Women in Transit through Literary Liminal Spaces

Kenneth A. Loparo, T. Gifford, Kenneth A. Loparo, T. Gifford, Teresa Gómez Reus, T. Gifford

• Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan
• Year: 2013
• ISBN:
  9781137330475
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Gender Studies
• Index: Social Sciences

This edited book provides a unique opportunity for international scholars to contribute to the exploration of liminality in the field of Anglo-American literature written by or about women between the Victorian period and the Second World War.

Part I

New Women, Old Patterns

1

‘Nobody’s child must sleep under Somebody’s roof – and why not yours?’ Adventures of the Female Ego in Dickens, George Meredith’s The Egoist and Wilkie Collins’s No Name

Shannon Russell

Did you ever witness the launch of one of those gallant vessels which form the bulwarks of our country […]? Is it possible to witness a launch without some such speculations and misgivings as these – to avoid thinking of the perils the ship must encounter from the rocks and shoals beneath her, the thunders of the heavens above, from foes without, and, perchance, mutiny within her bulwarks? Can we among all the works of man, find a fitter emblem of human life itself, and especially of the career of a young girl launched for the first time into the ocean of life?

(Pullan 1855: vii–viii)

To those bred under an elaborate social order few such moments of exhilaration can come as that which stands at the threshold of wild travel. The gates of the enclosed garden are thrown open, the chain at the entrance to the sanctuary is lowered, with a wary glance to right and left you step forth and behold! the immeasurable world.

(Bell 1907: 1)

When Matilda Pullan writes her Maternal Counsels to a Daughter in 1855, she figures the launch of a young girl’s ‘career’ of marriage and motherhood as the beginning of a bright, if perilous, adventure on the ‘ocean of life’. Over fifty years later, travel writer, Gertrude Bell, will open her first book on the Middle East with the image of a new woman escaping the house, embarking on ‘wild travel’. Yet the earlier journey of Pullan’s domestic angel also has the ‘immeasurable world’ in view. Forming the ‘bulwark’ of her society, so very like her nation’s ships of imperial conquest, her venture is attendant with ‘misgivings’ about whether or not she will founder. Pullan’s metaphor exposes the deep anxiety about modernity that fuelled the Victorian quest to understand who women were and where they were going. With their ability to civilize savage aspects of modern life, to stave off encroaching cultural degeneration, and to breed the next generation of empire-builders, married women were imagined as cultural saviours both at home and abroad. The angel’s face disguised an ambitious ego. These not so secret agents of empire were invented to help map out England’s claims to be the moral centre of the world (Ellis 1839: 13; Poovey 1989: 189), radiating influence to a periphery understood as racially inferior (Cotsell 1990: 15; Emerson 1856: 62), in need of Christian conversion, and ripe for conquest (Stodart 1844: 146–70).

Though appearing in different guises, this model of female heroism was an intrepid traveller in transit through Victorian discourse during the long era when Britain ruled the waves. Her lofty moral purpose was attractive both to conservatives who sought to keep women subordinate and in the home, and to radicals who argued for the extension of their rights and freedoms outside of it (Burton 1992: 139). The nation’s streets – those places of transit outside the domestic sphere – were territories of cultural contention. They offered a measure of national progress and were liminal spaces of uncertain outcome where women could either exercise their vaunted influence or suffer disgrace. In Can Women Regenerate Society? Ann Dryden asks whether, given the ‘brutal state of things’ on the streets, woman should not ‘be dumb about her influence’ (1884: 29). Troubling contradictions seemed to mark the state of both women and the nation, opening up both identities to processes of ‘constant renegotiation’ (Pykett 1992: 13) and ‘continual’ reassertion and potential reassimilation (Buzard 2005: 530).

Dickens’s mid-century novels, Collins’s No Name (1862) and Meredith’s The Egoist (1879), all play with the cultural currency of women’s transformative and regenerative influence. These radically different novels of social reform often, literally, take women out of the house into spaces of transit that can be viewed as either dangerous or liberating for them. Whether writing of self-sacrificing domestic angels, ambitious sensation heroines, or ‘new’ women, these writers reveal the extent to which women’s narratives are locked into myths of national reform and advance. All subvert women’s subordinate position in society, revealing it as an ironic pose masking an ambitious role of transformation. The struggles of these female characters prove their absolute right to act as civilizers of their societies. It is through their agency and influence that egocentric positions are first critiqued, then reformed, and, finally, reasserted in these novels. These characters also expose Dickens, Collins and Meredith as slaves of their own time and its dubious values.

