Interrogating Postfeminism through a
Comparative Study of Victorian and
Neo-Victorian Literature
Assessed by Tara McDonald
27
thJune 2014
Table of Contents
Introduction... 3
Women at Work... 10
Upper-class Heroines and Elitism...24
Pornography and Postfeminism...40
Conclusion... 49
Introduction
In recent years there has been a surge in the number of contemporary writers choosing to set their novels in the Victorian period. From September 2007, when Exeter University explored this fictional movement in a major international conference titled Neo-Victorianism: The Politics and
Aesthetics of Appropriation, Neo-Victorian studies has continued to grow as a field, with several
journals and conferences since emerging dedicated specifically to this area. Neo-Victorian critics have named different reasons for the rising prominence and popularity of this genre. Louisa Hadley suggests that one reason is our simultaneous temporal and cultural closeness to, yet distance from the Victorians: “[t]he idea that the Victorians are both ‘in and out of history’ is fundamental to understanding the contemporary return to the Victorians” (Hadley 8). Indeed, the Victorians are, for most modern Western readers, both foreign and familiar. Various novels, films and even history books have given us dim notions of a rigid, conservative society watched over by the unsmiling matriarch, Queen Victoria. The era is perceived, despite considerable evidence to the contrary, as a time of innocence and repressed sexuality in comparison to our own sexually permissive society. One enduring myth has been the supposed Victorian custom of covering piano legs, as they were deemed to be too suggestive to leave bare. Whilst this has no grounding in reality and records exist to demonstrate that sex was discussed in the public sphere in the nineteenth century, this idea is perhaps more revealing of our own contemporary attitudes. Myths such as these position our Victorian ancestors as old-fashioned and alien, perhaps
indicating a desire to sever ourselves from the past and to thus establish ourselves as comparatively progressive and modern.
the tenets of our modern society that we have come to take for granted; large, industrial cities; public transport; the invention of the telephone, the electric light bulb and photography. In London itself, Hadley notes that one is continually reminded of our debt to the Victorians in the looming architecture that still makes up much of the city’s centre (7). Indeed, it is this very closeness that Margaret D. Stetz proposes as the reason for the renewed contemporary interest in the Victorian period, suggesting that, in reality, we are not so very different from them after all. She argues that the social observations within Neo-Victorian novels about the period resonate powerfully with society today and that the injustices still bear relevance to our own time (138). When considering issues such as enormous wealth disparity, overcrowding in London and violence on its streets, there is perhaps truth in the suggestion that we share more with the Victorians in this respect than we might think. For although there may be different views on the reason for the emergence of Neo-Victorian literature, one point that most critics appear to agree on is that these texts serve as much to comment as much, if not more, on our contemporary society as on the society in which they are set. As Hadley suggests, “[h]istorical fiction...is defined as much by the period it evokes as the period it is written in. All historical novels, therefore, adopt a dual approach which combines a concern for the past and a concern with the present” (6). In my thesis I aim to examine this idea particularly in relation to women, exploring how Neo-Victorian writers are writing feminism through the past and in what ways they are appropriating Victorian ‘feminism’.
In The New Woman: Fiction and Feminism at the Fin de Siècle, Sally Ledger emphasises the dominant presence of the New Woman figure in late Victorian Britain, particularly within literary culture. Wearing the bloomers of ‘rational dress’ and often depicted riding on a bicycle, Ledger suggests that the New Woman was as much a creation of public discourse as she was a
reality (6). Ridiculed by the conservative press, she was frequently rendered as hyper-masculine, particularly in contrast to the feminised male ‘dandy’ often depicted alongside her as another example of the perceived transgression of gender codes. However, despite these stock
representations, the New Woman was not a two-dimensional figure. She was variously “a feminist activist, a social reformer, a popular novelist, a suffragette playwright, a woman poet” (Ledger 6), whilst for novelists such as Sarah Grand she was a exempla of civic virtue. Yet regardless of her manifestation and despite differences in political attitudes within the
movement, her impact lay in what Linda Dowling describes as “a profound threat to established culture” (Dowling 435), challenging conventional gender norms and expectations. As Angelique Richardson notes, what these “competing definitions of the New Woman have in common is her apparent newness, her autonomy and her determination to set her own agenda in developing an alternative vision of the future” (227).
When considering the challenge she posed to the status quo and the optimism for positive change so implicit in this New Woman figure, I argue that the proliferation of Neo-Victorian texts with strong female protagonists is a direct reflection on our current postfeminist climate. This term was first used by US and UK media as far back as the 1980s, although it did not enter popular parlance until the late 1990s, since which time the discussion of feminism has
increasingly entered the mainstream (Yvonne Tasker and Diane Negra 8). Although this is a somewhat controversial term, it is descriptive of the indisputable fact that we live in a society in which we are exposed to many different and competing feminisms, with the focus often on individual aspiration and consumption. One major criticism that has been repeatedly levelled at postfeminism by its critics is indeed this consumerist focus. Tasker and Negra suggest that “[w]ith its frequent emphasis on luxury lifestyling and retail pleasure, postfeminism is
thoroughly integrated with the economic discourses of aspirational niche-market Western societies” (Tasker and Negra 7). This element of postfeminism is problematic in its exclusivity, as not only does it risk distancing feminism from serious social and political issues, but the emphasis on capitalist concerns means that it fails to meet the needs of, or even to recognise those millions of women who are not leading privileged, Western lifestyles.
Stéphanie Genz treats postfeminism and the PFW (Postfeminist Woman) more sympathetically, but also suggests that there is a great deal of confusion at its heart. Postfeminism, she argues, generates:
[A]
mbiguous portrayals of femaleness, femininity, and feminism, exploring the contingent and unresolvable tension between these subject positions. In particular, the PFW navigates the conflicts between her feminist values and her feminine body, between individual and collective achievement, between professional career and personal relationship (98).
Whilst feminism is arguably discussed in the British press more than ever before, it often lacks a coherent message and a clearly-established set of aims. The PFW too is a figure characterised by contradictions, continually torn between traditional feminist notions of agency and
self-empowerment, yet aspiring towards “patriarchal ideas of feminine beauty and heterosexual coupledom” (Genz 100). As the title of the article, “Singled Out: Postfeminism’s ‘New Woman’
and the Dilemma of Having It All”, suggests, Genz draws a parallel between the PFW and the
New Woman of the nineteenth century, indicating that this PFW has become emblematic of the twenty first century in much the same way as the New Woman was in her own time. However, unlike the nineteenth-century’s New Woman, who seems by comparison to be a clearly
recognised figure, dressing in way that was deemed to be subversive and holding a clear set of social beliefs that would have instantly distinguished her in this period, the PFW by contrast is harder to define. New Women were seen as radical and were often mocked by the conservative press, whereas the PFW has been appropriated and absorbed by popular culture; the PFW today is the heroine of romantic comedies (we might think of Bridget Jones as the archetype), rather than a marginalised, rebellious figure.
