Private Sphere to World Stage from Austen to Eliot

Elizabeth Sabiston

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2017
• ISBN:
  9781351151382
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: Literary Criticism
• Index: Literature

Emily Dickinson's poem, 'This is my letter to the World/ That never wrote to Me --', opens the Introduction, which focuses on the near-anonymity of nineteenth-century women novelists. Close readings of works by five British novelists Jane Austen, Charlotte and Emily Brontë, Elizabeth Gaskell, and George Eliot offer persuasive accounts of the ways in which women used stealth tactics to outmaneuver their detractors. Chapters examine the 'hidden manifesto' in Austen's works, whose imaginative heroines defend women's writing; the lasting impact of Jane Eyre, with its modest heroine who takes up the pen to tell her own story, even on male writers outside the English tradition; Cathy's testament as the 'ghost-text' of Wuthering Heights; and the shifting gender roles in Daniel Deronda, with its silenced heroine and androgynous hero. Though the focus is on British novelists, the author's discussion of the Anglo-American connections in the factory novels of Elizabeth Gaskell and the slavery writings of Harriet Beecher Stowe has particular relevance for its demonstration of how the move from the private to the public sphere enables and even compels the blurring of national and ethnic boundaries. What emerges is a compelling argument for the relevance of these novelists to the emergence in our own time of hitherto-silenced female voices around the globe.

Chapter 1
Introduction—"Letters to the World": From Private Sphere to World Stage

This is my letter to the World
That never wrote to Me -
The simple News that Nature told -
With tender Majesty

Her Message is committed
To Hands I cannot see -
For love of Her - Sweet - countrymen -
Judge tenderly - of Me

Emily Dickinson, c. 1862

I'am Nobody! Who are you?
Are you - Nobody - too?
Then there's a pair of us?
Don't tell! they'd advertise - you know!

How dreary - to be - Somebody!
How public - like a Frog -
To tell one's name - the livelong June -
To an admiring Bog!

Emily Dickinson, c. 1861

In A Room of One's Own, Virginia Woolf identifies childlessness as the unifying trait in the women she selects as the four greatest British women novelists of the nineteenth century: Jane Austen, Charlotte Brontë, Emily Brontë, George Eliot.¹ This theory of the biological tradeoff—babies for art—probably influences her decision to relegate a fifth woman novelist, Elizabeth Gaskell, to minor status. It would also probably have led her to neglect a sixth, the American Harriet Beecher Stowe. I have opted, however, to include both the married women with children, Mrs. Gaskell and Mrs. Stowe, in an analysis of a peculiarly feminine contribution to the art of fiction in the nineteenth century, which prepared the way for a Virginia Woolf, a Doris Lessing, a Willa Cather, a Toni Morrison, a Margaret Laurence, an Alice Munro, a Bharati Mukherjee in the twentieth.

The Brontës' contemporary, the American Transcendental poet Emily Dickinson, seems to have signaled several other unifying traits among our six women novelists at least as important as that highlighted by Woolf. Moreover, these traits also link them with a number of their female predecessors in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, among them Madame de Lafayette, Charlotte Ramsay Lennox, Fanny Burney (d'Arblay), and Maria Edgeworth. Dickinson writes, "This is my letter to the World / That never wrote to me"; as Virginia Woolf comments, she always imagined that "Anon." was a woman (48).

One major stream of the earliest French and British fiction was the epistolary novel, as practiced, for instance, in Madame de Lafayette's La Princesse de Clèves and Samuel Richardson's Pamela (1740) and Clarissa (1749). Richardson's work influences, among others, Fanny Burney and Jane Austen. Richardson's use of the female as the dominant voice was a reflection of the reality: women as the dominant letter-writers in the private, domestic sphere. In fact, the seed for Richardson's Pamela was a book of model letters for maidservants. One can imagine Jane Austen, reading Pamela, Clarissa, and Sir Charles Grandison, saying to herself, "If I can write letters, I can do this too." But for Austen, as for the Brontës, Mrs. Gaskell, and George Eliot, the world never writes to them, never seeks them out, since the pen is perceived by society to be in men's hands: hence the anonymity, or the adoption of male pen names. Like Dickinson, their strength lies in communicating "the simple News that Nature [also personified as a woman] told"—the private, the emotional, woman's physical and spiritual landscape.

Yet writing (even if only for eventual publication, posthumously as in Dickinson's case) is by definition a public act, and all six of our women novelists were confronted with the dilemma of effecting an elision of public and private spheres, of articulating ranges of experience often considered so personal as to be incommunicable.

