Refining Work: Representations of Female Artistic Labour in Victorian Literature, 1848-1888 Patricia Zakreski Thesis submitted for the Degree of Doctor of Philosophy at the University of Sheffield Department of English Literature December 2002 2 Summary This thesis explores representations of women working in artistic professions in Britain in the second half of the nineteenth century. Applying an interdisciplinary method that draws on fiction, prose, painting and the periodical press from the years 1848-1888, this thesis aims to expand our understanding of women's relationships to paid work in the Victorian period. Paid work, I argue, was not always represented as a degrading activity for women. Throughout the thesis, I trace the process through which the concept of work for middle-class women was made increasingly acceptable through an association with artistry. One of my central purposes is to show how the supposedly degrading activity of paid work could be transformed into refining experience for women. Looking specifically at sewing, art, writing and acting, I demonstrate how these professions came to be represented as suitable remunerative work for middle-class women. In chapters one and two, I examine the way in which the reputations of the typically working-class occupations of needlework and industrial design were 'rescued' from their associations with commercial degradation and vulnerability in order to expand the middle-class woman's employment opportunities. Chapters three and four demonstrate that even the very public and self-promoting professions of authorship and acting could be represented as domestic in character. Each of these chapters considers the relationship between domesticity, creativity, remuneration and refinement in fictional representations of working women and shows how they produced images of work defined by female forms of experience. Such representations, I argue, helped to raise the profile of women's work so that, by the end of the century, the working women who had been pitied and patronised as victims of degrading circumstances came to be seen as a legitimate, respected and self-respecting group. 3 Contents List of Figures _________________________ 5 Acknowledgments ___________________________ 6 Introduction __________________________ 7 Chapter One: Needlework and Creativity in Representations of the Seamstress 26 Pity and Patronisation: The Distressed Seamstress in the 1840s ________ 33 The Reduced Gentlewoman: Representing the Genteel Seamstress ______ 42 Martyrs and Saints: The Value of Needlework _____________ 53 Needlework as Art: Representing the Creative Seamstress __________ 62 Chapter Two: 'A Suitable Employment for Women': The Woman Artist and the Principle of Compatibility 71 The Principles of Compatibility: Domesticating the Professional Artist 72 The Margin and the Screen: Redefining Domesticity 81 'Art Sisters': Female Communities in the Victorian Art World 97 Art and Industry: The Economics of Compatibility 104 Chapter Three: 'The difference is great in being known to write and setting up for an authoress': Representing the Writing Woman 110 Teaching and Learning: Representing the Feminine Writer 117 Child-Rearing, Writing, and Metaphors of Mothering 132 Vulnerability and Degradation: The Woman Writer in the Marketplace 145 Chapter Four: Unceasing Industry: Work and the Actress 158 Unconscious Acting: The Natural and the Professional 166 The Question of Legitimacy 177 4 Acting as Art: The Moral Potential of the Stage _____________ 186 Domesticity By Default: The Public Image of Ellen Terry ________ 199 Conclusion --------------------------------- 203 Bibliography 207 5 List of Figures 1.1 Richard Redgrave, The Sempstress, 1844 _____________ 35 1.2 Anna Blunden, 'For only one short hour' (.')ong ofthe Shirt), 1854 ____________ 36 1.3 Henry Anelay, Illustration from George W.M. Reynolds's The Seamstress, or i11e White Slave ofHngland, 1853 45 1.4 Dante Gabriel Rossetti, The Girlhood ofMary Virgin, 1849 ____________ 56 2.1 Henrietta Ward, God Save the Queen, 1857 (engraving in The Art JournaIL __ 78 2.2 Emily Mary Osborn, Nameless and Friendless, 1857 ______ 83 4.1 Title page for The Woman '.II Gazette, 1879 _____. 