NINETEENTH-CENTURY GENDER STUDIES ISSUE 4.1 (SPRING 2008) George Gissing's Manifesto: the Odd Women and the Unclassed
NINETEENTH-CENTURY GENDER STUDIES # ISSUE 4.1 (SPRING 2008) George Gissing's Manifesto: The Odd Women and The Unclassed By Lawton A. Brewer, Georgia State University <1>Jacob Korg, in George Gissing: A Critical Biography, contends that, although the economic circumstances of the Madden sisters, focal characters of The Odd Women, constitute severe challenges to their survival, “[…] Gissing perceives that the most desperate element of their plight is the loneliness and barrenness of lives in which an invitation to tea or a slice of roast beef are events of supreme importance” (188). The sisters long for activities appropriate to their claim to membership in the genteel middle class. Nonetheless, it is the Madden’s poverty that accounts for the social sterility Korg so correctly identifies. Their desire to eat competes with their desire for class inclusion. Consequently, although the book focuses on issues such as marriage, friendship, and kinship, these affiliations are brokered in an economic system in which everything has, quite literally, a price. George Gissing’s The Odd Women, a novel so often seen in terms of its feministic depiction of the “woman problem,”(1) reduces virtually every human relationship to the level of an economic transaction of some sort. Certainly, Gissing does not render every relationship in exclusively economic terms, nor does he stipulate that women or men are economic entities and nothing else. However, the deprived condition endured by the characters regulates many of the decisions, conversations, and commentary in the novel, resulting in discussions which often suggest, explicitly or implicitly, a business deal of some kind.
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