Modernism and the Women's Popular Romance in Britain, 1885–1925

Martin Hipsky

• Publisher: Ohio University Press
• Year: 2011
• ISBN:
  9780821443774
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: European Literary Collections
• Index: Literature

Today's mass-market romances have their precursors in late Victorian popular novels written by and for women. In Modernism and the Women's Popular Romance Martin Hipsky scrutinizes some of the best-selling British fiction from the period 1885 to 1925, the era when romances, especially those by British women, were sold and read more widely than ever before or since.

Recent scholarship has explored the desires and anxieties addressed by both "low modern" and "high modernist" British culture in the decades straddling the turn of the twentieth century. In keeping with these new studies, Hipsky offers a nuanced portrait of an important phenomenon in the history of modern fiction. He puts popular romances by Mrs. Humphry Ward, Marie Corelli, the Baroness Orczy, Florence Barclay, Rebecca West, Elinor Glyn, Victoria Cross, Ethel Dell, and E. M. Hull into direct relationship with the fiction of Virginia Woolf, Katherine Mansfield, James Joyce, and D. H. Lawrence, among other modernist greats.

CHAPTER ONE

Contexts of Popular Romance, 1885–1925

For an initial consideration of the relation of the popular romance to an emergent modernism, feminist criticism and gender studies may offer the best framework, especially as regards theories of genre and mode. Suzanne Clark’s work, for example, reveals the influence of the so-called (at the time) sentimental mode on important female modernists. In Sentimental Modernism: Women Writers and the Revolution of the Word, Clark restores this category to modernist literary history and vindicates the works of American (or New York–based) writers Emma Goldman, Edna St. Vincent Millay, Louise Bogan, and Kay Boyle.¹ Clark’s critical investigation, published in 1991, anticipated by a few years the current revisionist impulse to reconfigure the “low modern,” the “popular modernist,” and the middlebrow within our regnant historiographies of modernist literature. In the present study, in parallel with Clark’s revisionist work, I trace the evolution of an older tradition of narrative representation—in this case, the romance mode—through narrative specimens of the modernist era. However, I want neither to claim that women romance writers from Marie Corelli to Edith Maude Hull deserve to be elevated to high modernist status, nor to champion Virginia Woolf, Katherine Mansfield, or the Rebecca West of The Return of the Soldier as neglected women modernists (obviously, with the possible exception of West, this would be carrying coals to Newcastle). Though I am motivated by our need to take more seriously, as a chapter of cultural history, the turn-of-the-century women romance writers and to theorize the oft-overlooked Romantic and romance-mode dimensions of some high modernist texts, I am not presuming to offer a bid for the canonization of the neglected women writers or to describe the historical reading experience of the female audience.

In fact, the popular romances under scrutiny here had not yet taken on the ideological stigma of the “feminized ‘other’ discourse” (which Clark properly associates with the sentimental mode from the early nineteenth century on)—or, more accurately, they did not do so until the end of this period, with the appearance in the 1910s of Dell’s Way of an Eagle and Hull’s Sheik. As is discussed in later chapters, men of the period professed to reading and valuing the early works of Ward, Corelli, Orczy, and other writers discussed here.² Although the best-selling narratives covered here were at times tagged as “sentimental” (sometimes by fellow women writers, as discussed at the end of chapter 2), it was not generally by virtue of their romance mode per se that they were pejoratively gendered by cultural arbiters of the era. As Mary Hammond points out in her study of English literary taste in this period, it has become “a critical commonplace” in twenty-first-century criticism that “the romance . . . had very ill-defined and somewhat permeable boundaries, and that consequently the art/market opposition was less a divide than a negotiating table.”³ The women’s romance novel, as a mass-market subcategory of the romance mode, began to acquire its pejorative (and, of course, deeply ideological) associations with exclusively female writers and readers only in the third decade of the twentieth century, in the years following E. M. Hull’s publication of The Sheik in 1919. Even as late as 1932, the year in which Q. D. Leavis published Fiction and the Reading Public, the critic did not differentiate the sex of either author or reading public in her analysis of best-selling romances: Marie Corelli, Florence Barclay, Ethel M. Dell, Edgar Rice Burroughs, Gene Stratton Porter, and Horace de Vere Stacpoole—male authors as well as female ones (and American as well as British ones)—provided her prime instances of “fantasy-spinning . . . the kind of fiction classed as day-dreaming.”⁴ Prior to the 1920s, of course, “the romance” had had its detractors of various stripes for a long time; nonetheless, the ever-mutating forms, both poetic and fictional, ranged under this broad rubric were understood to be rooted in a native, organic, deeply British literary tradition going back six or more centuries, without a consistent gendering. Long past the medieval era of its importation from the Continent, “the romance” of whatever varietal was the gender-neutral fruit of homegrown vines. If the romance, as a narrative mode generally, has ever been a “discourse of the Other”—partitioned off, in the reading public’s collective imagination, as a feminine genre—this did not occur until later in the twentieth century.

