ IN LADY AUDLEY’S SECRET

Introduction

In the previous chapter, I demonstrated how Adam Bede questions the third-person male narrator‘s omniscient narrative perspective by analyzing the novel‘s complicated uses of the word ―misery,‖ and I argued that the novel induces readers to focus more on the alternative feminist voices perceived throughout Hetty and Dinah‘s wanderings. In this chapter, I move on to consider Mary Elizabeth Braddon‘s Lady Audley’s Secret (1862), in which I pay attention to how a feminist narrative around a working-class woman surfaces by another set of significant variations of the word ―misery.‖ I will argue that Braddon explores her fantasy about a working- class woman‘s energy and adventurous opportunities through building complicated narrative moves around the terms ―misery‖ and ―madness.‖ I observe that the novel binds its repetitive use of the term ―misery‖ inextricably with Lucy. While the term ―misery‖ still acts as an indicator of

Lucy‘s working-class identity even at Audley Court, where she rules over the whole household as Lady Audley, Lucy‘s unique perception of her miserable situations as an opportunity to gain momentum in actions remarkably distinguishes her from Ruth, Hetty, and Dinah in the previous chapters and guides her criminal moves. I will investigate how the novel maps out variations of the word ―misery‖ to highlight Lucy‘s incredible mobility in comparison with Robert‘s recurrent feelings of inertia and lack of action. I discover that the novel repetitively introduces the term

―misery‖ to make up circumstances where Lucy‘s genuine feeling of despair starts to be mixed with her conscious performance of the Victorian ideal of femininity and finally sets off the most impressive criminal act of empowerment, her arson attack at the Castle Inn. Lucy articulates her

feelings by using the term ―misery‖ and ―miserable‖ to create a dramatic situation in which she might be empowered. Lucy becomes the most powerful version of herself when she defines herself as ―the most miserable of women‖ (303). Lucy‘s willful acceptance of her status as a miserable woman catapults her ahead in the line of women who confront their misfortunes in my previous chapters. I contend that the narrator deliberately contrasts Lucy‘s appropriation of the term ―misery‖ against Sir Michael Audley‘s and Robert‘s conventional applications of the same term when they register sentimental feelings in an allegedly melodramatic situation. Whenever the male characters, including Robert and Sir Michael Audley, surrender to the pathos that the use of the term ―misery,‖ either by the narrator or Lucy, creates in the scenes, they lose the contest with Lucy. I explore how the novel deliberately frames its uses of the term ―misery‖ to empower Lucy with extraordinary willpower against the helpless male characters around her.

If the set of variations of the term ―misery‖ introduced in the novel lead up to showing

Lucy‘s power to overcome domestic misfortunes, the novel‘s framing of the term ―madness‖ through Lucy‘s storytelling is aimed at disintegrating male authority, which is easily influenced by the manipulative power of the term either as an accusation or an excuse. Lucy outperforms all male characters in her interpretation and appropriation of the term ―madness‖ as she does in her reimagination of the term ―misery.‖ I consider how the novel, mainly focalized through Lucy‘s perspective, opposes ―misery‖ as a powerful trigger for Lucy‘s prompt actions to ―madness‖ as a specious excuse to be easily manipulated as a matter of expediency by Lucy. While Lucy reimagines the melodramatic connotations of the term ―misery,‖ she usurps the professional authority built around ―madness.‖ The novel empowers Lucy‘s voice when she ponders the different set of implications of ―madness‖ through the narrative technique of internal focalization, which provides a point of view to the narration by the narrator‘s infiltration of what the character

thinks, and shows how Lucy manipulates the notion of madness as a weapon to fight against

Robert and protect herself from the execution of law. Lucy uses the term ―madness‖ to indicate a state of inaction or a stagnation of one‘s mind, likened to mental imprisonment, when she accuses Robert of monomania. Robert is framed as an unregenerate monomaniac. However, she also equates ―madness‖ with a set of wild impulses aroused from within alongside ―a thousand pages of her misery without one pause‖ to explain and justify the series of her criminal attempts

(314). According to her interpretation, madness can clear her of any responsibility for her actions.

The novel critiques the logical ground of male dominance by showing that Lady Audley‘s multifaceted understanding and clever framing of madness surpass Robert‘s and Sir Michael

Audley‘s uncritical and one-dimensional use of the term. Lucy‘s capacity to take the initiative to accuse Robert of madness and to mobilize it for her own ends mocks the legal authority of

Robert. In the end, Lucy‘s insistence on her inherited insanity paradoxically saves the honor of

Audley‘s family and works as a proper pretext for her criminal acts. Lucy knows that her latent madness will extenuate her crimes and protect her against the state‘s punitive power. That Lucy is sent to a private madhouse in Belgium is a circumvention of a more serious enforcement of the

British law in the courts. Lucy‘s contrivances and execution of crimes rely on her acute understanding of how the bourgeois masculine order is constructed around the perfunctory maintenance of the safe domestic space. The narration‘s point of view centered around Lucy‘s perspective gears towards revealing the helplessness of the bourgeois masculine order and empowering a working-class woman‘s exploration of her agency. Lucy‘s marriage into the aristocracy expands the prospect of a working-class woman‘s command of Victorian marriage system and reveals the vulnerability of it at the same time.

The novel stages a confrontation between a working-class-woman, Lucy, who transforms

herself into an upper-class woman, Lady Audley, by engaging in bigamy, and a middle-class bourgeois man, Robert Audley. I argue that, in terms of the plot itself, the novel heavily relies on the power struggle between Lucy and the male professionals concerning the discourse of madness. The novel‘s heroine, Lucy, marries Sir Michael Audley, who is a rich widower, to break from her old marriage which went to ruin after George Talboys, her former husband, abandoned her and their child to leave for Australia to prospect for gold. To commit the bigamy which would save her from the old broken marriage, Lucy faked the death of her former self, Helen

Talboys, and created a new identity, Lucy. Meanwhile, Robert Audley, a nephew of Sir Michael, invites his old friend George to his uncle‘s country manor Audley Court to help relieve his friend‘s grief over his wife Helen‘s death, about which George read in the newspapers after returning to England after three years of gold prospecting. However, at Audley Court, George suddenly disappears immediately after he is shown a portrait of Lady Audley. Noticing this,

Robert becomes suspicious of Lucy. Simultaneously, sensing Robert‘s suspicion of her, Lucy contrives various acts to elude his pursuit and crimes against him. Railway journeys to different

English towns play a prominent role in the conflict between Robert and Lucy, and the two compete in demonstrating their capacity for mobility. Lucy attempts to set Castle Inn on fire, where Robert was staying, with the intention of killing him. This criminal scene forms the climax of the novel. However, Robert survives the attack and confronts Lucy. At last, Lucy confesses her life story and her hereditary seed of insanity to Robert and Sir Michael. She also confesses to Robert that she attempted to kill George by pushing him down an old well. Struck with despondency, Sir Michael leaves for Europe, and Robert summons Dr. Mosgrave to ask for a professional judgment on Lucy‘s insanity. The doctor indeed makes a diagnosis of Lucy‘s latent insanity, and finally, Lucy is sent to a madhouse in Belgium. As this chapter will demonstrate,

despite her confinement in the end, Lucy‘s clever appropriation of the discourse of madness circulated between doctors challenges and mocks their professional competency.

Critics have shown particular interest in analyzing gender dynamics operating within the novel in relationship to the novel‘s treatment of mobility and modernity. They have made inquiries into the novel‘s depiction of gender-specific stamina, mobility, and engagements with modern technology such as the railway system. For instance, Eva Badowska, Daniel Martin, and

Charlotte Mathieson all point out that, in contrast with domestic fiction, a sensational novel like

Lady Audley’s Secret trains its subjects outside of the household and gives them opportunities to understand modernity by exposing them to the narrative thrills and new technologies of travel such as the Victorian railway. In ―On the Track of Things: Sensation and Modernity in Mary

Elizabeth Braddon‘s Lady Audley’s Secret‖ (2009), Badowska focuses on how Braddon‘s novel captures the paradox of modern culture, its newness and destined obsolescence. She asserts that, when one reads the sensational novel as the embodiment of the modern, it also means to discern in it ―the initial outlines of its impending obsolescence‖ (160). In particular, Badowska regards

Robert as representing anxieties about the threat posed by Lady Audley to the old Audley estate, yet she also argues that his amateurish clumsy investigation into Lady Audley‘s crimes reflects the novel‘s insight into the paradox of modernity: its fatalistic obsolescence. Meanwhile, in

―Railway Fatigue and the Coming-of-Age Narrative in Lady Audley’s Secret‖ (2008), Martin argues that the novel depicts ―a secret mobility at the heart of women‘s role in the public sphere‖ as a real threat ―during the formative years of railway expansion‖ (132). Martin focuses on revealing the unexpected gender dynamics in accepting modern technology by comparing the male professional Robert‘s incessant fatigue caused by railway travel to Lady Audley‘s inexhaustibility. Martin concludes that Braddon attempts to undermine the sense of masculine

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order represented by the Victorian railway timetables by revealing dominant cultural anxieties about its ―order, stability, mobility, distribution of capital, and lines of communication‖ through

Robert‘s continuous exhaustion and isolation on the rail (149). At the same time, Martin contends that Lady Audley‘s journey on the Victorian railway exemplifies an unprecedented mobilization of women‘s bodies in the public sphere. In a similar vein, Mathieson points out Robert‘s dis- embodiment and loss of individuality on the rail in her book titled Mobility in the Victorian

Novel: Placing the Nation (2015), in which she explores how mobile bodies contributed to locating the nation in Victorian novels. In the chapter ―‗A Perambulating Mass of Woolen

Goods‘: Bodies in the Railway Compartment of Lady Audley’s Secret,‘‘ Mathieson argues that

Robert gradually becomes an ―indistinct object‖ through repetitive displacement in the compartment and that Lucy secures privacy in the compartment by wrapping her body with furs and mantle (84). However, Mathieson does not separate out Lady Audley‘s sense of the space within the railway carriage from Robert‘s when she concludes that modern space is produced through the human bodies‘ increasing involvement with the system. I, in contrast, highlight Lady

Audley‘s exceptional sense of modern space including her domestication of the compartment, which contributes to her criminal purposes.

Although Badowska, Martin, and Mathieson all touch upon how the novel depicts gender-specific engagement with space and modernity, they do not examine the way Lucy becomes empowered through mobility as congruent with Braddon‘s interest in exploring a woman‘s liberty through a working-class woman‘s body. They rather identify Robert‘s physical exhaustion and alienation with the novel‘s reflection on the effects of modernity and technology.

However, I interpret the novel‘s reflection on modernization, including the railway system and women‘s increased movements in the public sphere, more positively. Focusing more on Lucy

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and contending that Braddon empowers Lucy with stamina to embark on criminal adventures against male authority, my reading is built around the close reading of the scenes in which the narrator‘s use of the term ―misery‖ immediately endows Lucy with extraordinary power and the narrator‘s voice becomes much closer to Lucy‘s through internal focalization. In my reading,

Lucy‘s adventures to different locations via the modern railway system also signal Braddon‘s interest in an expansion of a working-class woman‘s might and mobility beyond the place of duty and labor.

Meanwhile, another line of criticism has revolved around how to interpret Lucy‘s insistence on her madness towards the end. Most critics interpret Lucy‘s confession of madness as a performative action that reflects the author‘s broader concerns. For instance, Jill L. Matus argues that the novel acknowledges how the discourse of madness could serve as a tool to obfuscate issues of class, power, and material conditions and strengthen healthy middle-class identity by sorting out aberrant others in ―Disclosure as ‗Cover-up‘: The Discourse of Madness in Lady Audley’s Secret‖ (1993). Similarly, Lynn M. Voskuil also points out that the novel exposes the important paradoxes lying behind the construction of the authority of the middle- classes through the figure of Lady Audley in ―Acts of Madness: Lady Audley and the Meanings of Victorian Femininity‖ (2001). Analyzing Lady Audley‘s variable adoption of authenticity and performance of insanity, Voskuil highlights how Lady Audley exposes the instabilities embedded in the construction of Victorian middle-class womanhood. On the other hand, to Ann-Marie

Dunbar in ―Making the Case: Detection and Confession in Lady Audley’s Secret and The Woman in White‖ (2014), Lucy‘s confession of her latent madness at the end of the narrative conveys the cultural anxiety about the reliability of the objective mode of knowledge represented by Robert‘s collection of the circumstantial evidences. Dunbar particularly observes that Lady Audley‘s

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confession becomes an object of exchange between Robert and Dr. Mosgrave when they attempt to make her confession a ―discursively safe‖ one by transforming ―unstable, potentially disruptive confessions into more palatable, controllable forms‖ (110). Lucy‘s mode of confession operates as a source of threatening anxiety in the narrative.

However, unlike the above-mentioned critics, who view Lucy‘s confession of madness as a meaningful performative action, I argue that the real implication of ―madness‖ intended by the author in Lucy‘s storytelling is close to accusing bourgeois men of their complacent inaction, which forms an opposite axis to Lucy‘s series of real criminal actions triggered by her acute sense of ―misery.‖ Ironically, Lucy uses her latent madness as an excuse for her violative actions such as engaging in a bigamy, which she might have not committed if she had been really insane.

Taking a close look at the first moment when the novel introduced the word ―madness‖ gives a hint of the novel‘s real interpretation of Lucy‘s actions. At the very beginning of the novel,

Lucy‘s marriage to Sir Michael, which would be a bigamous connection for Lucy, is settled as a matter of course among Mr. Dawson‘s family, for whom Lucy worked as a governess: ―It was a tacitly understood thing in the surgeon‘s family that whenever Sir Michael proposed, the governess would quietly accept him; and, indeed, the simple Dawsons would have thought it something more than madness in a penniless girl to reject such an offer‖ (9, my emphasis). From a commonsense point of view, if Lucy did not marry the rich baronet, Sir Michael, it would mean

―something more than‖ madness. Even though the passage assumes the Dawson family‘s ignorance of Lucy‘s first marriage, it still supports Lucy‘s bigamous marriage while denouncing a rejection of the baronet‘s proposal as nothing less than madness. Thus, committing bigamy to save oneself from extreme poverty can be a reasonable action in contrast with inactiveness encapsulated in the term ―madness.‖ Madness is defined as maintaining the status quo of misery.

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I argue that this introductory use of the word ―madness‖ to posit Lucy‘s bigamy as a redemptive action sets the tone for the novel‘s engagement with the notion of madness. Although Lucy mobilizes the discourse of madness to defend her criminal actions in later scenes, the novel, from the beginning, places the justifiability of Lucy‘s criminal actions beyond the legal and medical frame of madness. I will demonstrate that Braddon empowers Lucy with the faculty to plan and perform authentic actions by piling up the variable implications of the term ―misery‖ and that the author frames the use of the word ―madness‖ to highlight the real significance of Lucy‘s actions.

―Misery‖ and Empowerment

In this section, I argue that Braddon explores her fantasy about a working-class woman‘s sense of liberty and mobility by creating a series of scenes in which Lucy‘s discernment of her wretched situation fills her body with an exceptional physical energy and generates moments of empowerment, such as bigamy, arson, and the experience of mobility on the railway. The novel‘s feminist narrative rising from the narrator‘s in and out of internal focalization through Lucy is pieced with the placement of the terms ―misery‖ and ―madness‖ in these focalized scenes. In the dramatic scenes I examine, Lucy‘s class identity becomes a contested issue as the term ―misery‖ clearly alludes to Lucy‘s secret bigamy and her original working-class identity while the background of the scenes, her luxurious boudoir at Audley Court, emblematizes her dramatic rise in status to an upper-class woman through bigamy. The lady‘s boudoir is a displacement of the ideal domestic sanctity and is emptied out of the ideal domestic woman and her virtues from the beginning. Placing the lady‘s boudoir, a depraved domestic space, at the beginning, the narration is charged with a subversive energy belonging to a working-class woman masquerading as an

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aristocratic lady. I contend that the subversive energy is mediated through the narration‘s introduction of the term ―misery‖ in close relation with Lucy. My close reading of the narrator‘s regulation of the degree of focalization in narrating Lucy‘s misery will also reveal Braddon‘s self-consciousness in narrating a story of a working-class woman‘s struggles from a middle-class author‘s perspective.