Dickinsons more playful poem "I'm Nobody! could express both their frustration and their quiet triumph at remaining faithful to their female subject and angle of vision, in contrast to the "man's world" of "advertising"—indeed, Dickinson seems to prophesy Madison Avenue. Certainly in Dickinson's day most of the froglike writers telling their name "- the livelong June - / To an admiring Bog!" belonged to the masculine tradition of publication. The Brontës' difficulties in dealing with publishers, not to mention Mrs. Stowe's in cheating herself out of vast wealth in royalties for the first "best-seller," are suggestive of women's malaise and naivety in the domain of literary production and distribution. Charlotte Brontë sold her copyright for 1500 pounds (Woolf 67); Emily Brontë was cheated by her publisher. Harriet Beecher Stowe got only 10 percent royalties on one of the world's first bestsellers because she was too fearful to take the chance of investing in her own talent. No wonder that Virginia Woolf became her own publisher, had Hogarth "a press of her own," in "that purely patriarchal society" (71).

What the six women novelists treated here have in common is a consciousness of their craft as keen as Virginia Woolf's. As Woolf notes, these women writers emerge not long after the birth of the novel in English: "The novel alone was young enough to be soft in [their] hands" (75). And the novel does not require public performance. Women's consciousness recognized the implications for them of the marriage market theme, particularly in the epistolary form as practiced by Samuel Richardson. Letters in the female voice become an instrument of seduction in Richardson, whose Pamela in some ways effects a more powerful and effective seduction on Mr. B. than his attempted rapes do on her. To carry that concept one step further, Richardson ultimately uses those female letters to effect the seduction of the reader. Thus the text itself becomes identified with the female body and the female consciousness, and passes by way of Charlotte Ramsay Lennox, whose "Female Quixote" is seduced by unrealistic French seventeenth-century romances, Fanny Burney, and Maria Edgeworth, to Jane Austen. As Brigid Brophy has remarked, Jane Austen then takes the novel as she sees it, pulverizes it, and creates a new form that brings the novel to full maturity.

My study focuses on Six women novelists—Austen, Charlotte and Emily Brontë, Elizabeth Gaskell, Harriet Beecher Stowe, and George Eliot—in an attempt to demonstrate the relationship between the self-reflexive novel and the emerging female text and voice. That these authors are regarded as "canonical" today only serves to underline their movement from near-anonymity, in the private sphere, to equality with their male contemporaries.

Chapter 2, "Jane Austen's 'Art of Fiction': The Hidden Manifesto," is a rebuttal of Henry James's patronizing treatment of Austen as an unconscious artist composing in the drawing-room in the intervals of dropped stitches. It argues that Austen was at least as conscious of her art as James himself. If she never wrote a manifesto entitled "The Art of Fiction," unlike James, there is a buried manifesto in her comments on the novel in her "The Plan of a Novel" parody of the romance, in Northanger Abbey and in Persuasion. I have written extensively elsewhere on Emma,² but will refer briefly to its relationship to "The Plan of a Novel," and to Northanger which she seems to have been revising for publication around the same time she was composing Emma. I will also glance at instances of intertextuality in Sense and Sensibility and Mansfield Park, illustrating her awareness of her predecessors and contemporaries

Chapter 3, "Not Carved in Stone: Women's Hearts and Women's Texts in Charlotte Bronte's Jane Evre," will focus on Jane Eyre but also refer briefly to the attempts of other Brontë heroines—such as Shirley Keeldar and Lucy Snowe—to create visual or verbal art works and mythologies that refute the discourses of patriarchy. Lest we think that Brontë's vision excludes male readers as some male texts are popularly supposed to exclude female readers, I will touch on Charlotte Brontë's curious influence on two of those supposedly quintessentially male novelists, the American Herman Melville and the Russian Leo Tolstoy.

Chapter 4, "Cathy's Book: The Ghost-Text in Emily Brontë's Wuthering Heights," argues that there are more than two ghosts in Wuthering Heights, that the book in which 12-year-old Cathy Earnshaw has inscribed her passionate revolt without let, restraint or inhibition, is the true story of Wuthering Heights on which Lockwood's and Nelly Dean's narratives merely constitute a gloss. Director William Wyler had the right intuition in having Merle Oberon, as Cathy, made up to resemble a portrait of Emily Bronte in the 1939 film version of Wuthering Heights.