It is striking to note the manner in which aspects of both the New Woman and the PFW combine, and at times conflict, within the heroines of Neo-Victorian fiction. In one respect we get the sense that contemporary writers, such as Clare Clark and Belinda Starling, whose work I will be looking at closely in this thesis, imagine the past as a time when feminism was perceived to have clear agendas. Issues such as the fight for female suffrage and the challenges to the perceived order were deemed new and exciting, meaning that these Neo-Victorian protagonists are often subversive and radical figures with ideas that set them apart. Yet on the other hand, we also see a conservatism within these novels that appears to have been generated, in part, by the postfeminist climate in which the authors are writing. There seems to be a friction within Neo-Victorian literature created by the writers’ desire to create strong female characters who are rebellious and outspoken, yet also a focus on the importance of heterosexual romance and capitalist concerns in a manner that makes these novels often less radical than their nineteenth-century counterparts. Whilst the New Woman is a figure defined, in part, by her marginalisation from mainstream society and the personal sacrifices that she makes in order to uphold her principles, the PFW seems reluctant to make sacrifices and her identity is constructed in many ways by her constant struggle to ‘have it all’: romance and motherhood as well as a career and independence. Thus we see in Neo-Victorian literature a conception of happiness in these
distinctly modern, postfeminist terms, despite their nineteenth-century setting, which situates these novels as constructs of a contemporary society.
Tasker and Negra further emphasise the inherently contradictory nature of postfeminism, suggesting that it is “characterized by a double discourse that works to construct feminism as a phenomenon of the past, traces of which can be found (and sometimes even valued) in the present; postfeminism suggests that it is the very success of feminism that that produces its irrelevance for contemporary culture” (8). In light of this, Neo-Victorian texts can be viewed as inherently postfeminist in the manner in which they construct feminism as an aspect of a past society, yet examine it through a contemporary lens. On the other hand, these writers might also be viewed as seeking to undo some of these contradictions as they strive to rediscover the core values of feminism which have been lost, or at least confused in our contemporary society. In consequence, these novels, through revisiting the past, present us with a comment on the position that feminism holds within today’s culture and the varying attitudes that surround it in a way that is often highly ambivalent.
The approach I will be taking within this thesis is somewhat unique, as the majority of Neo-Victorian criticism has thus far tended to focus exclusively on contemporary fiction, whereas I am aiming for a more comparative approach. In pairing Neo-Victorian texts with corresponding Victorian texts that share some key similarities, I hope to shed some light on the way in which narratives have been rewritten in the twenty-first century to reflect both Victorian and, more significantly, contemporary feminist issues. For, as Heilmann and Llewellyn state, Neo-Victorian texts: “are not merely part of the contemporary fascination with the Victorian past; they are aware of the purposes the Victorians are made to serve and…self-consciously comment on the political and cultural uses of the Victorians in the present” (Heilmann and
Llewellyn 14) and are thus prone to inaccurate appropriation, deliberate or otherwise. In order to illustrate this idea I will be looking at two pairs of texts, each consisting of one Victorian and one Neo-Victorian text. Through looking at texts from these very different periods in conjunction with one another, I aim to provide insights about contemporary attitudes to feminism that would not be possible if I were to study the novels in isolation. The first pair will be The Story of a
Modern Woman (1894) by Ella Hepworth Dixon and The Journal of Dora Damage (2007) by
Belinda Starling. Both these stories feature independent heroines who, somewhat unusually for the period, are required by necessity to take on work in order to support themselves and others. Meanwhile Ménie Muriel Dowie’s Gallia (1895) and Beautiful Lies (2012) by Clare Clark depict the lives of privileged, upper class women and the social issues that they concern themselves with vary accordingly. Yet whilst both these novels involve themselves with the world of Victorian politics and deal with issues of marriage, the class-system and scandal, Gallia is a novel with an obvious feminist agenda and the personal is political. Beautiful Lies, on the other hand, contains the elements of romance that we might expect from its populist genre and there is a distinctly postfeminist emphasis on the choice of the individual woman, with the political elements of the plot providing a backdrop rather than a focus. In comparing these two pairs of novels I will explore the way in which they are influenced by the gender discourse of their own times, as well as the ways in which the demands of the literary market may have had an impact on the novels’ authors. In the final chapter I will provide a comparison of the way in which the two Neo-Victorian novels take up the issue of pornography, a topic that was a keynote of contemporary feminist debate and which is still regarded with a certain ambivalence in postfeminist culture today.
Women at Work
The Story of a Modern Woman was first published in 1894, towards the end of the Victorian
period. Since the 1850s, the discussion of women’s rights and the desire for female suffrage had become increasingly prominent in Victorian society and feminist ideas were already well
established in public discourse at the time that Hepworth Dixon was writing her novel. However, women remained disenfranchised and disempowered, catalysing a response within fiction that explored the challenges and frustrations of being a woman in such an inequitable society. Described by John Sutherland as “the greatest unread novel of female struggle of the nineteenth century” (Sutherland 2), The Story of a Modern Woman is a text that does not shy away from a harsh realism, reflecting on the challenges of life as a self-sufficient woman in fin-de-siècle Victorian England. The novel’s heroine, Mary Erle, is arguably not a traditional New Woman figure. Unlike the radical heroines of other late-Victorian female novelists such as Sarah Grand, Mary is mild and even conservative in many ways. Moreover, much of the novel is spent with her quietly expecting to be married to Mr. Vincent Hemming, a man who is later to spurn her in order to marry a rich woman and thus further his political ambitions. It is arguably her friend Alison Ives who seems to better fit the mould of the traditional New Woman. Alison is wholly self-assured and often speaks in polemical terms, at one point asking Mary to promise her that she must:
[N]ever, never do anything to hurt another woman...I don’t suppose for an instant you ever would. But there comes a time in our lives when we can do a great deal of good, or an incalculable amount of harm. If women only used their power in the right way! If we
were only united we could lead the world. But we’re not (164).
This episode provides a telling comment on nineteenth-century feminism, as it is not an oppressive patriarchy that is identified here as the issue, as is often the case in Neo-Victorian texts, but instead the failure of women to unite together. Significantly it is also not men who are ascribed with the agency for change here but women.
Echoes can be seen of criticism that is still being levelled at the conflicted nature of postfeminism today, suggesting that the contemporary rewriting of the past is perhaps failing to address the fact that the issues facing nineteenth-century feminism were similarly complex and diverse as they are today. Mary’s response to Alison is also important here, particularly given the fact that Hepworth Dixon would later describe it as “the keynote of the book...a plea for a kind of moral and social trades-unionism among women” (qtd. in W.T. Stead 10). Mary says: “our time is dawning - at last. All we modern women are going to help each other, not to hinder. And there’s a great deal to do”(164). Her response is a somewhat hopeful one, with tinges of defiance, yet it still takes into account the enormity and the reality of the task ahead. Again the emphasis is on the importance of rallying women together and creating a mutually supportive sisterhood. However, whilst sisterhood is presented as a solution within this text, it is a notion that was to come under fire from later feminists, who have criticised the veracity of having ‘one female voice’ to represent an inhomogeneous group, containing different beliefs, concerns and aims. One of the responses to second-wave feminism that emerged in the 1970s was Alice Walker’s ‘Womanism’. Walker and her fellow womanists highlighted the fact that black women experienced a wholly different and more intense kind of oppression to that of white women and thus it was not appropriate to discuss the female experience in universal terms. They argued that a black feminism was necessary after earlier movements led by white middle-class women had
largely ignored oppression based on race and class (qtd. in Neeru Tandon 122).
