Construction of the Fallen Woman in Eighteenth and Nineteenth Century English Novels

ABSTRACT SAVING ADAM, SAVING EVE: CONSTRUCTION OF THE FALLEN WOMAN IN EIGHTEENTH AND NINETEENTH CENTURY ENGLISH NOVELS

Kelly Marie Clifton May 2013

SAVING ADAM, SAVING EVE: CONSTRUCTION OF THE FALLEN WOMAN IN EIGHTEENTH AND NINETEENTH CENTURY ENGLISH NOVELS

by Kelly Marie Clifton

A thesis submitted in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Master of Arts in English in the College of Arts and Humanities California State University, Fresno May 2013 APPROVED For the Department of English:

We, the undersigned, certify that the thesis of the following student meets the required standards of scholarship, format, and style of the university and the student's graduate degree program for the awarding of the master's degree.

Kelly Marie Clifton Thesis Author

Ruth Jenkins (Chair) English

Laurel Hendrix English

John Beynon English

For the University Graduate Committee:

Dean, Division of Graduate Studies AUTHORIZATION FOR REPRODUCTION OF MASTER’S THESIS

X I grant permission for the reproduction of this thesis in part or in its entirety without further authorization from me, on the condition that the person or agency requesting reproduction absorbs the cost and provides proper acknowledgment of authorship.

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Signature of thesis author: ACKNOWLEDGMENTS Thank you, first and foremost, to Dr. Ruth Y. Jenkins. It was in your classroom that I discovered the fallen woman, and discovered myself as well. I can’t begin to tell you what your guidance and support has meant to me. To Dr. John Beynon, without the inspiration from your classes, this project would be sorely reduced by half. To Dr. Laurel Hendrix, some of the fondest memories I have of my academic career are in your classroom. To the three of you, collectively: your passion for your subjects and compassion for your students make you not only wonderful professors, but wonderful people. I am so proud to have learned from you. Thank you to the friends and family I have neglected, or complained to, or snapped at while on the road to completing this project. This journey could not, would not, have been completed without your love for and belief in me. To the matriarchs in my life, my Mom and Grandma: I am so thankful to have had such amazing female role models. Your generosity and love knows no bounds, and I can only hope to follow the example that you both have set. To my Dad who has always supplied a sea of books, knowledge, and conversation. Your love of learning fostered the same in me. To my brother who has been my confidant, commiserator, and comic relief all of my life: I can’t imagine who I would be without you. You are the best and the brightest. To the women in my life, my own “sisters”: we have laughed and cried together, fallen and been redeemed together—I suspect the reason I felt drawn to studying redemptive sisterhoods in the first place was because I had one of my own. v v

Finally, to my husband Jeffrey: Thank you for being a wonderful man. You are my heart and my anchor. Thank you for not only accepting this journey, but absolutely embracing it. Your belief that I couldn’t possibly fail made me believe that I could probably succeed. Here’s to the next chapter, sunshine.

TABLE OF CONTENTS Page

CHAPTER 1: INTRODUCTION ...... 1 CHAPTER 2: FOREGROUNDING THE FALLEN: RICHARDSON’S PAMELA ...... 7 CHAPTER 3: DICKENS’S DEVIANTS: FALLEN WOMEN IN DAVID COPPERFIELD ...... 23 CHAPTER 4: HAYWOOD’S HAVEN: RECLUSION AS RECOVERY IN THE BRITISH RECLUSE ...... 42 CHAPTER 5: SISTER SAVIORS: GASKELL’S “LIZZIE LEIGH” AND RUTH ...... 59

CONCLUSION ...... 80

WORKS CITED ...... 82

CHAPTER 1: INTRODUCTION

The World was all before them, Where to choose Their place of rest, and Providence their guide. They, hand in hand, with wandering steps and slow Through Eden took their solitary way. Paradise Lost XII 646-49 This peaceful portrait of the first children, walking hand in hand out of Eden to face the new, wide world together, ends Milton’s masterful retelling of the story of Genesis. This end is also a fit beginning for exploring the reconstruction of Milton’s literary sons and daughters, who take up the story of the fall, if abstractly, and revise it anew. From the Biblical story of Genesis to Milton’s epic retelling, the tale of the temptation and fall of man is, in reality, the story of the fall of woman. Eve is the original archetype of the fallen woman—the woman who is seduced into sinning against the patriarchy, her Father and husband. In the Victorian Era, the tale of the fallen woman, whose origins can be traced back to the Biblical fall, becomes an outright obsession. Threads of the story of the fallen woman begin to be woven into narrative fiction, and tracking the evolving script of the fallen woman in the eighteenth and nineteenth-century English novel allows an interesting pattern to emerge: both male and female authors adopt the myth of the fall of Eve but also revise it. Instead of Milton’s tranquil portrait of the two original sinners being exiled together, strengthening their bond through their shared punishment, the harmonious ending is demolished through the literary treatment of the fallen woman. Male authors show us that the answer to the problem of the fallen women is displacement; in doing so, they revise the Miltonic fall by exonerating the male from punishment for his share in the sin—instead of 2 2 both participants being banished from their homeland, only the female is displaced. Their contemporary female authors appear to uphold this sentiment but in fact subvert this script by placing the fallen woman into all-female societies that are still within her homeland. Instead of displacing the fallen woman, they replace her into an alternative space of female redemption. Whether the author is male or female, however, the engagement of fallen woman mythology creates a space to redirect blame away from the author’s own sex in adapting the story of patriarchal punishment of the first fall. Two iconic works in feminist criticism, Nina Auerbach’s Woman and the Demon and Gilbert and Gubar’s The Madwoman in the Attic, both specifically ascribe the fallen woman of Victorian literature to Milton’s Eve in Paradise Lost. Both works also highlight the important cultural significance of Milton’s transforming the fall from an act that garners punishment for both Adam and Eve into an act that rests on Eve’s shoulders alone. Gilbert and Gubar note that “the Miltonic problem of the fall [is] a specifically female dilemma” (219). Burdening Eve and her descendants is illuminated by the fact that in the decades after Milton’s epic was published, the fall of Eve transfers itself onto the female in society and in literature by way of the cultural demonization of the fallen woman. Everything about the fallen woman is reminiscent of Milton’s Eve: of course the term itself is a nod to Eve, but Eve and the fallen woman are further bound by their sins against the patriarchy (the transgression of the rules set out by her male authorities) leading to her villainy, shame, and punishment through banishment. Auerbach goes on to illuminate this further: “At Eve’s fall, Milton tells us, ‘Earth felt the wound, and Nature from her seat / Sighing through all her Works gave signs of woe, / That all was lost’ (PL, IX, 781-784). In Victorian revisions it is the woman alone who is wounded, sighs, laments, and is lost; indifferent Nature 3 3 simply reclaims her” (160). In these versions, as well as in eighteenth-century revisions, not only does Nature abandon Eve to suffer the consequences of her sin alone, Adam abandons her as well. Unlike the Miltonic tradition, the male participant in the fall is left unpunished, free to continue life without consequence. The issues that led to the recasting of Eve as the sole recipient of punishment are intrinsically linked to the recasting of females in English society in general. As issues of bloodlines and birth became less important as a way to define English society, as the middle class emerged and expanded, the English consciousness sought to define itself in other ways (Backscheider and Richetti: ix- xxiii). One of those ways was through an increasing separation of gendered spheres of activity. The male sphere of existence was increasingly associated with public activity, and the female sphere was distanced by its association with private passivity. These dichotomized spheres only solidified with the expansion of city life, which resulted in the decimation of an agrarian society, a society which had previously and necessarily overlapped male and female spheres within and around the home. In the eighteenth century, as the feminine sphere of existence was formed, the woman was increasingly seen as a vehicle of domesticity. She became irrevocably defined by her role as wife and mother, and the importance of motherhood also led to a paradoxical desexualiztion through public condemnation that sought to control female sexuality. Because the importance of blood and bloodlines decreased with the rise of the middle class, patriarchal society sought to control female sexuality, perhaps as a way to counteract the possibility of promiscuity that was implied by the decreased need for “pure” bloodlines of the gentry. This anxiety regarding female sexuality led to a very public backlash against it—the ideal woman was increasingly associated with chastity. And, as the 4 4 ideal woman became defined as chaste, an opposing characterization emerged in the fallen woman. The myth of the fallen woman that begins to take shape in the eighteenth century evolves into an outright obsession in the nineteenth century fiction. Whether she functions within a work as a major literary character or as a shadowy warning in the background, the fallen woman permeates Victorian literature. She becomes a staple in Victorian literature and in the Victorian consciousness, traditionally functioning as a warning to women about the dangers of their desire: sexual activity leads to displacement, which leads to destitution, which leads to prostitution, which leads to death. The works of Richardson and Haywood inscribe variations of this model and provide a kind of template for the fallen woman mythology that follows in the Victorian authors explored here. Both eighteenth century authors anticipate the increased cultural attention to fallen woman mythology, and both provide a trajectory that nineteenth century fiction of the fallen woman seems to follow. In Samuel Richardson’s first novel, Pamela, fallen woman mythology can be detected in its embryonic stage. One might question the choice to work with Pamela and not Clarissa when discussing Richardson and fallen women, but, given the fact that I am attempting to trace the seeming obsession of the Victorians with the fallen woman to its modern inception, beginning with Richardson’s first novel, indeed, a novel that has been argued is the first English novel, working with Pamela seemed natural. This, along with the compelling character of Sally Godfrey, who fits the later mold of the fallen Victorian exile so precisely, fostered the choice to work with Pamela. Richardson’s Pamela not only foreshadows the hysterical anxiety of an active female sexuality that dominates the fallen woman myth, he also foregrounds what seems to be the necessary displacement of the 5 5 fallen woman, along with the exoneration of the male participant from similar punishment. Pamela is obsessive in maintaining her chastity, as are her parents, who repeatedly explain that they would rather have a daughter who is dead than one who is fallen. Sally Godfrey, the woman that is seduced, impregnated, and abandoned by Mr. B, works in the periphery of the novel, but her story provides the template that later Victorian authors seem to follow: Mr. B suffers no punishment for his participation in her fall, while she must be exiled in shame. Dickens follows this script in David Copperfield. Through the character of Emily Peggotty, Dickens displays the hysteria surrounding a woman’s virtue, as David’s narrative chronicles Emily’s devolution from innocent beauty to fallen exile. In the novel, Dickens creates a spectrum of redemption and uses the treatment of the other fallen women in the work as the ultimate determiner of their fate. The central argument of these two chapters is that both Richardson and Dickens revise the Fall by scapegoating the female and excusing the male from his punishment for participation. In her novella The British Recluse, Haywood seems to work within traditional literary and societal conventions in relation to female sexuality but ultimately creates a work in which these conventions are thwarted. She constructs female characters who are empowered by agency even while they are fallen, and also creates an all-female redemptive space in which the women find recovery. Belinda and Cleomira choose to isolate themselves from the dangers of the patriarchy, and find recovery together in the quiet life they live in reclusion. Elizabeth Gaskell’s “Lizzie Leigh” and Ruth build upon the foundation that Haywood has laid, developing the same line of convention and subversion. Gaskell ultimately revises traditional fallen woman mythology by refusing to accept the Madonna/whore dichotomy and by allowing her women the same 6 6 vehicle for redemption as Haywood: healing all-female societies. The female authors that are the focus of these chapters lace subversion under stories that seem to be conducive to patriarchal English society, and ultimately save their fallen women from exile by placing them into alternative female communities wherein these women find redemption.

CHAPTER 2: FOREGROUNDING THE FALLEN: RICHARDSON’S PAMELA

Samuel Richardson’s first novel Pamela exploded onto England’s literary scene in 1740. The cultural phenomenon that ensued is a testament to the power of Richardson’s work, and the result of the novel was the creation of a literary icon. Pamela seems to have been an overnight sensation, sparking replications and representations in all forms of media and art. However, the cultural obsession with Pamela was not without controversy. Pamela inspired countless flattering homages, yet it inspired many critiques and satirical spin-offs as well. The novel also sparked socio-literary division: Thomas Keymer describes the polarizing nature, explaining that after Pamela’s publication “one contemporary spoke of the world being divided into ‘two different parties, Pamelists and Antipamelists’” (Pamela xxv). It seems the divide is still one that is difficult to bridge, and the ongoing critical conversation about the problems of the text and criticism condemning the work is as exhaustive as it is exhausting. In “Novel Panic: Picture and Performance in the Reception of Richardson’s Pamela,” critic James Grantham Turner explains that these modern Pamelist and Antipamelist debates “replicate the eighteenth-century division” of criticism and “reduc[e] fiction to polemic by defending either the purity of the original text or the epistemic authority of its exposure in Shamela” (72). On whichever side of the Pamela scholarly debate one falls, however, the endurance of Richardson’s Pamela is difficult to ignore. Whether the text is read as an earnest didactic attempt of Richardson’s or as a hypocritical text chronicling female aspiration, its presence lingers in the literary world. In Pamela, we find an early eighteenth-century example of what becomes the myth of the fallen woman that later proliferated in the nineteenth century. 8 8

Richardson seems to foreshadow in Pamela the hysteria with which a woman’s virtue comes to be treated, the contaminating or contagious nature of the fallen woman, as well what becomes commonplace for many male authors in their literary treatment of the fallen woman: the “problem” of female sexual deviance is solved through her displacement, while the male participant suffers no equivalent consequence for his role in the fall. The eighteenth century witnessed the beginning of the evolution of the feminine ideal that would come to dominate cultural ideology of the nineteenth century, and this new ideal woman became necessarily, first and foremost, chaste. In the eighteenth century, as the rise of city life began to replace agrarian society, and as the separation of the masculine and feminine spheres of existence began to take shape, the role of the woman became increasingly connected with her position as wife and mother. In “Colonizing the Breast: Sexuality and Maternity in Eighteenth-Century England” Ruth Perry argues that this phenomenon was created largely by a reclassification of women as maternal beings in opposition to women as sexual beings, creating a desexualization of women in the latter half of the eighteenth century. This refocus of maternity, Perry argues, is an extension of England as a colonial force, as a “domestic, familial counterpart to land enclosure at home and imperialism abroad” (185). The implication here is a social form of colonization that mirrors the physical form of colonization: just as England was colonizing, gaining control over land, English society was also colonizing, gaining control over women’s sexuality. Perry points out that one of the consequences of this systematic desexualization is the jarring shift in the literary portrayal of women in the eighteenth century: “In the earlier period, women’s desire and sexual agency were portrayed in fiction with a tolerance, and even enjoyment, inconceivable in the later period” (189). Marlene LeGates also explores the 9 9 eighteenth-century shift in the literary portrayal of women in “The Cult of Womanhood in Eighteenth-Century Thought.” She explains that until the eighteenth century, “The virtuous and obedient woman was praised, of course, but it appears that her unruly sister attracted more attention” and that this unruly sister “is replaced by the image of the chaste maiden and obedient wife, popularized in the sentimental novels particularly” (23). Janet Todd argues that this “sentimental construction of femininity” helped to create a notion of the ideal woman that was solely related to her virtue and passive sexuality in order to gain control over female sexuality and desire, which was increasingly being characterized as a threat due to fluctuating societal constructs (qtd. in Backscheider and Richetti: xviii). Noting this increasing emphasis on chastity, coupled with shifting class division, Laura J. Rosenthal posits that in an era where the nature of one’s identity was no longer strictly defined by the bloodline one inherited, it became important to the British to sharpen their identities in other ways, and thus, this redefinition of identity led to a heightened focus on what gender was, where the distinctions between genders lay, and how one was supposed to act within the confines of that distinction (“Recovering from Recovery”). Rosenthal also explores women writers and feminist criticism of the eighteenth century and points out the importance of studying eighteenth-century literature with an eye toward gender: “Much criticism has further suggested that gender emerges as an increasingly important category of human identity in this period as the hereditary categories of rank overlapped with shifting class divisions” (3). This heightened interest on the distinctions of gender no doubt contributed to the ever-constricting expectations of femininity and to the anxieties of female sexuality present in eighteenth-century English consciousness. As a consequence of this increasingly rigid model of female propriety, larger society began to denounce women who did not live up to this new expectation of 10 10 femininity. In other words, as society increasingly upheld feminine sexual passivity, it simultaneously began to condemn feminine sexual activity (Rogers). Perry pinpoints the year that this shift in consciousness solidifies as 1740— the precise year that Richardson’s Pamela saw its publication. Out of this shift and the literature that follows, the myth of the fallen woman begins to take shape and Richardson begins to mold the underlying conventions of what will comprise the Victorian mythology of the fallen woman in Pamela. also associates Richardson’s picture of Pamela with nineteenth-century LeGates literature: referring to Pamela, she asks “What better precedent for the selfless, sexless woman of Victorian literature?” (24). While LeGates relates Richardson’s first novel to the nineteenth- century depiction of passive feminine sexuality, I would argue further that it is a paradigm for the literary conventions of the fallen woman as well. The hysterical nature of a woman’s virtue, the presence of a Madonna/whore dichotomy, the contagious nature of a fallen woman, and displacement as an answer to this contagion and punishment for the sin, are all conventions of fallen woman mythology, and the precedent for these conventions is set in Richardson’s Pamela. One facet of the ideology that led to the creation of the myth of the fallen woman that is exemplified in Pamela is the hysteria that surrounded a woman’s virtue. A woman’s chastity became the defining factor of a woman’s worth in the myth of the fallen woman, and this is foregrounded in the way in which Richardson constructs Pamela. She is absolutely feverish about her chastity. She is resolute about the necessity of maintaining her virtue or honesty (she uses the terms interchangeably) and, although critics have placed the blame on Pamela for her endangered state because she remains to finish embroidering a waistcoat for her master, she never waivers in the struggle of maintaining her virtue. Further, this frantic cleaving to her virtue is, of course, the moral of the story. As Laura J. 11 11