'"The Iron of Slavery in Her Soul,'" Chapter 5, on "The Literary Relationship of Elizabeth Gaskell and Harriet Beecher Stowe," examines two women writers who use their texts as instruments of social activism, who, like their contemporary Charlotte Brontë, carve their works on the female heart, not in stone.³ Finally, Chapter 6, "George Eliot's Daniel Deronda: 'Ά Daniel Come to Judgment,'" focuses on the complex relationship between Deronda and Gwendolen Harleth. If the putative heroine is "silenced," Deronda seems to be an androgynous hero whose first name may link him to Shakespeare's Portia in The Merchant of Venice, disguised as a male lawyer, and greeted by Shylock as a "wise young judge. A Daniel come to judgment." The Conclusion examines the ramifications and impact of these novelists and their heroines on the twentieth and twenty-first centuries.

But, before Jane Austen, there was Samuel Richardson. And between Richardson and Austen there were the eighteenth-century "mothers of the novel," among whom one of the most important for Austen was Richardson's colleague, Charlotte Ramsay Lennox.

1 "Save for the possibly relevant fact that not one of them had a child, four more incongruous characters could not have met together in a room" (64).

2 In The Prison of Womanhood: Four Provincial Heroines in Nineteenth-Century Fiction, I discussed Austen's Emma and Eliot's Dorothea Brooke as female would-be artists whose attempts at creativity are "silenced"or thwarted by their environment and their own shortcomings.

3 Stowe is the only American woman novelist I have chosen to include for this particular study. The choice was based largely on her "internationalism," her bestseller status in Great Britain, and on her literary relationships with Elizabeth Gaskell in particular, but also with Charlotte Brontë.

Chapter 2
Jane Austen's Art of Fiction: The Hidden Manifesto in Northanger Abbey and Persuasion

Introduction: The "Nay-Sayers" and the "Janeites"

In addition to anonymity and (at least according to Woolf) childlessness, another quality our nineteenth-century women novelists have in common is their ability to provoke controversy, both in their day and ours. Of the six, probably Jane Austen and Charlotte Brontë have sustained both the most virulent attacks and the most passionate defenses.¹ Critical attacks on Austen have tended to be condescending, on Charlotte Brontë angry, but both occur along gender lines. Henry James's picture of "dear Jane, gentle Jane, everyone's Jane," composing in the drawing-room in the intervals of dropped stitches, is typical of critics who patronize Austen. Actually, Austen was at least as conscious as James of her craft, but buried her manifesto in her creative work, rather than writing an essay on "The Art of Fiction."² Lionel Trilling, one of the more noteworthy Austen defenders, asked in an unfinished 1975 essay. "Why Read Jane Austen Today?" (He died before completing it, and probably before answering his own question.)

The attackers see her as dated, a snob, an apologist for a hierarchical society, and an advocate of economically determined marriages for upwardly mobile young women. The admirers see her as clear-eyed, candid, lucid, capable of both detached observation and ironic criticism of social institutions, including marriage, which she tends to see as the only possible outlet for most young women, perhaps less fortunate than herself in that she has her art and the encouragement of a loving, supportive family. Her Emma Woodhouse claims that marriage is not necessary to her; she is an heiress, financially independent, and she has her own imagination and supposed art of matchmaking to fall back on. But Emma, a true Female Quixote, lacks the discipline, technique, and detachment of a Jane Austen. Above all. Emma is a snob who never attaches her feminism to a critique of the patriarchy in general— although Mr. Knightley does and will do much to "democratize" her before and after marriage—whereas Austen's sharp, astute observations subtend a critique of the system, a critique which would lead, not perhaps to revolution à la Mary Wollstonecraft, but to evolution in the manner of Nathaniel Hawthorne.

Her work is remarkably congruent with Edward Said's position in "The World, the Text, and the Critic" in that Austen would never deny the work's referentiality to the world "out there." Indeed, her treatment, in Mansfield Park, of the Antigua material and of William Price's advancement in the navy, and, in P...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Dedication
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• Figure
• Acknowledgments
• 1 Introduction—"Letters to the World": From Private Sphere to World Stage
• 2 Jane Austen's Art of Fiction: The Hidden Manifesto in North anger Abbey and Persuasion
• 3 Not Carved in Stone: Women's Hearts and Women's Texts in Charlotte Bronte's Jane Eyre
• 4 Cathy's Book: The Ghost-text in Emily Bronte's Wuthering Heights
• 5 "The Iron of Slavery in Her Heart": The Literary Relationship of Elizabeth Gaskell and Harriet Beecher Stowe
• 6 George Eliot's Daniel Deronda: "A Daniel Come to Judgment"
• 7 Conclusion—and a New Beginning
• Bibliography
• Index