Yet whilst female unity is presented as the means to social progression in The Story of a
Modern Woman, similar issues to those identified by Walker and her fellow womanists also
trouble Hepworth Dixon’s novel. Whilst Mary is careful not to act in a way that will cause Vincent’s wife pain, that does not prevent her from invoking a sense of social superiority, referring to Mrs. Hemming as an “underbred young woman who has secured a desirable husband” (The Story of a Modern Woman 213). In addition, the women that Alison strives to help remain peripheral figures and even the young woman in the hospital bed, “number twenty-seven,” is referred to in these numerical terms for much of the novel, arguably used to a greater extent as a representative working-class character, rather than a figure of equivalent sympathy to her middle-class counterparts. Ledger states that the New Woman was “clearly a product of the middle and upper-classes” (16) and whilst they often concerned themselves with social issues relating to the working-class, there was nevertheless an elitist aspect to the movement.
Stetz is critical of Hepworth Dixon’s heroine, failing to see Mary Erle as a true New Woman figure, describing her as “incapable of analyzing the political dimensions of her personal experience, and disinclined to work with others to effect change” (Stetz 106). However, whilst Mary may indeed not conform to the image of the archetypal New Woman, she is true to her word, eventually rejecting the possibility of happy coupledom with Vincent as she cannot bring herself to injure his wife. Arguably in this moment she does demonstrate a recognition of the wider political dimensions of her decision, as the potential suffering that Vincent’s wife might experience if he leaves her becomes representative for her of women’s greater suffering. Mary cries: “Think how she would suffer! Oh, the torture of women’s lives- the helplessness, the impotence, the emptiness!” (304). In this moment The Story of a Modern Woman turns its lens
on the wider social landscape, encompassing all women and this intensely personal moment becomes a matter of public and political interest. Yet, as Valerie Fehlbaum is eager to stress, Hepworth Dixon’s novel is not purely a feminist tract but also strives to reveal real human emotion; she is a three-dimensional modern woman rather than a stock New Woman figure (Fehlbaum 83).
Mary’s commitment to the sisterhood is not without its difficulties and the ending of the novel is a despondent and ultimately disappointing one. She is forced to reject the man she has always loved and continue her life of loneliness and drudgery in order to uphold her principles. Although her decision to reject Vincent is almost an instantaneous one, we are privy to the emotional toll that it takes upon the heroine and understand that, for Mary, this is a difficult moment as the thought of their marriage has heretofore been something that “she clung to with a curious tenacity” (116) in the absence of any other source of support or comfort. In this respect perhaps the internal conflict that Mary experiences at this moment is not so very different from the contradictory “feminist notions of empowerment and agency as well as patriarchal ideas of feminine beauty and heterosexual coupledom” (100) that Genz identifies as characteristic of the postfeminist woman. However, whilst it is arguably this very conflict that generates the
postfeminist woman’s identity, the New Woman’s identity appears to be centred to a greater extent on a rejection of normative expectations in favour of feminist principles, even if it requires personal sacrifice. Indeed, self-sacrifice seems to have little place in postfeminism, with a constant emphasis on the woman’s entitlement to “have it all” seemingly at the heart of the feminist rhetoric in contemporary popular culture.
Like Mary Erle herself, Beth Palmer states that “Hepworth Dixon understood the difficulties as well as the excitement and benefits of working in the press” (99). She was the
daughter of a prominent newspaper editor, William Hepworth Dixon and, after his death in 1879, similarly continued to support herself through her writing. It is difficult, therefore, not to draw autobiographical comparisons between the author and her heroine when similarities abound between the text and the author’s own life. Whilst at the theatre, the dandyish Beaufy quips: “Oh I simply love these old-fashioned pieces where all the young men turn out to be baronets and all the women marry their first loves. They’re so adorably untrue to life...One wants that sort of thing in a pessimistic age” (Hepworth Dixon 207). This comment is to foreshadow the point in the novel when Mary’s editor insists that she rewrite parts of her novel because it treats marital infidelity too candidly. He states: “I should suggest a thoroughly happy ending. The public like happy endings. The novelists are getting so morbid” (223). In a curious case of art mirroring life, Hepworth Dixon experienced a similar episode herself when Chatto and Windus, who had published Dixon’s 1892 My Flirtations, ended up losing The Story of A Modern Woman to William Heinemann because it declined to pay her more than £35 “in view of the somewhat pessimistic tone of the story” (Fehlbaum 126). It is significant that Hepworth Dixon was willing to change publishers when they did not accept her novel, however it seems she was very aware that she should not alienate her market; a consideration that undoubtedly had a significant impact on her writing. As K.C. Ross suggests, her deliberate distancing of the heroine from a specific political movement “differs from other authors’ strategies, and was likely a result of Dixon’s hyperconsciousness of the criticism the New Woman was garnering in contemporary mainstream periodicals” (Ross 83). Nigel Bell further notes that: “not surprisingly the male, and hostile female, stereotype of the New Woman was a powerful invitation to ridicule, as in the pages of
Punch, with its ‘Advice to Girl Graduates’” (Bell 88). Through deciding to set Mary Erle apart
Dixon was perhaps attempting to make these ideas more palatable to the mainstream audience and to avoid the overly polemical style that had become associated with ‘New Woman Fiction’. There is further evidence for this in the decision to excise the chapter from her book in which Mary Erle receives an education in Germany (an episode mirroring the author’s own life), when it was later published in serial form in a periodical (Ross 83).
Yet the reason for this omission may have been more nuanced than the author merely deciding to bend to the whims of her audience. Through denying her heroine this key period of schooling, she is perhaps attempting to make a political point about the education that many women were denied in this period. Ross suggests that “Mary finds that she needs a profession and expresses subdued desires for more education, like the university education she provides for her brother, Jimmie...As an adult, she becomes painfully aware of the double standard in
expectations regarding education” (85), realising that her own education at the Central London School of Art counts for very little in the real world. Bell appears to support this view in his account of late-Victorian feminism, emphasising that the fact of being deprived of an education was a crucial aspect of the experience of ‘enslavement’ by men, to which women passionately decried once they had found their own voices (80). Overall, The Story of a Modern Woman is a
highly complex novel that evades a single, simplistic reading and the revisions made to the periodical edition serve to complicate it further. However, Hepworth Dixon’s creation of a more feminine, less radical protagonist and avoidance of the didactic tone used by many of her
contemporaries need not undermine a feminist reading of her text. As a journalist, Hepworth Dixon understood her market and as a writer she strove to create a novel that was emotionally truthful, whilst still documenting the struggles of women in this period.
themselves to useful comparison. Key similarities can be drawn between the two novels and the protagonists themselves share some important points of commonality. Fairly unusually for the Victorian period, both of these women are required to be professionally enterprising, using their creative talents in order to support themselves and their respective dependents when the male figure who had previously been their source of financial support dies. Importantly, for both these heroines, we are able to trace a significant character development throughout the novel; these initially rather conservative women are shaped by circumstances of their lives outside their control, leading to a feminist (and in Dora’s case, sexual) awakening. Although Dora is not strictly a ‘New Woman’, she is educated, outspoken about gender inequality, and even accused by her husband of seeming to be a “woman who wears the trousers beneath those skirts’”(66), suggesting that Starling was perhaps influenced by the movement when she created Dora. These heroines do appear to have a degree of independence, although their agency remains limited by the narrow social parameters that dictated the lives of Victorian women.