In the more-distant past, the lack of a gender-based stigma to the literary category of the romance narrative had to do, paradoxically, with the sex of its author—nearly always male, for centuries, and therefore ideologically “invisible.” This began to change when the education of women allowed for the emergence of such gothic romance writers as Clara Reeve, Anne Radcliffe, and Regina Maria Roche in the later eighteenth century and Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley in the early nineteenth. Authorial gender became a conscious factor in the discursive constitution of the signifier romance literature; some literary historians, following the lead of Harold Bloom, have even suggested that the romance mode became “internalized” as the spiritual quests of the (primarily) male poets of English Romanticism and in this development took on a symbolic masculinity.⁵ It can then be shown that the “domestic romance” narratives of Jane Austen and her nineteenth-century successors, while they partook in greater measure than their romance predecessors of the formal features of “masculine” realism, nonetheless “feminized” the romance mode and that the “adventure romances” of Rider Haggard, Robert Louis Stevenson, Arthur Conan Doyle, and H. G. Wells, while straying from disciplined realism into implausible dreamworlds, nonetheless displaced the serial incidents of the Arthurian quest-romance into a modernized masculinity. Then, too, it has been demonstrated that a renovated realism was the mode of the “New Woman” novels of the late 1880s through 1890s, and so romance’s modal antonym became associated with woman novelists at the moment when Marie Corelli was the reigning “queen” of romance.

The history of the gendering of the romance mode, in short, is somewhat dizzying. The “romance” form inherited by the women romanciers of 1885–1925 cannot be identified as a distinct, ideologically “feminized rhetoric” in the way that Clark’s discourse of the sentimental can be. When it comes to gender and genre, then, we may start with two stable facts: first, the romance writers considered in this study did not believe their novels to be a priori gendered forms; and second, they were (for the most part) quite deliberate in referring to their works as “romances” of varying genres, aimed no less than the romances of previous eras at both male and female readers. Ward labeled Robert Elsmere “a religious romance”; Corelli weighed in vehemently on the side of capital-R Romance in the late-Victorian realism-versus-romance debates; Elinor Glyn entitled her autobiography Romantic Adventure.

The Popular Sublime and Melodrama

Bracketing the question of gender for a moment, there is another difficulty here: in the culture of late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century Britain, “romance” can come to seem a rather thin and etiolated sign. For my understanding of the discursive strands woven into the term in its British usage during the period, I rely in part on Gillian Beer’s diachronic account of the mode. Beer acknowledges that the romance is too broad to be considered a single genre, yet she traces lines of continuity that stretch from Sir Gawain and the Green Knight and Thomas Malory to the later twentieth century. She catalogues what she calls a “cluster of properties” that distinguish the romance from other literary kinds, the most significant of which are the following: content based in love and adventure; the hero’s and/or heroine’s partial withdrawal from society; broadly limned characters; the interfusing of the quotidian and the marvellous; a sustained series of actions or incidents; “a strongly enforced code of conduct to which all the characters must comply”; and a happy ending.⁶ What I have found most pertinent here is twofold.

First, keeping in view the sheer length of time during which the romance form has been central to English-language traditions—well over six hundred years—helps us to avoid a reductive view of the romance as realism’s determinate negation (a reductivism that, to be fair, is partly attributable to the late Victorians’ own framings of “the realism versus romance debates”). There was the era of the Arthurian cycles, in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries; the rush of new romance-writing energies in the Elizabethan period, when writers such as John Lyly and Philip Sidney were inspired by translations of ancient Greek romances; the gradual schematization of the romance narrative contra “the novel” (or what came retroactively to be labeled realist fiction) in the eighteenth century; the new offshoots of gothic romance and the English Romantic movement soon thereafter; and, in the nineteenth century, the energetic development of romance genres as a challenge to the deterministic realism coming over from France (G. Beer, Romance, 6). The “archaeological layering” of romance specimens over this span of literary history reminds us that the romance writer in the period 1885–1925 had at hand various narrative and rhetorical resources—stratified down through literary-institutional memory like so many energy sources, many of them long antedating both contemporary romance models and the realism-romance debate—through which to model her formal nostalgia. And this is to say nothing of the semi- or unconscious osmosis of romance models, from all eras of British cultural history, through the young middle-class woman’s formal and informal education in the late nineteenth century (as Kate Flint has demonstrated).⁷ Second, Beer’s catalogue of enduring romance features intermingles specifications of content and form. She demonstrates that over the centuries, through various displacements and metaphorizations of content, the formal functions of the romance mode are increasingly what identify it. The romance is attributed a synchronic, enduring feature, whether literal or metaphorized: its heroines and heroes encode social class, and that class is often royal or aristocratic. That content-based characteristic is then effectively subsumed by a formal function: another of the synchronic features of the romance is proposed to be its use as a literature of wish fulfillment. Beer’s invocation of dreams is one key to her claims for the mode’s continuity across the centuries, as the simple assertion of dream-as-form carries with it the attendant structures of latent and manifest, of condensation and displacement, of dream work and dream interpretation, et cetera.

My argument regarding the “deep history” of this study’s romances—and of the modernist metaphorizations of the romance—may be anticipated through Beer’s formulation of the romance mode’s tendency toward greater abstraction across the centuries of its transformations through British literary history.