Before I begin to explore Lucy‘s empowerment, I examine the two male characters‘ melodramatic understanding of the notion of ―misery,‖ which the novel will contradistinguish from how Lucy interprets the state of her misery and her miserable feelings. Contrary to the male characters‘ conventional appreciation of ―misery,‖ Lucy immediately wakes up upon sensing her wretchedness and interprets her misery as a rare opportunity for empowerment. For the male characters, misery in the household constitutes a source of family breakdown, poverty, shame, or simply a social evil to be eradicated from middle and upper-class households. However, the novel‘s first articulation of the term ―misery‖ is ironically through the mouth of Sir Michael

Audley, who had been a widower for long before he saw Lucy, who was working as Mr.

Dawson‘s governess at the time, and became deeply lost in love with her in his fifties. In the scene in which he proposes to Lucy, the novel frames his words around the dramatic term

―misery,‖ which will hereafter formulate the tone for the story of Lucy and him. Sir Audley reveals his fear of Lucy‘s disproportionate feelings towards him and prognosticates his own misery. After naming the act of marrying a man that the woman does not love ―a sin,‖ Sir Audley uses the term ―misery‖ to describe the tragic result of such an unhappy marriage based on calculating intentions: ―nothing but misery can result from a marriage dictated by any motive but truth and love‖ (10, my emphasis). Sir Audley‘s warning words to Lucy (and to himself) indicates his sense of foreboding, which will soon prove true. Lucy‘s response to his proposal

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clearly conveys her calculating motif: ―I cannot be disinterested; I cannot be blind to the advantages of such an alliance. I cannot, I cannot!‖ (11). Thus, Lucy‘s acceptance of his proposal is definitely not based on ―truth and love.‖ By letting Sir Audley predict his marriage as miserable and featuring an immediate realization of his prophecy by Lucy‘s embrace of the opportunity of marriage provided by him, the novel preestablishes complexities around its application of the term ―misery.‖ Sir Audley is too incompetent to prevent his own misery, while

Lady Audley is too clever to miss the opportunity to save herself from a set of miseries—

―poverty, poverty, trials, vexations, humiliations, deprivations,‖ that had defined her childhood unattended by her insane mother (10).

The novel indicates that the male characters are apt to be benumbed and lose their agency by sentimentalizing the domestic melodrama of their own imagination, which is channeled through the term ―misery‖ by the narrator. The similar tendency of sentimentalizing the drama through the term ―misery‖ is observed when Eliot‘s male narrator renders Hetty as sympathetic and promotes sympathy among the readers by using the term ―misery.‖ However, Braddon‘s narrator warns that the act of sentimentalizing the imaginary scene of misery might break the power of execution. Robert, Sir Audley‘s nephew, intuitively envisions the misery that his further investigation into Lucy‘s secret will finally bring to his uncle. The envisioned tragedy causes

Robert to question the righteousness of his investigation. After presenting the competition between Lucy and Robert, who believes that Lucy committed a bigamous marriage with his uncle and killed her first husband George to cover up her bigamy, the novel presents another important scene in which the word ―misery‖ dramatizes the irresistible pathos that Robert feels in front of Lucy‘s poor old father, Mr. Maldon, in his poverty-stricken household. The narrator, as an observer, describes Mr. Maldon‘s appalling reaction to Robert‘s accusation that he aided and

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was complicit in Lucy‘s bigamous plan and attempted murder of George:

Perhaps in all the dismal scenes of domestic misery, which had been acted in those spare

and dreary houses—in all the petty miseries, the burning shames, the cruel sorrows, the

bitter disgraces which own poverty for their common father—there had never been such a

scene as this. The old man hiding his face from the light of day, and sobbing aloud in his

wretchedness. Robert Audley contemplated the painful picture with a hopeless and

pitying face. (171, my emphasis)

The narrator accentuates Mr. Maldon‘s wretched figure against a panorama of diverse kinds of domestic misery typically caused by a father‘s financial incompetence. In this way, Robert‘s sympathetic contemplation of Mr. Maldon‘s situation that will follow is contextualized within the picture of typical melodramatic tragedies, which are attributable to the family‘s poverty.

Subsequently, the narration is focalized through Robert. Looking at ―the shabby room, the dirt, the confusion, the figure of the old man, with his grey head upon the soiled table-cloth, amid the muddled debris of a wretched dinner‖ (171), Robert recalls his uncle who is as old as Mr.

Maldon. Robert‘s eyes immediately fill with tears the moment when he remembers his uncle who would shed ―bitterer tears‖ upon learning the truth of Lucy. Robert associates the most pitiable scene in the working-class family with an impending domestic tragedy that will soon befall his uncle. Robert‘s active imagination of his uncle‘s sorrow lets him feel doubts about his investigative action. He busies himself trying to shift the responsibility to an unknown outward force: ―It is not myself; it is the hand which is beckoning me further and further upon the dark road whose end I dare not dream of‖ (172). Soon afterwards, though, meeting with Clara Talboys,

George‘s sister, who captivates Robert with her ―grief-stricken face‖ (226), provides Robert with a new motivation to continue his detective work. In short, Robert‘s sensibility responds to the

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pathos of domestic melodrama carved in Clara‘s face. Robert is swayed ―in petticoat government‖ as he terms it (206). He shifts the agency in the investigation of Lucy‘s crimes onto Clara.

If the male characters‘ use of and imagination around the word ―misery‖ is melodramatic and restrictive, the same word carries more extensive and nuanced meanings such as power, sublimity, sense of isolation, guilt, treachery, and identity, when it is used in reference to Lucy‘s circumstances. By adding ontological implications to the word through her unique application of free indirect discourse and indirectly disparaging the male characters‘ simple melodramatic understanding of it, Braddon builds up the depth and dignity of Lucy as a character, through whom she explores the limits of what a working-class woman can achieve in terms of sexual freedom, mobility, and power. The first significant use of the word in relationship to Lucy occurs when Lucy attempts to accuse Robert of insanity in front of her husband, Sir Michael Audley.

The scene shows that using the word ―misery‖ in relation to Lucy generates a dramatic tension as

Lucy‘s intense feeling of wretchedness and her excellence in performance are interlocked.

Knowing that Robert secured the greatest piece of evidence that would prove her criminality,

Lucy is in a dire predicament and can no longer hide her desperate feelings. Therefore, Lucy loses control in her husband‘s presence and becomes disarmingly frank: ―A choking sensation in her throat seemed to strangle those false and plausible words, her only armour against her enemies‖ (283). Lucy‘s genuine feelings seem to filter through the term ―misery‖ in the following moment. However, as the use of the phrase ―seemed to‖ in the above quoted sentence reveals, the degree of focalization of the narrator through Lucy is ambiguous in the moment. The narrator moves in and out of Lucy‘s point of view and the internal focalization through Lucy is not really rigorous:

She could not speak. The agony she had endured silently in the dismal limewalk had

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grown too strong for her, and she broke into a tempest of hysterical sobbing. It was no

simulated grief that shook her slender frame, and tore at her like some ravenous beast that

would have rent her piece-meal with its horrible strength. It was a storm of real anguish

and terror, of remorse and misery. It was the one wild outcry, in which the woman‘s

feebler nature got the better of the syren‘s art. (283, my emphasis)

When the narrator says that the agony Lucy ―had endured silently in the dismal limewalk had grown too strong for her,‖ the narration is close to internal focalization. However, Braddon intentionally makes it unclear whether the narrator is accurately reading Lucy‘s mind or not when the narrator observes the outward expression of Lucy‘s intense feelings. On the whole, instead of enunciating Lucy‘s thoughts, the narrator articulates Lucy‘s unutterable feelings with simile and sound effects. Her immense grief is compared to ―some ravenous beast‖ and readers can almost hear a peal of ―real anguish and terror, of remorse and misery‖ conveyed through her

―hysterical sobbing.‖ If showing the outburst of Lucy‘s feelings instead of her artifice is a twist, it leads straight to another twist: the ―horrible strength‖ that would have torn Lucy apart rather saves her and instead makes her husband reel from shock.

While leaving it ambiguous at the above moment whether or not Lucy intentionally performed genuine expression of feelings, the narrator focuses on analyzing the influence of

Lucy‘s emotional outburst on Sir Michael Audley: ―perhaps no artifice which she could have devised would have served her so well as this one outburst of natural grief. It shook her husband to the very soul‖ (284). In the scene, the contrast between the unfathomable complexity of

Lucy‘s character and Sir Michael Audley‘s helplessness is well staged, and the narrator comments on Sir Michael Audley‘s folly from an omniscient perspective: ―Heaven pity him when the guilty creature has deceived him and comes with her tears and lamentations to throw

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herself at his feet in self-abandonment and remorse, torturing him with the sight of her agony, rending his heart with her sobs, lacerating his breast with her groans‖ (284). The narrator‘s scheme to unfold a subversive undertone of the term ―misery‖ begins to be acted out. Lucy is empowered with ―the sublimity of extreme misery‖ (276). In the continuity of scenes, Lucy, calmly recovered from the sobbing, sensibly charges Robert with madness.

That the narrator is not one hundred percent rigorous in internally focalizing the narration through Lucy reflects Braddon‘s self-consciousness as a middle-class writer and her hesitancy in adopting the point of view of Lucy to explore the author‘s own fantasy about freedom allocated for a working-class female character. That, in turn, makes readers endow Lucy with more interiority and sense of agency. Being self-conscious of her position as a middle-class author,

Braddon lets the narrator move between narrating the outward details of Lucy and narrating her thoughts and feelings via an internal focalization through her. Braddon‘s narrator‘s sophisticated gesture of keeping at a careful distance from Lucy is more obvious in the moments in which the narrator exposes herself with a first-person pronoun. In the scene upon which I focus, the narration moves into a non-focalized narrative while the narrator makes comments on Lucy‘s misery as a first-person omniscient observer. With such a complex positioning of her narration, the narrator carefully hints at the author‘s middle-class identity, which makes it necessary to question the legitimacy of the narrator‘s identification with Lucy:

I should be preaching a very stale sermon, and harping upon a very familiar moral, if I

were to seize this opportunity of declaiming against art and beauty, because my lady was

more wretched in this elegant apartment than many a half-starved sempstress in her

dreary garret. She was wretched by reason of a wound which lay too deep for the

possibility of any solace from such plasters as wealth and luxury; but her wretchedness

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was of an abnormal nature, and I can see no occasion for seizing upon the fact of her

misery as an argument in favour of poverty and discomfort as opposed to opulence. (295,

my emphasis)

―I,‖ the narrator, tries to avoid being a didactic middle-class author. However, while the narrator alludes to a peculiar situation of Lucy‘s misery that resists easy generalization, she situates Lucy in the luxurious apartment to be contrasted with a seamstress in ―her dreary garret‖ and dramatizes Lucy‘s wretchedness in the middle of domestic wealth. Although the narrator seems to spare herself and does not attempt an outright praise of the status of poverty as a relatively healthy alternative to excessive opulence, the narrator‘s weird sense of identification with Lucy and contempt of ―such plasters as wealth and luxury‖ can be discerned at the same time. Despite her carefulness, the narrator alludes to the author‘s identity as a middle-class female author who can easily sympathize with Lady Audley‘s disillusionment with the domestic comfort. In the subsequent comments, the narration gets closer to an internal focalization and attempts to discern what Lucy‘s misery entails: ―she had strayed far away into a desolate labyrinth of guilt and treachery, terror and crime‖ (296). Then, the narrator tells of Lucy‘s disillusionment with her luxurious possessions via internal focalization and almost shows Lucy escape the boudoir: ―all the treasures that had been collected for her could have given her no pleasure but one, the pleasure of flinging them into a heap beneath her feet, and trampling upon them and destroying them in her cruel despair‖ (296). By carefully adopting the point of disillusioned Lucy, Braddon, with self-consciousness, explores her own fantasy about a working-class woman‘s liberation from and empowerment outside of the domestic sphere.

The complicated sense of misery that Lucy inwardly feels begins to operate as a modifier

(―miserable‖) that Lucy employs to distinctively define her identity in front of others. For Lucy,

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calling herself a miserable woman engenders a particular sense of emancipation. After complaining about her wretchedness to Phoebe Marks, her former maid, by saying that she is

―wretchedly miserable,‖ Lucy immediately feels an unexpected gladness: ―She was glad to be able to complain even to this lady‘s-maid. She had brooded over her fears, and had suffered so long in secret, that it was an inexpressible relief to her to bemoan her fate aloud‖ (300). Lucy‘s awakening to the sense of emancipation then leads to her gesture of empowerment. Right in front of Phoebe, who came to meet Lucy being instigated by her husband, Luke Marks, to impose upon her and demand financial aid in exchange for keeping her secret, Lucy newly proclaims her identity as ―the most miserable of women‖ and plans out her moves while silencing ―Phoebe‘s consolatory murmurs‖ with ―an imperious gesture‖ (303). Rejecting Phoebe‘s sympathetic responses to her proclamation of identity, Lucy turns down a familiar sentimental framework for interpreting domestic misery. For Lucy, naming herself as ―the most miserable of women‖ is an empowering gesture that radically detaches herself from other women of all classes. She then scarcely listens to Phoebe‘s complaints about her husband—―these commonplace details‖ in

Lucy‘s terms—while she asks herself a question: ―Had she [Lucy] not her own terrors, her own soul-absorbing perplexities to usurp every thought of which her brain was capable?‖ (304). In these transformative moments during which Lucy newly defines herself as the most miserable woman, ―her horrible egotism of her own misery‖ (309) overpowers everything about and around her, so much so that she can no longer tolerate any facets of a commonplace domestic life, such as a chat with Phobe, which have defined her daily life so far.

Lucy‘s employment of the term ―misery‖ and ―miserable‖ in transformative manners is attended by physical signs of changes in her body, which attest to its power. Lucy‘s body becomes a location of empowerment, and the narrator closely observes the progress of

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empowerment either in a first-person observation mode or in a first-person omniscient mode.

While varying the narrative perspective from observation to omniscient narration, the narrator does not exactly adopt internal focalization in narrating Lucy‘s physical changes. Braddon‘s narrator does not identify herself with Lucy when it comes to Lucy‘s bodily experience.

Moreover, in tentatively withdrawing the omniscience of the narrative and only observing the changes in Lucy‘s body, Braddon yields up her authorial authority over Lucy‘s body and lets

Lucy autonomously engage with the power of it. For instance, making up her mind to burn

Castle Inn with the intention of killing Robert, her enemy, Lucy carefully equips herself for the nighttime walk to the Castle Inn. A series of dramatic changes happen in Lucy‘s body: ―Lady

Audley‘s face was no longer pale. An unnatural crimson spot burned in the centre of each rounded cheek, and an unnatural lustre gleamed in her great blue eyes. She spoke with an unnatural clearness, and an unnatural rapidity‖ (313). Unable to determine her body‘s mood and changes, the narrator can only describes her observations about Lucy‘s physical signs without explaining changes in her feelings. However, Braddon soon reasserts the omniscience of the narrative in the next moment by noting that Lucy‘s mind and body are unconscious of fatigue:

―The excitement which she was under held her in so strong a spell that neither her mind nor her body seemed to have any consciousness of fatigue‖ (314). Knowing Lucy‘s fatigue more than

Lucy, the narration gets close to non-focalized narrative. In another moment, when the narrator describes Lucy‘s involuntary action of twining her hair before the dressing table, a dash of omniscience blends in with the narrator‘s observation: ―My lady twined her fingers in her loose amber curls, and made as if she would have torn them from the head. But even in that moment of mute despair the unyielding dominion of beauty asserted itself, and she released the poor tangled glitter of ringlets, leaving them to make a halo round her head in the dim firelight‖ (297). The

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narrator keenly perceives how ―unyielding dominion of beauty‖ dictates Lucy‘s involuntary action, even in her great despair. However, the overall narrative point of view in the dressing table scene is an outside observation. Braddon‘s self-consciousness of the appropriation of the character of Lucy is most intricate in her fluctuation between her assertion and retraction of the narrative authority over Lucy‘s body. Thus, there‘s more room for Lucy‘s agency in the exploration of her body‘s power.

