https://theses.gla.ac.uk/ Theses Digitisation: https://www.gla.ac.uk/myglasgow/research/enlighten/theses/digitisation/ This is a digitised version of the original print thesis. Copyright and moral rights for this work are retained by the author A copy can be downloaded for personal non-commercial research or study, without prior permission or charge This work cannot be reproduced or quoted extensively from without first obtaining permission in writing from the author The content must not be changed in any way or sold commercially in any format or medium without the formal permission of the author When referring to this work, full bibliographic details including the author, title, awarding institution and date of the thesis must be given Enlighten: Theses https://theses.gla.ac.uk/ [email protected] Representations of Middle-Class Single Women in the Novel from the Mid-Nineteenth to the Early Twentieth Century By Fiona Ross A Thesis Submitted as a Partial Fulfilment for the Degree of Doctor of Philosophy Under the Supervision of Dorothy McMillan Department of English Literature Faculty of Arts University of Glasgow United Kingdom January 1996 ProQuest Number: 10390939 All rights reserved INFORMATION TO ALL USERS The quality of this reproduction is dependent upon the quality of the copy submitted. In the unlikely event that the author did not send a co m plete manuscript and there are missing pages, these will be noted. Also, if material had to be removed, a note will indicate the deletion. uest ProQ uest 10390939 Published by ProQuest LLO (2017). Copyright of the Dissertation is held by the Author. All rights reserved. This work is protected against unauthorized copying under Title 17, United States Code Microform Edition © ProQuest LLO. ProQuest LLO. 789 East Eisenhower Parkway P.Q. Box 1346 Ann Arbor, Ml 4 8 1 0 6 - 1346 GLASGOW D'NrVL'PSîTÎT Declaration. I declare that the research carried out for the doctoral thesis titled, ‘Representations of Middle-Class Single Women in the Novel from the Mid-Nineteenth to the Early Twentieth Century’, is my own. Signatures The Author: Fiona Ross The Supervisor: Dorothy McMillan Department of English Literature University of Glasgow United Kingdom Acknowledgements I would like to thank my supervisor, Dorothy McMillan, for her generous support, kindness and the energy and time that she devoted to this project. Without Dorothy's help I would never have completed this thesis. I owe an enormous debt to my parents, Alastair and Moira, for their love, encouragement and cheques. I would also like to thank Bill McGhee for giving me the courage to study English Literature at University. Thanks must go to Malcolm and to my lovely friends for their warmth, enthusiasm and optimism. I apologise to my daughter, Roisin, for having spent the first eleven months of her life writing this thesis. I would like to dedicate this thesis to my grandparents, Elsie Gordon, Jimmy Turner, Olive Bucket and Alex Ross. ABSTRACT The aims of this thesis are two-fold: to uncover the history of the middle-class single women in the feminist movement from the mid-nineteenth century up to the early twentieth century; and to analyse representations of single women in novels of the same period. The history of the middle-class women's movement in the nineteenth centuiy is to a large extent the history of the single woman. I have consulted major archives of feminist material and identified key discourses relating to female singleness. My sources include private papers, published tracts, biographies and feminist analyses of leading feminist figures, unpublished articles and sketches for articles. I have also consulted a number of periodicals paying particular attention to those directed at a female audience. The key issues and concepts which emerged have enabled the charting of changing ideologies of femininity. I try to show how women derived their identities from the cultural discourses available to them but also how they interrogated the discourses in the process of self-definition. I discuss how issues of female self-construction are fictionalised. These concerns crossed into fiction and were expressed through modes of female heroic action, the making of the heroine, plot lines and narrative devices and strategies. Some writers re-formulated existing literary models in an attempt to re-present the single woman in the novel. Plot structures and narrative forms were, to some extent, necessarily reinvented by the demands of such representation. Fiction engaged with cultural debates and female singleness was increasingly recognised as a forced or voluntary exclusion from the history of marriage. Consequently singleness challenged narratives of matrimony and heterosexual union. The thesis also examines the