Mistress of the House

Women of Property in the Victorian Novel

Tim Dolin

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2016
• ISBN:
  9781351917209
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: Literary Criticism for Comparative Literature
• Index: Literature

This exploration of gender and property ownership in eight important novels argues that property is a decisive undercurrent in narrative structures and modes, as well as an important gender signature in society and culture. Tim Dolin suggests that the formal development of nineteenth-century domestic fiction can only be understood in the context of changes in the theory and laws of property: indeed femininity and its representation cannot be considered separately from property relations and their reform. He presents original readings of novels in which a woman owns, acquires or loses property, focusing on exchanges between patriarchal cultural authority, the 'woman question' and narrative form, and on the place of domestic fiction in a culture in which property relations and gender relations are subject to radical review. Each chapter revolves around a representative text, but refers substantially to other material, both other novels and contemporary social, legal, political and feminist commentary.

Chapter One
A woman, and something more: Shirley

'Business! Really the word makes me conscious I am indeed no longer a girl, but quite a woman, and something more. I am an esquire: Shirley Keeldar, Esquire, ought to be my style and title. They gave me a man's name; I hold a man's position: it is enough to inspire me with a touch of manhood.'

(Brontë, 1981, p.200)

Reviewing Charlotte Brontë's Shirley in 1849, Eugéne Forbade remarked that 'as a picture of society, the novel could have been called Shirley, or the condition of women in the English middle-class' (Allott, 1974, p.143). Though it promises at first to be a tale of the conditions of poor working men in the industrial West Riding, the violent struggles of a dispossessed working class are paralleled and finally overtaken, as Forçgade observed, by the more modest struggles of two single women.¹ One is a young property-owner and heiress with the leisure to dream of the good she can do the world, and the other a young woman of limited means who despairs of her destiny as an old maid. When both win husbands in the end, the narrative of female independence is overtaken in its turn by the claims of the conventional courtship romance, intimating that novels about women, like women themselves, really have no business with public affairs – either the 'condition of England' or the 'condition of women' debates. Shirley Keeldar and Caroline Helstone convince themselves that the 'unmarried woman is somebody, the married, nobody!', as Ann Lamb proclaimed in 'Can Woman Regenerate Society?' (Murray, 1982, p.50). But the final double betrothal seems to suggest otherwise: that women's intervention in political or social questions is neither possible nor desirable, reflecting the dilettantism of the rich and the desperation of the bored.² How, then, are we most profitably to read this novel as a contribution to the 'woman question', and, more specifically, as a point of intersection with the literature of women's property reform? Is it in some way assumed of or even conditional upon heroines and women novelists alike that they withdraw, as Brontë is alleged to do, from public life? And finally, what happens, formally, to novels that interleave a polemic about women and politics with a plot from 'pernicious' romance, as Shirley does (Brontë, 1981, p.379)?

In describing herself as 'a woman, and something more', 'Captain' Keeldar (as she styles herself) draws the reader's attention to the fact that Bronte is not simply tracing 'the fortunes and feelings of two girls' (Allott, 1974, p. 123) in this novel, as many of its first reviewers assumed. For these two girls are not identical 'women in the English middle-class'. Shirley is a woman of considerable property, and Caroline an impoverished gentlewoman; one has money to pursue a life of independence, while the other must either earn a poor living or find a rich husband. Yet under the law, and in this novel, the two women are considered as social equals, with the same legal and political rights. They are perceived to belong to a single 'class' of womanhood for which the 'woman question' speaks, rather than two women transparently economically stratified just as the men in the novel are. In order to approach the questions with which I began, therefore, it is necessary first to recognize the emphatic correspondences Brontë establishes in Shirley between gender and class difference. Second, the novel suggests that sexual difference may be aligned not only with social problems but also with regional differences. What it means to be a 'woman' in this novel must therefore be referred to the terms of industrial conflict and provincial identity. When Caroline Helstone asks, '"where is my place in the world?"', her question echoes beyond the immediate context of the debate over a woman's place, and is heard in the controversies over the social consequences of industrial retooling and the destructive 'Orders in Council' which threaten England's place in the world, and in the novel's fierce resistance to the forces of national unity which threaten Yorkshire's place in the world. Shirley can be described accordingly as a provincial novel as well as an industrial novel and a condition of women novel, and it is in that light that I would like to consider its double plot of the woman of property and the impoverished gentlewoman caught up in the romance of coverture.

The Victorian woman's domestic vocation is customarily described in terms of the jurisdiction of social spaces, and in terms of actual physical demarcation. The ideology of separate spheres, correspondingly, employs a rhetoric of territoriality which links it simultaneously with property, class difference and provincial identity. Shirley takes up this conjunction of gender politics, social boundaries, and regionalism in the landed property of its independent eponymous heroine.³ Shirley's estate encompasses both the 'windowed grave' of Briarfield Rectory, in which Caroline Helstone feels herself buried, and Robert Moore's mill: the propertied woman's sphere is coterminous with the entire district, taking in both the intensely private realm of the retiring spinster and the openly violent public realm of the factory. This is an important structural and political device, and in order to understand what it means for Shirley to hand over her property to the new squire when she marries, we must account for the provincial meanings to which her ownership is so closely linked, and the politics of female authorship which Bronte is exploring through the politics of provincialism.