The narrator‘s careful retraction of the narrative authority over Lucy also appears in the scene in which her misery becomes the exact motivation for her arson attack on the Castle Inn.

The first-person narrator, ―I,‖ affirms her incompetency in recounting what Lucy thinks and suffers at the moment of her gritty determination:

However verbose I may be in my description of her feelings, I can never describe a tithe

of her thoughts or her sufferings. She suffered agonies that would fill closely printed

volumes, bulky with a thousand pages, in that one horrible night. She underwent volumes

of anguish, and doubt, and perplexity; sometimes repeating the same chapters of her

torments over and over again; sometimes hurrying through a thousand pages of her

misery without one pause, without one moment of breathing time. She stood by the low

fender in her boudoir, watching the minute hand of the clock, and waiting till it should be

time for her to leave the house in safety. (314, my emphasis)

To be more precise, the narrator oscillates between parading her omniscient knowledge of Lucy‘s sufferings and repudiating any sophomoric treatment of them. The narrator does know that

Lucy‘s agonies would ―fill closely printed volumes, bulky with a thousand pages.‖ However, the expression, ―a thousand pages of her misery,‖ also implies that comprehending every page of

Lucy‘s misery is almost impossible. The narrator‘s retraction of her epistemological power to

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fully describe Lucy‘s sufferings and what constructs all the pages of her misery makes Lucy‘s misery inviolable. By creating an inviolable aura around Lucy‘s misery, the narrator gives authority to Lucy‘s action based on it. However, although the narrator retracts from omniscience, she still describes the urgency and gravity of what is going through Lucy‘s mind. The narrator knows the speed at which Lucy is revisiting her book of misery. The narrator handles the scene in and out of internal focalization through Lucy, while grasping the dramatic tension between

Lucy‘s inward perturbation and the scene‘s quiet stillness. The pace in which Lucy hurries through ―a thousand pages of her misery‖ seems to prevent the infiltration of sentimentalism in her mind. Lucy‘s reminiscence about her past life is described with a sharp staccato touch: ―the old life, the old, hard, cruel, wretched life—the life of poverty, and humiliation, and vexation, and discontent‖ (316). The staccato mode of Lucy‘s thoughts is reflected in her steps: ―She walked with a firm and rapid step under the archway‖ (317). If the male characters‘ imagination of domestic misery restricted their radius of actions, Lucy‘s recollection of her misery contrastively fuels her energy to move and take actions.

Then, to what extent does the narrator side with Lucy and look positively on Lucy‘s mobile agency, which helps her to explore outside domesticity? To explore the question, I take note of the narrator‘s comment on Lucy‘s mobility. In the above-mentioned scene in which Lucy walks at night to Mount Stanning, the narrator says: ―Fragile and delicate as she was in appearance, she was a very good walker‖ (317). The simplicity of the sentence indicates the narrator‘s earnest approval of Lucy‘s physical vigor, in spite of her misleading outward frail look.

The sentence directly presents the superiority of Lucy‘s physical condition without a touch of criticism, irony, or sarcasm. It seems as though the narrator wants to make Lucy‘s superior mobility apparent to readers. In the next sentence, the narrator also writes: ―She had been in the

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habit of taking long country rambles with Mr. Dawson‘s children in her old days of dependence‖

(317). The narrator creates contrasting effects between Lucy‘s past economically dependent situation and her sustained efforts, throughout the situation, to train her own body by emphasizing how Lucy took long ―rambles‖ in her ―days of dependence.‖ In this regard, departing from the attitude of anxiety expressed by Robert over Lucy‘s mobility, the narrator positively presents how Lucy has exercised to acquire her present strong body. Lucy‘s strong body runs counter to the Victorian ideal of femininity which privileges fragility and delicacy. The coexistence of Lucy‘s apparent fragility and her physical stamina casts gender stereotypes into question.

Further on, the narrator presents Lucy‘s nighttime walking, which lasts about an hour, in an attempt to draw sympathy from the reader. Describing how steep the way to the Castle Inn is, the narrator attracts the reader‘s attention to Lucy‘s sense of urgency. Breaking the way through the darkness, Lucy walks with an uncommon courage born out of her misery: ―The way to

Mount Stanning was very hilly, and the long road looked black and dreary in the dark night; but my lady walked on with a desperate courage, which was no common constituent in her selfish, sensuous nature; but a strange faculty born out of her great despair‖ (317-18). While frankly acknowledging that Lucy has a ―selfish‖ and ―sensuous nature,‖ the narrator emphasizes Lucy‘s desperation. Lucy has determined to commit a crime to eliminate the threat of Robert, which would duly relegate her to a life of poverty and humiliation again. Overcoming herself, she is armed with ―defiance and determination‖ at the moment (316). What moves her ―with a firm and rapid step‖ to Mount Stanning is ―her great despair‖ (317). The narrator‘s description of the scene denotes the hint of sympathy the narrator feels towards Lucy at the impending moment of her crime. The narrator affirms Lucy‘s despair to be a real deal, which she should fight against.

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In this game, Lucy conquers herself by exerting her power to walk.

Throughout the narrative, the speed of thought and movement plays an important role in determining the winner of the battle between Lucy and Robert. The novel critiques middle-class male authorities by showing that Lucy‘s physical ability and understanding of the modern railway system surpass Robert‘s. Lucy competes with Robert over prompt timely movement to escape his dragnet or to forestall his investigation. Lucy defeats Robert in movement because of her agility and punctual reading of railway timetables across cities. Contextualizing Robert‘s railway travel within the arrival of capitalist modernity, Mathieson describes Robert‘s torpor in the railway to be ―his non-human status‖ ―incarcerated by the confining effects of new structures of modernity‖ (84). Lucy‘s mastery of the railway travel for her criminal purposes stands in a stark contrast to Robert‘s helplessness and reluctance. Considering the complexity of the contemporary railway timetables published in England and the difficulty that Victorian people experienced in accurate reading of them to take the pertinent train,21 Lucy is at the forefront of mobilizing the ability of modernistic time management for her own advantage. I contend that the incredible physical mobility in which Lucy engages to accomplish her purpose reflects her keen understanding of Victorian industrial society rapidly moving towards modernity which was built around the railway and also promoted a punctual conception of time as the time table of trains illustrated with their great influence on people‘s daily lives.

Moreover, Lucy demonstrates her mobility by taking trains to different places in England ahead of Robert to protect her secrets from him. Her agile movements undermine the Victorian industrial space division based on the separate-spheres ideology that marks the public sphere as masculine and confines women to the domestic sphere. Lucy‘s scope of mobility goes beyond

21 Regarding the fatigue and anxiety that the railway travel caused among the contemporaries of the nineteenth century, please refer to the article by Daniel Martin.

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that of public men and even anticipates the New Woman‘s appearance in city life and their gradual occupation of public roles. Lucy‘s use of public transportation threatens Robert‘s professional calmness and forces him out to enter into competition with her in the public sphere.

Contrasting Lucy‘s clever use of the railway travel to Robert‘s futile detective work, Martin also highlights how cunningly Lucy uses ―the railway‘s annihilation of spaces‖ to create her ―multiple identities‖ (140). Becoming a palimpsest, Lucy‘s body also starts to represent the movements of women in the period. Martin writes: ―He [Robert] may eventually be able to arrest Lady

Audley‘s movements, but her body itself functions as a synecdoche of a larger dispersal of mobile women riding the rails in search of upward mobility throughout the early to middle years of the Victorian era‖ (140). In After the Great Divide, Andreas Huyssen has shown interest in the pervasive notion which held ground during the nineteenth century that mass culture and the mass

(the common people in the public sphere) are associated with woman: ―The fear of the masses in this age of declining liberalism is always also a fear of woman, a fear of nature out of control, a fear of the unconscious, of sexuality, of the loss of identity and stable ego boundaries in the mass‖

(52). The novel represents what Huyssen conceptualized as ―the fear of woman‖ in Robert‘s fatiguing experiences of incessantly chasing Lucy via the railway travel. Against the anxieties that Robert undergoes, Lucy smoothly moves to different locations in England via railway, which allows her to take leave of her past miseries and to move behind the mass.

That Lucy improvises a performance of femininity for the purpose of deceiving others in the railway station demonstrates that the novel separates out the power of domestic woman from

Victorian living to complicate the sense of masculine order that heavily relies on female integrity at home. The following lines of Lucy to Robert when they meet at the London station, ―upon the platform at Shoreditch,‖ reveal how she conceals the real motivation of her visit to London—to

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snatch the letters Robert has secured for one of the clues against her—by pretending to be interested only in the consumption of luxury items and decoration: ―You will think me very foolish to travel upon such a day, without my dear darling‘s knowledge too; but I went up to town to settle a very terrific milliner‘s bill, which I did not wish my best of husbands to see; for indulgent as he is, he might think me extravagant; and I cannot bear to suffer even in his thoughts‖

(145). More particularly, Lucy disguises herself as a lady who acts according to the conventional

Victorian domestic woman‘s habit of complying with the opinions of her husband, while achieving her criminal goals by demonstrating her mobility in the public space. The moment of the above exchange is when Lucy has just arrived at the station and seated herself in a ―down- train for Colchester‖ (144) and ―the train moves as she spoke‖ (145). Lucy immediately assumes a role of a consumption-oriented woman when confronting Robert. Beneath the mask, Lucy is shrewd enough to take immediate action the moment she hears about the letters and she is defiant enough to bribe a blacksmith to sneak into Robert‘s room to get the letters.

The battle between Lucy and Robert comes to a climax at the Castle Inn at Mount

Stanning where Robert stays the night in order to excavate Lucy‘s secrets. Lucy executes a full- scale attack on Robert. The riskiness of Lucy‘s action increases—from bigamy to attempted murder—as she becomes acutely conscious of Robert‘s scrutiny of her past and his threat to reveal her secrets. If Robert relies on collecting more circumstantial evidence for his scrutiny,

Lucy accurately estimates her own physical strength needed for the execution of crime. In this section, I have analyzed how the pace of Lucy‘s thoughts about her misery created a series of transformative moments before Lucy decides to walk to Mount Stanning at night for the purpose of confronting Luke regarding the matter of money—the money Luke intends to extort from her as security for keeping her secret—and, more crucially, of putting Robert, her real enemy, at risk

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by arson. The scene of Lucy‘s walking towards Mount Stanning at midnight testifies to her incredible space perception and well-disciplined physical endurance. Lucy accurately estimates the time required for the arrival to the destination on foot by gauging the distance. It reflects her confidence in, and understanding of, her own physical ability:

―Now, Phoebe,‖ she said, ―it is three miles from here to Mount Stanning, isn‘t it?‖

―Yes, my lady.‖

―Then we can walk it in an hour.‖

Lady Audley had not stopped to say this: she was walking quickly along the avenue with

her humble companion by her side. Fragile and delicate as she was in appearance, she

was a very good walker. She had been in the habit of taking long country rambles with

Mr. Dawson‘s children in her old days of dependence, and she thought very little of a

distance of three miles. (317)

The narrator acknowledges Lucy‘s motive nerves and even defines her as ―a very good walker‖ despite her vulnerable body. That Lucy treats walking ―a distance of three miles‖ lightly indicates her lengthy training of her body while rambling outside with Mr. Dawson‘s children.

This fact implies how cleverly Lucy has utilized the time allocated to her, according to the discipline of the middle-class doctor‘s house, as a time for physical training. Lucy‘s stamina is grounded in her confidence in controlling the power of her body, which is expressed in her measurement of time needed for walking at her own tempo. Crucially, the mobile agency of

Lucy is channeled through her management of time and allows her to compete with Robert on equal footing.

In the rivalry with Lucy, Robert grows out of his frame of seeing a female as an object of protection and sympathy. After escaping from the threat of death caused by Lucy‘s arson attack

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at the Castle Inn, Robert confirms that he would no longer consider Lucy as a proper woman who is apt to arouse sympathy for her abnormal behavior. The following lines are Robert‘s declaration to Lucy:

After last night‘s deed of horror, there is no crime you could commit, however vast and

unnatural, which could make me wonder. Henceforth you must seem to me no longer a

woman; a guilty woman with a heart which in its worst wickedness has yet some latent

power to suffer and feel; I look upon you henceforth as the demoniac incarnation of some

evil principle. (345)

Robert‘s remark strips Lucy‘s mask of femininity off. Seeing through Lucy‘s power of execution, mobility, and criminality, he proclaims a full-scale war between them. Robert redefines Lucy‘s identity as ―the demoniac incarnation of some evil principle.‖ What Robert‘s redefinition of Lucy also signifies is that she, a working-class woman elevated to the upper-class by bigamy, transgresses the class/gender roles and the common principles of social behaviors. Robert‘s line,

―there is no crime you could commit, however vast and unnatural, which could make me wonder,‖ indicates his shock at the uncontrollability of Lucy‘s character. If Lucy‘s thorough understanding and performance of Victorian femininity have helped her in the competitive game with Robert so far, Lucy‘s demonstration of mobility through her nighttime walking, which signifies her radical throwing off the mask of Victorian femininity, and its significant criminal effects immensely perturb the beliefs of Robert.

In the following section, I explore how the term ―madness‖ is framed throughout the narrative as an extension of my investigation on how the novel empowers Lucy. In particular, I analyze how Lucy‘s interpretation of and storytelling around madness undermine the male authority of Robert, Sir Audley, and Dr. Mosgrave. In the framework established by Lucy‘s

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storytelling, the significance of Lucy‘s implementation of her actions is magnified against the undervalued male authority.

―Madness‖ and Storytelling

In this section, I contend that Lucy‘s deliberate uses of the term ―madness‖ to frame her life story beat the male characters‘ rigid understanding of madness. Lucy gives a new definition to madness by contrasting it with her agency in overcoming misery. When Lucy accuses Robert of monomania by interpreting the term ―madness‖ as a state of inaction, she undermines the male legal authority represented by the amateur lawyer Robert, whose suspension of judgment brings

Lucy some time to plan further actions. Lucy‘s interpretation of madness as a state of inaction resonates with the narrator‘s very first use of the term ―madness‖ as an indicator of passiveness against Lucy‘s rational decision to accept Sir Michael Audley‘s proposal to save her from a life of extreme poverty. When Lucy constructs her confession of crimes around the discourse of madness, the narrator rather seems to question the incompetent male professionals who too easily buy into Lucy‘s storytelling and make their professional judgments under the pretext of Lucy‘s argument. I argue that the narrator is sympathetic to the way Lucy frames the term ―madness‖ in her story. The key to gauging the narrator‘s tone is seeing how the narrator introduces the topic of madness in relation to Lucy. As the plot develops, the apparent alibi for Lucy‘s crimes is her latent madness (as Lucy insists). However, the narrator reveals the opposite; the narrator demonstrates to the readers how Lucy is desperate and sane enough to treat insanity as an alibi and how her sanity empowers her with a sharp wit to escape more severe punishment. I explore how the narrator‘s sympathetic view towards Lucy‘s creative applications of the term ―madness‖

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let readers see more clearly where Braddon‘s real criticism is directed.

Going back to the scene of Sir Michael Audrey‘s marriage proposal, when the word

―madness‖ first appears in the narrative, helps to reveal the narrator‘s view of Lucy. The major crime of Lucy that runs through the plot, causing a series of her other crimes, is her bigamy, which is presented at the start of the novel. Lucy accepts Sir Michael Audley‘s proposal of marriage, hiding the fact that she has already married George and has a son by him. Lucy wins

Sir Michael‘s favor while she works as a governess for Mr. Dawson, a local doctor, and whose patient is Sir Michael. However, the narrator represents the moment of her acceptance of marriage as a memorably painful one. Lucy gives the following speech the moment Sir Michael proposes marriage to her. Expressing her interest in his marriage proposal by arguing that it is impossible to be ―disinterested‖ in it, Lucy‘s words indicate her distress:

My mother—But do not let me speak of her. Poverty, poverty, trials, vexations,

humiliations, deprivations! You cannot tell; you, who are amongst those for whom life is

so smooth and easy; you can never guess what is endured by such as we. Do not ask too

much of me, then. I cannot be disinterested; I cannot be blind to the advantages of such

an alliance. I cannot, I cannot! (10-11).