Whilst sharing a nineteenth-century setting, these novels are evidently both products of the era in which they are written. Starling is not simply aiming for a depiction of a realistic Victorian setting but she is also parodying the Neo-Victorian genre itself in a manner that lends the novel a knowing, contemporary tone. Furthermore, there are significant differences between the feminist ideas expressed in The Story of a Modern Woman and the way in which feminism is written through the past in the Neo-Victorian text Dora Damage. Whilst Hepworth Dixon’s novel is transgressive, it can be read as realist fiction with a clear feminist agenda; in contrast,
Dora Damage proves more difficult to pin down.
Caterina Novák argues for a dual reading of Dora Damage, suggesting that it can be seen “both as a straightforward example of neo-Victorian feminist fiction and as a parody of the
genre, in the sense of exaggerating and commenting on many of its key characteristics and offering an important contribution to the debate surrounding its feminist political credentials” (Novák 115). It is arguably this very deliberate parody that prevents Dora Damage from falling into the trap of smugness that Stetz identifies as a frequent problem in Neo-Victorian literature, stemming from “the inescapable circumstance of knowing more about the world in which the characters find themselves, as well as about worlds to come, than they can ever know” (339). Dora’s spouting of second-wave feminist theory is so clearly anachronistic that it does not jar in the way that it perhaps might if there was greater attempt to disguise it. It is difficult, for instance to read Dora’s reflection, “I was stared at with impunity, especially by the men...why do men have to look directly?” (53), without considering that her apparent familiarity with Foucault’s theory of “The Gaze” would be unlikely for a nineteenth-century woman (Novák 126). There is arguably also a nod to Laura Mulvey’s subsequent second-wave feminist theory of the ‘Male Gaze’ as a feature of gender power asymmetry in film. Starling is able to use irony to great effect here; whilst the men may be openly staring at her, the gaze is subverted as we as readers are surveying the scene (including the men) entirely from Dora’s perspective as a woman.
However, in other respects, it is not necessary for Starling to add these contemporary touches in order for the novel to strike a chord with its modern-day readership. Ledger notes that:
[T]he concerns of the New Woman have considerable resonance with the concerns of the late twentieth-century women’s movement; employment and education opportunities for women; the competing demands of wage-earning work and motherhood; sexual morality and ‘freedom’...all these issues speak as loudly to us today, it seems to me, as they did one hundred years ago (6).
Starling draws attention to some of the major universalising issues that have preoccupied women for over a century, reaffirming the notion that Neo-Victorian fiction goes beyond a mere
fascination with the past, but acts as a vehicle to “self-consciously comment on the political and cultural uses of the Victorians in the present” (Heilman and Llewellyn 14). Marie-Luise Kohlke similarly attributes this idea to Dora Damage, suggesting that the episode in which various philanthropic organisations refuse to help Dora “conveys a distinctly postmodern view of Victorian social and moral hypocrisy, as well as resounding with the preferential policies of modern-day welfare systems” (197-198). We might even draw parallels between the power that Jocelyn exercises over Dora with the threat of Lucinda’s clitoridectomy and the very topical contemporary issue of Female Genital Mutilation. Dora Damage succeeds in many ways because Dora’s anachronistic comments on female suffering and lack of agency were as applicable then as they are now.
However, whilst Kohlke identifies a Victorian moral hypocrisy, perhaps there is also a tendency to display a double standard in the way in which sex in the Victorian period is rewritten today. The ambivalent attitude that Hadley points to in film and television dramas set in the Victorian era could equally be applied to Starling’s novel. She states that there is “a
contradictory desire that underpins such adaptations; viewers want to witness the eruption of the passion and the emotion believed to be barely contained beneath the high collars and stiff petticoats, an eruption that positions the Victorians as ‘just like us’” (Hadley 12). Likewise we see the way in which Dora’s almost entirely chaste marriage gives way to a torrid affair with Din, resulting at first in intense shame and eventually in a moment of sexual awakening. This appears to reflect the paradoxical desire to both keep the Victorians at arm’s length in order to show our own relative modernity and sexual permissiveness, yet simultaneously our relation to
them. Kohlke suggests that Dora herself presents a contradictory attitude towards sex that detracts from her credibility. She highlights Dora’s melodramatic “trembling” on reading the Decameron, suggesting that “such a repressed sensibility seems distinctly at odds with [her] tolerant sympathy for the ‘fallen woman’ Pansy Smith, whom she readily employs as a maid, or for Jack Tapster, the Damages’ apprentice, imprisoned for unspecified homosexual practices” (Kohlke 199). At this moment there is a possibility that Starling may be parodying the Victorian ‘bodice-ripper’, although it is difficult to ascertain whether or not she has merely stumbled into cliché. Kohlke suggests that “Dora and Din’s relationship proves one of the weak points of Starling’s novel, inevitably recycling the black man/white woman fantasy it critiques” (198). However, this may also be Starling’s means of incorporating the protagonist’s feminist ideals alongside the romance plot expected of this kind of populist fiction. It is striking that the person responsible for Dora’s sexual awakening is Din, an ex-slave, for Din is significant not only because he is black but, like Dora, he too is a marginalised figure and himself a victim of sexual objectification at the hands of the rich and powerful. As both her employee and someone non-representative of the established patriarchy, he is arguably the only male figure that could be Dora’s romantic partner without requiring her submission. Furthermore, he is not merely assigned the role of the stereotyped black lover that Kohlke is suggesting he fulfils, but he also has an identity as a political activist that is entirely separate to his relationship with Dora and ultimately proves more important to him.
Alongside sex, a similar preoccupation with feminine beauty also serves to reduce the perceived gap between the Victorian and our own contemporary culture. The Victorians’ obsession with physical appearance is well-documented, yet female beauty is similarly an ongoing concern of postfeminism. Dora turns her attention away from society and onto herself,
reflecting “I would never look like a lady...I had no waist or hips to speak of, my arms were more built up than Jack’s” (Starling 78). Likewise, Mary Erle also states matter-of-factly, “I never look pretty” (Hepworth Dixon 203) whilst another character is referred to as ‘the pretty woman’ repeatedly throughout the novel. The idealised feminine beauty that was so celebrated in the Victorian period is one that continues to persist in a postfeminist society. Often perpetuated by the very magazines that purport to celebrate women, they constantly remind them of their shortcomings; cruelly categorising their bodies with words like ‘pear-shaped’ or ‘boyish’. Neo-Victorian works such as Dora Damage thus serve to provide a somewhat depressing reflection on the limited progress of feminism, suggesting that women have faced many of the same obstacles and objectification for over a century.