190 4.2 J. Jackson, The Songstress, 1853 (engraving in The Art Journal) _______ 192 6 Acknow ledgments For her challenging and incisive thinking about my thesis at all stages of its development, I would like to thank my supervisor, Sally Shuttleworth. Sally's support and encouragement has been invaluable and much appreciated. Further thanks go to Jackie Labbe whose incisive and exhaustive responses in the early stages of this thesis brought a new perspective to my work. I am also very grateful to the University of Sheffield for providing the research grant that made this thesis possible. I must also acknowledge the staffs of the University of Sheffield Library, the British Library, the Fawcett Library, and the Sheffield City Library for patiently fulfilling all my requests. I am grateful to Louise Henson and Amy Waste for their advice, to Caroline Lucas for her apparently inexhaustible knowledge of Victorian novels, and to Isaac Sewell who fixed my computer more times than I can remember. Special thanks go to Joe Kember, who has supported me in ways too numerous to mention - and then some. I would also like to thank my mother and father, Jane and Joe Zakreski, for their financial and emotional support, Irene Zakrewski, from whom I inherited my desire to travel, Steve Boc for his financial assistance, and the rest of my family, who kept me sane. 7 Introduction In speaking or writing of woman and her affairs, the public have so long been accustomed to a certain set of stereotyped phrases, (many of these now done to death, and fit only to be cast aside as useless,) that when other signs are chosen to represent what is alive and not dead, alarm is taken lest some idol or household image is about to be demolished ... The one most often called for, brought forward rightly or wrongly on every possible occasion, and used whenever the speaker or writer feels himself embarrassed, or in danger of arriving at other conclusions than he knows are expected, (from at least the male portion of his audience,) is the word "domestic," and it invariably winds up some grand, fantastic rhodomontade about feeling and feeling alone. This peroration, so "touchingly tender," is quite conclusive to those who listen but do not think; the speaker or writer is applauded accordingly, and Paterfamilias is once more assured that all is right with his household gods. 1 Writing in 1861 about the need for a realistic understanding of women's lives in Victorian England, the author of 'Facts Versus Ideas' for the English Woman's Journal listed a series of 'stereotyped phrases' that she thought had become overused and meaningless. The first of these words is 'domestic', which, she notes, is used to describe the home as a sphere dedicated solely to emotion. The domestic sphere, she argues, had become enshrined and deified as a realm of womanly self-sacrifice and unassailable virtue through unthinking repetition by the self-satisfied male householder. Her particular problem with this sentimental idealisation of the domestic is that in limiting the function of the domestic it also limits the women who have become tied to the inanity of the middle-class household existence and denies the possibility that a woman may be employed in other work than household, and yet be domestic in the simple meaning of the word, in the same way that some men are called "domestic," although they have their business out of doors to attend to. Consequently, women may be full of home love, and home affections, who in like manner have an occupation requiring their presence for some many hours of the day elsewhere. 2 Such claims, that a woman could still be domestic while working outside the home, were not often so readily admitted in the Victorian debate concerning proper occupations for middle-class Victorian women. To associate the middle-class woman with the degrading public world of the marketplace was to contradict the cherished image of her as the embodiment of private virtue and unworldly moral superiority. 1 A.R.L., 'Facts Versus Ideas', English Woman's Journal 7 (1861), p. 74-5. 2 ibid., p. 77. 8 Indeed, the mainstream notion that her most appropriate function, whether married or not, was that of the domestic guardian - the 'angel in the house' - seemed to preclude the very notion of public work for women. 'It is a woman's business', a writer for the Quarterly Review argued, 'to be beautiful,.3 But women's 'business' was not as easily contained as this writer implies. This thesis will investigate the complex arguments that sought to redefine and expand the notion of woman's business in the second half of the nineteenth century. The image of the woman as the angel dedicated to her domestic sphere was increasingly challenged throughout the second half of the nineteenth century as the plight of the surplus woman and the reduced gentlewoman caught the public's attention. The revelation that a large number of middle-class women needed to work in order to support themselves caused a crisis for the image of the woman as the domestic goddess that many writers on the Woman Question raced to dispel. In confronting the question of how a woman could maintain her role as the custodian of the domestic ideal while spending 'many hours of the day elsewhere', some writers emphasised that paid work and domesticity could be considered