Lucy does not seem to be flattered or pleased at all at the moment. At the occasion of accepting their union in marriage, Lucy puts a socio-economic distance between them by comparing Sir

Michael‘s financial circumstances and her former life. What is implied in Lucy‘s stress on ―what is endured by such as we‖ is her strong sense of bonding with her mother. From Lucy‘s perspective, her mother is almost a synonym for ―poverty,‖ ―trials,‖ ―vexation,‖ ―humiliations,‖ and ―deprivations.‖ Through her strong sense of connectedness, those words also indicate Lucy‘s own fear of extreme poverty and of what it brings about. The social difference between Sir

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Michael and Lucy stands out remarkably at the moment. Also very interestingly, at the moment of accepting Sir Michael‘s proposal of marriage, Lucy is crouching down before him, subverting the conventional picture that men kneel before women: ―She was still on the ground at his feet, crouching rather than kneeling, her thin white dress clinging about her, her pale hair streaming over her shoulders, her great blue eyes glittering in the dusk, and her hands clutching at the black ribbon about her throat, as if it had been strangling her‖ (11). By casting Lucy in such a self- humiliating and agonizing position at the very first scene of her criminality, the narrator induces the reader to be more curious and sympathetic about Lucy‘s situation.

The sympathetic framework the narrator casts around Lucy‘s choice of bigamy from the very beginning of the novel becomes strengthened when the narrator focalizes on Lucy‘s confession of madness at the end of the novel. Narrowly escaping the fire at the Castle Inn and coming back alive, Robert menaces Lucy one final time. Realizing how far Lucy could go in terms of her crime, Robert finally decides to execute punishment on the nation‘s side. Namely, he chooses society‘s well-being over the honor of his family. Maintaining his family‘s impeccable patrician prestige, he yields to the seriousness of Lucy‘s criminality. However, the immediate response of Lucy to Robert‘s above-mentioned menace is to declare her madness in person for the first time, which is her ultimate secret: ―You have conquered—a MADWOMAN!‖ (345).

Due to the power of such declaration, when a moment of inevitable confession has arrived, Lucy is depicted as a helpless victim rather than as a perpetrator. The narrator actually stages Lucy as a casualty. In this regard, noticeably, Lucy takes the very similar posture of having fallen on her knees as shown above when she finally gets to confess her secrets and crimes before Sir Audley.

Affected by Lucy‘s kneeling posture, Sir Audley intensely concentrates on her story:

When first my lady had fallen on her knees, Sir Michael had attempted to raise her, and

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had remonstrated with her; but as she spoke he dropped into a chair close to the spot upon

which she knelt, and with his hands clasped together, and with his head bent to catch

every syllable of those horrible words, he listened as if his whole being had been resolved

into that one sense of hearing. (347)

Before the actual confession of Lucy is delivered, Lucy can draw Sir Michael‘s attention and sympathetic attitude by just assuming a submissive posture. ―Every syllable‖ of Lucy‘s words is empowered with meaning through Sir Michael‘s presence melted into ―one sense of hearing.‖

With such mise-en-scène, the narrator paradoxically authorizes Lucy to tell her own story.

Authorizing Lucy to narrate her own history and letting her ensure that Sir Michael would be her faithful listener, the narrator passes Lucy the initiative to construct her own confession without any interruption from Robert. Lucy‘s confession of madness intervenes in the judgmental moment at the Audley Court and causes confusion in Sir Michael‘s judgment.

Moreover, the narrator‘s sympathetic depiction of Lucy‘s desperateness follows the internal focalization on how Lucy frames her life story around the term ―madness‖ to counterattack male authority. Lucy‘s confession revolves around the theme of madness. Lucy‘s appropriation of the professional terms of madness ironically attests to her sanity rather than shows her potential madness. The main motive for her transgressions was her madness according to Lucy‘s framework of her own story. This shows that Lucy exactly understands this mechanism and uses it for her own interest, namely as an excuse for defending her crimes. Lucy assumes that she has potential madness, which she inherits from her mother. To Sir Michael Audley, she confesses that ―the only inheritance I [She] had to expect from my mother was—insanity‖ (350).

Throughout her confession to Sir Michael and Robert, Lucy presents her madness as a legitimate explanation for her fraudulent act. At the same time, Lucy uses her madness as a weapon to

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assault men. After being brought to a mad house in a remote Belgian region, to ―a living grave‖

(391), as Lucy terms it, Lucy finally tells Robert how she pushed George into the old well at

Audley Court. She accuses both George and Robert of being unsympathetic about her madness:

―He [George] did not know the hidden taint that I had sucked in with my mother‘s milk. He did not know that it was possible to drive me mad. He goaded me as you [Robert] have goaded me; he was as merciless as you have been merciless‖ (393). According to Lucy, being ignorant of her potential madness and being ―merciless‖ with her were the men‘s faults, because of which she was forced to commit crimes. Interestingly, though, Lucy‘s narrative revolving around her madness is expressed in acutely logical words. She is even sensible of Robert‘s measures against her. After her final confession of the attempted murder of George, Lucy states:

―You see I do not fear to make my confession to you,‖ said Helen Talboys, ―for two

reasons. The first is that you dare not use it against me, because you know it would kill

your uncle to see me in a criminal dock; the second is, that law could pronounce no worse

sentence than this, a life-long imprisonment in a mad-house. You see I do not thank you

for your mercy, Mr. Robert Audley, for I know exactly what it is worth.‖ (394)

Lucy perceives Robert‘s fear of distressing Sir Michael and, more importantly, understands how the legal system works: the law can only sentence her to ―a life-long imprisonment in a madhouse.‖ By showing that Lucy confesses her story of madness in her senses and she mockingly exploits the legal system concerning madness, the narrator questions the validity of the law, which overlooks social and economic circumstances of each individual criminal and applies a uniform discourse of madness to punish criminals and cover the real social injustices behind the scene.

Details of Lucy‘s circumstances offer abundant sources of contention in terms of class,

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gender, economic conditions of England, and question of human rights. Lucy was first deserted by her mother and then by her first husband George. George also deserted his baby who was sleeping in Lucy‘s arms. Although George goes to prospect gold in Australia, it is still an impetuous decision. Afterwards, believing that Lucy has died, George deserts his child one more time. George confesses to Robert: ―I shall be better in the diggings or the backwoods than ever I could be here. I‘m broken for a civilized life from this hour, Bob‖ (45). George, Lucy‘s former husband, abandons a civilized life in England and forsakes his child. However, the male characters including Robert strategically ignore such details while highlighting the importance of drumming Lucy out of the Audley Court and recovering the ostensible domestic order. Matus effectually summarizes how Lucy‘s social circumstances are subsumed under the problem of madness: ―What is outside, a matter of economic stress and social need, is inscribed and represented as inside, a deviant and disruptive force within the unacceptable woman that wreaks havoc on traditional stabilities and pieties‖ (336). My point is that, through free indirect speech, the novel paradoxically empowers Lucy through Lucy‘s line of reasoning behind her crimes and her justification based on her ―madness" as it does through her creative application of the term

―misery.‖

By featuring the narrator‘s sympathetic treatment of Lucy‘s confession framed around the term ―madness,‖ Braddon also problematizes the legal authorities who disregard the real circumstances surrounding a deviant individual. The final decision of confining Lucy in a

Belgian asylum is ordained by Dr. Mosgrave, who diagnoses Lucy‘s potential madness. However, his medical decision is not really a professional diagnosis but rather a result of Robert‘s belief in

Lucy‘s testimony of her madness—or, more precisely, her testimony of having a potential hereditary madness. Lucy offers a justification for Robert to apply legal limitations on her. The

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novel represents the process through which the diagnosis of madness is performed and then is used as a legal cause. In this process, particular issues of Lucy‘s former home environment and economic problems are conveniently obliterated. Also, the more complicated issues of class and gender, which have not been entirely resolved under Lucy‘s newly gained status as an upper- class Victorian lady, are again ignored: Lucy becomes just a mad woman to be dismissed from the Victorian society. Lucy‘s storytelling around ―madness‖ operates under this mechanism.

While denouncing the policing system that relied upon the incorrect diagnosis of madness, the narrator also sides with Lucy by expanding the symptom of madness onto Robert and, more profoundly, implying that Lucy fights to save her sanity in the most extreme situations. Indeed,

Lucy cleverly uses the ambiguous standard for diagnosing one‘s madness for her benefit, in defense of her crimes. The narrator also makes comments on how arbitrary the border line that divides sanity and insanity could be at several moments. For instance, the narrator directly asks in her first-person voice: ―Who has not been, or is not to be, mad in some lonely hour of life?

Who is quite safe from the trembling of the balance?‖ (404). Inserting such a comment in the narrative, the narrator seems to gesture towards a defense of Lucy‘s crimes, which are reasonably explained as a by-product of madness. However, more importantly, considering that the situations Lucy undergoes in the narrative are miserable enough to drive a normal person crazy,

Lucy‘s sensible explanation at the end attests to her strong mind in extreme situations. In this regard, the following comments of the narrator on Robert‘s insecure mentality have an effect of contrasting Lucy‘s strong mentality against the vulnerable mindset of Robert, an accuser of Lucy and a legal representative of the local authority: ―Do not laugh at poor Robert because he grew hypochondriacal, after hearing the horrible story of his friend‘s death. There is nothing so delicate, so fragile, as that invisible balance upon which the mind is always trembling. Mad to-

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day and sane to-morrow‖ (403). The tone of the narrator at the moment is ironical and mocking at the same time. Although the narrator asks the reader not to laugh at poor Robert, it is implied that Robert is sensitive enough to easily get ―hypochondriacal.‖ Also, the narrator emphasizes that the ―invisible balance upon which the mind is always trembling‖ is incomparably ―delicate‖ and ―fragile.‖ The distinction between madness and sanity seems almost meaningless according to the narrator‘s understanding. Again, such universalizing discourse of madness enfeebles the legal and policing systems, which are influenced by madness screening. A legal executor, Robert, is in frequent danger of losing his sanity throughout his detective journey.

Under the universality of madness proposed by the narrator, Braddon stages how appropriating the diagnosis of madness in advance is the key to the game between the hunted and the hunter. The person who effectively exploits the diagnosis of madness as a useful frame to endanger the other party is expected to win the game. In other words, the second round of the battle between Robert and Lucy revolves around accusing each other of madness. Through the second round of the battle between them, it becomes explicit that the term ―madness‖ functions as a superficial tool to accuse one‘s foe of a performative irresponsibility without involving medical substance or the stern realities of the criminal‘s life. Robert first uses the term ―mad‖ as a description of his astonishment towards her actions and to criticize Lucy‘s crimes. At this point, he is unaware of what Lucy will bring forward as a coup de grace: her mother‘s madness and her hereditary madness. Then, beyond the context of the dialogue between the two concerned parties,

Lucy accuses Robert of symptoms of madness in front of Sir Audley. By this action, Lucy attempts to take the initiative before Robert‘s revelation of her crimes to his uncle. Then, when the real threat comes from Robert, Lucy confesses her mother‘s madness and her own potential hereditary madness as though they are a fact in front of both Robert and Sir Audley. At this

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moment, the narrator pays attention to the way Lucy stages her madness as a legitimate excuse for her crimes. Furthermore, Lucy‘s official confession before the two men provides a just cause for her confinement. The confinement of Lucy is presented as an alternative to a court appearance for Lucy. Presenting this series of processes through which Lucy‘s madness is confirmed and used as a legal excuse, the novel undermines the validity of the government power of policing, which very much depends upon the judgment of law and medicine. In the strict sense, Robert and Dr. Mosgrave, who respectively represent law and medicine, do not decide the punishment of Lucy according to their own discretion. They rely on the pretext offered by Lucy: her potential madness. Although the decision is made in a professional setting, the state-driven control of crimes loses its power in the novel. In this context, the decision of

Robert to ―appeal to the experience of Dr. Mosgrave‖ does not guarantee reliability, and Robert‘s,

―physicians and lawyers are the confessors of this prosaic nineteenth century‖ (374), sounds rather ironical. A physician like Dr. Mosgrave and a lawyer like Robert himself are flashy yet fragile confessors who are swayed by and are under control of the confession of a criminal like

Lucy. The novel is only explicit about the madness of Lucy‘s mother and it maintains an ambiguous attitude towards the reality of Lucy‘s potential madness. Lucy‘s madness is prescribed as a potential one until the end of the novel.

In the novel, in which only the madness of Lucy‘s mother is presented as a reliable fact, the internal focalization of the stream of Lucy‘s thoughts demonstrates her mastery of the masculine discourse surrounding madness. The narrator‘s comments on the arbitrariness of madness mentioned above resonate with Lucy‘s thoughts below, and they sound reasonable:

―Why should he [Robert] not be mad?‖ resumed my lady. ―People are insane for years

and years before their insanity is found out. They know that they are mad, but they know

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how to keep their secret; and, perhaps they may sometimes keep it till they die.

Sometimes a paroxysm seizes them, and in an evil hour they betray themselves. They

commit a crime, perhaps. The horrible temptation of opportunity assails them, the knife is

in their hand, and the unconscious victim by their side. They may conquer the restless

demon and go away, and die innocent of any violent deed; but they may yield to the

horrible temptation—the frightful, passionate, hungry craving for violence and horror.

They sometimes yield, and are lost.‖ (286-287)

The thoughts of Lucy are internally focalized as though they are Lucy‘s monologue. The beginning of her monologue is to assume that Robert should be mad. However, interestingly, the flow of thoughts is possible to be read as Lucy‘s self-reflective comments on her own actions.

Lucy generalizes her own acts of keeping secrets and committing crimes: ―People are insane for years and years before their insanity is found out,‖ ―Sometimes a paroxysm seizes them, and in an evil hour they betray themselves. They commit a crime, perhaps.‖ As her reflection on the possibility of Robert‘s madness is conveyed in such a generalizing language, which even neutralizes the seriousness of Lucy‘s crimes, it acquires a patina of legitimacy. By inserting such a resonating moment in the narration, the narrator shows that it takes side with Lucy22.

Lucy‘s definition of the kind of madness that Robert has as ―monomania‖ incisively points out the status of inaction prevalent among the Victorian men featured in the novel. It‘s not just Robert but Sir Michael Audley and Dr. Mosgrave whose intellectual abilities are stagnant

22 In a larger frame, the insight Lucy shows in the quotation is reflected throughout the text. Namely, the symptoms of madness that Lucy mentions in the passage such as ―violence and horror,‖ are observed in different male characters in the novel. For instance, George‘s impetuous and violent nature is displayed in his abrupt outburst of anger towards Lucy when he first encounters her after coming back to England at the Audley Court. His violent action leaves a scar on Lucy‘s wrist: ―It was not one bruise, but four slender, purple marks, such as might have been made by the four fingers of a powerful hand that had grasped the delicate wrist a shade too roughly‖ (88). The novel testifies that the violent outburst of madness can be tracked down in any person as the above thoughts of Lucy aptly considers.

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enough to transfer their judgments to the pretext offered in Lucy‘s storytelling. Lucy ponders the details of Robert‘s mentality:

―Robert Audley is mad,‖ she said, decisively. ―What is one of the strongest diagnostics of

madness—what is the first appalling sign of mental aberration? The mind becomes

stationary; the brain stagnates; the even current of the mind is interrupted; the thinking

power of the brain resolves itself into a monotone. As the waters of a tideless pool putrefy

by reason of their stagnation, the mind becomes turbid and corrupt through lack of action;

and perpetual reflection upon one subject resolves itself into monomania. Robert Audley

is a monomaniac‖. (287)

The above process of deduction by which Lucy arrives at the hoped-for conclusion that Robert is mad ironically proves that ―the strongest diagnostics of madness,‖ if applied to diagnose herself, does not draw conclusive proof of Lucy‘s madness. Lucy‘s mind never ―becomes stationary‖ and her brain never ―stagnates.‖ The symptom of mental illness that Lucy figures out in the above passage is dullness of intelligence and ―lack of action.‖ Lucy has never lacked action throughout the narration. While Lucy‘s conclusion that ―Robert Audley is a monomaniac‖ sounds utterly reasonable in itself, it is surprising to observe that Lucy assumes the authority of an expert in diagnosing an unreliability of male professional‘s integrity and intelligence. At the same time,

Lucy‘s diagnosis adds value to her series of actions that have been triggered by her lively sense of misery. In short, Braddon juxtaposes Lucy‘s creative application of the term ―misery‖ for her criminal purposes with her professional mastery of what the term ―madness‖ signifies to explore the working-class woman‘s mobile agency over impotent male professionals.