rationale for the relationship between contexts and narratives and concludes that narratives are embedded within contexts that inevitably affected them, however indirectly. The thesis, then, is structured around the main phases of feminist activity within the period. The analysis begins with the 'superfluous woman' debate of the mid-nineteenth century and the fictive versions and social options which are available for spinsters at this time. It then moves on to the 'militant celibacy' of the suffragettes and shows how this interacts with the figure of the 'New Woman' of the fln-de-siècle . This section of the thesis also includes a discussion of areas of cultural controversy such as sexual anarchy, marriage and the politicisation of spinsterhood through communities of women. Neither the idea of'militant celibacy' nor the politicisation of the middle-class spinster have hitherto been fully examined in accounts of the British women's movement. The final section of the thesis analyses the impact of the discourses generated by the new 'science' of sexology on modem and post-World War I writing. It traces the formation of 'lesbian' identity and settles the point at which the political emphasis of celibacy begins to decline. Some further discussion follows of the relationship between mothers and their spinster daughters in fiction and finally the thesis moves on to a discussion of the sororal bond in the early fiction of Barbara Pym. My thesis covers a range of writers including Charlotte Bronte, Dickens, Wilkie Collins, Gaskell, Margaret Oliphant, James, Gissing, Clemence Dane, Radclyffe Hall, May Sinclair and Barbara Pym. Representations of Middle-Class Single Women in the Novel from the Mid- Nineteenth to the Early Twentieth Century Fiona Ross Table of Contents Title Page Declaration Acknowledgements Abstract Table of Contents Introduction........................................................................................1-31 Methodology......................................................................................... 5-10 The Use of'Patriarchy'........................................................................ 10-11 Overview of Fiction.............................................................................11-16 Historical Background........................................................................ 16-31 Chapter One: Dry Sticks, Old Flames and What About the Ashes? Some Cautionary Tales for Single Women in the Mid-Nineteenth Century Novel.................................................................................................. 32-125 Men's Umbrellas and Awkward Hands: the Spinster as Honorary Hero in Wilkie Collins's The Woman in White................. 55-65 'Fair Gladiators': the Rise of the Working Single Woman in Villette 65-104 Elizabeth Gaskell and the Amazons in Cranford.................................104-123 Chapter 2: The Virtues of Honest Trade in Margaret Oliphants Kirsteen.............................................126-154 Chapter 3: Maiden Aunt Turns Suitor: Spinsters and the Sex War in The Bostonians............................ 155-194 Chapter 4: Sexual Anarchy and the '"green bay-tree"' of Political Spinsterhood in Gissing's The Odd Women 195-235 Chapter 5: "'You'll die of hunger in the end'": Lesbian Vampires and Heterosexuality in Clemence Dane's Regiment of Women...................................................................236-278 Chapter 6: Miss M' comes out: Self-Identity and Maternity in the Fiction of Radclyffe Hall and May Sinclair 279-328 The Single Woman and Lesbian Identity in The Well o f Loneliness and The Unlit Lamp......................................................................293-313 Singleness and the Self In the Struggle with Maternity in Mary Olivier 313- 328 Chapter 7: The Loving Mirror: Spinsterhood and the Sororal Bond in Barbara Pym's Some Tame Gazelle, 329-347 Epilogue................................................................................ 348-352 Bibliography..................... 353-380 INTRODUCTION This thesis examines the range of ways of representing the middle-class celibate woman in the novel from the mid-nineteenth to the early decades of the twentieth century and analyses cultural responses to female singleness. I examine representation in both fiction and political and social debate. I pay attention to the perspectives provided by the testimonies of real middle-class single women, to discover how they understood their non-marital status. Hence much of my primary research is based on the letters, private papers, and archives of nineteenth-century women's organisations. The thesis traces the responses of middle-class single women to singleness. It begins at the point when single women ceased to be relatively