It is the men in the novel that constantly seek to turn Dora into a commodity and tend to be are archetypal, lecherous villains rather than convincing, realist characters, often serving as vehicles for expressions of patriarchal dominance. In spite of their lack of redeeming features, Dora is forced into an ambivalent relationship with many of these men, as she is reliant on them economically and made all too aware of her limited rights as a woman. Even Peter, Dora’s husband and one of the less unpleasant male characters in the novel, comes across as a laughable stereotype of Victorian chauvinism. He tells Dora:
Let us pity those poor women who are forced to make their own way in the world and earn their own keep, when they should be husbanding the wages of their menfolk...Let us praise your dependent existence, and work to your strengths, that of embellishing the house and cheering the heart of your husband (65).
Yet despite the comic extremity of this statement on the modern reader, it nevertheless acts as a reminder of some of the real and pervasive attitudes at the time. In Hepworth Dixon’s novel,
Alison utters the sentiment that: “all we women are so incredibly dependent on other people. It’s absurd that we do not know how to do anything useful” (58). This idea of female dependence is one that resonates within both of these texts, yet the heroines respond to it in different ways. Though both women are able achieve a degree of independence, there seems to be an acceptance in Dora Damage that female agency must always be limited, whilst in The Story of a Modern
Woman it appears to be possible only with personal sacrifice of some kind.
Novák argues that in Dora Damage “the overtly feminist perspective of the narrator clashes with the markedly conservative elements of the plot” (117). Indeed, the plot becomes increasingly centred around the love affair that develops between Dora and Din, with Din stepping in as a heroic male figure to rescue both Dora and her daughter from danger. When considering the fact that Starling is writing popular fiction, we might think again at this moment of Mary Erle’s editor and the truth behind the idea that “the public like happy endings”
(Hepworth Dixon 223) and wonder about the impact that the market and expectations of the genre may have had on Starling. Despite Dora’s unconventional decision to live with Sylvia and the claim that they are “both curiously happy to be free of our chains to men” (431) the novel ultimately ends with an Epilogue reporting that Dora has handed over Damages to Jack,
choosing instead to take up a profession deemed more socially acceptable for a woman: helping out at a school (444). Moreover, the majority of income for Dora and Sylvia appears to come from the money left to Nathaniel in Sir Jocelyn’s will. In this respect, Dora’s ending might also perhaps be read in terms of the PFW. Dora comes as close to “having it all” as is possible given the historical setting: she is commercially successful; she is content to live with Sylvia; her daughter is safe, and the villains are vanquished. Starling grants her heroine both an episode of consummated heterosexual romance yet does not permit her to be compromised by the
“inevitable seas of resentment and quiet loathing” (Starling 431) that Dora considers marriage to be. It is also interesting to consider Jack’s marriage to Pansy in this respect, as it seems to provide another moment of ambiguity. If we are to read this in line with Novák’s argument, this moment may simply be viewed as part of the general movement that occurs within the novel from transgression to compliant heteronormativity. However, the fact that is homosexual and Pansy is apparently uninterested in a sexual relationship could be seen as a comment on the superficiality of the relationship between men and women as well as a tongue-in-cheek reference to the conventional marriage-plot of the Victorian novel; a more probable reading given
Starling’s skilful deployment of irony throughout Dora Damage.
The Epilogue might also be read in more disruptive terms, serving to ironically undercut the seemingly idealised ending, indicating Starling’s historical awareness of the restrictions on female agency and the near-impossibility at the time of achieving true independence from men. Nadine Muller states that “in patriarchal societies women usually serve as commodities within transactions between men (be it through marriage, prostitution, or other cultural customs); consequently, in such a structure, they are unable to act as autonomous transaction partners themselves” (116).Throughout the novel Dora is indeed prized as a commodity by the male characters with whom she does business, such as Diprose, Pizzy and Jocelyn, culminating in the idea that her very skin should become a pocket-book for the latter to own. What’s more,
Lucinda’s statement in the Epilogue that Jack, after taking ownership of Damage’s Bindery “proved capable, unlike my mother, of steering a course through the con-men and undesirables of the city” (422) is further indicative of Starling’s hyper-awareness that this was a world in which women found it almost impossible to be the “autonomous transaction partner”, more often finding themselves the object of transaction.
Yet even taking this reading of the Epilogue into consideration, the ending of The Story
of a Modern Woman, by contrast, is arguably more radical and more realist in its plot. Hepworth
Dixon makes no attempt to arrange a happy ending for her heroine, with the final image of Mary as she “began to plod home in the twilight along the suburban road” (322) conveying an
overwhelming bleakness for the future. By denying Mary the happy ending that the reader would hope for, Dixon makes a powerful statement about the restricted life available to women who cannot depend on others. Although Mary has rejected Vincent Hemming and is making her own way in the world, there is no triumph to be gleaned from the close of this novel.
Starling on the other hand seems more anxious to demonstrate an awareness of the demands of her readership, with Kohlke suggesting that “at times [she] tries too hard for political correctness” (198). However, this is certainly an area of ambiguity, generated by the conflict that runs throughout the novel between historical representation and contemporary awareness of issues such as race. Whilst Dora tells Lucinda her hands are “black as a pickaninny” (115) and is shocked by the colour of his skin when Din first arrives, the narrative itself is a very inclusive one. The voice that Starling gives to marginalised figures such as Din, who is black; convicted homosexual Jack, and Pansy, deemed by Victorian society to be a ‘fallen woman’, is in keeping with Dora’s own apparent contemporary awareness of feminist theory. Through representing such figures, Starling goes beyond a mere imitation of a Victorian style or plot, striving not for complete historical accuracy but rewriting the period to include those figures who were not allowed to speak within nineteenth-century texts, but who nevertheless were part of the fabric of Victorian society. For just as Dora shows an awareness of second-wave feminism, perhaps Starling is also responding to the backlash that the movement faced from those who have felt that feminism has been commandeered by the concerns of white, middle-class women. It is therefore
perhaps unfair to criticise Starling for inclusiveness when she is merely attempting to create a text that is both true to the historical world that it creates, yet representative of more than one single, dominant perspective.
If Starling’s novel is to be criticised then it is perhaps due to the the fact that she, like Dora, appears to want to ‘have it all’. One of the reasons that the novel generates such an ambiguous reading is because Starling has attempted to create something that both satisfies the demands of the popular market, whilst still demonstrating enough contemporary social and political consciousness to give her novel academic weight. Ultimately she does create an effective parody of the Neo-Victorian genre and by doing so goes beyond a reinvention of the period to provide interesting, and often troubling, reflections on modern day gender politics. The novel may have been more effective, however, if she had been able to permit her heroine a more ambiguous and realist, if less satisfying, ending like the one that Mary Erle is made to suffer. Hepworth Dixon’s novel is far more radical in this respect, as she refuses to give in to the public’s desire for a happy ending, whilst Starling seems all too aware of her postfeminist reading audience and their desire to have it all.