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Conclusion

I contend that Braddon deploys a fantasy of working-class women through Lucy. The novel‘s narrative techniques around its applications of the terms ―misery‖ and ―madness,‖ particularly the narrator‘s frequent disavowal of the narrative authority, complicate the appropriative gesture of the author. Alongside the withdrawal of the omniscient perspective, the narrator shows that Lucy‘s journey of empowerment as an individual is mapped onto her creative reinterpretation of her miserable situations and demonstration of mobility. Meanwhile, the narrator‘s sympathetic framing of Lucy‘s confession of ―madness‖ and its internal focalization on how Lucy contemplates the theme of ―madness‖ attest to the novel‘s interest in problematizing the legal discourses in which specific conditions of deviant women is ignored and madness is used as an excuse to punish them.

My exploration of the uses of the words ―misery‖ and ―madness‖ rereads the novel as a strong feminist narrative despite its conventional ending. Although Robert realizes his dream of

―a fairy cottage‖ with Clara in the end, ―Audley Court is shut up‖ and Sir Michael Audley ―has no fancy to return to the familiar dwelling-place in which he once dreamed a brief dream of impossible happiness‖ (445-446). Maintaining a peaceful domestic life is heavily intertwined with a destruction of another domestic life. In this regard, reading irony into Braddon‘s last comment, ―I hope no one will take objection to my story because the end of it leaves the good people all happy and at peace‖ (446-447), is compelling. At a first glance, the statement seems to simply defend her choice of ending the story with a happy ending. However, a close reading of the sentence reveals an ironic undertone. I contend that the sentence asks readers to appreciate the main contents of the story despite its conventional ending.

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5. TESS‘S ―MISERY‖ AND A MARK OF INDIVIDUALITY IN TESS OF THE

D’URBERVILLES

Introduction

In the previous chapter, I contended that Lucy is empowered to stand up against male authority in a set of transformative moments built around the narrative uses of the terms ―misery‖ and ―madness.‖ In this chapter, I will examine how Hardy‘s narrator deploys the term ―misery‖ in indicating Tess‘s exceptional mental liberty to distinguish between her individuality and socially recognized status—a miserable woman—in Tess of the d’Urbervilles: A Pure Woman

Faithfully Presented (1892). Detaching her individuality from her status of misery and learning to objectify the status, Tess even becomes mature enough to contemplate Angel‘s misery, which she believes that he inherits from her. Tess goes beyond her confined unhappiness and seeks to put an end to Angel‘s misery by killing Alec. Through my close reading of the scenes where the term ―misery‖ is associated with Angel in Tess‘s speech, I contend that Tess‘s voluntary embracement of Angel‘s misery culminates in her achievement of mental independence from her own miserable status. She reframes her story of seduction and unwanted pregnancy from her own perspective. Keeping aloof from her miserable image created while being mindful of others,

Tess rewrites the story of her body. Building upon my close reading of a set of transformative moments when Tess detaches herself from the term ―misery,‖ I argue that Tess of the d’Urbervilles is a feminist text where Hardy‘s narrator, who represents a middle-class male author Hardy himself, keeps a critical distance from the middle-class male characters and explores the possibility for an alternative liberal individuality based on a working-class woman‘s

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body. Hardy‘s narrator names Tess‘s sense of maturity ―her mental harvest‖ (140) and contrasts it with the self-deceptive positions that the middle-class male characters including Angel and Alec fall under despite benefiting from a humanities education and being followers of the Christian faith.

In assessing Tess‘s achievement of her own individuality distinguished from the portrait of her drawn by the male characters, I refer to how Elaine Hadley evinces the frame of mind of

Victorian liberal individuals in Living Liberalism: Practical Citizenship in Mid-Victorian Britain

(2010). I argue that Hadley‘s groundbreaking insight into mid-Victorian liberalism is still valid in reading the aesthetic culture of the late-Victorian period and provides a reliable frame to read

Hardy‘s exploration of Tess‘s mental liberty that notably marks her as an independent thinker.

However, while Hadley locates mid-Victorian liberal individuality in abstracted middle-class male bodies and their disinterested pursuit of the liberal arts, I contend that Hardy explores the feasibility of liberal individualism through a working-class woman‘s questioning of her miserable status and her various walking activities associated with labor. Hardy revisits the notion of Victorian liberal individualism from a working-class woman‘s perspective rooted in her physical stamina. This can overcome the limit of defining liberalism based on citizenship and voting rights. Tess is aware and mindful of the environment while she walks, and her cognitive ability cultivated during her walks is in contrast to Angel‘s failure to recognize particularities around him as a result of his infatuation with arts and reading. Tess remembers the topographical features of the landscape and recognizes the patters of the roads in which she walks. For instance, she knows ―every contour of the surrounding hills was as personal to her as that of her relatives‘ faces‖ (47) in the Vale of Blackmore. Tess‘s mindfulness of the space around her and sensitivity to the rhythm of nature are the basis of her growing agency. Imagining a nook with no personal

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spatial memories and observing how recuperative power ordains the course of nature during her walks, Tess cultivates agency to reformulate the real value of virginity on her own. She questions and concludes: ―Was once lost always lost really true of chastity? She would ask herself. She might prove it false if she could veil bygones. The recuperative power which pervaded organic nature was surely not denied to maidenhood alone‖ (112). The language that describes Tess‘s mental restoration resonates with the sense of the law of nature: ―some spirit within her rose automatically as the sap in the twigs‖ (113). She also restores her mental dignity by thinking through a new career opportunity during her solitary moments of walking.

Once Tess begins to objectify her misery, she has agency over it. If the term ―misery‖ first of all signifies a sexual fall for Ruth in Ruth, a physical burden for Hetty in Adam Bede and a motivation for the series of criminal actions for Lucy in Lady Audley’s Secret, it becomes a cogitable object for Tess. As a cogitable object, the term ―misery‖ becomes more closely related with Angel in Tess‘s speech. Tess objectifies the term, detaches herself from it, and sympathizes with Angel when he suffers from misery, which Tess attributes to her past with Alec. While Tess detaches herself from what the term ―misery‖ socially signifies and defines about her, she becomes more sensitive to how others can suffer from misery. Tess‘s body, which is stigmatized with the loss of virginity and unexpected pregnancy, paradoxically becomes a location for her discovery of agency over her suffering during her walks. I contend that Tess‘s repetitive nighttime walks and various forms of walking activities set the stage for her gradual mastery of the skills to cognitively objectify her misery and detach herself from the notorious public eye.

Developing a cognitive ability, Tess feels her way toward a viewpoint to reframe a story of rape inscribed in her body by Alec and liberate her body from a disgraceful slavery to her seducer.

Tess‘s liberal idea proceeds to a real action when she kills her rapist, Alec, and she accepts the

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complete liability of the action. I contend that Tess‘s accumulated experience of solitary walking and parallel cultivation of cognitive power to objectify her status and form an independent opinion of it form the basis of her alternative liberal individuality, which imparts a new meaning to what the body performs in accordance with one‘s opinion. While Tess‘s allegiance to Angel to the end parodies the emotional qualities of respective domestic women, it crucially contributes both to liberating her body from the humiliating servitude to her seducer through the murder and to releasing Angel from his sense of misery.

I argue that Tess‘s idea of liberalism stands in stark contrast to the way Angel pursues liberalism. Angel‘s infatuation with liberal arts imprisons him in excessive preoccupation with his own principles. His principles become as doctrinaire as church dogma. For instance, in response to Tess‘s protestation that she thought she was ―not respectable enough, long ago—and on that account‖ she didn‘t want to marry him despite his urging her to marry him, Angel says in

―an ebullition of bitterness against womankind in general‖: ―It isn‘t a question of respectability, but one of principle‖ (260-61). To contextualize the way Angel pursues liberalism, I refer to

Hadley‘s reading of Anthony Trollope‘s The Warden (1855) in juxtaposition with John Stuart

Mill‘s Autobiography (1873). Hadley focuses on Harding‘s love of sacred music, Mill‘s reading of Wordsworth, and Arnold‘s perusal of great canonical works of literature as pathways to differentiate themselves and attain liberal individuality. I argue that Angel‘s study of liberal arts is an extension of these mid-Victorian men‘s pursuit of liberal individualism. Critiquing the abstractedness and exclusive nature of these cultural habits as the legitimate pathway to liberal individualism, I pay attention to Tess‘s walking activities, which are in counterpoint to these middle-class male bodies‘ immersion in cultural practices that lack the body‘s real engagement with the world.

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The novel‘s narrative voice has been considered as male due to its intensely sensual tone when it describes Tess by many critics of Hardy. If the male narrator‘s repeated fascination with

Tess‘s physical attractiveness duplicates those of Alec and Angel to a certain degree, Hardy also keeps the vision of the male narrator distanced from Tess‘s body at significant moments. As

Penny Boumelha points out, ―the novel withholds narrative access‖ and ―Tess is either asleep or withdrawn into her own inner world‖ during such important moments as the rape scene and when her body is snatched away by the police from Stonehenge in the end (20). Boumelha argues that, by inserting the moments of Tess‘s unconsciousness, "the novel permits its heroine a degree of resistance to the otherwise pervasive physical and psychological display through which she is constructed‖ (20). Boumelha offers an insight into the way Hardy deploys the narrative voice in the novel. I contend that Hardy creates a male narrator who ironically stands a certain distance apart from his own authorial perspective. Hardy presents a male narrator with a self- consciousness of his gaze towards Tess which is not so much free from the conventional male perspective towards a working-class woman with a comely face like Tess. Furthermore, the male narrator points out the violence embedded in Angel Clare‘s idolization of Tess and in Alec‘s sexual objectification of Tess‘s body at the same time. Although the male narrator assumes a similar type of aspiring gazes that the other male characters have towards Tess23, he more often penetrates the conventionality and violence embedded in their gazes and sharply perceives Tess‘s

23 For instance, the eyes of the male narrator naturally overlap with Angel‘s in the below passage:

How very lovable her face was to him. Yet there was nothing ethereal about it: all was real vitality, real warmth, real incarnation. And it was in her mouth that this culminated. Eyes almost as deep and speaking he had seen before, and cheeks perhaps as fair; brows as arched, a chin and throat almost as shapely; her mouth he had seen nothing to equal on the face of the earth. To a young man with the least fire in him that little upward lift in the middle of her read top lip was distracting, infatuating, maddening. He had never before seen a woman‘s lips and teeth which forced upon his mind, with such persistent iteration, the old Elizabethan simile of roses filled with snow. (165)

Such a phrase as ―to a young man with the least fire in him‖ advocates Angel and the narrator himself.

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uniqueness which becomes much more nuanced through a series of trials and her solitary meditations. To specify, the male narrator keeps separating Tess‘s identity from her sinful past in tandem with Tess‘s own mental enlightenment. Pointing out Angel‘s limited understanding of

Tess, after the couple‘s separation due to a revelation of Tess‘s past, the narrator writes: ―her moral value having to be reckoned not by achievement but by tendency‖ (284). Following such a nuanced voice of the narrator, I distinguish the male narrator‘s sharp reading of Tess‘s unique power of imagination from Angel‘s self-centered idolization of Tess based on his own ideal type.

I will examine how the male narrator endows significance in Tess‘s perspectives, which are often divergent and unconventional, through the intricately designed moments of internal focalization on Tess when the narrator‘s idea conforms to Tess‘s thoughts.

What is really at stake behind Tess‘s murder of Alec is the reclamation of agency over her body, the concrete location of her individuality. Tess develops the power to reframe her narrative over the story forcefully inscribed on her body by Alec and even by Angel. Tess fights against their inveterate impulse to generalize the body of women. According to David Wayne Thomas‘s explanation in Cultivating Victorians: Liberal Culture and the Aesthetic (2004), in which he rethinks Victorian liberal values in relation with other public projects such as social amelioration, liberalism has been criticized as a liberal agent‘s ―unduly abstracting subscription of agency to universalizing moral perspectives‖ (14). I argue that Hardy‘s exploration of liberal individualism runs counter to the general understanding of the liberal agent‘s abstraction in universal moral views, as exemplified by Angel, and seeks particularity based on each individual agent‘s body.

Tess‘s imaginary capability to hear the discrete voices of the natural objects during her walk, which Angel is completely unaware of, is a meaningful example of their different incarnations of

Victorian liberal individualism. Through walking alone at night, Tess learns how to inscribe an

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authentic feature both to the surroundings and to her body beyond the cultural imperatives of the universal moral law.

The scene where the expression, ―touch of rarity,‖ appears to describe Tess is worth a close reading as it lays out the discrepancy between Tess and Angel in their way of viewing things. While Tess is free from intransigence and embraces changes and particularities, Angel is more accustomed to basing his conclusion on generalizations. It appears when Angel first stumbles on Tess in the garden late at night. Their dialogue, for the first time, touches upon an innermost feeling of fear in Tess—a fundamental fear or awe of life. Upon Angel‘s request to articulate the reason for her fear—more practically, to tell him the reason for her night rambling and furtive gestures, Tess volubly murmurs:

She thought that he meant what were the aspects of things to her, and replied shyly: ―The

trees have inquisitive eyes, haven‘t they?—that is, seem as if they had. And the river says

‗Why do ye trouble me with your looks?‘ And you seem to see numbers of to-morrows

just all in a line, the first of them the biggest and clearest, the others getting smaller and

smaller as they stand further away; but they all seem very fierce and cruel and as if they

said, ―I‘m coming! Beware of me! Beware of me!...But you, sir, can raise up dreams with

your music, and drive all such horrid fancies away!‖ (140)

Tess revivifies the natural objects surrounding her with her imaginative personification: the trees have expressive eyes and the river whispers to her with sympathy. However, while Tess reads her fear into them, she simultaneously discovers a detached view in the trees and the river. They have their own particular thoughts and voices. She does not simply romanticize them according to her feeling but even proceeds to contemplate the passage of history reflected in the course of nature. To Angel‘s surprise, her imaginative power establishes a link between her innermost fear

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and the fearful sentiment at the fin de siècle inscribed in natural objects. As the narration notes in the below passage, Angel discovers Tess‘ rarity in her sense of grand imagination:

He was surprised to find this young woman—who though but a milkmaid had just that

touch of rarity about her which might make her the envied of her housemates—shaping

such sad imaginings. She was expressing in her own native phrases—assisted a little by

her sixth-standard training—feelings which might almost have been called those of the

age—the ache of modernism. (140, my emphasis)

Through her articulation, Tess reframes her inner fear away from the Victorian moral casting which brands her as a miserable woman with a history of being raped, pregnant, and giving birth, and proceeds to shape her sentiment according to a collective dread of the immediate age.

However, while Angel is awestruck by Tess‘s extraordinary sensibility, he is still not completely free from his prejudice against a mere milkmaid like Tess. Angel‘s intellectual ability is bound to convention and he is hesitant to acknowledge Tess‘s particularity that elevates her above the other working-class housemates.