In Dombey and Son, the egocentric Dombey fails to recognize the current market value of women’s influence, a blindness that costs him his trading house and his home. Under-appreciating Florence as ‘base coin’, Dombey must be taught to see her as his moral master, and to recognize how her civilizing influence underwrites the new imperial speculations in free trade rather than the slave trade (Moynahan 1963: 123). As a bride, Florence climbs aboard a trading ship to China. Her marriage to sailor Walter Gay both corrects Dombey’s own bad investment in a loveless marriage to Edith and signals the re-launching of re-humanized imperial houses. Internalizing the ‘nobody’ status she has been raised with, Florence will describe herself to her husband as ‘nothing. Nothing but your wife’ (Dickens [1848] 1974: 752). But Dickens exposes that status as ironic. She is the essential ‘something’ of the novel, and she brings the potent currency of her civilizing influence to the new improved colonial venture and adventure:

Upon the deck, image to the roughest man on board of something that is graceful, beautiful, and harmless – something that is good and pleasant to have there and that should make the voyage prosperous is Florence.

(772)

Her transit promises a future good by reinforcing the reformist fantasy of the erasure of Dombey’s – and the nation’s – bad past.

Florence also softens the estrangements of modernity conveyed through Dickens’s ambivalent treatment of that ‘engine of progress’, the railway.¹ A train kills off the villain Carker in a ham-fisted suggestion of the possibilities of ‘improvement’ offered by modernity, but the railway is also responsible for the alienating transformation of Staggs’s Gardens. Dickens suggests that the violent changes in a world speeding up can be civilized through the non-threatening influence of a duty-bound woman. By rail or by sea, in the end, the earth is re-made for the kinder, gentler Dombey and Daughter to trade in, ‘to preserve inviolate a system of which they are [now] the centre’.

In David Copperfield, Dickens, again, endorses as progressive a second marriage to follow a bad first one, when the domestically incompetent Dora is replaced by the angel, Agnes Wickfield who is perpetually ‘pointing upward’, and, by implication, onward. But in Em’ly’s emigration to the penal colony of Australia following her sexual corruption by the rich and egocentric Steerforth, who must die in the novel, Dickens offers another version of women’s influence abroad. He demonstrates how fallen women like Em’ly can be recycled to become productive colonists (Russell 1998: 43–63). Refusing to marry out of masochistic penance for her past sexual crimes, Em’ly nevertheless acts the part of the self-sacrificing domestic angel by nursing, teaching and helping ‘all that has any trouble’ (Dickens [1850] 1999: 847) in the colony, thus assisting the imperial advance of her nation.

In Bleak House, Dickens revisits the theme of domestic shame, offering his most direct engagement with the relationship between women’s mission and national entitlements (Moers 1973: 13–24). He writes this novel in a rage at the contradictions between the pretensions of greatness touted by that ‘show of shows’, the Great Exhibition, and the shocking realities of poor English ‘savages’ like Jo. That rage is directed at women like Mrs Pardiggle, Mrs Jellyby and Miss Wisk. Portrayed as blind egotists, these are puffed up women with misdirected missions whose telescopic philanthropy leaves them blind to the national damage in their own streets.

The philanthropic movements of these women are counterbalanced by the local transit of Esther whose actions in those streets establish her legitimacy to rule as social saviour. Modelled as she is on the biblical queen Esther who saves her people, Esther’s character is, of course, constructed with very ‘high pretensions’ and for many readers, a ‘coy egotism’ (Zwerdling 1973: 428). Yet as an illegitimate ‘nobody’, Esther’s progress in the novel to ‘somebody’ of importance is a personal story that can be read as an allegory of national reform. Her physical breakdowns in the novel register as psychic stages in an identity crisis for both Esther and her nation, as both progress toward a fantasy of removing marks of ‘shame’ – like Victorian dis-ease with illegitimacy and poverty. Lady Dedlock’s daughter participates in the fantasy of the fall of the ‘great house’ and the rise of its middle-class replacement; Esther’s illegitimacy is wiped out by her legitimate claims to have earned her way into that domestic tableaux her mother could only witness from a distance in the opening page of the novel.