Upper-class Heroines and Elitism
The upper-class heroines of Menie Muriel Dowie’s Gallia and Clare Clark’s Beautiful Lies stand apart in these novels, often rejecting the company of other women; indeed we see far less of the close female friendship that is integral to the previous two novels. In fact Dowie goes to great lengths to emphasise the ways in which Gallia is different from other women; we learn that even “as a child Gallia had never had a doll; had never played at keeping house, teaching school, having callers as most other girl-children do. If there was a baby about she shivered and left the
room” (Dowie 59). Her exceptional character is something that Essex also notices, stating on one occasion that “nine out of ten women would have meant that speech to end in a smother of embraces” (88). Gallia struggles to fit in because her “views are nobler” (94) than her fellow women and her modernity makes her an anachronism, separating her from those around her. Yet in spite of her uniqueness, Gallia’s agency nevertheless remains limited by both the social expectations of her class and her gender, which prevent her from ever truly breaking out of the narrow social parameters that dictated the lives of Victorian women.
Clark’s protagonist Maribel is similarly individualist, although she often appears to be needlessly critical of her fellow women, her views and behaviour undermining her own purported ideals. Although we learn that she has lectured on “Socialism and the Modern Woman” (163), Clark appears unaware of the hypocrisy in Maribel’s apparent disinclination to live her life in a way that reflects her socialist standpoint and in many respects she seems rather conservative. Although there are vague attempts to show Maribel’s awareness of the women who were “poisoned in leadworks, exhausted in nailworks, worn haggard and ancient by ceaseless toil” (162), it is unclear what efforts she makes to improve their condition, instead rhapsodising about her Parisien gowns and focusing her energies on raising funds to prevent her titled
husband’s country estate from having to be sold. Whilst the novels by Starling and Hepworth Dixon are stories of a struggle for survival, in Beautiful Lies, and to a large extent Gallia, there is far less at stake.
Furthermore, counter to a comment made to Maribel by Mrs. Aveling that, “I should resist the temptation to judge by appearances. It is hard enough having to prove our worth to men without having to fight the same petty prejudices in our own sex” (352), she often regards other women with disdain in a manner that does not seem to be criticised within the novel, but rather
used for comic effect. She sneers at a female speaker for being overweight, referring to her derisively as “Brown Dress” rather than using her name and barely registers the fact that the woman is providing an eloquent defence of the feminist idea that women should have rights over their own bodies (31). In another episode she laughs at an earnest-looking woman in a cafe, hypothesising to her friend Charlotte, “she is writing a definitive New Woman novel. A Table
for One. It will be a devastating critique of female education, marriage, the shackles of
motherhood and the emancipation of fish with parsley sauce” (261). The mocking tone adopted here implicitly dismisses these social issues and unwittingly echoes the treatment of New Women in the conservative Victorian press, seemingly without parody. Tasker and Negra note how “postfeminism suggests that it is the very success of feminism that produces its irrelevance for contemporary culture” (8). Clark can arguably be seen to adopt this postfeminist standpoint within her novel; these are issues that on the whole do not preoccupy the PFW and as a result they are presented as the concerns of earlier feminisms and trivialised in this way. The
judgemental attitude that Maribel displays is further significant when viewed in contrast to the feminist aims of Gallia, which Anne-Sophie Leluan-Pinker describes as staging the “male tendency to ‘sum up’ women either as an outward form or as a type, both reductions
conveniently circumventing a direct confrontation with the reality of female experience, and ultimately denying women's existence” (17). Yet whilst Gallia depicts these male attitudes critically in order to expose the role they play in reinforcing gender stereotypes and reducing women’s agency, Clark’s heroine derives humour from maligning other women in a manner that makes the text, at times, appear not simply postfeminist but anti-feminist.
Whilst both these novels represent women who are set apart from the others in many ways, their treatment of the personal and the political is very different. Although, as
Leluan-Pinker argues, Gallia’s individualism means that “the reader is made to feel he [or she] is presented with an original and convincing assessment of a given female character” (17), on the whole Dowie uses Gallia as a mouthpiece for her proto-feminist politics and wider social
critique, rather than allowing her character long episodes of personal introspection. On the other hand Beautiful Lies demonstrates an undoubted prioritisation of the individual over the
collective. The focus lies on the internal life of the heroine, with the social and political backdrop serving to add colour to a narrative that is highly personal. Even while depicting the squalor of Victorian life, or the Socialist movement that her husband supports, the attention continually returns to conventional Neo-Victorian tropes of romance, secrecy and scandal. Through
emphasising the universality of ideas such as the experience of love and motherhood, Clark thus takes the Victorian characters out of their specific historical context (Genz 101). She appears to have been caught up in the glamour of depicting the life of a Victorian aristocrat with celebrity friends such as Oscar Wilde, prioritising this aspect of the plot in a manner that constantly undermines the supposed feminist standpoint of her protagonist. The eventual ‘happy’ resolution of the novel comes with the final lifting of the threat of scandal and Maribel’s symbolic burial of the letters that represent her private past. Genz notes that:
[C]ritics bemoan that postfeminist writing/film fails to move out of the protagonists’ personal sphere and relate the process of confession to a wider context of female discrimination and social inequality. They argue that postfeminism’s return to the personal does not provide an access to feminist politics and, thus, risks sliding into a lifestyle feminism, confined to navel-gazing introspection rather than life-changing analysis and interrogation. (101)
more than provide a backdrop for Maribel’s own personal dramas, which revolve around her marriage, her family and the scandal of her past as a prostitute.
Prostitution is an issue that is dealt with in both of these novels, yet surprisingly Gallia can be considered to be less conservative in its ambivalent treatment of these women than
Beautiful Lies, which falls back on tired clichés of the Victorian ‘fallen woman’. Gallia’s
narrator states: “there are some women in the social state, as it is at present, fitted exclusively for the ‘oldest of all professions for women’. They are to be met in all ranks of life” (130). Whilst this may be read as a conservative attitude, in keeping with the supporters of the Contagious Diseases Act who viewed these women as shameless profiteers, gaining from the momentary aberrations of men, this need not be the case. Firstly, prostitution is not portrayed as the last resort of a drunken, impoverished and desperate woman like the character of Betsey in Beautiful
Lies, instead there is a suggestion that it stems from an innate sensuality in some women,
regardless of their class or status. Furthermore, whilst the novel is critical of these women in some respects, it attempts to present a balanced perspective, acknowledging both the positive and negative impact of these women, stating “that is the dark side of the picture. Of the light side and its effect, Gurdon is an example” (131). Moreover, despite her often clichéd exoticism, Cara does have a voice and her relationship with Gurdon is detailed to some extent, making her a
developed character in her own right rather than simply a narrative device like Betsey. It should further be noted that it is Gurdon who stereotypes Cara in this way and is exposed as doing so within the novel. On another occasion Gallia admonishes Miss Janion not to judge these women but to be grateful to them and to pity them. There is a similar attitude here to that expressed by William Acton, a noted doctor and social reformer who wrote extensively about prostitution from the 1840s until his death in 1875. Steven Marcus outlines Acton’s position, stating that he
regarded prostitution on the whole as a necessary evil and explains that one of his chief purposes was to “humanize the prostitute, to educate or persuade his respectable audience to regard her not as some alien or monstrous creature but as a fellow human being” (5). He also demonstrated from his own professional experience that, contrary to public opinion, prostitutes were, as a group, no more drunken or diseased than the general population (Marcus 5). Likewise in Gallia, prostitutes are presented as a kind of social necessity, or at least an inevitability and the
acknowledgment of women’s sexual desire in a period when it was often considered not to exist is further significant in feminist terms. Beautiful Lies, on the other hand simply perpetuates the same stereotype of Victorian prostitution that Acton fought to destroy in a manner that reveals the novel’s desire to over-simplify the past and make it appear more distant.