Among many critics of the novel who have attempted to read Tess‘s body as more than just a victimized raped one, my reading of Tess‘s achievement of individuality through walking in nature critically revises the arguments of Kaja Silverman in ―History, Figuration, and Female

Subjectivity in ‗Tess of the d‘Urbervilles‘‖ (1984) and Jules David Law in ―Sleeping Figures:

Hardy, History, and the Gendered Body‖ (1998). Both Silverman and Law give particular attentions to the historical dynamics inscribed in Tess‘s body. Silverman argues that Tess‘s body becomes a point of discursive figural coercion and asserts that she can only resist this historical inscription by becoming detached from her own exteriority. In Silverman‘s reading, a redemptive possibility for Tess is eliminated as Tess fails to liberate herself from exteriority. In a similar vein,

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Law contends that Tess‘s body is a vehicle for archiving historical meanings. Like Silverman,

Law interprets Tess‘s body as a historical vessel which ―is fetishized as the supreme historical signifier‖ (253). While respecting their feminist readings that regard the novel as complicit with patriarchal discourses, my reading redraws a line of feminism that the novel connects to: I read the novel as inheriting the radical ideas of previous Victorian women novelists in my consideration of a working-class woman‘s liberty and as one of the first New Woman novels, in which the heroine is empowered as a liberal individual woman with mental liberty and mobile agency. I will contend that Hardy grants Tess‘s body with an aggressive feminist potential by methodically disengaging it from the role of a historical vessel: Tess clearly sees the distinction between her own liberal individuality based on her independent movements and the history her body holds. Namely, I will show a more emancipating reading of the novel, overcoming the limits of these two critics‘ contentions—in the case of Law‘s reading, the fetishization of Tess‘s body and, in Silverman‘s reading, the trap of historical representation that imprisons Tess24.

Tess‘s ―Misery‖

In this section, I argue that Tess seeks to let her body be liberated from the stigmatized image of the raped body while searching for its distinctiveness based on her growing cognitive power to objectify her misery during her solitary walks. I will also argue that the novel creates a

24 While Silverman‘s point of argument that ―Tess escapes from cultural structuration by retreating out of, rather than into corporeality‖ is very insightful, she still does not acknowledge Tess as a liberal individual with agency and, thus, writes: ―Unfortunately for Tess and the female reader constituted through identification with her, the assimilation of figure into background means the abolition not just of hierarchy, but of difference, and hence of identity (27). Law argues a similar extinction of Tess‘s identity in his other article: ―In reducing Tess not only to a body beyond social convention but to a body beyond the social altogether, the narrator‘s advice reduces her to no body‖ (256, Law 1997).

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contrast between Tess‘s active pursuit of liberal individuality and Angel‘s pursuit of a mere abstract notion of it. While Tess undergoes trials and strives for a way toward a liberal individual viewpoint, Angel reflects on it in his mind until he becomes too absorbed in aesthetic archetypes and misses meaningful singular points of the particular beings and objects around him. In making the distinction, I am indebted to Thomas‘ impressive reading of George Eliot‘s

Middlemarch in Cultivating Victorians: Liberal Culture and the Aesthetic, in which he values

Dorothea Brooke‘s regulative ideal of liberal conduct more than Camden Farebrother‘s static liberal agency. However, while Thomas compares and contrasts the different embodiments of liberal individual ideas between a middle-class woman and an upper-class man, I delve more deeply into how a working-class woman like Tess has agency to seek her alternative sense of liberal individualism. Tess‘s exploration of individuality is mapped onto her awakening into her body‘s particularity in relation to the natural objects while moving in the wilderness.

Tess moves several times to new places of residence throughout the narrative due to an economic need, a circumstantial compulsion, and a pursuit of independence from her family.

Continuously exposing herself to new working environments, Tess keeps separating herself from her past experiences—what her body has been forced to endure and undergo. To follow the thread of the plot, Tess, first, inadvertently let her family‘s horse die by accident and moves to work at the D‘Urberville estate as a poultry keeper to compensate for her mistake which caused great economic trouble for her family. However, at the D‘Urberville farm, Tess is continuously exposed to temptation as Alec D‘Urberville feels sexual attraction toward her. Late one night, walking home from her outing to town together with some other Trantridge villagers, Tess gets caught in a fight with Car Darch, who feels jealous of Tess, exposing herself to physical danger.

Alec appears to rescue her and rides her through the forest named ―the Chase.‖ In the end of the

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chapter, the novel clearly implies that Alec rapes Tess in the Chase while Tess is unconscious during sleep. Having lost her virginity, Tess goes back to her father‘s house and gives birth to a sickly baby who dies after only a few weeks. After staying in her father‘s house during winter, she moves to a dairy called ―Talbothays‖ to start a new life and earn her living as a milkmaid.

The transfer is a result of Tess‘s own choice to work as a milkmaid and, more importantly, a result of her independent line of thoughts that allows her to separate herself from the unintended past event and her neighbors‘ rigid frame of thought about it.

Most importantly for the unfolding of the central plot of Tess‘s cognitive growth, the novel emphasizes that Tess should learn to see clearly the distinction between the received opinion of her past and her own individuality. When Tess determines to pursue ―a new sweet independence‖ in terms of career after many months of ―wearing and wasting her palpitating heart with every engine of regret‖ over her sexual fall caused by the rape, pregnancy, and the childbirth (103), the narrator suggests a level of growth that he believes Tess could achieve. I contend that the novel deliberately introduces the term ―misery‖ to show how Tess possesses agency in relationship to the conventional image of her sexual fall and can outgrow the limits to which the term threatens to confine her. If Ruth and Hetty should fight against the term‘s conventional connotations for women, the term finally begins to lose its significance for the sexual fall and its accompanying difficulties for single mothers with Tess. When the term

―misery‖ first appears in the novel as the narrator makes assumptions about Tess‘s reasoning, it is already suggested as being separated out from Tess‘s inner sensations, which would matter more to her individuality:

Moreover, alone in a desert island would she have been wretched at what had happened

to her? Not greatly. If she could have been just created, to discover herself as a spouseless

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mother, with no experience of life except as the parent of a nameless child, would the

position have caused her to despair? No, she would have taken it calmly, and found

pleasures therein. Most of the misery had been generated by her conventional aspect, and

not by her innate sensations. (104, my emphasis)

The narrator suggests that, with the drastic change of the location in her imagination, Tess could even reinterpret her position as a single mother: she would have rather discovered ―pleasures‖ in the position ―if she could have been just created‖ in ―a desert island.‖ Tess‘s spatial imagination might have helped her to distinguish her innate sensations, which are equal to her immediate pleasures in the pursuit of independence, from the despair rooted in the conventional understanding of her position. The narrator‘s persuasive assumptions about Tess‘s reasoning are immediately followed by Tess‘s physical movement: ―Whatever Tess‘s reasoning, some spirit had induced her to dress herself up neatly as she had formerly done, and come out into the fields, harvest-hands being greatly in demand just then‖ (104). Tess‘s action is a result of her hope to be useful again. In a deeper level of narration, Tess‘s hope to serve the community with her strength echoes the narrator‘s assumptive comments on her power to redefine her position according to her innate sensations. Tess‘s restorative power based on her valuation of labor is exerted again after her baby‘s death. She departs her parents‘ home to become a milkmaid.

Tess‘s step towards new surroundings should be understood in the context of the incessant whirlpool of rumors she is exposed to on a daily basis in the domestic space after coming back to her parents‘ home, upon losing her virginity in the Chase. The rumors circulating in the domestic space endanger Tess‘s private experiences and stories. As the following scene shows in an almost caricature image, the domestic environment of Tess‘s family is bombarded with the neighboring girls‘ inquisitiveness and inflated gossips about the rape:

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The event of Tess Durbeyfield‘s return from the manor of her bogus kinsfolk was

rumoured abroad, if rumour be not too large a word for a space of a square mile. In the

afternoon several young girls of Marlott, former schoolfellows and acquaintances of Tess,

called to see her; arriving dressed in their best starched and ironed, as became visitors to

a person who had made a transcendent conquest (as they supposed); and sat round the

room looking at her with great curiosity. (95)

The narrator‘s wry tone reveals how violently Tess‘s private experience of rape is distorted by ignorant young girls‘ curiosity: the rape is distorted to ―a transcendent conquest‖ of Tess according to their naïve perspective. And the narrator‘s cynical comment, ―if rumour be not too large a word for a space of a square mile,‖ amplifies the ludicrous nature of the girls‘ nosy interest in Tess‘s affair. Besides, her family is not on her side at all when it comes to protecting her from the contaminative influence of the meaningless gossip. While Tess barely escapes hearing the inquisitive comments of the young girl on her beauty the next moment, her mother

Joan is bent solely upon satisfying her sense of vanity, which died on the vine as the original marriage plan fell through:

Tess, who was reaching up to get the tea-things from the corner-cupboard, did not hear

these commentaries. If she had heard them she might soon have set her friends right on

the matter. But her mother heard, and Joan‘s simple vanity, having been denied the hope

of a dashing marriage, fed itself as well as it could upon the sensation of a dashing

flirtation. Upon the whole she felt gratified, even though such a limited and evanescent

triumph should involve her daughter‘s reputation; it might end in marriage yet, and in the

warmth of her responsiveness to their admiration she invited her visitors to stay to tea.

(95, my emphasis)

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The narrator points out Joan‘s pathetic attitude to gratify herself with a girl‘s ignorant comments and how her attitude prolongs the visitors‘ stay at home. Joan‘s motherly warmth is wrongly directed towards the girls who are only filled with crass questions about her daughter and ignores the story told by Tess. Due to her mother‘s deficiency in terms of understanding Tess‘s situation,

Tess is more at risk of being intimidated by inconsiderate neighbors at home. More importantly,

Joan still hopes to subordinate Tess to the marriage institution regardless of her grudge against

Alec. The domestic space becomes almost threatening to Tess. Her personal history is distorted and distributed in a violent way, and thus, her story is in danger of being falsely presented.

In this context, Tess dispels her mother‘s hope for the reinstatement of the patriarchal relations through Tess‘s marriage to Alec when she leaves home to change her workplace one more time. Tess‘s pursuit of liberal individuality is concretized as a movement to secure a mental distance from a collective wish, which is represented by her mother and supported by the girls, to restore normative patriarchal relations to her body. I argue that the narrator deliberately controls his narrative perspective to vitalize Tess‘s imagination and highlight her agency. Voluntarily disorienting her body in nature at night, Tess pursues ―absolute mental liberty‖ to recognize her body‘s singularity in relation with the natural objects around her (97). Tess‘s movement over a long distance to a different town is prepared by her daily walks after dark. Walking within easy distance allows Tess to practice forming an independent frame of mind that would allow her to reinterpret the events that happened to her. The narrative technique becomes close to a free indirect discourse when the novel describes the mental aspect of her nighttime walk—Tess‘s innermost thoughts are intimately filtered through the third-person narrative voice. However, at the same time, the third-person point of view keeps its physical distance from Tess‘s body to provide a panoramic view of Tess‘s movement in nature:

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On these lonely hills and dales her quiescent glide was of a piece with the element she

moved in. Her flexuous and stealthy figure became an integral part of the scene. At times

her whimsical fancy would intensify natural processes around her till they seemed a part

of her own story. Rather they became a part of it; for the world is only a psychological

phenomenon, and what they seemed they were. (97)

The narrator‘s position that commands a wide prospect of Tess‘s movement in nature seems to allow more room for Tess‘s free movement in the scene. The narrator qualifies Tess‘s figure in indefinite terms such as ―flexuous‖ and ―stealthy.‖ Using such language, the narrator zooms out and withdraws his intense gaze from Tess‘s body and then internally focalizes on Tess‘s thoughts in the next breath. Her fancy absorbs ―natural processes‖ around her until they become ―a part of her own story.‖ Then, the narrator soon generalizes from Tess‘s fancy and writes: ―the world is only a psychological phenomenon.‖ While the narrator respects Tess‘s ―absolute mental liberty‖ to hear imaginary reproaching voices from ―the midnight airs and gusts‖ and to be ―terrified without reason,‖ he does not interfere with Tess‘s own mental process of making a distinction between herself and the natural objects. For a moment, the narrator focalizes on Tess‘s fancy and then falls out of it with his disinterested comments: ―Walking among the sleeping birds in the hedges, watching the skipping rabbits on a moonlit warren, or standing under a pheasant-laden bough, she looked upon herself as a figure of Guilt intruding into the haunts of Innocence. But all the while she was making a distinction where there was no difference‖ (97). I argue that the narrator‘s rather cynical comment is not a real assault on Tess‘s fancy but rather a gesture to dispel the reader‘s urge to allegorize Tess‘s body as a figure of Guilt. The narrator adds: ―She had been made to break an accepted social law, but no law known to the environment in which she fancied herself such an anomaly‖ (98).

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Although the narrator does not intervene into Tess‘s fancy and leaves it intact, his global perspective towards her innocence will soon resonate with Tess‘s growing awareness of the recuperative power within her when she connects her inner self to the laws of nature and decides to leap into the new environment. The narrator‘s assumptive description of Tess‘s reasoning lays out how her fancy can paradoxically operate as an empowering way of thinking: ―She might have seen that what had bowed her head so profoundly—the thought of the world‘s concern at her situation—was founded on an illusion. She was not an existence, an experience, a passion, a structure of sensations, to anyone but herself. To all humankind besides Tess was only a passing thought‖ (103-104). She has liberty to make herself ―miserable,‖ but it still is only a passing thought to her neighbors (104). Tess‘s growing agency over her misery is based on this insight.

Tess feels the recuperative power, which she observes in organic nature, as her own. During her walking journey to the new workplace, the perspective of the people no longer affects her and the importance of it diminishes while she experiences her body‘s peculiar power to sympathize with natural objects: ―Her hopes mingled with the sunshine in an ideal photosphere which surrounded her as she bounded along against the soft south wind. She heard a pleasant voice in every breeze, and in every bird‘s note seemed to lurk a joy‖ (119). She spontaneously reacts to the deeper whispers of the surrounding nature beyond the world‘s opinion, which is only skin-deep. Tess‘s chain of thoughts moves within a wider radius of natural surroundings than the local neighborhood.

I contend that the novel draws a comparison between Tess‘s growth into a liberal individual after much trials and Angel‘s indulgence in the abstract notion of liberal individualism.

The narrator takes the lead in distinguishing Tess‘s achievement from a general understanding of liberal individualism based on education. The narrator‘s voice is particularly remarkable in the

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sense that it represents the middle-class author‘s educated perspective. He writes:

Almost at a leap Tess thus changed from simple girl to complex woman. Symbols of

reflectiveness passed into her face, and a note of tragedy at times into her voice. Her eyes

grew larger and more eloquent. She became what would have been called a fine creature;

her aspect was fair and arresting; her soul that of a woman whom the turbulent

experiences of the last year or two had quite failed to demoralize. But for the world‘s

opinion those experiences would have been simply a liberal education. (112)

At first glance, the narrator‘s observation of Tess‘s change seems to be indifferent—she

―changed from simple girl to complex woman‖. A more detailed explanation of her physical change is nothing beyond commonplace observations—―symbols of reflectiveness‖ on her face,

―a note of tragedy‖ in her voice, and ―more eloquent‖ eyes. However, the tone of the narrative immediately goes against the reader‘s expectation and becomes cynical when it flatly refuses the world‘s opinion, for which Tess‘s ―experiences would have been simply a liberal education.‖

After differentiating Tess‘s achievement from what a liberal education pursues, the narrator proceeds to show a more nuanced reading of Tess‘s physical change that happens in accordance with the alteration of consciousness over the course of her walk: ―Her face had latterly changed with changing states of mind, continually fluctuating between beauty and ordinariness, according as the thoughts were gay or grave. One day she was pink and flawless; another pale and tragical‖

(119). Her body is again presented as a flexuous body. The narrator refuses to pin down what she internally goes through during the walk and keeps her subjective feelings intact in the same way as he endowed her with a room to indulge in fancy.

Tess‘s susceptibility towards the individual features of natural objects which has been central to her cognitive growth is in contrast to Angel‘s habitual disregard of the particulars.

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Angel is accustomed to grounding his judgments on general impressions. From the first time they meet, Angel fails to distinguish Tess from the crowd of the girls gathered for the May-Day dance. Being encouraged to choose a dancing partner among the girls, Angel is almost forced to choose at random: ―The young man thus invited glanced them over, and attempted some discrimination; but as the group were all so new to him he could not very well exercise it. He took almost the first that came to hand, which was not the speaker, as she had expected; nor did it happen to be Tess Durbeyfield‖ (23). Angel loses his freedom of choice and selects the first girl that comes into sight. Moreover, Angel‘s visual cognition does not really progress even when he discovers Tess the next moment. Instead of reflecting on himself, Angel rather blames the backwardness of Tess, ―whose own large orbs [eyes] wore, to tell the truth, the faintest aspect of reproach that he had not chosen her‖ (23). He does recognize the impressiveness of Tess‘s figure and especially recognizes her among ―the white figures of the girls in the green enclosure‖ (24).