In Shirley the province and the language of the province — its vernacular —are significant in a wider literary-historical context than that suggested at first by Brontë's Yorkshire characters and settings, and her own background.⁴ This novel is more consciously a provincial novel than Jane Eyre, openly declaring that the experience it represents may be alien to both men and 'southern' readers.⁵ It appears at an important moment in the history of English provincial fiction, especially that written by women, and an important moment in the history of 'Englishness' and its enemies.⁶ Like Wuthering Heights and Jane Eyre before it, Shirley needs to be read in the light of what Nancy Armstrong calls the 'regional or ethnic remapping of British culture' (1992, p.245) throughout the 1830s and 1840s, during which the United Kingdom invented and relayed itself as ethnically homogeneous and socially stable to its colonized others in Ireland and the East. The cultural processes through which this was to be achieved, according to Armstrong and Elsie Michie (1992), included drawing a division between 'a modern literate urban core and ... a celtic or ethnic periphery' (Armstrong, 1992, p.245). The figures of Heathcliff and Rochester both represent this ethnicizing of the provincial. They participate in the process of 'internal colonialism' through which one part of England, the northern periphery, was subjugated to the southern metropolitan centre.⁷ The discourses of internal colonialism were met with counter-discourses, however, of which the provincial novel was one.⁸ This conflict between London and the northern provinces generates ideological collisions in Shirley, produced in the growing tradition of radical northern provincial fiction that was actively engaged in producing such a counter-discourse. This is the context for the novel's exploration of the territorial rhetoric of Victorian sexual separatism. In Shirley sexual difference is explicitly aligned with regional hostility; and this alignment provides Bronte with a way of addressing and contesting both internal colonialism and sexual apartheid. For in this novel the sexual-provincial counter-discourse endeavours to redefine the territories of Victorian fiction and controvert those who assume the voice of imaginative sovereignty over them.

Shirley is critically concerned with the conditions of its own literary production, and it anticipates, partly combatively and partly defensively, its own critical reception. It is above all a response to the public response to Jane Eyre. Contemporary readers of Brontë's first published work (and reviews of that controversial book continued the debate over what properly constituted the 'territory' of the novel, especially the woman's novel) consistently conflated questions of provincialism and gender. The typical critical reaction to Jane Eyre found in it a masculine coarseness and a hoydenish vulgarity especially offensive since, on the basis of its modest scope, it was self-evidently the work of a female with little experience of 'life' — that is, London Life. This is most obvious in Elizabeth Rigby's famous attack on Currer Bell's social ignorance.⁹ The mystery of the author's sex and origin confused reviewers of Jane Eyre into revealing uncertain and questionable opinions about the relationship between gender, place, and fiction. But the predictable equation of the provincial and the uncultivated, and the less predictable obscuring of the feminine and unfeminine, reveal something of Jane Eyre's startling originality. For with its publication the passionate interior life of the poor, plain, quiet heroine was announced in a dialect altogether unfamiliar. Further, a new territory, a territory, as G.H.Lewes suggested, 'the very antipode of "lady like"' (Olmsted, 1979, vol.3, p.657) was claimed by the speakers of that dialect.

These antipodes were sited generically by Matthew Arnold in his well-known essay on the 'note of provinciality' in English prose, 'The Literary Influence of Academies', wherein the argument turns on the relative merits of genius, appropriate to poetry, and 'quick, flexible intelligence', typical of critical prose (Arnold, 1962, p.241). Provincial genius is characterized as a form of crude energy that must be qualified and tempered by the order and lucidity of urbane reason:

The provincial spirit ... exaggerates the value of its ideas for want of a high standard at hand by which to try them. Or rather, for want of such a standard, it gives one idea too much prominence ...; it orders its ideas amiss; it is hurried away by fancies; it likes and dislikes too passionately, too exclusively. Its admiration weeps hysterical tears, and its disapprobation foams at the mouth. So we get the eruptive and the aggressive manner in literature; the former prevails most in our criticism, the latter in our newspapers. ... the provincial tone is more violent, and seems to aim rather at an effect upon the blood and senses than upon the spirit and intellect.

(p.249)

Arnold's conception of energy, the nation's 'chief spiritual characteristic', assumes a subversive and even sinister aspect when matched with adjectives like eruptive, aggressive and violent. The conflation of provincialism and energy, and the association of urbanity and control, recalls too well the long history of struggle for provincial independence. It also registers the ambivalent attraction towards, and contempt for, the specific fictional territory which Bronte is claiming, and the deep-seated middle-class fear of the violent energy centred on that territory, an energy simultaneously identified in the industrial working classes of the north.