Ledger emphasises the importance of the Campaigns against the Contagious Diseases Acts to early feminism, in which “the objective was to protect the purity of women’s bodies and to fight against the notorious Victorian ‘double standard’ of sexual morality which legitimised male sexuality but punished its female equivalent” (112). Both novels demonstrate the
complicity of women in the creation of this gendered attitude towards sexuality, particularly in regards to extra-marital sex. Gallia describes how “it was habitual for women to disapprove of a man who kept a mistress and took small pains to conceal this fact; just as it was habitual for them to...marry, men who had connections, decently regulated and properly concealed, of a more casual nature” (103). The suggestion is that it is almost expected that men will have relationships outside of marriage, whilst women will not, and it will only be met with disapproval if the man is indiscreet. Richardson discusses the gendered attitude towards sexual morality expressed by prominent New Woman writer Sarah Grand. She states:
be hereditary. Having set out in defiance of prevalent ideas of sexual difference, challenging the assumption that the male sexual urge is a biological fact, it became transformed by the ideas it had sought to transform. Feeding increasingly off discourses of degeneration, it began to endorse sexual difference, biologizing male sexuality as brutish if left unchecked (239).
This suggestion that women had a moral superiority over men is also prevalent in Gallia, the indication being that the responsibility lies with women to prevent the degeneration of society through the production of strong, healthy offspring. Gallia at least draws attention to this contradictory attitude towards sexuality, emphasising how a woman can “spend the rest of her life after marrying [a man], in adapting or concealing the parts of her nature which offend the good lord, her husband” (Dowie 65). On the other hand, Beautiful Lies appears to reaffirm it without question. Whilst Maribel refers to “the shame of her past” (56), she accepts the fact that her husband visits brothels, describing the moment in which she follows him and sees him entering one as “her impropriety” (127, my italics). Although this remark can perhaps be read as a knowing contemporary comment on Victorian social attitudes, the conservative nature of the plot, in which the potential public scandal of Edward’s actions takes precedence over a potential exposition of gender inequality, means that any intended irony is largely lost.
Clark can be seen as further troubling a feminist reading of her novel through the manner in which she deals with Victorian spirituality and mediumship. Ann Heilmann describes the popularity of spiritualism from the 1840s onwards, stating that:
[A]s patriarchal ideology constructed women as spiritual and other-worldly in order to justify their social and political confinement to the domestic world, a counter-religion which invoked women’s spiritual powers in order to invest them with a social and
cultural authority, and which counter-poised the male-centred discourses of Church and Science with the concept of female agency (feminine mediumship) must have been singularly appealing even to women who did not set out to challenge hegemonic structures (91).
It is striking to note, therefore, in Clark’s Afterword to Beautiful Lies, that although the character of Maribel is based on the real historical figure, Gabriela Cunninghame Graham, Clark made the decision to entirely rewrite Maribel’s attitude towards spirituality, deciding that her heroine should instead share her own cynicism towards these subjects. Clark states:
Only her mysticism prevented me from loving [Gabriela] unreservedly. I could not help finding it peculiar, even improbable, that a woman who had once summoned the courage to run away from home to go on the stage would in later life succumb to what I
considered to be mumbo-jumbo (494).
This significant omission is revealing of the impact of a contemporary attitude towards ideas of spirituality on the text; now those who believe in these kinds of practices tend to be regarded at best as naive, and at worst, fraudulent. However, through deciding to make her heroine more palatable to her contemporary readership and, apparently, to herself, Clark also serves to rewrite Victorian feminism. For as Heilmann further argues, spiritualism had an important social
significance, and she suggests that feminism and “feminist spiritualism”, although differing in their aims and reasons, both posed a challenge to traditional concepts of femininity (91). Victorian spiritualism itself, especially as embodied by female mediums, constituted an active rather than a passive set of practices that served to both challenge social hierarchies, even generating new and experimental forms of writing (Stetz 342).
Heilmann suggests, Maribel adopts the attitude of sneering rationality held by the patriarchy at the time. This alteration highlights one of the obstacles that Neo-Victorian writers must face when writing for a post-feminist audience. Yet whilst Dora Damage is able to overcome this to a large extent through adopting a style that parodies the genre and makes knowing anachronistic comments that belie its contemporary origins, Beautiful Lies is less successful providing a resolution to the postfeminist conflict. Clark’s decision to omit Maribel’s interest in spirituality undermines the significant role that it played in subverting traditional female roles. Instead it risks conveying that very “smugness” that Stetz identifies as being so often present in Neo-Victorian literature (339). There is a certain irony that in attempting to make Maribel more appealing to a contemporary readership, Clark is required to make her in some ways a less transgressive character, whose views are more in keeping with those of the traditional patriarchy at the time in which the novel is set.
Whilst Gallia, on the other hand, strives to undermine patriarchy and can be read in many ways as an emphatically modern novel in its provision of an incisive critique of established gender norms, there remain elements to the novel which have prevented it from receiving the critical attention it might otherwise have had from later feminists. Namely it is the emphasis on eugenics within the text that goes some way to explaining why it remains one of “the lesser-known feminist novels of the 1890s” (Leluan-Pinker 17). Ledger notes that New Women writers “often had considerable investment in eugenic and other imperial discourses” (6) thus preventing it from offering a particularly attractive model for late-twentieth century feminism. For implicit in eugenic ideas is a hierarchical philosophy of class and race that undermines the fundamental feminist philosophy of equality and appears to conflict with the critique we see within Gallia of those men who judge and categorise women on the basis of their physical appearance. Gallia
views Mark Gurdon “rather as a dealer might notice the points in a horse than as a lady might perceive a young man's claims to handsomeness” (Dowie 121) and, as Molly Youngkin suggests, this decision to marry him based purely on his physical features means that “she is choosing him on the basis of racialised characteristics” (129) in a manner that was very troubling even for some of Dowie’s contemporary feminists and certainly for the modern reader.