Rosenthal explains in “Pamela’s Work” “The Lesson of Pamela stands out most memorably in its implication that the rewards of domestic and economic comfort will present themselves to women who retain their sexual virtue” (248). As the subtitle of the work suggests, Pamela is rewarded for her virtue by her marriage to Mr. B. Whether modern readers, or even Richardson’s contemporaries, see Mr. B. as a fitting reward is beside the point: Richardson certainly thought Mr. B. was a “reward” for Pamela, and he attempts to demonstrate to the reader that, if a woman clings to her virtue as Pamela does, she will be rewarded with domestic felicity, which, of course, becomes the perceived proper role of woman. Indeed, Charlotte Sussman reads the text in this way when she states that “Pamela is a proof-text of the new importance of feminine virtue” (93). Sussman also points to Richardson’s innovation: “Pamela…describes, perhaps for the first time, a woman valued for her strict sexual morality” (92). This strict sexual morality, or what becomes the assumed female passive sexuality, is the foundation of the idealized new femininity that begins taking shape in the eighteenth century. In fact, pointing to the model of this “chaste maiden and obedient wife” that replaced the earlier “unruly sister,” LeGates speaks to the importance of Richardson in relation to the new feminine ideal: “The model is Richardson’s Pamela, virtuous unto marriage” (23). This virtuosity is a driving force of the text, and Pamela is so steadfast in her chastity, she is willing to die for it. The life or death nature of a woman’s virtue is another ideological convention of the myth of the fallen woman that Richardson foregrounds in Pamela. In “The Imperfect Dead: Mourning Women in Eighteenth-Century Oratory and Fiction” Desiree Henderson explores the characterization of the fallen woman in eighteenth-century funeral sermons. The virtuous women being mourned in sermons of the eighteenth century was often juxtaposed with the 12 12 image of a sexual deviant who “dies repenting her short-sighted life” (495). Henderson explains that “The death of a fallen woman is understood as a deserved punishment” (487). In one sermon, the “horror of an impious woman” is explored as she is “embraced alternately by the devil and death” (495). Henderson goes on to explain the implications: “The fact that her punishment involves the unwelcome embrace of an evil man reveals how seduction was the truest sign of a woman’s failure to comply with social ideas of womanhood” (495). This impious woman has her sins repeated, presumably eternally, and her new partner in sexual deviance is the devil: “She finds herself clasped in the icy arms of the king of terrors” (494). Here we see the full extent of the condemnation of the fallen woman: her sexual deviance has damned her to hell. Certainly, the depiction of the fallen woman as perpetually punished by (being raped by) Satan is an extreme example, but it is also certainly true that, by literary convention, a fallen woman’s fate was certain death. However, Richardson shows the reader an inversion of this: instead of being punished with death for the transgression of her virtue, Pamela is willing to sacrifice her life in its defense. Pamela states that she will “die a thousand deaths, rather than be dishonest in any way” and promises her parents that she is their “dutiful Daughter till Death” (15). Here we see a conception of death as a preventative force, in defense of virtue, instead of the tradition of death as punishment or consequence of sexual deviance. Indeed, Pamela’s parents certainly agree that she should die in defense of her virtue as well. In her father’s very first letter, he implores her not to “be too grateful, --and reward him with that Jewel, your Virtue, which no Riches, nor Favour, nor anything in this Life, can make up to you” (14). He goes on to state that he and her mother would rather “follow you to the Church-yard, than have it said, a Child of ours preferr’d 13 13 worldly Conveniences to her Virtue” (14). This notion was continued and upheld throughout nineteenth-century fiction as well. This is evidenced, for example, by Charles Dickens’s David Copperfield. In David’s eminent speech about the fallen woman, he prophesizes Emily Peggotty’s fall: “There has been a time since—I do not say it lasted long, but it has been—when I have asked myself the question, would it have been better for little Em’ly to have had the waters close above her head in my sight; and when I have answered Yes, it would have been” (Dickens 701). The frantic importance placed upon a woman’s virtue in nineteenth-century art and literature is foregrounded in Pamela: the feverish clinging to chastity as well as the notion that death is preferable to fallenness both find a modern literary predecessor in Richardson’s iconic first novel. Just as the foundation for the literary woman of virtue is laid out in Pamela, so is the foundation for her counterpart, the fallen woman. The Madonna/whore dichotomy is a long-standing and pervasive convention that Richardson takes up in Pamela through the juxtaposition of Pamela and Sally Godfrey. The reader is introduced to Sally Godfrey late in the novel, and we learn that she has been seduced by Mr. B, and that the tryst has resulted in the conception of a child. With the introduction of Godfrey’s story, Richardson effectively sets up his own Madonna/whore dichotomy: Pamela is the virtuous ideal and Sally Godfrey is, of course, the impious woman, fallen from grace. Sussman describes Pamela and Sally as “polar opposites” and that “Against Pamela’s story of marriage, Pamela must set Sally Godfrey’s story of seduction” (97, 93). Pamela’s narrative of marriage as the reward for her steadfast chastity is contrasted with Sally Godfrey’s by the taunting of Mr. B. He tells Pamela that he “doubted not” she would become “Sally Godfrey the second” (486). In this way, Richardson has Mr. B. point out what might have happened to Pamela if she had not clung to her virtue. 14 14

Sussman sums up the effect of this dichotomy effectively: “Part of the ideological work that Pamela performs is precisely the foregrounding of a virtuous marriage—a representation of a new social formation […] Yet an alternative reading of the novel would examine the way in which such a representation depends on other representations—representations of other, less virtuous kinds of femininity” (101). This less virtuous femininity is represented in Pamela through Sally Godfrey, and Richardson works within the conventional dichotomy to recreate his version of the Madonna/whore literary tradition. This conventional dichotomy becomes an obsession in nineteenth-century literature, and I would argue that Richardson is responsible for some of the literary characteristics of the fallen woman mythology that evolve out of the dichotomous positioning of the Madonna/whore archetypes. One example of this mythology is the notion that a woman’s fallenness may act as a contagion. In the nineteenth century, the notion that a woman’s sexual deviance would infect virtuous ladies was a common theme in literature and in the ideology of larger society. Richardson hints at this contaminating effect of the fallen woman in Pamela through the character of Sally Godfrey (whose story is not detailed until the ending chapters of the work), but Sally’s story has an immediate and powerful effect on Pamela. In “The Place of Sally Godfrey in Richardson’s Pamela” Albert Rivero describes the effect that Lady Davers’ revelation has on Pamela: “From this point on, ‘poor Sally Godfrey’—she is rarely mentioned without the adjective—becomes a narrative obsession” (30). Indeed the fallen woman Sally Godfrey does become an obsession for Pamela. Throughout the ending pages of Pamela, Sally Godfrey pervades Pamela’s thoughts. From the time that Sally comes into her consciousness, Pamela relates that “this poor Miss Sally Godfrey runs into my head!” and “methinks I want to know more about her” (437). 15 15

Whether Sally Godfrey is “living or dead” is a consistent question in Pamela’s mind as well. This obsession with Sally’s fate harkens back to the notion of the fatality of a woman’s fall, but I would argue that the persistent presence of Sally in Pamela’s thoughts is also an early example of the contaminating nature of fallen women that proliferates in nineteenth-century literature. The notion that the active sexuality of one woman can potentially pollute the passive sexuality of another is evidenced in Richardson’s construction of Sally Godfrey as a pollutant to Pamela’s thoughts, and, even if readers do not see Sally as an active threat to Pamela’s virtue, the fact remains that Sally has an immediate and profound influence on Pamela’s conscience and consciousness. Perhaps ironically, this permeating nature of active sexuality gets turned back onto Richardson by some of his contemporary critics. Many readers found Pamela to be pornographic, and the corrupting force of Pamela through the sexual nature of the work was used to condemn it. The author of “Pamela Censured” writes, “Interspersed throughout the Whole, there are such Scenes of Love, and such lewed Ideas, as must fill the Youth that read them with Sentiments and Desires worse than Rochester can […] It is impossible to read it without endeavoring to gratify the Passion he hath raised” (qtd. in Turner 70). It is interesting to note that one of the notions that Richardson highlights, the corrosive power of active sexuality through the fallen woman, was used to condemn the novel. The condemnation of the sexuality that pervades the text ironically works to reinforce the very same notion of an active sexuality as a contaminating force that is present inside the text as well. The idea of contagious sexuality that begins to take shape in English consciousness, an idea that Richardson helps shape with his text, is displayed through the controversy and condemnation that followed the novel’s publication. 16 16

Another aspect of what becomes the mythology of the fallen woman that Richardson’s Pamela foregrounds is displacement as the answer to the anxieties created by the active sexuality of the fallen woman. At the end of the novel, the reader learns that Sally Godfrey has moved to Jamaica, where she, apparently, lives happily as wife and mother. Rivero states that Sally’s “convenient transportation to Jamaica […] writes a satisfactorily male ending to her story” (35). The ending to Sally’s story is “male” because of the absence of Sally’s voice in favor of Mr. B’s—by transporting her to Jamaica, effectively absenting her from the text, Richardson deprives Sally of any chance to tell her story. This patriarchal ending of displacement of the fallen woman becomes a common answer for some male authors of the nineteenth century (those who don’t automatically condemn the fallen woman to death, that is). David Copperfield is again an apt example of this later tradition. Much like Sally Godfrey, the fallen women in Dickens’ text, Emily Peggotty and Martha Endell, are displaced, transported to Australia. Here we see Richardson again paving the way for what becomes a part of the myth of the fallen woman in the nineteenth century: the fallen woman is allowed to live, even to recover her proper role of wife and mother, but she is only allowed to do this in a society wherein she did not previously work as a contaminating force. The contaminating effect of the fallen woman that Richardson explores leads to the necessary displacement of her; she is removed from the society in which she was perceived as a threatening force. Once Pamela learns of Sally Godfrey’s fate, it seems that the infectious nature of the fallen woman evaporates, and the persistent presence of Sally Godfrey is replaced with the concluding picture of Pamela’s own happy home life. It would indeed seem, in this way, Richardson is suggesting that the way to decontaminate Pamela’s thoughts of Sally Godfrey is found in the fallen woman’s 17 17 displacement. Pamela acknowledges the necessity of Sally’s displacement: she notes that while Sally is happy in her new society, “she could not have been here” (483). And, though Rivero claims that “There is nothing agreeable about Sally Godfrey’s fate,” I would actually disagree (46). Sally Godfrey’s fate is certainly not an ideal ending for modern readers, but it is also certainly more agreeable than the convention of dooming the fallen woman to death or damnation. She is not dead, she is not destitute or diseased, but happily carrying out an existence in a new society. She is even allowed by Richardson to recover her “proper” role as wife and mother, which demonstrates Richardson’s revision of the more punitive versions of the fallen woman. And, though we can also certainly appreciate the patriarchal oppression that saturates Pamela and recognize it as a precursory example of what becomes the mythology of the fallen woman in the nineteenth century, perhaps we can also allow for Richardson to be commended for the areas of his comparatively sympathetic treatment of the fallen woman Sally Godfrey. In Nina Auerbach’s iconic theoretical work Woman and the Demon, the literary treatment of women in Victorian society is explored. In the chapter “The Rise of the Fallen Woman,” Auerbach states that Milton’s Paradise Lost is the archetype for what becomes the myth of the fallen woman (155). She explores the difference in treatment of Milton’s Eve and the Victorian fallen woman when she states, “Milton’s Eve will survive in the triumph ascending woman whose heel will bruise the serpent’s head, while Victorian conventions ordain that a woman’s fall ends in death” (155). Though Auerbach explores the fallen woman in Victorian art and literature exclusively, this ideology can be applied to the earlier portrayals of the fallen woman as well, who, as I have attempted to point out, is in the embryonic stages of mythical treatment in the eighteenth century. If, like Auerbach, we trace the fallen woman to Milton’s portrayal of the Biblical fall, 18 18 another striking difference arises as the myth of the fallen woman develops: the male participant is almost completely exonerated from his part in the sin. Milton’s version of Genesis, the fall of mankind, transfigures itself into the fall of woman— woman, exclusively. If this myth can indeed be traced to Milton’s retelling of the Biblical Fall, we see that Adam is no longer culpable for his participation in the sin. Instead, it is Eve alone, the fallen woman solely, who is responsible and made an outcast. The transfiguration of the Miltonic fall that excuses the male for his participation is evidenced in Pamela. The aforementioned displacement of Sally Godfrey is her punishment for her sins against the patriarchy, her fallenness. However, Mr. B’s life is virtually undisturbed after Sally’s fall: the fall is Sally’s alone, not Mr. B’s. We see evidence of the lack of consequence from Mr. B himself, at the conclusion of his relating the affair with Sally to Pamela. After Sally is displaced to Jamaica, Mr. B states: I went soon after to travel; a hundred new Objects danced before my Eyes, and kept Reflection from me. And, you see, I had, five or six Years afterwards, and even before that, so thoroughly lost all the Impressions you talk of, that I doubted not to make Pamela change her Name, without either Act of Parliament or Wedlock, and be Sally Godfrey the second. (486) Here is evidence that Mr. B did not pay in kind for his seduction of Sally Godfrey. Unlike Sally, who is so ashamed of her past that she flees to Jamaica, Mr. B is allowed to continue life as if the fall had never happened—or, at least, as if he had never participated in it. After the affair, he travels and is enamored by so many new “Objects” that any lesson he might have learned from the affair and consequential displacement of Sally, indeed the consequences of the resulting lovechild as well, are all but lost on him. He is unable and unwilling to reflect 19 19 because he has suffered no lasting consequence. The blame is put entirely upon Sally Godfrey. Such scapegoating of the female is fairly typical for patriarchal society; however, it is one more detail in the evolution of the myth of the fall—and of the myth of the fallen woman. One real-life connection that can be made between Samuel Richardson and the fallen woman is evidenced in the progressive views he held about fallen woman in the eighteenth century. Richardson was involved with funding several charities, and in “Redemptive Spaces: Magdalen House and Prostitution in the Novels and Letters of Richardson,” Martha J. Koehler explains that Richardson was intimately involved in the conception and formation of a charity that was specifically designed as a redemptive space for fallen women: The charity that clearly interested him most was Magdalen House, a privately funded asylum for penitent prostitutes, which opened on the eastern edge of London in August 1758 [. . .] Richardson’s particular investments (beyond financial) in the idea of this space and in the narrative of how a woman arrives there—indeed, his proposal of the institution several years before it became a topic of public discussion—authorize a reading of his novels in the context of his era’s discourses of prostitution and reform. (250) Here Koehler points to the evidence that Richardson was one of the leading minds contributing to the very conception of penitent houses such as the Magdalen House, and she uses the dates of his personal letters as evidence in her argument. This view is important because, however the modern reader feels about the treatment of the women and the expectations of them in these asylums, the fact is that they worked towards a progressive treatment of fallen women at the time. The fact that Richardson contributed to a penitent project such as this speaks to his 20 20 attitude toward fallen women in general and, even if modern readers understand the problems with some of these institutions (there was indeed reason to deem them ‘asylums’) we can also understand that this was, at the very least, a more progressive and enlightened stance than the tradition of dooming the fallen woman to death. The history of the Magdalen House is complicated, for the actual institutions operated more like modern-day penitentiaries rather than rehabilitation centers. In the article “Prostitution and Charity: The Magdalen Hospital, A Case Study,” Stanley Nash investigates all facets of the Magdalen House as an institution, along with its place as a precursor to modern institutions of social control. The Magdalen House focused its mission on the rehabilitation of fallen women, and the principal means of the penitent to reach rehabilitation and eventual reintegration were “submission and repentance” (Nash 620). The strict schedule of the lives of inhabitants was regimented daily with “prescribed hours of eating, working, sleeping and praying” (Nash 620). Punishment for unseemly behavior or failing to follow the highly regimented daily schedule often resulted in an early form of solitary confinement, with penitents forcefully being locked in a room alone for varying hours, depending upon the severity of their transgressions (Nash 624). Scholars like Sarah Lloyd have pointed out other problems with charitable enterprises like Magdalen House, such as the ways in which motivations for founding these institutions may have been economic and also that the propaganda circulated by pamphleteers was artfully manipulated to manifest sympathy in the society as a way to foster financial support (“Pleasure’s Golden Bait”). The economically driven controversy continues in relation to the fact that the inhabitants or “inmates” of the asylum were put to work producing sellable goods; Nash points out that one critic of the institution characterized it as a 21 21