Writing to James Taylor shortly after the publication of Shirley, Bronte expressed her disappointment at its reception: 'I imagined, mistakenly it now appears, that "Shirley" bore fewer traces of the female hand than "Jane Eyre'" (Wise and Symington, 1980, vol.3, p.34). In spite of its manifest differences —the change to third-person narration, the explicit social theme, the larger cast —and in spite of its statement of realist intent on the opening page, readers saw in it only another Jane Eyre. Again, the emphasis of the reviews was laid on distinctions between male and female authors, feminine and masculine tone, and southern and northern vernacular. An anonymous reviewer of Shirley professed that 'to our southern visions, the entire environments of the piece seem somewhat strange and uncouth, but not without a possible reality, which, though one's experience cannot, one's imagination can readily embrace'(Allott, 1974, p. 120). The Spectator, too, complained of 'a literal provincial coarseness, . whether it be the author's fault or Yorkshire's' (p. 131), a sentiment later echoed by Lewes when he wrote that the 'frequent harshness and rudeness [of the characters] is something which startles on a first reading, and, on a second, is quite inexplicable. Is this correct as regards Yorkshire, or is the fault with the artist?' (p. 165). The problems of provincial obscenity, the eponymous property-owning heroine with a man's name, and the gender of the author converge in Fraser's Magazine, which 'could bet a trifle that the author is a Yorkshirewoman; — Yorkshire, we are sure; woman, we think. Why not Miss Currer Bell as well as Miss Shirley Keeldar?' (p. 154).

Inevitably, Brontë invoked in Shirley a contemporary novel that represented to her what Jane Eyre was not: Vanity Fair. Shirley may be read as Bronte's attempt to transcend the first-person, and with it, the prison of solitary consciousness she wrote of in 'Reason':

Life I must bound, existence sum
In the strait limits of one mind;
That mind my own. Oh! narrow cell ...

(Quoted Gérin, 1976, p.279)

Boumelha notes, however, that the common description of Shirley as 'Brontë's Thackerayan novel' and her 'attempt at social panorama' is at odds with the considerable constraints placed upon Caroline Helstone (1990, p.78). Third-person narration seems to conspire in an ubiquitous impenetrability of character (epitomized in 'that little man of bronze' Matthewson Helstone, Brontë, 1981, p.100), and the novel's atmosphere of suffocation. Peering in on a woman's consciousness seems suddenly more problematic than it is in Jane Eyre. The fact of boundedness becomes especially acute not only because we feel keenly the injunctions upon speech and action which afflict Caroline but because we become aware of what we do not see of Robert Moore, or Hiram Yorke, or Shirley Keeldar.

Lewes's review of Shirley picked up on the change to third-person as the difference between Jane Eyre's unity and the structural problems of its successor: 'In Jane Eyre life was viewed from the standing point of individual experience; in Shirley that standing point, is frequently abandoned, and the artist paints only a panorama of which she, as well as you, are but spectators' (Allott, 1974, p.163). A few paragraphs later, Lewes writes that Shirley 'is not a picture; but a portfolio of random sketches for one or more pictures' (p. 165). In this it is perhaps most like Vanity Fair, which one reviewer called 'a novel without a plan' (Tillotson and Hawes, 1968, p.66). But Shirley's lack of unity opened it to the contrary charges of narrowness, 'poverty of invention', and vulgarity:

Arc ... deals with the broad principles of human nature, not with idiosyncrasies: and, although it requires an experience of life both comprehensive and profound, to enable us to say with confidence, that 'this motive is unnatural', or 'that passion is untrue', it requires no great experience to say 'this character has not the air of reality; it may be copied from nature, but it does not look so'.

(Allott, 1974, p. 167)

Note especially the contrasts Lewes invokes: broad versus idiosyncratic; 'comprehensive and profound' versus 'no great experience'. Narrowness is again summoned in a denunciation of a picture of life that is perceived to be not vulgarly melodramatic, as Jane Eyre was, but vulgarly factual: provincial. Brontë's panorama retreats to the 'strait limits of one mind'.

The shadow of Thackeray falls over a complex division and interchange of loyalties in Shirley between northern provincialism and the London novel. Territorial ambivalence informs the rhetoric of expectations, at once tentative and provocative, with which the novel opens: its 'reader, do you expect?' questions. This voice of the apologist is really wholly comprehensible only in reference to the issue of female authorship. For Brontë's appeal to the truthfulness of her work is equally a defiance and a rejection of the double chauvinism, against femininity and provinciality, implicit in the charge of hoyden. This more than any concern for the realistic use of dialect br...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• Preface
• Acknowledgements
• Dedication
• Introduction: Women, property, and Victorian fiction
• 1 A woman, and something more: Shirley
• 2 Cranford and its belongings
• 3 'He could get, but not keep': Villette
• 4 Crimes of property: The Moonstone
• 5 Hardy's uncovered women
• 6 Mistress of herself: Diana of the Crossways
• Appendix 1 Barbara Bodichon: A brief summary of the laws concerning women (1854)
• Appendix 2 The Caroline Norton affair
• Bibliography
• Index