In this respect, Neo-Victorian fiction might be viewed in some ways as a response to novels such as Gallia; these modern authors co-opt many of the ideas expressed within New Woman fiction that align with contemporary feminisms, yet also demonstrate a contemporary awareness of issues such as race and class. However, it must be remembered that Dowie was writing at a time when Darwinian ideas and atavism was a real fear. As a result, motherhood took on significance as a moral responsibility, creating a feminine narrative of regeneration in opposition to a masculine narrative of degeneration. Yet in comparison to novels such as Sarah Grand’s Heavenly Twins, Gallia need not be read as a novel that is necessarily wholly in favour of eugenic ideas, rather they are presented as a possible alternative to established ideas
concerning women and motherhood. Margaret is distressed by Gallia’s proposals,
exclaiming,“[i]t sounds like treating the world as a sort of farm, and men and women merely as animals” (177) and this moment of dissent is arguably very significant and should thus not be overlooked. It could well be that Dowie is turning her criticism towards the state of society at this moment, reflecting on the depressing necessity for this kind of reproduction. It was also the case that Dowie was attempting to use eugenics in order to reinforce notions of female agency and as a response to the conception of women as selfish. Jill Rappaport notes how “depictions of positive eugenic selection allowed late-century fiction to replace women’s purported ‘selfish’ desires with the saving gifts of sacrificial motherhood and martyrdom” (Rappaport 149). Gallia’s
decision to marry for purposes of reproduction rather than for love demonstrates that again, as in
The Story of a Modern Woman, this idea of self-sacrifice appears to be significant to Gallia’s
identity as a New Woman. Richardson further notes the shift from a ‘selfish’ romantic love, towards a eugenic love, stating that, “in eugenic love, the flesh should submit to the spirit in order to contribute to racial progress; pleasure is overshadowed and undercut by the imperative of (re)production” (230). Gallia refers to her decision quite plainly as a personal sacrifice, reflecting “I look at it like the women who marry for position and money-as a price” (203). Although it is difficult as a contemporary reader to view her choice positively, Gallia’s decision to prioritise her political beliefs over her personal fulfilment is a significant one and her final decision to marry Gurdon acts as a microcosm of the novel as a whole through the promotion of ideals at the expense of a focus on the character’s individual happiness through romance.
In a manner that can been seen as a fulfilment of Gallia’s eugenic ideals, motherhood becomes her utmost priority. Yet arguably there is also an emphasis that this is one of the few available roles for women, and a way for her to seek her “place in the world” (200). Indeed this attention to motherhood might rather be taken as a comment on the limited social space available to women than a championing of eugenics. Essex is very aware of Gallia’s anachronistic position as a modern woman living within a sphere that has not yet caught up with her and he tells her: “there is no place in all the world for you...you are for no use” (196-7). Through this blunt remark he reveals the way in which in order to belong in this society as a woman, you must conform to set of pre-existing ideas and serve a specific purpose. Whilst Margaret and Cara respectively appear to be embodiments of the angel/whore dichotomy, Gallia is less easy to situate. Essex himself also appears perturbed by this, telling her he was “misled by her
attributes, with the power given to the man to interpret them the way that he desires. Women are required to fulfil a specific function; an expectation that does not appear to extend to the men in her society. Although notions of civic motherhood are no doubt significant in the novel, Gallia’s decision seems to be taken largely because she feels she has no other choice to bring about the change she desires. She states: “I will teach [my children] none of the unhappy things I know when I bring them up” (201). These words tellingly reveal her awareness of the rigidity of her society in regards to the place for women. The implication is that social change must be slow, happening gradually over generations, and that she must satisfy herself with teaching her progressive ideas to her children rather than being an active agent of change herself.
It might be argued that Gallia’s frustration at her limited agency and potential reflect Dowie’s own. The genre of the novel itself was perhaps as restrictive for its female characters as Gallia’s own social sphere, with Jane Eldridge Miller highlighting “the inadequacies of the traditional form of the nineteenth-century novel for narrating the lives of modern women” (Rebel
Women 38). Although we, as contemporary readers, might have hoped for more for our
outspoken heroine than her aspirations to be a dutiful mother, perhaps Dowie was simply refusing to shy away from realism. Indeed we might consider Dowie to be bowing to “the more dominant needs of the novel, such as social integration and culture” (Miller 20) whilst
simultaneously providing a critique of a society that would not have permitted Gallia to have any other ending. It seems inevitable that Gallia must confine herself to the domestic sphere, as indeed the majority of New Women did. Miller writes that “most are not politically active; the New Woman’s rebellion is mainly personal” (14-15). This certainly seems to be the case for Gallia, for although she has engaged with politics in the past, attempting to run an agricultural education program, we learn that it was an utter failure. Thus, through lack of an alternative, she
is required to turn to the domestic sphere, asserting her agency through her choice of partner and eventually, she expects, through motherhood. Ultimately there is some truth in Essex’s words: Gallia is a character in transition, with ideas that are ahead of her time. However, she is still bound in many respects by the social codes that govern her class and gender and as a result is prevented from ever being truly revolutionary.
Meanwhile, motherhood (or rather its absence) also plays a significant role in Beautiful
Lies, yet unlike in Gallia, it is presented as an active choice in a way that places the novel in
opposition to New Woman fiction, and aligns it more closely with contemporary attitudes. Maribel and her husband’s friends are envious of “the freedom of their lives unencumbered by children” (54) and there is no hint that she feels duty-bound to procreate as Gallia does. Yet Maribel does appear to have a somewhat ambivalent attitude towards her childlessness, stating on the one hand that she and her husband, “are quite happy as we are, and a good deal happier than most” (106). Nevertheless, she describes her her womb as something “shrivelled,
dessicated”, stating, “the fierce spark of life was not in her” (152), suggesting that a childless woman is somehow lacking, living a life that is less fulfilled. However, this conflict in itself can be viewed as distinctly postfeminist, for whilst there is a freedom to be found in pursuing her own interests such as writing and photography, there is also an underlying fear that she might be missing out in some respect. This is a feeling that is all the more pronounced for Maribel who gave up her son after he was born, leading her to return to Spain in search of the parallel life as a mother that she might have led. Her attitude appears to exemplify the inconsistencies within a postfeminism that both promotes women’s equality and success in domains previously
considered the reserve of men, yet also has a tendency to “overvalue” motherhood (Tasker and Negra 127).
To some extent, Clark appears to want to align the novel with a Victorian feminist tradition, as can be seen in Maribel’s admiration of social campaigners such as Mrs. Besant, and attempts to posit Maribel as a New Woman in the eyes of the older, ultra-conservative Lady Wingate. However, the same problems that Caplan points to in A.S. Byatt’s novel Possession can be identified within Beautiful Lies. She states that:
Byatt’s romantic investment in good heterosexual sex...is a symptom of her sexual conservatism which guides her selective use of feminism in her treatment of both present and past, a feminism happiest when it is most traditional, celebrating female ‘genius’ and the poetic deployment of the feminine figure in the past (110).
This idea of selective feminism is precisely what undermines Clark’s text; the occasional
attempts to position Maribel as an outspoken New Woman figure through repeated references to her smoking or the meetings that she attends are constantly undercut by her fundamental self-centeredness that means she does not conceive of herself in relation to other women. The fact that she is a writer is also significant in light of Caplan’s comments, as there is a sense that she is participating in a role that lies within the realms of a traditional and non-threatening feminism. However perhaps there is a certain irony, deliberate or otherwise, to be found in Maribel’s constant frustrated scribblings out and tearing up of her work that reflects the stifled nature and fundamental emptiness of her feminist expression.
Both of these novels depict women who are exceptional for the period in which they are living. However, particularly in the case of Clark’s novel, the distance between Maribel and other women in the novel that is generated both by her upper-class status and own personal aloofness is troubling in feminist terms. Caplan notes the way that rebellious female figures such as Maribel are commonplace in Neo-Victorian fiction, stating that although they are “treated