“sanctimonious sweatshop” (620). Controversy also abounds because of the fact that many of the women who gained access to the asylum were not penitent prostitutes after all, but “seduced women” whom the operators of the institution hoped to save from that fate (Nash 619). Nash also states, however, that the harsh criticism surrounding the institution is unjust, and that it would be “an historical misjudgment to condemn” the thinkers behind the Magdalen House, and other like charitable enterprises that arose in the eighteenth century, most importantly because the “chief motive for this novel venture was declared to be compassion for fallen women” (617). Instead, Nash argues, and I would agree, that the Magdalen House can be seen as an earnest attempt to gain control over a social problem that arose in the rapidly developing world of eighteenth-century England. Institutions like the Magdalen House, which as previously mentioned, Richardson not only funded but helped to conceptualize, were conceived as a way to get prostitutes off of the streets and also to prevent fallen women who were not yet prostitutes from following that path, allowing them to recuperate some of their respectability within the confines of the Magdalen House. This progressive work is problematized when we look at the actual function of the institution and reasoning behind it. Moreover, the need for such institutions for women, but not for men, speaks again to the fact that the real-life male participant in sexual deviance suffered no equivalent consequences for his actions. The focus of these houses on penance is also a testament to the fact that the woman was viewed as a sinner who must make amends for her transgressions. This ideology continues on into the nineteenth century, as does its literary representation through the mythology of the fallen woman. The impact of Richardson’s Pamela is still being felt in modern literary criticism: however, it does not seem much has changed in its polarizing nature. 22 22

Perhaps it is the convoluted nature of the work itself that makes it so hard to align interpretations. On the one hand, in Pamela, Richardson creates a virtuous heroine who relies on her wit and eloquence to keep to her virtue; we have a construction of the fallen woman whom the author does not allow to become damned, diseased, or deceased; however, Pamela is also a novel that it appears is the foundation for much of what become staples of the myth of the fallen woman in the nineteenth century. Pamela and her parents treat her virtue as an urgent matter of life or death, and Richardson also contributes to the nineteenth-century custom of the fallen woman as a contagion, as well as the practice of male authors answering the problem of this contagious nature by displacing the fallen woman and exonerating the male participant from any sort of real punishment. As Sussman states “Seeing Pamela herself as an example of eighteenth-century English society is disturbing because of the way it narrows the field of what culture meant in relation to women” (90). And the picture Richardson paints of femininity in the eighteenth century is disturbing: the woman must hold on to her virtue, even if it costs her life, or she must vacate her society. So the war of the Pamelists and Antipamelists wages on; although, I would argue, as modern readers, we can certainly appreciate the work precisely because it simultaneously illuminates the problems arising because of the anxiety of female sexuality at the same time as it reinforces the values that helped contribute to these problems.

CHAPTER 3: DICKENS’S DEVIANTS: FALLEN WOMEN IN DAVID COPPERFIELD

Charles Dickens’s novels are glimpses of the Victorian society in which he lived. Significant issues such as social class, education, and utilitarianism are all explored in his texts, and David Copperfield is no exception. Not only does it contain Dickens’s “favorite child” David, but a multitude of complexly layered characters of all sorts. Amid these characters are three fallen women—Emily Peggotty, Martha Endell and Rosa Dartle. These women are all fallen to different degrees, and as there is a spectrum of fallenness in the novel, Dickens also creates a spectrum of redemption. David’s narratological relation to these fallen women reveals the deep-seated anxieties about feminine sexuality that were present in Victorian society, anxieties that carried over from the latter half of the eighteenth century. This is evidenced in the way that David describes and relates to each of the fallen women in the text, and, most significantly, in the varying fates of the women at the end of the narrative. Reading Dickens’s views of femininity and female sexual deviance reveals the plight of the fallen woman in Victorian society. Those views also reveal the ongoing evolution of fallen woman mythology, as Dickens follows and furthers many of the literary conventions set up by Richardson in Pamela. In David Copperfield, the reader learns that, for Dickens, it is possible for a woman to be redeemed from fallenness, but that this redemption is a direct reflection of her treatment of other fallen women. Further, we learn that regardless of her redemption, the only options available to fallen women are their disfigurement, displacement, or discarding. The solidification of gendered spheres that were formed as a result of the Industrial Revolution led to the creation of a finite definition of the feminine ideal in the Victorian era. Beginning in the latter half of the eighteenth century and 24 24 continuing on into the nineteenth, the Industrial Revolution was a catalyst of enormous social and cultural changes for English society and forced the locus of production outside of the home as factory work and city life overtook the previously agrarian social system. Working class males now increasingly sought their economic means outside the home, in the public or masculine sphere, while women were relegated to the private or domestic sphere. No longer a combined effort, the work in and around the home fell upon the shoulders of women, and contributed to the idealized female archetype known as the “Angel of the House,” a term appropriated from the title of Coventry Patmore’s poem. In “Regendering the Domestic Novel in David Copperfield,” Emily Rena-Dozier explains the formation of these gendered spheres: “The ideology of separate spheres rests on a strict division between masculine and feminine arenas of activity, such that the masculine (the public) is marked as economically remunerative and takes place either outside the home or in a localized area within the home, and the feminine (the domestic) is economically unproductive and contained within and throughout the home” (812). Thus, the domestic sphere was a place of economic and social passivity, and this passivity bled into the sexual realm as well. The angelified woman, a term I use to identify the process of Victorian society of turning the ideal woman into an angel, represented the sort of glorification of the woman and her role in the home and in society formed by this model of gendered spheres; the angelified woman was expected to cleave to her virtue above all else, adopting the hysterical necessity that gauged femininity by way of chastity that took shape in the eighteenth century. This rigid model of idyllic femininity continued evolving in nineteenth-century English consciousness, and as it evolved, it produced an increased disgust for any woman who fell short of the sexual expectations set for her by society; rather than being the Angel of the House, she became the fallen 25 25 woman. A state of fallenness included prostitution, of course, but was extended to any woman that Victorian society deemed to be sexually deviant. Jane Rogers explains that “The middle-class Victorian reaction to prostitution as a social evil was accompanied or pre-empted by a re-evaluation of gender roles” (Dickens and Urania Cottage). Although Rogers relates the reformed gender roles to prostitution exclusively, they could easily apply to fallen women in general. In fact, prostitution was often conflated with fallenness, as Catherin J. Golden details: “Victorian society did not allow for a distinction between prostitute and a young woman who made one mistake” (7). The social stigma that was attached to fallen women was due to the violation of their expected passive sexuality. In other words, engaging in sexual deviance was evidence of an active sexuality, a sexuality that was vigorous enough to persuade women to subvert social norms. This sexual deviance, or fallenness, was often seen as a sort of contagion of social ruin that threatened innocent wives and daughters who complied with the feminine ideal. The anxiety over the perceived threat of the fallen woman that began in the eighteenth century saturates Victorian art and literature. The attention that was paid to fallen women in the era reflects a sort of sexual mania—a suspicion that deviant sexual behavior would permeate and infect the masses. In January of 1857, the satirical magazine Punch ran a comic that was entitled “The Great Social Evil.” Depicted in this cartoon are two women, Fanny and Bella. Bella is inside, dressed in Victorian finery, looking out on Fanny who is in rumpled rags, skirt pulled up to her ankles, revealing mismatched socks. In the cartoon Bella, who has a stern, disapproving look on her face, asks “Ah, Fanny! How long have you been gay?” The subtitle reads “Time- Midnight. A sketch not a hundred miles from the Haymarket.” The implications of this cartoon are obvious: Fanny is a 26 26 newly turned prostitute, and Bella is a proper young Victorian female. Haymarket was a notorious place for prostitution, filled, as it was, with theaters and pubs which fostered the sex trade for many Victorians. The name Fanny had long been associated with prostitution, most likely arriving from Fanny Hill, the protagonist of Memoirs of a Woman of Pleasure, a highly scandalous pornographic novel. The word gay had also come to be a description of a woman “living by prostitution” (OED). Thus, “Punch” had identified prostitution, and by extension the fallen woman, as the paramount social evil for the Victorians, and this was a sentiment that was echoed in the larger consciousness of Victorian society. “Better she should die” was a common notion, and in fact, in most of the era’s fiction, the fate of the fallen women was death. In “The Rise of the Fallen Woman” Nina Auerbach explains this attitude, noting that “Victorian conventions ordain that a woman’s fall ends in death” (30). Auerbach also explains the prolific nature of the fallen woman in Victorian art: the fallen woman’s “Prone form becomes so pervasive an image that it takes on the status of a shared cultural mythology” (29). This mythology is reflected in the rich literary presence of the fallen woman in Victorian fiction, including Dickens’s work, and the literary tropes that can be traced back to Richardson’s Pamela are all present as well: the anxiety over an active female sexuality and the hysteria surrounding a woman’s chastity, the contagious nature of an active female sexuality, and finding answers to this contagion through the displacement of fallen women are all reflected and developed in David Copperfield. Perhaps the most standard or long-standing literary tradition that abounds in mythology of the fallen woman is the creation of a Madonna/whore dichotomy. Just as Richardson creates his own version of this convention in Pamela, so does Dickens in David Copperfield. In the essay “Late-Twentieth-Century Readers in 27 27

Search of a Dickensian Heroine: Angels, Fallen Sisters, and Eccentric Women,” Catherine J. Golden explores female archetypes in Dickens’ work. Golden explains that “Dickens often created minor characters who mirror the virtuous and the fallen; just as Sophy Traddles accentuates Agnes Wickfield’s goodness, Martha Endell underscores Emily Peggotty’s fall” (11). However, two of these characters, Agnes and Emily, also work as inverted mirrors of each other, creating a Madonna/whore dichotomy that is typical in the treatment of the fallen woman. Golden explains that “Dickens idealizes the angelic woman” in his works and that “Agnes Wickfield of David Copperfield, Dickens’s favorite novel, ideally represents the Victorian angel in the house” (6). Agnes, David’s “good angel” is the paramount example of the ideal Victorian woman within the text. She must be, for who else would be good enough for Dickens’s favorite child, David? Certainly not her counterpart in the novel, Emily. Golden again explicates Agnes’ angelified role: “Often associated with the stained glass windows of a church, Agnes is ever pointing David upward to higher things.” And, further, “Agnes embodies the qualities of the angel in the house . . . patience, unselfishness, earnestness, faithfulness, and devotion” (6). These virtues are set in direct opposition to Emily’s qualities: her impatience to be with Steerforth by absconding selfishly with him, and her deceit, unfaithfulness, and lack of devotion to Ham. The depiction of these two women, one whom David loves in his youth, and one whom he loves in his adulthood, is a traditional model of the Madonna/whore dichotomy that pervades fallen woman mythology. As Golden notes, part of Agnes’ appeal as a Victorian model of femininity is that Dickens “consistently pictures Agnes in passive roles” (8). This passivity is, of course, the antithesis of Emily’s activity. And it is exactly this active female sexuality that the Victorians perceived as a threat. 28 28

In David Copperfield, Dickens epitomizes Victorian anxiety about an active female sexuality through the evolution of the character Emily Peggotty. Margaret C. Wiley states that David Copperfield is “The novel in which Dickens most clearly wrestles with the question of fallen women,” and that among these fallen women, little Em’ly is “easily the most complex.” (108-109). This complexity is revealed in the introduction to Emily in the text. Within the (relatively) short time that David spends with the Peggotys as a child, Em’ly evolves from innocent beauty to future fallen woman. Em’ly is at first a “most beautiful little girl” who runs and hides when David tries to kiss her hello (609). This modesty soon evaporates when David asks an important question: “‘You would like to be a lady?’ I said. Emily looked at me, and laughed and nodded ‘yes’” (683). This passage is notable because David refers to her here, for the first and only time until she is grown, as “Emily.” It is not, as in all the other instances from their childhood, little Em’ly—not Em’ly or even little Emily, but only her proper first name. This is reflective of a loss of innocence to David in that moment. The only possible way for Em’ly to become a lady would be to marry a gentleman; thus, in that moment, she is not only aspiring above her social station, a problem in its own right, but also thinking about marriage and by extension her own sexuality. David acknowledges this as a transgression of her proper passive femininity (she is actively thinking about her sexuality) by changing his form of address from the childlike “little Em’ly” to the mature “Emily.” Em’ly, by Victorian convention, should not be able to articulate her desire to become a lady—a gentleman’s wife and sexual partner—at this stage in her life. This is Em’ly’s first misstep in her role as Victorian female, and Dickens acknowledges this by giving a subtle clue to David’s disapproval of this active thinking by changing his form of address. 29 29