Esther’s endurance through her fever’s ‘fire, storm and darkness’ rhetorically echoes Woodcourt’s own experiences as a naval hero of empire, rescuing sailors during a wreck in the East Indies (Dickens [1853] 1987: 442). Naturally paired as the self-effacing regenerators of their society, their marriage and the replacement home they will create is, as D.A. Miller writes, the kind of ‘house of correction’ (1988: 103) Dickens wants us to believe will not only ‘cure’ the nation’s ills, but ensure the radiation of ‘widening circles of enlightenment’ to ‘savages’ abroad (Dickens [1848] 1996: 125). Worshipping her husband as everyone’s saviour, Esther’s narrative closes with yet another example of that coyly half-buried female ego that seems necessary to support the national one.

In all of these novels, one has the feeling that Dickens is working hard to maintain his faith in the domestic woman’s ability to reform and regenerate society. What he exposes, particularly in his portrayal of Esther, is that the attention to domestic duties is a highly disciplined performance that may not come naturally to all women. He also exposes a voice self-consciously pitched to national service and self-sacrifice. If Dickens wants to believe in women as national saviours, he also exposes the threadbare qualities of this security blanket and its inadequacy to cover up all of the desires of the secret self.

A decade after Bleak House, in No Name, Wilkie Collins exploits the generic possibilities of ‘sensation fiction’ to expose the ‘pretensions’ behind the ‘loud self-assertion of Modern Progress’ (Collins [1862] 2004: 210) revealing ‘those most mysterious of mysteries, the mysteries that are at our own doors’ (James 1865: 593–5). Offering its readers thrills and chills to feed the appetites of a mobile and potentially degenerate culture (Mansel 1863: 482), sensation fiction engaged with a range of anxieties about modernity and its epidemics, among them nervous health, madness, railway angst, publishing innovations, commodity culture and, of course, the unconventional movements of the ‘new’ woman (Pykett 2006: 50–64). According to Captain Wragge, Magdalen Vanstone is just one of ‘hundreds’ of ‘modern’ female adventuresses disguising themselves for their ‘own ends’ whose stories swell the pages of contemporary newspapers.

But No Name has been one of the most troublesome of Collins’s novels to categorize (Jones 2007: 35), in part, because, as Margaret Oliphant wrote, ‘at the cheap cost of a fever’ its ‘polluted’ heroine emerges as ‘pure, as high-minded, and as spotless as the most dazzling white of heroines’ (1863: 170), rewarded with reincorporation into the community of respectability she has transgressed. Unwittingly, perhaps, Oliphant identifies Collins’s secret manipulation of Magdalen’s role as the conventional heroine of novels of social reform. Detecting who No Name is and speculating on her meaning is part of the narrative game Collins is playing with his reader. He imitates Dickens’s own rhetorical strategies in Bleak House when he asks his readers to think about the connections between the legitimate and illegitimate characters in his novel and to contemplate the elaborate performances that mask uncomfortable truths. A ‘lady’, as Magdalen asserts with authority, is simply ‘a woman who wears a silk gown and has a sense of her own importance’ (504).

Is Magdalen the dangerous new woman and modern ‘adventuress’, or is she the womanly ideal in clever disguise? In fact, she is both. Collins plays to an audience he knows will be thrilled by the performances of each type of heroine. The drama lies in the reader’s recognition of the hidden ‘end’ and ‘buried hopes’ behind Magdalen’s unscrupulous con game. It may be a sensational claim to suggest that Magdalen Vanstone is but another version of Esther Summerson, but the interpretive ‘mysteries’ of this mixed genre novel depend upon the ironic ways in which Collins revisits Dickens’s own nervous gender investments.

Collins invokes that nervousness, as Dickens did in Dombey and Son, through his play on the modern anxieties associated with railway transit (Daly 1999: 461–87). He specifically sets his novel in 1844, the year of national shame and sham, when ‘Railway Mania’ caused speculators, like Captain Wragge himself, to lose fortunes in bogus rail companies (149). Magdalen and her sister Norah, too, will lose everything in the train crash that kills her father and mother; transformed overnight into nobodies when it is revealed that their parents’ married respectability has been an act. The private shame that leaves them penniless and illegitimate exposes a national one: ‘cruel laws’ exist in this ‘Christian country’ (109).

By contrast with her dutiful and passive sister Norah, Magdalen mobilizes to address this social injustice, performing a ‘double’ act that involves her physical and moral transit along traditional narrative paths and landscapes of both the fallen woman and the self-sacrificing angel. Infected, too, with t...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Contents
• List of Illustrations
• Acknowledgements
• Notes on Contributors
• Introduction
• Part I New Women, Old Patterns
• Part II The Call of the Wild
• Part III Redrawing the Boundaries
• Bibliography
• Index