Whereas in the earlier part of its history, when it was the dominant form for fiction, the romance can be quite reliably recognized by its subject-matter, the distinction between [realist] novel and romance later becomes a matter of the balance of attention. The [realist] novel is more preoccupied with representing and interpreting a known world, the romance with making apparent the hidden dreams of that world. Romance is always concerned with the fulfillment of desires—and for that reason it takes many forms: the heroic, the pastoral, the exotic, the mysterious, the dream, childhood, and total passionate love. (Romance, 12)

With the roster of popular romanciers under consideration here, we may add to this catalogue various forms native to their era: the religious romance, the mystical romance, the historical romance, the erotic romance, the imperial erotic romance, and the romance of interiority. But the key feature of this formulation, subtending all of these later genres, is the persistence of encoded desires. Beer concludes her history of the English-language romance with this diachronic feature: the romance “remakes the world in the image of desire” (22). Here the dimension of gender returns to our investigation of the selected romances of Ward, Corelli, Orczy, Glyn, Barclay, Cross, Dell, and Hull. It returns, not as a question of discursive othering or as an essentializing claim to the expression of monolithically conceived “female desire” but rather as a matter of perceiving these texts as historically specific opportunities for plurally female and androgynous desires to be encoded in popular narrative.

We may begin to characterize the representation of desire in the texts at hand by noting what it is not: desire is not primarily configured through a female character’s subjectivity, focused on the meeting-courtship-marriage arc. Only four of the eleven best sellers (Corelli’s Treasure of Heaven, Barclay’s The Rosary, Dell’s The Way of an Eagle, and Hull’s The Sheik) considered here may be seen to structure a stereotypically conceived, heterosexual female desire along the central narrative sequence that would later come to be identified with “the romance novel”—that is, through the exposition of a corrupt society, the meeting of heroine and hero, the obstacles to their mutual attraction, and their eventual declaration of love and betrothal.⁸ Among that group of four, only two (Barclay and Hull) offer a narrative exclusively from the point of view of the female protagonist. Prior to their commodification via mass-market formulas, such narrative elements had not yet hardened into place. This is not to deny that the consummation of romantic heterosexual love is represented as the locus of transcendence in many of these romances, but it suggests that we need to avoid a reductive interpretation of that desire for transcendence through the lens of later critical stereotypes about the romance novel, in which that desire is minimized as purely “emotional” and as channeled into “safe,” institutionally sanctioned desublimations. One crucial point to make here, variously elaborated in critical work by Melisa Brittain, Nickianne Moody, Ann Ardis, and Laura Frost (all of whom I draw on in later chapters),⁹ is that the romances of Cross, Glyn, and Hull sympathetically portray female desires in extramarital libidinality, in transgressions that are neither exclusively emotional nor institutionally sanctioned.

However, this sympathy is not consciously shared by all eight of the romance novelists under scrutiny here. Instead, a common denominator is to be found in the phenomenon of “the popular sublime,” which comprises broad continuities among the various encodings of desire in these romances. In Rita Felski’s formulation, “the popular sublime” is a late nineteenth- through early twentieth-century cultural phenomenon that expresses “a romantic yearning for the ineffable.”¹⁰ Many popular romances of the period, Felski indicates, exhibit “utopian and quasi-transcendental aspirations, as exemplified in a gesturing toward an ineffable domain beyond the constraints of a mundane material reality” (117). As in other literary and artistic contexts, the sublime is “an index of the unrepresentable”; in the case of the popular romances in question, the sublime facets of the romance discourse are those discursive zones that would strain and stretch to express “that which exists beyond prevailing discourses, conventions, and systems of meaning” (119). It is not hard to see how women’s sexual desires, in the period under study here, would reside along the edges of prevailing discourses and would thereby present a challenging complex of near-inexpressible energies to work into the romance narrative. But the virtue of “the popular sublime” as an interpretive category is that it does not delimit desires to narrowly defined libidinal intensities; it includes those desires that were considered spiritual but were felt to burst through the vocabulary of institutional religiosity. In all of the woman-authored romances explored here, libidinal and spiritual yearning are portrayed as on a continuum—even, and probably against the conscious will of their writers, in the cases of the putatively “conservative” texts.

Felski’s primary examples of the popular sublime are the romances of Marie Corelli, but she demonstrates that these narratives represent a larger feature of emergent mass culture and, indeed, the culture of turn-of-the-century modernity more generally: the popular romance of this era, Felski suggests, is “a form often considered to be regressive and anachronistic but whose nostalgic yearning for an indeterminate ‘elsewhere’ is . . . a foundational trope within the modern itself” (31). The popular sublime of the 1880s through the 1...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half title
• Title
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Contents
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction
• 1. Contexts of Popular Romance, 1885–1925
• 2. Mary Ward’s Romances and the Literary Field
• 3. Marie Corelli and the Discourse of Romance
• 4. The Women’s Romance and the Ideology of Form
• 5. The Imperial Erotic Romance
• 6. Modernism and the Romance of Interiority
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Index