Dickens continues to explore the threat of feminine sexuality by the evolution of Emily’s character. This evolution is reflected in David’s later encounter with her: “But when she drew nearer, and I saw her blue eyes looking bluer, and her dimpled face looking brighter, and her whole self prettier and gayer, a curious feeling came over me that made me pretend not to know her” (2499). Scholars have read this particular episode as an allusion to the possibility of Emily as potential prostitute. By describing Emily with the term “gayer,” Dickens has David, perhaps unconsciously, begin to associate Emily with this fate. David’s actions are also revealing in this particular scene: David sees Emily in all her newly-grown womanhood and is embarrassed to acknowledge her. He is acting in precisely the way that a gentleman might behave towards prostitutes he happened to encounter on the street: he pretends to ignore her (Wiley 117). Emily’s reaction to David in this scene is equally revealing: she runs away from him, laughing, and when David tries to kiss her hello, she stops him by covering her “cherry lips” and tells him she is no longer a “baby” (2502). Her words, and David’s, display her sexuality, and she is fully aware that she is now too old to be kissing David without impropriety. However, instead of being truly embarrassed (as she was in their first meeting) she laughs “harder than ever” and runs away teasingly. Through this early encounter, Emily evolves still into a coquettish flirt, dangerously teetering on the edge of propriety. Another convention of the mythology of the fallen woman foregrounded by Richardson is the treatment of the mortal nature of a woman’s chastity—the hysterical need to be virtuous. This is evidenced in the early episode at the Peggotty’s, where Emily evolves further on the road to ruin by the foreshadowing of David. David ruminates about Emily: “There has been a time since—I do not say it lasted long, but it has been—when I have asked myself the question, would 30 30 it have been better for little Em’ly to have had the waters close above her head in my sight; and when I have answered Yes, it would have been” (701). Because of the notion that a fallen woman would be better off dead, the reader is warned of Emily’s fall. Dickens, through David, is signaling to the reader that Emily is going to fall, and, though he doesn’t have Emily suffer the fate that many of his contemporaries would have deemed appropriate, he does allude to it as a possibility. And, further, the notion that Richardson sets up of death as a deterrent for fallenness is explored here as well: David suggests that, at least for a moment, he has truly felt that it would have been better for Emily to have died while innocent than to have become fallen as she does. In other words, Dickens has David suggest that Emily’s death at that young age would have prevented her fall, and that there was a time when David would have welcomed Emily’s death in order to preserve her virtue. This is an important notion because we see here that the hysterical need for chastity is valued above a woman’s life. Throughout this first glimpse of Emily, (what Wiley calls a “loaded introduction”) the reader sees her constructed as a character who reflects the anxieties that Victorian society maintained about femininity and female sexuality: building upon the conventions of fallen woman mythology established in the eighteenth century, Dickens depicts Emily as evolving from an innocent object of David’s love to a character that the reader absolutely expects to fall. The anxiety of the fallen woman as a contagion is also highlighted in the novel, here expressed through the relationship between Emily and Martha. When Emily has agreed to help the prostitute Martha make her way to London, Ham explains how this has come about: “’For the matter o’ that, Mas’r Davy,’ replied Ham, ‘all’s told a’most in them words, ‘Em’ly, Em’ly, for Christ’s sake, have a woman’s heart towards me, I was once like you!”’ (5865). Ham relates this appeal 31 31 of Martha’s twice in the space of a page. This signals the importance of Martha’s plea for Emily to relate to Martha through her “woman’s heart.” Only Emily’s position as fellow female can save Martha—perhaps because of her feminine compassion, but also because she too is a victim of the Victorian feminine ideal. The effect of Martha on Emily becomes obvious when she breaks down after Martha’s departure: Emily is almost inconsolable, and asks everyone in the room to help her because she is “vain and changeable” (5916). Her words and her feverish condemnation of herself (she is “not as good as [she] should be”) suggest that Emily already knows the danger she is in, and perhaps she takes pity on Martha not because they were once alike, as Martha suggests, but because she knows that they might very well be alike again in their fallenness (5922). It is important to note that it is directly after this episode, after her exposure to Martha, that Emily’s road to ruin is paved. The next time we hear of Emily, Ham is telling David about her fall—she has run away with Steerforth. Emily is the fallen angel of the Victorian era. Through Dickens’s construction of Emily, Victorian anxiety about feminine sexuality is exemplified: she is first an innocent beauty, then a flirtatious coquette, and finally, after her physical exposure to Martha the prostitute, a fallen woman. Dickens reverses Emily’s pattern of development in Martha Endell, creating an epitome of possible redemption for the fallen woman. In Martha, Dickens creates a character that is first the most fallen, and then the most redeemed. She is the most extreme of the fallen characters in that she is the only one in whom the full extent of the Victorian anxiety about sexual deviance is realized: she is a prostitute; “trod under foot by all the town” who “shrink” from her more than they do “the mowld o the churchyard” (5861). She is actually more repulsive than mold on gravestones. However, through David’s narratological 32 32 relation to Martha, Dickens reveals a development that is inverted when compared to Emily: Instead of evolving into fallenness, she evolves out of it. Martha is first cast as a haunting figure. On the beach, walking behind Ham and Emily, David observes that “Suddenly there passed us—evidently following them—a young woman whose approach we had not observed” and that she “disappeared in a like manner” (5665). Steerforth calls her a “black shadow” and does not even acknowledge her as a human: “Where the devil did it come from?” and “It’s gone! He returned, looking over his shoulder. ‘And all ill go with it’” (5671). This is a construction of Martha as a threatening presence: she is created as a specter, hauntingly following the “girl” Emily. The next time Martha appears, she pleads for Emily to help her make her way to London. But, it is interesting to note, instead of the haunting, menacing creature David has constructed in her introduction, we see a woman “in agony” who modestly covers her face with her shawl as she cries and moans in a “low, dreary, wretched” way and vows to “do better” (5893, 5911). This more compassionate relation to Martha continues in a later scene with David and Mr. Peggotty. After Emily’s fall, David and Mr. Peggotty seek out Martha in an attempt to gain any answers they can find about Emily. David and Mr. Peggotty eventually find Martha and follow her as she despondently makes her way toward the water. She stares at the river, desperately seeking a release from the guilt and shame of her life of prostitution, and just as she is about to fling herself into the polluted water, David garbs her arm and he and Mr. Peggotty successfully prevent her suicide. Martha’s words about the episode are telling: “I can’t keep away from it. I can’t forget it. It haunts me day and night. It’s the only thing in all the world that I am fit for, or that’s fit for me. Oh, the dreadful river!” (11803). Martha believes she deserves the fate that Victorian society 33 33 ordained: death as punishment for her sexual sins. This is an important nod to the convention of a fallen woman paying for her sexual sins with her life; however, the sorrow that Mr. Peggotty, and even David himself, feel for Martha is palpable: when Mr. Peggotty is looking at Martha in this scene, David notes “I never saw, in any painting or reality, horror and compassion so impressively blended” (11803). David not only stops her from flinging herself in the river (though it is true that this perhaps is because she might have information about Emily that would be lost if she died), but, after she has agreed to help them in the search and rescue of Emily, he implores her to not attempt suicide again, in the name of God: “’In the name of the great judge,’ said I, ‘before whom you and all of us must stand at His dread time, dismiss that terrible idea! We can all do some good, if we will’” (11892). Throughout the novel, Martha evolves from wretchedness to sympathy, until we finally see a woman who is ready to recover her feminine role. On the boat headed for Australia, Martha continues the progressing from fallen woman to redeemed feminine ideal. David relates that Martha “glided calmly through the disorder” on the ship, and he even mistakes her for Agnes, who is of course David’s “good angel” (6368). The narratological evolution created by Dickens, through David, is juxtaposed in the characters of Martha and Emily, and as Emily devolves into the Victorian fallen woman, Martha evolves into the Victorian feminine ideal. By relating Martha with the angelified Agnes at the precise moment she is about to disembark for Australia, Dickens displays that the fallen woman can indeed be redeemed and even become angelified, but, she can only do so after being banished from her homeland. In the middle of these two evolving characters is the figure of Rosa Dartle. Unlike the characters of Emily or Martha, Rosa is a stagnant figure; and, though she is the only fallen woman who is allowed to maintain her place in the society of 34 34 her origin, she seems doomed to a state of perpetual misery—an internal exile that stems from her fall. Margaret C. Wiley explicates Rosa’s role: “Looming in the background of these ladies is the figure of Rosa Dartle, whose scarred lip and barely contained rage mark her as a menacing image of fallenness” (109). This menacing nature is evident through her characterization. Rosa is a truly complex character, and she intrigues both the reader and David from their first meeting: “There was a second lady in the dining-room, of a slight, short figure, dark, and not agreeable to look at, but with some appearance of good looks too, which attracted my attention” (5086). David goes on to describe her scar: “It was an old scar—I should rather call it a seam, for it was not discoloured, and had healed years ago- which had once cut through her mouth, downward towards the chin, but was now barely visible, except above her upper lip, the shape which it had altered” (5086). Note an observation by Nina Auerbach: “One constant element in the myth of the fallen woman, reaching back to the Old Testament and to Milton’s epic recasting of it, is the absolute transforming power of the fall” (34). This transformative nature is absolute in Rosa. The transgression with Steerforth, which led to her scar, has transformed her physically (visible by the way the hammer has “altered” her lip) but has also marred her emotionally and socially: she is a constant reflection of the violence of her fall, frozen in a state of perpetual anger. The stagnant nature of Rosa’s character is reflected in David’s relation to her. David is obsessive about Rosa’s scar—detailing the shape and color, its transforming nature depending upon Rosa’s mood, and its permanence. Lauren N. Hoffer explains the complicated nature of David’s almost morbid curiosity about Rosa: “Rosa seems to draw other characters, as well as the reader, toward her and repulse them at the same time” (195). This is certainly an apt description of 35 35

David’s relationship to Rosa. David acknowledges her “appearance of good looks” while at the same time obsessively describing her disfigurement. David’s obsession with Rosa’s scarred face is evidenced even into the night by an interesting episode in which he appraises a portrait of Rosa in his room: “The painter hadn’t made the scar, but I made it; and there it was, coming and going; now confined to the upper lip as I had seen it at dinner, and now showing the whole extent of the wound inflicted by the hammer, as I had seen it when she was passionate” (5192). David is careful to alert the reader to the fact that the scar is most visible when she is passionate. This is a key idea: presumably, the scar lessens her threat to society by decreasing her aesthetic appeal to men, but also by becoming most visible at precisely the moment when she might be a threat— reinforcing her status as marked figure of sexual deviance whenever she becomes excited. Rosa’s passion for Steerforth has led to her fall, and to her scar, and she is wearing a perpetual reminder of her contaminated femininity. She carries the consequences of her sexual sins on her face, forever reminded (and reminding) of the fact that she is a ruined woman. Instead of a character who evolves into her fallenness, like Emily, or out of her fallenness, like Martha, Rosa is frozen in her society as a fiend of fallenness, an important, perhaps necessary, reminder of the dangers of sexual deviance. Displacement of the fallen woman as an answer to the threat she poses to society is another convention, foregrounded by Richardson, which Dickens follows. Like Sally Godfrey in Pamela, two of the fallen women in David Copperfield must vacate their homeland and find new homes on different continents. Dickens adds to this notion of displacement by creating a spectrum of redemption through the fates of the fallen women. Both Emily and Martha are displaced from their society of origin. Golden states that “There is no place for 36 36

Emily or Martha in Dickens’s Victorian world” (6). By removing them to Australia, Dickens illustrates that these two women are not fit to continue in the society of their origin; they both must be displaced, again reflecting the fallen woman mythology that is set up by Richardson. The success of this displacement is varied, however. On one end of the spectrum is the figure of Emily Peggotty, who is not only displaced from her original society, but also discarded in her new society in Australia. Mr. Peggotty relates to David and the reader that Emily has adjusted to her new home, but she is never fully integrated into her new society through her proper feminine role. The importance of this, as Golden suggests, is that “Dickens leaves Emily alive but perpetually penitent,” not only displacing her to Australia but discarding her as unfit to fully recover her idealized role as wife and mother. Martha, on the other hand, is able to fully participate in Australian society—she has become a wife and mother, managing to attain the ideal female model. Rosa, who has arguably suffered the worst punishment of the three, is neither displaced nor discarded. She is disfigured, remaining a stagnant reminder of the consequences of sexual deviance in her society of origin. Both Martha and Rosa actively prevent or denounce fallenness in others, while Emily contributes to it, and the spectrum of redemption that Dickens creates for the fallen women in David Copperfield is directly dependent upon their treatment of other fallen women. Rosa and Martha are able to participate in society in more substantial ways because of their relation to Emily. In the infamous scene where Rosa finally confronts the fallen Emily, the fury and hatred of Rosa is unmistakable: Rosa calls Emily “a purchased slave,” and “trembling from head to foot with rage and scorn,” she avows that “If I could have it done, I would have this girl whipped to death,” thereafter urging Emily to “hide [ . . .] in some obscure death” (12505). Rosa’s attack on Emily is brutal, but she is 37 37 campaigning against sexual deviance, and David seems to think Emily deserves the abusive words—he refuses to intervene in the verbal assault. Martha, in the end, also acts as a deterrent to sexual deviance by saving Emily from further fallenness and a life of prostitution. Mr. Peggotty relates the episode to David: “’When my child’ he said aloud, and with an energy of gratitude that shook him from head to foot, ‘stood upon the brink of more than I can say or think on— Martha, trew to her promise, saved her’” (12617). Here we see Martha angelified by Mr. Peggotty: “She come, white and hurried, upon Em’ly in her sleep. She says to her, ‘Rise up from worse thatn death, and come with me!’ [ . . .] She walked among ‘em with my child, minding only her; and brought her safe out, in the dead of night, from that black pit of ruin!” (12623). On the other hand, Emily actually advances Martha’s fallen state by giving her money to go to London and continue her life as a prostitute. This difference in treatment of other fallen women is the reason that the women vary in their fates. Emily, who only added to fallenness, must first be displaced and then discarded by society. Rosa, who is simultaneously the violent condemner and the violently condemned, remains a stagnated warning of fallenness in her original society. Martha, who saves Emily from further fallenness is allowed to recuperate her role as Angel of the House, though this is only possible once she is removed from the society in which she worked as a contaminating force. Why does Dickens so deeply explore the issue of fallen women in the novel about his “favorite child” David? Possibly because David is at least a semi- autobiographical rendition of Dickens himself, and fallen women were an important issue to the author. Dickens was so attached to the issue, that he also helped establish a home for the redemption of fallen women: Urania Cottage (which, consequently, is another interesting parallel to Richardson and his work 38 38 with the Magdalen House). There is strong evidence that this work contributed to his construction of the fallen women he explores in David Copperfield. In “Epistolary Revelations,” Jodi Devine explains that “As Dickens was helping to establish the Home for Homeless Women (which was how he referred to Urania Cottage) he was simultaneously writing David Copperfield” (57). Dickens was intimately involved in every aspect of the creation of Urania Cottage and his pride in the recovery of the women is obvious in a 1853 entry in Household Words: “Thirty (of whom seven are now married) on their arrival in Australia or elsewhere, entered into good service, acquired a good character and have done so well ever since as to establish a strong prepossession in favour of others sent out from the same quarter” (qtd. in Rogers). This was the goal of Urania Cottage, to provide a place where fallen women could recuperate the loss of their reputation, and, after that recovery, be placed in a new society with the hopes of attaining their proper gender role as Angel of the House. Wiley explains the importance of the connection of Dickens’s work with fallen women to David Copperfield: “In Martha, he articulates what his goals were for most of the inmates of Urania Cottage: emigration and marriage” (122). In this way, Martha exemplifies Dickens’s ultimate aspirations for the Victorian fallen woman. Gareth Cordery focuses on the novel as Dickens’s epic ode to domestic felicity, but I would argue that this can be inverted to view David Copperfield as a warning against behavior that can impede such domestic bliss. As Golden relates, the literary construction of the Dickensian fallen woman problematizes the relationship that he had to these women and this institution: “The punishment for Emily and Dickens’ other fallen women [. . .] lead us to question the sternness of their creator despite his active involvement in safe houses for prostitutes and his help in the emigration of many fallen sisters” (17). Through the fallen women Dickens creates, and through 39 39

David’s narratological relation to them, the reader learns that in only very specialized circumstances can a fallen woman be allowed to participate in domestic felicity—and even then, she must be removed to a society in which she was not previously a contaminating presence. And what of the males who participate in the fall of these women? One we know, Steerforth, David’s patronizing but charismatic friend. Steerforth has participated in the fall of two of the three fallen women in the novel. Steerforth dies at the end of the novel, perhaps as punishment for the ruined women he has left in his wake, but, at the same time, Dickens, through David, immortalizes Steerforth in a way that makes the reader question if the death is really a reflection of punishment. David is never able to fully condemn Steerforth for his actions: he remembers his fated friend fondly, recalling only the good in him. Also, like Mr. B in Pamela, Steerforth has transgressed early in his youth and the lack of punishment for that crime leaves him open to future transgressions. Unlike Rosa, who is permanently and perpetually punished for her sexual engagement, Steerforth suffers no consequences, except, perhaps, that he must put up with Rosa’s presence. After he engages in a slight verbal spar with Rosa, Steerforth scoffs as David calls her clever; Steerforth blames Rosa for her tempestuous nature: “’Clever! She brings everything to a grindstone,’ said Steerforth, ‘and sharpens it, as she has sharpened her own face and figure these years past. She has worn herself away by constant sharpening. She is all edge” (5133). Indeed, he callously explains the origin of the fascinating scar: “’Why, the fact is,’ he returned, ‘I did that’” (5134). When David assumes he gave Rosa the scar in a horrific accident, Steerforth clarifies: “No. I was a young boy, and she exasperated me, and I threw a hammer at her” (5132). Even though Steerforth adds on a self- depreciating comment to the end of his explanation (“A promising young angel I 40 40 must have been!”), the curt delivery of the story and his blame of Rosa for her justified antagonism make it clear that he is, in fact, not sorry or remorseful—for her fall, or for the disfigurement. He has learned nothing from this early episode, and, due to the lack of an equalized punishment, he is left able and willing to continue his participation in female sexual deviance. The participants we do not know, Martha’s partners in sexual deviance who seek her out as a prostitute, suffer no visible punishment either. Again, as in Richardson’s work, it is only the female participants that suffer for their sexual activity—the blame solely falls on the fallen woman; there is no modern mythology of the fallen man. The popularity of David Copperfield and its author as cultural forces speaks to the pervasiveness of the condemnation of sexual deviants by Victorian society. Cordery explains that “Like no other novelist of his day, Dickens was a public figure, the publication of his novels significant cultural events at which readers could celebrate and thus confirm the tastes and values that they shared with their author” (82). As Cordery points out, the reason that Dickens is hailed by many as the Victorian novelist is precisely because so many of his contemporary readers identified with the cultural views that were reflected in his work. The Dickensian notion of the mere existence of recuperation for fallen women was certainly progressive, as was his dedication to his work in the Urania Cottage; however, through Emily, Martha and Rosa, Dickens reveals his own anxiety about feminine sexuality by creating a limited spectrum of redemption that is solely based on the fallen woman functioning as a denouncer or preventer of fallenness in others. Moreover, Dickens also perpetuates the notion that the male participant need suffer little or no repercussions for his part in the fall. For all of Dickens’s progressive views about, and work with, fallen women, David Copperfield reveals the same anxiety and prejudice about women’s sexuality that was present in larger 41 41

Victorian society and modern readers can certainly appreciate Dickens’s progressiveness while at the same time we recognize the limits of that advancement.