However, his conceptualization of the figure of Tess relies on a pack of vague wording:

All of them, except, perhaps, one. This white shape stood apart by the hedge alone. From

her position he knew it to be the pretty maiden with whom he had not danced. Trifling as

the matter was, he yet instinctively felt that she was hurt by his oversight. He wished that

he had asked her; he wished that he had inquired her name. She was so modest, so

expressive, she had looked so soft in her thin white gown that he felt he had acted

stupidly. (24)

Tess is still termed as ―this white shape,‖ which is not so much different from ―the white figures of the girls,‖ and the reason why he feels sorry for her is based on his observation of the docile qualities of Tess, which he merely projects onto her, such as modesty and softness in her attitude.

At the end of their first encounter, Angel‘s appreciation of Tess is summarized in a cliché, ―the

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pretty maiden.‖ Angel‘s failure to rightly appreciate Tess‘s individuality mirrors his lack of definite individuality. The narrator writes: ―That he was a desultory, tentative student of something and everything might only have been predicated of him‖ (22).

Angel‘s refusals of an institutional commitment and liberal vision hinder him from concentrating on his occupation, and he is uncertain about what lies ahead of him in the future.

He is habitually learning and never stays in the present. Angel‘s occupational vision is up in the air: ―He did not milk cows because he was obliged to milk cows, but because he was learning how to be a rich and prosperous dairyman, landowner, agriculturist, and breeder of cattle‖ (140).

Angel‘s detachment from the practical aspect of the job can be juxtaposed with Hadley‘s reading of the occupational view of Harding in Trollope‘s The Warden. Hadley writes: ―he [Harding] detaches himself from a constitutive relationship with his institutional position and its interests, placing the wardenship in a merely arbitrary relation to himself, Harding the individual‖ (77).

Hadley sees Harding‘s disinterestedness in his occupation as a mark for a liberal individual.

However, I emphasize how Hardy‘s narrator, differentiating himself from the line of Victorian middle-class champions of liberalism, contrasts Angel‘s abstract vision to Tess‘s practical approach to work and explores his alternative idea of liberal individualism through Tess‘s mobile agency and cognitive achievement of independence from social prejudices. Different from

Angel‘s disinterestedness, Tess‘s concentration on milking begins to define her individuality:

―When Tess had changed her bonnet for a hood, and was really on her stool under the cow, and the milk was squirting from her fists into the pail, she appeared to feel that she really had laid a new foundation for her future‖ (124). Tess experienced a series of concrete bodily sensations and

―soon discovered which of the cows had a preference for her style of manipulation‖ (137). If

Tess is quick to understand personality of each of the cows, Angel is almost blind to the

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surrounding objects. In the same vein, Angel‘s indulgence in reading books and pieces of music keeps him from acknowledging the appearance of Tess at Talbothays Dairy and rather brings him closer to the state of the cognitive disinterestedness.

For several days after Tess‘s arrival Clare, sitting abstractedly reading from some book,

periodical, or piece of music just come by post, hardly noticed that she was present at

table. She talked so little, and the other maids talked so much, that the babble did not

strike him as possessing a new note; and he was ever in the habit of neglecting the

particulars of an outward scene for the general impression. (135)

In contrast to Angel‘s habitual ignorance of ―the particulars of an outward scene for the general impression,‖ Tess is almost always aware of the particular characteristics and nuances of the surrounding people. For instance, Tess immediately recognizes Angel when she first sees him again at the Dairy. She notices that beneath Angel‘s local clothing, there was ―something educated, reserved, subtle, sad, differing‖ (127). Seeing through him from the start, she remembers that he is ―the passing stranger who had come she knew not whence, had danced with others but not with her, had slightingly left her, and gone on his way with his friends‖ (128). Tess exactly recollects what has happened between them.

Through his remarkable reading of George Eliot‘s Middlemarch, Thomas adds a new layer to Hadley‘s proposition of the distinction between conformity to Victorian middle-class virtues and autonomous agency of liberal individualism. Beyond his comparison between Fred

Vincy and Camden Farebrother based on Hadley‘s proposition, Thomas pays attention to

Dorothea Brooke‘s liberal aspiration based on feeling instead of reflection. While my reading of the distinction between Tess‘s striving towards liberal individuality based on her physical sensation and Angel‘s abstract version of liberalism is influenced by Thomas‘s sharp insight, I

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intend to highlight how the class difference between them and Hardy‘s championing of Tess make the distinction even more striking. By siding with Tess against Angel‘s self-deceptive pursuit of liberalism, Hardy, a middle-class male author, takes over Eliot‘s exploration of liberal heroism through Dorothea in a more radical way. The romance with Angel only adds to the tragedy of Tess. Despite his refusal to accept his father‘s dogmatic Christian world view, Angel still upholds a patriarchal view of women‘s value and fails to perceive Tess‘s quality that lies deeper than the mere fact of her loss of virginity. Angel is self-contradictorily imprisoned in his idea of archetypal womanhood25 while denouncing the orthodox doctrines of the church. Tess first appeals to Angel as an archetype of an untainted country girl, and they marry after Angel‘s tenacious proposals. However, upon Tess‘s confession of her tragic past about her loss of virginity shortly after their very short honeymoon tour, Angel, unable to reconcile his ideal picture of a woman with the reality of Tess‘s tainted past, leaves her to start his life anew alone in

Brazil.

Hardy attributes Tess‘s power to recuperate from this distressful situation to her trained act of walking. Being left alone, Tess first goes back to her parents‘ house but soon leaves them

25 Angel imagines an edenic romance with Tess and seeks an archetypal image in Tess. To Angel, ―she was no longer the milkmaid, but a visionary essence of woman—a whole sex condensed into one typical form‖ (146). In this regard, Angel‘s first impression of Tess, a fresh virgin, is well summarized in his monologue in the following scene:

Clare continued to observe her. She soon finished her eating, and having a consciousness that Clare was regarding her began to trace imaginary patterns on the tablecloth with her forefinger, with the constraint of a domestic animal that perceives itself to be watched.

―What a fresh and virginal daughter of Nature that milkmaid is,‖ he said to himself. (136)

Responding to Clare‘s expectation, Tess detects a reason for his interest in her as well: ―The insight afforded into Clare‘s character suggested to her that it was largely owing to her supposed untraditional newness that she had won interest in his eyes‖ (143). Indeed, Tess‘s perceptive intelligence to read Angel‘s characteristic sustains their relationship. And it is the narrator‘s voice that points out the shallowness in Angel‘s feeling: ―He loved her dearly, though perhaps rather ideally and fancifully than with the impassioned thoroughness of her feeling for him‖ (222).

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again and decides to work as a dairywoman again ―near Port-Bredy‖ (292). She is reluctant to let her parents know her prolonged estrangement with Angel and is also unwilling to receive financial help from Angel‘s parents. Tess directs her steps towards a farm ―in the centre of the country, to which she had been recommended by a wandering letter which had reached her from

Marian,‖ who is her old friend from the dairy Talbothays (295). An invitation from her co-worker, however trifling it is, encourages Tess and gives her a momentum. This proves Tess‘s deep- rooted attitude of self-reliance. What determines the mode of Tess‘s transfer is again her longing to support herself with her physical abilities. Moving equals to seek for mental liberty from the restriction drawn by the past experiences associated with the familiar social space. Tess‘s rambling steps to the farm disengage her from the past and dictate a cognitive separation from concerns about others:

With the shortening of the days all hope of obtaining her husband‘s forgiveness began to

leave her; and there was something of the habitude of the wild animal in the unreflecting

instinct with which she rambled on—disconnecting herself by littles from her eventful

past at every step, obliterating her identity, giving no thought to accidents or

contingencies which might make a quick discovery of her whereabouts by others of

importance to her own happiness, of not to theirs. (295)

The mode of walking is ―unreflecting‖ and is determined by Tess‘s ―instinct.‖ The narrator names her instinct ―the habitude of wild animal.‖ In other words, Tess is very accustomed to the mode of walking, through which she can detach herself from ―her eventful past.‖ ―Obliterating‖ of her identity should be read as obliterating her past identity related to her past experiences.

Getting a cognitive distance from the past is no longer a difficulty for Tess.

However, different from her former walks, during which she focused on cultivating

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mental liberty, a fresh difficulty threatens her new walking journey: ―Among the difficulties of her lonely position not the least was the attention she excited by her appearance, a certain bearing of distinction which she had caught from Clare being superadded to her natural attractiveness‖ (295). ―A certain bearing of distinction‖ that she adopted from Clare signifies a mark of gentility or a refined gesture. To achieve a real distance from her past identity, Tess should efface this cultural inheritance from Clare and reinstate ―her natural attractiveness.‖ In this context, I argue that Tess‘s voluntary snipping off of her eyebrows should be understood as a deliberate attempt to reinstate her body‘s natural recuperative power. On a superficial level, Tess snips her eyebrows off to defeat the casual lovers who notice her physical beauty on the journey—especially on her solitary walk. However, a close reading of the below scene in connection with the above remark about ―a certain bearing of distinction which she had caught from Clare‖ reveals Tess‘s real intention:

She also, by a felicitous thought, took a handkerchief from her bundle, and tied it round

her face under her bonnet, covering her chin, and half her cheeks, and temples, as if she

were suffering from toothache. Then with her little scissors, by the aid of a pocket

looking-glass, she mercilessly snipped her eyebrows off; and thus insured against

aggressive admiration she went on her uneven way. (299)

By cutting her eyebrows off, Tess strategically obliterates any trace of refinement and defeats

―aggressive admiration‖ that might hamper her contemplative journey. Her body restores its harmony with the wild landscape: ―Thus Tess walks on; a figure which is part of the landscape; a fieldwoman pure and simple, in winter guise‖ (299). In this regard, after her parting with Angel,

Tess‘s walking incorporates a violent reconfiguration of her body to efface the traces of what she inherited from Angel and to prevent any interruption to her body‘s rhythmic journey.

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My reading of the above scene contradicts the thoughts of Silverman and Law about the role of Tess‘s body in the novel. Silverman also foregrounds the same scene where Tess cut off her eyebrows, and Silverman importantly names her action ―disfiguration‖ to disengage her body from its serving role for figuration: ―She thus attempts not only to obscure the outlines of her form, and thereby melt into her surroundings, but to efface the erotic pattern that has been traced upon her body by a series of ‗interested‘ viewers, so that she herself no longer serves as a supporting surface for figuration‖ (25). While sharply grasping the recalcitrant nature of Tess‘ action, Silverman‘s interpretation overlooks the initial motive for it—a reinstatement of her body‘s natural attractiveness and its power to walk in harmony with the course of nature. Thus,

Silverman concludes that Tess loses her identity throughout the journey: ―Unfortunately for Tess and the female reader constituted through identification with her, the assimilation of figure into background means the abolition not just of hierarchy, but of difference, and hence of identity‖

(27). In the same vein with Silverman, Law concludes: ―In Tess, the disavowal of the male spectator‘s body permits the gendering and aestheticizing of history to meet in the figure of the female body. Women become the objects of history, and men its subjects‖ (253). Contrary to Law,

I conclude that Tess becomes a subject of her own history and subordinates men to it. My close reading of the scenes where Tess associates the term ―misery‖ with Angel in her speech will support my conclusion of the first section.

Angel‘s ―Misery‖

In this section, I contend that the highlight of Tess‘s cognitive growth is how she shakes off her self-pity while objectifying her misery and seeking communion with fellow sufferers.

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Promptly aligning her physical movement with her dismissal of the idea of misery, Tess tightens vigilance against wallowing in self-pity. However, while Tess achieves agency over her misery,

Angel inherits Tess‘s misery rooted in her sexual fall and internalizes it as a part of his identity.

Angel voluntarily chooses to live with the misery and expels himself from a more liberal reunion with Tess. My close reading of significant scenes, including Tess‘s first articulation of the term

―misery‖ in relation to Angel, Angel‘s sleepwalking and Tess‘s guidance, and Tess‘s discovery of a school of dead and dying birds during her walk, will demonstrate how Tess‘s mature agency over her misery empowers her to act for others and to save Angel from his miserable choice to internalize the inherited misery.

Their respective embodiment of the idea of liberal individualism differently affects Tess and Angel in their acceptance of family tragedy. While Tess is mature enough to take a critical distance from her past and be ready to take responsibility for her confession of it, Angel weighs

Tess‘s fault against his abstract notion of women‘s virginity. To find the root cause of the tragedy, he resorts to his old habit of artworks appreciation. He attempts to find a source of sinister purposes in Tess by comparing Tess‘s face with the image of one of the d‘Urberville dames, whose portrait is over the entrance to Tess‘s bedchamber. Finding resemblance between them,

Angel laments over his former aesthetic infatuation with Tess‘s sweet face. The narrator‘s comment on Angel‘s false conjecture attests to the inadequacy of his abstract interpretation of

Tess: ―He argued erroneously when he said to himself that her heart was not indexed in the honest freshness of her face; but Tess had no advocate to set him right‖ (254). The moment when the term ―misery‖ appears again in the novel after a long pause is significant in the sense that it appears combined with Angel, not Tess, in Tess‘s appealing speech to Angel. After Tess‘s groundbreaking confession of her past with Alec to Angel, they wander together in silence ―as in

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a funeral procession‖ (252). Perceiving Angel‘s agony and cold inclemency, Tess speaks: ―I don‘t see how I can help being the cause of much misery to you all your life. The river is down there: I can put an end to myself in it. I am not afraid‖ (252, my emphasis). Although Tess calls herself

―the cause of much misery,‖ the sense of misery is more closely related with Angel than herself in Tess‘s consciousness. Tess‘s insight in perceiving Angel‘s agony and his voluntary inheritance of her misery is confirmed a moment later when Angel takes a peep at her apartment where she is asleep with ―nothing more to fear‖ and with ―scarce anything to hope‖ (253). Angel feels that

Tess has shifted the burden of her misery to him:

Before lying down he crept shoeless upstairs, and listened at the door of her apartment.

Her measured breathing told that she was sleeping profoundly.

―Thank God!‖ murmured Clare; and yet he was conscious of a pang of bitterness at the

thought—approximately true, though not wholly so—that having shifted the burden of

her life to his shoulders she was now reposing without care. (254)

The narrator‘s inserted comment on the potential for error in Angel‘s thought, ―approximately true, though not wholly so,‖ points to Angel‘s misconception of Tess. Angel‘s bitter misunderstanding of Tess and slavish adherence to his principles are extended to his voluntary inheritance of Tess‘s misery—Angel believes that Tess‘s virginity belongs to him and considers the premarital loss of it as his own misery. Angel‘s adherence to the patriarchal idea makes a sharp contrast with Tess‘s radical understanding of chastity.

For the next few occasions when Tess articulates the term ―misery,‖ the term is again closely related with Angel despite her use of the word to describe her mental status. For instance, after coming back to her parents‘ home after her three brief days of honeymoon with Angel, Tess opens up her wrenching heart to Joan, her mother. In response to Joan‘s comment that Tess has

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already ―sinned enough to marry‖ Angel in the first place before Tess could argue about sinning against him by not telling him the truth, Tess says: ―Yes, yes: that‘s where my misery do lie‖ (276, my emphasis). Tess‘s sense of misery is associated with her sin against Angel by marrying him.

However, what makes her marriage to Angel a sin is Angel and her mother‘s belief in the patriarchal notion of virginity. Tess‘s affirmation of her sin and use of the word ―misery‖ in front of her mother should be interpreted as her magnanimous tolerance of their belief and not as her degeneration. In the scene, the word ―misery‖ in Tess‘s speech attests to her sympathy towards other people‘s agony rather than her self-pity.