CHAPTER 4: HAYWOOD’S HAVEN: RECLUSION AS RECOVERY IN THE BRITISH RECLUSE

Fiction by women in the early eighteenth century has often been discarded as works of little value, conceived of as little ruminations on or fantastical imaginings of frivolous topics important only to a female audience. As critic Nicholas Seager explains, amatory fiction has traditionally been read as “trashy women’s romances” (111). This prejudice has long been upheld by literary consumers and critics alike; however, as Paula Backscheider and John Richertti explain in the introduction to Popular Fiction by Women 1660-1730: An Anthology, in the last few decades scholars have taken to reevaluating these works and their importance to the literary world, recognizing the influence that these amatory fictions had over their fellow authors and over the evolution of the novel itself. Among these influential female authors is Eliza Haywood, a writer whose prominence and popularity surpassed both her female peers and male rivals. The success of Love in Excess was particularly astonishing, and sales of that book cast it in the top four best-selling works of the first half of the eighteenth century (Backscheider and Richetti: x). Explored here is another work from Haywood, The British Recluse, which can be read as a cautionary tale that appears to warn the reader against a variety of feminine follies. It is, on the surface, a tale of two women, Belinda and Cleomira, who have been undone by their unchecked desire and cast out of society as a consequence of their fallen state; however, a closer reading reveals rich subversive material. In The British Recluse, Haywood presents the reader with a story that assumes the guise of a cautionary tale that maintains the status quo but instead subverts social expectations and ultimately allows Belinda and Cleomira to recover from their fallen state by retreating from 43 43 public life into a purely female society that they create for themselves, by their choice, and on their own terms. Critical comparisons of Eliza Haywood and her contemporary Samuel Richardson account for a substantial portion of recent eighteenth-century criticism. The connection between Richardson and Haywood is strong: Haywood even engages with Richardson’s Pamela by writing Anti-Pamela, a satirical critique of Richardson’s domestic novel. Further than this blatant literary connection between the two authors, recent criticism has also pointed out the ways in which Richardson might have taken some cues for his first novel by reversing the ideas in Haywood’s amatory fiction: Nicholas Seager calls Haywood’s fiction a “negative precursor to a mainstream domestic fiction” such as Richardson’s Pamela (120). Seager focuses on the incorporation of an excerpt of Haywood’s The British Recluse into the 1740 addition of Defoe’s Roxana. He attempts to understand the placement of Haywood’s amatory fiction within the more conservative, or “Richardsonian model” of Defoe’s work (104). In the article “Haywood’s Re-Appropriation of the Amatory Heroine in Betsy Thoughtless,” Aleksondra Hultquist explores the appropriation of the literary tropes in Haywood’s amatory fiction by Richardson and the subsequent re-appropriation of these literary techniques by Haywood in her later domestic fiction. Hultquist further explains the connection of Haywood’s amatory fiction and Richardson’s domestic novel: “Domestic fiction, rather than rejecting amatory modes— especially scenes of seduction and stories of fallen women—incorporates them to promote their comparatively conservative outcomes” (142). Hultquist calls the tale of Sally Godfrey in Pamela “a plot lifted from amatory fiction” and explains the ways in which “the story echoes the kinds of situations in which Haywood’s heroines find themselves: the young lady, the wealthy young man, the passions of 44 44 both, and the ease with which the man extricates himself” (143, 146). Explorations of Haywood’s connections with Richardson are as compelling as they are informative; however, the purpose of this project is twofold: to explore the ways in which male and female treatment and engagement with the myth of the Fall and the myth of the fallen woman differ, as well as to elucidate the congruencies of literary traditions within the sexes. And, just as Richardson foregrounds the literary tradition that subsequent male authors such as Dickens follow, so too does Haywood set up tradition followed by future female writers. Haywood, however, establishes a different, subversive tradition that will subvert the patriarchal literary tradition—especially in the treatment of the myth of the fallen woman. This female tradition also follows Milton’s iconic Paradise Lost, his epic version of the Biblical fall. In The Madwoman in the Attic, Sandra Gilbert and Susan Gubar explore the implications and ramifications of Milton’s text, explaining that “Since the appearance of Paradise Lost—even, in a sense, before—all women writers have been to some extent Milton’s daughters, continually wondering what their relationship to his patriarchal poetry ought to be” (219). Haywood and the authors of amatory fiction in the eighteenth century were, then, among these Miltonic daughters, their wounds from the patriarchal poetry still fresh from of a distance of only a few decades. Gilbert and Gubar identify Milton as the “first of the masculinists” and the “patriarch of patriarchs” and explicate that the dominant script to be extracted from Milton’s “metaphorical misogyny” in the epic, for women, is “of course the story of woman’s secondness, her otherness, and how that otherness leads inexorably to her demonic anger, her sin, her fall, and her exclusion from that garden of the gods which is also, for her, the garden of poetry” (191, 192). This depiction of women as other and inferior is 45 45 of course a part of traditional patriarchal society and the literature therein. The ever-widening gap between public and private spheres, developed in previous chapters, between masculine and feminine gender roles and duties, worked to substantiate female subjectivity in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. Moreover, the exclusion of women from the garden of poetry is also an exclusion from the literary landscape as a whole, and female authors of the eighteenth century felt this exclusion acutely. The growing anxiety over female sexuality in the eighteenth century transferred into an anxiety over female authorship. Sharon Harrow, in “Having Text: Desire and Language in Haywood’s Love in Excess,” explains the root of the anxiety over female writers: “Enlightenment writers worried that women’s greater capacity for passion could overwhelm their capacity for reason” (283). To counter this anxiety over female authorship, many women writers constructed works that on the surface could be read as conforming to the evolving gender roles and expectations of womanhood. Jane Spencer explains the importance of Haywood and other female writers’ seeming to align with English society’s expectations of them: “men would allow women to write only so long as they produced works which focused upon women and women’s subjects, particularly love and marriage, and only so long as their treatment of those subjects remained within the boundaries prescribed by established male literary traditions” (qtd. in Craft 821). In the essay “Reworking Male Models,” Catherine Craft analyzes Haywood’s amatory fiction Fantomina along with two other texts from women writers in this era, examining and exposing the “encoding of female discourse” that is present in the seemingly traditional texts (822). Female amatory writers, Craft explains, “produced narratives that seemed, at first glance, to be no different from the tales told by men; women’s fictions, however, often contained elements contradictory 46 46 to and critical of ideology which formed the standards and content of the main portion of the text” (822). The importance of packaging subversion within societal mores is explained by Haywood herself in The Female Spectator: “it is not by Force our Sex can hope to maintain their Influence over the Men, and I again repeat it as the most infallible Maxim, that whenever we would truly conquer, we must seem to yield” (qtd. in Seager 118, emphasis added). This infallible maxim blatantly conveys the moral purpose of Haywood’s stories: even though her writing was controversial, she superficially appears to conform to the ideas and expectations of patriarchal society, but in reality works to subvert the anticipated mythology of the fallen woman. Female authors were aware of the need to appear to conform to the evolving gender codes, and cunningly used those codes in their own defense: In “It’s Not Easy Being Green: Gender and Friendship in Eliza Haywood’s Political Periodicals,” Rachel Carnell states that female authors of the early eighteenth century labeling their work as amatory fiction was a “somewhat disingenuous defense frequently used by women writers who were arrested for seditious libel” (203). The implication here is that women actively used their gender and the prescription that their writing was “merely amatory fiction” to dismiss their own work in order to escape public trouble. In doing this, weaving in subversion within the context of a narrative that appears to reinforce patriarchal values, female writers such as Haywood were able to successfully—and actively—participate in the eighteenth-century literary world. Haywood participates in this tradition of subversion by female authors in The British Recluse through the guise of a cautionary tale. The first supposed caution to be explored is the usurpation of parental authority. Cleomira’s and Belinda’s stories are similar in that, in the beginning of their narratives, they are stifled by a lack of power over their own lives. Cleomira has grown up in court 47 47 with wealthy parents, but when her father dies, her mother chooses to have them quit the court life, due to grief and fear that Cleomira’s great beauty yet small fortune will not produce a desirable match in the city. Cleomira finds the country life stifling and ignores her mother’s entreaties to “learn to play the good Housewife and forget there ever were such Things as Balls, Plays, Masquerades, or Assemblies” (162). This is too much to ask from a young girl who is used to such societal pleasures, and, indeed, she seems to blame the seclusion from court life as the root of her behavior. She tells Belinda “this sudden Change from all the Liberties in the World, to the most strict Confinement, is all the Excuse I can make for my ill Conduct” (162). Cleomira’s mother takes away her freedom to continue life at court, and Cleomira states that this, the loss of liberty to confinement, is the starting point of her fall. Similarly, Belinda begins her story with parental oppression. She has lost both of her parents, but before dying, her father has made arrangements for her to marry a man of his choosing. The aptly named Mr. Worthly is a man of virtue, sense, and fortune, but Belinda feels nothing but indifference towards him. She is likewise indifferent to her impending marriage until she meets (the, again, aptly named) Courtal, who is, of course, one in the same as Cleomira’s lover Lysander. Belinda loves Courtal immediately, and her father’s choice of husband, Mr. Worthly, becomes a source of suffocating obligation. The answer to such unwanted confinement, for both ladies, is to usurp the power of their parents. Cleomira takes control by appointing a guardian whom she knows will let her have the liberty to see Lysander, and Belinda takes control by disregarding her father’s wishes and ending her engagement to Worthly. These acts of disobedience have disastrous consequences, however, and the women seize power over their lives from their parents only to have it taken away again by 48 48

Bellamy (who is the “real” Lysander and Courtal). Both women give over their power to Bellamy by giving into their passions. He steals their innocence along with their power, and the reader is left to conjecture that had the women followed the duty of listening to their parents, they would have been safe from Bellamy’s deceiving charms. On the surface this seems as a quaint caution to would-be disobedient daughters. Backscheider and Richetti explain that this is a common theme, as the fifth Commandment was a substantial subject in literature from the eighteenth century (170). However, if we go back to the beginning of the women’s stories, we see that the need to usurp parental, or patriarchal, power stems from the complete lack of liberty each woman possesses. One might suppose that if the women had any agency at all in their choices, such rash actions might not have been necessary in the first place. Underneath the moral of the story to mind one’s parents, Haywood gives the reader pause to think about the consequences of oppression. Seager agrees in his statement that The British Recluse “exposes the ‘liberties’ men take and the extent to which gender and marital ideology were depriving women of this liberty” (118). Such tyranny can only be overcome by a revolt against the oppressor, and the consequences of this usurpation stem only from a want of liberty. In this way, what on the surface is a tale that cautions against subverting authority becomes a tale that cautions against unwanted confinement. Caution against patriarchal confinement is continued in The British Recluse with respect to passion. The reader learns that when confinement is imposed by the patriarchy, it dangerously promotes desire. Harrow has noted that in “Haywood’s fiction, confined spaces are spaces where women can body forth desire through language” and further that confining passion or attempting to stifle it leads to excessive passion (294). This is certainly true in The British Recluse in 49 49 the case of Cleomira. When Cleomira finally is able to enjoy a night of English society, she claims “never was any Prisoner, who long had languished in a Dungeon, more rejoiced to see open Air than I to find myself once more in Court.” (163). In this first taste of freedom from her long and unwanted confinement she meets Lysander/Bellamy: “I Loved-- -- was plunged into a wild Sea of Passion before I had time to know or stem the Danger” (164). Cleomira keeps this encounter a secret from her mother: “I resolved to say nothing to my Mother of what had passed, believing with Reason enough, that she would not only condemn me for Mismanagement but also take such Measures as should for ever deprive me of the Sight of him” (165). Cleomira has done nothing wrong as of yet, but her mother, she fears, will again take her liberty away by isolating her from Bellamy’s presence. Cleomira’s fears are realized when her mother does confine her after she returns home from her night of freedom, and, because she is unable to continue a proper courtship with him in the society of court, Cleomira takes to corresponding with Bellamy through personal, amorous letters. After receiving a second letter from Bellamy-as-Lysander, she is “so blinded by Passion that [she] could think of nothing but which way [she] would gratify it” (168). Her absence from Bellamy, brought on by her parentally-enforced confinement, urges her to succumb to his passionate words by writing her own. Cleomira explains the way in which her passion, at this point becoming unreasonable, is fueled by her mother’s confinement: “I regretted nothing but the Power she had over me, lest she should exert it yet more and deprive me of any future means of seeing him” (170). Harrow notes that Haywood consciously represents confinement as a vehicle for passion: “For Haywood understood that making passion private—or confining it—served to potentiate rather than to palliate it” (287). It is through 50 50 this unwanted confinement, first from court and English society at large, and then from Lysander/Bellamy, that fosters Cleomira’s evolving passion. The gendered gap between reason and passion that was ascribed to the masculine and feminine spheres, respectively, is also explored in The British Recluse. Harrow explains that this was a traditional treatment from Haywood: “Thematically and generically, Haywood’s novels reflect the complicated and often blurry Enlightenment divides between masculine/feminine, reason/passion, and public/private” (284). Both Cleomira and Belinda display unreasonable— hysterical—passion throughout the work. In the midst of their respective tales of seduction, each woman frequently breaks down in “Agonies,” or a “Torrent of Tears” (212,193). The literary construction of women as hysterical creatures is well-established: Michel Foucault explains female hysteria in the eighteenth century as an “‘image’ rather than an ‘illness,’ a set of amatory signs over which the woman has no interpretative control. It is, after all, the men in these seduction scenes who interpret the woman’s body as desirous and submissive” (qtd. in Harrow 298). It would appear that the women of The British Recluse confirm Foucault’s assessment: they display hysterical passion that Bellamy interprets as consent in the seduction scenes. Each woman’s passion leaves her unable to act: Belinda’s hysterical passion renders her in such a state that her “trembling Limbs refused to oppose the lovely Tyrant’s Will!” (211) and Cleomira laments that she “suffered—or, rather let me say I could not resist his proceeding from one Freedom to another, till there was nothing left for him to ask or me to grant” (178). However, Haywood shows, if the hysterical woman is accompanied by a female companion, the companion can work as a calming—or reasonable—force. After one of her interruption of hysterics, the narrator explains “But the Recluse had too much Complaisance and Good-nature to be able to endure the Influence she 51 51 perceived her Afflictions had over the tender Disposition of the other and composing herself as well as she could, continued her Discourse.” (193). It is the presence of Belinda that checks Cleomira’s descent into hysterical passion. Similarly, when Belinda falls apart in her narration, Cleomira works to console and calm her into reason: “It was now that Lady’s turn to comfort, which she did with such Success that the other was soon able to resume her Discourse[. . .]” (213). The women act as a calming force, a deterrent to the passionate hysterics to which each are prone. Moreover, unreasonable female passion is squelched when the two fallen women choose to retire into the country together, and the gap between reason and passion is bridged once the women take back their agency from Bellamy through this choice. It can be argued that this is a perfectly reasonable choice for two young women who have become fallen, unwilling to place themselves in the dangers of larger society any longer. Though they go into hysterics while reliving their own stories, they end up in a reasonable calm at the end of their respective narratives by retiring to a calm country life. Further, each woman acts as a calming—or reasonable—force to the other while first one, and then the other, succumb to hysterics while recounting their tale of fallenness. Instead of the fallen women acting as contaminates or mutually fostering these hysterics, they work to soothe them. Reading the text in this way, the women become reasonable creatures with moments of passion, instead of passionate creatures with moments of reason. It seems here that Haywood is inverting the passion/reason dichotomy that eighteenth-century consciousness imposed upon the male/female spheres of existence, an inversion that is further displayed in the character of Bellamy. Haywood seems to feminize Bellamy, first connecting him to personal letters, and then filling those letters with passionate, amorous language. Harrow explains the 52 52 way in which personal letters were perceived in the early eighteenth century: “Letters were associated with spontaneity of feeling, with the ‘thematics of love’ and were labeled as ‘sentimental non-literary’” (285). Bellamy chooses letters to correspond with the women out of necessity; however, his passionate advances are all his own creation. Cleomira states his expressions of love were “an inexpressible Shock to my Modesty” (165). Initially, she reacts with this modesty—and reason: After his first passionate letter, Cleomira claims that she is “a little Diffident of the Continuance of a Passion so weakly grounded” (167). Belinda, too, responds to Bellamy’s passionate first advances and letters with caution or reason. She even questions the hyperbolic language of Bellamy/Courtal’s letters: “I have heard say, by those more skilled than myself, that the greatest Symptoms of true Passion is to be deprived of Utterance, Incoherence in Expressions; and as I have not Vanity enough to imagine there is anything in me capable of engaging you to the Reality, am unwilling to be made the Property of an Amusement” (209). This is further evidenced by the content of one of Bellamy’s early letters to Cleomira: “It is with an inconceivable Terror I look back on that Declaration, which the Force of the most violet Passion that ever was, obliged me to make, in so unpolite and unprepared a Manner; and tremble when I consider how much Reason you have to condemn Presumption of this” (166). He has passion; she has reason. Bellamy, in this way, is the hysterical woman, uncontrollably trembling and hyperbolically expressing his passion in an amorous letter. In the beginning of the affair, Cleomira continues to be the more subdued—the more reasonable—correspondent. And, though she agrees to a meeting with Bellamy/Lysander, her words are not fraught with the lofty language of love that he expresses. As explored above, it is only until she is barred from the liberty to see Bellamy by her mother’s confinement that she begins the descent 53 53 into unreasonable passion. By feminizing Bellamy, aligning him with personal letters and making the content of those letters passionate, Haywood subverts the eighteenth century dichotomous notion of the reasonable male and passionate female. Bellamy is at first passionate and unreasonable, but, once his passion has been satiated by taking the virtue of each woman, he evolves into the traditionally reasonable eighteenth-century male. Bellamy-as-Lysander addresses his letters to Cleomira accordingly: “To the Divine Cleomira” (166); “To my Adored Cleomira” (167); “To my Soul’s only Treasure, the adorable Cleomira” (173); “To the lovely Cleomira” (181); “To the unkind Cleomira” (186); and finally, devoid of any the passion heretofore seen, “To Cleomira” (193). By tracing the addresses or titles of his letters to Cleomira, we can see the arch of Bellamy’s passion slowly reducing as he first aspires for, and then receives, her virtue. This change from passion to reason is completed in his chastising Cleomira for the continued passion of her love letters: “Believe me Cleomira! Whatever in our Days of Courtship we profess, the Excess of any Passion is ridiculous to a Man of Sense; and Love, of all others, more excites our Mirth than our Pity” (192). Here Bellamy hypocritically condemns the professions of passion he so vehemently attested to in his early letters. He has become “a man of sense;” a man of reason. The reasonable male that abhors passion is somewhat of a theme in Haywood’s amatory fiction. As Harrow notes, “Passion, declares D’Elmont early in Love in Excess, is ‘a trifle in it self, and below the dignity of a man of sense’” (284). Bellamy—after his professed passion is quenched—finally becomes the reasonable male, ready to marry, but his hypocritically harsh nature makes this supposed masculinity laughable. The reader sees that Bellamy does not suffer for his sins, much in the same way as the previously explored male authors exonerate the Adam character; 54 54 however, as readers, the disgust that we feel towards Bellamy for his actions makes him a far less compelling character than Richardson’s Mr. B or Dickens’s Steerforth. Haywood’s male participant in the fall—her Adam—is left unpunished for his sins in the world within the fiction, but unlike readers for Richardson or Dickens, Haywood’s readers more readily condemn him as an archetype of male hypocrisy. The caution against believing a deceitful lover is Haywood’s most overt warning to the reader. From the onset of the tale, she tells us that she desires to display “A sad example of what Miseries may attend a Woman, who has no other Foundation for Belief in what her Lover says to her than the good Opinion her Passion has made her conceive of him” (155). If one takes Haywood’s statement of intent at face value, believing a man’s words over his actions in addition to an overestimation of his character, led by a woman’s desire, are the chief ills that she wishes to display in the work. She does display this through Cleomira and Belinda and their naïve belief in the love that Bellamy proclaims. It is interesting, though, that Haywood does not say she wishes to show the dangers of a deceitful man, but the dangers of believing a deceitful man. It seems as though Haywood is blaming the believer of the lies, rather than the liar. This, of course, is in accordance with traditional blaming of the female victim, and also speaks to the utter lack of consequences for men, as opposed to the utter ruin of women, who engage in the same sexual deviance. However, I am disinclined to take Haywood’s words of intent at face value. Instead, they might be seen as a foreshadowing or mirror to a scene in Bellamy’s incarnation as Lysander. In a letter to Cleomira, Bellamy blames his loss of interest on her passion. He admits that he has lost his desire, but Cleomira cannot “blame” his “Change of Humour, since your own extravagance has been the Cause” (192). He entreats her to 55 55

“assure” herself that her “own Mismanagement” is the cause of his ceased devotion. (192) Like the aforementioned passage of Haywood’s intent, he blames Cleomira, the believer of the lies, instead of himself, the liar. As Seager explains “Lysander blames Cleomira for causing the premature end of his love of her [. . .] Put in Lysander’s mouth, the hypocrisy of the double standard he defends is apparent, as he prescribes the resigned and uncomplaining feminine model that was normalized later in the century” (119). Because Lysander becomes such a detestable character, the reader, appalled by his hypocrisy, inconstancy and deceit might look back to this passage and discount his blame of Cleomira. The fact that Haywood chooses her words at the beginning to mirror the villain’s so exactly could cue the reader into disregarding her blame for the victim, or the believer of the lies, as well. In this way, Haywood would be commenting on the practice of blaming the victim and the injustice of the double standard that existed in her society. Society is no better than the treacherous Bellamy if we choose to blame the target of deceit rather than the deceiver. If the reader chooses a reading such as this, we again see that Haywood is weaving subversion in the midst of a work that on its surface seems to reinforce the status quo. The last and arguably most substantial cultural subversion in The British Recluse is presented in the conclusion of the tale. As we have seen, the two chief characters, Belinda and Cleomira, succumb to their passion, ignore their reason, and end up fallen women. Ruined by desire, they retire from larger society, and are never able to fulfill the expectation of their gender role of becoming a wife and mother. Some might argue that the moral to be extracted here is that because they are fallen, Cleomira and Belinda are no longer fit for larger society, so they must seclude themselves from the rest of the population. However, a closer reading reveals that all is not lost for the fallen women. Neither Belinda nor Cleomira 56 56 suffer the same consequences as many of their factual counterparts: they do not become destitute, diseased or deceased, a fate which much of society would have claimed they deserved. Neither do they suffer the fate that becomes the answer to many male authors: displacement. As Hultquist explains, “Haywood’s early fictions do not necessarily punish the seduced heroines with deportation or death, but rather allow them to reclaim virtuous reputations on their home soil.” (145). Instead of banishing the fallen women, an Edenic displacement that kicks them out of their homeland, Haywood allows the women to recuperate from the fall in their society of origin. Unlike parental or patriarchal imposed confinement, self-appointed confinement offers solace. Harrow states “The solution to an assault on ‘liberty,’ Haywood implies, is to shut oneself in” and that “confinement therefore secures liberty” (306). This is true when the confinement is self-imposed. After their respective falls, the women come to the boarding house of their own will. Cleomira begins her solitary seclusion and Belinda is seeking out her still- supposed lover. This demonstrates an enormous amount of agency, and is the first step to taking back the control that they lost to Bellamy. Furthermore, Belinda and Cleomira retire from the public sphere, it is true, but Haywood makes perfectly clear that theirs is a self-appointed seclusion. It is by their own “resolution” that they continue “abandoning the World” (224). The word choice here is key: instead of being banished by the world they resolve to abandon it. Haywood’s closing words are telling of her feelings on the matter: “And where a solitary Life is the effect of Choice, it certainly yields more solid Comfort than all the public Diversions which those who are the greatest Pursuers of them can find” (224). The emphasis on “choice” is hers. Thus, far from being debilitated by their fallen state, the women end up in complete control of their destinies. They are calling 57 57 the shots; they choose to retire to country life, and, it seems, they spend the rest of their days in happy retirement together. It seems that Haywood is creating a new haven for fallen women. As Hultquist notes, Haywood “not only offers strategies for life after seduction, but also proposes that the path from attraction to abandonment is complicated and offers many chances of redemption” (143). This is certainly true in that these women are able to recover from their fallen state by choosing to take themselves out of society, away from the dangers of a deceiving man, and recover control over their lives in a world of their own making. Hultquist also explains that recent criticism of amatory fiction has “done much to recover and reconsider Haywood’s place in the context of the rise of the novel, but nonetheless see her as less important as Richardson, valuing her earlier work mostly for its political and cultural implications rather than its literary merit and influence” (141). This literary merit and influence can be seen in the female authors of the nineteenth century—authors who take up the myth of the fallen woman and grant her agency and solace through reclusion. The subversion that nineteenth-century women writers weave into their fiction, fiction that on the surface seems to conform to patriarchal standards, can be traced back to the early amatory fiction writers such as Haywood. As a way to navigate through the aforementioned complicated nature of their relationship to Milton and his version of the female, and the fall, Gilbert and Gubar explain that female authors often “enact subversively feminist interpretations of Paradise Lost” (220). This subversion can be found in the eighteenth century among amatory authors such as Haywood. Haywood not only subverts mores of her increasingly conservative society, but also engages with Milton in recasting her Eves—her fallen women—by revising the traditional ending of the fall. Her Eves are not banished by the patriarchy for their sins, but 58 58 instead isolate themselves in a feminine society of their own, on their home soil, and eschew the patriarchal structure that victimized them in the first place. It is also important to note that societies that looked much like the female community that Haywood creates—all female institutions that were removed from larger society and created by women, for women, became factual places of refuge and rehabilitation for fallen women some generations later. Seager also notes this when he states “The British Recluse is a fiction that refuses to punish fallen women in traditional ways” and further that “Cleomira and Belinda ultimately do not need men for happiness—the ending anticipates the all-female social networks that were becoming popular in fiction of the mid-century” (112). In her fiction, Haywood is developing the idea of these societies; her influence and importance extending beyond the literary community and into the lives and fates of women in the real world. Haywood creates a cautionary tale—not to reinforce cultural values but to bolster agency for women with an alternative community for them.