Tess‘s sympathetic understanding of other beings‘ misery is immediately accompanied by her action to alleviate their sufferings. The episode in the plantation wherein Tess takes shelter for a night to avoid a lecherous ―boor‖, whom she has met before with Angel at the inn and meets again during her solitary walk, is a great example that shows Tess‘s spontaneous sympathetic action for alleviating sufferings of other beings. A terrible sight of dying birds meets her eyes as day breaks in the sky in the plantation:

Under the trees several pheasants lay about, their rich plumage dabbled with blood; some

were dead, some feebly twitching a wing, some staring up at the sky, some pulsating

quickly, some contorted, some stretched out—all of them writhing in agony except the

fortunate ones whose tortures had ended during the night by the inability of nature to bear

more. (297)

The night before, Tess heard the noises of the fall of the dying pheasants. The dying pheasants are innocent victims of ―some shooting party‖ (297). They are ―weaker fellows in nature‘s teeming family‖ (298). Tess promptly discerns the particulars of these dying birds. Tess‘s immediate response to the scene is to help them die: ―With the impulse of a soul who could feel

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for kindred sufferers as much as for herself. Tess‘s first thought was to put the still living birds out of their torture, and to this end with her own hands she broke the necks of as many as she could find, leaving‖ (298). It is remarkable how Tess wastes no time in sentimentalizing the fate of the pheasants. She is quick to perform what she can do to relieve the birds‘ physical pain.

Tess‘s affective response to the scene comes only after she begins to commit an action for the pheasants:

―Poor darlings—to suppose myself the most miserable being on earth in the sight o‘such

misery as yours!‖ she exclaimed, her tears running down as she killed the birds tenderly.

―And not a twinge of bodily pain about me! I be not mangled, and I be not bleeding, and I

have two hands to feed and clothe me.‖ She was ashamed of herself for her gloom of the

night, based on nothing more tangible than a sense of condemnation under an arbitrary

law of society which had no foundation in Nature. (298, my emphasis)

One more time, Tess compares her own misery to the pheasants‘ misery, and becomes ―ashamed of herself.‖ She immediately extricates herself out of the last night‘s self-pity, which was ―based on nothing more tangible than a sense of condemnation under an arbitrary law of society.‖

Compared to the writhing pheasants‘ physical distress, Tess‘s sense of misery, which accompanies ―not a twinge of bodily pain‖ but only a vague sense of disapproval under a random law of society, is not worth a night of agony. That Tess‘s merciful action towards the pheasants precedes her contemplation over their misery is a mark of her liberal individualism rooted in her body‘s relation with the world.

If Tess departs from self-pity while taking a walk, Angel‘s mode of walking is an extension of his engrossment in his misery. Tess observes: ―Tess saw that continued mental distress had wrought him into that somnambulistic state now‖ (266). He sleepwalks at night. The

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novel records an occasion of Angel‘s sleepwalk in detail. In the below episode, Angel‘s somnambulistic walking in which he hands over his agency to Tess is in stark contrast to Tess‘s mode of walking, during which she disentangles what‘s important for her individuality from arbitrary opinions of society. While Tess leads sleepwalking Angel, the narrator focuses on how

Tess mandates her body to walk and hauls Angel‘s body with maximum efforts. In the mean time, unconscious Angel only recognizes Tess as ―a spirit‖ without a body. After a bout of sleepwalking, Angel falls into deep sleep on the ground. Tess works out a way to let him move again:

It suddenly occurred to her to try persuasion; and accordingly she whispered in his ear,

with as much firmness and decision as she could summon: ―Let us walk on, darling,‖ at

the same time taking him suggestively by the arm. To her relief he unresistingly

acquiesced; her words had apparently thrown him back into his dream, which

thenceforward seemed to enter on a new phase, wherein he fancied she had risen as a

spirit, and was leading him to heaven. Thus she conducted him by the arm to the stone

bridge in front of their residence, crossing which they stood at the manor-house door.

Tess‘s feet were quite bare, and the stones hurt her, and chilled her to the bone; but Clare

was in his woolen stockings, and appeared to feel no discomfort. (269)

Tess backs Angel up, and in doing so, her feet are sore and ―chilled her to the bone.‖ Tess tests the limits of her physical abilities. While pushing her body towards its uppermost limit, Tess also exerts physical control over Angel: he acquiescently follows Tess‘s instruction to walk on.

Interestingly, Tess‘s words also exert influence over the imaginative realm of Angel and she indirectly participates in Angel‘s dreamy experience by appreciating his new mental phase where he recognizes her as a spirit. In the passage, the verb ―fancy‖ has Angel as its subject. However,

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such a status of Angel‘s fantasy is narrated as what Tess supposes his status to be with the use of words and phrases such as ―seemed to‖ and ―apparently.‖ In other words, the narrator more internally focalizes on Tess‘ thoughts while depicting the somnambulistic status of Angel.

Accordingly, Tess coordinates both the physical movement of Angel and changes in his mental realm by leading the sleepwalking Angel‘s body and soul to obey her.

Angel hardly ever shows agency over his misery, which he voluntarily inherits from Tess and brings with him even to Brazil. Thus, Angel neglects his body and lets his misery gradually emaciate his body. When Angel finally comes back from his self-exile to Brazil so as to forgive

Tess and to go back to her, his haggard look shocks his parents: ―so reduced was that figure from its former contours by worry and the bad season that Clare had experienced in the climate to which he had so rashly hurried in this first aversion to the mockery of events at home‖ (390). His ghastly look attests to his mental agony: ―You could see the skeleton behind the man, and almost the ghost behind the skeleton‖ (390). In other words, Angel becomes a walking embodiment of misery. He drags himself to meet Tess. During their brief encounter on the threshold of the house where Tess lives, Angel‘s intensified misery is communicated to Tess in an almost palpable form immediately after she tells him that Alec has won her back to him: ―Clare looked at her keenly, then gathering her meaning flagged like one plague-stricken, and his glance sank: it fell on her hands, which, once rosy, were now white and more delicate‖ (401). Angel‘s body sways and his pathetic glance fell on Tess‘s hands. However delicate her hands are to Angel, they will soon prove their agency. Although Angel believes at the moment that Tess has allowed her body to drift, ―like a corpse upon the current, in a direction dissociated from its living will,‖ it is articulated through Angel‘s vague consciousness (401). Angel still sees Tess from his perspective.

Contrary to Angel‘s assumption, Tess‘s body is still full of energy to even commit a crime

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according to her will. I pay great attention to how Tess‘s confession of her crime to Angel liberates her from the position to be objectified by his abstract idea. Tess‘s confession of her crime—murdering Alec—to Angel also overthrows his patriarchal idea that Tess‘s body and soul belong to him:

―I have done it – I don‘t know how,‖ she continued. ―Still, I owed it to you, and to myself,

Angel. I feared long ago, when I struck him on the mouth with my glove, that I might do

it some day for the trap he set for me in my simple youth, and his wrong to you through

me. He has come between us and ruined us, and now he can never do it any more.‖ (407)

The verb ―feared‖ in her confession can actually be translated to ―(fearfully) imagined‖: Tess has imagined how she could someday kill Alec in revenge for what he did to her body and to Angel.

She carefully calculated her own body‘s power to implement the revenge plan when she actually attacked Alec by striking him on the mouth in the past. The moment of exerting her body‘s power inspires Tess to act further based on what she could imagine in terms of her physical capability. Moreover, Tess‘s expression, ―I owed it to you,‖ implies that she felt pressure to act for Angel. In the same vein with her previous rescue of the pheasants, Tess saves Angel from his misery.

The significance of Tess‘s confession of murder becomes clear when it is juxtaposed to her previous protest to Angel. Tess sharply denounces Angel: ―What have I done, what have I done? I have not told of anything that interferes with or belies my love for you. You don‘t think I planned it, do you? It is in your own mind, what you are angry at, Angel; it is not in me. O it is not in me, and I am not that deceitful woman you think me!‖ (251). Tess declares that what

Angel is angry at in his mind is not practically based on her. She distinguishes between what

Angel believes her to be in his mind and what she believes her own value to be. If only he had

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accepted Tess‘s liberating idea of love, he would have been liberated from his misery. Tess‘s plea,

―What have I done, what have I done?‖ particularly resonates with her above confession of murder, which starts with ―I have done it – I don‘t know how.‖ This time, Tess killed Alec to save Angel from his misery. She acts upon what Angel has wrongly imagined about her and subverts the belief of Angel by showing how she can repeal ―his [Alec‘s] wrong to you [Angel] through me [Tess].‖ Tess‘s murder liberates them both from the prison of Angel‘s misery and enables her to articulate her own narrative.

Conclusion

I argue that Tess‘s liberal agency allows her to question under what social restrictions she and other beings have lived. Tess‘s struggle for an economically independent lifestyle and pursuit of love beyond the form of marriage brings her close to the New Woman characters. Tess verifies her liberal agency by killing Alec to save Angel from his inherited misery. I assert that the novel deals with the issues surrounding the New Woman fiction, such as criticism of marriage as an institution, women‘s pursuit of independent careers, and questions on how to live life with liberal agency. Strikingly, Hardy‘s interest in distinguishing Tess‘s struggle for liberal individualism from Angel‘s feeble attempt at liberalism sets a new milestone for Victorian liberalism, which has been mainly built around the middle-class intellectual men.

Many scholars including Silverman and Law have argued that Tess‘s characterization as a historical vessel affirms the novel‘s dismissal of future possibilities for Tess. For instance,

Margaret Kolb in ―Plot Circles: Hardy‘s Drunkards and Their Walks‖ (2014) states that Tess‘s steps are no more than ―one instance of a historical pattern, a pattern that seems to recur

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ceaselessly and without substantive change‖ (610). However, I emphasize how the novel criticizes Angel‘s parochialism but supports Tess‘s alternative sense of liberal agency. I argue that

Hardy‘s perspective is well represented by Angel‘s companion in Brazil. The sagacious answer provided by the anonymous character concerning Angel‘s mental agony over the ―sorrowful facts of his marriage‖ provides an epiphany for Angel and helps him overcome his parochial view towards Tess:

The stranger had sojourned in many more lands and among many more peoples than

Angel; to his cosmopolitan mind such deviations from the social norm, so immense to

domesticity, were no more than are the irregularities of vale and mountain-chain to the

whole terrestrial curve. He viewed the matter in quite a different light from Angel;

thought that what Tess had been was of no importance beside what she would be, and

plainly told Clare that he was wrong in coming away from her. (360-61)

The omniscient narrator, who represents Hardy, compares Tess‘s sexual fall to the mere

―irregularities of vale and mountain-chain to the whole terrestrial curve‖ through the lens of the stranger. In this way, the narrator weaves the stranger‘s global perspective together with what

Tess gradually becomes aware of in terms of the meaning of her virginity and individuality during her walking journeys. Hardy, through the voice of the stranger, supports Tess on what she could achieve and scolds Angel for imposing constraints on Tess‘s possibilities. In short, it is possible that Tess becomes more than an embodiment of the tragic life of a working-class peasant girl. Tess‘s physical stamina, walks, mental liberty, and power to live them out bring her misery to an end and enable Angel to start anew. I see Tess‘s execution at the end of the narrative as a narrative manifestation of her willingness to bear the responsibility of the result of her liberal decision to save Angel from the deep sense of misery.

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6. CODA

All these infinitely obscure lives remain to be recorded, I said, addressing Mary Carmichael as if she were present; and went on in thought through the streets of London feeling in imagination the pressure of dumbness, the accumulation of unrecorded life, whether from the women at the street corners with their arms akimbo, and the rings embedded in their fat swollen fingers, talking with a gesticulation like the swing of Shakespeare‘s words; or from the violet-sellers and match-sellers and old crones stationed under doorways; or from drifting girls whose faces, like waves in sun and cloud, signal the coming of men and women and the flickering lights of shop windows. All that you will have to explore, I said to Mary Carmichael, holding your torch firm in your hand.

-Virginia Woolf, from A Room of One’s Own

In the previous chapters, this dissertation investigated the ways in which the working- class female characters‘ struggles against their misery collectively elevate their status as an individual in the mid-to-late Victorian period. Each of the fictions that this dissertation dealt with unsettles the popular notion that Victorian working-class female characters were a mere background figure for the dominant domestic middle-class women in the novels. Since the idea of mobility outside home plays an essential role in the novels of my consideration, this study explored how the working-class female characters‘ unique occupation of specific spaces such as the wilderness and remote mountain paths and their movement in these spaces affect and shape their mental development. In all the chapters, it was demonstrated that the use of the term

―misery‖ in the narratives can be surprisingly transformative in terms of showing the working- class female characters‘ growth into an independent woman with an individual voice. In chapters four and five, these women‘s conquest of their miseries was particularly contrasted with the male characters‘ understanding of a miserable situation. If this study is extended back to cover how the early-nineteenth-century novels represent female characters in terms of their responses to miserable situations and is also extended onto the discussion of late Victorian female characters‘ relationship to their works and its representation in the narratives, the alternative feminist literary

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history that I attempted to draw around Victorian working-class female characters will become much more complicated, enriched, and nuanced. This then will become a part of the history of working-class women represented by the middle-class authors and a part of the history of how the middle-class authors deployed a fantasy of working-class women to imagine an alternative possibility of domestic life, the necessity of which is defended by Virginia Woolf‘s imaginary conversation with a female author, Mary Carmichael, in A Room of One’s Own (1929).

I believe that Woolf‘s interests in archiving the unrecorded lives of women on the streets and her longing to create solidarity between women in different spaces and times, which are expressed through her imagining a female writer, Mary Carmichael, and enjoining her to write about different women, inherit and complicate Victorian middle-class writers‘ collective curiosity about the working-class women‘s lives outside home. In the above passage of A Room of One’s

Own, Woolf envisages the crones, the sellers, and the girls in the streets of London in her mind‘s eyes and passes her vision over to Mary Carmichael, an imaginary female author. In Tess of the

D’Urbervilles, Hardy‘s narrator often explores the significance of surrounding objects through the mind eyes of Tess. In my argument, Tess eventually grows up into an alternative liberal individual with her transformative power of mind. If Hardy‘s male narrator proposes a revision of liberal individualism through a working-class woman like Tess, Woolf‘s dialogic narrative gestures towards collapsing boundaries between different classes of women by identifying the narrator with diverse women including Mary Beton, Mary Seton, and Mary Carmichael—all of them are lack of a room of their own. While Woolf‘s feminist ideas expressed in A Room of

One’s Own are based off of her revision of Victorian liberalism to stand up for women‘s rights as an independent thinker with financial means, she also appeals for solidarity among professional women who can undermine British imperialist project centered on Victorian separate sphere

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ideology in Three Guineas (1938) by refusing to become an educated gentleman‘s ally in preventing the war according to his practical suggestions and suggesting an alternative education for women, an experimental women‘s college. Woolf‘s radical detachment from the contemporary structure of education which is responsible for producing the imperialist logic of dominance can be discussed as an extension of the trajectory that I have traced in the dissertation through the working-class women‘s insubordination to domestic ideology.

My study‘s perspective associates the works of Victorian middle-class writers to the important works of first-wave feminist writers including Woolf. My investigation of the narrative strategies adopted by the middle-class writers in exploring the voices of the marginalized women opens up a new line of feminist reading, which will be useful to perceive the narrative art of later feminist writings like Woolf‘s. Furthermore, the transformative drama around the term ―misery‖ observed in four novels of my consideration can lead up to more profound discussions of the implications of the term in relation to the woman question in first-wave feminist writings and

New Woman narratives. To cite just one example from New Woman narratives, in George

Gissing‘s The Odd Women (1893), the term ―misery‖ extends its denotations by being associated with the sense of loneliness of both men and women who are unable to marry or fail in their married lives. In the novel, while ―misery‖ is used as a referent for a form of life that the characters struggle against to evade, the term is also mobilized to signify harmful consequences of the married life, which two New Woman characters, Mrs. Cosgrove and Rhoda Nunn, laugh away as results of an uncivilized form of life yet are not still entirely free from. Exploring how the notion of misery evolves in the New Woman narratives and what the evolution reflects in the history of women will complete my project of rereading ―misery‖ represented in British novels.

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