CHAPTER 5: SISTER SAVIORS: GASKELL’S “LIZZIE LEIGH” AND RUTH

Victorian England was a place of revolution: of industry, cultural values, and, most importantly for this project, gender ideology. As a result of this unprecedented revolution of lifestyle and social mores, Victorian fiction became saturated with allegorical treatments of the many social issues of the age. And, if there was one dominant myth that rose out of the ashes of the old order of life—an order that had been steadily in flux since the eighteenth century, but saw its complete decimation in the nineteenth—it was the mythology of the fallen woman. As the previous chapters have illustrated, Richardson and Dickens responded to this trope by shifting blame away from the man as well as demonstrated the increasingly restrictive responses culture revealed toward female sexuality and desire. Haywood, however, as the previous chapter analyzes, created narratives that subverted patriarchal expectations for women and the resulting oppressive scripts despite the apparent reproduction of cultural values in her work. As in Haywood’s work of the eighteenth century, Gaskell, in her treatment of the eponymous Lizzie Leigh and Ruth, plants seeds of subversion beneath the soil of stories that can be seen to uphold some of the most oppressive and damaging details that surround the mythological treatment of the fictionalized fallen woman. One of the chief ways in which she takes on this traditional mythology is by negating the binary of the Madonna/whore dichotomy that pervades the treatment of fallen women in fiction. In “Lizzie Leigh” Gaskell presents the reader with an angelified version of the ideal woman; however, the story subverts and convolutes the traditional Madonna/whore dichotomy. Gaskell negates the binary by aligning the “angel” and “whore” of the tale through motherhood, a role that traditionally supported the patriarchy but which Gaskell 60 60 uses to subvert it. In Ruth Gaskell furthers this subversion, creating a Madonna/whore dichotomy within Ruth herself, and also creating Bellingham as a demonized fallen man. In both works, Gaskell challenges the hypocrisy of the patriarchy and allows her fallen women to find recovery and redemption in female communities, saving her from the patriarchal banishment of the Miltonic fall. In much of the literary criticism devoted to her, Gaskell has been labeled as proponent of the patriarchy, passively reinforcing the Victorian ideals of womanhood. The long-standing address of “Mrs. Gaskell” that is used in scholarship makes the lack of respect and condescension of many critics palpable. Ruth M. Cook attributes this phenomenon to Gaskell’s “lack of rage at ‘women’s lot,’” that made much of her fiction “too colorless” for feminist criticism (30). Thus, critics dismissed Gaskell’s work for appearing to silently submit to the idealized domesticity of the Victorians. However, recent criticism of Gaskell’s work rejects this passive stereotype, and allows Gaskell and her work to finally function within the larger history of subversive female fiction that is celebrated as truly feminist. Critics use the active roles of women in much of her work to point out this subversion, suggesting Gaskell grants her female characters autonomy as a way to critique the passive role of women that saturated both Victorian literature and social convention. Using her Unitarian beliefs as a backdrop, many critics also highlight the themes of redemption and forgiveness present in her fiction, subverting the traditional focus on punishment for sins against the patriarchy that permeates Victorian literature. This subversion, I will argue, is undoubtedly present in her treatment of fallen women, and abounds in both “Lizzie Leigh” and Ruth. Perhaps the most striking example of fallen woman mythology that Gaskell engages in her fiction is her treatment of the Madonna/whore dichotomy. In this 61 61 traditional dichotomized treatment of female characters, authors pose two archetypal females to expose and highlight the ideal of one and condemn her antithesis in the other. In the Victorian era, as the gendered spheres of masculine and feminine existence became increasingly rigid, the expected role of woman became associated with an idealized version of domesticity that came to be a suffocating expectation of feminine propriety and behavior—an idealized version of a female inhabiting the private sphere that was set directly against the masculine inhabitance of the masculine or public sphere. In Reclaiming Myths of Power, Ruth Y. Jenkins explicates the ramifications of this separation of acceptable spheres of existence: “As a consequence of this physical distinction, the home evolved into a recognized symbol of purity, thus fixing the character of women and the domestic sphere as separate and undefiled by the world” (18). This idealization of the undefiled Victorian woman and her role and duties led to the creation of a typology of woman, defined by her angelic qualities—as Coventry Patmore describes, the ideal Victorian woman became the “Angel in the House.” This angelification of woman was dichotomized with the demonization of another type of woman—the fallen woman. In other words, the angel in the house, the ideal Victorian female, was constructed in direct opposition to the demon in the street, the fallen woman. These polar-opposite female archetypes and the mythology surrounding them are both conventions that Gaskell treats in her fiction, negating the binary by conflating the dichotomized characters, challenging the notion that all women fit into one of these two predetermined categories. In “Faith of Our Mothers,” Joanne Thompson explores the agency of women in “Lizzie Leigh.” She argues that in the novella, Gaskell revises the traditional treatment of the fallen woman by creating an autonomous matriarch in Anne Leigh and also by bonding the women through their roles as mothers. The 62 62 focus on motherhood is continued as Thompson ultimately argues that Lizzie is redeemed by the love of her child. Emily Jane Morris also explores “Lizzie Leigh” as a subversive text. In “Ready to Hear and to Help,” Morris highlights the ways in which Gaskell challenges the traditional portrait of fallen women by creating proactive female characters. She argues that the key to understanding Gaskell’s subversive construction of female characters is to examine their agency against the male characters’ inability to act, and that the results of this subversion are female characters that are able to redeem the status of the fallen woman through their active roles. In “The Politics Behind the Angel,” Marie Fitzwilliam examines “Lizzie Leigh” as a response to the rigid separate spheres that were celebrated in the Victorian era. She argues that Lizzie’s banishment from the Leigh home and the treatment of her by her father and brother is not only morally motivated, but economically and socially motivated as well. In other words, because an active sexuality was associated with behavior of the lower classes, the Leigh men had to distance themselves from her as a way to reinforce their standing as a family of the middle class. In “Lizzie Leigh,” Gaskell establishes conventions of the treatment of the fallen woman and Madonna/whore dichotomy only to complicate or subvert those conventions; in doing so, she can comment or critique the traditional literary tropes of the fallen woman mythology. Throughout the tale, Gaskell consistently employs both language and imagery to create in Susan an idealized version of the Victorian female, the angel. Susan is consistently described in angelic terms, and associated with many traditional Victorian ideals regarding womanhood. This angelification begins before the reader is even introduced to Susan, as Will is escorting the drunken Mr. Palmer home: “His home was exquisitely clean and neat, even in outside appearance; threshold, window, and windowsill were 63 63 outward signs of some spirit of purity within” (129). This spirit of purity, of course, is his daughter Susan. Not only is the Palmer home a picture of cleanliness, but the woman within is a picture of purity as well. When Will first meets Susan, he further characterizes her in language that shows her undefiled state: her dress is “spotless,” and she is “pure and maidenly” (139-146). Gaskell angelifies Susan as undefiled and pure, but also grants her many of the social expectations of behavior as well. At their first meeting, after Mr. Palmer has asked Will to return for a visit, Will asks her permission to come back into their home. She, however, says nothing but “Will left the house, liking her all the better for never speaking” (135). Here Gaskell is not only portraying Susan’s modesty but also the Victorian notion that women, like children, should be seen and not heard. Gaskell constructs Susan consistently in angelic terms, and even deifies her in a sort of Christ-like sacrifice: she selflessly takes care of her borderline-abusive father, nursing him through his consistent drunken stupors, she gives herself freely and completely as Nanny’s guardian, and, once Anne and Lizzie have reconciled, she sacrifices her own bed for the two reunited souls: in reference to Anne and Lizzie, Gaskell writes, “That night they lay in each other’s arms; but Susan slept on the ground beside them” (471). Susan is consistently identified in angelified terms, an obvious and traditional characterization that Gaskell sets up in order to subvert. As she does with the angelified woman, Gaskell employs traditional literary tropes of the patriarchal treatment of the fallen woman in order to construct Lizzie’s character. Because of the obvious and consistent angelification of Susan, the reader might expect Lizzie to be characterized in demonized terms, as was the case with much of the Victorian treatment of fallen woman in fiction. Lizzie’s “lack of modesty would negate her right to call herself ‘woman’, but relegate her 64 64 to the status of ‘monster’” (Fitzwilliam 16). Certainly the patriarchs of the story see Lizzie as a monster. Father James and brother Will are both so horrified by Lizzie’s fallen state that they refuse to have any familial connection to her. There is even evidence that Anne is horrified by her daughter’s fallen state. Will and Anne discuss Lizzie’s possible fate: “’Many a one die in—‘ ‘Oh, my lad! Dunnot speak so to me, or my heart will break outright,’ said his mother, with a sort of cry” (175). It is true that Anne’s heart is breaking at the thought of her child being dead; however, because she cuts off Will’s words before he actually names the act—prostitution—it signifies to the reader that even Anne is horrified by what her daughter has become. Gaskell complicates this traditional dichotomy, first by undercutting Susan as the Victorian ideal, and next by blurring the line of fallen and pure women by closely associating Susan and Lizzie. Gaskell establishes Susan as an angelified version of woman, but subsequently undercuts this attribute by granting Susan agency that no ideal Victorian female should possess. As Fitzwilliam explains, the fact that Susan is the financial provider for her household is “a fact irreconcilable with her role as domestic angel” (21). Not only is Susan capable and willing to financially provide for herself, she is also the earner for the rest of the household (though, it can be argued that this is in a domestic arena, as a nursery school teacher). Thus, her agency and ability to provide for herself, her father, and Nanny, grants her the role of the patriarch, the head of household, severing her role as angelified Victorian female. With the characterization and construction of Susan, Gaskell establishes traditional conventions of the idealized female, only to subvert those established conventions, which also, importantly, subverts Susan’s place in the Madonna/whore dichotomy of fallen woman mythology. 65 65

Gaskell further subverts the traditional fallen woman mythology as she associates Susan and Lizzie through shared patriarchal defiance that their agency as mothers brings. Motherhood, a role that was supposed to support the patriarchy, is boldly employed by Gaskell to subvert it. Both Susan and Lizzie are mothers to Nanny: Lizzie the biological mother to the illegitimate child, and Susan, the loving foster-mother. The fact that they are both mothers to Nanny creates an immediate and undeniable connection between the two women, undercutting the traditional Madonna/whore dichotomy of traditional fiction. Speaking of the association of Susan and Lizzie, Morris sates, “The identification certainly suggests that the two figures are not separate categories, and that therefore the fallen woman has a right to be considered as something other than lost, ruined, and irretrievable” (48). This association of Lizzie and Susan is achieved through their role as Nanny’s mothers but also through the agency that motherhood gives them. As Morris explains, “Susan Palmer is the shining example of purity and morality in the story, but, instead of acting as a foil to the impure Lizzie, she is specifically identified with her, as well as with Anne in her focus on doing what needs to be done” (47). The identification of Susan and Lizzie creates a blurring of the Madonna/whore dichotomy and is achieved by associating both pure and fallen women through motherhood: Both women gain the ability to act through their role as mother to Nanny—Lizzie in finding an acceptable home for Nanny, away from the shame that association with Lizzie would bring, and Susan by immediately taking on the role of mother that Lizzie thrusts upon her. Motherhood, usually constructed as a role that furthers the domesticated angel in Victorian ideology, in this case, grants the women agency; moreover, not only does this motherhood grant them agency, it is also a vehicle for subverting the patriarchy, instead of supporting it. By finding a foster mother for Nanny, Lizzie defies the patriarchy’s need to punish Nanny as 66 66 bastard child (though, of course, Nanny ends up punished anyway). Susan defies the patriarchy by ignoring her father’s wishes by taking Nanny in and giving a permanent home to a child that larger society would consider a pariah. Thompson notes, “The centrality of the mother in this version of the fallen woman story alters the myth considerably. In the typical version of the story, the young woman is seduced and abandoned by an upper-class villain, suffers the curses of her father, and dies begging the mercy of her male savior” (24). Instead, in “Lizzie Leigh,” Gaskell creates the fallen woman and angelified female as conflated by agency- granting motherhood, motherhood that is used to defy the patriarchy, again subverting the traditional Madonna/whore dichotomy that is created on the surface of the story. In “Evangelicansim in Ruth,” Yoko Hatano connects the themes of rescue and redemption that are present in the novel with Evangelical magdalenism, aligning these themes with real-life Evangelical attempts to provide rehabilitation for prostitutes, explaining that the novel provides Gaskell with an avenue to put forth a social message of sympathy for fallen women. Peter Stiles’ essay “Grace, Redemption and the ‘Fallen Woman’” explores Gaskell’s Ruth as a precursor to Thomas Hardy’s Tess D’Ubervilles. He also explains that in Ruth Gaskell creates Leonard as a Christ figure, Ruth as a Madonna figure, and in Bradshaw a character that exemplifies the religious hypocrisy and distortion of Christ’s Word in larger society, in doing so she comments on the necessity of reexamining the Word as it applies to issues of redeeming the repentant fallen woman. Siv Jansson reads Ruth as a subversive novel that takes on the impossible expectation of women present in Victorian society. Jansson argues that Gaskell creates a combined version of the Madonna/whore dichotomy in Ruth, and in doing so questions not only the treatment of the fallen woman, but the Victorian feminine ideal as well (65-76). In 67 67

“Gaskell’s Single Women: Surviving Outside the Patriarchal Pyramid,” author Ruth M. Cook challenges critics who compartmentalize Gaskell as a writer who silently submits to proper place in domesticity. Cook argues that by dismissing the answer to the dangers of the patriarchy that Gaskell presents in many of her novels—the picture of a contented all-female community—critics actually buy into the patriarchal model that they intend to critique by insisting that the female community is not as valid or as satisfying as male competition (30-40). Gaskell subverts the traditional Madonna/whore dichotomy of fallen woman mythology in Ruth, pushing the association of Madonna and whore that is created in “Lizzie Leigh” by combining this dichotomy in the singular character of Ruth herself. Throughout the novel, Gaskell paints a portrait of Ruth as both vilified by her fallen state and angelified in spite of it. This dualism is noted by several critics, and Jansson explains the implications of this combination of both fallen woman and angel in the novel: Ruth’s dual nature and role are, of course, reflected in the two names: Mrs. Denbigh is the virtuous woman and Ruth Hilton is the fallen woman. Ruth Hilton is, however, also a virtuous woman, and Mrs. Denbigh is a fallen woman: the Madonna and Magdalen may have different names, but they are the same woman, providing Gaskell with a methodology that “subverts and explodes her culture’s and its sanctioned religion’s rigid and reductive dichotomous vision of women”. (71) In the character of Ruth, Gaskell continues to conflate the associations of the Madonna/whore dichotomy that was started in “Lizzie Leigh” to the absolute conflation of the two traditional female archetypes. In so doing, Gaskell challenges the reader to reevaluate the notions of the dichotomized version of the angelified/demonized woman, and poses that, as Jansson sates, women are “both 68 68 and neither” of these roles (75). This adamant defiance of the dichotomization of her female characters is a strikingly subversive act in Gaskell’s literature. She denies the patriarchal tendency to separate women into purely good or purely evil categorization, thereby challenging the very definition of the dualized nature of the Victorian female. The Madonna/whore dichotomy that Gaskell complicates in Ruth and “Lizzie Leigh” demonstrates that women are neither angels nor demons, but humans. Through her fiction Gaskell comments that women, like men, contain the ability to makes mistakes and be redeemed. As subversive and revolutionary as the Madonna/whore dichotomy that Gaskell dismantles through the women of her work is, the most radical subversion of Madonna/whore dichotomy is displayed in connection to Ruth and Bellingham. As Ruth is being lifted up from her fallenness, angelified, Bellingham becomes demonized. The portrait of Bellingham becoming fallen begins with him as a character that the reader simply dislikes. Gaskell achieves this distaste for Bellingham chiefly through his portrait as a hypocrite and coward. When his mother shows up at his sick-bed, she is able to convince him to leave Ruth without much protest, and Bellingham accepts her vehement request to abandon Ruth, as long as they do not “behave[e] unhandsomely” (1261). His cowardly sniveling does nothing for his character, as he whines for his mother to “Only spare me all this worry while I am so weak. I put myself in your hands. Dismiss her, as you wish it; but let it be done handsomely, and let me have a quiet life, without being lectured while I am pent up here, and unable to shake off unpleasant thoughts” (1261). Even the title of this chapter, “Mrs. Bellamy does the thing handsomely” smacks of sarcasm and speaks to Belligham’s lack of power and prowess to do ‘the thing’ in leaving Ruth. A similar situation comes about when Bellingham and Bradshaw conduct business. Speaking of a few unsavory details of their business 69 69 plan, Bellingham assures Mr. Bradshaw “Of, of course! Disagreeable necessity! Better speak as little about such things as possible; other people can be found to arrange all the dirty work. Neither you nor I would like to soil our fingers by it, I am sure. Four thousand pounds are in Mr. Pilson’s hands, and I shall never inquire what becomes of them” (3606). Just as he did with Ruth, Bellingham shows his spineless nature by passing off the ‘dirty work’ in his life to someone else. Further, this passivity, this lack of action on the part of Bellingham, feminizes him. Instead of taking control of his life and the situations around him, he passes the activity to someone else. Gaskell’s completely eviscerates the fallen woman mythology through Belingham’s character, turning the demon in the street—the fallen woman—into the fallen man. Gaskell moves from creating in Bellingham a character we simply dislike to a demonized character, flipping the script of the demonization of fallen woman. Although Jansson feels that Bellingham “is not portrayed as evil, but weak and spineless,” I would disagree (69). Although Jansson’s assessment is true for most of the book, after Ruth and Bellingham are reacquainted through the Bradshaws, Gaskell specifically and consistently characterizes Bellignham in demonic terms: Gaskell uses the term evil to characterize him four times; he is a “nightmare”(3843) that “haunts” (3866) Ruth in church, separating her from God. Not only does Gaskell demonize Bellingham through Ruth’s language, she also attributes to him the contaminating nature of the fallen woman: Ruth would rather her son Leonard die than be exposed to his “evil” (4135). Much like Haywood’s Bellamy in The British Recluse, Bellingham doesn’t suffer consequences of his wrongdoings by society, but he is damned by both the reader and the author. In both “Lizzie Leigh” and Ruth, Gaskell takes on the hypocrisy of the patriarchy chiefly through the traditional patriarchal view of fallen women 70 70 working as contaminating or corrosive forces to the people who associate with them. The treatment of fallen women in her novels by traditional patriarchal figures exposes the hypocrisy of the patriarchy, and, later, the superfluous and even damaging nature of such patriarchal judgment. In “Lizzie Leigh,” Gaskell explores the issue of contamination through Will’s fear that he can never have a relationship with Susan because Lizzie has forever tainted him by her fallenness, rendering him unworthy of the pious Susan. When Will confesses to his mother that he is in love with Susan, he expresses that his anxiety over Lizzie’s contamination is so strong that he will leave in order to not contaminate Susan by proxy: he tells his mother, “And I love her above a bit. And it’s because I love her I want to leave Manchester. That’s all” (190). Will is so sure that he is unworthy of Susan because of his relationship to Lizzie, and because of the contamination that this relationship has brought upon him, he is unwilling to express his love for Susan. As Morris points out, Will “is paralysed by his own sense of pollution by association with Lizzie, so that he would rather leave the city without declaring his love than risk rejection” (47). The language Gaskell uses to express this feeling of contamination is particularly telling. After Anne relates to Will that she has told Susan about Lizzie, he laments “Mother! you’ve ruined me” (304). He is ruined by Susan’s knowledge of Lizzie’s fallenness—ruined, of course, being the exact language that was used in relation to fallen women themselves. Fallen women are ruined in society by ruining their chastity, and this is precisely the term Will chooses to describe himself after his love has found out about his sister’s fallenness. The contamination that Will expresses is fairly reasonable for a Victorian man whose sister is fallen to feel, in a society that was obsessed with the contaminating or corrosive nature of the fallen woman. It might be reasonable for him to feel unworthy of Susan because of his sister’s fallen state; however, 71 71

Gaskell shows us that, for Will, it is unreasonable. And, further, that it is not Will’s contamination that could potentially ruin his courtship with Susan, but his own patriarchal judgment that threatens it: when he tells Susan he thinks Lizzie has deserved “every jot” of her sufferings, Susan condemns this judgment: “Will Leigh! I have thought so well of you; don’t go and make me think you cruel and hard” (430). It is Will’s judgment of Lizzie—not his contamination by her—that would cause Susan’s feeling for Will to change. Through the treatment of contamination by the fallen woman in “Lizzie Leigh,” Gaskell shows the reader that fear of the fallen woman as contaminant is unnecessary, and that patriarchal judgment is the real threat. Through Ruth and her corrective force on Jemima (correcting her nature from “naughty” behavior not in accordance with the feminine ideal), Gaskell comments that even though fallen, Ruth is not a contaminant. After Ruth has been established and recovered in the home of the Bensons, Mr. Benson secures a job for Ruth as a governess for the Bradshaw children. By all accounts, Ruth is a wonderful governess. Bradshaw’s eldest daughter, Jemima, is suffering from depression and despondency because she is growing insecure in her courtship with Mr. Farquhar. Because of these insecurities, she has grown combative, and Mr. Farquhar begins to see her as “uncurbed and passionate [. . .] naughty, willful, [and] plaguing” (3147, 3156). Mr. Bradshaw begins to see this change in Jemima, and the change in Mr. Farquhar’s feelings towards her, and asks Ruth to “remonstrate with her” (3115), saying there is “no one so able” to help in the situation (3124). And Ruth does help—Jemima is so influenced simply by the presence of Ruth that there is no need for Ruth to “remonstrate” with her as Mr. Bradshaw suggested. The quality of Ruth’s character is enough to curb the “naughty” and combative behavior of Jemima. Ruth works as a calming and 72 72 corrective force, and Jemima acknowledges this, telling Ruth “Oh Ruth! I have been so unhappy lately. I want you to come put me to rights” (3238). Mr. Bradshaw is so pleased with Ruth’s corrective influence that “He resolved to buy her Mrs. Denbigh a handsome silk gown the very next day” (3219). The correction in behavior that she supplies in Jemima is enough to attract Mr. Farquhar again. As he is leaving the Bradshaw residence, he sings, “On revient, on revient toujours, A ses premiers amours” (3251). She even has Mr. Farquhar singing he will come back to his first love—Jemima—after Ruth’s corrective presence on her. However, when Mr. Bradshaw finds out about Ruth’s status as an unwed mother, all of the help that Ruth provided Jemima is forgotten. As he is railing against Ruth, Jemima tries to defend the fallen woman but Mr. Bradshaw won’t hear of it: “You hold your tongue, Jemima. You have grown more and more insolent—more and more disobedient every day. I now know who to thank for it. When such a woman came into my family there is no wonder at any corruption— any evil—any defilement’’ (4634). Only after Bradshaw has found out about Ruth’s status as an unwed mother is she seen as a corrosive force. Whereas before, Bradshaw has acknowledged that Ruth is solely responsible for the positive change in Jemima, now Ruth becomes responsible for Jemima’s ill conduct in the first place. Of course, the reader and Gaskell know that it is an imagined harm she has brought upon his family, and Gaskell, by first creating a corrective force in Ruth, comments on the hypocrisy of the patriarchy in connection to the fallen woman. Bradshaw, in retroactively condemning Ruth for “contaminating [his] innocent girls,” cuts to the heart of the hypocritical nature of the patriarchy’s unfair judgment of the fallen woman (4797). 73 73

The utter hypocrisy of Bellingham’s character is another detail that Gaskell relates in order to comment on the hypocritical treatment of the fallen woman. When Bellingham first sees Ruth with the Bradshaws, not knowing it is Ruth at this point, he is absolutely enamored with the governess: “Her face was positively Greek; and then such a proud, superb turn of her head; quite queenly! A governess in Mr. Bradshaw’s family! Why, she might have been a Percy or a Howard for the grandeur of her grace” (3813). This resounding praise for the Bradshaw’s governess is certainly a different reaction than the one he has immediately upon realizing that Ruth is, in fact, his former mistress: “It certainly was Ruth; only how the devil had she played her cards so well as to be the governess—the respected governess, in such a family as Mr. Bradshaw’s?” (3828). Before he realizes that Ruth is indeed his ex-mistress, Bellingham attributes her with the respectability of the gentry, after she must have been conniving and deceitful in order to obtain the position. The utter hypocrisy of the situation, chiefly articulated through Bellingham’s reaction, is palpable: How can one woman go from being too queenly to be a governess to one that has surely had to scheme and ‘play her cards’ in order to obtain the position? Why, by being a fallen woman, of course. Here Gaskell again challenges the traditional assumptions about the value of the fallen woman. Because we know Ruth’s real worth—her real respectability and indeed her value to the patriarchy—this interlude challenges the traditional patriarchal treatment of the fallen woman by Bellingham, and by society, exposing the hypocrisy of both. Gaskell uses the traditional treatment of the fallen woman only to in turn subvert reader expectations to the outcomes of the treatment, and conforms to the traditional treatment of society only to provide a critique of the damaging nature of such treatment of the fallen. In “Lizzie Leigh,” Gaskell seems to conform to the 74 74 tradition of the banishment of the fallen woman that stemmed from the Miltonic treatment of the Biblical fall. The tale of “Lizzie Leigh” is absolutely saturated with societal judgment typical of the patriarchal Victorian era: as Thompson explains, “All of the men in the story are committed to the fiction of the fallen woman” (24). When Lizzie is found out to be fallen, she is a victim of Miltonic/Biblical exile of the fallen woman—first by being displaced from her employer, and secondly by her family’s banishment from her original home. James Leigh’s reaction to the fallen state of his daughter Lizzie, and her subsequent termination by her employer aligns with traditional Victorian expectations: “He had forbidden weeping, heart-broken wife to go and try to find her poor sinning child, and declared henceforth they would have no daughter; that she should be as one dead, and her name never more named at market or meal time, in blessing or in prayer” (86). Thompson again explains the necessary nature of James Leigh’s reaction: “His attitude to his ruined daughter, if harsh, is consistent with literary convention, according which the fallen woman always dies” (23). Will’s reaction is similar to his father: “He thought about her sometimes, till he ground his teeth together, and could have struck her down in shame” (86). Will attempts to pass this attitude along to his mother, imploring Anne to “[. . .] think with me that she is dead—and, to my mind, that would be more comfort than to think of her living” (99). The attitudes of both James and Will toward the fallen Lizzie align with the traditional notion that it is better, even necessary, for a woman to die after falling. The portrait of James and Will aligning with these traditional expectations points out an ironic and unfortunate aspect of the patriarchal judgment of the fallen. It is only after Lizzie has been kicked out of the home of her employer and banished from her childhood home that she falls further from sexual deviance into prostitution. It is the judgment of Lizzie Leigh, 75 75 the lack of forgiveness and guidance that results in her advanced fallen state. Instead of acting as any sort of corrective to Lizzie, the patriarchal judgment that condemns her sexual deviance only progresses it. Through the traditional eviction of the fallen woman in the Miltonic tradition, and through the premature or superfluous judgment of the patriarchal characters in both Ruth and “Lizzie Leigh,” Gaskell comments upon and critiques harsh patriarchal judgment of the fallen woman, highlighting that such judgment does not, in fact, solve anything, only causing damage and counter-actively creating and furthering the very fallenness that it seeks to condemn. Gaskell takes the consequences of this harsh judgment even further in Ruth, creating judgment as not only furthering fallenness, but the cause of fallenness in the first place. The catalyst for Ruth’s deviance is judgment: when her employer releases her, she has not crossed any real lines; the appearance of potential fallenness is enough to condemn Ruth, and this superfluous and unnecessary judgment actually causes her fallen state. Because the reader “knows” Ruth, because Gaskell has done such an amazing job of creating a connection between Ruth and the reader, the condemnation by the patriarchal woman Mrs. Mason is obviously much too harsh. Instead of creating a sense of justice through the judgment of Mrs. Mason, Gaskell creates a sense of sympathy for Ruth. Ruth is being turned out not because she has truly crossed any lines at this point—she is turned out because of the vague appearance of impropriety and fallenness; further, this loss of job/place in the world is the real catalyst for her fallen state. In Ruth and “Lizzie Leigh,” Gaskell allows the fallen women to be kicked out of their homes, but not their homeland, subverting the Miltonic fall that insists upon banishment. In “Lizzie Leigh,” Gaskell finally allows Anne Leigh to reclaim her daughter Lizzie, and the ending is a portrait of mother and daughter living in 76 76 contented, if somber, seclusion: “Mrs. Leigh and Lizzie dwell in a cottage so secluded that, until you drop into the very hollow where it is placed, you do not see it” (477). By allowing Lizzie to be reclaimed and recovered by her mother, Gaskell challenges the tradition of exiling the fallen woman, a tradition male authors like Dickens who embrace the fallen woman mythology continue by banishing them to another continent. Critics such as Fitzwilliam lament that Lizzie is “banished to an all-female household,” but the fact is that Gaskell actually subverts the notion of traditional Miltonic banishment by allowing her to reclaim a place in her homeland. In addition, although it is true that Gaskell allows for this reclamation only within a marginalized, all female society, she further subverts the traditional patriarchal treatment of the fallen woman by allowing Lizzie to work as a therapeutic force on society at-large. Lizzie goes out into the community “whenever there is a shadow in any household,” and “many hearts bless Lizzie Leigh” for her service to the sick and suffering (484). Morris explains the significance of this by calling it “a challenge to the lost fallen woman, for not only is she found, she is shown to be useful to others and blessed for it” (51). Gaskell continues to subvert traditional Miltonic banishment in Ruth by creating a sisterhood, which includes Benson, that fosters Ruth’s recovery. Hapke argues that Ruth is unique because of the emphasis on Benson’s sister as being necessary in Ruth’s recovery: “In contrast to the outcast women in novels by men, Ruth, when left by her seducer, is befriended by both a man and a woman, the Dissenting minister Mr. Benson and his unmarried sister” (19). Ruth is subversive because of the recovery that the sisters provide; however, Gaskell not only provides sisterly support from the females in the work, but, by continuously feminizing Benson, he actually becomes a part of the sisterhood that redeems Ruth as well. Gaskell consistently paints Mr. Benson as feminized: he has a “musical 77 77 voice,” and speaks “soft words of healing” (1922); Benson has a “sick incapacity for exertion” and runs “a sort of domestic Sunday-school” (1968, 2081); he has a “gentle heart” and a “feminine morbidness of conscience” (4930, 5179). Perhaps the picture of Benson as an active member of the sisterhood of Ruth’s recovery is best demonstrated by Gaskell’s own description: “The household had many failings [. . .] but, somehow, the very errors and faults of one individual served to call out higher excellences in another, and so they reacted upon each other, and the result of short discords was exceeding harmony and peace.” (1963). Thurston Benson is a part of this communal living, working together with the women to create a peaceful feminized household. Though Ruth finds her solace and recovery in the home with Mr. Benson, Gaskell paints him in such feminized language, that he becomes a sympathetic sister, a part of the sisterhood that will give her the means of recovery and reintegration. Similar to the recovery of Lizzie, and of Haywood’s Cleomira and Belinda, Ruth is allowed to recover her respectability and her place within her homeland through the aid of a feminine community. Unfortunately, Ruth’s story does not end with her recovery in the Benson sisterhood. But, by creating an ending that readers would have expected, Gaskell further critiques the judgment and condemnation of Victorian society. Hapke reads the ending thusly: “These men will never permit Ruth to forget what she once was. In the terms of the novel, her only atonement is death [. . .] Gaskell bows to convention by killing off her heroine” (20). Critics might see this as Gaskell submitting to conventions of the patriarchy; however, I believe this is a calculated subversion, with Gaskell bowing to convention only in order to critique her culture’s condemnation of the fallen woman. In the end, Gaskell conforms to the harshest literary trope, death as punishment for the fallen, in order to critique and complicate societal expectation of such harsh punishment. In other words, by 78 78 giving the reader what we want (or at least, what we have come to expect), she complicates those expectations because the death of Ruth is certainly not what we want for her, or from Gaskell. By finally fully adhering to the conventions of fallen woman mythology, Gaskell critiques such harsh treatments by providing us with a portrait of the consequences: good people die when authors conform to the conventions of patriarchal society. Speaking of Anne in “Lizzie Leigh,” Morris explains “With the death of the patriarch, absolute masculine authority and unquestioning female deference to it is overthrown and Gaskell opens the way for other endings to the traditional story” (44-45). Like Gaskell, Anne seems to willingly uphold the Miltonic patriarchy until an opportunity for subversion presents itself. Unlike Anne, the female authors of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries are never entirely free of the patriarch, so they must lace their subversion into conservative tales. Gaskell takes the reigns from Haywood and allows her female fallen figures the same arena for recovery—sisterly societies within their homeland. She revises the story of the Miltonic fall in much the same way as Haywood, engaging with the Miltonic ending by revising it so that her Eves, Lizzie and Ruth, are provided with arenas to recover from their fallen state within their homeland; however, Gaskell moves from Haywood’s haven of sisterly recovery by transforming her fallen women into saviors in their own right—they become vehicles for the redemption and salvation of others. Both become healers, saviors, of sick members of society. In contrast to Haywood’s characters, who recover from society through sisterly seclusion, Ruth and Lizzie Leigh are truly forgiven by society through their redemption and healing of others. Lizzie Leigh is still sequestered, but she does engage with larger society whenever she is needed. Ruth is also a healer, nursing the sick and “carrying them up to heaven.” In consequence, the engagement of the Miltonic 79 79 fall, Haywood’s revisionary practice of saving her Eves from displacement, transforms into a New Testament attitude of Christian forgiveness, allowing the fallen sisters to not only be saved, but to also become saviors themselves.

CONCLUSION

Coventry Patmore’s idyllic ode to his wife, “The Angel in the House,” came to epitomize the notions of the Victorian woman of perfection. In the poem, Patmore details the selfless dedication of his wife to their children, her unadulterated commitment to him, and her unquestioning subordination to his authority, all attributes that would go on to define the Victorian feminine ideal. The term “angel in the house” soon would be quoted infinitely and this portrait of womanly perfection helped to solidify the societal expectation of the Victorian female. Along with this idealized notion of the Victorian woman emerged a picture of her antithesis—the demon in the street—the fallen woman. This fallen woman evolved into a mythology of its own in Victorian fiction, and became a dominant feature in both literature and cultural ideology. By tracing the threads of the portrait of the fallen woman back to her embryonic conception in the work of eighteenth-century authors, to an era where the novel itself is in its early development, we learn that the fallen woman is not only a staple of Victorian fiction, but a staple of the English novel itself. By engaging in the fallen woman, authors of the eighteenth and nineteenth century revise the Miltonic fall by re-imagining the ending portrait of the two first children who are exiled together as a result of their sin. Male authors such as Richardson and Dickens perpetuate Eve’s Edenic displacement by casting the fallen woman off onto a new society. Not only do they displace the fallen woman, they also revise the Biblical myth to exempt man from similar punishment for his share in the sin, distancing both Adam and the patriarchy from the demonized fallen woman. Treatments by female authors such as Haywood and Gaskell, however, revise this ending further still, allowing the fallen woman to remain within their homeland through female societies of recovery, creating a redemptive world of 81 81 their own, away from patriarchal oppression. These parallel traditions reveal that both male and female authors engage in the mythology of the Miltonic fall and revise the ending to suit their own agendas. In a society where the rigidity of the gendered spheres allows only for a two-script definition of gender roles, where the proper spheres of inhabitance for male and females is so polarized, this rigidity fosters a dangerous and damaging dichotomized mentality. As with any two-part dichotomy one group becomes dominant, and one becomes “othered.” Not only does dichotomy prove problematic in the masculine and feminine spheres, but within the feminine sphere itself, reflected in the traditional Madonna/whore literary trope that permeates the fallen woman mythology. This mentality is perpetuated in the traditional misogynistic mythology of the fallen woman, in which the common trajectory is for her to sin, fall, and die. However, even in the more progressive or forgiving treatments of the fallen woman which have been explored in this thesis, she must be displaced, in one way or another. As the rigidity of gender roles and separate spheres is softened, indeed as the notion of gender is reexamined in the first place, and as society accepts the idea that gender is not a two point dichotomy, but a vast spectrum in which every point is equally as valid as any other point, perhaps there will be less of a need for this dichotomized thinking, less of a need for authors to save Adam or save Eve, precisely because there is no longer a rigid dichotomy which fosters this need to be saved from one another.

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